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When toilet paper disappeared from store shelves across Japan in November 1973, the housewives who searched their neighborhood markets and stood in long lines for the scarce packs were described as unwitting perpetrators of a "toilet paper panic." The word "panic" evoked well-established notions of a social frenzy, irrational and overwrought. This article overturns a conception of panic laden with condescension and adopts, instead, a more empathetic approach to examining why a run on toilet paper and other daily necessities occurred in late 1973, and why it resonated so deeply across Japan as a "panic." In the broader context of the early 1970s, the toilet paper scare and its characterization as a "panic" can be understood as responses to sweeping and multifaceted economic challenges that destabilized daily life and threatened to upend middle-class lifestyles. After more than fifteen years of high economic growth, that sense of middle-class comfort and security was shaken by shortages and inflation as well as mounting evidence of government ineptitude and corporate profiteering. Buffeted by insecurity and uncertainty, Japanese "middle-classness" as both an experience and an ideal had never seemed as vulnerable as it did in the early 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Walter Benjamin's criticisms of dwelling and the modern interior are well known. The middle classes retreated from the alienation of nineteenth-century city life into domestic seclusion, surrounding themselves with soft furnishings in a search for comfort. In Living Rooms (2022), Sam Johnson-Schlee uses objects typically found in the living room or lounge as his starting point for the development of Benjamin's ideas. Recognising the labour invested in domestic commodities would allow us to realise our dreams of connecting with others and escaping the confines of capitalism like roots breaking out of a plant pot. The personal observations used to support the arguments reflect the experience of Generation Rent. They inform an attempt to relate IKEA's 1996 'Chuck out that chintz!' advert to crucial changes in the British housing market. The emphasis on labour largely sidelines household labour and its gendering, with the exception of the activities of 'cleanfluencer' Mrs. Hinch. The link between domestic commodities and our longing for intimacy is effectively depicted using a combination of historical research, cultural references and family stories. Plants and flowers are used throughout to illustrate specific arguments and to serve as a symbol of a different, and better, life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transformation of teacher education programs is needed. To be authentic and sustainable, efforts at transformation need to be grounded in shifting power and policy making away from just the university to shared decision making among stakeholders. This paper examines what are seen as first steps towards this objective. The effort described here involves a teacher preparation program and a neighboring school district. The university program is largely composed of white middle class students, and the school district is largely African American. This paper focuses on a project to support the voices of those who are being taught (referred to as scholars), and those planning to teacher (referred to as candidates). Both groups frame conversation around James Baldwin's "A talk to Teachers" and explore what has changed, what has not changed, and what needs to change. Teachers and administrators joined over twenty-five classes from the school district with the sophomore class cohort at the university.

This paper explores linguistic life-histories from five participants in a larger interview study with U.S.-based adults. These five interviewees were middle-class White women from monolingual English-speaking families who pursued multilingual learning trajectories in young adulthood. Having previously attained proficiency in one language through academic study, all five recounted similar pivotal decisions to deprioritize that language, and instead invest in another language that they now saw as more socially relevant. Through discursive analysis of the emotionality and (lack of) agency in their narratives of linguistic decision-making, the paper demonstrates how all five women, in dialogue with the interviewer, co-constructed ideologies of linguistic solidarity across lines of social difference. Drawing on Bakhtinian theory to analyze identity development as ideological becoming, the research explores elite contestation of dominant language ideologies within interview dialogues.

This paper focuses on data from a study of middle- to upper-middle class Scottish S2 ([approximately]seventh grade) students who participated in Inspiring Purpose, a school-based character development program, during the 2016 to 2017 school year. Directed by their teachers, participating youth reflected on values and future aspirations and researched and wrote about an inspiring person. We examine the hypotheses that youth who select a more proximal inspiring figure and/or make a personal connection with that person will demonstrate higher developmental outcomes in the areas of confidence, contribution, self-reflection, goal development, and self-concept. We connected 230 student posters of inspirational figures, 34 youth interviews, and 462 student surveys. Mixed-method analysis revealed students were more likely to describe proximal figures as inspiring and make explicit personal connections over the course of their engagement with the Inspiring Purpose program. Moreover, youth who made personal connections were more likely to score higher on confidence, general self-concept, and contribution. These results suggest that when youth see themselves in inspiring figures and firmly articulate this connection, this can spur beneficial developmental outcomes.

