‘The only time I feel girly is when I go out’: Drinking stories, Teenage girls, and respectable femininities

Over the past decade or so, there has been a growing concern in public and policy discourse that contemporary British young women are drinking in ever- greater quantities at an ever-younger age. Titis paper is based on a small-scale doctoral research into young women's smoking and drinking practice in a town in Southern England, and explores how teenage girls perform, negotiate and scrutinize legitimate generational drinking femininities. The article, using a feminist poststructuralist analysis, particularly focuses on the use of teenage girls' cultural and material practices, especially the use of stories and snapshots in enabling girls to navigate and negotiate shifting gendered alcohol discourses

Pedagogies of discomfort and care: Balancing critical tensions in delivering gender-related violence training to youth practitioners

This reflective paper explores the emotions, ethics, and challenges of facilitating training for youth practitioners to tackle gender-related violence (GRV). This paper draws on insights from a training intervention that emerged from an EU-funded feminist project (UK GAPWORK project), which sought to bring together approaches to tackle violence against women and girls with challenging heteronormativity and homophobia. Drawing on accounts from facilitators and participants, the aim of this paper is to identify tensions, opportunities and strategies in developing training to support critically engaged practice around sensitive topics such as GRV, and to consider the significance of working with discomfort within any such training intervention. We reflect on how discomfort presented within the training space and the challenges presented. This paper examines how Boler’s theoretical work on pedagogy of discomfort can be operationalised to think productively about designing and delivering training for informal educators on sensitive issues with ethical integrity

The advantages of chaos1 : myth-making and Covid-19 in Hungary

The COVID-19 pandemic has created new opportunities and challenges for populist regimes. A growing body of work has explored the formation of populist and nationalist political reactions in the wake of a global health crisis. This article explores mythmaking and the Covid 19 pandemic in populist Hungary. We identify pandemic ‘mythogenic’ narratives that reconfigure and replay older ethno-nationalist myths, those of the ‘polluting’ alien other, Hungarian exceptionalism, and treachery and betrayal. Thus, the power of global crisis is drawn into extant myths to support local political ends and the interests of Hungary’s governing party. The article cites examples of mythologising practice from Hungary’s hybrid media landscape, suggesting Hungarian politics is as much contested within the mythic and symbolic as in other domains

Playwork goes to School:Professional (mis)recognition and playwork practice in primary school.

The article considers some of the key contemporary challenges facing playwork professionals in England when working in interagency and inter-professional contexts, specifically in English primary schools. This paper is based on a small-scale qualitative evaluation of a pilot play project situated within a primary school in a large English town. By drawing on broader debates within sociological literature and interview and observational data, this paper provides insights into the gendered, classed and interprofessional discourses that are in play within a new phase of the austere economic and occupational public sector landscape. Drawing on concepts of ‘misrecognition’, the authors’ explore issues of professional power, the process of professionalisation and how aspects such as gender and status shape contemporary inter-professional dynamics in schools and playwork contexts

Are Teen Girls Funny? Laughter, Humor and Young Women's Performance of Gender and Sexual Agency

Much previous scholarly work has noted the gendered nature of humor and the notion that women use comedy in a different way than do their male peers. Drawing on prior work on gender and humor, and my ethnographic work on teen girl cultures, I explore in this article how young women utilize popular cultural texts as well as everyday and staged comedy as part of a gendered resource that provides potential sites for sex-gender transgression and conformity. Through a series of vignettes, I explore how girls do funny and provide a backdrop to perform youthful gendered identities, as well as establish, maintain, and transgress cultural and social boundaries. Moving on to explore young women and stand-up I question the potential in mobilizing humor as an educational resource and a site in which to explore sex-gender norms with young people

Lesbian Cinderella and other stories: telling tales and researching sexualities equalities in primary school

This article provides a critical account of a selection of approaches that were used in the 26-month No Outsiders participatory action research project in education settings. The paper questions what challenges are presented to educators in critically exploring and challenging heteronormative sex-gender discourses. We revisit some of the tensions in undertaking a project of this kind, by exploring data episodes as vignettes to highlight the recuperative nature of heteronormativity. The paper’s title originates in one of the author’s dramatic persona of Cindy, a Lesbian Cinderella. We critically reflect on this creation, acknowledge Cindy’s potential, and query the characters’ capacity to even briefly ‘trouble’ heteronormative discourses in action within the classroom. Finally, we argue that pupils’ multiple and shifting subjectivities, and understandings of these discourses offered by such pedagogic interventions, provides an arena for children to resist, reappropriate and challenge such figures that move beyond bounds of heteronormative sex–gender discourses