Conference Program

This paper examines higher education (HE) priorities advanced in the opening months of the second Trump administration, a period shaped by the prominent role of Elon Musk as a Special Government Employee and the emergence of the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE). Building on the premise that HE is always political rather than insulated from ideological struggle (Marshall & Scribner, 1991; Apple, 2003), the study mobilises world-systems theory to situate US HE policy shifts within world core–periphery dynamics and struggles over hegemony (Wallerstein, 1974; Spring, 2015). Methodologically, the study undertakes a thematic analysis of 16 national-level presidential policy documents (13 executive orders and 3 proclamations) issued between 20 January and 28 May 2025, collected from the Federal Register (2025) via structured keyword searches and analysed in NVivo 12 using a four-phase thematic analysis framework (Kushnir, 2025b).

The analysis identifies three interconnected priorities. First, the restoration of “traditional values” is operationalised through executive actions that frame diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) initiatives as illegitimate, bureaucratic, and discriminatory, and that recast “merit” and “biological truth” as neutral foundations for public policy. This agenda is paired with efforts to reduce federal oversight – up to and including proposals to abolish the Department of Education – while simultaneously conditioning federal support on ideological compliance. Second, the defence of “religious freedom” positions Christians as targets of institutional hostility and links moral authority to policy interventions spanning campus life, public health mandates, and “gender ideology”. Measures framed as combating antisemitism further expand punitive oversight of universities and student protest, fusing religious liberty claims with national security and disciplinary governance. Third, “accountability” is reframed from a quality assurance and public responsibility mechanism into an instrument of surveillance and control: accreditation reform is used to delegitimise equity-oriented standards, weaken monitoring of outcomes, and enable institutions to exit “antithetical” accreditors, while foreign-funding disclosure requirements represent international collaboration as a security risk.

The paper argues that these priorities – emerging alongside visible disruptions to educational research capacity (e.g., major cuts to the Institute of Education Sciences) and to academic mobility (e.g., intensified visa constraints and threats to international enrolment) – signal a strategic “purification” of the HE sector as a nationalist project rather than administrative neutral reform (Binkley & Toness, 2025; Feng, 2025). Yet, interpreted through world-systems theory, the early trajectory suggests recalibration rather than structural transformation: while the turmoil may open short-term opportunities for semi-peripheral systems to attract talent, entrenched infrastructures of US academic dominance and the political economy of international student flows remain resilient (Bound et al., 2021; Chase-Dunn et al., 2019).

This study’s significance is in explaining how early second-term federal actions have reshaped US HE and what that means for universities in and beyond the US trying to protect academic freedom, equity work, and international collaboration.

From “woke campuses” to an alleged free-speech crisis, UK universities are increasingly framed as politically charged spaces (Fryer, 2023; Loader, 2015; Raaper, 2024). Yet empirical research remains limited on whether higher education actually politicises today’s students, even as media attention to this issue has intensified (Scott, 2022; Simon, 2022). In this talk, we will explore the following questions: how does the UK press portray student politics, what evidence do these articles rely on, and whose voices are heard and whose might be missing? We will draw on a systematic media analysis of UK national newspapers (September 2020–September 2025), in which we used Lexis+ UK and a targeted keyword strategy to build a final dataset of 89 articles.

Two findings will be discussed in detail: First, widespread claims that universities strongly shape students’ political views, particularly by promoting left-wing or “woke” ideologies, are rarely supported by robust empirical evidence. Second, more than half of all coverage focuses on Oxford and Cambridge, with incidents at these elite institutions frequently treated as representative of the higher education sector as a whole. We will discuss why this matters and what is obscured when “the student” is imagined through Oxbridge alone.

The proposed talk points to a highly relevant and pressing societal issue of today’s educational and political landscape in many European countries and beyond. It aims to contribute to the panel discussion by reflecting on how education is mobilised within broader anti-democratic and reactionary discourses (Bennett et al., 2017).

This paper shows how a policy designed to enhance democracy in Canada’s largest school district was challenged - and ultimately undone - by New Right actors at the local and provincial levels in Ontario, Canada. The paper presents findings from a critical policy study (Molla, 2021) of debates over a policy change made by elected members (i.e., trustees) of the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), a change designed to enhance equity by increasing access to specialized programs for historically marginalized students.

