Jessica Gerrard

Whiteness is not innate – it is learned. The systems of white domination that prevail across the world are not pregiven or natural. Rather, they are forged and sustained in social and political life. Learning Whiteness examines the material conditions, knowledge politics and complex feelings that create and relay systems of racial domination. Focusing on Australia, the authors demonstrate how whiteness is fundamentally an educational project – taught within education institutions and through public discourse – in active service of the settler colonial state. To see whiteness as learned is to recognise that it can be confronted. This book invites readers to reckon with past and present politics of education in order to imagine a future thoroughly divested from racism.

Whiteness is not innate – it is learned. The systems of white domination that prevail across the world are not pregiven or natural. Rather, they are forged and sustained in social and political life. Learning Whiteness examines the material conditions, knowledge politics and complex feelings that create and relay systems of racial domination. Focusing on Australia, the authors demonstrate how whiteness is fundamentally an educational project – taught within education institutions and through public discourse – in active service of the settler colonial state. To see whiteness as learned is to recognise that it can be confronted. This book invites readers to reckon with past and present politics of education in order to imagine a future thoroughly divested from racism.

This book offers an important and timely critique of expertise, showing how it is a ‘keyword’ shaped by social, historical, and political debates about what counts as knowledge and truth, and who counts as experts. Using teacher expertise as an illustrative case, Jessica Gerrard and Jessica Holloway reflect on recent events, including COVID-19 and the climate crisis, to examine how expertise is never neutral, objective, or fixed. They argue that ‘getting political’ is not just an inevitable part of teacher expertise, but a necessary basis of any claim to it. Across the chapters, Expertise explores how expertise is socially constructed in relation to governance, uses of data and evidence, understandings of ignorance and the unknown, and – ultimately – power. Using contemporary and historical examples from international contexts, the authors address the political positioning of expertise and how this creates boundaries between who is an expert and who is not, and what is (and is not) expertise. Gerrard and Holloway argue that ongoing policy debates about teacher expertise cannot be resolved by neutral definitions of ‘good teaching’. Rather, expertise is unavoidably political in its expression.

This book offers an important and timely critique of expertise, showing how it is a ‘keyword’ shaped by social, historical, and political debates about what counts as knowledge and truth, and who counts as experts. Using teacher expertise as an illustrative case, Jessica Gerrard and Jessica Holloway reflect on recent events, including COVID-19 and the climate crisis, to examine how expertise is never neutral, objective, or fixed. They argue that ‘getting political’ is not just an inevitable part of teacher expertise, but a necessary basis of any claim to it. Across the chapters, Expertise explores how expertise is socially constructed in relation to governance, uses of data and evidence, understandings of ignorance and the unknown, and – ultimately – power. Using contemporary and historical examples from international contexts, the authors address the political positioning of expertise and how this creates boundaries between who is an expert and who is not, and what is (and is not) expertise. Gerrard and Holloway argue that ongoing policy debates about teacher expertise cannot be resolved by neutral definitions of ‘good teaching’. Rather, expertise is unavoidably political in its expression.

This book explores the contemporary conditions of marginal work within the context of persistent unemployment, poverty, and homelessness in wealthy nations. Drawing from research concerning three cities—Melbourne, San Francisco, and London—Jessica Gerrard offers a rich account of one of the most precarious informal forms of work: selling homeless street press (The Big Issue and Street Sheet). Combining analyses of sellers’ everyday work experiences with theorizations of marginality, working, and learning, Gerrard provides much-needed insight into contemporary forms of entrepreneurial and precarious work. This book demonstrates that those who are unemployed and seemingly unproductive are, in fact, highly productive. They value, desire, and seek practical work experience whilst also struggling to fulfill the basic needs that many of us take for granted.

At a time when education appears to be simply reproducing social class relations, Radical childhoods offers a timely consideration of how children’s and young people’s education can confront and challenge social inequality. Presenting detailed analysis of archival material and oral testimony, the book examines the experiences of students and educators in two schooling initiatives that were connected to two of the most significant social movements in Britain: Socialist Sunday Schools (est. 1892) and Black Saturday/Supplementary Schools (est. 1967). Analysing across time, the author explores the ways in which these two very different schooling movements incorporated large numbers of women, challenged class and race inequality, and attempted to create spaces of ‘emancipatory’ education independent to the state. It argues that despite appearing to be on the ‘margins’ of the public sphere these schools were important, if contested and complex, sites of political struggle.