My research and teaching is centrally concerned with the politics of education. I am particularly interested in how 'education' - whether an ideal, a practice, or an institution -  can govern and contest matters of inequality and difference. This has been reflected in my ethnographic work on education reform in the Indian and Australian contexts, as well as more recent research on state reforms of childhood and the family.

Animating my research as a sociologist of education is an abiding interest in the politics of knowledge and epistemic justice. I have been examining the contested ‘science’ of education and international development, past and present, and the active erasures of racism and coloniality in global education policy. This research has been funded by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship and continues through my work as Co-Director of the Centre for Comparative and International Research in Education.

See my recent co-authored background paper for UNESCO, called Racism, Education, and Reparative Futures, here: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000374045

I am currently co-writing a book called Learning Whiteness: Education and the Settler-Colonial State. This work builds on ongoing collaborations with Sophie Rudolph and Jessica Gerrard (both at the University of Melbourne). We are examining how systems of racial domination in the settler colony of Australia are produced through ongoing educative efforts of the state – both in terms of formal education systems as well as through public pedagogies.

I am a Member of the Board of: Comparative Education; International Studies in Sociology of Education; Discourse; and, Race, Ethnicity and Education.