Conference Agenda

The aim of this symposium is to examine various politics, technologies, and affects that are shifting education policymaking, in complex directions, to re-form and ‘protect’ young subjects of education internationally. Drawing on cases from the UK, Ireland and Australia, and a set of critical analytic tools including assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), discourse (Foucault 1978), affect (Ahmed 2004) and hegemony (Laclau and Mouffe 2001), we argue that (re-)assertions of majority national sovereignty, and of the need to protect certain youth are being worked in diverse ways across territories and political divides. We ask: how can we understand attempts to (re-)frame education policy along these lines, and what are the consequences for the subjects of education, particularly those from marginalised communities?

Each country’s modern history has been dominated by centre-right governance, which has made education policy notions of parental choice, school standards and meritocracy hegemonic. Yet within and beyond these countries, unprecedented access to digital forums, and disaffection caused by economic crisis and misinformation have challenged centre-right policy hegemony and influenced centrists’ deployment of nationalist discourses to contain rising right-wing populisms. The latter movements often claim to protect ‘the people’ from elites’ pandering various minorities (Judis 2016) and have helped reframe policy debates in the terms of reinstating what is feared lost: in particular, national sovereignty, childhood innocence and youth opportunity. This framing is evident in all three countries in anti-asylum seeker narratives (Hussain and Yunus 2021; Moffitt and Sengui 2023; Sloane 2025).

We argue these dynamics do not indicate a linear global ‘turn’ towards nationalist discourses of loss and protection in education policy. Rather they reflect a set of policy trajectories that (re-)assemble and prioritise familiar discourses and affects (Ball 1993). The figure of the child has always been used across the political spectrum to achieve particular goals (Baird 2008). In each paper, we analyse the diverse ways that deployment of concern over loss of childhood innocence and/or youth opportunity reflects an attempt across policy territories to grapple with perceived internal and external threats, including those of global technology platforms, ethno-religious diversification, and right-wing populism itself.

In Paper 1, McGimpsey examines UK parliamentary and committee inquiries which produce notions of troubling and underachieving white working-class boys. McGimpsey argues the figure of the white working-class boy condenses and superficially responds to a variety of challenges to the legitimacy of English education policy, including claims the white working class are the victims of anti-racist policies, and concerns over failures to address digitally-driven misogyny.

In Paper 2, Youdell takes up the framing of a policy need to protect youth from global social media corporations through an analysis of Australia’s ban on social media for under-16s. Youdell argues that a key result of the ban, which is entangled with concerns over online hate, is a paradoxical incitement of children and youth in Australia (and beyond) to not speak, or see themselves as having a role in engaging with difference and conflict in and beyond school.

In Paper 3, Kitching examines Irish education policy’s relationship, or lack thereof, to right-wing populism, and argues that despite equality policy rhetoric, racialised majoritarianism remains so embedded in school provision policies and imaginings of ‘good’ Irish childhoods, that it is difficult for populists to make convincing claims about a threat to white-Irish communities’ interests.

These cases we argue, illustrate that forms of hegemonic reframing and continuity regarding who is a threatened and threatening subject are shaping old and new education policy nationalisms across territories. We contend our analysis can inform contemporary ethico-political debate about the forms of childhood/youth that policy makes available to young people to practice (Burman 2023).

The recently announced White Working-Class Educational Outcomes inquiry commissioned by Star Academies is the third national-scale inquiry on this topic in the UK since 2014 (see also House of Commons Education Committee 2014, 2021). The paper argues that, while often presented using a rhetoric of equalities and evidence-based reason, the widespread use of the figure of the White working-class pupil functions symbolically to condense themes of white victimhood and troubling masculinity that have been increasingly circulated in public discourse (Gillborn 2024; Horeck 2026). This paper goes on to explore the sustained concern with White working-class outcomes in UK policy-making as symptomatic of a ‘hegemonic crisis’ (Hall, 2013) that has marked a rupture of the relative ideological closure of neoliberalism. Post-Thatcherism, the political relationship between neoliberal hegemony and educational reform amounted to a ‘passive consent’ (Gilbert & Williams 2022) for programmes of state investment tied to privatizing and managerialist system reform and normative cultures of competitive individualism and instrumentalism. Symbolically, the signifier of the market articulated the purpose and value of education for ostensibly centrist politics as part of a neoliberal ‘global hegemonic hypernarrative’ (Clarke, 2014). Since the financial crisis, however, ‘education, education, education’ has given way to the spectacle of educational controversy often surrounding the cultural dimensions of schooling and university. Central to the production of this dissensus is the reconstitution of Right-wing politics in the UK around an identity and values-based mobilisation of national majoritarianism aligned to i) profound challenges the international economic order of global neoliberalism (Milanovic, 2026), and ii) national social-structural change that is reordering Left/Right cleavages between younger graduates and migrants in diverse urban areas with stronger labour demand and ‘white school leavers’ with low qualifications in more ethnically homogenous former industrial towns and rural areas (Ford, 2020, p. 304). Moving from its empirical focus on policy and media coverage of the White Working-Class Educational Outcomes inquiry, the paper argues that given the centrality of majoritarian nationalism to political identification and dissensus, not only is the policy representation of White working-class pupils inevitably highly politicised, but it is also indicative of future directions of political reform of education - and therefore of education policy sociological critique - after neoliberalism.

