Children's Use of Multiple Categorisations in Practice in a Multicultural Setting

Little is known about whether and how children combine categories of race, ethnicity, language and religion in multicultural settings where more than one of these dimensions is salient. Ethnographic data from a multicultural London primary school found that children usually organised multiple categories congruently (e.g. ‘If you're Indian you are Sikh’), despite strong opposition from teachers. This congruent organisation may originate in an undifferentiated experience of categories in the family and/or represent the best ‘fit' with a local population in which categories were correlated. Children used congruent organisation to infer peers’ group membership, which may amplify intergroup contrasts.     

Deterred by debt? Young people,schools and the escalating cost of UK higher education

Popular commentaries lament that reforms to the financing of Higher Education (HE) in the UK will operate as a significant deterrent to HE participation amongst students from less advantaged backgrounds. This view of debt as a deterrent is powerful and exists not only at a societal level, but also, as we show, is present in schools. Our data reveal, however, that these ‘debt commentaries’ play out very differently across schools according to the nature of their catchment and the sorts of views staff hold about pupils in relation to their fear of debt. Furthermore, students’ views on debt largely contradict these popular ‘debt-as-deterrent’ narratives and instead are often characterised by acceptance, ambivalence and at times positive orientations towards the prospect of debt. These findings vividly illuminate both the regional and institutional specificity of staff and student decision making in relation to ‘debt’, hence they have substantial implications for HE funding policy specifically and debates about widening participation in HE more generally, where ensuring greater equity in the scope of choices young people have when it comes to choosing a university is a pressing concern.     

When data justice and environmental justice meet: formulating a response to extractive logic through environmental data justice

ABSTRACT

Environmental data justice (EDJ) emerges from conversations between data justice and environmental justice while identifying the limits and tensions of these lenses. Through a reflexive process of querying our entanglement in non-innocent relations, this paper develops and engages EDJ by examining how it informs the work of the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI), a distributed, consensus-based organization that formed in response to the 2016 US presidential election. Through grassroots archiving of data sets, monitoring federal environmental and energy agency websites, and writing rapid-response reports about how federal agencies are being undermined, EDGI mobilizes EDJ to challenge the ‘extractive logic’ of current federal environmental policy and data infrastructures. ‘Extractive logic’ disconnects data from provenance, privileges the matrix of domination, and whitewashes data to generate uncertainty. We use the dynamic EDJ framework to reflect on EDGI’s public comment advising against the US Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed rule for Transparent Science. Through EDJ, EDGI aspires to create new environmental data infrastructures and practices that are participatory and embody equitable, transparent data care.     

Renegotiating religious transnationalism: fractures in transnational Chinese evangelicalism

In this article, I question to what extent future generations of immigrants will engage in practices of religious transnationalism through their ethnic institutions. I examine how leaders of the next generation of English‐speaking Chinese Canadian evangelicals made sense of their participation in the Chinese Coordination Centre of World Evangelism, a movement that rallies behind both a pan‐Chinese identity and the belief that the Chinese have a special role in evangelizing the world. I argue that the call to religious mobilization grounded in Chinese ethnicity stands on tenuous ground and propose that linguistic, geographical, generational and ideological fractures may diminish the participation of future generations of the Chinese diaspora in ethnically‐based transnational religious organizations. I conclude that these developments would push ‘negotiated transnational religious networks’ into a state of ‘renegotiation'.     

Schooling youth (sub)cultures in East Asian education: the case of high school rock in Taiwan

Over the past few years, some articles in this journal began to propose avenues of inquiry that would go beyond the long lasting subculture/post-subculture debate. This article aims to contribute to this emerging literature through examining the semi-independent role of ‘schooling’ in shaping specific patterns of youth (sub)cultural participation with specific reference to the role of high school rock music in Taiwan. I analyse how certain schooling structures and institutions – such as academic ranking and exams – frame the way students engage in their rock activities, and how this facilitates the popularity of heavy metal rock and the replication of exam culture in students’ rock subculture. Extending Shildrick and Macdonald’s use of the term ‘leisure career’, I suggest that an in-depth analysis of the interplay between young people’s ‘educational career’ and their focused leisure activities can be useful in understanding how specific patterns of decision making shape young students’ everyday culture and contribute to the distinctiveness of their subcultural participation.     

The More Things Change,the More They Remain the Same?

