Space,Place,and Social Justice in Education

Introduction

Karen Barad (2007) argues persuasively that justice

is not a state that can be achieved once and for all. There are no solutions: There is only the ongoing practice of being open and alive, each intra-action, so that we might use our ability to respond, our responsibility, to help awaken, to breathe life into ever new possibilities for living justly. (p. x)

Furthermore, the “yearning for justice . . . is necessarily about our connections and responsibilities to one another—that is, entanglements” (Barad, 2007, p. xi). So how is justice related to space and place? Well, that “practice” to which Barad refers, that yearning, those entanglements, all occur in space; at least as far as space is a constantly productive “encounter, assembly, simultaneity . . . [of] everything that there is in space . . . Everything: living beings, things, objects, works, signs and symbols” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 101). They also occur in time or, more precisely in “space-time” (Massey, 1992). And in place, where “porous networks of social relations” (Massey, 1994, p. 121) are configured contingently through localized and contested “power geometries” (Massey, 1994). What is more, those yearnings and entanglements are affective. They flow through what Thrift (2008) has called spatialities of feeling.

This special edition is part of an ongoing attempt to grow a bigger entanglement, in Barad’s sense, around ways of thinking and doing space, place, and social justice in the broad field of education. Seven of the nine articles collected here have been developed from papers—one being Valerie Walkerdine’s key note contribution—originally presented to an international research seminar that took place in summer 2012 at the Education and Social Research Institute (ESRI) at Manchester Metropolitan University. That seminar brought together an international, multidisciplinary audience interested in working the “spatial turn” in social theory to deepen their interrogation of contemporary education discourse, policy and practice. Around 70 participants came together on the day to engage with contributions from a total of 35 scholars from five continents—Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and South America—covering both formal and informal education in sectors ranging from early years to adult education, and at a variety of scales from the school bus via the classroom to the regional, national and global. It’s worth pausing, though, to recall where the idea for that event was first seeded.

In fact, it came out of one of those productive, unofficial “cracks” that still occasionally occur in the ever more pressurized and instrumental space of the contemporary academy: coffee time at the 2010 European Conference of Education Research (ECER) at the University of Helsinki! Basically, a paper session convened by the Ethnography network of ECER had prompted a discussion about relatively untheorized uses of spatial terms in educational ethnography: “site,” “field,” and such like. As a result of an initial conversation between members of the Ethnography network, the Social Justice and Intercultural Education network, and one of the editors of this special edition, a decision was taken to develop a research conversation about how the drive for uniformity in the global education project is producing spatialities of deepening injustice embedded in asymmetric power relations and how effectively (or not) educational ethnography and qualitative inquiry more broadly are challenging that process.

Those involved in that conversation were particularly keen to understand, and advocate for, resistances to the neoliberal education project that were evident at that time on the street, within the academy, and in the rich activism of in between. From coffee in Helsinki, the idea grew via other conversations over other coffees at other gatherings until, by way of ECER 2011 (this time in Berlin) and the 2011 British Education Research Association (BERA) conference in London, colleagues at ESRI eventually succeeded in gaining funding from ECER and BERA to bring the international seminar to Manchester Metropolitan University. We had the beginning, we might say, of our “entanglement”; the most engaging and relevant aspects of which we present to Qualitative Inquiry (QI) readers here.

Education, the Spatial Turn, and Social Justice

It will be apparent that the authors contributing to this special edition are, like the editors, largely “at home” in educational studies. They share a view of that space, however, as one that is in flux where a “bundle of trajectories” can be seen to flow in and out (Massey, 2005; Lefebvre, 1991), and where nomadic ventures into interdisciplinarity are increasingly necessary. The articles, too, “fit” within the field of educational studies. What distinguishes them—and distinguishes this special edition, too—is the way they deploy different aspects of the spatial turn in social theory (see Warf & Arias, 2009) to try and do education research and education practice in ways that enable and enact social justice. In general, the papers collected here aren’t particularly concerned with exploring social justice at a conceptual level (though Roberts and Green make a telling contribution in that area). Rather, they are keen to make use of the spatial turn as a way of redoing a politics of possibility (Denzin & Giardina, 2012). To paraphrase Barad, they attempt to “breathe life into ever new possibilities for [researching] justly.” And they do that by operationalizing the theory that they work with, by putting it to work for change.