Clarke, M. (2014). The sublime objects of education policy: quality, equity and ideology. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 35(4), 584-598. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2013.871230 Ford, R. J., Will. (2020). The Changing Cleavage Politics of Western Europe. Annual Review of Political Science, 23, 295-314. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-052217-104957 Gilbert, J., & Williams, A. (2022). Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (and How We Win it Back). Verso. Gillborn, D. (2024). White lies: Racism, education and critical race theory. Routledge. Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J., & Roberts, B. (2013). Policing the Crisis : Mugging, the State and Law and Order. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bham/detail.action?docID=4763679 Horeck, T. ‘A Howl of Despair’: The affective politics of Netflix’s Adolescence. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 0(0), 13675494251353570. https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494251353570 House of Commons Education Committee. (2014). Underachievement in Education by White Working Class Children. The Stationery Office Limited. https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201415/cmselect/cmeduc/142/142.pdf House of Commons Education Committee. (2021). The forgotten: how White working-class pupils have been let down, and how to change it. House of Commons. https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/6364/documents/70802/default/ Milanovic, B. (2026). The Great Global Transformation: The United States, China, and the Remaking of the World Economic Order. In The Great Global Transformation. University of Chicago Press.

This paper considers how curriculum, pedagogic relationships, everyday school practices and children are impacted by shifting local and global norms of political speech; the relative porosities of identities, cultures, religions, and politics; and the extent to which communities/publics are free to speak. The paper’s focus is Australia, where a world-first ban of social media for under-16s is raises questions of innocence, addiction, exploitation, rights and ‘political communication’ (Beck 2025). In New South Wales, this ban overlays a late-2024 smart-phone ban in public schools. Days after the social media ban began, an attack by two gunmen at a public celebration of the Jewish holiday of Chanukah at Bondi Beach killed 14 people. In the weeks following, the Government sought to introduce legislation to police hate speech and extend gun controls. At the time of writing, the House has voted in the ‘Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill’ but the Bill has not yet passed the Senate. In the emerging context of the social media ban and the Bill, and drawing on the conceptual work of Foucault, Spivak, Butler and Laclau, the paper explores evidence from Government, schools, advocacy groups and media to consider: the premises and effects of the ban; the speakability of questions underpinning and resulting from the ban, and the force of the amplification/diminution of these; and the potential/initial impacts of the Bill on hegemonic forms of political speech, on political speech in and between minoritised publics, and on children’s access to, engagement with, and opportunities for political speech inside and outside school. The paper argues that legislative control, curricula advice, mandated syllabi, shifting social norms and hegemonic forms of ‘good sense’, render the proper place of the political subject to be, paradoxically, to not speak (Butler 1993). This silent(silenced) political subject circulates in and is avowed by schools – the ‘good’ subject of schooling. Such normative silence forecloses schools’ capacities to develop with children understandings of diversity and difference, including the irreconcilability of values and politics, that are needed to stop antagonisms becoming hate and instead be remade through agonistic pluralism (Laclau, Zizek and Butler 2000). The paper concludes that schools and systems can resist the inference that no speech is safe speech, and instead explore, understand, recognise and respect agonisms as part of everyday life in diverse societies and schools (Sutton, Youdell and Kitching 2025).

