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This article examines the case of women full professors in a gendered and neoliberalised context to propose the concept of complex reflexivity. This concept refers to an internal conversation and accounts for the practical way in which people may ponder their ambiguities and contradictions. This paper presents the concrete experiences and practices of some women professors in relation to the institutional structure. The research is based on fieldwork conducted between November 2018 and December 2020, which includes interviews with 24 professors, as well as an ethnographic study. Their complex reflexivity combines adapting to the precarious conditions, rebuscar (unusual ways of getting resources), perceiving envy from their peers, and, at the same time, dealing with the administration, reducing the time dedicated to academic tasks, and developing caring and careful practices. With their actions, the professors navigate the shortcomings and conflicts in the university, but they also modify these supposedly immovable conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we draw on the concepts of figurations, capital, and hegemonic masculinity to analyse a bullying relation involving two fifth-grade boys at a Swedish comprehensive school. The findings are based on ethnographic fieldwork, which included participant observations and group interviews with eight teachers and fourteen students (seven girls and seven boys) from the same class. Our findings demonstrate the complexity of the relation between the boys and suggest that rather than constituting a straight-forward bullying situation involving a problematically aggressive 'bully' targeting a less powerful 'victim', it is part of a more complex figuration involving interdependent social relations that are tenuously balanced in terms of power dynamics and where the boys position themselves and are positioned in relation to the long-term symbolic norms of status dominant within their specific school field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes the notion of inclusion as an imperfect and contested project toward educational and social justice, which seeks to address social and historically constructed exclusion. It aims to problematise 'inclusion research' of school and community relationships in Mexico by examining the orientations and implications for inclusion of doing educational research aligned with a more 'Western' critical approach to social justice as opposed to research explicitly situated in a decolonial and intercultural perspective. It firstly characterises how inclusion is dealt with by critical and decolonial perspectives. Secondly, through a comparative exploration of two ethnographic research projects about school-community relationships, it analyses the implications of both approaches and explores the articulation between 'substantive power' and 'formal power' in the research, arguing for the need to include an epistemic and ontological dimension in inclusion as social-justice-oriented research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Research has long demonstrated the exclusion and Othering experienced by young people with disabilities in education. This paper presents findings from an ethnographic study conducted in an 'elite' sixth-form college in England, set against the backdrop of a shifting social, political, and cultural landscape, where neo-liberal discourses of dis/ability and healthism—centring on mental health and wellbeing—are becoming further embedded in educational policy. Drawing on theoretical work by Bourdieu and Foucault, we demonstrate how the students in this study appeared able to re-make disability as a liberal intellectual identity marker and use it as a form of capital within the bounded college sub-field. However, we argue that these empowered disabled subjectivities were strongly middle-classed and precarious. The findings have implications through advancing current understandings of young people's complexifying relationships with disability in education, of enduring inequalities around disability, and how social class is implicated in this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between social background, choice of university programme and academic culture among Danish university students. Statistically and sociologically, university students are often treated as a homogeneous group, but the ever-increasing number of students in higher education demands a closer examination of the hidden heterogeneity in the students’ social origin and educational strategies. Using a mixed-method approach (register data and ethnographic observations and interviews) the paper focuses on the students’ class origins and on different cultural practices in three Danish university programmes. It is shown that the Danish university field is characterized by a significant variation in social selectivity from programme to programme, and it is argued that these different social profiles correspond with distinctively different cultural practices in the programmes. Correspondingly, the students have distinctively different strategies towards education and future work life. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Editorial. French sociologist and internationally renowned public intellectual Pierre Bourdieu died in 2002. He developed a remarkable capacity for critical social analysis and epistemic reflexivity. He also organized a network of progressive social scientists into the group "Raisons d'agir" and launched a publishing house of the same name to bring sociological analyses of contemporary civic issues to a broader public. Bourdieu also succeeded in developing a highly individual brand of sociology. His scholarship was a synthesis of philosophy, social anthropology and sociology underpinned by a passionate commitment to social justice. An acute interest in social inequality and the ways in which it is masked and perpetuated became an enduring contribution preoccupation that influenced his writings.

