This article draws on ethnographic research that examines the contemporary articulation of class identity in the postcolonial elite school setting of Old College high school in Barbados. From the qualitative data derived from this study, we argue that social class is better conceived as a series of flows, mutations, performances and performatives.…

In this paper we study the effects of power in a bathroom, which is a rarely analysed space in preschools, using empirical examples from a semi-ethnographic study conducted in New South Wales, Australia. We demonstrate that educators' understanding and practices mostly consider their own positioning in discourses and come short in accounting…

The article examines a US public elementary bilingual, multicultural school that attempts to interrupt the reproduction of existing relations of dominance and subordination across a variety of differences. The school's experiences illuminate the complex reality of schools as a site of struggle and compromise between at times contradictory…

This article is part of a project that seeks in part to explore how students understand and use the concept of intelligence. It is based on an ethnographically contextualized study of linguistic events and was conducted in an inner-city upper secondary school in Sweden. The article shows that the concept of intelligence is not spontaneously used…

Although we know a great deal about college choice in nations such as the United States, we know considerably less about how college choice operates in settings lacking well-defined hierarchies between higher education institutions. In the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, students from high socio-economic status backgrounds are…

The global movement of people alters our understandings of social mobility. Here, I draw on ethnographic data collected since January 2011 and utilize the notion of "assemblage" to document and analyze how disparate people, their material objects, and discursive practices are brought together to render refugees as educable, productive,…

Drawing upon two ethnographic studies of affluent and elite co-educational secondary schools in the United States, Weis and Cipollone spotlight the explicit "class work" of a now highly insecure middle/upper middle class, as they attempt to maintain advantage via entrance to particularly located post-secondary destinations. Affirming the…

This paper examines the experiences of minority students from two different cultural groups, immigrant children of Pontian background and indigenous minority children of Roma descent, in the Greek-Cypriot educational system. Through a joint re-examination of results from two different qualitative studies, this paper delineates similarities and…

This paper asserts that the religious assumptions of Christian academies need to be fully examined in relation to any analysis of their cultural practices, impact or policy implications. It proposes that Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, cultural capital and symbolic power can be broadened out from their traditional use in accounting for social…

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…

Especially in research on the "classed practice" of educational decision-making, it is striking how the Bourdieuian concepts of habitus and capital have dominated. With a tendency to focus on the middle-classes' ability to accumulate and deploy cultural capital, less attention has been given to the role of the educational institution and its place…

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…

In extant research, the concept of student engagement refers to individual behavioural patterns and traits. Recent research indicates that engagement not only should be related to the individual but also should be anchored in the social context. This ethnographic field study of students and teachers in a Danish vocational education and training…

In this article, using data from ethnographic research, we try to present some glimpses of the way education is described as an experience and possibility "from below", by pupils who grow up and study in schools in the most segregated and territorially stigmatized suburbs on the outskirts of our major cities. What we feel they describe is an…

This paper examines new structured attempts to address and manage emotions in the classroom. Critical analysis focuses on the broad emotional literacy agenda operating within schools, and more specifically the Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL) programme. Data are drawn on from an ethnographic study located in Behaviour Support Units…