The (stereo)typical student: how European higher education students feel they are viewed by relevant others

There is a growing body of scholarship on how students see themselves, and also on how they are conceptualised by other social actors. However, what has been less explored is how students believe they are seen by others, and how this impacts them. Drawing on focus groups with students across Europe–and particularly plasticine models students made to depict how they felt they were seen by relevant others–this paper will illustrate how the four most common ways in which students felt they were constructed were as hedonistic and lazy; useless and a burden; clever, hardworking, and successful; and a resource to be exploited. It will argue that such stereotypes had significant material impact on students’ lives and how they experienced being a student. Finally, it will analyse how specific national contexts accounted for a range of variations in how students articulated these constructions. Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2021.2007358

Compact analogue neural network: a new paradigm for neural based combinatorial optimisation

The authors present a new approach to neural based optimisation, to be termed as the compact analogue neural network (CANN), which requires substantially fewer neurons and interconnection weights as compared to the Hopfield net. They demonstrate that the graph colouring problem can be solved by using the CANN, with only O(N) neurons and O(N2) interconnections, where N is the number of nodes. In contrast, a Hopfield net would require N2 neurons and O(N4) interconnection weights. A novel scheme for realising the CANN in hardware form is discussed, in which each neuron consists of a modified phase locked loop (PLL), whose output frequency represents the colour of the relevant node in a graph. Interactions between coupled neurons cause the PLLs to equilibrate to frequencies corresponding to a valid colouring. Computer simulations and experimental results using hardware bear out the efficacy of the approach

Keep calm and apply to Germany: how online communities mediate transnational student mobility from India to Germany

This paper draws attention to the increasingly central yet understudied role of social media in facilitating student mobility from India. More specifically, it explores the emergence of online mutual-help communities of aspirant student migrants on Facebook and WhatsApp, which are aimed at helping members navigate the process of going abroad for study. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork focused on postgraduate-level student migration from India to Germany, the paper explores how these communities are meeting aspirant student migrants’ information and support needs in novel ways. Not only are they a key space in which information on study in Germany is discussed, dissected, and interpreted, they have also resulted in the production of a whole new body of information, tools, and resources on how to navigate the process of going to Germany for a Master’s degree. The paper argues that these communities can be seen as democratising access to study abroad, to some extent, by dramatically expanding applicants’ social networks and the social capital to which they have access

'Below English Line': An ethnographic exploration of class and the English language in post-liberalization India

Anthropological studies of India's post-liberalization middle classes have tended to focus mainly on the role of consumption behaviour in the constitution of this class group. Building on these studies, and taking class as an object of ethnographic enquiry, I argue that, over the last 20 years, class dynamics in the country have been significantly altered by the unprecedentedly important and complex role that the English language has come to play in the production and reproduction of class. Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork—conducted at commercial spoken-English training centres, schools, and corporate organizations in Bangalore—I analyse the processes by which this change in class dynamics has occurred, and how it is experienced on the ground. I demonstrate how, apart from being a valuable type of class cultural capital in its own right, proficiency in English has come to play a key role in the acquisition and performance of other important forms of capital associated with middle-class identity. As a result, being able to demonstrate proficiency in English has come to be experienced as a critical element in claiming and maintaining a space in the middle class, regardless of the other types of class cultural capital a person possesses