Gender, process, and praxis: Re-politicizing education in an era of neoliberalism, instrumentalism, and "Big Data"

Abstract

The authors establish an analytical framework comprising the socio-historical and ideological formation(s) and re-formation(s) of hegemonic masculinities as part of a system of governmentality. They use hegemonic masculinity and heteropatriarchal settler colonialism as lenses through which to understand and critique the historically gendered, classed, racialized, and sexualized assumptions that underlie education discourses based on conservative modernization through analysis of the historic relationship between education and the military, particularly gaming technology as curricular and pedagogical tools for recruiting and transmitting military values and skills. They finally urge that the "hidden curriculum" underpinning the power and practices of the education-industrial complex be made more visible, stronger curricular counter-narratives asserted, and they seek to uncover spaces of disruption and possibility, cognizant of the constraints that arise from the totalizing nature of conservative modernization in education and schooling.