The “spatial turn” is not new, of course. It originated out of a challenge against positivism in geography made by

the historical and geographical materialism that emerged in the 1970s [which] ushered in a rather different interpretation of spatiality, whereby space was deemed to be inherently caught up in social relations both socially produced and consumed. (Hubbard, Kitchen, & Valentine, 2004, pp. 4-5)

It had a strong political character from the outset and quickly impacted dramatically at different scales: at the border of geographies of urbanization and urban sociology in the work of David Harvey and Manuel Castells, in Doreen Massey’s work focusing on localities, in the geopolitical systems approach of Wallerstein. Lefebvre’s notion of space as socially produced—first articulated in the 1974 work, La production de l’espace, but only translated into English in 1991—was signal, definitively leaving behind the empty redundancies of absolute space. From such beginnings, the trajectory of social and cultural geography has continued toward an understanding of social, economic, and political phenomena (including, obviously, education) as the product of spatio-temporal locality in which “the articulations of inter-relations brings space into being” (Hubbard et al., 2004, p. 1).

Expanding out of these beginnings in geographical studies, spatial theories traveled into social theory more widely (Gregory, 1994; Hubbard et al., 2004; Robson, Horton, & Kraftl, 2013), manifesting “in the humanities and other social sciences as works in the fields of literary and cultural studies, sociology, political science, anthropology, history, and art history have become increasingly spatial in their orientation” (Warf & Arias, 2009, p. 1). This development—part of a general shift to interdisciplinarity that occurred as disciplines were subject to the epistemological uncertainties of the postmodern moment (Nowotny, Scott, & Gibbons, 2001)—was not, however, without controversy. Some questioned interdisciplinarity, pointing out the durability of disciplinary boundaries and the need to protect them in order to retain specificity of critique (Young & Muller, 2007, 2010). C. Taylor (2009), for example, worried about the dilution of hard-won specialist vocabularies of space and place within geography. However, many welcomed the turn toward multiple trajectories of thought, and to the critical power of spatial thinking in particular, as a fruitful approach to theorizing the contemporary.

Changing Spaces and Places of Education

In education, spatial relationships between learners, homes, local areas, informal and formal learning spaces, regions, nations, and the globalized economy have clearly changed in the recent period, becoming increasingly mobile and virtual. Sociotechnical change has led to the emergence of entirely new sites of learning outside traditional educational institutions and to new divisions, reinforcing the effects of social disadvantage both on a global and a local scale (Leander & Sheehy, 2004). On one hand, boundaries between national economies of education are no longer fixed and individual learners can sometimes position themselves advantageously, developing identities across multinational spaces and places and in relation to the wider community beyond the immediate locality. On the other hand, neoliberal policy agendas sustain and intensify unequal provision of education on a global and a local scale; a process that not only draws academic attention to questions around geographies of choice and spatial dimensions of the marketization of educational provision (Ball, 2003; C. Taylor, 2001) but also meets with considerable resistance. Indeed, resistance itself takes increasingly spatialized forms: sometimes occupying institutional spaces, sometimes situating new educational spaces entirely outside the academy. ¹

It’s something of an oddity, then, that the take up of spatial perspectives by scholars in educational studies was initially slow (Gulson & Symes, 2007), even though theorizations of space and place are a fairly obvious resource for disrupting persistent geographies of inequality that plague educational processes. We would speculatively suggest that this tardiness is related to the fact that questions of social justice in education have tended to be the prerogative of critical pedagogic thought in the lineage of Freire which, while it has been keen to rethink itself (Kincheloe & McLaren, 2005), has come late to spatial thought. Spatially focused research, having grown from early, probing, but infrequent forays into spatialized methodology (Nespor, 2000, 2002) and spaces and places of race, gender, and class (Mac an Ghaill, 1996; McDowell, 1999, 2003; Reay, 1998, 2000), is now well established and diversely focused (Brown, 2011; Charlton et al., 2011; Green & White, 2007; Kintrea, Bannister, Pickering, Reid, & Suzuki, 2008; Jack, 2010; Robinson, Smyth, Down, & McInerney, 2012; Shildrick, Blackman, & MacDonald, 2009). However, attention to social justice tends to be implied by topic rather than made explicit. Work that hinges spatial theorization directly to matters of justice remains fairly rare and, certainly on the evidence of this special edition, is tending to grow out of and beyond the received framework of critical pedagogy.