In Goffman's terms, qualitative interviews are social encounters with their own realities. Hence, the 'situational critique' holds that interviews cannot produce knowledge about the world beyond these encounters, and that other methods, ethnography in particular, render lived life more accurately. The situational critique cannot be dismissed; yet interviewing remains an indispensable sociological tool. This paper demonstrates the "value" that situationalism holds for interviewing. We examine seemingly contradictory findings from interview studies of middle-class identity (cultural hierarchies and/or egalitarianism?). We then render these contradictions comprehensible by interpreting data excerpts through 'methodological situationalism': Goffman's theories of interaction order, ritual, and frontstage/backstage. In 'situationalist interviewing,' we suggest that sociologists be attentive to the 'imagined audiences' and 'imagined communities'. These are key to identifying the situations, interaction orders, and cultural repertoires that lie beyond the interview encounter, but to which it refers. In sum, we argue for greater situational awareness among sociologists who must rely on interviews. We also discuss techniques and measures that can facilitate situational awareness. A promise of situational interviewing is that it helps us make sense of contradictions, ambiguities, and disagreements within and between interviews.

Research indicates that white middle-class families' engagement with urban schools in gentrifying localities is often characterised by strategies of dominance and control, which support claims of belonging and identity, as well as securing educational advantage for their children. This is referred as 'class colonisation' or 'school gentrification'. However, there has been a neglect of educators' perspectives and responses to urban social change and middle-class parental practices. In this paper, I offer an institutionally-focused analysis of class colonisation as a feature of educators' working lives. I argue that class colonisation produces organisational 'turmoil' through parental practices and interactions which unsettle staff's social and cultural control over key aspects of their work situation and institutional boundary maintenance. This turmoil is experienced as disruptive of the social order, generating staff cynicism, conflict, ambivalence, and alienation. I draw on ethnographic data with teachers and teaching assistants from a gentrifying inner-London primary school to empirically specify these arguments. Theoretically, this paper integrates elements of Bourdieu and micro-sociology, to foreground how agents use their unequal resources to negotiate their interpersonal institutional realities, and in the process, re-produce classed and racialised boundaries and relations within the changing contexts of urban education.

Using a comparative case study, this paper explores the pedagogic practices for regulating behaviour in two Norwegian primary school classrooms with social compositions that become increasingly contrasted due to an increasing school segregation. Based on classroom observations and teacher interviews and using Bernstein's concepts of 'framing' and 'classification', the study has found that working-class students are subjected to a more visible pedagogic practice than middle-class students. The different behavioural expectations in the classrooms shape a passive and receptive learner identity in the former case and a more active learner identity in the latter case. Social class assumptions and neoliberal education policy may underlie the formation of these distinct identities. This paper argues that in an education system that advocates equal opportunities for everyone as the most important value, it is crucial to consider whether visible pedagogic practices promoted through evidence-based programmes rather contribute to reproduction of existing social inequality.

This paper deconstructs ways in which the white 'race' of Eastern European pupils and the class determination of their parents in the country of arrival combine to either afford or deny them racialised privileges in British education. Critically reviewing published research on Eastern European pupils in British schools, this article concludes that past understandings of 'white middle-class privilege', developed mostly in research about white middle-class nationals, cannot be applied in the same way to white-middle class migrants. This paper shows that the class and race of white middle-class migrants become re-articulated in school contexts in ways that suggest that, despite being white and middle-class in their home countries, Eastern Europeans cannot be fully white and middle class in the migration setting. Based on these insights, we offer an analytical frame for theorising this observed conundrum, making a contribution to sociology of education, race and migration.

Upon COVID-19 being declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization, parent-carers worldwide faced major challenges in how to adapt, become resilient, and to continue educating their children at all levels amid school closures. Home-schooling, with parent-carers becoming the substitute teachers, had become the new 'norm' during the first and third lockdowns in England. This paper reports on qualitative findings from semi-structured interviews with 35 participants comprised of parents with children aged between 5 and 8 years old in South London, England. Thematical analysis is used to capture parents' well-being experiences of home-schooling amid COVID-19 compulsory school closures. This paper explores how the pressure on parent-carers to provide education at home akin to a school setting is physically and emotionally challenging. The paper also addresses how parents' stress levels intensified in the second (January 2021) home-schooling period. A post-structural feminist framework is deployed to unpick gender socio-cultural inequalities relating to the distribution of work/labour/childcare duties at home during lockdown. Existing research has focussed on the impact on low-income families and children's well-being during the pandemic. This research contributes to existing research by addressing an under-researched area relating to the impact on well-belling for middle-income maternal caregivers. Findings of this research show how financial privilege does not provide an escape from additional stress and how parents' well-being was affected.

