While some forms of knowledge emerge as legitimised and authoritative; other forms are resisted or repressed. This collection draws on a range of psychoanalytic and social theory, in order to explore writing as a practice that can stabilise or unsettle subjectivities; the unconscious relations between school practices, subjectivities, educational spaces and ideologies; implications of the productive energies and the deadening inwardness associated with mourning and melancholia for formal and informal learning; and the authority we invest in apparently rigid or ephemeral institutional spaces. This book was originally published as a special issue of Pedagogy, Culture & Society.

Introduction - Journal as methodological archive: introduction to a cataloguing system for insecure knowledge 1. Interrupting the frame: reflective practice in the classroom and the consulting room 2. Bringing up gender: academic abjection? 3. Writing in a foreign language as a science of writing or grammatology 4. The enjoyment of space: the university campus in students' narratives and photography 5. Learning to fail and learning from failure - ideology at work in a mathematics classroom 6. Reconstructing memory through the archives: public pedagogy, citizenship and Letizia Battaglia's photographic record of mafia violence 7. Psychoanalytic notes on the status of depression in curriculum affected by histories of loss 8. Explorations in knowing: thinking psychosocially about legitimacy 9. Going spiral? Phenomena of 'half-knowledge' in the experiential large group as temporary learning community