Introduction

The work of Judith Butler has transformed thinking in critical education studies. This collection of essays engages in different ways with the work of Judith Butler in order to understand education and its subjects. Butler has been most well known for her work on gender and this is where she has been most widely taken up in education. Charlotte Chadderton’s ‘Towards a research framework for race in education: critical race theory and Judith Butler’ is particularly useful because it puts ideas from Butler in conversation with Critical Race Theory. Claudia Matus and Marta Infante’s ‘Undoing diversity: knowledge and neoliberal discourses in colleges of education’ applies ideas from Butler to analyse a discourse of diversity and the practices this produces in higher education, bringing Butler’s analytics to a Chilean context. Davies was perhaps the first feminist education scholar to take up Butler’s thinking and apply it to analysing the workings of gender in schooling.