Since the publication of Arlie Hochschild’s groundbreaking work, The Second Shift (1989), scholars have delineated and deliberated the predictors and implications of American men’s participation in unpaid labor. Still, there’s little consensus about the current or future state of gender inequality in US households. In the course of reviewing scholarship published on this topic over the last two decades, this piece outlines and critically reflects upon two paradoxical conclusions one might reach when examining trends in men’s housework and care work time. In comparing and contrasting what I call ‘the mop bucket is half full’ and ‘the mop bucket is half empty’ conclusions, I also highlight the major theoretical frameworks, empirical findings, and diverging opinions on whether Hochschild’s ‘household revolution’ is permanently stalled, slowly reigniting, or ready to take off. I then conclude with a call for consensus among scholars and suggestions for future research on men’s participation in unpaid labor.     

What's in a name? An exploration of the significance of personal naming of ‘mixed’ children for parents from different racial,ethnic and faith backgrounds

This article is concerned with how and why parent couples from different racial, ethnic and faith backgrounds choose their children's personal names? The limited literature on the topic of names often focuses on outcomes, using birth name registration data sets, rather than process. In particular, we consider the extent to which the personal names that ‘mixed’ couples give their children represent an individualised taste, or reflect a form of collective affiliation to family, race, ethnicity or faith. We place this discussion in the context of debates about the racial and faith affiliation of ‘mixed’ people, positing various forms of ‘pro’ or ‘post’ collective identity. We draw on in‐depth interview data to show that, in the case of ‘mixed’ couple parents, while most wanted names for their children that they liked, they also wanted names that symbolised their children's heritages. This could involve parents in complicated practices concerning who was involved in naming the children and what those names were. We conclude that, for a full understanding of naming practices and the extent to which these are individualised or affiliative it is important to address process, and that the processes we have identified for ‘mixed’ parents reveal the persistence of collective identity associated with race, ethnicity and faith alongside elements of individualised taste and transcendence, as well as some gendered features.     

Internet risks and expert views: a case study of the insider perspectives of youth workers in Hong Kong

This study collects and analyses the viewpoints of front-line youth workers regarding the notion of ‘Internet risks’. Previous studies have examined and discussed various dangers of the Internet. Parental, school, and governmental interventions are often called for by those concerned. The implicit assumption is that these are the people who possess the expertise to tackle the problems at hand. Through participation in three forums focusing on ‘Internet risks’, and in-depth interviews with 10 such ‘experts’ in Hong Kong, the study examines if this is a valid assumption. It finds that experts perceive Internet risks rather differently. In addition to the more conventional views about content, contact and conduct risks, our interviewees are aware that a new order is quickly emerging in the new media environment. Despite being considered as ‘experts’, they do not necessarily know how to tackle the so-called ‘youth-at-risk’. Rather, they are exploring how they would capitalize on the opportunities offered by the developments. The key findings highlight the need to critically review the notion of ‘Internet risks’. As with other risk frameworks, the ultimate aim is to develop intervention programmes. In this regard, risks are often treated as concrete problems that can be solved. Youth experts, however, find that the changing scope, speed and persistence of communication in today's information society present the biggest challenge in youth work. The existing framework of risks was unable to describe and account for such risks. In response, Internet risk has to be reconceptualized so that more updated, relevant and imaginative intervention can be introduced.     

A revised approach to racism in youth multiculture: the significance of schoolyard conversations about sex,dating and desire

Anxieties about social cohesion in multicultural societies have prompted scrutiny of how young people negotiate culturally diverse spaces. A key perspective of the literature at the intersections of youth studies and urban multiculture is that young people shift between racist and convivial modes of relationality to navigate their complex social worlds. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a culturally diverse high school in Melbourne, Australia, I suggest that this binary framing fails to capture some of the diverse logics and practices within multicultural youth sociality. Reconciling dichotomous conceptual frames that position young people as moving back-and-forth between forms of exclusion and openness, I propose an alternative frame – a perverse form of everyday cosmopolitanism – through which to consider young people’s intercultural relations. To do this, I draw on young people’s conversations about sex, dating and desire as an entry point for new theorising about racism. Race and ethnicity were cornerstones of students’ frequent discussions about sexual ‘tastes’ and activity, discourses that have racist histories and effects. However, students did not understand their social world in such terms. These students’ social practices offer a situated illustration of how racism can function as part of a more inclusive cosmopolitan ethos in young lives, which I term ‘perverse cosmopolitanism’.     

Democracy denied,youth participation and criminalizing digital dissent

Attention is given in this article to recent action by many liberal states to regulate and criminalize certain forms of political dissent reliant on new media. I ask how those working in the fields of youth studies and social science more generally might understand such processes of criminalizing political dissent involving young people digital media. I do this mindful of the prevailing concern about a ‘crisis in democracy’ said to be evident in the withdrawal by many young people from traditional forms of political engagement, and the need to encourage greater youth participation in democratic practices. A heuristic or guiding frame is developed to analyse how new laws, amendments to existing laws and other regulatory practices are being implemented to contain certain forms of political participation, performed in large part by young people. A case study of ‘Distributed Denial of Service action’ is offered to examine government responses to political practices which I argue constitute legitimate forms of protest and civil disobedience.     

