This article describes the account of a "European Queens" course as an example of the intellectual growth available to both the professor and the student when an instructor uses engaged, responsive teaching to address apparently incommensurable understandings of a given topic. The author outlines how the study of premodern queens relates…

The New Education movement was a remarkable coalition of national reform movements that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century. As a heterogeneous movement that was united only in its opposition to the schooling system at the time, its structure and boundaries in the UK have remained a matter of academic debate. This article implements the…

This narrative describes two United States Air Force bandswomen whose combined careers span the past sixty years. Cornetist Martha (Martye) Jean Awkerman joined the U.S. Women in the Air Force (WAF) Band in 1955. She served the WAF band as cornet soloist and principal trumpet until the band was disbanded in 1961. In 1983, tubist Jan Duga joined…

Across the globe, women are struggling to overcome social and cultural confines, while creating new opportunities for their gender, by becoming leaders in research and career fields from which they have been historically excluded. This afterword responds to and builds upon contributors' trenchant articles that highlight social, economic, and…

In common with a number of recent studies of religious change that have taken a gendered approach, this article takes older women as its focus and considers the role the emotions play in religious change, adopting Riis and Woodhead's new conceptual framework of religious emotion. Emotions, they argue, are not merely private, personal and…

Many theories have been offered to explain why people are impoverished. This article by Karen Seccombe uses the case study of "Dee," a newly single mother, to explore four of the most common: individualism, social structuralism, the culture of poverty, and fatalism. She concludes that poverty is a highly complex phenomenon, and it is likely that…

Although any "choice" young people make about higher education incorporates a subtle interplay of individual agency, circumstance and social structure, the centrality of identity in such life choices for rural young people cannot be underestimated. Since mobility is an ontological absolute for most rural young people accessing…

Girl fighting and its relational context is a problem that is receiving extensive attention in popular and academic circles. This article reports on a project that gathered the opinions from focus groups of seventh- and eighth-grade girls, organized to understand the perspectives of young adolescent girls in middle school on girl fighting. Both…

Elder statesman Lee Kuan Yew maintains that a society ruled by elites is necessary to provide for high growth and social progress. Elitism conjures a class divide; an ongoing concern is a disconnection between elite and the citizens it has to represent. In the tradition of political socialization, and using the case study approach, this article…

The purpose of this article is to discuss the ways in which the social, political and cultural foundation of the headscarf as a symbol affects the nature and practice of educational life. It will examine the ways in which the headscarf practice is constructed in the public sphere. In order to understand the headscarf practice in Turkey the nature…

On a chilly Toronto evening in November 2005, an envelope was opened in a darkened auditorium, and the words spoken reached out across the land to Muskoday First Nation in Saskatchewan. No doubt Lindsay Knight's family was watching the televised Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards that night and would have felt elated to hear her being honored with…

The article provides an overview of the development of the field of time use studies. It provides an intellectual history charting the various interests that have shaped the growing applications of this broad social indicator. Recent applications, reflected in this special issue, are (a) interpreting the meaning of leisure, time; (b) the social…

Using several approaches of data collection over a period of 10 months, the author combines participant observations, conversational interviews, photo-elicitations, and various other serendipitous types of information gathering in performative spaces of actions and re-actions, demonstrating the contestatory negotiations of two transnational female…

Girls' bodies are often constructed negatively and passively in their dominant cultures, but at the same time, girls may collectively construct menstruation and the body in creative ways. By exploring menstrual talk in individual and group interview data from mostly white, high school age girls and boys in the US, this study finds that girls draw…

The educational system in Jamaica is examined in terms of the comparative numbers of males and females enrolled. Sex-role stereotyping is presented as a reflection of Jamaican society, and suggestions for reform of curriculum based on social goals are offered. (JMF)