Judged by recent media coverage, schools and teachers in New Zealand are copping a fair lashing.

While tidying up e-mail archives in 2019, the authors stumbled across correspondence from their research participants that captured their attention. They had interviewed thirty-two high school students as part of an Australian Research Council (ARC) project over a three-year period while these young people were transitioning from school to the world of work. Even though the project had finished in 2013, the authors deliberately maintained contact with them electronically to understand what was happening in their lives. Not all young people responded in 2014; however, the fact that some did was quite remarkable, and their responses unearthed 'thick descriptions' and powerful narratives that the authors reflect on throughout the chapter. Participants' stories advance theoretical and methodological insights capable of informing social action, bringing to the fore 'modalities of time and space' as they continue to 'echo'; demanding our reflexive attention as we enter the 'field' once again to engage, connect and listen to their narratives; 'with them'. Weaving together student narratives, researcher fieldnotes and supporting theoretical frameworks, this chapter culminates in sharing experiences and memories that 'haunt' even when consciously attempting to 'let participants go' (from a field of choice). We learn from and acknowledge the haunting echoes of our participants because they never really 'exit' but 'tag along' as we continue to create democratic spaces, places and directions in future educational research.

This article deploys critical sociology to examine institutions of higher learning, worldwide, within a context of a more utopian set of possibilities. The article contests the idea of universities as marketplaces - competition, commercialisation and vocationalisation; the synthetic values of docility, conformity, and image/impression management; the calibration and metrification of all facets of university activity; and the containment of universities as places of dissent and social critique, shackling them instead to the whims of capitalism. As an alternative, the author explores Klein's elements of a social imaginary that involves extirpating the alien interloper neoliberal ideology that has been allowed to invade and colonise universities, and instead allowing indigenous ideologies to emerge from the discourses of those who do academic work. The austerity logic that has so poisoned universities, is replaced by the humanising and democratising practices and voices of those who have been wilfully excluded. Above all, what the author pitches towards is not 'fixing' our broken universities, for that would be in Klein's terms 'fitting into the box' that has been constructed for universities over the past half-century, but rather an 'exploding of the box'. Examples from the author's prior community-based research are used to illustrate humanising, transformative possibilities.

This entry begins by posing a number of framing questions, namely: (1) What is ethnographic research? (2) Why do ethnographic research with adolescents? (3) What are some examples of ethnographic research in and with adolescents? (4) How might ethnographic research advance a socially critical understanding of adolescents? And (5) what are the challenges facing ethnographic research? The entry then discusses the key attributes of ethnographic research: studying everyday lives up close; the quest for underlying meaning and cultural logics as ascribed by informants; holistic portrayals of observations, interviews, and artifacts; being open to the prospect of surprise and refocusing in light of experience; and the pursuit of an advocacy role as a consequence of what is learned with informants. The entry then engages in a discussion of how this research approach might be an efficacious way of accessing what might otherwise remain concealed in adolescent lives. To illustrate all of this, the key revelations are provided from a number of significant ethnographic studies of adolescent lives, particularly as they relate to schooling. The entry concludes by pointing to how this style of research can lead to adolescents becoming powerful agents in understanding and gaining some control over their lives; the entry also considers issues to be mindful of.

The mechanistic input-output metaphor of the Newtownian machine is struggling to pass the laugh test in most complex schools and classrooms as a form of realistic representation. To continue to think about schools in terms of the long shadow of the largely discredited and outmoded mass-production education is to live a fantasy, the effects of which are extremely damaging to those most affected. The quality of student learning is measured by narrow tests, and, increasingly, teachers' salaries and school resources are being tied to test scores. Teachers have little time or incentive to work together as professionals in the service of children's learning. Learning has become an instrument for so much else than education that the vocabulary commonsensically talk about learning and education cannot be trusted. A crucial ingredient in reclamation project is the language and practice of critical inquiry in instructional supervision.

