Deborah Youdell is Professor of Sociology of Education in the School of Education at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her work develops analyses of the relationship between policy, practice and inequalities, and how inequalities are connected to subjectivities, everyday practices, pedagogy, institutional processes and policy. Her research has spanned issues of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, social class, ability and disability and has been underpinned by her engagement with the work of Judith Butler. She is the author of School Trouble: identity, power and politics in education (2010), Impossible Bodies and Impossible Selves: exclusions and student subjectivities (2006), and Rationing Education: policy, practice, reform and equity (with David Gillborn, 1999). Her recent work is at the forefront of the developing field of biosocial education, which brings emerging knowledge in the new biological sciences together with sociological accounts of schooling and student subjectivities.