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The purpose of this paper is to understand, more deeply, what the field of citizenship education stands for, in both theory and practice, historically and currently, and especially, in relation to the new Australian Curriculum: Civics and Citizenship. The authors have drawn on the backgrounds in social studies/social education, multicultural education, democracy education and Indigenous studies, in order to more deeply and profoundly understand “civics and citizenship education” and what it represents today in Australia.

Methodologically, the authors see epistemological spaces as discursive productions from post-structural/post-modern and critical perspectives. These positions draw upon the notion of discourse as an absent power that can validate/legitimize vs negate/de-legitimize. The authors employ a meta-level analysis that historicizes the spaces made possible/impossible for those in deviant subject positions through a critique of the current literature juxtaposed with a presentation and analysis of “citizenship snapshots” of the authors. In this way, the authors attempt to move beyond conceptions of deviant citizenship based on curricular content and instructional method, and explore the realms of epistemology through the study of exclusion/inclusion.

Reflecting the highly personal and individualized nature of the type of research required to be conducted in this aspect of national and personal identity, each of the authors draws here on personal experiences with aspects of citizenship that are not noticeably present in the current national curriculum. Specifically, the three “citizenship snapshots” at the heart of this paper’s discussion and analysis – snapshots constructed by academics who both understand and resist the racialised/classed privilege bestowed upon them by nation states – are: “The boomerang citizen”, “privileged and non-privileged citizen immigrants”, and “Indigenous citizenship, sovereignty & colonialism”.

Drawing both on the current international scholarship on citizenship, power and social changes and the critical/post-structuralist qualitative methodology set forth by the authors, this work describes and problematizes the evolving “citizenship identities” in an attempt to critically assess the new civics and citizenship component of the Australian curriculum; understand the ongoing development of national, regional and global “trans/international” citizenship youth identities; and make connections between citizenship education, identity development and the global youth “occupy”/liberation movements.

The purpose of this paper is to use the experience of attempting to locate funding for three contiguous components of a research program to be undertaken in remote areas of Queensland to reflect upon the increasing challenges to critical qualitative research in the Australian context.

This paper utilizes forms and formats of the composite narrator, narrative inquiry and autoethnographic techniques in putting their lived experience into the context of the neoliberalized university.

As the research team developed and pursued a funding application through various university committees, the value of their work and the ways in which they were being increasingly marginalized qua researchers became starkly apparent to them.

While Appadurai’s concern was to try to understand the inexplicable and seemingly inordinate fear of small numbers that, in contemporary times, causes large majority groups to launch horrendous campaigns of erasure against miniscule minority groups, the authors wonder whether the same concern of an ascendant majority is not at play in strategies of erasure being deployed in contemporary research paradigm skirmishes. Regardless, the authors are rapidly approaching the point where perhaps the authors, as critical qualitative researchers, should fear any numbers, big or small.

The purpose of this paper is to gather research-stories, that is, the stories of the researcher themselves. The authors gather stories that situate researchers in their social, political, personal and professional contexts to learn about being a researcher in a University at this particular historical moment.

The authors’ stories began with the naive question – “What is it like to be a researcher in a University right now?”. The authors asked this question of Julie White’s (2012) “disposable academics” (p. 50); short-term and casualised staff with insecure teaching or research contracts. They asked White’s (2012, p. 48) “academic infantry” the mid-career researchers who have felt the labour intensification of recent times. They also asked senior academics, established professors with established research histories and the security (they hope) of a steady track record and a list of external grants.

The answers were not simple. They were stories of the pragmatics of managing the new academic scene; maintaining a research passion despite the pressures of new managerialism’s focus on certain forms of efficiency, external accountability and monitoring; resolving the apparent losses of autonomy, academic freedom, support, security and academic dignity. The authors heard emotional and vulnerable stories, stories of personal investment and emotionally and physically risky and dangerous encounters. The authors learnt something of the complex business of negotiating personal and professional subjectivities.

The authors heard emotional and vulnerable stories, stories of personal investment and emotionally and physically risky and dangerous encounters. They learnt something of the complex business of negotiating personal and professional subjectivities.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the usefulness of Halliday’s linguistic theory known as Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) in analysing qualitative data. In order to do this, it initially presents an overview of SFL, and then explains how and why four linguistic features namely, nominalisation, grammatical metaphor, thematic structure and lexical density are useful in examining qualitative data. The paper also discusses three social metafunctions of language known as the ideational, the interpersonal and the textual metafunctions which are significant for understanding and interpreting texts.

