Dr Kim Davies

I have graduate and postgraduate qualifications in social work and education and have worked extensively as a professional in both these fields, primarily in public sector positions with the Department of Social Security (Centrelink) and The Queensland Department of Education (Education Queensland). In my work as a social worker, teacher and teaching Principal, I worked in metropolitan, regional and rural/remote locations, within and across diverse communities.

Before joining the School of Education at Deakin University in 2016, I worked as an academic with the School of Education at The University of Queensland and with the Faculty of Education at Monash University.

My (first class) honours research focused on the relationships between teacher beliefs and teacher practice while my PhD represents a sociocultural history of the diagnosis of 'Asperger's Syndrome'.

My current research focuses on the take-up of psy discourses in schooling, especially as they effect policy, teacher practice and 'risk management',  the effects of diagnosis and the Diagnostic Chronotope (Davies, 2016) on teacher education and teacher and learner subjectivities, as well as the impacts of the cerebralisation of 'ability' and personhood, or what I refer to as the ideology of brainism, on curriculum, pedagogy and the politics of educational exclusion. Following Rose (1999), I consider the present "as an array of problems and questions, an actuality to be acted upon ... to be made amenable to action by the action of thought (11)".

My enduring curiosity is to understand the effects of what 'we' think 'we' know about 'self', 'other/s' and our (?) world/s, on who 'we' think 'we' are, what 'we' think 'we' are capable of and how 'we' should/could live together. I am interested in the relational co-constitution of persons, groups and societies, given our mutually contingent foundations (Butler, 1990; Harraway, 2003) and our ontological indeterminancy (Lather, 2016). I draw widely and deeply from a range of theoretical and disciplinary resources and bring them to bear in interesting and innovative ways on the matters of education.

Part of my ongoing project is learning how to productively embrace the existential unfinalisability (Bakhtin, 1993)  and unresolved becoming within multiple, contested and shifting arenas of constraint, that flow from epistemological and ontological uncertainty. To me, these efforts are beyond scholarly. They require an ethics of hospitable encounter (Derrida, 2005),  negotiating ways of affording every body liveable lives (Butler, 2004) even if this may involve the necesary precarity of perpetual thresholds.