This paper reports on the social factors influencing the learning of two cohorts of school students and their experience of compulsory secondary education in a city in southern England - the secondary schooling phase of a 12-year, longitudinal ethnographic study that also tracked the same children's experiences through primary schooling. We embed our report of secondary school findings within the theoretical models and understandings generated by the Identity and Learning Programme as a whole. The paper addresses three key issues. First, we trace how social influences on learning broaden as young people develop through adolescence, and illustrate why viewing learning as social activity is so important. Second, we discuss evolving processes of social differentiation in relation to gender and social class. We draw particular attention to the dangers of over-simplified models of social reproduction. Finally, we review an analysis of strategic action and identities, contrasting the differentiated experience of young people attending independent and selective schools compared with those attending non-selective comprehensive schools. Overall, this analysis seeks to complement studies of differentiated educational outcomes by suggesting possible social processes that could help to account for them. The Identity and Learning Programme, both in its secondary phase and as a whole, shows clearly how individual agency enables young people to cope with their circumstances. However, in so doing, they both reproduce elements of constraint/opportunity and construct others anew. This has significant implications for policy and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews and critiques significant developments within contemporary ethnography. The first part of the paper traces the antecedents of ethnography in an anthropology which was itself closely identified and entwined with colonialism and imperialism. The paper then goes on to review contemporary developments within ethnography, particularly those associated with postmodernism. Attempts to establish a critical ethnography are reviewed and critiqued in the following section. The paper then goes on to suggest ways in which the concepts of 'really useful knowledge' and the processes of action research might be combined in order to assist in the construction of critical ethnography. The paper concludes by acknowledging the difficulties which exist for educational researchers and practitioners who wish to practice critical ethnography in the current educational climate in both Britain and North America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the spatial experiences of Emirati higher education women students. It presents some of the unique ways they engaged with and appropriated their campus space. To understand and explore women's spatial experiences as manifested through their spatial practices, appropriation and emerging spaces, I conducted an ethnographic qualitative inquiry with multiple levels of data gathering and analysis. I utilized social theories of space specifically the social construction of space and Lefebvre's triad as a theoretical framework for this study. The emerging spatial practices of 'togetherness' and 'sitting on the floor' were highly informed by aspects of women students' identity and socio-cultural formation, with an evident link to their traditional past that intersects with their specific nation's modern demands and challenges. Although Emirati women learners' spatiality might resonate with that of other women learners, their spatial practices are context and culture specific. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I present the findings of a study which explored teacher-family collaboration in state primary schools in Cyprus. The research strategy was one of multiple case study, with a sample of seven teachers, their pupils and the pupils' parents. The research approach was ethnographic and the data set reported in this paper includes the data collected from the field of two of the sites. The analysis of the data showed that participant parents, regardless of their background, valued their children's educational success, wanted their children to do well in school, and correspondingly saw themselves as supporting their children in one way or another. The evidence, however, demonstrated a variation in familial perspectives and needs and a considerable distinction in how families of different background used their school contacts. These conclusions draw on Bourdieu's views of cultural capital and seem quite consistent with the findings of other researchers elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the research approach of a case study ethnography. The study sought to explore the peer group understandings of five male friends aged between six and eight years. In exploring the social dynamics of peer culture, and in particular how these dynamics interacted to define, regulate and maintain particular understandings of masculinity, the study's research approach drew on Mackay's (1993) affinity group method. This method of grouping people of similar interest and engaging them in discussion aims to promote a sense of group cohesion, which encourages the participants to speak with openness about their ideas, interpretations and feelings (Hickey & Fitzclarence, 2000). The intimate and informal context facilitates the identification of shared and contradicting stories, ideas and understandings through clarifications, negotiations and confirmations. Within a description of the study's methodological framework, this paper outlines how this approach was adopted and modified for young children. The affinity group approach is presented as useful in exploring the social dynamics, relevances, complexities and subtleties of peer culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the aim is to highlight the absence of a sociology of learning in relation to primary education. Further, it is argued that there is considerable scope for cooperation between psychologists and sociologists in tackling this issue and one way will be explored in which this could be achieved by drawing on social constructivist psychology and symbolic interactionist sociology. In support of this suggestion, some brief illustrative material is presented, drawn from a longitudinal ethnography of a pupil cohort progressing through a primary school in UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last two decades, undergraduate medical education in the United Kingdom has undergone several important changes. Many of these have revolved around a paradigmatic shift from ‘paternalistic’ to ‘patient-centred’ approaches to healthcare. Adopting a Foucauldian understanding of power and borrowing from Freire’s critical pedagogy, in this paper