Trickle-down economics is a fallacious metaphor that hurts working people and the civic commons. In this paper, we discuss the role and impact metaphors have in economics education. We explore the stickiness of "truthy" but ultimately false metaphors and offer economics educators alternative metaphors to displace this problematic metaphorical language. In its place, we propose a restorying of this fiction to tell a more truthful story in economics classrooms using the dual metaphors of "evaporative economics" and "economic desertification." We end by identifying the limitations of metaphorical language in teaching complex economic concepts, even while we recognize the power of these tools to elicit engagement in and with economics content that has real and lasting impacts on individuals and communities.

This opinion piece explores the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on exposing educational inequity. The historically racist and discriminatory practices related to both academic instruction and discipline are long-standing in the history of American education, but have been brought to the attention of White, middle-class America as a result of the global health crisis. Specific strategies are presented as initial steps in simultaneously embedding anti-racism and addressing discriminatory policies in every American classroom, specifically related to students of color and disabled students.

"George Orwell's Perverse Humanity: Socialism and Free Speech" by Glenn Burgess is a book that explores the relationship between liberalism and socialism in Orwell's work. The author argues that Orwell's vision combines both ideologies and that they are mutually dependent on each other. The book examines Orwell's views on real-world experiences, political violence, and the importance of freedom of speech. However, the book also addresses contemporary issues such as "wokeism" and the debate surrounding cancel culture, although the evidence presented in this regard may be less convincing. Overall, the book provides a comprehensive analysis of Orwell's political thinking and his contributions to the fields of liberalism and socialism. [Extracted from the article]

This paper reports the motivations of middle-class Asian students who choose German universities of applied sciences under the third wave of international student mobility. It aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the students' qualitative experiences in Asian countries that influenced their preference for German universities of applied sciences and their expectations of their German degree as cultural capital. The research analyzes the family, school, peer experiences of 23 Asian students currently enrolled in a German university of applied sciences to understand their motivations for choosing this type of institution and Germany. The findings reveal that the cultural capital that influenced their choice includes differentiation strategies of middle-class students, reasonable education investment choices of Asian students, and the use of a German degree as a trump card in the labor market. The study provides implications for the development of international higher education by connecting Asian students' aspirations for global cultural capital to a complex and atypical structure that encompasses global, national, and individual dimensions simultaneously.

This study explores the experiences of middle-class transnational Latina mothers whose children are enrolled in gentrified dual-language ­programs. Drawing upon the theory of differential consciousness, I explored how these mothers' own complex identities informed their navigation of conflicting discourses that position dual-language education on one hand as part of an anti-racist, social justice movement, and conversely as a neoliberal enrichment tool that confers a competitive social advantage for privileged children. Ultimately, this paper highlights how mothers engaged differential consciousness to shift between these ideologies strategically, centering community and working to expand access to these programs to other Spanish-speaking and transnational families. In doing so, they increased racial and linguistic diversity--but not socioeconomic diversity--in these programs. This study argues for the importance of considering multiple dimensions of parent identity in dual-language programs, and for continually acknowledging the key role social class plays in families' experiences of and access to these programs.

Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) as a secondary school subject is affected by two policies, namely the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) and Progress 8, which contribute to the measurement of performance in exams at age 16 (GCSEs). In this paper, I discuss the concept of performance measurement in schools and the purpose it purportedly serves, before outlining these two policies and considering how they contribute to the culture of performance measurement and a non-neutral discourse around 'standards'. I argue that the two policies act in tension in a game of tug of war with one another in such a way that the net positive effect on the subject of MFL is zero, but that the negative effect on students is substantial. I suggest that the policies act to impose middle-class notions of what it means to be educated on students, with a substantial negative effect on students from low socio-economic status backgrounds both in terms of their interest in the subject and their perceptions of their own value within the education system.

Educational Technology (EdTech) plays a significant role in enabling learners with disabilities to access learning at school and reduce educational and social exclusion. It also enables them to enjoy the benefits of a full school curriculum and to participate in activities in different educational arrangements. The purpose of this review was to address the existing evidence of how EdTech is being used to support learners with disabilities in order to inform future research and policymaking. It sought to contribute to an evidence base of ways to reduce barriers to learning drawing on a systematic methodology to gather evidence pertaining to access to EdTech for primary school learners with disabilities aged 6-12 years. After a thorough examination of the literature, the final sample comprised 51 published articles (43 peer-review and 8 conference papers). The review revealed examples of positive outcomes of EdTech interventions being used, particularly in special schools; however, the evidence of their efficacy is weak. The use of EdTech for learners with disabilities in low- and middle-income countries requires further, robust and long-term research that considers the involvement of learners, pedagogy and curriculum design in order to understand its impact on improving educational experiences of children with disabilities.

