Abstract

This book draws upon original research at a celebrated flagship secondary school, to explore how new forms of neoliberal governmentality are reproducing raced, classed and gendered inequalities. Considering the complex narratives of students, teachers and parents, the book examines the stories underlying the school’s glossy veneer of success, highlighting the persistent structural inequalities concealed beneath its rhetoric of aspirational citizenship. Chapters demonstrate how hopes and dreams are harnessed and mobilized to exact social control, and how marketized education systems reshape inequality, foreclosing spaces of democratic participation through the imposition of authoritarian discipline and self-belief