I draw upon ethnographic data from one UK medical school to illustrate the recurrence among medical students of narrow and uncritical understandings of patient-centred practices. These understandings highlight a tension between the ideals and frameworks of medical education policy and students’ conceptualisations of professional learning and practice. I explore this tension by tracing some possible links between students’ views of patient-centredness and the teaching practices at the medical school. I argue that more critical approaches to medical learning are sorely needed and suggest some directions for medical education that would help support the personal and professional development of more critically aware practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysis of teachers' agency as multifarious change, embedded in educational reform in the global era, stands largely unexamined in educational policy. Although the concept of teachers as agents has political implications, beyond this, examining teachers' agency offers ways of describing and reviewing changes to teachers' work and relations within evolving education systems. Local systems draw from globally orientated education policies, which continue to influence to the way that local systems redesign education. In the global context, education systems are complex interactions between structure and agency, evidenced as 'multiplicity undergoing change'. In other words, there is dynamic and dialectic interplay between structure and agency. Teachers' agency, germane to dynamic interplay, means that teachers are not only engaging in the reproduction of structural change aligning globalization-driven reforms to their work and practice, but also, in adapting and reacting to new structural conditions, they are transformed through their actions. In this paper, the focus becomes teachers' agency as a framework for understanding how teachers are redesigned and reassembled to do things differently within restructured education systems. Finally, the discussion considers the possible consequences of teachers work and practice, given teachers' agency relative to the macro policy of superfigures and the transitional national/global structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most previous research on parental involvement in children's homework has focused on the pedagogical advantages or disadvantages of school assignments while neglecting the practice in its social context, family life. By studying parent-child homework negotiations in Swedish families, this paper examines how family members position themselves and each other in relation to Swedish discourses on homework and parental involvement. The study shows that parents want their children to do homework independently. It is hard for the parents to take up another subject position than that of a 'responsible parent' who helps the child with homework or controls that it is done. Thereby, the child is simultaneously positioned as 'irresponsible' whether that is the case or not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on ethnographic research to discuss the ways in which a group of thirteen- and fourteen-year-old girls living in a rural area organised, negotiated and controlled their developing heterosexual relationships--of 'getting' and 'having' boyfriends. Their active initiation of relationships with boys and the lead they took in defining boundaries contradicts the picture of passivity presented in feminist youth culture literature of the 1970s and 1980s. Three forms of heterosexual relationships are explored: 'getting off', 'seeing someone' and 'going out with' and the differing 'quality' of each relationship. Within each variety there is a 'continuum of seriousness'. Each relationship form was negotiated in such a way that it would not interfere with the business of 'doing friendship' with girlfriends. The girls' sexual behaviour and the way in which they themselves discuss and make sense of their sexuality are framed within the boundaries of 'compulsory heterosexuality'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Post-war theories of 'youth' as a transitional phase of life are reviewed in terms of their common assumption about the formation of a stable adult identity. The post-modern challenge to the assumption of a stable self is outlined together with attempts by theorists of late modernity to hold structure and agency in creative tension. People with learning difficulties, it is argued, represent an abnormal transition in a Learning Society, thus enabling us to understand the nature of transition and identity in such a society more clearly. Ethnographic case studies of a man of 23, a man of 33 and a woman of 43, all being Down's Syndrome, are presented. The limits of their transition to full adulthood are specified in terms of four key markers of adulthood. The paper concludes by reflecting on the purchase of different theories of youth and identity, and on the politics of learning difficulties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1985, the Higher Education Equity Program was introduced by the Australian Government to improve the participation of those persons from social groups traditionally under-represented within higher education. In 1990, the program was incorporated within A Fair Chance For All which provided more specific details of the government's desire for a system-wide approach to equity issues. One result has been the proliferation of access and equity programs conducted by universities around the country and aimed at redressing the disadvantage of potential students. The alleged success of these programs is based on greater participation in and graduation from Australian universities by individuals from targeted disadvantaged groups. The research reported here, however, would suggest that such programs are prone to co-opt the language of equity and social justice, dependent as they are on satisfying statistically-orientated program performance indicators in order to receive recurrent government funding. Further, the paper argues that success in achieving equity within Australian higher education will remain limited unless the structural arrangements that work to construct social inequalities in mainstream higher education are addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spatial dimensions of social interaction and reproduction have received increasing attention from sociologists in recent years. However, these issues remain largely implicit in most studies of classrooms, schools and the education system. In this paper, I argue that the study of social space should be integral to analyses of the relationship between educational differentiation and social reproduction. After examining the position of space in Gidden's theory