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This paper utilises the conceptual lens of intersectionality to explore gendered academic career trajectory in the context of one participant’s challenge to a normative reading of the link between her private life and its relation to a ‘successful’ academic career. The paper then charts the recalibrations that needed to take place to ensure certain sociocultural categories and intersections were not privileged over others. Finally, the paper then utilises the concept of intersectionality as a metaphor with which to view the intersecting and reflexive relationship between the interviewer, the interviewee and the performative event of the interview process. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the last decade it is young women who have come to be widely understood as the bearers of educational qualifications. It is girls who are now seen to have 'the world at their feet' and to be able to attain the glittering prizes of academic success associated with elite universities and top occupations. And it is upper-middle-class girls, in particular, who appear to be achieving the most; a 'super class' of pupils who are supposedly able to effortlessly succeed in everything that they do. Drawing on ethnographic data generated during a research project in a single-sex, selective girls' school this paper will explore what it meant for one group of elite girls to achieve and succeed in school. The paper will examine the different versions of success made available to the girls in this school, the girls' differing relations to these discourses and their intersection with other relations of power. The paper will question the popular post-feminist picture of the smart, sassy and successful 'top girl' who is able to 'have it all' and in the conditions of her own choosing. The paper will suggest that, even for the girls in this school, success was not easy to perform or 'own' for oneself. Despite attending a school where success was openly celebrated, the paper will demonstrate the ways in which many girls still felt restricted to perform success in narrow and competitive ways that clashed with dominant discourses of femininity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the learning experiences and literacy practices of a group of female migrant domestic workers from Nepal, reporting on ethnographic data collected between 2008 and 2013. Drawing on the conceptualisation of literacy as a social practice, as well as the notion of translocational positionality, it examines the way in which the women’s emerging literacy practices in English interacted with their experiences as migrant workers. It argues that understanding the transnational nature of the women’s lives is essential to understanding the complex ways in which literacy was threaded through their social and material practices. In doing so it points to the need for a more complex conceptualisation of context and of the relationship between the local and global within literacy research, which pays attention to the way in which literacy practices interact with processes entailing movement and positioning across boundaries and between different transnational spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the theoretical perspectives I utilised in my doctoral research to uncover the role of class and gender in my respondents’ stories and experiences of their career success. I argue that adopting an economic model for conceptualising the influence of social class and gender in the respondents’ stories and experiences of their career success is inadequate because it has historically neglected to take account of women’s position in the labour market. Drawing on an example from my data examining the influence of the respondents’ familial attitudes and dispositions towards education, the paper contends that Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is an invaluable tool for theorising senior female academics’ pathways to career success by bringing together a cultural, social and economic understanding of social class and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper adopts a social constructionist position on assessment, specifically that it can never be free of the social conditions in which it is practiced. As such, we explore two aspects of classroom interactions which contribute to and shape the learning environments in which assessment takes place. By drawing on interviews carried out with 51 teachers and 307 Year 3 (7–8‐year‐old) pupils the paper demonstrates where and how beliefs and attitudes about gender influence what they perceived as ‘good’ or ‘appropriate’ working relationships. It also considers the ways in which teachers utilize perceptions of gender to plan the curriculum and manage their classrooms. Whilst the pupils believed their teachers treated them in a fair and just manner, three quarters of the teachers interviewed believed they did or should respond differently to pupils according to gender. We argue that the emphasis given to boys’ underachievement has contributed to this scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Higher education policy and research tend to be dominated by the messaging systems of the North. De Sousa Santos argues that we need to start listening to the South and that we need to develop a sociology of absences. This paper attempts to engage with some of these absences by deconstructing participation in higher education, in quantitative and qualitative terms, in Ghana and Tanzania. The paper is based on interim findings from a research project on Economic and Social Research Council/Department for International Development-funded research project on Widening Participation in Higher Education in Ghana and Tanzania: Developing an Equity Scorecard (www.sussex.ac.uk/education/wideningparticipation). It argues that, while globally the higher education sector has become associated with economic development and the hyper modernisation of the knowledge economy, some archaic patterns of participation appear to be continuing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researching the intersection of class, race, gender, sexuality and disability raises many issues for educational research. Indeed, Maynard (2002, 33) has recently argued that 'difference is one of the most significant, yet unresolved, issues for feminist and social thinking at the beginning of the twentieth century'. This paper reviews some of the key imperatives of working with 'intersectional theory' and explores the extent to these debates are informing research around difference in education and Physical Education (PE). The first part of the paper highlights some key issues in theorising and researching intersectionality before moving on to consider how difference has been addressed within PE. The paper then considers three ongoing challenges of intersectionality - bodies and embodiment, politics and practice and empirical