Politics of Voice in Education

Engaging with the voices of students and educators and the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Eve Mayes crafts an account of what voice can and must do in education. The book works with the textures, tremors and murmurs of voice felt over ten years of ethnographic and participatory research in Australian schools from research encounters with students and puppets, to school governance council meetings, to school reform evaluation processes, to students' political activism. It offers a timely critique of the liberal humanist and late capitalist logics of student voice in educational reform, entwined with an affirmation of other possibilities for transversal pedagogical relations in and beyond institutional sites of education.

Eve Mayes is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Education at Deakin University, Australia. She currently lives and works on unceded Wadawurrung Country. Her publications and research interests are in the areas of student voice and activism, climate justice education and participatory research. Eve is currently undertaking the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Fellowship (DECRA) project: Striking Voices: Australian school-aged students’ climate justice activism (2022-2025). She has ten years of experience as an English and English as an Additional Language teacher in government secondary schools in Australia.