This paper examines new epistemological positions from which to read the radical inequalities that shape the workings of advanced capitalism in our schools today. It draws on data from three sequential projects with schools in western Sydney Australia characterized by high multilingual ethnically diverse learners. The first project, Student trajectory aspiration research (Somerville et al, 2013) drew on Zipin et al’s (2015) research on aspiration. Appadurai’s (2004) understanding of aspiration as the capacity to imagine led to the development of creative methods and the unexpected findings that children in two schools only walking distance apart became highly differentiated in their levels of aspiration between Grades 1 and 5 (Somerville et al, 2013). The phenomenon of residualised schools resulting from neoliberal policies of school choice emerged again in two subsequent projects in which children in complex multicultural classrooms mapped their everyday language practices in order to develop new pedagogies to better connect home and school learning (Somerville & D’warte, J. 2014). One particular school was highly challenging with large numbers of high needs children living in poverty, and high enrolments of both Aboriginal and multilingual children. This work led to considerable existential despair for the researcher who continually questioned the legitimacy of research where it was so difficult to even imagine how to make a difference in the face of such radical inequality. In order to read this radical inequality radically Braidotti’s (2014) Deleuzean analysis of advanced capitalism is offered as a process ontology that codes and recodes existing rules that construct our socio-economic relations. Braidotti (2014) argues that we cannot use the existing language of universities based in logic and a linear sequence of cause and effect because advanced capitalism contradicts itself, changing the rules with perfect ease and panache. Subjectivities are produced in which difference is subsumed into a market economy, disconnected from the emancipatory potential of making a difference in the world. Braidotti offers two strategies which will be taken up in the analytical work of this paper. The first is a return to the feminist politics of location in which the only site of possibility is the local, and the second a reconceptualisation of the Freudian/Lacanian concept of desire as ‘lack’ to a Deleuzean understanding of desire as ‘positivity’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004). These strategies illuminate possibilities in relation to a single Aboriginal child who came to symbolize a canary in the mines of advanced capitalism.

Appadurai, A. (2004). The capacity to aspire: Culture and the terms of recognition. In V. Rao & M. Walton (Eds.), Culture and public action: A cross-disciplinary dialogue on development policy(pp. 59–84). Stanford, CA: Stanford Social Sciences. Braidotti, R. (2014). Indebted citizenship. The Open University. Retrieved from http://www.open.ac.uk/ccig/media/indebted-citizenship-an-interview-series-conducted-by-andrea-mura Deleuze & Guattari. (2004). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. London and New York: Continuum. Somerville, M. & D’warte, J. 2014. Researching children’s linguistic repertoires in globalized classrooms. Knowledge Cultures: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 2,4, 133-151. Somerville, M., Reid, C., Naidoo, L., Gray, T. & Gannon, S. (2013). Student Trajectory Aspiration Research. Report to the Higher Education Participation Program, Western Sydney University. https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/cer/research/research_reports. Zipin, L., Sellar, S., Brennan, M. & Gale, T. 2015. Educating for Futures in Marginalized Regions: A sociological framework for rethinking and researching aspirations, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 47(3): 227-246.