Presenters
Dr Richard Niesche is a senior lecturer in the School of Education at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. He has worked as a teacher in Queensland and New South Wales at both primary and secondary levels. His research interests include educational leadership, the principalship and social justice. His particular research focus is to use a critical perspective in educational leadership to examine the work of school principals in disadvantaged schools and how they can work towards achieving more socially just outcomes. He has published his research in a range of peer-reviewed journals and is the author of a number of books including Foucault and Educational leadership: Disciplining the Principal (Routledge, 2011) and Deconstructing Educational Leadership: Derrida and Lyotard (Routledge, 2013). Forthcoming is Leadership, Ethics and Schooling for Social Justice, co-authored with Dr Amanda Keddie from the University of Queensland (Routledge, 2015).
Dr Gregory Vass work in the Sociology of Education is concerned with social and Indigenous perspectives in education. His research interests are focused on investigating relationships between policy enactment, and pedagogic/curricula performative race-making practices and inequalities. This work explores how discrimination and privilege are connected to subjectivities that continue to rely on racialised social scripts and everyday practices. Building on his experiences as a high school teacher, central to his work are concerns with how educators can work towards disrupting the reproduction of raced hierarchies and inequalities within educational settings.
