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.

Materialities and Mobilities in Education

The new book I have written with Johanna Waters will be published in a few weeks. Below we have pasted a few details about the book as a whole, and the list of contents. We are particularly grateful to Ravinder Sidhu, of the University of Queensland, who kindly wrote the Afterword for us.

Materialities and Mobilities in Education develops new arguments about the ways in which educational processes can be analysed. Drawing on a recent interest in mobilities across the social sciences, and a conterminous resurgence in academic accounts of materialities, the book demonstrates how these two ostensibly differing perspectives on education might be fruitfully deployed in tandem.  Considering the interaction and convergence of materialities and mobilities, the book highlights the relationship between structural constraints and opportunities and the agency of individuals, providing a unique and essential insight into contemporary education.

Examining a range of education spaces from the formal to the informal and the different types of mobility that manifest in relation to education, the book introduces readers to a range of theoretical resources and detailed case studies used to analyse the spatiality of education from across the disciplines of human geography, education and sociology.

Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: The materiality of education

Chapter 3: Buildings and bodies

Chapter 4: Mobilities in education: movement and flows

Chapter 5: Transnational (educational) mobilities

Chapter 6: The convergence of materiality and movement

Chapter 7: Convergence within urban education

Afterword (by Ravinder Sidhu)

 

 

Student Politics and Protest – now published

spp-bookStudent Politics and Protest: International Perspectives has now been published as part of the Routledge/Society for Research into Higher Education series on Research into Higher Education. It provides the first book-length analysis of student politics within contemporary higher education, comprising contributions from a wide variety of different countries and addressing questions such as:

What roles do students’ unions play in politics today?
How successful are students in bringing about change?
In what ways are students engaged in politics and protest in contemporary society?
How does such engagement differ by national context?

Its thirteen chapters explore a number of common themes, including: the focus and nature of student politics and protest; whether students are engaging in fundamentally new forms of political activity; the characteristics of politically engaged students; the extent to which such activity can be considered to be ‘globalised’; and societal responses to political activity on the part of students.

We will be running several events to open up discussion about some of the topics covered in the book, including a seminar at the University of Surrey on 29th November, and a symposium (and formal launch of the book) at the SRHE annual conference  from 7-9th December.

Student Politics and Protest: International Perspectives

22351108924_d963009ff0I have recently sent off the final manuscript for Student Politics and Protest: International Perspectives, which will be published in the Routledge/SRHE series later on this year (probably mid-October). Thanks to all the contributing authors – putting the collection together was a very enjoyable process. I am hoping to put together a symposium at the SRHE annual conference in December to discuss some of the ideas contained in the book.

Here is the table of contents:

Chapter 1. Student Politics and Protest: an Introduction (Rachel Brooks, University of Surrey, UK)

Chapter 2. Campaigning for a Movement: Collective Identity and Student Solidarity in the 2010/11 UK Protests against Fees and Cuts (Alexander Hensby, University of Kent, UK)

Chapter 3. Student Struggles and Power Relations in Contemporary Universities. The Cases of Italy and England (Lorenzo Cini, European University Institute, Florence, Italy)

Chapter 4. Neoliberal Discourses and the Emergence of an Agentic Field: the Chilean Student Movement (Carolina Guzman Valenzuela, University of Chile, Chile)

Chapter 5. Affinities and Barricades. A Comparative Analysis of Student Organizing in Quebec and the USA (Rushdia Mehreen, Montreal, Quebec, Canada and Ryan Thomson, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA)

Chapter 6. Student Politics and the Value(s) of Public Welfare (Gritt Nielsen, Aarhus University, Denmark)

Chapter 7. The Politics of Higher Education Funding in the UK Student Movement 1996-2010 (Debbie McVitty, University of Bedfordshire, UK)

Chapter 8. Student Power in 21st Century Africa: The Character and Role of Student Organising (Thierry Luescher, University of the Free State, South Africa, and Manja Klemenčič, Harvard University, USA)

Chapter 9. Student Associations: The New Zealand Experience (Sylvia Nissen and Bronwyn Hayward, University of Canterbury, New Zealand)

Chapter 10. ‘If not now, then when? If not us, who?’ Understanding the Student Protest Movement in Hong Kong (Bruce Macfarlane, University of Southampton, UK)

Chapter 11. Student Mobilization during Turkey’s Gezi Resistance: From the Politics of Change to the Politics of Lifestyle (Begüm Uzun, University of Toronto, Canada)

Chapter 12. Network Formation in Student Political Worlds (Joseph Ibrahim, Leeds Beckett University, UK and Nick Crossley, University of Manchester, UK)

Chapter 13. Conclusion (Rachel Brooks, University of Surrey, UK)