This paper explores the process of transnational institutional matching between elite institutions in Singapore and Great Britain, and the role of state-sponsored scholarships in enabling this process as political and administrative elites are selected and groomed. Using data gathered from in-depth interviews conducted with Singaporean…

This paper examines how high levels of social-cultural connectedness and academic excellence, inflected by gender and social class, constitute a particular school habitus of "assured optimism" at an elite Scottish girls' school. In Bourdieuian terms, Dalrymple is a "forcing ground" for the "intense cultivation"…

The elite international school is a rich site for sociological inquiry in global times. In this paper, we conceptualize the international school as a transnational space of agonist social class-making given the dynamic positioning of the complement of international school actors. We position international schoolteachers in the middle of these…

Homework is an increasing yet under-researched part of young children's everyday lives. Framed by the international agendas of starting strong and school accountability, homework in the lives of young children has been either overlooked or considered from the perspective of adults rather than from the perspective of children themselves. This…

While student parents now represent a significant proportion of the higher education population in England, this group has been given limited consideration in policy circles. Using a social constructivist and feminist theoretical framework, this paper draws on a research project investigating the role of higher education policies in supporting…

This paper explores the layered transitional experiences of a semi-professional athlete named Jack (a pseudonym) between the fields of professional sport and further and higher education. Our analysis is framed by the quadripartite framework of structuration and focuses on Jack's "in-situ" practices at his college and university in…

The data for this paper are drawn from a qualitative research project involving a number of alternative education sites in Australia and the United Kingdom. In this paper, we focus only on the motives and teaching philosophies of a sample of teachers who have chosen to work in alternative education sites despite, for some, the prospect of…

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…

In this paper we offer a unique contribution to understandings of schooling as a site for the production of social class difference. We bring together the rich body of work that has been conducted on middle-class educational identities, with explorations of the centrality of the feminine in representations of class difference from the field of…

This article focuses on the concerns expressed by three female Muslim educators who are support staff at an English comprehensive school. Consistent with the debates associated with multiculturalism, group rights and feminism, the article illuminates spaces of gender constraint and possibility within the discourses shaping these women's lives…

"Selling yourself" through personal statements and interviews is now a standard practice for university applicants. This article draws on a multi-case-study research project to report on the self-marketing orientations of students within three 16-19 institutions in England. These orientations (active/passive; internal/external;…

This article is about the educational work of governesses on Australia's remote cattle and sheep stations. These stations occupy vast tracts of land in the outback, and form part of global food supply chains exporting meat to countries around the world. The article explores the nature of governesses' work, the boundaries they negotiate…

This article details the findings of a study into lecturers' perceptions of undergraduate employability. The investigation employed interviews with the staff on a BA (Hons) in Education Studies course at a post-1992 university. The aim was to examine staff beliefs regarding their students' potential employability in the business and…

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,…