The sifting and sorting mechanisms of Australia's education system continue to work to the detriment of groups put at a disadvantage. For mainstream schools serving working-class communities in particular, the rejection of the offers and advantages of schooling continue to result in differential class consequences and inequalities for…

In this article, we discuss how class and migrant background intersect when students discuss their studies in general upper secondary education and their aspirations in university admission. We focus on the discussed social inequalities in student admission to one of the elite fields, medicine, in eight ethnographic interviews with students and…

Ethnography as a methodological approach presents the fieldworker with many ethical crossroads throughout the research process. This is because of the unique position that ethnographers find themselves in, the environments that they research and the relationships which are formed. This paper presents four confessional vignettes from a broader…

Despite successive policy interventions, students' socio-economic status continues to strongly predict educational outcomes. Many schools aspire to 'close' this 'gap'. This paper presents an ethnographic study of a group of Primary schools in predominantly white working-class areas in the Midlands of England. Generating ethnographic data through…

Trangression is an act of challenging boundaries that separate apparently distinct oppositional categories objects. Examples are categories such as such as civilised/primitive, male/female, master/servant, Lordship/bondage. The article deals with such transgressions related to the evolution of class consciousness transgressive critical thinking.…

Based on research in Karratha, a remote resource town in Western Australia, this paper explores the ways in which blue-collar affluence disturbs the meritocratic mythology of formal education. In the opening decade of the twenty-first century Karratha was one of Australia's most affluent towns, yet its adult population was characterised by a level…

Previous research presented in this journal and elsewhere has suggested that vocational education is highly gender segregated and it is the heavy industrial sectors such as industry, vehicle and construction programmes that mainly attract boys with an anti-school attitude who are not interested in academic school work. However, there are good…

Reframing immigrant families as transnationals, this article highlights transnational families' ways of knowing. This study is based on a three-year, multi-sited critical ethnographic set of case studies of four families in the USA and Mexico. Transnational families in this study demonstrated Nepantlera knowing, or liminal, bridge-building knowing…

Several societies throughout the global North and South are now witnessing unprecedented patterns of marginally higher female academic performance and educational attainment. But the processes that have generated such patterns and responses to their development have not been uniform across or within these societies. In multiracial Fiji, statistics…

This article explores the identity development of a group of white working-class adolescent girls as they consider their futures after high school. Attention is paid to themes of gender and social class as well as the impact of a deindustrialised economy. Despite the fact that few of their parents graduated from college, the girls expressed a…