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This paper explores the salience of sport in the lives of eight-year-old and nine-year-old South African primary school boys. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data, I argue that young boys' developing relationship with sport is inscribed within particular gendered, raced and classed discourses in South Africa. Throughout the paper I show differences and durability of meanings across the social sites that affect and position blacks, white, boys and girls. It is argued that young boys' early association with sport is centrally about identity and doing sport, or at least establishing interest in sport is one important way in claiming to be a real boy. The findings have implications for the call by the South African Government to get the nation to play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores, through the life histories of a group of first and second generation immigrant pupils from the 'Asian' and 'African' diasporas, the complex ways in which 'black' identities have evolved in British society over the past two decades. The phrase 'black identities' is used here not as a racially descriptive term but rather as a signifier of ethnic 'otherness'; to make distinct (from white society) and, at the same time, to unify the experiences of disparate groups of ethnic minority groups as marginals within metropolitan societies. Charting the life histories of a group of students in an inner-city comprehensive school in their own collective and individual voices, the paper provides a glimpse of their perceptions of their status as citizens, their views on cultural identity, and their dreams, aspirations, hopes and desires as young people growing up in contemporary British society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from theories of identity formation and feminist theories, this paper develops an account which is both structural and personal of the social construction of academic women's lives in a South African setting. Such discussion is necessary given the paucity of material on gender in South Africa, and timely in its comparative account of the shaping effects not only of gender, but also of race in the academy. Using life-history interviews, the paper explores and begins to explain the marginalisation of women in South African universities where male and masculine carries greater cultural prestige, and where the gendered economy and gender divisions in private lives shape and constrain academic selves, but where race has been and is a central carrier of power. Using the words of the women, it seeks to unpick the seamless narration of the White, male, masculinist colonial university as a move towards a more inclusive and so more fully human account of aspects of life in South African universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]