Abstract

In this seminar, Glenn will explore the notion of ‘community’ as it is articulated in current social and educational policy in Australia, and will also feature data from his current ethnographic research that investigates the ways community is experienced and imagined by young people in two socially disparate suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. In doing so, he will examine Australia’s ‘community turn’ in politics, which mirrors recent UK reforms and which sees community emerge as a governable space through which certain individual and collective capacities can be surveilled and nourished. Building on this, he also will explore emerging educational policies in Australia, which re-imagine schools as ‘learning communities’ in which the realms of academic excellence and equity are seen to harmoniously operate. Drawing upon his emerging research data, Glenn will then explore the ways community, both in-and-around schools, is experienced and imagined by young people. In particular, he will examine the role of the imagination in positioning young people as members of particular classed and spatialised communities. He will also draw upon in-school data to canvas some of the tensions and paradoxes that emerge when two schools in very different social spaces attempt to imagine and govern themselves toward policy ideals of the ‘learning community’.