Awarded 2nd Prize, Best Book award, the Society for Education Studies, 2011 Refugees are physically and symbolically 'out of place' - their presence forces governments to address issues of rights and moral obligations. This book contrasts the hostility of immigration policy to 'non-citizen'' children with teachers' exceptional compassion and 'citizen students' ambivalence in defining who can belong.

The marketised and securitised shaping of formal education sites in terms of risk prevention strategies have transformed what it means to be a learner and a citizen. In this book, Karl Kitching explores racialised dimensions to suggest how individuals and collectives are increasingly made responsible for their own welfare as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ students, at the expense of the protection of their rights as learner-citizens. Focusing on Ireland as a post-colonial Atlantic state, the book demonstrates how liberal governance, racisms, migration and mass education are interconnected and struggled over at local, national, European and global levels. Using a variety of qualitative studies and analytic approaches, The Politics of Compulsive Education details the significance of mass education(s) to the ongoing racialisation of national sovereignty. It draws on in-depth historical, policy, media and school-based research, moving from the 19th century to the present day. Chapters explore diverse themes such as student deportation, austerity and the politics of community ‘integration’, the depoliticisation of third level education via international student and ‘quality’ teacher regimes, the racialised distribution of learner ‘ability’, and school-based bullying and harassment. Combined, these studies demonstrate the possibilities and constraints that exist for educational anti-racisms both in terms of social movements and everyday classroom situations. The Politics of Compulsive Education asks key questions about anti-racist responsibility across multiple education sites and explores how racisms are both shaped, and can be interrupted, by the interaction of the global and the local, as seen in terms of migration, the distribution of capital, media, education policy discourse, and teacher and learner identifications. It will be of interest to researchers, academics and postgraduate students of sociology, education, cultural studies, political theory, philosophy and postcolonial studies.

There is no single answer to the question: what are human rights? The answer depends on whom you ask. Several of the papers presented at Fourteenth World Congress of Comparative Education held at Bog ̆aziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey, in June 2010 discussed issues related to human rights from a comparative education viewpoint. The nine papers presented in this book spans from policy analysis to practices in classrooms. They include analyses of human rights from a regional or country perspective, including Greece, Jordan, the Latin American region, Morocco, Northern Ireland, Portugal, the UK, the US, and Turkey. In facilitating a clarification of the ways in which we understand and talk about human rights in the field of comparative education, the editors have analysed and visualized the chapter contributions using Marie-Bénédicte Dembour’s categorization of human rights discourses. This is a fruitful exercise as it unravels the fact that we do not always mean the same thing when talking about human rights and also sheds light on the issues within human rights to which we are silent, issues that we should conceivably be discussing. Our engagement in human rights seems to focus on using these rights as leverage to promote our arguments about education, not engaging in a more philosophical debate about human rights. Human rights can be used as an ethical lingua franca and thus providing a fertile ground for nuancing our understanding of human rights. Since we experience a huge gap between morality and reality, an engagement in the ethical perspectives of human rights can help us on the way to closing this gap.

Flüchtlinge sind in ihrem Leben mit Übergängen konfrontiert: auf individueller, sozialer und kultureller Ebene. Dieses Buch behandelt verschiedene Aspekte dieser Übergänge und ihre Überschneidungen mit Bildungserfahrungen. Studien aus unterschiedlichen Länderkontexten zeigen die komplexen Beziehungen zwischen Individuum, Kultur, Gesellschaft und Institutionen. Die Untersuchung dieser Beziehungen und Erfahrungen während der Übergangsprozesse soll zu einem tieferen Verständnis der verschiedenen Arten von Übergängen im Zusammenhang mit Bildung beitragen, was in der Zukunft zur Verbesserung von Unterstützungsstrukturen genutzt werden kann.

Schooling for Refugee Children is a collaboration between five authors who explore their interactions with refugee children displaced from Syria to the Lebanese borders and London. Through a programme of carefully tailored research activities, they analyse the children’s representations of their personal journeys and current circumstances, especially with regard to ongoing schooling. The children’s experiences are expressed through their own words and drawings, disrupting the stereotype of children as ‘receivers’ rather than empowered actors, and challenging traditional solutions for improving schooling. Throughout, the children are eloquent about their schooling in the context of displacement. Their views and illustrations depict a keen awareness of social justice issues, including on the distribution of wealth, recognition of status and representation of voice. These are framed by the authors within Nancy Fraser’s concept of social justice as parity-of-participation. In this way, the book brings to light important representations of some empowering experiences lived through by refugee children from Syria, as well as their thoughts on what has helped their learning and what can be done better. The children’s need for care and a sense of belonging in their schools and new communities is given particular emphasis throughout the book, represented by one child, who simply requested, ‘Add some more love!’

School Leadership for Refugees’ Education examines how educational leaders shape and lead different practices to meet refugee students' educational needs, while also considering issues of equity and social justice. It presents cutting-edge theoretical understanding and rich first-hand research findings, which point out the local idiosyncrasies and cross-national themes involved in leading welcoming schools for newcomers. The book provides a global analysis of policy guidelines and up-to-date research findings concerning refugee education. Vast populations have been forced to leave their homelands in recent years due to war, political conflict and economic collapse. The countries that provide sanctuary need to ensure quality education that will allow these destitute but hopeful children to build a new future. Through this book a comprehensive model is presented to guide culturally relevant educational leadership to welcome newcomers in their schools and society. This book will be of great interest for academics, researchers, and postgraduate students in the fields of educational leadership, social justice education and educational administration.

Contemporary social transformations, characterised by multi-dimensional globalisation and technological change, have lent new impetus to the emergence of internationally oriented and interdisciplinary childhood and youth studies. Analysis of sharpened polarisations of chances and risks within and between generations in specific life circumstances meets up with the re-conceptualisation of childhood and youth as social constructions within the life-course. As such, insulated national discourses are no longer an adequate framework to address such issues: economic and cultural globalisation processes exert dual and reciprocal influences, restructuring societies and identities from within and without. This collection offers a three-fold thematic focus: on the social construction of the life-course, privileging gendered and family transitions and transformations; on the contours of (not) belonging, in particular bringing migration and poverty into the spotlight; and on the potential of virtual worlds for creating and enabling new positive and negative forms of individual, social and political action on the part of young people. This collection thus offers a particular snapshot of the current landscape of childhood and youth studies, and it provides a set of exemplars from diverse national contexts. Each chapter can stand for itself – but the contributions are ordered thematically, not according to the corner of the world from which they derive. As the introductory chapter explores, the intention is – via a loose vectoring of theme and context – to encourage multiple opportunities for reflection on relations between the specificities and commonalities of children’s and young people’s lives today. This volume joins the growing library of scholarly resources for international and interdisciplinary childhood and youth studies; it brings together well-established and young scholars writing from an unusual range of national and cultural contexts. The collection will be of interest not simply for specialist researchers and those in related fields, but equally as a teaching and learning resource for higher education professionals and students in social sciences and education, including courses that link theory and research with policy and practice.