Julie Allan is Professor of Equity and Inclusion at School of Education, University of Birmingham, UK. Her work encompasses inclusive education, disability studies and children’s rights and is both empirical and theoretical. She has a particular interest in educational theory and the insights offered through poststructural and social capital analyses. Julie has been advisor to the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and the Dutch and Queensland Governments and has worked extensively with the Council of Europe.
Julie is an Honorary Network Member of the European Educational Research Association (EERA).
In the seminar Julie Allan will draw on her latest book where she examines the emergence of psychologised discourses of the self in education and considers their effects on children and young people, on relationships both in and out of school and on educational practices. It undertakes a Foucauldian genealogy of the discourses of the self in education in order to scrutinise the ‘focal points of experience’ for children and young people. In the book she offers a critical analysis of the discourses of the self that operate within interventions of self esteem, self concept, self efficacy and self regulation and their incursions into education. It provides counter-narratives of the self, drawn principally from the arts and politics and providing alternative, and potentially radical, ways of when and how the self might speak. The book also articulates how teachers may support children and young people in giving voice to these counter-narratives as they move through school.