Reconceptualizing the presence of students on school governance councils: the a/effects of spatial positioning

This article conceptualizes the materialities of school governance council meetings. A concern for the material a/effects of spatial positioning emerged during a participatory action research project concerned with secondary school students’ sense of the benefits and challenges of student representation on school councils. Attending to affective, spatial and material dimensions of power with the conceptual resources of new materialisms, I question representational logics in policy, research and practice related to school councils. In particular, I interrogate whether the presence of human bodies representing interest groups necessarily promotes more democratic relations, and whether questions of power are best explored through discursive analysis alone. School council meetings are understood to be events where the political philosoph(ies) of a school materialize in concrete relations between bodies, and where subjects form, re-form (and de-form) in and through material-discursive practices.