This paper addresses the challenge of developing a conceptual framing for the meaning of value with respect to higher education. The author argues that criteria derived from analyses of the life histories of longstanding graduates, which often take the form of counternarratives and proceed from that which matters to them, can inform an evaluative…

The Anglican Church congresses sought to foster relations between clergy and lay people. They promoted the Church as part of the social fabric of the nation with parades, civic receptions, services and public talks. Women were a presence at the congresses as platform speakers, organisers, hostesses and members of the audience. Congresses provided…

This article looks at the process of compiling a community archive in Westbury, Johannesburg. The township is located alongside the better known Sophiatown. Its history provides an insight into the experiences of the working class in the city since the establishment of Johannesburg more than a 100 years ago. The motivation for this archive comes…

This article documents the authors' efforts over the last several years to move themselves as well as their undergraduate women's studies students beyond the constraints of the Marxist legacy, in which class immediately registers as working class. In the process of teaching Women and Class, they discovered that class was largely invisible to their…

This paper challenges post-feminist discourses and recuperative masculinity politics in education that have evoked mythical constructions of the successful "achieving" girl in ways that flatten out social and cultural difference and render invisible ongoing gendered and sexualised inequalities and violence in the social worlds of schools…

In 2005, the first mother to be sentenced to jail because her eldest daughter persistently truanted was sentenced for a second time because she "failed" to stop her younger daughter from missing school. This story certainly exposes the links between education and punishment for working-class children and families, and the ways in which…

ConscienceRebels are women of African descent who align themselves with the struggles of working class/working poor black communities and intentionally counter and re-script exclusive, dominant discourses. Any self-identified black female college student who focuses on the black poor or working class in their writing forms the basis of this study…

This article discusses the denial of access to education to Ismaili Muslim women in colonial Kenya during the 1890s and the 1960s. The Ismailis were part of the "Asians" in Africa, a working class, religious, Muslim immigrant group from India, circumscribed by poverty and a traditional culture, the orthodox elements of which, with regard…

Examining two particular texts and applying modifications of Western feminist concepts, the author argues that early twentieth-century Chinese women's writing contains feminist thoughts and textual strategies far more complex and nuanced than conventional wisdom has led one to expect. (Contains 6 notes.)

The film documentary titled "Hip Hop: beyond beats and rhymes" captures ongoing conversations among scholars, cultural critics, and hip hop insiders about the state of African Americans by interrogating distinct expressive forms associated with hip hop culture. Durham draws from two scenes to describe her memories as the researched…

This article profiles Maria Montessori, an international ambassador for children who became known for her theories and methods of pedagogy, called the "Montessori Method." Montessori developed an educational theory, which combined ideas of scholar Froebel, anthropologists Giuseooe Serge, French physicians Jean Itard and Edouard Sequin,…

This ethnographic reflection foregrounds the efforts a K-12 English-medium (EM) school in Kolkata is making to pull EM schooling more fully into India's multilingual ethos. By focusing on the special needs of a small group of struggling working-class girls, the successes of the majority of working-class students at this school become more visible.…

In psychological terms, impostor syndrome is a cognitive distortion that prevents a person from internalizing any sense of accomplishment. By many accounts, academics--graduate students, junior professors, and even some full professors--relate to this only a little less than they relate to eye strain. The condition was first identified in 1978 by…

This paper examines the inexorable rise of "health" as regulative discourse, highlighting its class and cultural dimensions. With reference to the policy content of recent obesity reports, analysis suggests that contemporary concerns around obesity are but a modern variant of earlier eighteenth and nineteenth century child saving crusades whose…

Although teen pregnancy and birth rates in the United States declined for ten straight years during the 1990s and were less than half of comparative figures from 1957, the year of the all-time high of teen pregnancy, nearly one in ten teenage young women still became pregnant in 2001, with half of these young women giving birth. Teen pregnancy…