The study was grounded in theories of network governance (Ball, 2009), argumentative discourse (Hajer, 2006), and critical democracy (Solomon & Portelli, 2001). Data include: transcripts from TDSB meetings; TDSB policy texts; elected officials’ social media posts; Ontario government texts; and news reports. Argumentative discourse analysis (Hajer, 2006) was used to identify arguments made by actors for and against the policy change. As discussed below, New Right members of the coalition advocating a return to ‘merit-based’ competition for admission prevailed due to the provincial government’s takeover of the democratically elected school board.

Findings:

In 2022, the TDSB changed its policy on how students would be admitted to its specialized (e.g., Arts, STEM) programs. The board’s data showed some groups were overrepresented in these programs while others were underrepresented. The imbalances were attributed in part to admissions processes involving assessments of ability that advantaged affluent students. The policy change removed these mechanisms and enabled anyone with an interest in the programs to apply. It also prioritized admission to students from historically underrepresented groups.

A school board election was held shortly after the policy change was introduced, with some new trustees vowing to restore the previous admissions policy. In calling for a return to “merit-based” admissions, these and other opponents argued the new policy undermined “excellence” and hurt hard-working, talented students. They also questioned the legitimacy of consultations held before the change. Opponents spoke at board meeting as individual citizens and trustees, but some were also affiliated with local neoconservative organizations and/or liaised with members of Ontario’s New Right government led by Doug Ford, a neoliberal populist (Budd 2020). Ford’s government has introduced multiple policies that undermine democratic education in name of the “choice” and “merit” since 2018 (Di Giovanni & Parker, 2024; Satia & Dej, 2026).

In Spring 2024, Ontario’s Minister of Education (a member of Ford’s government) intervened in the local debate, instructing trustees to review the policy change and launch a policy consultation. Calling for a new consultation on TDSB’s admissions policy positioned the Minister of Education as an advocate for democracy while he actively undermined it.

The TDSB planned to launch public consultations in Summer 2025. However, before it could the Ford government took over the democratically elected school board and appointed a supervisor. A TDSB trustee and new admissions policy opponent praised the takeover. One of the supervisor’s first moves was to re-instate competitive admissions to the TDSB’s specialized programs. Ontario’s Minister of Education praised the return to “a fair admissions process…based on merit” (Calandra, 2025).

In recent years, the Chilean educational system has suffered massive reforms and policies implementations. Ley de Inclusión, Desmunicipalización, LEGE, among others, have sought to transform the system towards an idea of democratization and participation; however, their implementation has been inadequate. After more than thirty years of apparent left-wing leaning transformation attempts, the educational landscape has not changed in its structure, but strong discourses of merit, authority, and freedom of education have re-emerged to undermine all of them (Arzola, 2024; Cubillos et al., 2021). This mix is a crucial site for understanding how new right-wing assemblages are reconfiguring the very meaning of democracy, social justice and education, not only in Chile, but across the entire hemisphere.

Against a backdrop of neoliberal modernization and moral conservatism, contemporary right-wing actors in Chile mobilize a discourse working towards the dismantling of public education, the moral panic around gender and diversity, and the managerial language of “quality assurance” (Reyes & Cabaluz, 2025), creating an ideal public terrain where social justice is reframed as ideological threat rather than democratic horizon.

This presentation in particular examines these dynamics through the lens of popular education, revisiting their emancipatory contributions to Chile’s democratic struggles, from the resistance to the Pinochet dictatorship to the 2019 social uprising. Using documentary analysis, interviews with educators, and institutional discourse review, we explore how the educational policies, far from their left-wing appearance, articulate neoliberal and neoconservative rationalities, disciplining dissent while promoting an illusion of participation. These “post-political” configurations (Apple, 2013) coexist with renewed attempts by grassroots educational experiences, popular education spaces, to restore a sense of collective agency and public purpose in education (Fernández, Acuña & Albornoz, 2024; Ojeda et al., 2024; Cabezas, 2023).