Building Out of Theoretical Traditions

That said, spatial approaches do speak to and enhance recent theoretical trends in educational studies. Sociocultural theories of learning, prevalent during the last decade, challenge the view of learning as “the mind in isolation” or the person as a vessel to be filled with “knowledge”—instead offering an account of learning as a social process. In sociocultural approaches, learning is always theorized as taking place somewhere, both in relation to history (time) and context (place/space) thereby foregrounding questions around the role of space and place in learning process and practice (Sefton-Green, 2009; Leander, Phillips, & Taylor, 2010). Practice is understood in its “situated complexity” and meaning made in context and bound up with questions of identity and identity formation (Lemke, 2000; Wortham, 2005). Equally, ideas about how we learn are intimately connected with attempts to conceptualize space and place in education. The spatial turn in educational studies is bound up with contextual and theoretical movements that foreground the situatedness of learning, materiality, and social justice in thinking about spaces and places of learning.

Within this general dynamic, spatial theorizing in education takes off in a variety of directions following a number of influences. The contributions of professional geographers—Harvey, Soja, Massey, Yi-Fu Tuan, Thrift, Gillian Rose—are clearly evident. Beyond the disciplinary boundary of geography, though, there are a plethora of other spatializing perspectives available through the work of Said, Spivak, Latour, Foucault, Baudrillard, Butler, and Deleuze and Guattari (see Hubbard et al., 2004). Contributors to this special edition work productively with Lefebvre (Christie), Soja (Roberts and Green), Massey (Liz Taylor), Foucault (Jackson), Deleuze and Guattari (Fendler, Cross, et al.), and Guattari, (Walkerdine) while Manchester and Bragg deploy the turn more generally and Yvette Taylor interrogates class and gender geographies and temporalities with a strong attentiveness to affect.

In short, then, social and cultural geographic approaches that theorize space as fluidly relational, as in-movement rather than stationary (McGregor, 2004; Lefebvre, 1991; Massey, 2005), are theoretically necessary and practically and politically productive. They offer an expansive, open perspective—viewing spaces and places as continually remade by networks of power, by people and by interactions with the (many) materials of the material world (McGregor, 2004). Inevitably, then, they promote novel ways of thinking about inclusion and exclusion, about who (and what) is “in, at the heart, on the margins” (Gulson & Symes, 2007, p. 99) and link our own work—which we’ll now say something about—to the articles collected here.

Our Work

Bright’s (2011, 2012a, 2102b) ethnographic work lingers, for example, in a locality similar to that explored in Yvette Taylor’s contribution to this special edition. Focusing on a deindustrialized U.K. coal-mining community in a space of “industrial ruin” (Edensor, 2005), it explores how such a location—once positioned as a dangerously insubordinate site of “the enemy within” ² —is haunted by absent presences, notably the intergenerational transmission of “affects of trauma” (Hardt, 2007, p. xii) related to the British miners’ strike of 1984-1985. These spectral intensities, Bright suggests, impact on young people and their experience of education in manifold ways, and are often linked to informal or formal exclusion from school.

Describing how deindustrialization attempts a smoothing over not only of physical places but also of resistant knowledge, the argument is made that deindustrialization effectively supports neoliberalism in producing itself as a world without any counter history. Such erasure neatly elides matters of social justice, silencing counter histories as an always deniable “other.” In the locality studied, this effectively cuts off a generation of young people from their own class history. In contrast, a space of industrial ruin holds

forgotten forms of collectivity and solidarity, lost skills, ways of behaving and feeling, traces of arcane language, and neglected historical and contemporary forms of social enterprise. (Edensor, 2005, pp. 166-167)

Here, the visible and the invisible, the material and the immaterial, intersect. Consequently, researching such a domain offers both a significant methodological challenge and a political opportunity. It raises obvious methodological questions about the nature of the empirical and what the “material” might encompass, calling forth new materialist approaches and new relational ecologies (Bennett, 2010; Coole & Frost, 2010). Beyond that, however, it also reminds us that things might be otherwise. It is a space haunted by what Ernst Bloch called spuren [traces] of hope and enfolds, always, its own immanent “not-yet” (Bloch, 1969, 1995). In the locality of Bright’s research, this utopic residue is apprehended through a spatiality of feeling that, because of very particular circumstances of community trauma (Bright, 2012b; Walkerdine & Jimenez, 2012), involves a social haunting (Gordon, 1997) as space is made into place “through ghosts” (Bell, 1997, p. 820) and the past is opened as a tool for reconfiguring the present. Prompted by the idea of socially produced space as saturated in unfinished imaginings of justice, Bright has recently worked with Bloch’s (1995) notion of “concrete utopia” as a model for participatory youth and community work.