This paper employs SFL as the main theoretical framework to discussing the usefulness of this linguistics theory in qualitative data analysis.

SFL can be seen as a paradigm shift in linguistic theory moving away from the traditional focus on syntax to the inclusion of the interface between language and pragmatics. The focus of SFL is language in use. It deals with texts in social contexts, which is the main focus in qualitative data analysis. Thus, SFL provides both research tools and theoretical insights for understanding and interpreting texts.

This paper provides significant insights into language which are crucial for understanding and interpreting texts in social contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to explore their experiences as singers in a community choir called Arrkula (a Yanyuwa word meaning “one voice”) based in the School of Education at the University of Queensland as performance of song, self, social justice and seeing beyond boundaries. Performing at “gigs” inside and outside the university, Arrkula has been singing together since 2011, and despite an environment replete with neo-liberal ideals of individualism, competitiveness and capitalist driven research agendas, at the centre of their song remains a yearning for social connection, equality and renewed consciousness.

The authors take an autoethnographic creative approach and bring performance of song together with their stories and interviews with choir members to link the “secret space” of the rehearsal with the “public space” of staged performances.

The authors’ aim is to think and perform the potential the voice and voices of Arrkula hold in terms of heightening senses of agency, provoking and empowering a pursuit of freedom and transforming lived worlds through song.

The value of this paper is the authors’ take up of Maxine Greene’s (2005, p. 38) question, “if we can link imagination to our sense of possibility and our ability to respond to other human beings, can we link it to the making of community as well?” to consider what singing for democracy and difference might mean individually and collectively in the current climate of higher education.

Art-based research is about so much more than producing interesting, confronting, or pretty visuals: it is about the stories beneath, attached to, and elicited through the image. It is also about the experience of thinking about, capturing, and producing that visual. The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of participant-driven photo-elicitation interviews with six women working in sex work in Victoria, Australia.

The author does this both through the women’s narratives and through a researcher autoethnography. From her current position, the author (re)writes her experiences of undertaking this research in 2009, in order to highlight the uncertainty and confusion that can accompany visual research methods.

The multiple places that photos can take participants, researchers, and readers is explored including empathy and understandings of how a single phenomenon (such as sex work) intersects with all other aspects of people’s lives and cannot be explained through theory that does not take account of intersectionality.

This paper is a unique exploration of two methods, one layered over the other. It contributes to learnings obtained through participant-driven photo-elicitation while also treating the researcher’s experience of using this interview technique as data as well.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the possibility of doing more with writing and autoethnography as ethical, response-able and decolonizing practice.

This paper is written in a playful, performative and poetic way and engages with the writings and ideas of Helene Cixous and Virginia Woolf as a conversation between them and the author.

This paper suggests that an autoethnographic writing practice which is at once affective, critical and performative, holds the possibilities to engage in decoloniality.

Engagement with the past and present legacy of colonial practice in education and ethnography is crucial if the author want to move beyond social justice and decoloniality as metaphor. The writing practice put forward is new and challenging in its push to do this.

Critical discussion of the social conditions that shape educational thinking and practice is now embedded in accredited teacher education programmes. Beneath beliefs that critique of educational inequality is desirable, however, lie more problematic questions around critical pedagogies, ethics and power. Emotional investments can work to protect habituated ways of thinking, despite attempts to move students beyond their comfort zone. This strategic process can shift attitudes and promote intellectual and emotional growth, but can also produce defensive reactions. This paper, a self-study in relation to an incident in a tertiary education programme, examines how student feedback on content and pedagogy positions teachers and learners. The purpose of this paper is to frame and reframe ways in which learner feedback to critical approaches might be read. The argument examines, through dialogue, the potential of disruptive teaching approaches for recontextualising both learner and teacher response. Such exploration articulates particular tensions and challenges inherent in critical teacher education pedagogies.

This is a reflective practitioner piece – involving journaling and the use of dialogue – to explore a critical incident.

This is an exploratory piece – the authors explore the workings of tension in critical/poststructural pedagogical work.

The deployment of dialogue as a method and as a way of presenting key issues is somewhat novel. The paper works through quite complex terrain in an accessible and reasonably clear fashion.