Debbie Epstein

• Doctor of Philosophy
• University of Roehampton

In this chapter, we explore debates around ‘failing boys’ in UK schools as a postfeminist educational media panic. First, we explore how neoliberal ‘discourses’ of feminine educational success have influenced what we call a postfeminist media panic that constructs girls as wholly successful in the Global North, through a review of British policy on...

Elite schools have always been social choreographers par excellence. The world over, they put together highly dexterous performances as they stage and restage changing relations of ruling. They are adept at aligning their social choreographies to shifting historical conditions and cultural tastes. In multiple theatres, they now regularly rehearse t...

This paper draws on fieldwork done in Greystone School in South Africa, a single sex girls' school. I explore how the legacy of coloniser and colonised is reconfigured through the history of the school and the particular racialised politics of South Africa, where race and class have always been imbricated in differently nuanced ways before, during...

Before the opening credits of the Coen brothers’ (2009) film, A Serious Man, a prologue tells a story from the shtetl.1 An old man arrives home late because the wheel came off his wagon on the way back from the market and an old neighbour, whom he has invited to come to share the soup his wife is making, helped him with the repair.

This paper examines the Bourne trilogy to explore several characteristics of what we term the bioconvergent age. First, we consider the imagined and actual interfaces of bioconvergence—of body, gadgetry, and electronic communications. We explore the ways in which the bioconvergent tendencies represented in and by Bourne reflect and cultivate a cult...

In this paper, based on a project funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council considering how people position themselves in relation to popular representations of mathematics and mathematicians, we explore constructions of mathematicians in popular culture and the ways learners make meanings from these. Drawing on an analysis of popular c...

This paper makes both a critical analysis of some popular cultural texts about mathematics and mathematicians, and explores the ways in which young people deploy the discourses produced in these texts. We argue that there are particular (and sometimes contradictory) meanings and discourses about mathematics that circulate in popular culture, that y...

In this presentation, we draw on a number of examples taken from fieldwork over several years and in different projects, in order to explore the formation of young people's sexual identities. We argue that young people produce themselves as gendered and sexualized actors in and through certain key relationships. Their most immediate contexts are th...

In this presentation, we draw on a number of examples taken from fieldwork over several years and in different projects, in order to explore the formation of young people's sexual identities. We argue that young people produce themselves as gendered and sexualized actors in and through certain key relationships. Their most immediate contexts are th...

I was talking about my friend who was the maths geek. He came back this summer and he has got like the pi symbol and it's about an inch big tattooed on like the underside of his wrist. Everyone was telling me he had 'pi' and I was thinking, 'why has he got a pie tattooed on his wrist?' And I was thinking, 'what kind of pie would it be and why would...

The Michael Jackson trial represented a spectacular and, indeed, macabre event on a global scale. The trial keyed into a number of contemporaneous cultural anxieties and fascinations. These include: a seemingly inexhaustible popular craving for celebrity, excess and scandal; the totalising proliferation of surveillance culture; the “corruption” of...

This article highlights one strand of a study which investigated the concept of the violence‐resilient school. In six inner‐city secondary schools, data on violent incidents in school and violent crime in the neighbourhood were gathered, and compared with school practices to minimise violence, accessed through interviews. Some degree of association...

In this paper, we argue that education and the possibility of becoming educated are in tension with sexuality in schools and that, consequently, students tend either to suppress all kinds of knowledges—embodied and otherwise—that are neither welcome nor recognised within the formal contexts of schooling or debar themselves from success in terms of...

Discourse 25.3 (2003) 90-114 American talk television has cut a significant swathe across the broadcasting landscape. As a genre it is one of the most extensively syndicated and franchised media forms world-wide. American talk shows have long been pre-eminent not only in the massive export of multiple products, but also as genre-setting influences...

This study investigates how sexuality is dealt with at all levels of formal education and focuses on the way sexualities are manufactured in, and by, educational establishments, ranging from primary schools through to universities and colleges. <br /

This article aims to explore some of the ways in which the cultural meanings and practices of gender, sexuality and relationships intersect with and are reworked in the same-sex friendships of children aged nine to eleven. Using material from an ethnographic study, it focuses on two boys, Ben and Karl, who identified themselves as best friends. The...

