Social Transformation and Education Research Hub

The Social Transformations and Education (STE) Research Hub addresses questions about educational purposes, policies and practices in light of social transformations. Our work explores new formations of knowledge, identities, social relations and cultural diversity, and how these are shaping and are shaped by education.

We engage with disciplinary perspectives from across the social sciences and humanities, including philosophical, historical and sociological approaches, as well as interdisciplinary policy studies.

The STE Research Hub encourages work that explores new modes of theorizing to better understand the ways in which social and educational transformations are historically constituted and politically contested.

Researchers draw from scholarship in globalization, postcolonial, feminist, socio-material and cultural studies, and also in the sociology of knowledge and political theories of inequality and social justice.

Affiliated researchers include academic staff, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students, creating a vibrant scholarly community and hub for working with other researchers and research centres within the Faculty of Education and across the university.

We are keen to incubate ideas, build collaborations and partnerships, and seed new research activities that connect with our interests and the following themes and topics.

The kind of research problems we investigate include:

• Aims of schools and universities in an era of rapid change
• Purposes of curriculum today
• Histories of youth and educational provision
• Globalization and education policy
• Identity and difference
• Knowledge economy and the changing nature of work
• Education for citizenship
• Senior years of schooling and educational policy
• New and old forms of inequalities in education
• Popular culture and transnational space
• Teaching for changing Asia-Australia relations
• Objects, affects and public pedagogy
• Digital cultures.