Associate Professor
Cushla Kapitzke

Biography

My early work as a critical language and literacy educator focused on the literacies afforded by new communications technologies. As part of that work, I observed that heightened levels of copyright protection accompanied the upsurge of creative endeavour enabled by networked technologies. From a critical sociological perspective, policy trends toward more tightly regulated intellectual property regimes can be viewed as mechanisms for the maintenance of scarcity within conditions of abundance.
Following this, my current teaching and research program focuses on issues of education policy and governance in relation to the shrinking domains of public knowledge and public education within social contexts driven by global capital. I use Neo-Foucauldian theorisations of power, the subject, agency, and governmentality to link macro forces of globalisation with everyday practices in local intersections of education, the state, and the market.
For example, with a team of researchers from QUT, Griffith University, and the Department of Education and Training, I lead an ARC Linkage study of industry school partnerships. Given the focus on 'partnering' in current state and national policy discourse, the project investigates conceptions of partnerships held by participants. Its aim is to assess the degree to which participant views and practices reflect the literature framing partnerships as networks for knowledge sharing across the sites of schools, communities and workplaces. It is anticipated that the findings will generate a framework for partnering to ensure optimum outcomes for all parties, including students, industry, business and community.