Books

My research considers difference, equity, and education across diverse local, national, and global contexts, from the USA and Hong Kong to Tanzania and Bangladesh.

This page showcases my major single-authored works. You can browse more of my books at Routledge or Springer. See my CV for a full list of my (19) books and other publications.

Emotions: Philosophy of Education in Practice

Bloomsbury, 2024.

Even when educators figured emotions into theory/practice, feelings were too often assumed to be one's own, independent of social context and interpersonal interaction. Liz Jackson's Emotions skewers that assumption -- from a crosscultural perspective -- and encourages us to refigure the emotional dimensions of educational experience. Both timely and well-argued!

-- Barbara S. Stengel, Vanderbilt University, USA

In this short and highly accessible book, Jackson takes us on a whistle-stop tour to critically examine the particulars of educating emotions. This book will be of interest to anyone who wants to know more about the educational benefits of a more rounded understanding of compassion, empathy, kindness, resilience and mindfulness, as they are cashed out in learner settings.

-- Gerry Dunne, Marino Institute of Education, Ireland

Beyond Virtue: The Politics of Educating Emotions

Cambridge University Press, 2021.

American Educational Studies Critics’ Choice Award

Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award

Liz jackson explores the role that emotions play in life and education, focusing on the question of how to teach others about emotion. It's a work that deftly examines the main views of emotions in moral philosophy and is a useful introduction to the issues.

-- Michael Peters, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

What Jackson has done is offer a thoughtful and rigorous
articulation of the difficult balancing act that all educators concerned with social justice have to manage: a refusal to accept a status quo that undermines human freedom, justice, and equality, and a commitment to challenging and changing it, alongside a pragmatic concern for the individual children they encounter, who are experiencing this political reality.

-- Judith Suissa, University College London

Contesting Education and Identity in Hong Kong

Routledge, 2021.

A powerful portrayal and thought-provoking assessment of the complex relations between education, identity formation, and civic engagement in Hong Kong. In this insightful book, Jackson critically analyzes the most important controversies since Hong Kong’s return from Britain to China in 1997, centering on Hongkongers’ longstanding struggles over local, national and global identities in a global age, and carefully evaluates student- and youth-led social movements for greater freedom and democracy in education and society. Jackson prudently scrutinizes why and how politically sensitive school subjects have become an ideological battlefield between Hong Kong and mainland China in general, and between localists and nationalists in Hong Kong in particular. She vividly demonstrates how the post-1997 school curriculum has been politicized to promote China’s positive image and foster nationalistic sentiments, rather than pro-Hong Kong feelings or multiculturalism. A must-read for researchers, scholars, students, and policymakers in Hong Kong studies and in the general field of politics, identity and education.

-- Wing-Wah Law, University of Hong Kong

At a time when the youth of Hong Kong are struggling to come to terms with how to sustain the only life they have ever known, this book brings a globally informed perspective to bear on the emerging challenges of identity and civic education. Jackson demonstrates how the problem of cultural diversity and national identity is played out in a more complex manner than elsewhere due to the challenge of integrating differences between two Chinese systems. The book adds to the study of civic education in a changing world.

-- Gerard A. Postiglione, University of Hong Kong

As a scholar with a philosophy background, Liz is particularly good at teasing out the paradoxes and conundrums related to the controversial school subjects such as history and liberal studies, recent student movements, the national education question, the local-national-global tensions, and the issue of multiculturalism... This is a must-read book if you wish to know how education and identity in Hong Kong is struggling for its directions at a crossroads.

-- Wing On Lee, Institute of Adult Learning and Series Editor of Citizenship, Character and Values Education

Questioning Allegiance: Resituating Civic Education

Routledge, 2019.

American Educational Studies Critics’ Choice Award

Questioning Allegiance is a capacious examination of the role of education in helping people to live together well in multiple spatial and geographical contexts. Jackson makes a finely wrought, crucial contribution for our ambivalent ever-localizing and ever-globalizing time.’

– Cris Mayo, West Virginia University, USA

Jackson’s book is a major contribution to the theoretical literature on civic education. Her impressive breadth of scholarship and her personal experience of education on several different continents shine through the text. Her position on education for allegiance is carefully worked out, persuasively argued and boldly expressed: it invites civic educators around the world to think again about what they are trying to achieve. It has another quality too, one that is all too rare in educational theory and yet of the first importance for the improvement of educational practice: it is unassailably correct.

– Michael Hand, University of Birmingham, UK

Muslims and Islam in U.S. Education: Reconsidering Multiculturalism

Routledge, 2014.

University of Hong Kong Research Output Prize

Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia Book Award

Liz Jackson provides two invaluable services in this book. The first is to identify, and begin to correct, the distorted and incomplete ways in which Muslims are represented in American popular culture and in American school materials (textbooks, state standards, and curricula). Her account is richly informative and provides a framework for rereading those materials through a more critical lens. Second, she discusses the importance of these problems in the context of a wider understanding of multicultural education, and in this context her argument frames a broader set of questions about the purposes and methods of education in a democratic society. Her analysis is critical, challenging, but also constructive in providing a more productive way forward in dealing with Islam – as well as other "controversial" cultural subjects – in schools.

-- Nick Burbules, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Since the tragic events of September 11, public education has once again become a major site of debates about whether public schools in the United States should privilege Christian traditions or promote a robust secularism. American Muslim communities have found themselves at the pointy end of these debates, subjected to some very uncomfortable questions about their right to belong. At the same time, serious questions have arisen about the responsibility of public schools to the principles of diversity and social inclusion. This book unhesitatingly accepts the challenge of tackling these questions, and presents a philosophical analysis as perceptive as it is accessible.

-- Fazal Rizvi, University of Melbourne Australia