Career development theory is critical in understanding how individuals make transitions through education and the workplace. However, despite evidence of the importance of geographical place in shaping individual trajectories, limited theoretical work has focused on the topic. In this paper, the potential for the development of a theoretical…

Although previous studies have investigated the contribution of several components of the school choice paradigm to school segregation, one critical aspect has not received attention from segregation scholars: schools' priority rules, that is, the rules schools apply in case of oversubscription. We evaluate how three priority rules -- grade-based,…

Literacy is considered to be a public good--one that benefits not only literate people, but also others in society through mechanisms of sharing and mediation. But to what extent do the benefits of literacy extend to socially distant groups? This paper applies the sociological concept of social distance to examine how social stratification impacts…

This article explores the perceived role of UK international education as foreign cultural capital, obtained outside the UK, in facilitating middle-class social mobility. Drawing on interviews with students in Malaysia, it extends Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital to explain understandings of the rewards and limitations of undertaking UK…

The paper draws on an ESRC-funded study of 70 families in two London locations. It focuses on a set of contemporary and contradictory political discourses that work on and through the lives of working-class mothers and thereby create tensions and impossibilities within their lives. We illustrate the ways in which these women are positioned by and…

Judith Butler's conceptualisation of how gender is routinely spoken through a hegemonic heterosexual matrix has been pivotal for many social scientists researching within and beyond educational settings for exposing the ways in which children's normative gender identities ("intelligible genders") are inextricably tied to dominant notions of…