By tracing this authoritarian technocracy advancement, we argue that the New Right’s project in education is not a return to tradition but actually a reconfiguration of pedagogical-political power, one that combines managerial depoliticization with moral regulation. Yet, within this context of reaction and control, popular education persists, unseen and unrevisited by the academic world, as a counter-hegemonic force that produces spaces of hope and radical dialogue (Freire, 1970). The Chilean case thus reveals both the dangers of democratic erosion and the vitality of pedagogical resistance, offering insight into how, from popular education, we can reimagine democracy from below amid global authoritarian currents.

Ultimately, we conclude that defending democracy in education today demands both resisting right-wing policies and, at the same time, reaffirming education as a collective ethical praxis, a terrain where solidarity and critical consciousness can still transform the social order. From popular education, we can envision pedagogical practices that do not simply defend democracy but actively reinvent it in times of crisis.

While there has been debate about the nature of democratic education and its effectiveness, there has been less discussion of the social and economic conditions which enable such an education. Given the ascent of the New Right in many countries this has become a vital question. Democratic education refers to an education for democratic citizenship and a system of education which is democratic. Dewey noted that ‘education is the midwife to democracy’, yet the current state of polarized societies vitiates this view. This suggests that we need to consider the conditions under which a democratic education is possible. The failure of Liberal democracies, hollowed out by Neo Liberal policies, has created an epistemic deficit that has enabled what Arendt called the ‘big lies’ associated with totalitarian regimes. To establish the failure of an education for democratic citizenship under Liberal democracies, evidence is drawn from the historical example of Germany during the democratic period of the Weimar Republic and subsequent Nazi dominance and from contemporary research on the Global Citizenship programme in the International Baccalaureate, where many students view it as a way of elevating their CVs as Neo-Liberal subjects (Hayden et al, 2020). In education, the consequence of this democratic failure has been what Balarin and Rodriguez (2024) have called ‘shallow pedagogies’. This suggests that a democratic education will only be effective in a society based on participatory democracy in which citizens engage in the informal education of decision-making according to our best theories and evidence. That said, without considering the economic conditions that have given rise to the New Right, such a proposal would be Idealist. This suggests that both participatory democracy and democratic education need to be seen as part of a broader progressive programme which addresses the fundamental contradictions within capitalism.

This contribution examines the narratives on the role of secondary school teachers shaped by educational policies in Argentina, currently governed by far-right president Javier Milei. We focus here on two jurisdictions, the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (CABA, in Spanish) and Santa Fe, whose current right-wing governments crystallize the New Right national governmental framework. Thus, their educational policies show the globally on-going convergence and negotiation between far-right, neoliberal and traditional rationalities (Bonnet, 2024; Guidici et al., 2025).

Our research follows an anthropology of public policies approach, which allows us to interpret the discursive morality and normativity produced by educational policies, and their relation to social conflicts and structures (Shore y Wright, 1997; Shore, 2010). We have gathered a diverse corpus, which reflects the discursive universe of educational policies for secondary education in Santa Fe and CABA. Following a multi-scaled and comparative approach, we included: laws and legal documents, government orientations addressed to teachers, official reports and press statements, and documents issued by teachers’ unions.

The analysis shows how, within the context of a broader global narrative constructing a “crisis” of public education (Pini and Amaré 2025), teachers are simultaneously manufactured as the main agent and, at the same time, the enemy of educational change.

On the one hand, public policy for secondary education focuses on technocratic management via the transformation of individual teaching practices, set as a key element of flexibilisation, innovation and modernisation. Thus, neoliberal rationality shapes a narrative that overestimates individual agency, holding teachers responsible for change and neglecting the material and structural conditions of education (Meo et al., 2023; Sorondo and Alucin, in press). This rationality seems to find a fertile ground in the historical moralisation of teacher identity, as laic apostles of civilisation (Ascolani, 1999).

