1 Changing contexts: Doing educational work Terri Seddon Monash University, Melbourne Keynote Symposium, British Education Research Association Conference, Warwick University, 3 September 2010 This paper is part of a research program that is examining politics in working life in the context of globalised flexible capitalism. It is prompted by the ambivalence of human service workers as they face and navigate the effects of globalization and welfare state reforms in their working lives. In education, this ambivalence is evident in the ‘despair’ (Ball, 2010), the uncertainty about directions which makes us so good at critique but less effective in charting a forward course and the different ‘voices of hope’ that suggest programs but only sometimes politics (Nixon, Marks, Rowland, & Walker, 2001; Sawyer, et al., 2007). My aim in this paper is to consider what terms and conditions facilitate transforming politics in human service through a case of academic occupational boundary work. I approach this task by reflecting on the global book project that enabled the editorial team to say ‘we’ and recognise the ‘politics of we’ as a key step towards collective agency in neo-liberal workplaces. This case of occupational boundary work suggests the significance of space, time, knowledge and distance-proximity in the politics of we, serving as resources in processes that both disrupt human service occupations and remake boundaries that permit people to say ‘we’. This paper is organised into three main sections: Understanding ‘we’ Background In our prior collaborative research, we tracked the effects of neo-liberal globalization in human service work (nursing, teaching and social work) (Seddon, Henriksson, & Niemeyer, 2010). We found that global transformations, playing through reform of welfare state regimes, disturbed human service work in ways that participants found disturbing. Yet in these terms and conditions of work, transforming politics were hard to see. There was more evidence of de-professionalisation and invisibilisation of human service labour than of everyday politics, which contested social relations of domination-subordination, possession-dispossession in what might once have been called a ‘politics of liberation’ (Haug & and Others, 1987). The idea of a ‘politics of we’ emerged practically and theoretically as a way of naming the possibility of collective action in fragmented individuated neo-liberal workplaces. In practical terms, this notion recognises that ‘we’s are emerging, although not in familiar forms that characterised modernist industrial politics, where unions and employers faced off across the negotiating table in disputes within clearly bounded jurisdictions. Rather people come together as a ‘we’ in projects, places and events in more ephemeral, fluid ways, they emerge and disperse more rapidly and with less formalised institutionalisation.