International student mobility within Europe

With Sazana Jayadeva, Aline Courtois, Daniel Faas and Suzanne Beech, I’ve recently completed guest-editing a special issue of Higher Education on ‘International student mobility within Europe: responding to contemporary challenges’. It should be published soon and will contain the following articles:

(No) time to engage: an exploratory mixed‑method study into factors predicting the engagement of postgraduate research students in Ireland, by Daniel Guigui, Daniel Faas, Merike Darmody and Siobhán Nic Fhlannchadha

The post‑racial myth: rethinking Chinese university students’ experiences and perceptions of racialised microaggressions in the UK, by Jingran Yu, Rohini Rai, Miguel Antonio Lim and Hanwei Li

Rhizomic communication practices bridging international students and the host society and beyond, by Suvi Jokila and Charles Mathies

Diverse socio‑economic backgrounds and international pathways: European mobility opportunities through a scholarship programme for Mexican doctoral students, by Karla Lopez‑Murillo

The world turned upside down: Can international student mobility contribute towards democratization and human development? Evidence from the Eurograduate pilot survey, by Georgiana Mihut

The ‘chosen’ UK? Remapping of international education mobility for prospective Chinese master’s students during and post the COVID‑19 pandemic, by Yun Yu and Rui He

Uncertain futures: climate change and international student mobility in Europe, by Robin Shields and Tianqi Lu

An analysis of the UK’s Turing Scheme as a response to socio‑economic and geo‑political challenges, by Rachel Brooks and Johanna Waters

You can also read the introduction to the special issue here.

Turkish-UK HE partnerships

We are currently conducting some research for the British Council on higher education partnerships between Turkey and the UK. As part of this project, we are looking to conduct some online focus groups in January 2021 with the following groups of people:

  • Turkish students who have come to the UK to study;
  • Turkish citizens who have come to the UK to work in HE; and
  • UK-based academics who have been involved in a partnership with Turkish colleagues for either teaching or research.

If you are interested in taking part, please email me (Rachel Brooks – r.brooks@surrey.ac.uk) for further details. Many thanks!

Student-carers in HE: call for chapter-abstracts

We (Genine Hook, Marie-Pierre Moreau and Rachel Brooks) are putting together  an edited volume on student carers in higher education (provisional title: Student Carers in Higher Education: Navigating, resisting and redefining academic cultures). We have been in touch with Routledge who have expressed an interest in this project. We are now in the process of identifying contributors, before submitting a proposal in July 2020.

If our proposal is successful, the proposed collection will map the experiences of student carers in academic cultures across a broad range of institutional and national contexts. The collection favours an inclusive perspective, including work looking at those caring for children, parents and other family members, as well as pets and friends. We are also interested in approaches which highlight the diverse intersectional ways in which student carers experience their dual status. 

While we anticipate that the volume will be sociologically-informed, we welcome a broad range of methodological approaches, including auto-ethnographically-based case studies, empirical studies and theoretically informed work. We welcome contributions from scholars at various stages of their career and from various parts of the world, particularly, though not only, First Nations communities and the Global South. 

If you are interested, please do send a 250-word abstract, by 30 June, to studentcarers@gmail.com

At this stage, we anticipate that we would need full drafts of chapters by December 2020.  Please also note that the abstracts and the full chapters will be subject to a peer-review process and may or may not be accepted for publication. 

Students as political actors?

A new article from the Eurostudents project has just been published in the British Educational Research Journal. Drawing on data from students, higher education staff and policymakers from six European countries, we argue that it remains a relatively common assumption that students should be politically engaged. However, while students articulated a strong interest in a wide range of political issues, those working in higher education and influencing higher education policy tended to believe that students were considerably less politically active than their predecessors. Moreover, while staff and policy influencers typically conceived of political engagement in terms of collective action, articulated through common reference to the absence of a ‘student movement’ or unified student voice, students’ narratives tended not to valorise ‘student movements’ in the same way and many categorised as ‘political’ action they had taken alone and/or with a small number of other students. Alongside these broad commonalities across Europe, the article also evidences some key differences between nation‐states, institutions and disciplines. In this way, it contributes to the comparative literature on young people’s political engagement specifically, as well as wider debates about the ways in which higher education students are understood.

You can read the full article here (open access).

Asserting the nation

The latest article from the Eurostudents project has just been published in Sociological Research Online. This draws on 26 interviews with higher education ‘policy influencers’ across Europe and explores the ways in which students were understood by this group of social actors. We argue in the article that although many of the characteristics identified by the interviewees are evident across various nation-states, they were frequently discussed and explained in terms of very distinct ‘national narratives’.

