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From the in-group status as a former homeschool parent, the goal is to problematize the entanglement of neoliberalism within self-directed education (SDE) pedagogies. Further and importantly, this study aims to bring attention to and examine the neoliberal resistant practices found in Black homeschooling.

A narrative literature review, content analysis and autoethnographic reflection to critically examine the neoliberal subjectivity of SDE and identify neoliberal-resistant SDE practices of Black homeschooling families.

This paper identifies SDE’s vulnerability to neoliberal subjectivity despite the neoliberal oppositional ethos of many of its practices and its antiestablishment historical context and rhetoric. It analyzes conceptions of self, autonomy and freedom (the ideas that underwrite self-direction) that can inform a critical self-directed learning (SDL) approach. It explores contemporary Black homeschooling and SDE practices for evidence of these conceptions, arguing that this demographic, at the margin of the discursive homeschooling community, instantiates an authentic resistance and disruption to neoliberal subjectivity in SDE.

Very little research has been done on neoliberal subjectivity in the discursive SDE community. The vulnerability of SDE to neoliberalization is important to SDL homeschoolers, unschoolers and other SDE facilitators who want to practice alternative-to-mainstream values or social justice-oriented pedagogy. Without awareness of this vulnerability, neoliberal hegemony can be reproduced by SDE practices.

This qualitative study discusses the importance of effective leadership practices in connecting the macro-, meso-, and micro-contexts in which school leaders operate, considering the colonial and apartheid history of South Africa and the current era of neoliberal philosophies by exploring the degree to which school leaders in historically disadvantaged schools in Western Cape Province use an edupreneurial approach to steer their schools in new directions. The school leaders, especially in historically disadvantaged Colored schools, are expected to be more autonomous and accountable for making the school environment conducive to performance standards and improved learning results. The study uses an edupreneurial leadership approach as a theoretical lens to explore entrepreneurial agency, together with the educational leadership approach of school principals as a consequence of neoliberal policies.

This study focuses on secondary schools in historically Colored communities in Western Cape Province through semi-structured interviews with four purposively selected school principals and four teachers from four different schools in the Western Cape Province.

Education and training programs should focus on cultural values and practices to enhance the efficacy of these schools. Furthermore, an entrepreneurial mindset and spirit are aspects that can be encouraged in a culturally sensitive manner. The edupreneurial leadership approach in developing countries has a distinctive nature.

This study contributes to forging an understanding of how neoliberal trends influence school leadership practices in developing countries, especially the leadership work of school principals across public schools in the Western Cape Province in South Africa.

Educators have had good reason to be concerned with social justice in a context where diversity has become more pronounced in both our schools and communities, with widening divisions between the advantaged and the disadvantaged. Internationally, increasing emphasis has been placed on utilizing the role of school leadership to address issues of social justice and equality, within a scenario where comparative studies of the performance of educational systems dominate the policy imagination globally, thus leading to increased pressure on school systems. This chapter presents a problematization of the social justice concept within education as presented in the literature, while setting out to critique this concept as an educational goal, as well as the role educational leadership is expected to play in the promotion of equity and social justice discourses through the lens of Actor-Network Theory (ANT). This theoretical chapter has implications for theory, policy, and practice.

This paper introduces the special issue on Race and Accounting and Accountability. In so doing, it explores racism in its historical and contemporary forms, the role of accounting and accountability in enabling racism and racial discrimination and also efforts of redress and resistance.

We reflect on several critical themes to demonstrate the pervasive and insidious nature of racism and, review the literature on race and racism in accounting, focusing on studies that followed the seminal work by Annisette and Prasad (2017) who called for more research. We also review the six papers included in this special issue.

While many overt systems of racial domination experienced throughout history have subsided, racism is engrained in our everyday lives and in broader societal structures in more covert and nuanced forms. Yet, in accounting, as Annisette and Prasad noted, the focus has continued to be on the former. This special issue shifts this imbalance – five of the six papers focus on contemporary racism. Moreover, it demonstrates that although accounting technologies can and do facilitate racism and racist practices, accountability and counter accounts offer avenues for calling out and disrupting the powers and privileges that underlie racial discrimination and, resistance by un-silencing minority groups subjected to discrimination and injustice.

This introduction and the papers in the special issue offer rich empirical and theoretical contributions to accounting and accountability research on race and racial discrimination. We hope they inspire future race research to nurture progress towards a true post-racial society.

The past two decades have witnessed exponential growth in the use of mindfulness-based programmes within professional workplace cultures. From digital media giants such as Google, Apple and Facebook, to Fortune 500 companies, hospitals, universities, and government departments, many contemporary workplaces now offer mindfulness-based programmes as a remedy for workplace challenges such as low productivity, employee stress and staff attrition. Using Google’s Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute as a case study, this chapter adopts Lauren Berlant’s concept of ‘cruel optimism’ as a critical framework for re-evaluating the affective and relational experiences of mindfulness within the contemporary neoliberal workplace. Specifically, it considers the ways in which corporate mindfulness initiatives commonly use the rubric of ‘employee wellbeing’ and ‘self-care’ to pathologise employee experiences of boredom, dissatisfaction and stress while downplaying the social, political and economic factors that contribute to workplace dissatisfaction and employee burnout.

The sporting body in Indian sports studies has been studied in the context of changing power relations in society, and this essay continues in a similar vein. The significance of sport in India evolved from being used as a means of control by the coloniser to becoming a point of resistance and then a tool for nation-building for the colonised peoples. Post-liberalisation wrought significant changes to the social and cultural landscape and brought with it a singular focus upon the individual, as the idea of the nation receded to the background and the link between sport and self-making became prominent. In the context of the changing cultures of sport and the body from colonial to post-liberalisation India and the growing prominence of sport in popular culture, this chapter turns a critical eye towards the representation of sport in three Nike advertisements between 2007 and 2016 with the understanding that these representations are shaped by the workings of power and ideology in society and therefore provide a window to access the evolution of sports discourse over time. Through this examination, it explores the complex dynamic between the liberation of the postcolonial sporting body from discursive shackles and its evolution – and possible entrapment – into becoming a placard of the neoliberal vision and what this means in terms of the decoloniality discourse.

Government primary schools in Australia increasingly take up the International Baccalaureate's Primary Years Programme (IB-PYP) to supplement government-mandated curriculum and governance expectations. The purpose of this paper is to explore how teachers navigate and contest dual policy-practice expectations in the Victorian Government IB-PYP context.

This study used a narrative inquiry approach. The narratives of two teachers were generated through a narrative interview and then re-storied with participants through a set of conceptual lenses drawn out of the policy assemblage and affect studies theoretical spaces.

The stories participants told show that competing mandatory local policy expressions are experienced and contested both to stabilize a technocratic rationality and produce alternative critical-political educational futures.

There a few accounts of teachers' policy experience in government school settings implementing the IB-PYP. In addressing this gap, this paper directly responds to prior claims of the IB's failure to promote an emancipatory pedagogy, showing instead that when teachers who bring a more critical understanding of educational purpose to their work take up the IB-PYP policy to support the enactment of that purpose.