Ann Phoenix

• Professor at University College London Institute of Education

Bhekizizwe Peterson’s interdisciplinarity was wide ranging and displayed his easy familiarity with the Arts, Social Sciences and Philosophy. The breadth of his interests and oeuvre make him genuinely psychosocial, interested, for example, in psychoanalytic issues of mourning and melancholia and bringing this together with deep understandings of nar...

The main argument in the chapter is that the concept of hegemonic masculinity remains important to the understanding of contemporary power relations and processes of exclusion and inclusion in relation to citizenship and militarism. The chapter investigates the ways in which men benefit from hegemonic masculinity and the ambivalences this raises fo...

This paper focuses on Judith Butler’s theorisation of the performative subject and contemporary critiques to consider its relevance to the doing of racialized masculinities in Finnish schools. Recent postcolonial critique has indicated that, early work on performativity and subjectivation implicitly assumes a white and western, enlightenment subjec...

The #metoo movement and various other social media campaigns have made sexual harassment increasingly visible in recent years. Such collective practices of naming and thereby resisting sexual harassment have been made possible by feminist discourses that have enabled the linking of personal experiences to gendered social structures. In this paper,...

This article makes a small contribution to Families, Relationships and Societies’ knowledge production. It addresses racialised and ethnicised inequalities experienced in the everyday lives of a family constituted through serial migration, where the adult interviewed (‘Lizzie’) reflected on her childhood experience of leaving the Caribbean to join...

For nearly 50 years, the Thomas Coram Research Unit (TCRU) has been integral to the IOE (Institute of Education), UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society (University College London, UK). This article is written from the perspectives of four researchers who have served in the TCRU’s formative years and over its lifetime. It chronicles the TCRU’s hist...

In 2020, COVID-19 took many people by surprise, as did the intercontinental waves of protest triggered by the casual racist murder of George Floyd by a US policeman. The years of 2020 and 2021 will undoubtedly be remembered for massive, unexpected disruptions that require new social normalities to be negotiated. These social disruptions were trigge...

While intersectionality is burgeoning in much scholarship, few childhood researchers employ it. This chapter considers ways in which intersectionality can contribute to research understandings of childhood and children’s lives. It argues that intersectionality enables a holistic perspective on children’s lives, facilitating analysis of how they are...

This multidisciplinary volume reflects the shifting experiences and framings of Finnishness and its relation to race and coloniality. The authors centre their investigations on whiteness and unravel the cultural myth of a normative Finnish (white) ethnicity. Rather than presenting a unified definition for whiteness, the book gives space to the diff...

Nuancing Young Masculinities tells a complex story about the plurality of young masculinities. It draws on the narratives of Finnish young people (mostly boys) of different social classes and ethnicities who attend schools in Helsinki, Finland. Their accounts of relations with peers, parents, and teachers give insights into boys’ experiences and ev...

Since the start of the covid-19 pandemic, in the UK and elsewhere, the phrase “living with covid”—and variations such as “live with it,” “learning to live with the virus”—has circulated in public discourse. It refers to, and summarises, increasingly polarised positions with regards to the pandemic: on the one hand, accept the virus and resist adapt...

The COVID-19 pandemic has shone a light on the complex relationship between science and policy. Policymakers have had to make decisions at speed in conditions of uncertainty, implementing policies that have had profound consequences for people's lives. Yet this process has sometimes been characterised by fragmentation, opacity and a disconnect betw...

The unexpected transformations produced by the conjunction of COVID-19, the murder of George Floyd and the resurgence of Black Lives Matter highlight the importance of social psychological understandings and the need for a step change in theorization of the social. This paper focuses on racialization. It considers issues that social psychology need...

Classrooms have long been understood to be about much more than academic learning. They contribute to the normalisation of some identities and, by contrast, construct others as non-normative. Children and young people are interlinked with their teachers in a process that involves both the politics of recognition and the ways in which identities and...

