ABSTRACT
The starting point for this book is the idea that schooling is implicated in the making of particular sorts of people as well as the making of educational and social exclusions and inequalities. And, following from this, that schools are important sites of counteror radical-politics. From this starting point the book investigates a range of resources for theorizing and enacting political practices that make ‘school trouble’. The spirit and the form of my title, School Trouble, is borrowed from Judith Butler’s (1990) Gender Trouble in which she sets out the problematics of gender, demonstrates some of the trouble that gender categories cause, and offers theoretical and political tools for ‘troubling’ gender. This book hopes to make similar moves in relation to schooling. Its key goal is to piece together a series of tools and tactics for intervening into contemporary education in ways that have the potential to destabilize the endurance of its inequalities and loosen the constraints of its normative knowledges, meanings, practices and subjects. The book does this by bringing theorizations of counterpolitics together with a range of counter-political traditions in education. This underpins another key concern of the book – to illustrate resistance politics inside education. The book investigates a range of ideas for and empirical examples of critical action in school as this is enacted in the practice of teachers and students across a series of educational settings and levels of intervention. I engage self-conscious politics pursued by educators, practices that might be understood as sub-political activities that are a part of educators’ day-to-day practice and practices that can be seen as implicitly political but might not ordinarily be thought of in this way either by those engaged in them or by those looking on from outside. This highlights the book’s concern with the political aspects and effects of ordinary, day-to-day practices, pedagogic encounters and everyday life inside schools, the ways that these connect to ‘who’ is recognized as a ‘good’ student and learner and how the constraints on such recognition might be unsettled. In this sense a key target of the politics of the book is, borrowing from Critical Race Theory, the ‘business as usual’ of schooling.
