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The Australian Radical Education Group (RED G) was created in June 1976, which in turn launched a magazine for radical(ising) teachers, the Radical Education Dossier (RED), that would be published for the next 30 years. The purpose of this paper is to characterise the emergence and first phase of RED’s publication up to its name change in 1984.

The authors draw on interviews with key members of the magazine’s editorial collective, and a review of RED’s contents, to identify the major political ambitions as manifest in RED in historical context. The authors contextualise this radical education project in the post-1968 world context of social and political upheaval, rejecting the Cold War options of either Soviet style Communist or US-based capitalist pathways.

In this context RED generated powerful critiques of dominant educational policy in multiple areas. The critique was part of a project to promote a socialist understanding of mass education, and to promote the transformation of Australian society towards socialism. The authors argue that the debates and struggles within RED in this period, seeking to define and advance a socialist educational project, reflected a broad and consistent critique of progressive educational reforms, rooted in its radical political foundations.

This paper provides an historical review of a 30-year radical education publishing initiative in Australia, about which no accounts have been published. It connects directly with contemporary educational issues, and offers insights for interviews with those directly involved in the historical project.

The purpose of this paper is to consider historical shifts in the mobilisation of the concept of radical in relation to Australian schooling.

Two texts composed at two distinct points in a 40-year period in Australia relating to radicalism and education are strategically juxtaposed. These texts are: the first issue of the Radical Education Dossier (RED, 1976), and the Attorney General Department’s publication Preventing Violent Extremism and Radicalisation in Australia (PVERA, 2015). The analysis of the term radical in these texts is influenced by Raymond Williams’s examination of particular keywords in their historical and contemporary contexts.

Across these two texts, radical is deployed as adjective for a process of interrogating structured inequalities of the economy and employment, and as individualised noun attached to the “vulnerable” young person.

Reading the first issue of RED alongside the PVERA text suggests the consequences of the reconstitution of the role of schools, teachers and the re-positioning of certain young people as “vulnerable”. The juxtaposition of these two texts surfaces contemporary patterns of the therapeutisation of political concerns.

A methodological contribution is offered to historical sociological analyses of shifts and continuities of the role of the school in relation to society.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a broad theoretical orientation for the themed section of History of Education Review, “Unstable concepts in the history of Australian schooling: radicalism, religion, migration”. Through the conceptual frame of “contrapuntal historiography”, it commends the practice of re-looking at taken-for-granted concepts and re-readings of the cultural archive of Australian schooling, with especial attention to silences, discontinuities and the movements of concepts.

Drawing on Edward Said’s approach of “contrapuntal reading”, this paper refers to the recent work of Bruce Pascoe as an exemplar of this practice in the field of Australian history. It then relates this approach to the study of the history of Australian schooling as demonstrated in the three papers that make up the themed section “Unstable concepts in the history of Australian schooling: radicalism, religion, migration”.

Following in the style of Said’s contrapuntal reading and the example of Pascoe’s work, this paper argues that there are inerasable traces of historical politics – that is, the records of constitutive exclusions and silences – which “haunt” taken-for-granted concepts like the migrant, the secular and the radical in the history of Australian schooling.

Taken alongside the three papers in the themed section, this paper urges the proliferation of different theoretical and disciplinary approaches in order to think anew about silences, discontinuities and movements of concepts as a counterpoint to dominant narrative lines in the history of Australian education.

This article is the first in a series that seeks to examine the Federal Bureau of Investigation’ (FBI) surveillance of social philosopher and activist Herbert Marcuse between 1943 and 1976. We intend to map in parallel lines local, national, and international media representations of Marcuse, scholarly analysis of Marcuse's writings, Marcuse's own correspondence, speeches, and texts in comparison with the presentations of Herbert Marcuse in the collected FBI documents. Our goal is to assess what the Marcuse's FBI files tell us about the FBI, Marcuse, the New Left, and U.S. society in the 1960s. In particular, close attention is paid to examining events described inside the FBI documents occurring in the mid-1960s when Herbert Marcuse was emerging as a self-proclaimed Marxist radical, a father figure to New Left and countercultural activists, an influential author, public speaker, and teacher, and was beginning to be perceived as a threat by the FBI to U.S. national security. We seek to clarify if FBI documents can provide information and insight to help illuminate and understand U.S. social and cultural history, in this particular case, to assess how FBI documents measure up against scholarship and perceived views of Marcuse and the 1960s. We are thus interested both in what we can learn about Herbert Marcuse's life and times from these documents and what FBI surveillance and documents tell us about the FBI and U.S. intelligence services.

In the public arena, immigrants are easily recognized as “vulnerable” but also “as a risk” for the social environment. They are associated with stigmatized infectious‐contagious health conditions, with deviant or disturbed behaviours, with poor education and hygiene, and with dubious morality and parental competence. This paper aims to analyse the complex array of targeted programmes designed in the last decades in Europe in order to intervene on immigrants' health practices and lifestyles.

The paper was designed to engage with a critical approach to the healthcare sector, rendering visible the rationale behind such programmes of intervention by focusing on the relations between the representation of immigrants' health, the symbolic and physical borders of the body and the nation, the welfare state, and the contemporary politics of care.

The paper highlights: the racialization of public health and social care policy, which have been constituting migrant populations as unsanitary citizens; the intervention of social care programmes as technologies of citizenship in order to guide these populations towards specific models of body, health, behaviour and life projects; and the paradigmatic shifts in the way healthcare is perceived and deployed, and its ethical and political implications.

Building on the contributions from medical anthropology, historical sociology, and governmentality studies, the paper sheds a new light on the subject by positioning the practices of healthcare on a racialized post‐colonial setting of intervening on populations constituting vulnerabilities and managing risks through medical expertise.

Discussing the Swiss case, the purpose of this paper is to examine how gender equality policies deal with the present requirements for scholars to be considered “excellent”. It aims to pinpoint the lines of tension or coherence between excellence, meritocracy and gender politics.

In order to specify the norms of academic careers and their different renditions, the author draws on two studies (at local and national levels) to illustrate where the changes and resistances are taking place.

The translations of a number of demands of feminist movements into the policies set up to favour equality between the sexes may combine to challenge the norms of academia as a gendered realm. Nevertheless, without strong pressure from feminists at local level and the conduct of research pursuing the enterprise of deconstructing norms, top-down policies may prove less “corrective” than affirmative action. This pressure is not only useful to build gender equality in science but also to broaden the spectrum of knowledge that can become a common good.

As neither the names nor the positions of the experts who select the candidates at national level are made public, we had to opt for other, less satisfactory means.

The originality of the paper lies in the link made between the enhancements brought by Equalities policies and the changes they bring. It attempts to bring to light the extent to which gender equality policies conform to the neo-managerial order or challenge its norms to build a world that is more just.