Allendyke, like Fendler, Cross et al., and Walkerdine in the present issue, finds her starting point in Deleuze and Guattari. Her work draws specifically on theories of affect and the Deleuzian notion of the event to think about how those with a difficult relationship to feeding the body might have more livable lives (Dyke, 2013a, 2013b). Attending to “eating disorder” in terms of the abstract spatiality of the body—what Massumi terms the virtual or incorporeal (Massumi, 2002)—allows her to work differently with the space of the body and places which enable particular practices of embodiment. Deploying a Deleuzian practice of productive paradox, her work takes flight from the fixities of good and common sense (Deleuze, 1990) to trouble what is presumed concrete about matter. It moves decisively away, therefore, from spaces of “the actual” or what can be seen in vision alone (Massumi, 2011).

Working in online space of “pro-ana” sites, Dyke (Allendyke) argues that the “pro” in “pro-ana” challenges the way that medical cultures produce “diagnosis” as neutral (American Psychiatric Association, 2000) and reduce anorexia to representations of weight and appearance; a process which obscures the everyday relationship to feeding the body, which is incremental in its development and difficult well in advance of the ascription of the “proper name” of Anorexia Nervosa (Dyke, 2013a, 2013b). Allendyke notices how online communities also commune and communicate off-line in ways that require rethinking spaces of “proper” and “improper” anorexia. Side-stepping forecasts that consider the virtual as the “apocalypse of corporeal subjectivity” (Keeps, cited in Markham, 2008, p. 252) she proposes “pro-anorexia” as a material-discursive-affective spatiality (Dyke, 2013b) the mobilities of which evade the fixed space of anorexia. For Allendyke, there are justice implications here. It is, she contends, only through engaging with anorexia as a snowballing, open-ended, differential (Massumi, 2002) that the incremental becomings and openings to difference evident in her work might lead to “relations less impoverished than the ones we have thus far imagined and lived” (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2008, p. 491).

Concerned with the many varieties of formal and informal learning across the life course, Manchester’s work naturally ranges across space/time and place. Agency and social justice are bought into focus in her work on sociospatial aspects of voice and participation: for instance, in exploring emergent child–adult spaces in schools and “community” public spheres that emerge through participatory media practices (Forde, Foxwell, & Meadows, 2002). Her work on community media production looked at the resistant spaces that developed in inner city communities in the North West of England as people worked together to (re)-interpret and (re)-present their own identities and experiences—in some cases establishing counter discourses (Manchester, 2008). Much of her work straddles disciplines: cultural studies, education, and community development to name a few—rarely feeling at home in any.

More recently, in seeking to address pressing global challenges such as demographic, economic, and environmental change, she has—like Bright and Allendyke—drawn on the material turn in social theory, moving beyond more textual approaches to acknowledge “the place of embodied humans within a material world” (Coole & Frost, 2010, p. 3). In so doing, the benefits of working across disciplines to explore ethical and political challenges become clearer. Interest in how we can build intergenerational connections in our aging communities or how learner identities develop and are nurtured across our whole lives raise challenges for researchers that require more complex, nuanced, and interdisciplinary responses. In her recent work with Keri Facer, learning was understood as a process operating on multiple timescales and in a range of spatial locations from the microencounter of a conversation, to the meso-level knitting together of these moments to solve new challenges, to the macro-level articulation of identity narratives (Facer & Manchester, 2012). Using a variety of technologies, learners were asked to record their (learning) experiences across physical and virtual time and space, questioning the “imagined geographies” of education and learning and raising questions about the different mobilities of learners moving through their lives.

Papers in the Special Edition

All of the contributors to this special edition of QI draw on spatial theories to accelerate the productive possibilities of difference that reside within intersecting geographies of gender, race, and class. In doing so, they boldly disrupt dominant methods in educational studies, changing the unit of analysis and inviting researchers to look across spaces and places of learning to examine how our lives are entangled with a myriad of others, to register how artifacts and texts link different spaces, and to explore social, political, economic and material forces at work in learning. For all educational researchers such an approach is risky. It involves movement out of and beyond traditional locations such as “the school” and invites participation in a variety of new research activities—from cartography to “yarning”—as we’ll see in the paper summaries below. Happily, all the papers collected here rise spiritedly to the challenge.

