(Semi)public places, practices and pedagogy

Abstract

Rather than being banal and uninteresting, Western women’s public toilets may be seen as educational spaces. While prolific in number and usage, they have typically escaped research attention. This paper argues that the common inclusion of toilet texts in these places renders them not only interesting but also worthy of inclusion in accounts of public pedagogies. The paper draws attention to the pedagogical voices that occupy the ostensible privacy of places like toilets. It does so by discussing a collection of toilet texts using the entangled concepts of place, practice and pedagogy. Overall, the paper demonstrates how the texts act as proxy for absent pedagogues who seek to disseminate particular knowledges and/or promote specific cultural practices, and in doing so it repositions women’s (semi)public toilets as richly pedagogical.

Keywords:

• Toilet texts
• public toilets
• public pedagogy
• place
• signs

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges the contributions of colleagues and friends who shared images of toilet texts and pointed her to various sources of related literature. Acknowledgement and thanks too, to Dr Marie Manidis who provided feedback on language concepts drawn on in the paper along with Dr Terry Fitzgerald who cast his scrupulous editing eye over the final draft. Finally, I acknowledge and thank the reviewers for their constructive feedback and helpful suggestions.

Notes

1. The term ‘beat’ is used in Australia to identify places where men who have sex with men meet for casual sex. Inner-city public toilets are well represented amongst such beats.