Between the Masks articulates a study of representation and the 'politics of place' through a pedagogy of narrative-performing inquiry and a critical reflection on identity. As a resistance to essentialist politics, the text focuses on the identity making/marking role of cultural materials in the recovery of different and overdetermind histories. It proposes a multicultural revision of knowledge that displaces the binarisms of insider/outside rather than simply shifting the margin to the center. By combining perspectives that produce strong readings with a semiotic method of analysis, the...

One of the most compelling ethnographies of school ever written, 'Schooling as a Ritual Performance' has for over a decade made its mark among educators, sociologists, and those seeking to understand the cultural meaning of classroom practices. Written by one of the major world figures on the educational left, 'Schooling as a Ritual Performance' is a pioneering study of the partnership between capitalism and religion and the educational offspring it produces. Not since Paul Willis' 'Learning to Labor' has an educational ethnography about schooling so pushed the limits of current social...

In this compelling and timely treatise, cultural theorist and educator Peter Trifonas puts forth the first book-length study of Jacques Derrida's "educational texts": that is, those writings most explicitly concerned with the ethics and politics of the historico- philosophical structures constituting the scene of teaching. "The Ethics of Writing" engages these aspects of Derrida's work on the institution of education, especially as it relates to the philosopher's association with the GREPH (Groupe de Recherches sur l'Enseignement Philosophiques) and the public movement to protect the teaching...