This article is concerned with developing a philosophical approach to a number of significant changes to academic publishing, and specifically the global journal knowledge system wrought by a range of new digital technologies that herald the third age of the journal as an electronic, interactive and mixed-media form of scientific communication. The paper emerges from an Editors' Collective, a small New Zealand-based organisation comprised of editors and reviewers of academic journals mostly in the fields of education and philosophy. The paper is the result of a collective writing process.

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Current trends suggest that significant gender disparities exist within Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education at university, with female students being underrepresented in physics, but more equally represented in life sciences (e.g., biology, medicine). To understand these trends, it is important to consider the context in which students make decisions about which university courses to enrol in. The current study seeks to investigate gender differences in STEM through a unique approach that combines network analysis of student enrollment data with an interpretive lens based on the sociological theory of Pierre Bourdieu. We generate a network of courses taken by around 9000 undergraduate physics students (from 2009 to 2014) to quantify Bourdieu’s concept of field. We identify the fields in which physics students participate by constructing a weighted co-enrollment network and finding communities within it. We then use odds ratios to report gender differences in transverse movements between different academic fields, and non-parametric tests to assess gender differences in vertical movements (changes in students’ achievement rankings within a field). Odds ratios comparing the likelihood of progression from one field to another indicate that female students were more likely to make transverse movements into life science fields. We also found that university physics did a poor job in attracting high achieving students, and especially high achieving female students. Of the students who did choose to study physics at university, low and middle achieving female high school students were more likely to decrease their relative rank in their first year compared to their male counterparts. Low achieving female students were also less likely to continue with physics after their first year compared to their male counterparts. Results and implications are discussed in the context of Bourdieu’s theory, and previous research. We argue that in order to remove constraints on female students’ study choices, the field of physics needs to provide a culture in which all students feel like they belong.

This article results from a collaborative investigation into Antipodean theory in education by members of the Editors' Collective (www.editorscollective.org.nz). The Prologue contains a brief personal account of the South Project (www. southernperspectives.net), as an example of the contemporary projects and activities falling under the banner of 'Antipodean' ways of working and thinking. The Introduction briefly reviews the history of (mainly Western) ideas about the Antipodes, from classical Greek philosophy through to the contemporary globalised era. This is followed by a synopsis of the motivations, purposes and benefits of Antipodean theory, with more detailed examinations of equality, indigeneity, replication and creation as some of its central elements. We consider the role of Antipodean thinking as a located critical theory for education, and a way to defend our aspirations for equality and social justice against the incursions of neoliberalism, today and in the future.

Understanding factors that contribute to students' self-concept in science is an important task in boosting the number of students studying science and retaining students in science fields. A questionnaire was administered to science students at the University of Auckland in New Zealand (N = 693) to test a theoretical model of science self-concept tied to the work of Pierre Bourdieu. In this model, a student's social capital (i.e., relationships with parents, teachers and peers) and cultural capital (i.e., science related resources) are seen as key determinants of a student's belief that science is a domain in which they can succeed. Results from a Structural Equation Model (SEM) show that, of the factors included in the model, exposure to passionate science teachers during high school was the main predictor of science self-concept for our sample of university science students, while having peers who value science was also found to be important. Interestingly, science-related resources and parents' value of science were not significant predictors of science self-concept, but the number of university generations in the family did have a positive association. Students who self-identified as male had higher levels of science self-concept, even after accounting for social and cultural factors in our theoretical model. Implications of these findings are discussed in the context of the field of science education and Bourdieu's sociological theory.