In recent years, Innovative Schools in Dali have received increasing coverage in Chinese social media and have also attracted middle-class parents from cities, as viable bottom-up educational initiatives. This paper explores the rationales for Chinese middle-class parents' choice of Innovative Schools in Dali. Analysis of data from online interviews with 33 parents from seven Innovative Schools in Dali revealed three types of narratives parents provided in explaining their alternative school choices: investors, escapees, and idealists. The narratives reflect different ways in which parents negotiate their relationship with mainstream education and Innovative Schools, how they define the "educational goods" they would like to pursue and how they deal with potential tensions within their practice. We then situate the phenomenon within the Chinese educational landscape and discuss its social implications in light of social reproduction theories.

In this paper, I develop the idea of cosmopolitan stances -- one 'intellectual' and the other 'aesthetic' -- to examine conceptions of cosmopolitanism within a range of university strategies. Recent research into cosmopolitanism has adopted a Bourdieusian lens, understanding it as cultural capital, which acts as a locus of stratification in the global system. By examining the strategies in 11 London-based universities, this paper sought to identify which cosmopolitan stances are mobilised. Following a thematic analysis this paper argues that those stances privileged by the global middle class are often implicit and generated incidentally as a function of other initiatives such as inclusivity and diversity, global citizenship, placement opportunities and graduate attributes/outcomes.

This paper investigates the language fluency problems of skilled immigrants from mainland China to Canada. It capitalises on interview data to explore the relationships between Chinese immigrants' identities, second language practices, and language skills. It reports the informants' difficulty in integrating into their workplaces and their unwillingness to make considerable investments in learning English. Drawing on Bourdieu's (1984) theory of practice and linking it with the issue of identity, this paper explains how the habitus of the informants interact with their milieux, how a marginalised identity emerges, and how this identity negatively impacts on their oral proficiency in English.

In recent decades there has been an increasing number of parents opting for alternative forms of education worldwide. However, most studies on this phenomenon are conducted within Western contexts, while little is known about alternative education in China. This paper addresses this gap by providing an overview of alternative education in China over the past 20 years. This paper consists of four parts. First, we review the definition, categories, and development of alternative education in China. Second, we discuss three critical questions, namely (1) who is practising alternative education, (2) why do they choose alternative education, and (3) what is the legal status of alternative education in China? Subsequently, we develop a framework that enables us to situate different types of alternative education. Finally, we consider the phenomenon within a broader context and discuss the theoretical potential of further research into alternative education in China.

This paper explores the experience of researching food in schools. Food is personal. It is an ingested symbol of culture, family, tradition, ethnicity… What does this mean as a researcher? How do we navigate food relationships? How is this relationship shaped by the rules of the school? This paper examines how I went about doing food research in primary schools, and the various incidents that occurred that revealed food was something "more" than that consumed. It outlines the ethnographic approach adopted, paying attention to the sensory in research. I explore researcher identity, explaining how my own identity was multiple, and shifting, depending on where I was at a particular "food moment". I draw attention to several events that, on reflection, serve to reveal the importance of food in everyday life, and helped understand both the field site, and the wider context of the research.

The university is a highly politicized and fractious realm for students and academics. Amidst trade-offs between the processes of massification, democratization, commodification, and globalization, the question of transformation "for" sustainability has become crucial to the social good(s) of higher education. This paper considers academic citizenry within Indian public higher education -- a context where the increase in the enrollment of first-generation students and female students, due to affirmative action policies, has not substantially translated into altering the composition of academic staff. Informed by a mixed-method study conducted in 2019 with the participation of academics and those in leadership positions at four higher education institutions, we found that the enactment of such policies was operationalized for the production of the "New Middle Class" by universities. Of concern is that neither the representation nor the participation of academics who are women, "lower" castes, or minorities meets the mark of just, inclusive institutions. Despite the rhetoric of inclusiveness and development, the implementation of related policies clothe subalterns with the veneer of the intellectual class, permitting access on condition that sociocultural identities are concealed, and the hegemonic status quo maintained. Terms such as "quality" and "equality" function as tools for social control rather than serving social justice, where assertions of caste identity and resistance are simultaneously repudiated and misrecognized.

