Jessica Gerrard Books

This book explores the contemporary conditions of marginal work within the context of persistent unemployment, poverty, and homelessness in wealthy nations. Drawing from research concerning three cities—Melbourne, San Francisco, and London—Jessica Gerrard offers a rich account of one of the most precarious informal forms of work: selling homeless street press (The Big Issue and Street Sheet). Combining analyses of sellers’ everyday work experiences with theorizations of marginality, working, and learning, Gerrard provides much-needed insight into contemporary forms of entrepreneurial and precarious work. This book demonstrates that those who are unemployed and seemingly unproductive are, in fact, highly productive. They value, desire, and seek practical work experience whilst also struggling to fulfill the basic needs that many of us take for granted.

As racism persists across the world, we need to understand the role of education in sustaining white supremacy

The book explores the critical role of education in the pursuit of radical social change amidst growing social class inequalities. It delves into the challenges of conceptualizing and achieving 'emancipatory' education in a context where these disparities are becoming more pronounced. Through this lens, the text examines the complexities and potential pathways for transformative educational practices that can address and counteract systemic inequities.

This book offers a distinctive perspective on keyword expertise by positioning teacher expertise within broader social and political debates surrounding the constitution of knowledge, truth and experts. Bringing debates surrounding teacher expertise into conversation with wider debates surrounding expertise, Jessica Gerrard and Jessica Holloway reflect on recent events, including COVID-19 and the climate crisis, to show that expertise is not a neutral, objective or fixed idea that is easily definable. Rather than seek to understand expertise simply in relation to pedagogical or curriculum practices in the classroom, they demonstrate that any account of expertise must first reckon with its social and political positioning and how it creates boundaries between who is an expert and who is not. Drawing on international research, this book places experience within a global context, attending to the ways in which teacher expertise itself is subject to struggles and contestations in power in different ways across different national and sub-national contexts. Through illustrative examples taken from this research, this book shows how expertise is as much about who is understood to be an expert, and who is understood not to be. Expertise sheds timely light on the contradictory and ambivalent practices of expertise.