This special issue of "Men and Masculinities" originates from the April 1999 symposium entitled "Disciplining and Punishing Masculinities" held at the University of Warwick in England. It tackles ways in which boys and young men negotiate learn and are positioned within different versions of masculinity. The areas under discussion are educational w...

In this article we explore the narratives and discursive frameworks which were deployed in the second Age of Consent debate in the British House of Commons in order to identify shifts, continuities and emergent elements in sexual politics in the late 1990s. In the first section we will be looking at questions of theory and method. Here we will draw...

Book Reviewed in this article: Social Life in School: pupils' experience of brcaktimc and recess from 7 to 16 years P eter B latchford Racism, Gender Identities and Young Children: social relations in a multi‐ethnic inner‐city primary school, 1998 P aul C onnolly Points of Viewing Children's Thinking: a digital ethnographer's journey R icki G oldma...

This paper explores several versions of the “American Dream,” which frame, and are produced within, the Oprah Winfrey Show. We begin by examining the conventional narrative of rags to riches, freedom and opportunity, mom, baseball, and apple pie most commonly associated with the American Dream and most graphically taken up as a liberal politics wit...

This paper explores several versions of the “American Dream,” which frame, and are produced within, the Oprah Winfrey Show. We begin by examining the conventional narrative of rags to riches, freedom and opportunity, mom, baseball, and apple pie most commonly associated with the American Dream and most graphically taken up as a liberal politics wit...

DEBBIE EPSTEIN suggests that new and unpredictable ways of being man are in process, replacing the masculinities created in the heat and violence of apartheid. Inextricably implicated in the ‘remaking of man'are the institutions and popular cultures in which men perform, make choices and resist

ABSTRACT In this paper I will draw on ethnographic work to argue that schools are highly sexualised sites, within which struggles around sexuality are pervasive, of consuming interest and, at the same time, taboo. I will suggest that struggles around sexuality are intimately connected with struggles around gender, and that the explicit homophobia a...

The Oprah Winfrey Show provides an interesting set of contradictions. On the one hand, it appears to challenge common-sense assumptions about relationships, specifically heterosexual relationships (for example, by consistently raising issues of sexual violence within a heterosexual context). Yet, at the same time, Oprah's presentation often works t...

The Oprah Winfrey Show provides an interesting set of contradictions. On the one hand, it appears to challenge common-sense assumptions about relationships, specifically heterosexual relationships (for example, by consistently raising issues of sexual violence within a heterosexual context). Yet, at the same time, Oprah's presentation often works t...

In response to articles in London's "Daily Mail" newspaper asserting that young children do not have the intellectual, social or moral skill to grasp the concept of heterosexuality and should not be exposed to lessons in bisexually or homosexuality, this paper argues that sexuality is pervasive in primary schools and suggests that the presumption o...

In this paper I offer a reading of the coverage in the popular press (tabloid and broadsheet) of the Jane Brown/Romeo and Juliet scandal, which hit the headlines in the United Kingdom (and was extensively reported in other Anglophone countries such as New Zealand, Australia and the USA) in January and February 1994. The paper traces the cultural an...

Since September 1991 I have been engaged in a research project in which we set out to explore the experiences of lesbian and gay students, teachers, and parents in relation to the English system of education.2 In the course of the project, we have interviewed or held group discussions with some 30 lesbians and gay men, as well as carrying out ethno...

During the 1980s and 1990s we have seen major changes in the education system, many of which have appealed to the notion of ‘accountability’. This paper argues that one of the reasons for the success of these appeals in common sense has been the failure of anti‐racist and other radical educationists to consider issues of accountability. It is sugge...

This paper is organised around three possible meanings that can be given to the question ‘Too small to notice?’ in relation to racism and anti‐racism in the early years of schooling (up to the age of eight). Firstly, are young children too small to have notice taken of their serious concerns and questions? Secondly, are young children too small to...

Many people have mapped the boundaries of the 'social turn' in mathematics education. We do not want to push back the boundaries and so claim more territory for the social but to explore what sets those bounds and, drawing on Judith Butler's work, to imagine mathematics learning as always already social. We use data from 27 group interviews with 15...