Alison Mackenzie

Queen's University Belfast | QUB · School of Education

This collective article presents a theoretical kaleidoscope, the multiple lenses of which are used to examine and critique citizen science and humanities in postdigital contexts and from postdigital perspectives. It brings together 19 short theoretical and experiential contributions, organised into six loose groups which explore areas and perspecti...

This research aims to understand how teachers of autistic children responded to teaching remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. Six teachers who work in an autism centre took part in face-to-face semi-structured interviews in the Kingdom of Bahrain on their perspectives of teaching autistic children remotely and how their mothers adapted to this mo...

We are delighted to have been appointed as the new Editorial Team for the British Educational Research Journal (BERJ). As we embark on this new challenge, we would like to reflect here on our aspirations and ambitions for the journal over the coming 4 years of our tenure. We recognise that BERJ occupies a unique position as a diverse yet broad and...

From the perspective of neoliberal governmentality, this study sets out to investigate the linear relation from agency to performance through a survey of junior-high-school teachers’ (n=2,319) attitudes toward performance management. While this linear relationship is documented, the best model of the SEM analysis shows that intermediates positively...

This systematic review examines the experimental studies on interventions that influence the success of high-attaining primary school girls in STEM courses.

The World Health Organization estimates that almost one in three women were subjected to physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or sexual violence by someone other than their partner at least once in their lifetime. During the COVID-19 pandemic, there were increased reports of violence against women in some countries, whereas others repor...

The pandemic affected more than 1.5 billion students and youth, and the most vulnerable learners were hit hardest, making digital inequality in educational settings impossible to overlook. Given this reality, we, all educators, came together to find ways to understand and address some of these inequalities. As a product of this collaboration, we pr...

In this chapter, I offer a postdigital feminist analysis of misogyny and its harmful manifestations online. The Internet is a powerful tool in the systemic and structural dissemination of gender-based violence against women and girls (VAWG). This violence includes technology-facilitated harmful behaviour, along with technological tools to violate v...

Peer tutoring cultivates task awareness and empowers metacognitive mastery, an under-explored realm in 32 years of research. The synthesis of evidence concerning the combination of peer tutoring and metacognition was notably scarce.

This chapter addresses the Postdigital Science and Education community’s pressing need to examine its own research praxes and asks: What binds us together in postdigital research, particularly in a methodological sense? The essay outlines genealogies, challenges, opportunities, and future perspectives of postdigital research. It offers authors’ und...

This chapter is a summary of philosophy, theory, and practice arising from collective writing experiments conducted between 2016 and 2022 in the community associated with the Editors’ Collective and more than 20 scholarly journals. The main body of the chapter summarises the community’s insights into the many faces of collective writing. Appendix 1...

The pandemic affected more than 1.5 billion students and youth, and the most vulnerable learners were hit hardest, making digital inequality in educational settings impossible to overlook. Given this reality, we, all educators, came together to find ways to understand and address some of these inequalities. As a product of this collaboration, we pr...

This paper analyses how teachers contribute to a successful society through a lens of Foucauldian perspective. It uses this lens to analyse how teachers’ self-improvement through professional development in the regime of neoliberal governmentality is influenced by society, performativity and professional ‘norms’. Data is presented from 3,131 teache...

There is good evidence that peer tutoring, when used in a structured manner can lead to attainment gains in English reading. Transferability of the technique to other languages and educational contexts are less well studied. This paper reports results from a Phase 2 exploratory trial designed to establish if peer tutoring, in the form of Paired Rea...

This systematic evidence synthesis examined the reported research on the effect of peer tutoring on metacognition in primary and secondary school students. A comprehensive search of multiple databases, including ERIC, Education source, British Education Index, ProQuest, Scopus, and Psych Info was conducted. The evidence synthesis included experimen...

This discursive article discusses some of the inherent and durable problems associated with human capital discourses in education. While human capital is regarded as a core element in ensuring international competitiveness, this discourse greatly jeopardizes the ability of lower SES students to acquire agency through schooling. This is due to its t...

This research reports on mothers’ experiences of raising adolescent autistic sons and how they responded to their sexual and emotional behaviours against a background of social conservativeness. Seventeen mothers of adolescents between the ages of 12 and 20 years’ old were interviewed in semi-structured interviews in Saudi Arabia (n = 10) and Bahra...

