While some forms of knowledge emerge as legitimised and authoritative; other forms are resisted or repressed. This collection draws on a range of psychoanalytic and social theory, in order to explore writing as a practice that can stabilise or unsettle subjectivities; the unconscious relations between school practices, subjectivities, educational spaces and ideologies; implications of the productive energies and the deadening inwardness associated with mourning and melancholia for formal and informal learning; and the authority we invest in apparently rigid or ephemeral institutional spaces. This book was originally published as a special issue of Pedagogy, Culture & Society.