On the other hand, in convergence with conservative morality, this discourse also deploys antagonising and suspicion-based strategies in the reshaping of secondary education teachers’ identities (Normand, 2024). Disciplinary and accountability policies regarding attendance and working conditions aim to build a common image of teachers as “lazy”, “unengaged” and “anti-innovation”. Reinvigorating narratives from past dictatorships, political and unionised engagements are also demonised, as so-called “anti-adoctrination” policies, based on discipline- and punish-mechanisms (Larrondo, 2025), are being promoted at a national and local scale.

Our comparative analysis shows that, while CABA’s well rooted neoliberal educational framework smoothly transitions towards a more authoritarian moralising approach, Santa Fe’s turn from social-educational policies towards a more individualised and fragmented perspective speaks of an inconspicuous and often concealed continuity between progressive-neoliberal and (far-)right policies. Despite the different contexts, both Santa Fe and CABA’s educational policies partake in reshaping teachers’ identity towards the desintegration of collective approaches to education (Gluz y Kesler, 2024). Exploring these cases allows us to delve deeper in the configuration of the New Right narrative in education, showing that, rather than an entirely new discourse, it emerges from an heterogenous articulation between neoliberal normative logic and authoritarian and repressive strategies (Dardot et al., 2021), as well as historically sedimented rationalities in the educational field.

In contemporary American conservatism, education has moved from a secondary policy domain to a strategic terrain of ideological struggle. Within the political constellation associated with Donald Trump and the broader MAGA movement (Field 2025), schools and universities are increasingly portrayed as key sites of cultural conflict and ideological reproduction (Apple 2006; Hartman 2015). Educational institutions are framed as environments captured by progressive elites, bureaucratic structures, and intellectual agendas perceived as hostile to the values of the national community.

This paper examines how education has been repositioned at the center of the contemporary conservative ideological project. The analysis focuses primarily on Mandate for Leadership 2025 (Heritage Foundation, 2023), the policy blueprint designed to guide a new conservative governing cycle, and situates it within a longitudinal comparison with Mandate for Leadership II (1984), which accompanied the consolidation of Reagan-era conservatism.

The comparison reveals a significant transformation in the ideological architecture of American conservatism. In the Reagan-era Mandate, education occupied a relatively marginal position within an agenda overwhelmingly structured around political economy and institutional reform. In the contemporary document, by contrast, education emerges as a strategic field through which broader cultural and political conflicts are articulated. Schools and universities are increasingly represented as institutional spaces that must be reclaimed, restructured, and rebuilt on new normative foundations.

Our interest is not to assess these policy proposals from a normative perspective but to analyze the ideological and discursive reconfiguration that underpins them. By combining the comparative analysis of the two Heritage Mandates with an examination of the educational policies and executive initiatives aligned with the Trump political project, the paper shows how the cultural centrality attributed to education has translated into a coherent strategy of governance.

Within this framework, education functions simultaneously as a battlefield of the American culture wars and as a strategic lever through which contemporary conservatism seeks to construct an alternative cultural hegemony challenging the liberal-progressive paradigm and contributing to the emergence of a post-liberal political order.

The neoliberal turn in educational policies in France has progressed more discreetly than in other so-called “Northern” countries, yet it has advanced steadily since the 1980s. Four decades after the emergence of new public management reforms (Maroy, 2006), decentralisation, results-based governance and increasing competition between public and private actors in education, the consequences of these transformations for reducing social and educational inequalities remain a key issue for research and public debate.

A growing body of sociological literature suggests that contemporary educational policies tend less to focus on reducing structural inequalities and achievement gaps than on enabling each student to perform as well as possible within a meritocratic framework (Rochex, 2020; Frandji & Rochex, 2011). Such policies are often embedded in individualising and naturalising interpretations of educational success and failure, which risk reinforcing inequalities by shifting attention away from the social conditions shaping access to knowledge and learning. In this perspective, the emphasis on personal responsibility, competences and adaptability may contribute to redefining the role of public education and the aims of compensatory policies.

This paper analyses these transformations through the case of the Cités éducatives programme. Introduced in France in 2019, this national policy label targets disadvantaged urban areas identified within urban policy frameworks. Its main objective is to strengthen coordination among existing initiatives and stakeholders in priority neighbourhoods and schools within priority education schemes, with the goal of fostering “educational success” among children and young people.