of structuration, I focus on how space is used in schools as a resource in the production of unequal gender relations. Space is viewed not simply as a context in which interaction occurs, but as a phenomenon which both produces and is produced by, gendered power relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contrasts the use of ethnographic research procedures in the study of schools in Great Britain and the U.S. It also reflects on differences between the anthropology and the sociology of education. In the course of this exploration the authors also hope to draw together much of the literature from the respective countries and disciplinary fields. There is an obvious and striking difference between British and U.S. school ethnography. Whereas the U.S. research on schools and classrooms has been conducted primarily by applied anthropologists, that in Great Britain has been done overwhelmingly by researchers who see themselves as sociologists. It is noticeable that several researchers working as sociologists were trained as anthropologists or began work in anthropology departments. Where British research has looked to North America it has been to U.S. sociology in genera--especially symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology. The article also attempts to establish that the Atlantic really does divide school ethnographers into differing traditions. It establishes the truth of the authors' claim that school and classroom ethnography in the U.S. and Canada is predominantly anthropological in orientation, while that in Great Britain is more sociological.

This article explores how one cohort of first-in-family students narrated their movement into and through university, proposed as a form of boundary crossing. These metaphors emerged from the stories that students told about their persistence, with references ranging from institutional or organisational boundaries through to those imposed by self and others. Applying the sensitizing lens of boundary crossing, an analysis is provided of how learners navigated their transition into university and the types of persistence behaviours adopted. The focus is on those who traversed these boundaries, considering the nature of incursions and the ways these were negotiated within students' everyday lives. This cohort all self-identified as being the first in their family to attend university but also acknowledged a variety of additional social, cultural and economic factors that impacted upon their educational journey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws together a comparative sociological analysis and a political theory perspective to interpret children's views on the role of school and being a pupil, and what these tell us about their conceptual representations of citizenship and belonging in France and England. The article presents research findings from a cross-national ethnographic study with children aged 10 and 11 years in two primary schools, one in France and one in England. This article shows that children's views generally reflected national value orientations around citizenship and belonging, but that these conceptions of citizenship were not always fully understood by children, and masked, in some cases, deeper mechanisms of exclusion. This raises questions about the place of citizenship in education in France and England, and calls for a deeper understanding of the ways in which conceptions of citizenship are formed through children's experience of school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A governmentality ethnographic approach is adopted to examine the everyday making of school in Buenos Aires slums. By addressing events at the intersection of the life of school and of the neighborhood, in this article we problematize schooling – how it is put together and the tensions that beset it on a daily basis. The notion of the self-made school is proposed as a way to delve into how management society calls on the population to manage itself. We identify micro-procedures that take the shape of silent struggles to turn the school/neighborhood into a place to live. As a hypothesis, we propose that school is produced at the intersection of everyday struggles and the struggle for the everyday in the context of the precarization of life in the age of management. From a methodological standpoint what are at play are not dichotomies, but rather the stickiness and tension of daily practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on data generated by a 3-year study, informed by ethnographic principles, of the interface between Gypsy culture and the educational system in the South West of England, this article focuses specifically on the experiences of young Gypsy males [1]. The manner in which they perform specific forms of masculine identity though business skills and dealing, fighting, and sex talk are considered. Tensions are highlighted regarding the ways in which these performances are valued in different communities of practice, and how this operates to maintain an atmosphere of suspicion regarding the educational system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the implications of radical criticism of interview studies for educational sociology. A recurrent theme in commentary on the sociology of education bemoans the tendency for it to become cut off from the parent discipline, charging it with failing to draw on developments there. A recent variation on this theme is Delamont et al.'s criticism of British ethnographic work in education for failing to keep pace with the latest methodological developments, as portrayed in Denzin and Linconl's moment model; though they are also critical of the development character of that model. Whatever the accuracy of this charge in general, and irrespective of whether keeping up is always desirable, it is true that there has been recent work in the field of methodology that has had little noticeable impact on qualitative work in the sociology of education. A key example is what was referred to as the radical critique of interviews. This critique focuses on what is regarded as increasing over-dependence among qualitative researchers on interview data, and above all their use of such data as a window on the world and/or on the minds of informants. Furthermore, some of the critics argue that this privileging of interview material reflects a wider trend: the emergence of the interview society. Concern over the status and use of interview data is by no means new, of course. However, the grounds for this concern, and the conclusion drawn, have changed somewhat. In the past, the focus was on the issue of how do we know the informant is telling the truth, on the incompleteness of interview data and on the difference between what people say and what they do.