The article is called ‘Asserting the nation: the dominance of national narratives in policy influencers’ constructions of higher education students’ and you can read the full version here.

Out-of-place: the lack of engagement with parent networks of caregiving fathers of young children

A new article, co-authored with Paul Hodkinson, published recently in Families, Relationship and Societies, discusses one of the key themes from our research with UK fathers who had taken on primary or equal caring responsibilities for their young children.

The article outlines how, for most such fathers in our sample, contact with other parents during their day-to-day care was minimal. Many initially rationalised their isolation as a personal preference rooted in their own ‘introverted’ nature, but such individualised narratives underplayed how various systemic factors worked against their integration into parent networks. While these may include, we suggest, less intense pressures than mothers to engage with such groups in the first place, our primary findings concern barriers they faced, including: feeling ‘out-of-place’ in many daytime public spaces; a specific fear of being judged because of their gender; and the difficulty of meeting other fathers with responsibility for day-to-day care. The operation of these factors, we argue, provides evidence of the enduring nature of gender differences with respect to early years parenting and in particular, of the gendering of daytime public parenting spaces – something that may represent a barrier to the extent and longevity of fathers’ caregiving roles.

The full article can be accessed here.

Construction of students in higher education policy

A new article from the ‘Eurostudents’ project has just been published in the journal Compare. It explores some of the dominant constructions of students that emerged from our analysis of higher education policy documents in six European countries (Denmark, England, Germany, Ireland, Poland and Spain). We consider students as, variously, ‘objects of criticism’, investors or investments, and bearers of rights or duties. We also assess how students are positioned spatially and, in particular, the extent to which they are seen as Europeans. You can read the full article here.

Interchangeable parents?

An article I have co-authored with Paul Hodkinson, has just been published in Current Sociology. It draws on research that Paul and I conducted with fathers who had taken on primary or equal caring responsibilities for young children. We argue that the men’s comfort in presenting themselves and their partners as interchangeable equivalents suggests that they had begun to move beyond clearly differentiated motherly or fatherly roles. The article goes on, however, to show that certain emotional, organisational and social aspects of parenting sometimes continued to be centred on mothers. In explaining the endurance of these areas of maternal responsibility within otherwise interchangeable partnerships, we outline mutually reinforcing sets of maternal pressures and paternal barriers. The full article is available here.

Education and Society: Places, Policies, Processes

Over the past couple of years, I have been writing a new textbook for undergraduate sociology of education courses, based on teaching I have done at the University of Surrey. It will be published in October 2018, and comprises the following chapters:

1. Education and Society: an Introduction
2. Contested Purposes of Education
3. Policy and Policymaking
4. Globalisation and Education
5. Social Class
6. Gender and Sexuality
7. Race and Ethnicity
8. Age
9. Curriculum and Assessment
10. Teachers and Teaching
11. Types of School
12. Higher Education and Beyond
13. New Directions in Educational Research.

It can be ordered here.

Families and Parenting Forum

 University of Surrey, 26th June

The Families and Parenting Forum brings together an exciting array of research on families, media, communication and contemporary politics of parenthood, consumption, gender and everyday life. Join us at Guildford, for what promises to be an excellent forum. The forum will be followed by a wine and nibbles reception. Tickets are free, but seats are capped.

Opening Plenary: Charlotte Faircloth: 1315-1400

What is ‘intensive motherhood’? Historical and cross-cultural perspectives on childhood and the politics of parenting

Panel 1: 1400-1500

Vicki Harman: Unpacking the Lunchbox: Biopedagogies, mothering and social class

Rachel Brooks & Paul Hodkinson: ‘Just the two of us’: the lack of engagement with parent networks of caregiving fathers of young children

Ranjana Das: The internet and maternal wellbeing: Reflections on emerging health literacies

Tea and Cakes: 1500-1530

Panel 2: 1530: 1630

Kate Burningham & Sue Venn: Understanding and Practising Sustainable Consumption in Early Motherhood

Brita Ytre-Arne: Everyday public connection – gender differences in media use in a family framework

Maria Adams: ‘Surviving’ the effects of incarceration for families

Paul Hodkinson & Ranjana Das: Networked paternal intimacies: Fathers’ adoption of social media to communicate about perinatal mental health

Wine and Nibbles: 1630-1730

Further details and registration information can be found here.