The recent expansion of the overseas education market in China has led to the rise of "Background Promotion Projects" designed to strengthen the applications of elite university aspirants. Based on ethnographic findings of a particular Background Promotion Project, a Chinese high school entrepreneurship competition, this study analyses…

Previous studies of citizenship preparation in upper secondary school, including studies on vocational programmes, have primarily focused on general subjects. Potential and actual roles of vocational subjects in this context have received little attention, so we have little knowledge of what is likely a significant part of the citizenship…

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…

This article focuses on the pedagogical project of the Hizmet Movement, with a special focus on its gender politics as they were activated and performed at one of the movement's schools in a peripheral rural city in western Turkey. Through an ethnographic, conversation-based account of female teachers as active and committed adherents of the…

There is a significant, longstanding tradition in British sociological research that renders cultural capital synonymous with whiteness. This article suggests that one substantive factor that contributes to the enduring relationship between whiteness and cultural capital is the paucity of research on the Black and ethnic minority middle classes.…

This article discusses friendships and peer groups of migrant and minority ethnic youth in schools in England and Spain, and critically considers them in relation to existing notions of "peer social capital" and bridging (heterogeneous) and bonding (homogeneous) peer networks. The article argues for an extended understanding of peer…

This article aims to revisit the relationship between school-level variables and students' educational opportunities through the lens of institutional habitus. This approach is particularly well suited to explore the notion of school culture because it brings to the forefront the impact of social context, avoiding some of the limitations typically…

This paper intends to show the processes and identity negotiations of white working-class boys surrounding their own learner-identity within a "raising aspirations" rhetoric. The current dominant neoliberal discourse, which prioritizes a view of aspiration that is competitive, economic, and status-based, shapes the subjectivities of…

In this paper I examine the "pedagogies of positioning" performatively played out within the Australian high school classrooms I observed. The study aimed to develop a better understanding of how teachers pedagogically racialise the classroom in and through discursive encounters with students. The social analysis of these data accepts…

This article is concerned with teachers' negotiation of global transitions premised on improving educational opportunity with implications for professionalism. The study blends sociology of gender, work, and organisations and gender policy analysis to theorise teachers' policy negotiations. I explore how 20 Argentine teachers mediate 3 programmes'…

Employing students to market higher education (HE) and widen access is established practice in the United Kingdom and other developed countries. In the United Kingdom, student ambassadors are held to be effective in aspiration and attainment-raising work and cited as "role-models" for pupils. The focus of this paper is student ambassador…

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.…

This article contributes to ongoing discussion of the Bourdieusian concept of cultural capital and current attempts to elaborate this concept and its derivatives. The paper identifies "identity capital", the capacity to create a narrative of social and self-awareness by constructing a flexible sense of self. This concept explains…

While researchers agree that note passing is predominantly an activity engaged in by girls, there has been relatively little consideration of why this is the case. In this article, I argue that gendered expectations about the appropriate characters of boys and girls in Vietnam are incorporated into the disciplinary framework of schools, and that…

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…