This article uses a variety of sources to review the racialisation of children and young people's lives with a view to understanding their current experiences and the futures that appear to be available to them. In the absence of much work using children's own accounts on this issue, the essay draws on research from a range of perspectives. The firrst part sketches in the background to many children and young people's experiences of the intersection of racialisation and gender by considering how racialisation and gender currently intersect with education. Education potentially provides the qualifications, and hence the social capital, that serve to mediate children's futures. However, it also provides the institutions within which children and young people have to negotiate many of their everyday practices and relationships as social actors. The second part of the essay considers examples of racialised and gendered positioning that need to be addressed if inequalities are to be eradicated. This essay has argued that the welcome recent focus on young children as agents needs to be extended to provide understandings of racialisation and its intersection with gender and education. The literature available documents shifting patterns of racialised and ethnicised, as well as gendered and classed, inequalities in educational attainment and experiences, as well as Afro-American and Asian parents' political campaigns and efforts to improve their children's educational chances

Locating oneself as a poststructuralist not only emphasies readings of texts, but generates data comparable with this location. This article considers some possibilities in researching everyday happening at primary school. Reading and producing discourages, rather than texts only , involves bringing into play our own subjective understanding. Writing differently then a methodology for the analysis of what we have recorded of what we have recorded as research data. For the study of sites and events one, one possibility is for deconstructions to follow a form of ethnography. However with psotstructural theories and their related academic practices, the research choices are different. An effect of this difference is that the timmings and resolution of gathering, presenting and analysing data are dislocated. These dislocations may be read as an enactment of a radical philosophy. They may also be read as a puzzle to be resisted but which is nevertheless constructed to match today's cultural shift and to challenge the nature of researching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ethnographies of youth culture and schooling produced by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural studies and its followers had a major impact on educational sociology during the late 1970s and 1980s. Despite this invaluable contribution, important theoretical and methodological problems emerged in their treatment of class and culture. In particular, the untheorised presence of the 'new middle class' and a confusing notion of 'dominant culture', weakened the coherence of their analyses. This article traces these problems from the early studies of youth culture through to more recent school ethnographies. It concludes by stressing the relevance of critical concepts like class and culture within contemporary debates emerging from the 'new' educational settlement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some problems in recent sociology of education, such as those associated with epistemological and cultural relativism, are traced to foundationalist and dualist epistemologies. These problems are avoided by a materialist epistemology which is holist, rejecting the idea of foundations for knowledge, and monist in asserting but one kind of object of knowledge-the physical. Recent interpretivist and Marxist views are unable to specify grounds for rational theory-comparison, e.g. with positivism. The proposed epistemology, materialist pragmatism, includes a methodology, based on "touchstone theory", enabling rational debate and avoiding a vicious relativism. Once we reject the material/non-material and related dualims (especially natural science/social science) it can be argued that qualitative research methods, such as ethnography, are epistemologically more basic than quantitative methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]