Rwanda's ‘Hutsi’: intersections of ethnicity and violence in the lives of youth of ‘mixed’ heritage

This article looks at young Rwandans of ‘mixed’ Hutu–Tutsi heritage, exploring how their mixed identity shaped their experiences during the 1994 genocide and how it influences their everyday experiences of categorization and belonging in contemporary Rwanda. It reveals the complex position of these young ‘Hutsi’ and the significant constraints they face in exercising identity choices in a context with a history of ethnic violence and where state policies have outlawed ethnicity. This article argues that the experiences, narratives and performances of these young Rwandans simultaneously challenge and reinforce the binary ‘ethnic logic’ that persists in contemporary Rwanda. Yet it suggests that providing space for Rwanda's ‘Hutsi’ and their diverse experiences could help to de-essentialize the categories ‘Hutu’ and ‘Tutsi’ and reduce the risks of future violence.     

Self-work and social change: disindividualised participation amongst young Australian Buddhist practitioners

Recent work on youth participation has mobilised a ‘DIY’ or ‘individualised’ framework to explain the nature of contemporary participation, particularly amongst minoritised religious youth. This paper examines this conceptual framework in light of concurrent claims that contemporary participation can be better conceptualised using a ‘doing it with others’ (DIWO) approach, which emphasises the collaborative nature of participation. In light of these claims, I analyse the participation experiences of 22 young adult Buddhist practitioners who are located within a neo-liberal Australian context, yet simultaneously have access to religious teachings and practices which challenge distinct notions of selfhood. This paper shows that both ‘DIY’ and ‘DIWO’ conceptions of participation find expression in the participation experiences of participants from the study, and that both DIY and DIWO approaches can additionally be seen as mutually reinforcing rather than distinctly contrasting. I propose a new concept of ‘disindividualisation’, suggesting that Maffesoli's concept of ‘disindividuation’ and Elias's work linking psychological development and social change should be considered in conjunction with an individualised or DIY perspective on youth participation to denote this kind of participatory work.     

Social exclusion,mobility and access1

Much of the literature on social exclusion ignores its ‘spatial’ or ‘mobility’ related aspects. This paper seeks to rectify this by examining the mobile processes and infrastructures of travel and transport that engender and reinforce social exclusion in contemporary societies. To the extent to which this issue is addressed, it is mainly organized around the notion of ‘access’ to activities, values and goods. This paper examines this discourse in some detail. It is argued that there are many dimensions of such access, that improving access is a complex matter because of the range of human activities that might need to be ‘accessed’, that in order to know what is to be accessed the changing nature of travel and communications requires examination, and that some dimensions of access are only revealed through changes in the infrastructure that ‘uncover’ previously hidden social exclusions. Claims about access and socio‐spatial exclusion routinely make assumptions about what it is to participate effectively in society. We turn this question around, also asking how mobilities of different forms constitute societal values and sets of relations, participation in which may become important for social inclusion. This paper draws upon an extensive range of library, desk and field research to deal with crucial issues relating to the nature of a fair, just and mobile society.     

Narrative and Frame Alignment in Social Movements: Labor Problem Novels and the 1929 Gastonia Strike

Research on social movements and frame alignment has shed light on how activists draw new participants to social movements through meaning making. However, the ‘framing perspective’ has failed to interrogate how the form or genre in which frames are deployed affects the communication of meaning. The burgeoning literature on social movements and narrative would seem to point to one discursive form of importance to meaning making in social movements, but scholars have failed to connect their insights with the literature on framing. In this article, I analyze five novels published in response to a 1929 communist-led strike in Gastonia, North Carolina. I argue that labor movement activists deployed these long-form narratives for the purposes of ‘frame alignment,’ specifically ‘frame amplification’ and ‘frame transformation,’ and I show how these narratives conveyed frames in ways that other discursive forms could not. The study raises new questions about the selection and reception of discursive forms in social movements.     

‘Who should do the caring’? Involved fatherhood and ambivalent gendered moral rationalities among cohabiting/married irish parents

Drawing on qualitative couple interviews with cohabiting/married mothers and fathers, this paper examines accounts of involved fatherhood in contemporary Ireland. It shows that while the ideal of fathers as heavily involved in day-to-day parenting is widespread, the reality is somewhat different – and this despite increased participation of Irish mothers in the labour market. Given this mismatch between fatherhood ideals and realities, it begs the question: how do we account for this inequitable division of family work? Gender-differentiated parenting experiences, I argue, are strongly influenced by ambivalent attitudes on the part of both fathers and mothers. I argue that mothers draw on ‘primarily mother’ moral rationalities that associates ‘good’ mothering with large amounts of time in direct provision of childcare, while fathers display a ‘primarily worker’ rationality associated with strong commitment to the labour market. It is the clash of these contrasting normative societal demands that gives rise to a pervasive sense of ambivalence about ‘who should do the caring’. This ambivalence, I demonstrate, is especially prominent in single-income families where the father is the sole breadwinner. In dual-income families, several parents go some distance towards reconciling these contradictory claims, these competing moral discourses.     