research. The paper argues for a continued focus on the specific context of PE within education for its contribution to these questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing international research suggests that widespread performative pedagogy has contributed to producing educational inequalities for ‘disadvantaged’ learners. There have also been calls for alternative pedagogies, which can be characterised as child-centred. This paper analyses pupils’ hierarchical positioning in a contemporary, mixed socio-economic, child-centred classroom using Bernstein’s theory of competence pedagogy and the concept of the ideal pupil. The ideal pupil’s central characteristics were perceived ‘intelligence’ and ‘good humour’, which were closely associated with middle-class boys. Middle-class and working-class girls were positioned against a female ideal pupil, who would take on a supporting role by creating a facilitating environment for boys’ learning. While middle-class girls were moderately successful in approximating these characteristics, working-class girls were positioned at the bottom of the class hierarchy. These findings have implications for these pupils’ self-perceptions, and raise questions about the implications of child-centred pedagogy for social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyses the interrelation of twenty-first-century education and work from a gender perspective. The analysis is carried out theoretically by asking whether human capital theory and Bourdieu’s reproduction theory are adequate instruments for such an endeavour. It is argued that the explanatory power of the human capital concept of the interrelation between education and work is extremely weak, because the human capital concept conceals costs necessary to create human capital. In contrast, reproduction theory comprehends investments in education through reproductive work. But, reproduction theory fails short to explain ongoing gender hierarchies within employment. Therefore, analysis of social and societal structure needs to go beyond the focus on education and work to explain the maintenance of gender hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyses the educational attainment of Tajikistani adults born between 1947 and 1989. Adults in the oldest cohorts completed school during the educational expansion of the Soviet period and the youngest cohorts completed their education in the post-Soviet period, which was marked by educational contraction. To date, there is not a clear picture of attainment trends during the Soviet period that provide a perspective for judging educational attainment in the post-Soviet period. Using household survey data collected in 2007 by the World Bank, I conduct a synthetic cohort analysis to estimate the likelihood of completing basic, secondary and higher education for men and women; urban and rural residents and ethnic majority and minority citizens. Findings for particular groups are mixed, but in general the gap in educational attainment between advantaged groups and disadvantaged groups narrows during the Soviet era, but widens in the post-Soviet period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the stratification of the curriculum according to parents' education, gender, ethnicity and school sector in England, focusing on year 10 subject choices. Using the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England, we analyse both year 10 subject choices and the factors that may motivate these choices, such as liked and disliked subjects, attitudes to subject choice and the extent to which choices were shaped by parents, teachers or the young people themselves. The social structure of curriculum choice is mapped using Multiple Correspondence Analysis, which reveals the hierarchy of subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The challenges for education systems of student disaffection in working-class schools are well known, but the implications of high levels of student optimism in the absence of the resources needed to support academic success have been less often considered. Through examination of the school experiences post-compulsory learners in Australia, this paper seeks to identify some of the ways in which disadvantaged schools are able to command confidence and optimism from students. Analysis of the perspectives of students in schools catering to large numbers of second-generation Turkish-background students suggests that gender and ethnicity organise, make legible and obscure the production of educational disadvantage in these sites. I discuss the implications of strong confidence and faith in schools amongst students in light of contribution of this investment to a wider system of management and legitimisation of inequalities in schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we describe evolving educational aspirations and practices of female high school students and their families in the context of rapidly changing education and employment markets in Kolkata. We interviewed 35 families of girls attending two government high schools. The families are from lower middle-class and lower income backgrounds. The latter see access to education as a way towards upward social mobility. Using gender and social class as axes of analysis, we explore how these families negotiate educational aspirations and practices in connection with married life and motherhood. We also look at the influence of social, cultural, and economic capitals on the formation of aspirations, knowledge about careers, and the ability to put aspirations into practice. This work contributes to the domain of research on education and social class in India with a gendered perspective and a unique setting in government high schools for girls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the impact of recent state and employment changes upon young people in vocational and educational training. Earlier academic representations of young people's transition from school to work (TSW) emphasised socio-economic constraints and accompanying forms of youth resistance. Such work was important in establishing the structural impact of dominant social relations and divisions, particularly with reference to class formations, and to a lesser extent gender and ethnicity. In so doing, there was a tendency to focus on the commonalties that particular groups of subordinated young people experienced in post-compulsory school sites and the construction of a range of collective subcultural responses. Youth typologies are criticised for being too rigid. Rather, it is suggested that there are a wide range of youth transitions, with emerging identities that are marked by fluidities, ambivalences, contradictions and tensions. Over the past twenty years a number of key texts have examined the interplay between ideologies of traditional masculinity, the institutions of waged labour and the processes of working class culture in a de-industrialising society.

