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This article examines assumptions embedded in the routine practice of trying to make the places represented in qualitative accounts anonymous. Anonymity is usually seen as an ethical issue, but like any representational strategy, it conceals assumptions about the nature of entities in the world and our relations with them. Focusing on place anonymization, the author argues that the use of pseudonyms and the omission of identifying historical and geographical information align research accounts with certain ontological assumptions, modes of theorizing, and corporate constructions of the public sphere. The author concludes by suggesting ways that place and identification can be rethought in qualitative inquiry.

In this review essay, Jan Nespor uses three recent contributions to place-based education, Paul Theobald's Teaching the Commons, C.A. Bowers's Revitalizing the Commons, and David Gruenewald and Gregory Smith's edited volume Place-Based Education in the Global Age, to examine some fundamental conceptual and practical issues in the area. One is how ''place'' is defined in place-based education theory, and in particular how moralizing idealizations of place woven into problematic distinctions (place/nonplace, urban/rural, local/global, and so on) may actually make it harder for us to understand education and place. A second is how class, ethnicity, gender, and other forms of difference are addressedor not -in the field's theoretical formulations. Finally, Nespor explores problems of articulating the visions of place-based education in these texts with larger social or political movements to transform schooling and environmental practices.

The article explores the complexities of educational scalemaking. 'Educational scales' are defined as the spatial and temporal orders generated as pupils and teachers move and are moved through educational systems; scales are 'envelopes of spacetime' into which certain schoolbased identities (and not others) can be folded. Scale is thus both an object and a means of power in educational practice. Using data from life history interviews with an elementary teacher in the USA, the article illustrates the multiplicity of scale-making processes, and raises the question of how certain scale definitions become more widely accepted and authoritative than others.

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