In this paper, I discuss rape myths and mythologies, their negative effects on rape and sexual assault complainants, and how they prejudicially construct women qua women. The backdrop for the analysis is the Belfast Rugby Rape Trial, which took place in 2018. Four men, two of whom were well‐known rugby players, were acquitted of rape and sexual ass...

This paper is a summary of philosophy, theory, and practice arising from collective writing experiments conducted between 2016 and 2022 in the community associated with the Editors’ Collective and more than 20 scholarly journals. The main body of the paper summarises the community’s insights into the many faces of collective writing. Appendix 1 pre...

Despite the growth and popularity of Irish-medium Education (IME) in Northern Ireland, the sector has not received the same levels of state support and funding as has heritage language education in the rest of the UK and the Republic of Ireland. Educating children in an immersive language setting, particularly in a minority or endangered language,...

We discuss how the colonisation of the island of Ireland has marginalised and delegitimised Gaeilge, the Irish language, and the relationship of this colonial genealogy in place to local educational institutions and the practices therein. The hegemonic and homogenising processes of British colonialism continue to reverberate in modern discourses th...

Drawing upon Bourdieu's cultural reproduction theory, this study sets out to examine the influence of agency on the practice of cultural capital. The technique of hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) was applied to analyze this influence on 960 graduates randomly sampled from 12 Chinese independent high schools in Malaysia. The results show that moth...

Education is one of the most powerful means by which to advance equality, equity, and justice, yet it is also one of the most powerful mechanisms by which inequality, inequity and injustice are reproduced. Although academics have developed various ways for understanding these phenomena, the dichotomy between agency and structuralism persists, and i...

This article is a collective response to the 2020 iteration of The Manifesto for Teaching Online. Originally published in 2011 as 20 simple but provocative statements, the aim was, and continues to be, to critically challenge the normalization of education as techno-corporate enterprise and the failure to properly account for digital methods in tea...

Saudi Arabia and Bahrain have both signed the 2006 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and have a number of acts and policies which support inclusive education for children with disabilities. However, achieving the goals of equitable education at all levels remains a challenge, especially for autistic children. This article rep...

This collectively written article explores postdigital relationships between science, philosophy, and religion within the continuum of enchantment, disenchantment, and re-enchantment. Contributions are broadly classified within four sections related to academic fields of philosophy, theology, critical theory, and postdigital studies. The article re...

In this chapter, we take our cue from Machiavelli to explore whether deceit by those who govern us is good for the polity. We argue that it is not: all forms of deception carry great risks that infect social and political relations. It is particularly harmful when these deceits are conducted in online platforms, given the speed at which lies, fake...

MacKenzie, A., Rose, J. & Bhatt, I. (2021) Introduction: The Genesis of Dupery by Design. In: The Epistemology of Deceit in a Postdigital Era: Dupery by Design. MacKenzie, A., Rose, J. & Bhatt, I. (eds.). Springer, p. xvii-xxiii

In this chapter, we take our cue from Machiavelli to explore whether deceit by those who govern us is good for the polity. We argue that it is not: all forms of deception carry great risks that infect social and political relations. It is particularly harmful when these deceits are conducted in online platforms, given the speed at which lies, fake...

This article focuses on discourses of child safety and protection of stakeholder organisations (SOs) and school pastoral care co‐ordinators (PCCs) on educating young people about sexting. Individual semi‐structured interviews were conducted with the representatives of four organisations who assist schools in the delivery of Relationships and Sexual...

This paper presents the challenges and opportunities of using a participatory action research (PAR) methodology in a social science PhD exploring young people's attitudes to sexting in Northern Ireland. Based upon a children's rights approach, a Young People's Advisory Group (YPAG) was created to seek advice on data collection activities and resour...

This study focuses on sexting amongst young people in Northern Ireland about which there is, as yet, very little qualitative research. To address the gap, and using a liberal philosophical feminist framework, focus group interviews were conducted with seventeen (ten girls and seven boys) 16-17-year-olds to explore their views on sexting. The young...

There is good evidence that peer tutoring, when used in a structured manner can lead to attainment gains in English reading. Transferability of the technique to other languages and educational contexts are less well studied. This is a protocol for a Phase 2 exploratory trial designed to establish if peer tutoring, in the form of Paired Reading can...

