The new spatial politics of (re)bordering and (re)ordering the state-education-citizen relation

One outcome of more than three decades of social and political transformation around the world, the result of processes broadly referred to as globalisation, has been the emergence of a complex (and at first glance, contradictory) conceptual language in the social sciences that has sought to grasp hold of these developments. Throughout the 1990s, theorists began to emphasise a world in motion, deploying concepts like ??liquid modernity?? (Zygmunt Bauman) to signal rapid and profound changes at work in the social structures, relations, and spatialities of societies (Neil Brenner) that were reconfiguring state-citizen relations (Saskia Sassen). Recently, however, researchers have concentrated on the study of borders and containers as a corrective to the preoccupation with mobility, arguing it is not possible to imagine a world which is only borderless and de-territorialised, because the basic ordering of social groups and societies requires categories and compartments. This paper focuses attention on processes of bordering and ordering in contemporary education systems, suggesting that comparative educators ?C whose main intellectual project is to understand how (different) education processes are re/produced within and across time, space and societies ?C would get much greater purchase on transformations currently under way.     

Counselling clients with acquired hearing impairment: towards improved understanding and communication

This article seeks to bring to the attention of counsellors and counselling psychologists specific knowledge and awareness in working with clients with adult onset hearing loss. The need for improved awareness of the needs of these clients is argued, the experience of hearing loss explored, and psychological issues at the core of the disability discussed. Practical matters about communication that need consideration in the counselling setting are examined. It is presented from the vantage point of an experienced counselling psychologist who is herself hearing impaired.     

Information Needs of a Young Nation: Rebuilding Library Services in Timor-Leste

ABSTRACT

Timor-Leste is an emerging young nation that has many ambitious plans for its people. After a long period of conflict major projects focus on rebuilding the country, including education. Libraries are regarded as an essential part of the young nation's intellectual capital development. The authors will focus on the opportunities and challenges that face the country's national university, Universidade Nacionál Timór Lorosa’e Timor-Leste (UNTL), in the redevelopment of its library and services.     

Piketty,capital and education: a solution to,or problem in,rising social inequalities?

Abstract

When Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-first Century was released in 2014, it became an overnight success. Piketty focused on the concentration of wealth in a tiny social elite, and showed that their wealth had increased following the financial crisis in 2008. Yet the value of Piketty’s book offers something more than this for social scientists concerned with social inequalities. His work on a large data-set of long-run income and wealth statistics illustrates that the assumptions and models which have guided the work of neoclassical economists are flawed, but that societal arrangements matter. Yet despite this insight, Piketty’s solution to the problem of inequality is to argue that ‘… the best way to reduce inequalities with respect to labor … is to invest in education’. In this article I argue that there are major problems with this proposed solution and outline three lacunae that need to be addressed.     

Students’ career concerns: challenges facing guidance providers in higher education

The study reported here examined higher education career guidance at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland. In a survey (N = 880), students were asked to describe how much thinking they had done about their future career and forthcoming transition from university to working life. The use of different sources of guidance and counselling service providers was examined from the perspective of a student-centred holistic model of guidance. On the basis of the empirical findings, challenges facing career guidance in higher education are discussed.     

Parallel literacy classes and hidden strengths: learning to read in English,Urdu and classical Arabic

The aim of this article is to explore young bilingual children’s early literacy experiences in three different languages, English, Urdu and classical Arabic, and in three strikingly different types of classes in England. It draws on a larger ethnographic study that sets out to discover what kinds of advantages or additional strengths bilingual children might bring from their community literacy practices and from their experiences of learning to read in two or more languages simultaneously into their English literacy lessons. The main focus of the article is on one bilingual boy, Ikram, of Pakistani background, who at the beginning of the study was 5 years old. The participant observations in these three different types of classes and audio and video tapes of some these lessons show that at the age of 7 Ikram has begun to read in three languages. I argue that in doing so he is developing additional strengths that are generally overlooked. These new types of literacy strengths derive from the fact he is learning to read simultaneously in three languages. Yet they remain hidden within his English lessons.     

Career repertoires of IT students: A group counselling case study in higher education

Uncertainty about future career prospects has increased enormously for students enrolled in higher education Information Technology (IT) programs. However, many computer science programmes pay little attention to career counselling. This article reports the results of a pilot study intended to develop group counselling for IT students to promote the students’ agency concerning their future careers. The group counselling discussions were analysed from the discourse-analytic perspective. Five repertoires were found: the status, the professional career, the pedagogical orientation, the employability, and the emergency plan repertoires.     

‘Why should I be like bloody Rain Man?!’ Navigating the autistic identity

This article explores the views of six higher education students with autism/Asperger syndrome. The research draws upon social identity theory to explore how participants made meaning of their label. There was consensus that information given at the point of diagnosis generally did not reflect their individual experiences. First‐hand accounts tended to be perceived as more personally relevant. The ‘Asperger’ identity was generally framed as fragile and inconsistent, leading some individuals to distance themselves from it. This may be problematic for a group that is already disadvantaged and isolated. However, participants conveyed strong self‐images regardless of how and whether they identified with their diagnosis, which was attributed to their relative privilege in achieving higher education and therefore experiencing success and achievement related to their personal strengths. In this article, Andrea MacLeod, Ann Lewis and Christopher Robertson, from the University of Birmingham, call for researchers and relevant services to involve autistic individuals directly in fostering a constructive ‘autism identity’.