Latin families moving to a different Latin American country are placed in a dominated position by what is called 'coloniality'. In this sense, we argue that the processes of classification (in terms of social class), racialisation and genderisation that migrant Latin families experience when choosing schools for their children in the Chilean context can be a form of this coloniality. To make our case, we use narratives from in-depth interviews conducted in Valparaíso with migrant families who applied to schools under the new admission system. In this sense, narratives show that the processes of classification, racialisation and genderisation, as socio-cultural productions, intersect with migrant families' school-choice experiences. These intersections emerge when families match school choices with an shelter search, as they manifest their interests to protect their children, avoiding schools with 'marginal children' or racial bullying and safeguarding gender expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the contemporary scholarly discourse, the under-representation of women in science is often explained by the phenomenon of women ‘in the pipeline’. The pipeline carries a flow from one stage to another, and the flow of women diminishes between the stages. Based on the literature and qualitative studies, it can be inferred that one of the main causes of leaking in the pipeline is the difficulty in reconciling professional and family life by female scientists. Scientific work that requires mobility and competition forces numerous women to abandon their career or take a career break for the period of assuming different family roles. The results of a number of studies demonstrate that there are some differences between Polish women and their peers from other countries in achieving the work–family connection. It appears that after fulfilling a set of necessary conditions, the reconciliation of professional and family life is sometimes possible. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent decades have seen a dramatic expansion in the educational attainment and occupational opportunities of German women. Both the educational and occupational positions of the mothers and those of their daughters are continuously changing across cohorts. Our study aims to detect the probability of daughters to experience maternal-line intergenerational educational and occupational mobility. Using new data from the National Educational Panel Study of adult cohorts, we analyse successive cohorts of German women born between 1944 and 1984. We demonstrate that the relation between mothers’ and daughters’ educational and occupational career has changed over time. Maternal-line female mobility has decreased over cohorts. Our results also reveal that the relationship between educational careers and female job mobility has changed. The tertiary level of education has become more relevant across cohorts in preventing downward intergenerational mobility and it has become a prerequisite for taking part in the completion for upward intergenerational mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite the political commitment expressed through numerous international and national policies to widen educational access and participation, we are living in a time of increased and widening social and economic inequalities. Although we have largely moved from an elite to a mass higher education system in England and in many other countries, those benefitting the most from policies to expand higher education are those with relative social, economic and cultural advantages. Suffering from a recession and financial crisis, the Coalition came into government in Britain with the promise to make ‘tough decisions’, referring to significant funding cuts to the public sector. This has had serious implications for widening participation (WP), with universities increasingly becoming sites of selectivity, marketisation and competitiveness. The decentralisation of WP has relocated the responsibility of widening access and participation to universities themselves, putting increasing levels of responsibility on WP professionals and units. This study draws on research on WP professional subjectivities and practices to examine the current impossibilities of WP and to consider possibilities for sustaining a commitment to social justice and equity in higher education participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The INCLUD-ED project's case studies of successful schools in Europe reveal that there are advantages involved in opening schools to all kinds of women as far as educational and social inclusion is concerned. 'Other Women' - those whose voices have traditionally been silenced in academic settings - help in crucial ways to improve education when they have the chance to participate in multiple spaces and activities in the school. By participating in decision-making bodies, in classrooms and in family education, amongst other activities, the 'Other Women' enhance students' learning, improve living together and break down cultural and gender stereotypes. All these findings point to the need to open schools to all women to advance processes of educational transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an overview of global higher education focusing particularly on issues of diversity and gender. The main evidence is drawn from seven unique projects on Widening Participation in Higher Education funded by the British Government's Higher Education Funding Council for England and administered through the Economic and Social Research Council's Teaching and Learning Research Programme. The issues are contextualised from a feminist perspective, current global and national policy debates about extending fair access to, and participation within, higher education and the contestation about these debates on global higher education in the twenty-first century. Whilst there is clear evidence that participation in higher education has increased, especially for women, by contrast with traditional students defined as young, white, male and middle-class, this participation is neither equal nor fairly distributed. There are systemic and systematic inequalities but, nevertheless, opportunities for critical and feminist pedagogies within the global academy have increased and offer the potential for the future of the twenty-first-century global academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past three decades educational research has provided an exciting and dynamic theoretical engagement with gender and sexuality. While acknowledging this contribution, this article is a conceptually-led exploration of a number of theoretical and methodological tensions contained within this research. More specifically, it argues that current research is limiting the possibilities of new knowledge by insisting on particular epistemological, methodological and theoretical positions. It argues that, in the spirit of Bachelard (2002), the research community needs to pursue epistemological breaks in order to recalibrate their theoretical and methodological positions. More specifically, this article suggests that a current dependence on sexuality identity categories, the positioning of the body as central to methodology and a reliance on particular theories of gender restrict the possibilities for new knowledge and understanding in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the significance of the identification of ethnic and class differences in educational research on gender. On the basis of postructuralist theory, factors like gender, race, social class are not internal to different selves instead the self is positioned and repositioned in discourses around gender, race and social class. This theory has supported the feminist work and provided tools to analyze the complexity of human interaction around issues of identity and power. The construction of gender difference by primary and secondary school children depends on their interactive environment. People are shaped by and drawn on experiences and influences around them in their constructions of themselves. Their personality develops and changes throughout their lives. People's constructions of selves depends on other people's perceptions about them. So, it is not possible during an educational research that a researcher is able to predict the behavior of student respondents. But this does not mean that the research is not valid or useful. The researcher should ask student respondents whether their opinions would be able to provide new insights on the subject of the research.

