Editorial

George Eliot described the intellectual development of a young doctor in her novel Middlemarch as follows: “But the moment of vocation had come, and before he got down from his chair, the world was made new to him by a presentiment of endless processes filling the vast spaces planked out of his sight by that wordy ignorance which he had supposed to be knowledge. From that hour Lydgate felt the growth of an intellectual passion.” (Eliot 1994, p144). This issue of ELiSS explores aspects of pedagogies, rights and the construction of pedagogic subjects in papers across several social science disciplines from contributors working in Australia, the UK, including Northern Ireland, and the US. The term ‘pedagogies’ rather than ‘pedagogy’ was used in the call for papers to recognise that conceptualisations, descriptions and interpretations are distinct outputs grounded in local material circumstances. This introduction draws on a small part only of the pedagogic work of Frederic Jameson. Contributors to this issue do not necessarily espouse Jameson’s forms of analysis or theoretical approaches but their papers can be set against this background. Jameson’s ‘pedagogy of Marxism’ (Wise 1994) shares at a level of generality a characterisation of pedagogy found in the work of both Basil Bernstein and Pierre Bourdieu whose writings are drawn upon in the papers. Jameson has expanded upon Bertolt Brecht’s maxim for pedagogy, itself drawn from classical and Christian writings, “to move, to teach, and to delight” (Jameson 2000, p3). The papers in this issue address all that Brecht meant by this maxim.