Drawing on an empirical investigation conducted in one local Cité éducative, the study examines processes of policy design, governance and implementation at the territorial level. It assesses the extent to which this configuration contributes to reducing inequalities in access to knowledge and learning. Findings show that Cités éducatives create spaces for the multiplication of educational actors locally, including the growing involvement and legitimisation of non-profit organisations in addressing students’ learning difficulties. These actors intervene both in disadvantaged schools and during formal schooling time, reshaping the boundaries of educational action.

The research also highlights that some interventions rely on naturalising and pathologising interpretations of school inequalities, which tend to minimise the centrality of knowledge transmission and pedagogical conditions of learning. By focusing on individual deficits or socio-emotional competences, such approaches may paradoxically reinforce the inequalities they aim to reduce.

More broadly, the paper argues that these developments are embedded in a neoliberal configuration of public action characterised by the partial delegation of educational responsibilities to the non-profit private sector (Massei, 2024) and governance arrangements encouraging competition and partnerships between public and private actors. Analysing Cités éducatives thus sheds light on the reconfiguration of educational policies and on tensions between social justice objectives and managerial logics in contemporary education systems.

Student wellbeing became a major concern during the 2020 pandemic. Increasing evidence of illbeing (anxiety, school disengagement, self-harm, etc.), particularly among adolescents, generated urgency in public discourse. International actors developed policies to promote wellbeing in education, concerned with its consequences on learning and academic success. This could have been an opportunity to bring together different epistemologies on emotion and wellbeing at school, from a more critical and less western-centric perspective (Jiang, Saito, Zhang & Waterhouse, 2024). Instead, a conception of individual wellbeing and socio-emotional intelligence, that does not equally contemplate its structural dimensions (Fernández, 2018), became standardized in education.

This has particular implications for school systems governed by right-wing and neoliberal administrations, as in Madrid, Spain. Decades of privatization, marketization and school segregation under an “individual freedom” brand, mark the public education landscape of this European region. National reforms in 2020–2021 incorporated new measures, including the creation of a wellbeing coordinator role within schools and the implementation of large-scale teacher training on mental health. Examining how these institutional policies and conceptions of student wellbeing are enacted and/or resisted within schools reveals differences in institutional habitus, with contextualized dispositions towards attending to student emotions (Reay, 2015).

Based on semi-structured interviews with 60 school leaders, counsellors and teachers from five public secondary schools in Madrid, this paper provides discursive and thematic analysis to understand conceptions, practices and emotional norms, or regimes, around student wellbeing. It aims to answer how, why and under what conditions student wellbeing is conceptualized and addressed by public secondary education under this international “wellbeing turn”. Selected schools have diverse student compositions in terms of socioeconomic and migrant background, hence the study also explores structural inequalities that intersect with schools' approaches towards student wellbeing.

Critical theories in the sociology of affect and emotion allow us to identify emotional registers, norms and doxa at school (Threadgold, 2020; Ahmed, 2004). These elements are socially constructed and reproduced through discourses and practices, legitimizing some emotional registers while excluding or disciplining others (Abramowski, 2024). These dynamics constitute particular emotional “regimes” that are part of a school’s institutional habitus (Ibid; Reay, 2004). Understanding how schools conceptualize emotions and wellbeing, and how these approaches are enacted by adults at school, has important implications for different students, especially those belonging to working-class, migrant and/or ethnic minorities (Reay, 2025). Consequently, the present study shows that emotional school regimes affect not only how student wellbeing is addressed, but also whose wellbeing and emotional worlds are legitimized, identifying inherent affective inequalities (Nobile & Tarabini, 2025; Lynch & Baker, 2005).

This paper brings forward implications for policymaking and school practice in a neoliberal education scenario, where student wellbeing is mainly understood as an individual responsibility to be regulated through emotional management, as a marketable capability (Lynch, Baker, Cantillon & Walsh, 2009), while undermining its structural roots (racism, poverty, gender inequality, etc.). This work also aims to contribute to a growing body of critical research on emotion and wellbeing at school, centering urgent questions of emotional/affective inequality in education.