More than 5.6 million people have fled Syria since the start of the Civil War in 2011, seeking refuge in countries such as Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. Turkey has approximately one percent of the world population but hosts nearly 15 percent of the global refugee population. The country currently has 3.6 million Syrian refugees, the largest number of...

This edited book collection offers strong theoretical and philosophical insight into how digital platforms and their constituent algorithms interact with belief systems to achieve deception, and how related vices such as lies, bullshit, misinformation, disinformation, and ignorance contribute to deception. This inter-disciplinary collection explore...

The Israeli occupation has had a considerable negative impact on the lives of Palestinians, such that achieving an effective, equitable, quality education for all children is far from being realised. Palestinian children are not only adversely affected by the occupation, but also by an educational system that fails fully and systematically to accor...

This paper explores relationships between environment and education after the Covid-19 pandemic through the lens of philosophy of education in a new key developed by Michael Peters and the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia (PESA). The paper is collectively written by 15 authors who responded to the question: Who remembers Greta Thunber...

The Palestinian National Authority has signed into law human rights protocols that promote, protect and ensure the rights of all children and the rights of persons with disabilities, including the right to an inclusive, equitable education. These protocols are supported by a series of laws and policies which seek to realise the aim of respecting al...

‘Post-truth’ politics poses a serious challenge to the values of truth, and consequently trust. Sections of mainstream political parties and the media do not appear to have basic knowledge or insight into processes that underpin our institutions, and we are confronted with the proliferation of lies, fake news and bullshit—and profound ignorance. We...

This is the accepted manuscript (author version), to be published by Taylor & Francis, and to appear in a special issue of Teaching in Higher Education on “Experts, knowledge and criticality in the age of ‘alternative facts’: re-examining the contribution of higher education” [February 2019]. Cited as: Bhatt, I. & MacKenzie (forthcoming / 2019) Ju...

Cite this article as: MacKenzie, A. & Bhatt, I. (2019). Lies, Bullshit and Fake News: Some Epistemological Concerns. Postdigit Science & Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-018-0025-4

Recognition of inclusion in mainstream schools for all people with disabilities is enshrined in the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). General Comment 4 on Article 24 (Right to inclusive education) of the CRPD provides a concept of inclusion and its core features which we discuss here. Article 7 of the same enjoins state...

This paper engages with a philosophical conception of moralised compassion. This involves imaginative dwelling on the condition of the other person, an active regard for her good, and a view of her as a fellow human being. We will suggest that we ought, following Schopenhauer, to cultivate moralised compassion if we are to have just relations and j...

Links between schools in the United Kingdom and partner schools in developing countries are an increasingly popular approach to teaching global citizenship. This study addresses the limited empirical research to date on the influence of such links on pupils’ learning and understanding. Following an overview of the curricular theme of global citizen...

Noting public concern about sexual exploitation, abuse and sexualisation, we argue that sex education in the UK needs revision. Choice is a feature of current sex education policy and, acknowledging that choice can be problematic, we defend its place in an approach to sex education premised on informed deliberation, relational autonomy, a particula...

Curriculum for Excellence, Scotland’s 3–18 curriculum, has been described as ‘the most significant curricular change in Scotland for a generation’ (McAra, Broadley & McLauchlan, 2013, p. 223). The purpose of the curriculum is ‘encapsulated’ in four capacities in order that learners become i) successful learners, ii) confident individuals, iii) resp...

The August 2011 riots in England occasioned widespread condemnation from government and the media. Here, we apply the concepts of hypocrisy and affiliation to explore reactions to these riots. Initially acknowledging that politics necessitates a degree of hypocrisy, we note that some forms of hypocrisy are indefensible: they compromise integrity. W...

The Capabilities Approach places dignity at its core, emphasising people as ends not means who should be enabled to achieve the plans and goals they have reason to value. Focussed on the entitlement of all people to flourish and to be treated with equal respect, we argue here that this approach lends itself to a consideration of ethical issues arou...

Care is a feature of all of our lives, all of the time. An analysis of Scotland's Curriculum for Excellence reveals that care and caring permeate complex dimensions of life in and after school and we ask here, if, on some accounts, care can do the work required of it. Acknowledging the significance of her contribution to care, we focus on the work...