The purpose of the article is to compare and contrast higher education and research among public relations and journalism students of middle-class and working-class origin. The paper applied Bourdieu's theory of "habitus" to analyze prejudices against the working class, explores whether working-class students express an anti-education view, and whether the appreciation of education (and research in particular) is a predominantly middle-class attitude. Focus groups and an online questionnaire were used to obtain views of students at a university in Northern England. Triple coding (open, axial, selective) was used and the data was then analyzed and presented using thematic analysis. Findings show that early socialization about education as well as students' type of neighborhoods (habitus) influence studies' views of higher education and research in particular. While the findings show some similarity with views in the literature of the middle-class being more inclined to value education, these findings show that this is true only for those who grow up in middle class areas whereas middle-class students who grew up in working-class areas show working-class attitudes toward education. Equally, working-class students who grew up in middle-class areas show what is usually perceived as a middle-class view of education. Both groups of students show a tendency toward embracing a consumerist view of higher education.

This paper draws on Bourdieu's theorising (particularly habitus and field) to think about position-making of teachers in respect of the early enactment of the Australian Curriculum. Position-making, a concept developed from the analysis proffered, can be contrasted with the more common practice of position-taking endemic in a relatively stable field. Position-making is an ongoing phenomenon in a changing field when the habitus is out of place, here the field of the new Australian Curriculum, creating the effect of what Bourdieu sees as hysteresis. This paper explores the positioning and re-positioning of agents (teachers and school leaders) due to an external change (the Australian curriculum) in the schooling field. Data for this study were collected from a middle-class state high school in Brisbane Australia, which was an early adopter of the new Australian Curriculum. The initial enactment phase of curriculum change was an unsettling one that (re)positioned agents--hence, the concept of position-making, which is a contribution to Bourdieu's theoretical resources and which complements the idea of policy enactment as opposed to policy implementation. Both allow some agency in mediation of mandated changes in the specific contexts of schools and teacher/leader habitus.

This paper was motivated by the anecdotal experiences of the lead author on the views of middle-class Black African parents who did their schooling under apartheid and who were parents of high school learners in contemporary post-apartheid South Africa. In this paper narrative inquiry was used to engage with ten purposively selected Black African parents. In the process their narratives of schooling under apartheid and the parental choices they made on the subjects their children studied were constructed. As a theoretical lens Critical Race Theory was used to allow the parents to tell their counter-stories. These parents were adamant that their children should not study history. This was partially rooted in their own apartheid-era schooling experiences. For the most part the Black African parents tried to live their unfulfilled dreams and ambitions through their children by getting them to study science and mathematics as this was directly linked to upward-mobility, middle-classness, prosperity and success. While school history in the post-apartheid context was lauded and appreciated, the prevailing sentiment was that their children should steer clear of it.

In this paper the authors study 19 Global Middle Class (GMC) families currently residing in four global cities: Hong Kong; London; Buenos Aires; and Tel Aviv. Through qualitative in-depth interviews, they sought to gather insights about GMC parenting strategies, specifically drawing attention to the decision-making processes of school choice. To facilitate their analysis, they draw on Bourdieu's theory on types of capital and Ben-Porath's notion of bounded rationality. From the inductive analysis of their interview data with mobile GMC parents, they identified a subtype of cultural capital they called 'cosmopolitan start-up capital'. The overall argument in the paper is that the accumulation of cosmopolitan start-up capital is a specific strategy guiding the GMC families' school choice practices, set within a frame of mobilities. Given the growing number of mobile families who continuously enter and exit local education systems, focusing on this group is pertinent for policy makers and practitioners around the world.

This paper offers an ethnographic account of how Golden Harvest International School in Bengaluru branded itself as both 'International' and 'Indian', by elaborating discursive practices within the school. Drawing upon scholarship that has sought to delineate the ways in which globally hyper-mobile Indians construct a distinctive cultural identity, the paper shows how a fusion of national and international allowed the school to cater to a particular set of elite parents, who were globally hyper-mobile even as they sought to be 'appropriately Indian'. The paper pays attention to how cultural practices and resources in the school operated within a forward caste-Hindu ethos that was presented as 'Indian', while also responsibilising teachers, students, and even parents to ensure the school acquired and retained globally valued credentials such as accreditation for the Middle Years Program of the International Baccalaureate.