Finding ways (and words) to move: Mad student politics and practices of loneliness

Abstract

By blending the conceptual frameworks of epistemic injustice and ethical loneliness and applying them to campus-based practices of ‘risk’ identification and ‘referral’, this article describes how Mad students come to be abandoned as knowers and learners. I then dwell in and politicize the condition of (ethical) loneliness these harms produce by seeking to ‘practise’ it as a form of Mad knowing, and as a framework for visioning justice. Framing Mad student experiences in this way opens up several possibilities for epistemic justice. First, it offers additional language and interpretive resources for naming and protesting our experiences of violence. Second, it compels us to understand and attend to Mad student experiences of epistemic harm and to recognize how Mad knowledges are routinely generated in their wake. Third, it invites new ways of understanding and responding to these harms, and imagining redress.     

Selling the cryptosphere in China

ABSTRACT

China, one of the world’s most clandestine states, is currently engaged in moves to make state secrecy a matter of public policy, even inaugurating a ‘National Security Education Day’ in 2016. This article explores some recent campaigns about spy-catching to show how the state is using crowdsourcing, content marketing, and prosumerist gambits to sell an emergent social space of civic duty that I term the cryptosphere. Inciting civic participation is a particularly deft tool for propaganda work of this kind, which pivots on performative ideology. The ostensible purpose of these campaigns is to enlist the Chinese people in the securitization of the state, but in practice this is a highly disingenuous move given that the realm of the classified in China is so vast that ‘keeping secrets’ can only be perfunctory for almost all of its citizens. So far, commentators outside China have either been amused by the state’s new forays into infographics and mash-up videos, or critical of their xenophobic messaging. But the state’s apparently light-hearted drive to remind the Chinese people of the need to track spies is only peripherally about foreigners. It is occurring at a time when the government is also trialling a vast algorithmic grab on its own citizens’ personal data via the social credit system; operating a CCTV surveillance regime of more than one million cameras; and conducting mandatory biometric profiling in Xinjiang using DNA, blood types, iris scans, and fingerprints. These policies, I argue, constitute the exoskeleton of the cryptosphere. But this new sphere also needs its soft padding. Propaganda campaigns which school subjects on how to perform the role of loyal ‘informants’ – at the very moment that their own information is increasingly being expropriated by the state – are providing just this kind of thought work cushion.     

On ethnomethodology, feminism, and the analysis of categorial reference to gender in talk-in-interaction

This paper sets out an ethnomethodological approach to the study of gender and interaction, and demonstrates how the topic of ‘gender’ can be studied empirically via its categorial reference in talk‐in‐interaction. I begin by charting the history of ethnomethodological accounts and studies of gender, starting with Garfinkel's groundbreaking work and the subsequent ‘doing gender’ project, alongside a more general discussion of feminism's relationship to ethnomethodology. I then consider two related trajectories of research, one in conversation analysis and the other in membership categorization analysis, both of which deal with the explication of gender's relevance to interaction, but in somewhat different ways that raise different problems. Finally, drawing on data from different institutional settings, I show how ‘categorial’ phenomena such as ‘gender’ can be studied as phenomena of sequential organization using the machinery of membership categorization alongside conversation analysis. I suggest that the analysis of members' categories in their sequential environment allows language and gender researchers to see how everyday notions of gender are taken up, reformulated, or resisted, in turns of talk that accomplish conversational action; that is, how categories ‘might be relevant for the doing of some activity’ ( Sacks, 1992 vol. 1: 597).     

Evidence‐loving rock star chief medical officers: Female leadership amidst COVID‐19 in Canada

This article presents a feminist poststructuralist inquiry perspective on how news and social media discourse around the COVID‐19 pandemic is presenting a potential shift in hegemonic representations of masculine leadership. I am informed by organizational rules and sensemaking theories, and consider how Canadian and international female leaders are showing resilience, emotion and vulnerability as they help lead their countries through these uncertain times. I reflexively ground my observations in my own sensemaking and personal experiences. Despite reservations, I am hopeful. There are indications that the ‘rules of the game’ are starting to be challenged, and feminine frameworks that question traditional gender roles are disrupting conceptions around ‘business as usual’.