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This paper draws on qualitative data exploring the experiences of first-generation middle-class Black Caribbean-heritage parents, their own parents, and their children. We focus on the different ways in which race and class intersect in shaping attitudes towards education and subsequent educational practices. We argue that the nature of racism has changed, but it still remains, mainly in more subtle, insidious forms. We conclude that race cannot be simply ‘added on’ to class. Race changes how class works, how it is experienced, and the subjectivites available to individuals. The paper illustrates how the two intersect, in complex ways, in different historical ‘moments’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Young people who disengage or disconnect from school are often demonised within the media and the wider public imagination, from a largely individualized and pathological positioning. Policy explanations and responses are often unhelpful in their focus on a range of ‘deficit’ attributes – poverty, poor parenting, dysfunctional families, low familial achievement, aspiration and motivation, and other ‘at risk’ categories. This paper offers a different explanatory framework that foregrounds the experiences of some young people who had disengaged from school and resumed learning under a very different set of conditions to the ones that had exiled them from schools in the first place. Using a socio-spatial framework, the paper explores the notion of ‘relational space’ as it was appropriated and reclaimed by these young people, in explaining how they saw themselves as constructing viable and sustainable learning identities for themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper provides a critical appraisal of approaches to reflexivity in sociology. It uses data from social network research to argue that Archer’s approach to reflexivity provides a valuable lens with which to understand how people navigate their education and career pathways. The paper is also critical of Archer’s methodology and typology of reflexivity as ‘types’; it is argued that social network research suggests people reveal different approaches to reflexivity in different situations. It concurs with Archer that the concept reflexivity is central to our understanding of the relationships between agency, structure and social change [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Cultural theorists have illuminated how photographic images contribute to autobiographical remembering and identity formation. This has new significance given that digital photography now allows personal images to circulate rapidly amongst peer groups. Taking these insights into classroom contexts, this paper draws on recent case-study data to explore a teacher’s use of digital photography to provide ‘feedback’ to pupils. Critiquing dominant psychological understandings of classroom assessment for their lack of recognition of power relations, it takes up post-structuralist theories of discourse, embodiment and affect to consider how these digital photographs became ‘sticky’ with memories of peer derision, ‘mortifying’ pupils and marking them as ‘other’ in ways that were intensified through later display to the class. Thus, rather than providing benign support for learning, the circulation of these images as part of feedback processes in this classroom context seems to have functioned as a powerful technology of individualization and normalization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper offers an interpretation of the role of emotions in understanding the transitions that young people make to university. I draw on qualitative research with a group of non-traditional students, entering elite universities, to argue that youth transitions are emotional as well instrumental affairs. I argue that choice-making processes incorporate both trust in, and fear of, the transitions infrastructure, and that these emotions infuse more instrumental judgements about the economic benefits of higher education. I also demonstrate that emotional aspects of class - including feelings of entitlement to education and the rejection of normative student identities - constitute the experience of 'being' or 'doing' a student. A broader understanding of how young people become university students then depends not just on developing a new identity but on the complex interaction between emotion and infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foucault's view of the body as a detailed text from which can be read a system of power is used to consider some aspects of contemporary teacher work. In particular, this paper considers the impact on primary school teachers of social anxiety about touching children. One effect has been an intensification of self-surveillance by teachers, and increased experience of child-touch and child-proximity as 'uncomfortable'. Paradoxically, teachers' need for visibility so they can be seen as innocent has the effect of constituting teachers as always and already guilty—as potential sexual abusers. This guilt is now enacted in the everyday common sense actions of 'safe' teachers. The argument is developed with reference to teacher union policy texts and interview data from teachers in a range of New Zealand primary schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a response to Harker & May 1987 which rejects as inaccurate and misleading their 'exposition' of the theory, the analysis of the place of rules in the theory, the analysis of what is taken to be its structuralist base, and shows how forms of the practical sense may be realised in, and described by, the theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Directions in schooling for tribal Aborigines in Australia have long been influenced by psychological and anthropological perspectives. This paper argues that these are inadequate and cannot account for the frequent failure of school to meet community expectations. It is argued that there is a need for new directions based on analysis of the social relations of Aboriginal education. The possibilities opened up by such an analysis are discussed with reference to recent Aboriginal initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]