The article presents information on implications of social capital theory for men and women with learning difficulties. It focuses on gender, social capital and lifelong learning for people with mental difficulties. Social capital is currently a very popular concept in social science. The social capital thinking is useful in understanding the nature and effects of people's social networks. The social capital offers a way of humanizing an essentially brutal economic system. The social capital focuses on the intervening variables of gender, social class and disability. Social capital within the family that gives the child access to the adult's human capital depends both on the physical presence of adults in the family and on the attention given by adults to the child. Single-parent families are observed to be deficient in social capital. The Learning Society project also presented the ways in which experiences of training and supported employment were structured by gender. The lack of access to coherent post-school education, training and employment, has negative consequences for the social capital of people with learning difficulties.

This article presents findings of a sociological research project "Promoting Equality Awareness: Women As Citizens," funded by the European Commission. The project investigated discourses of citizenship used by student teachers and their trainers in universities and colleges in Greece, Spain, Portugal, England and Wales. The overall aim of this ongoing project is to develop critical training materials to promote equality awareness amongst student teachers, materials which could be used in both teacher training courses and in secondary schools. The first stage of the project set out to tap levels of gender literacy of student teachers at the point at which they finished their professional training, and secondly, to uncover the language/discourses of citizenship being used and ways in which gender issues are addressed through such discourses. The data suggests that from the student teachers' point of view, women are not easily characterized as part of the brotherhood of man even when they act as community activists and carers. Women are not necessarily freed by political discourses, even those committed to critical citizenship, nor are they easily granted rights in all spheres of their lives.

This article focuses on how Black respondents negotiate whiteness in educational arenas. The focus is on the practice of whiteness and how this practice impinges upon the lives of Black students and teachers. It is argued that Black identities are inherently positioned in relation to White identities, and thereby are engaged in responding to whiteness. As such, interviewees are continually having to manoeuvre across a White norm, so have to develop multiple strategies for negotiating its exigencies. The variety of techniques utilised by participants incorporate individual acts of subversion and accommodation, as well as processes of avoidance, resistance and negotiation. These multiple responses also imply that whiteness is a variable in Black peoples' experience and intersected by class, gender and sexuality. Although Black respondents demonstrate considerable expertise when engaging with whiteness, this process can still incur psychological costs. However, the numerous strategies deployed in the act of negotiation reveal a potential for subversion.

This article examines the articulation of racism and masculinity within the context of a multi-ethnic, inner-city primary school. It draws upon data derived from a year-long ethnographic study of Anne Devlin Primary School. The author spent three days a week, on average, observing and interviewing the school's three parallel, vertically-grouped, Reception/Year 1 infant classes (ages 5 to 6). The school itself is more ethnically diverse than its catchment area with roughly half its children being white whilst a quarter are South Asian and a quarter African/Caribbean. The first and most immediate context within which racist incidents were more likely to emerge was in competitive situations. A senior management team was trying to engage African/Caribbean boys through the promotion of football and other sports. This element of their multicultural/antiracist strategy was, in turn, increasing the popularity of football generally amongst the other children including the infants. On the other hand, however, when the author approached the question of where and when are racist incidents more likely to occur? The focus was increasingly drawn to football as a context within which not only were Asian boys almost systematically excluded from playing but, of the occasional boy who was allowed to play, he was far more likely to be subject to racist abuse than in other contexts. Girls on the other hand were significantly marginalized and excluded. It is therefore necessary that not only class that needs to be taken into account in any anti-racist strategy, but also gender. Masculinity, in this instance as expressed through football, provides one important context for the emergence of racism. It is this complex relationship between race, gender and class and the way in which they articulate at times to mutually reinforce and reproduce each other that requires more attention and understanding.