Previous work on working-class academics has highlighted recurring themes, such as micro-aggressions, imposter syndrome, liminality, exclusion, invisibility and habitus. These themes have been encapsulated in a number of metaphors, such as 'the ghost' and 'the phantom-limb', both of which connote absence, silence and marginalisation. Whilst these…

Elite schools, long tasked with creating a future national elite, often now find themselves competing in a global education market. This article explores how one such school, in Switzerland, articulates with the global imaginary of its local geography -- in particular, with images of luxury tourism and safety -- to appeal to a globally wealthy…

This ethnographic data-driven article investigates the urban political economy of a new form of elite schooling, which is represented by the fee-charging international programs recently established by 'key' public high schools in metro China. Grounding the analysis in Harvey's work on urbanization and neoliberalism, the literature on China's…

This paper explores ways in which university students articulate understandings of their class positions and perceptions of opportunities for social mobility. The promise that participation in higher education (HE) would lead to social mobility for all has been central to the project of widening participation. However, in the twenty-first century,…

Efforts to desegregate schools have consistently been undermined by privileged parents finding ways to avoid undesirable schools. In some contexts, a more complex picture is emerging, where 'progressive' privileged parents choose 'diverse' schools but still reproduce segregation. We demonstrate how the desegregation aims of an Indian education…

This article explores how principles of multimodality can be effectively incorporated into game analysis in the context of social justice. The authors use a multimodal framework to assist developers, researchers, and educators in better understanding representations of class, race, and gender in videogames. Videogames are multimodal in nature: not…

This article focuses on the ways in which international students from Chile narrate their experiences in the US, and the extent to which mobility across national borders reshapes social class understandings and privilege. To complete this study, I conducted 13 in-depth interviews and a focus group with five Chilean graduate international students…

This paper focuses on the perspectives of minority/racialized students in urban high schools. It is based on findings of interviews with 85 students in six secondary schools in Toronto and Vancouver, Canada, and in Melbourne, Australia, during 2016-2019. While there has been increasing attention to closing the racial achievement gap and some…

This paper explores how classed identities are constituted through the socio-sartorial inscriptions of a working-class school and community in an Irish city in the twenty-first century. The data of the paper were generated through a wider three-year critical ethnography of a school community. The focus here is upon the identity work of the…

Drawing on my own experience as a working-class academic, as well of that of working-class students in the present, I discuss how the experience for working-class students in elite universities still includes many aspects of classism, even when those students can, and do, do very well indeed and even when policies are apparently in place to…

Mental health problems among young people have increased in recent decades, particularly among middle-class youth, a development often related to increasing achievement pressure. This paper explores how young people from the financial and cultural middle classes in Norway experience school stress and their parents' values and practices concerning…

Higher education in both India and the United States has been experiencing a neoliberal turn discernable since the 1990s. At the same time, tensions around who does and does not belong on campuses in the neoliberal moment have also plagued universities in the two nations. Drawing from critical geography, this article employs a 'relational…

Whilst most social and educational research on friendship focuses on children at school, it remains a crucially important factor for students in higher education -- and can play a key role in the maintenance, exacerbation or subversion of dominant forms of social inequalities. This paper explores the complexities of such dynamics in relation to…

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…

Schooling has long been studied for its role in class formation and reproduction, Australian government secondary schools have also traditionally been associated with 'the local' and with 'nation building'. Some schools might now also be engaged with ideas of the 'the global' not only through policy practices and priorities, but also through the…