The opening contribution to this edition sets the adventurous tone. Valerie Walkerdine’s article adds to a recently discernible trend in sympathetically troubling the received Deleuze and Guattari couplet (see Osborne, 2011) by focusing more emphatically on the contribution of Guattari. Walkerdine works with Felix Guatarri’s writing on territorialities to unpick notions of space, place, and performances and practices of self. As with Pam Christie’s article in this edition, but with difference, she draws on ideas of rhythm and refrain, linking them to the “affective base of experience.” Excitingly, social justice is placed well outside its conventional theoretical territory and described as a “cartography of a dreamed-of-future” where there is much “imagination work” to be done. Attuned to the “affective turn” (Clough, 2007), she suggests that intensity work (affect) should be considered as prior to identity work; and that personal and social change needs to be considered creatively in the hope that “assemblages of enunciation” might emerge, and that possibilities of iterability might collide to forge “new coordinates of interruption.” As with other articles in this special edition (Fendler; Manchester and Bragg), the notion of “safe spaces” emerges here where it is argued that, without them, the processes of becoming implied by educational and social change is inevitably stalled.

Next, Roberts and Green’s article develops an Australian perspective on the political and methodological challenges involved in researching rural education. On the back of a detailed account of rural educational achievement in that country, the authors log the persistent disadvantages experienced by rural communities, noting the “geographical blindness” of conventional, distributive notions of social justice which effectively essentialize rural educational disadvantage by fixing the rural as a discrete and uniform category. In response, they build on earlier work which experiments with problematizing space in relation to equity and rural education, exploring “space as an axis of social justice” and working with “place as a key reference-point for researching rural education.” Proposing a spatialized “strategic eclecticism” that offers educational researchers “time to pause, to dwell on particularities and subjectivities and to recognize the affordances of places” they mobilize Soja’s notion of spatial justice to analyze what happens when rural Australia—itself a sociohistorical production—is affected by neoliberal discourses which universalize learning experiences. Roberts and Green’s account of how rural deficit is constructed through the metropolitan gaze of (increasingly globalized) policy production is particularly insightful, being important well beyond the particularities of the Australian setting. Indeed, their account implies much wider questions that will be of interest to the QI readership: not least about the relationship between metropolitan policy elites and the construction of research and knowledge within the contemporary university.

Writing in South Africa, Pam Christie investigates the way that contradictory contemporary global/local dynamics play out in the context of the historical geographies of colonialism and apartheid in South African schools. Using the Lefebvrian approach of rhythmanalysis, she draws on the triad of practice, representation and lived experience to analyze the domestic education policy setting. Rhythmanalysis—a “double act of noticing and understanding [that] requires both sensual and intellectual attentiveness”—foregrounds the multiple scales and rhythms of practice that produce social space. And it does so, Christie contends, in such a way as to steer our attention toward possible pressure points for change. Interestingly, like Roberts and Green, she uses the concept of affordances—developing it somewhat—to ask “two complementary questions . . . [w]hat do schools in different places offer students? And: What do students in different places perceive or imagine that schools offer them?” The notion of affordances, she argues, brings out the triadic nexus between the materiality of schools as social spaces, the perceptions of students, and the imaginaries of students. It thus locates a point where the inequalities of schooling may be identified, with the aim of interrupting and working against them.

In her article, Rachel Fendler draws on Deleuze and Guattari, Crang, and Thrift to propose a mobile methodology that follows the “nomadic” learner through the “eventful space” of their life-wide learning journey. In doing so, she disrupts any lingering notion of fixity within the field of educational ethnography. Drawing attention to the way in which a nomadic pedagogy frames learning as a process which occurs when subjects enter into unfamiliar territory, Fendler centralizes the notion of unfamiliar territory as an issue for the social justice agenda to consider. As a nomadic subject, she proposes, a learner is involved in becoming-other, engaging in a relationship with his or her surrounding in a process of (continual) deterritorialization. Making specific reference to a/r/t ography as a method for generating conditions of deterritorialization, she explores a practice that might be called “yarning” to experimentally map—rather than expertly and definitively trace—the rhizomatic contours of those deterritorializations. Fendler’s yarn practice loops insightfully and productively with recent work such as that of Elizabeth De Freitas. Developing strategies for diagramming interactions in educational research, de Freitas notes that

mapping subjectivity across the classroom would be less about identifying stages in a genetic axis or positions in a deep structure, or about representation of interaction, but would involve following the affects and percepts in their twisting, braiding, and knotting emergence. (De Freitas, 2012, p. 563)

Thread—as an instantiation of entanglement—finds itself woven into the contribution of Beth Cross and her coresearchers’ article, too. Cross and her coparticipants, Caroline McFarlane, Ian Brookes and Kerry McInnes, completely embrace the mission of QI, approaching participatory research writing as a lived enactment of social justice. Using metaphors of spatiality in a way that amplifies Laurel Richardson’s discussion of how metaphorical writing might “resist social inequalities” (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2008, p. 492), they seek to challenge interconnected and often invisible barriers faced by service users and, using what they term “embodied methodologies,” literally weave into visibility the practice of researching, writing, and representing difference, differently.

