Free listing tasks are a common data collection method used by cultural anthropologists, language historians and linguists (Nolan, 2002; Ryan et al., 2000; Weller & Romney, 1988; Wolfram & Schillings-Estes, 1998). These tasks are interviews in which a researcher asks groups of respondents to list words or expressions that come to mind for…

Scrutinising disproportionate media and political attention provided to the ills of the 'white working-class', this article examines the framing of their apparent underachievement in education policy and discourse in early post-Brexit vote England. In a political context dominated by anti-immigration and nationalist rhetoric, this article aims to…

Drawing on the dramaturgical theory of Erving Goffman, this paper explores undergraduate students' differing experiences of the Cambridge supervision system. Semi-structured interviews with fifteen undergraduate students were analysed to examine the dramaturgical demands of the supervision and students' perceived abilities to meet these. Findings…

Research has highlighted that engagement with science is highly gendered and that the masculinised culture of science makes it difficult for many girls/women to engage. Meanwhile, a growing body of research has explored the potential of out-of-school spaces to provide more equitable engagement opportunities. In this paper, I examine engagement…

A seminal body of work emerged in the 1980s recognising reading as a site for gender and class identity work. However, understandings around working-class girls' reading identities are invisible in the current Australian education policy space where gender equalities with respect to curriculum subjects have disappeared. This paper draws on a…

This paper considers gender and social class in relation to teacher education through an episodic study of the development of adult educational institutions in Huddersfield. It briefly discusses nineteenth-century mechanics' institutes in the town before moving to a consideration of school teacher training college students in the twentieth…

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…

Gendered moral rationalities (GMRs) have been proposed as a means of grounding mothers' employment-related choices in the structural, policy, and social support contexts of their maternal routines. This article analyzes a form of GMR that is anchored in the class-ethno-national position of mothers and comprises a manifestation of their maternal…

The article draws upon Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and cultural capital to provide an in-depth analysis of the gender differences in students' motivation for undertaking postgraduate (PG) education in Mainland China. It reports an in-depth case study comprising 381 questionnaires and 30 semi-structured interviews. The quantitative data show…

The aim of this article is to problematize the ways class and gender are played out in adult students' narratives about their occupational choice and future. Drawing on Beverly Skeggs, we analyse how students think about future occupations, what motivates them towards these and how they are able to form their future in relation to them. Taking on…

Little research attention has been paid to the effect of yearlong placements in elite accounting firms and investment banks on the social mobility of working class graduates. Using the framework of Bourdieu, this paper examines the link between placements and employment destinations of eight cohorts of accounting and finance graduates from a…

This paper is based on a qualitative study about middle-class mothers' experiences of school choice in Chile. It draws on Butler, Berlant and Hardt's work on affects, and on feminist contributions to the intersection between school choice, social class and mothering. These contributions help us deepen our understanding of school choice as both a…

This paper draws on Judith Butler's concepts of "intelligibility" and "identity as performance" to make sense of enactments of 'subaltern' (that is, subordinated) urban students within secondary school science. Understanding classrooms as constituted by complex power struggles for voice, authenticity and recognition, the paper…

Women from working class and some ethnic minority backgrounds continue to be underrepresented in science, particularly in areas such as physical sciences and engineering. Many find it difficult to see science as something that is "for them", which then has implications for their learning and participation in science. In this paper, I…

This study explored the perspectives of medical students from first-in-family (FiF) university backgrounds. Semi-structured interviews focused on steps into, and experiences of medical education, and effects of student identity on social networks. Twenty FiF medical students from one English medical school took part in qualitative interviews. Data…