Memorializes Marcia Worrell (1966-2020). Marcia read psychology and sociology from 1985 at the University of Reading. Her PhD, awarded in 2001 on child abuse and neglect at the Open University, led to her advocacy on behalf of survivors. During her PhD research she was employed as a researcher and a member of course teams designing innovative cours...

This paper examines the notion of acceleration as simultaneously dynamic and fast moving but underpinned by legacies from an earlier age that inform their development and the ways in which they inflect social life. It shows how sites of dynamic social acceleration can shift and change its focus over time, while (implicitly) maintaining the same log...

This paper analyses the retrospective narratives of an adult language broker. Language brokering involved not only learning how to translate/interpret language for others, but also understanding the meaning that Spanish and English assumed in society and the ways in which she and her parents were socially positioned. Language brokering was both psy...

This paper focuses on a proliferating narrative genre: videos where children are central, posted on the internet for public consumption. The video analyzed is of a pre-school U.S. Black girl resisting how her mother has combed her hair. It offers insights into family practices and display (Finch, 2007; Morgan, 2011) that would usually not be open t...

Telling and listening to stories is a basic way in which we make sense of the world. It has long been understood that our understandings of childhood are inextricably linked with the stories we tell and that these, in turn, are produced through the methods we use (Burman in Deconstructing Developmental Psychology. Routledge, London, 2016). Bradley...

»Postmigrantisch« steht für gesellschaftliche Zustände, die durch die Erfahrung der Migration strukturiert sind. Migration wird dabei als soziale Praxis verstanden, die politisch, medial und sozial kontrovers verhandelt und reguliert wird - und gleichzeitig Gesellschaften nachhaltig prägt. In diesem Band geht es um eine Gegenwartsanalyse, die aktue...

This chapter analyzes two interviews that come from a study concerned with the ways in which adults from three different family backgrounds re-evaluate their earlier experiences of growing up in visibly ethnically different households. Both examples are from adults who are of mixed black-white parentage. The chapter considers the ways in which the...

Background Besides handling the physical impacts of COVID-19 there is more than ever a need to understand what can help when mental health is challenged. Within this context our practical wisdom – our ability to understand and recognise when ‘the other’, for example the patient, is feeling lonely or anxious is particularly important. Aim This arti...

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement is generating a new appetite for understanding the ubiquity of systemic racism. In this short piece, a professor and three newly graduated students from different racialized groups reflect on the reproduction of social inequalities in key institutions and on what decolonization means for the nation, not just fo...

Personal narratives’ relation to social change is a frequent topic in the narrative-psychological and wider narrative social science literature. It is, indeed, a driving interest for many of those doing and reading narrative social research. This book aims to analyze not only the strong but also qualified significance of personal stories for progre...

In this report, we do not present British social sciences as unified and non-conflictual; nor do we see social sciences in the UK as isolated from professional or political developments in other countries and regions. In addition, the report is multi-disciplinary; it covers research from the fields of psychosocial studies, sociology, social policy,...

This article aims to contribute to understandings of how children experience family troubles. It considers how children’s family troubles are socially situated and interlinked with the resources children and other family members have available and the societal contexts in which they live. Since this is an under researched area, the article aims to...

Transnational Perspectives on Democracy, Citizenship, Human Rights and Peace Education considers ways in which national systems of education could work together, across borders, to determine the meaning and significance of the principles of democracy, human rights and peace education, in ways that are comparative and relational. The contributors an...

At a time when the pace of global change has led to unprecedented shifts in, and unsettling of, identities, Brubaker brings “trans/gender” and “trans/racial” creatively into conversation to theorize the historical location of identity claims and to examine the question of whether identities are optional, self-consciously chosen and subject to polit...

Anhand (auto-)biographischer Erzählungen von Frauen, die im Zuge von Kettenmigration von ihren Eltern in der Karibik verlassen wurden und später in Großbritannien eine Zusammenführung erlebten, verknüpft Ann Phoenix in ihrem Beitrag „Claiminglivablelives: Adult subjectificationand narratives of ‘non-normative’ childhoodexperiences“ diese Narrative...

