Equalities in Freefall? Ontological Insecurity and the long-term Impact of COVID-19 in the Academy

This intervention focuses on the impact of the global crisis resulting from the COVID‐19 pandemic on existing racialized and gendered inequalities within the academy and in particular our discipline of Politics and International Relations. We argue that responses to recent crises within the academy have exacerbated ontological insecurity among minoritized groups, including women. When coupled with increased caring responsibilities the current crises call into question who can be creative and innovative, necessary conditions for knowledge production. While University managers seek to reassure University staff of the temporary nature of COVID‐19 interventions, we argue that the possibilities for progressive leaps at a later state of institutional regeneration is unlikely when efforts to address structural inequalities are sidelined and crisis responses are undertaken which run counter to such work

Children’s friendships in diverse primary schools: teachers and the processes of policy enactment

Drawing on data from a project exploring children's and adults’ friendships across social class and ethnic difference, this paper focuses on the enactment of national and institutional policy around children’s friendships as realized in three primary schools in diverse urban areas in London. Through a focus on the way in which social and emotional learning (SEL) and teachers’ understandings of children’s friendships seek to govern children’s friendship behaviours, we turn to Foucault’s work to explore how power shapes relations between policy frameworks and teachers’ practices, and between those who teach and those who are taught. We discuss the disciplinary potential of SEL and teachers’ ‘common sense’ understandings of children’s friendships, but conclude by noting possibilities for teachers to create spaces in which all children can safely explore the nature of friendships

Is race still relevant? Student perceptions and experiences of racism in higher education

This paper explores the current views and experiences of university students toward issues of race and racism in England. A decade into the UK’s Equality Act (2010), we have witnessed a proliferation of support for minority rights and movements, especially from the younger generation, often praised as progressive and liberal. Yet, in UK higher education, there are growing evidence and concerns of racial and ethnic inequalities in the experiences and outcomes of minority ethnic students. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 42 undergraduates in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) degrees, we explore the nuances in racial perspectives as we highlight three contemporary student discourses of racism: the naïve, the bystander and the victim. Implications for policy and practice are suggested

White privilege, empathy and alterity in higher education : Teaching about race and racism in the sociology of PE and sport

In this chapter we provide a reflexive account on personal experiences teaching in HE in order to consider the extent to which our status as white HE practitioners reinforces and/or undermines white privilege in HE. As lecturers teaching within the discipline of sociology in physical education (PE) and sport contexts, we question whether our delivery of lectures on race and racism effectively challenges racialised discourses and encourages social action within our field. Despite the fact that the undergraduate programmes we work on incorporate lectures on race and ethnicity as a crucial part of the curriculum, these sessions have rarely been delivered by black and minority ethnic (BME) academics. We therefore consider whether our practice can provide a critical pedagogic voice, or if it simply provides a platform for white academics to unconsciously reinforce the institutional whiteness of HE. In particular, we reflect upon the possibility for white academics to empathise with the racialised social experiences of BME students in our cohorts, and the potential risk that our practice simply offers tokenistic discussion of race which reinforce the current forms of inequality and white privilege, whilst violating the alterity of our students

Dear British criminology: Where has all the race and racism gone?

In this article we use Emirbayer and Desmond’s institutional reflexivity framework to critically examine the production of racial knowledge in British criminology. Identifying weakness, neglect and marginalization in theorizing race and racism, we focus principally on the disciplinary unconscious element of their three-tier framework, identifying and interrogating aspects of criminology’s ‘obligatory problematics’, ‘habits of thought’ and ‘position-taking’ as well as its institutional structure and social relations that combine to render the discipline ‘institutionally white’. We also consider, briefly, aspects of criminology’s relationship to race, racism and whiteness in the USA. The final part of the article makes the case for British criminology to engage in telling and narrating racisms, urging it to understand the complexities of race in our subject matter, avoid its reduction to class and inequality, and to pay particular attention to reflexivity, history, sociology and language, turning to face race with postcolonial tools and resolve

Ethnicity, gender, deprivation and low educational attainment in England: Political arithmetic, ideological stances and the deficient society

Attainment data on England’s school pupils are more extensive in coverage, detail, quantity, accessibility and of higher quality than monitoring statistics routinely available in other European countries. These data facilitate investigation of low attainment in England’s schools and its relationship to ethnicity, gender and poverty. This article reviews longitudinal sample studies and extends this with simpler presentations of England’s national attainment statistics for education over 5 years up to 2014. The analyses show recurrent correlations of low attainment with specific ethnic minority groups, with gender and most strongly with low-income sections of society. There is a strong case, from these data and other research, that these inequalities are rooted in social and economic factors outside the school, created and sustained by neoliberal economic practices and elitist structures. It is argued that reducing the proportion of children growing up in poverty will have a bigger impact on raising average attainment levels than focusing on in-school factors

