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"Jessica Gerrard"
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Learning Whiteness
Whiteness is not innate – it is learned. The systems of white domination that prevail across the world are not pregiven or natural. Rather, they are forged and sustained in social and political life.Learning Whiteness examines the material conditions, knowledge politics and complex feelings that create and relay systems of racial domination. Focusing on Australia, the authors demonstrate how whiteness is fundamentally an educational project – taught within education institutions and through public discourse – in active service of the settler colonial state.To see whiteness as learned is to recognise that it can be confronted. This book invites readers to reckon with past and present politics of education in order to imagine a future thoroughly divested from racism.
eBook
Activist women, schooling and the rise of grassroots Christian conservatism
This paper argues for the need to better understand the role of mothers and schooling in shaping modern conservative cultural politics. Arguing that 1970s-1980s was a critical period for anti-progressive politics surrounding
schooling, the paper examines the activism of Australian Christian morals campaigner Rona Joyner. Joyner's successful provocation of a 1978 governmental ban on social science curriculum materials was a signal event in an international
Anglophone reaction against what she and others theorised as dangerously permissive forces in public culture. Pitting 'Christian' parental authority against 'humanist' state overreach in relation to the upbringing of children, Joyner
created a detailed vision of the cultural-moral corruption of schools and other social institutions. This paper demonstrates how Joyner represented her labour as a project of both public motherhood and grassroots community activism, and
how activist women like Joyner were foundational to the growth of a new contemporary grassroots conservatism expressed as a popular politics of 'the people' against the state. [Author abstract]
Journal Article
Philanthropy, marketing disadvantage and the enterprising public school
Disadvantage in schooling is often constructed as a crisis in need of fixing. Global policy reforms tend to emphasise that solutions for disadvantage often lie beyond the capacity of the state, necessitating private/philanthropic
intervention. This paper seeks to contribute to this line of analysis by investigating the rise of philanthropy in Australian public schooling. Our analysis focuses on the intermediary organisation, Schools Plus, which works to connect
donors to disadvantaged public schools. Through qualitative content analysis and stakeholder interviews we demonstrate how philanthropy has come to be seen as a solution to the complex problem of disadvantage, or more specifically in
this case, the perceived inadequacies of public education provision. The consequence of this, we suggest, is the changing of responsibility for addressing disadvantage from government to individual schools that have been able to
establish an entrepreneurial culture to market their disadvantage. [Author abstract]
Journal Article
The Interconnected Histories of Labour and Homelessness
This paper examines the interconnections between the history of homelessness and the history of labour in Australia. Taking a purposeful broad scope, focusing on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the paper explores the ways in which homelessness is central to the history of work and labour. Drawing on the mythology attached to the swag and swagmen in Australian popular culture as its starting point, this paper demonstrates the need to understand the diverse experiences and meanings of homelessness - across specific contexts and times - as connected to the shifting cultures and practices of work, and associated gender and race relations in Australia's settler colonial context.
Journal Article
Class Analysis and the Emancipatory Potential of Education
Recently, a range of educational theorists have explored and extended upon popular currents in political theory through articulating 'open' and 'unknowing' pedagogies. Such contributions represent a radical turn away from the presumed 'universals' found in proclamations of justice and emancipation and, ultimately, the centering of class analysis. At the same time, inspired by and building upon Bourdieuian theory, another cluster of educational research has developed a nuanced understanding of the social, cultural, and educational mechanisms involved in class reproduction. In this essay, Jessica Gerrard offers a critical - though sympathetic - response to these dual trends. Bringing together theories of reproduction in conversation with theories of pedagogical possibility, Gerrard argues for a renewed understanding of working- class relations to education that incorporates an understanding of working- class action and struggle. [Author abstract]
Journal Article
The 'lamentable sight' of homelessness and the society of the spectacle
In this paper, we contend that the visual discourses of poverty and inequality are constructed through everyday social relations – the visual, spatial and bodily 'encounter' with homelessness in public space, steeped in the politics of the stigmatised Other. Bringing together Erving Goffman's theory of everyday encounters with Guy Debord's society of the spectacle, we explore the intersection between the 'sight' and 'scene' of homelessness and the spectacle of capital in public space. We identify how everyday encounters with homelessness perpetuate the notion that homelessness is 'out of joint' in relation to the spatial and aesthetic logic of capital and commodity consumption and performance. Reflecting on the repercussions of this for understanding homelessness, we explore the aesthetic dimension of the experience of homelessness within the context of a public space saturated by the social and aesthetic relations and of capital.
Journal Article
Academic Knowledge and Contemporary Poverty
This article explores the field of homelessness research in relation to the dynamics of contemporary inequality and governmentality, arguing that the dominant perspectives within this field have developed in ways that can converge with the demands of neoliberal governance. The article discusses the causal focus of much homelessness research, the emergence of the ‘orthodoxy’ of homelessness research and new approaches emphasising subjectivity and arguing for a ‘culture of homelessness’. We suggest that homelessness has been constructed as a discrete analytical object extraordinary to the social relations of contemporary inequality. The authority to represent homelessness legitimately has been constituted through positioning ‘the homeless’ outside of a community of valorised and normatively legitimate subjectivities. The article concludes with reflections on an alternative politics of homelessness research that moves towards a critical engagement with the position of homelessness within the structural dynamics of late modernity.
Journal Article
Precarious Enterprise on the Margins
This book explores the contemporary conditions of marginal work within the context of persistent unemployment, poverty, and homelessness in wealthy nations.Drawing from research concerning three cities--Melbourne, San Francisco, and London--Jessica Gerrard offers a rich account of one of the most precarious informal forms of work: selling.
eBook
The quarantine archives: educators in “social isolation”
PurposeThe archives gathered in this collection engage in the current COVID-19 moment. They do so in order to attempt to understand it, to think and feel with others and to create a collectivity that, beyond the slogan “we are in this together”, seriously contemplates the implications of what it means to be given an opportunity to alter the course of history, to begin to learn to live and educate otherwise.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is collectively written by twelve academics in March 2020, a few weeks into the first closing down of common spaces in 2020, Victoria, Australia. Writing through and against “social isolation”, the twelve quarantine archives in this paper are all at once questions, methods, data, analysis, implications and limitations of these pandemic times and their afterlives.FindingsThese quarantine archives reveal a profound sense of dislocation, relatability and concern. Several of the findings in this piece succeed at failing to explain in generalising terms these un-new upending times and, in the process, raise more questions and propose un-named methodologies.Originality/valueIf there is anything this paper could claim as original, it would be its present ability to respond to the current times as a historical moment of intensity. At times when “isolation”, “self” and “contained” are the common terms of reference, the “collective”, “connected” and “socially engaged” nature of this paper defies those very terms. Finally, the socially transformative desire archived in each of the pieces is a form of future history-making that resists the straight order with which history is often written and made.
Journal Article