Although higher education is positioned as a site of opportunity for young women in the UK, not all female applicants experience straightforward pathways into this arena. This paper focuses on a group of 16 high-achieving girls from working-class backgrounds who are striving for academic success, in the form of top grades and places at high-tariff…

This article embodies a kind of backward travelling by revisiting the history of workers' education in a mining community as part of our contemporary struggle to reinvigorate notions of the common good and popular education. Its focus is the complexities of working-class history, disparaged in neoliberal condescension and oversimplified in some…

Rising educational inequality is considered as one pressing social problem in many national education systems. There is limited existing literature that examines how youth from different social backgrounds perceive and consider social inequalities and "justice." This study addresses this research gap by probing the perspectives of…

Drawing on the notions of neoliberal governmentality, regime of subjectification, as well as on the ordoliberal conception of social policy, self and class, I analyse how neoliberalism is entrenched in the formation of the affirmative action policy in higher education in Chile. Based on a fieldwork focused on the two main affirmative action…

Affect and habitus are used in the paper to harness the intermingling of race and class in the young people's everyday identity practices at school, as they aspire to embody 'Black excellence'. This paper draws on ethnographic data collected with working-class Black-British young people aged between 16 and 18. Through the careful management of…

This article discusses an example of public engagement involving university staff and students, a local charity and older residents in a community oral history project. It is based on participants' oral and written accounts of their involvement. It critically examines the meanings of public, engagement and public good created through the project…

This article deploys a materialist theoretical and methodological framework to analyse and discuss capitalism's disabling phenomena. It is my intention to demonstrate how Marx's concept of a "relative surplus population" may be used to scrutinise capitalism's symbols, meanings, images, and practices which reproduce ableism as the norm.…

Questions about Sweden's education system often consider the extent to which educational reforms between 1940 and 1990 contributed to social justice, equity and equality, and the extent to which neoliberal market reforms from the early 1990s onwards have reversed this tendency. Using Young's model of structural injustice, Wodak's critical…

This paper provides insight into working-class parents' views of the structural and systemic injustices shaping post-school options and opportunities in contemporary Australia, drawing on interview data with a group of mothers living in growth corridor suburbs in the outer west of Melbourne. Illustrating aspects of Berlant's (2011) notion of…

This article presents the results of a descriptive case study of the Union School of the Chilean nongovernmental organization (NGO) Alejandro Lipschutz Institute of Science (ICAL-Spanish acronym). The study contributes to the field of adult education by providing a contemporary example of what Gramscian pedagogy can look like. Theoretically, this…

This article focuses on a particular group in capitalist society that is disabled, demeaned and denied by capitalism itself, through processes of economic exploitation, systematic and systemic class exclusion, and discrimination/ prejudice- that is- the working class. In doing so I recognise that the working class (defined as all those who sell…

This paper examines the relationship of working-class feminist academics to the Academy. Our paper interrogates tensions between resistance and submission from the perspective of four educationally successful working-class women who have become academics. The paper starts with an overview of the state of the Academy at the beginning of the…

This article features a Foucauldian analysis of interview data from a qualitative study of four North Carolina public school teachers who are required to clock in and out of school each day via a virtual time clock. In this article, Michel Foucault's theories of discourse, discipline, power, and surveillance are brought into dialogue with…

This article analyses the narratives and counter-narratives which characterised the struggle between the Chicago Public School Board (CPS) and the Chicago Teachers' Union (CTU) preceding the 2019 Chicago teachers' strike. This was an extraordinary event which has received little scholarly attention. The paper explores the types and uses of the…

Previous research exploring how working-class women experience UK Higher Education (HE) work has made evident recurring themes around social segregation and corresponding difficulties with feeling they belong. This paper develops this work by exploring the ways in which UK, HE based working-class women lecturers talk about their sense of…