Over the last decade, education researchers have been concerned with the ‘impression management’ activities of schools in the current climate of school corporatisation. Among these activities is the dissemination of school prospectuses that, far from being merely arbitrary sources of information, are seen as strategic texts that communicate the ethos of educational providers to potential clientele. Through sociocultural, feminist and post-structuralist frames, we consider how the positioning of masculinities is utilised as a marketing technique in such texts and, in turn, how such texts are implicated in the discursive construction of idealised schooling subjectivities. We undertake a semiotic analysis of the prospectuses of six private boys schools in the Sydney region of New South Wales, Australia, considering how masculinities are represented within binaries that position older boys as hard, strong and capable, and younger boys as small, weak and vulnerable. We argue that schooling is depicted in these texts as providing the necessary training ground for boys making the transition from boyhood to manhood. We argue that these images of masculinity continue to be associated, either directly or indirectly, with narrow notions of social privilege.

Objective: This evaluation considered the potential of We-Yarn, a suicide prevention gatekeeper training workshop, to contribute to Aboriginal suicide prevention in rural New South Wales. Design: A mixed methods approach included surveys, in-depth interviews and workshop observations. Setting: Aboriginal suicide prevention training in rural New South Wales, Australia.

Online promotional videos on Australian university websites are a form of institutional branding and marketing that construct university experience in a variety of ways. In this paper, we consider how these multimedia texts represent student lifestyles, identities and aspirations in terms of the 'good life'. We consider how the 'promise of happiness' is deployed as an appeal to perceived consumer desires within the local student market, as well as within the highly competitive global knowledge economy. These texts position university students as youthful, attractive, active and fun, and depict student life as being about leisure and pleasure. Such representations promote cultural and social entitlement to the 'good life' as if synonymous with choice, participation and success in higher education. Learning and scholarship are depicted as secondary activities. We also contend that claims to cosmopolitanism and consumerism are framed by racialised entitlements through which an appeal to Whiteness as both commodity and context is maintained.

This article continues a discussion about the ways in which gender is constructed in the aesthetic presentation and impression management strategies of elite private schools. While before we focused on the construction and promotion of valorised masculinities in elite private boys school prospectuses (Gottschall, Wardman, Edgeworth, Hutchesson & Saltmarsh, 2010), we now extend that work by investigating the versions of femininity celebrated in the promotional materials of elite girls schools. We also contrast, compare and critique the subjectivities constructed by elite private girls schools in relation to the elite private boys schools. Drawing on feminist and post-structuralist theoretical frames and semiotic techniques, we consider how the text, layout and images of the prospectuses work to legitimate and/or disrupt hegemonic versions of ‘well-rounded’ femininity predicated on physical beauty, passivity and subservience.

No abstract