In the physics class: university physics students’ enactment of class and gender in the context of laboratory work

This article explores how the doing of social class and gender can intersect with the learning of science, through case studies of two male, working-class university students’ constitutions of identities as physics students. In doing so, I challenge the taken-for-granted notion that male physics students have an unproblematic relation to their chosen discipline, and nuance the picture of how working-class students relate to higher education by the explicit focus on one disciplinary culture. Working from the perspective of situated learning theory, the interviews with the two male students were analysed for how they negotiated the practice of the physics student laboratory and their own classed and gendered participation in this practice. By drawing on the heterogeneity of the practice of physics the two students were able to use the practical and technological aspects of physics as a gateway into the discipline. However, this is not to say that their participation in physics was completely frictionless. The students were both engaged in a continuous negotiation of how skills they had learned to value in the background may or may not be compatible with the ones they perceived to be valued in the university physicist community.     

Gender performativity in physics: affordances or only constraints?

In this forum we engage in a dialogue with Allison Gonsalves’s paper ‘“Physics and the girly girl—there is a contradiction somewhere”: Doctoral students’ positioning around discourses of gender and competence in physics’. In her paper Gonsalves uses a sociocultural approach to examine women doctoral students’ stories about becoming physicists. In doing so her paper focuses on how discourses of masculinity and femininity can create available and unavailable positions for the women students. In this dialogue we do a parallel reading of two of the student narratives presented by Gonsalves, using Judith Butler’s (1990) concept of discursive agency as a means to more explicitly bring the affordances for women identity constitution offered by their localized physicist context to the fore, rather focusing on its, often more visible, constraints.     

A note on the construction of test panels for the spectral imaging of paintings

The construction and examination of test panels is an ad hoc procedure, necessary for every spectral imaging study of paintings. Despite the common features, almost every scientific team follows a different way of construction. Furthermore, many of these approaches are not adequately documented in the relevant papers. Failure to use common language and practice leads to confusion about properties of materials and paint layers that have been overall examined by the scientists, as well as the validity of the results and their exploitation in several conservation applications. The present theoretical approach points out the need for common protocols for the construction of test panels and draws general principles as a flow chart on which they should be based.     

The Funding of Higher Education in the UK: a Contribution to the Debate

In this paper we review arguments that have been well rehearsed in the economic literature in the past twenty years and which are relevant to the present debate over student loans and the funding of the higher education sector.
The body of the paper assesses four finding proposals: (1) The Government's mortgage-type loan scheme, (2) The Barr, National Insurance repayment scheme, (3) The Graduate Tax and (4) A Loan scheme based on the individual higher education institution.
Each proposal is assessed in terms of its efficiency impact in six dimensions, (i) set up costs and flexibility, (ii) administrative costs (iii) incentives (iv) information (v) the balance of public and private involvement, and (vi) equity.
We conclude that, overall, we would not recommend any of the alternatives as unambiguously superior on all counts. Insofar as a radical approach is to be implemented we argue that a scheme based on the individual higher education institution, with repayment via the National Insurance system, is probably the best option.