Liz Taylor’s article reconsiders case study research, questioning in particular the “boundedness” of the case. By drawing on Doreen Massey’s work on the relational conceptualization of space, she invites the QI readership to consider what she refers to as the “thrown-togetherness” of emergent things and the mutual constitution of the local and the global. In this article, places, rather than being points on a map, become spatio-temporal events and space is articulated as “the sphere of a multiplicity of trajectories.” Liz Taylor asks us to consider writing and analysis as a “meeting place with its own ‘spacetime’ in a way that echoes Alecia Jackson and Lisa Mazzei’s notion of ‘plugging in’: reading-the-data-while-thinking-the-theory . . . entering the assemblage, . . . making new connectives” as developed in a recent QI article (Jackson & Mazzei, 2013, p. 264).

Helen Manchester and Sara Bragg also work to disrupt the boundedness of the “case study”—and of the “school,” as well—through the metaphor of capaciousness. They consider “school ethos” as a moving and dynamic concept, foregrounding the following: porousness and permeability in relations between the research space, the researcher, and others; identity work; emplacement in social, sensory, and material geographies; and more psychoanalytic concerns such as the “containment” of difficult emotions. Like Christie, Manchester and Bragg draw on Lefebvre to highlight connections in the U.K. context between schools and other spaces, places, and networks, arguing that ignoring these connections may be particularly significant for schools located in areas of socioeconomic deprivation. They also highlight how both conservative and progressive spatial imaginaries have particular consequences for understanding the role of the investigating researcher.

In her article, Yvette Taylor (2012) reports on aspects of a major U.K. research project, Fitting Into Place? Class and Gender Geographies and Temporalities, which charts gendered, generational transitions from the North East England industrial landscapes of one or two generations ago, to a current present and “regenerated” future. In this particular article, she focuses on young U.K. women’s experience of time and space, drawing our attention to the way in which gender, generation, and class intersect in temporalized notions of responsibility, failure, and success. Yvette Taylor uses Bourdieusian and feminist phenomenological insights to engage with data gathered in the context of austerity and government cuts to welfare and public services. As she notes, “[r]ecognising the gendering of austerity measures is an important corrective against ‘can do’ girl discourses.”

The final article in this special edition effectively takes us right back to the excerpt from Karen Barad’s work with which we began. For Barad, we’ll remember, justice is not a solution but a process of ongoing entanglement. Alecia Jackson—writing from the south of the United States—mines the still rich seam of Foucauldian thought to make a very similar point but, importantly and originally, she makes it in the specific context of education. Contending that Foucault’s theory of power and knowledge is spatial in both concept and practice and that the power/knowledge “doublet” provides a framework in which to situate processes of relating justly, she engages with power/knowledge as a co-implicated relation, moving from a notion of space as enclosure toward an idea of space as dynamic, mobile, and creative. In such a space, the idea of the subject as an autonomous, unitary category is permanently undermined, with the resultant loss of identity being viewed by Jackson as productive rather than pathological. Giving room to the vivid voice of “Destiny” (a participant in her ethnographic study of southern girls’ subjectivity and education), Jackson develops her paper as a work of “optimism” in a way that encapsulates the overall tone of this special issue. In her view, the analysis of practices through a Foucauldian spatial methodology brings out how people already actively embed and embody justice through their everyday practices. They are creative actors, not mere dupes of structural inequality awaiting enlistment to a program of emancipation carried out in their name.

Taking our cue from Jackson, we feel that this up-beat note is the right one on which to pause and hand the discussion over to the QI readership. At the same time, however—and courtesy again of Jackson—we also remain mindful of Foucault’s barbed observation that while not everything is bad, everything is dangerous and that therefore—in living and educating justly—we “always have something to do.” In handing over what is now, hopefully, a somewhat bigger entanglement, we’d like to politely draw attention to the imperative implied there, too.