Beck, L, (2025) ‘Two teens have launched a legal challenge to the under-16s social media ban – will it make a difference?’ Centre for Human Rights Law, Monash University. https://www.monash.edu/law/research/centres/castancentre/public-events/news/2025/under-16-social-media-ban Butler, J. and Spivak, G.C. (2007) Who Sings The Nation State? Duke. Butler, J., Laclau, E., Zizek, S. (2000) Contingency, Hegemony Universality, Verso. Butler, J, (2004) Precarious Life, Polity. Foucault, M, (1983) Fearless Speech, Polity. Spivak, G.C. (1988) ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Maxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Nelson, C. & Grossberg, L. (Eds), Macmillan. Sutton, J., Youdell, D., & Kitching, K. (2026). School spaces of dissensus: Protecting sexualities education in anti-gender, anti-Muslim and de-democratising times. The Curriculum Journal, 37, 107–123. https://doi.org/10.1002/curj.334

The politicisation of education is a key tool in contemporary right-wing populist political coalition-building internationally. Often using disinformation, movements and governments in Argentina, the US and Hungary have achieved popularity partly through claims that they will rescue the nation’s youth from alleged liberal or anti-Christian bias of anti-racist and/or LGBTQ+ inclusive education (Neumann and Rudnicki 2025). With some exceptions relating to gender and sexuality education (Mac an Ghaill et al. 2003; The Journal 2025), the right-wing populist vilifying of support for minorities in education have not been mainstreamed in Irish education policy and politics. Yet, Garner (2007, p. 115) argues, the concept of Irishness is “so intimately racialized” that it forms a core assumption of mainstream politics in Ireland. Focusing particularly on schooling and childhood, this paper argues that the intimate racialisation of Irishness helps absorb and to some degree prevent the popularity of culture war claims on education policy seen elsewhere. The paper analyses key, mediatised flashpoints regarding primary school choice and segregation in Ireland, and relating anti-racist social and education policy. 88% of Ireland’s state-funded primary schools are run by Catholic patrons, despite significantly declined levels of religious observance in the population. Policies attempting to change this status quo, I argue, have been non-performative (Ahmed 2006), i.e., they do not bring about the action they represent. Rather than address questions of the common good by e.g., forging a secular school system, governments have responsibilised parents to advocate for change (Kitching 2020). This has made minimal difference in the system, increased segregation between minoritised and white Irish communities, and at times fomented culture wars locally, with implied threats that Irish identity and ‘good’ Irish childhoods would be eroded if Catholic schools were lost (O’Kelly 2019). Wider national policies commit to anti-racism, but are not designed to address these issues, and in-depth anti-racist education in Ireland is marginalised (McGuirk 2026). A narrow concept of racism as bullying is present Ireland’s National Action Plan Against Racism (Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth 2023), and the plan is silent on the majoritarian school sector. I argue that while the majoritarian nature of Irish education policymaking may lessen the strength of right-wing populist claims about schools, alternative approaches that meaningfully support minorities and address myths generated by a growing Irish far-right digital ecosystem (Fattibene et al. 2024) are needed.

Ahmed, S. (2006) The nonperformativity of antiracism. Meridians 7(1): 104-126. Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth (2023) National Action Plan Against Racism. Dublin: The Stationery Office. Fattibene, G., Windle, J., Lynch, O., Helm, G., Purvis, J. and Seppa, L. (2024) The far-right ecosystem in Ireland: History and contemporary trends. Perspectives on Terrorism 28: 4. Garner, S. (2007) Ireland and immigration: explaining the absence of the far right. Patterns of Prejudice 41:2, 109-130. Kitching, K. (2020) Childhood, Religion and School Injustice. Cork: Cork University Press. Mac an Ghaill, M., Hanafin, J. and Conway, P.F. (2003) Gender Politics and Exploring Masculinities in Irish Education. Dublin: NCCA. McGuirk, N. (2026). ‘We were all sticking with the safe ones’: anti-racism education and Educate Together primary schools in Ireland. Irish Educational Studies 1–26. Neumann, E., & Rudnicki, P. (2025). Populist radical-right governments in Central-Eastern Europe and education policy-making: a comparison of Hungary and Poland. Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 33(1): 90–103. O’Kelly, E. (2019) Third Dublin school sends letter warning of consequences over changing patronage. RTÉ News https://www.rte.ie/news/2019/0403/1040323-school_patronage/ Accessed 25 January 2026. The Journal (2025) DCU welcomes decision by the Press Council to uphold complaints about two SPHE articles. The Journal https://www.thejournal.ie/dcu-welcomes-press-ombudsman-decision-to-uphold-complaints-about-gript-articles-6769268-Jul2025/ Accessed 25 January 2026.