What can health inequalities researchers learn from an intersectionality perspective?:Understanding social dynamics with an inter-categorical approach

The concept of intersectionality was developed by social scientists seeking to analyse the multiple interacting influences of social location, identity and historical oppression. Despite broad take-up elsewhere, its application in public health remains underdeveloped. We consider how health inequalities research in the United Kingdom has predominantly taken class and later socioeconomic position as its key axis in a manner that tends to overlook other crucial dimensions. We especially focus on international research on ethnicity, gender and caste to argue that an intersectional perspective is relevant for health inequalities research because it compels researchers to move beyond (but not ignore) class and socioeconomic position in analysing the structural determinants of health. Drawing on these theoretical developments, we argue for an inter-categorical conceptualisation of social location that recognises differentiation without reifying social groupings – thus encouraging researchers to focus on social dynamics rather than social categories, recognising that experiences of advantage and disadvantage reflect the exercise of power across social institutions. Such an understanding may help address the historic tendency of health inequalities research to privilege methodological issues and consider different axes of inequality in isolation from one another, encouraging researchers to move beyond micro-level behaviours to consider the structural drivers of inequalities

The concealed middle?:An exploration of ordinary young people and school GCSE subject area attainment

This is the final version of the article. Available from ESRC Centre for Population Change via the link in this record.In Britain school examination results are now an annual newsworthy item. This recurrent event illustrates, and reinforces, the importance of school level qualifications. The General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) is the standard qualification undertaken by pupils at the end of year 11 (age 15-16). GCSEs continue to play an important and central role in young people’s educational and employment pathways. Within the sociology of youth there has been recent interest in documenting the lives and educational experiences of ‘ordinary’ young people. There are many analyses of agglomerate (i.e. overall) school GCSE attainment. More recently attention has been focused on individual GCSE subjects. In this paper we analyse school GCSE attainment at the subject area level. This is an innovative approach and our motivation is to explore substantively interesting patterns of attainment that might be concealed in analyses of overall attainment, or attainment within individual subjects. We analyse data from the Youth Cohort Study of England and Wales using a latent variable approach. The modelling process uncovered four distinctive latent educational groups. One latent group is characterised by high levels of overall attainment, whereas another latent group is characterised by poor GCSE performance. There are two latent groups with moderate or ‘middle’ levels of GCSE attainment. These two latent groups have similar levels of agglomerate attainment, but one group performs better in science and the other performs better in arts GCSEs. Pupils study for multiple GCSEs which are drawn from a wide menu of choices. There is a large array of possible GCSE subject combinations, and results in individual GCSE subjects are highly correlated. The adoption of a latent variable approach is attractive because it handles the messy nature of the data whilst not trivialising its complexity. The paper demonstrates that a latent variable approach is practicable with large-scale social survey data, and is appealing for the analysis of more contemporaneous cohorts.The ESRC Centre for Population Change (CPC) is a joint initiative between the Universities of Southampton, St Andrews, Edinburgh, Stirling, Strathclyde, in partnership with the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and the General Register Office Scotland (GROS). The Centre is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) grant numbers RES-625-28-0001 and ES/K007394/1

Social mix, schooling and intersectionality: identity and risk for Black middle class families

This paper addresses some particular aspects of the complex intersections between race and social class. It is based upon data collected as part of a two-year Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded project exploring the ‘Educational strategies of the Black Middle Classes’ (BMC). (‘The Educational Strategies of the Black middle classes’, ESRC RES-062-23-1880). The project as a whole focuses on the educational perspectives, strategies and experiences of Black Caribbean-heritage middle class families in England. Little research attention has been given to the growing BMC, despite the massive interest in the educational decision-making of White middle class families. The assumption perpetuated in media coverage of issues like educational achievement is that Black children are working class. Here we consider the role of ethnic and social class mix – within school choice and within children’s friendship groups as these are inflected by the concerns about racism and educational achievement articulated by BMC parents. The paper indicates different degrees of importance given to social mix in relation to school choice and in the making and monitoring of friendships among the families in the sample and some of the issues of strategy, risk and identity that are embedded in their thinking about and planning for social mix. Some gender differences are also signalled and their intersection with race and class is discussed