Low completion rates amongst students from Black working-class backgrounds remain a persistent challenge to post-apartheid university transformation in South Africa. Notions of universities as colour-blind, meritocratic, and post-racial have developed around a deficit and victim-blaming majoritarian narrative that individualises educational…

This case study builds on Bourdieu's theory of practice to explore the ways in which two rural lower-class EFL learners--Andy and Xu--developed contrasting digital literacy trajectories in non-instructional and naturalistic settings. This study also seeks to examine how different online literacy trajectories impact rural lower-class students'…

There is growing interest in the role of schools in supporting children facing adversity, including children with refugee and immigrant backgrounds. Based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork (December 2018 to June 2019) and interviews with teachers in two classes for adolescent newcomer refugee and immigrant learners in Denmark, this paper…

A central element in the writing of marginal subjects is the personal and autobiographical voice they use to write about themselves and their experiences. This article uses a personal voice- autoethnography - to examine, in a multi-layered manner, one-stop of the author's educational biography and her path, as a working-class Mizrahi woman, to…

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…

Identifying developmental patterns in intergroup contact and its relation with bias is crucial for improving prevention strategies around intergroup relations. This study applied time-varying effects modeling (TVEM) to examine age-based changes in relations between contact and bias in a divided community that included 667 youth (M age = 15.74, SD…

This paper challenges the notion that quantitative data -- as a numeric truth -- exist independent of a nation's political and racial landscape. Utilising large-scale national attainment data, the analysis challenges the belief that 'White working class' children in England, especially boys, are 'the new oppressed' -- as a former equality adviser…

Searching for development paths and suitable educational policies, postcolonial governments often turned to the experiences of other countries and sought to adapt these to their own contexts. Research on such processes has largely neglected the resulting entanglements between postcolonial and European socialist countries, and between different…

This study aims to add to the literature that explores the experiences of working-class students within elite higher education institutions. It has been undertaken at a time when there is a shift in higher education policy around access and widening participation: from applications and admissions to supporting students throughout the entire…

Existing studies have found that the starting point for class divisions is the family: while schools play a interrupting role, it is passive compared to the roles of the family and children themselves. It is therefore taken for granted when rural students are screened out by school education or fail to test into good universities. If the…

Despite suspicions concerning the global expansion of Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) education, the teaching of Chinese is often a mainstay within global citizenship and elite education. With this paradox in mind, the paper draws on theories of classed selfhood and learner identities to explore the possibilities of CFL to influence the…

This book examines the structural and cultural factors that explain the persistence of an attainment gap between white and Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) students in UK universities. So-called 'deficit' approaches have long represented the orthodoxy in higher education strategy-making, yet they overlook the structural and institutional…

This paper proposes "perceptual multilingualism" as a research interest within the broader folk linguistic enterprise. By drawing on the geolinguistic mapping tasks popular in perceptual dialectology -- whereby participants are asked to draw and depict dialectal diversity in a given region -- we show that perceptual multilingualism can…

Studies in relation to working-class students at elite universities document on the one hand the role of 'mundane reflexivity' in dealing with class domination while on the other indicate a new form of domination and disadvantages working on these working-class 'exceptions' -- they may achieve academically at university but experience various…

This study extends Boudon's positional theory to understand how students from different social origins make choices about university and how they interpret risks during the choice-making process in contemporary China. I draw upon empirical evidence from 71 in-depth semi-structured interviews with undergraduates from different social backgrounds…