PurposeTo consider what a criticalist qualitative research methodology might look like for universities in the context of the contemporary COVID-19 crisis.Design/methodology/approachThis polemical paper explores the rationale for a dramatic recasting of the approach needed in qualitative research methodology to address the challenges of the crisis-ridden times we live in. Broadly conceived of as an “evolving criticality”, to borrow from Kincheloe, the paper addresses the kind of disposition, orientation or state of mind required that provides the space and opportunities in universities within which this strategic methodological reinvention might occur. After explaining what a research methodology committed to the notion of “criticality” might look like, the paper argues that to enact this we need to start with the immediacy of our own academic work and then emanate to other public spheres.FindingsThe polemical exchange engaged in by this paper presents the underpinnings of how critical social science might be deployed in both reconceiving how we understand the purpose of research in universities and changing the nature of academic work.Research limitations/implicationsThese exist only in so far as university academics are prepared to embrace what is being argued for to change the status quo.Practical implicationsThe broader critical social science methodology being argued for in this paper is using a wider framing to a form of critical ethnography that has the potential to enable academic workers to extricate themselves from the ruinous situation brought on by the neoliberal paradigm that has been so drastically exacerbated by COVID-19.Originality/valueWhile the paper rehearses some existing ideas of critical social science, the novelty of the papers lies in the way these are applied to the COVID-19 crisis within which universities have become embroiled.

Western democracies are infatuated with neoliberalism and attendant notions of choice, individualism, competition, metrification and market-based approaches, even within education. This chapter looks to the possibilities of disrupting this failed social experiment by pursuing a revived version of critical reflection. Two parts of the chapter include a rehearsal of events when we embraced critical reflection within teaching in the 1980s, and the lessons we might learn. Second, an argument is made for a more sociologically informed and socially critical approach to reflective practice that has quite different turns from its predecessor. Three animating questions ask: Why do we need a critically reflective approach now, and what is behind this imperative? What form might a revitalized form of critical reflection take, and to where can we look for ideas? What benefits may flow from such a reworked notion of critical reflection, and what might be the barriers and obstacles?

This article argues that re-inserting the 'public' back into public education and public school involves the reclamation of the indigenous (i.e. native) language and practices of schools and their communities. It argues that banishing the interloper discourses of neoliberalism can only occur when schools organise themselves around the alternative discourse of the socially just school.

This paper is a rejoinder to James Avis 'paper: A Note on Class, Dispositions and Radical Politics which is, in turn, a critique of the opening chapter of the book Education and Working-Class Youth: Reshaping the Politics of Inclusion, written by the authors of this article. Here we deal with each of the criticisms raised by Avis, including his accusation that our position is reductionist and fails to recognise the complex nature of social class in contemporary society. In doing this, we re-emphasise our relational perspective on education and social class.

This chapter provides the backdrop and sets the tone for the book. It begins by scoping out some of the challenges and injustices facing working-class youth, and by highlighting some of the mismatches between the structures and processes of education and the lives of many working-class young people. It then goes on to develop an alternative agenda which, it is argued, is necessary to engage working-class youth in relevant and meaningful ways, and to challenge the dominant structures of schooling and education which systematically disadvantage so many young people. The chapter finishes by proving a brief overview of the chapters which follow, and by highlighting some of the key themes explored in the rest of the book.

This book provides an inclusive and incisive analysis of the experiences of working-class young people in education. While there is an established literature on education and the working class stretching back decades, over recent years there has been something of a neglect of class-based inequality.

This chapter examines the cascade from forms of detachment, toxicity, and dys-function, to forms of institutional violence and organisational dysfunction via the question: what is animating or permitting all of this?From the perspective of critical theory, the chapter addresses how we might begin to puncture the 'new political economy' in three ways. First, there is the concealment of interests. Second, there is what some call the instrumentalisation of everything. Third, there is what might be described as a cauterising or extirpation of critical reflective thought and action. Organisational malfeasance, toxic and zombie leadership, and maladministration all receive their warrants, remits, and licences from a higher authority than mere rogue or pathological individuals. Springer offers an account of 'the violence of neoliberalism' that is relevant institutionally within educational organisations. In the realm of education, this means that 'the policy rhetoric diagnoses the crisis in terms of the need to improve economic competitiveness, and a concomitant concern about educational standards'.