Working in groups is increasingly regarded as fruitful for the process of analyzing qualitative data. It has been reported to build research skills, make the analytic process visible, reduce inequalities and social distance particularly between researchers and participants, and broaden and intensify engagement with the material. This article contri...

Since the 1970s, those who support and those who oppose ‘transracial’ fostering and adoption have often been deeply divided. In transracial placements, diversity, difference and belonging are at the heart of developments in foster care and adoption. Yet, relatively little is currently known about how these issues impact on family practices and expe...

What is sociology to me? One of the reasons that sociology is an attractive discipline is that it allows us to ask and answer questions about the nature of society and people’s social experiences. It illuminates commonalities and differences between social groups. It is sociology that helps us to understand social inequalities of various kinds, the...

Sociologists’ Tales presents the narratives of 33 UK sociologists from different generations, many internationally recognised, writing about what sociology means to them. The different tales together reveal the changing context of sociology and how this has shaped the authors’ practice. Providing a valuable insight into why sociology is so fascinat...

To some extent, policy-relevant research on families and households addresses timeless questions designed to understand the processes that lead to particular social practices and outcomes for parents, children and professionals. Yet, the social contexts in which families and households negotiate their everyday practices are necessarily dynamic, as...

Most considerations of daughtering and mothering take for granted that the subjectivities of mothers and daughters are negotiated in contexts of physical proximity throughout daughters’ childhoods. Yet many mothers and daughters spend periods separated from each other, sometimes across national borders. Globally, an increasing number of children ex...

Gender inequalities in schools have implications for life chances, emotional well-being and educational policies and practices, but are apparently resistant to change. This paper employs Judith Butler’s conceptualisation of performativity in a study of young people and consumption to provide insights into gendered inequities. It argues that how the...

This article aims to contribute to the currently sparse literature on transnational families and gender. It focuses on the retrospective accounts of Caribbean-born adults who as children were serial migrants, joining their parents in the UK following a period of separation. It considers aspects of their relationships with their siblings and with th...

This paper takes up Avtar Brah's (1999) invitation to write back to the issues she raises in her mapping of the production of gendered, classed and racialised subjectivities in west London. It addresses two topics that, together, illuminate racialised and gendered interpellation and psychosocial processes. The paper is divided into two main section...

This roundtable discussion was the opening plenary panel of the 7th Gender and Education Association Conference, entitled ‘Regulation and Resistance’, held at the Institute of Education, London, 25–27 March 2009. The discussion centred on exploring the historical development and continuing relevance of intersectional and Black British feminist appr...

Intersektionalität ist ein ‚Bottom-up‘-Konzept, das aus der Beobachtung und Analyse alltäglicher Praktiken und sozialer Positionierungen und nicht ‚Top-down‘ von einer einzelnen Fachdisziplin oder von einem(r) TheoretikerIn entwickelt wurde. So beruhte das häufi g zitierte Manifest des schwarzen lesbischen Combahee River Collective von 1977 auf den...

This paper uses feminist work on diaspora and postcolonial theory to examine the ways in which women serial migrants, who as children left the Caribbean to join their parents in the UK, experienced racialised, gendered intersections in the ‘contact zone’ of school. Drawing on narrative accounts from women serial migrants the paper argues that schoo...

Abstract „Konsumkultur und Männlichkeiten: Überschneidungen von Gender und Peer-Kulturen in alltäglichen Schulroutinen“

The article examines the use of photo-elicitation methods in an ESRC-funded study of young consumers. Participants were asked to take photographs of consumer items that were significant to them. These were subsequently used in recorded interviews as a trigger to elicit the discussion of the relationship between consumer goods and identity. The anal...

Women who become mothers under the age of 20 are usually thought to he at greater risk of health and social problems. The authors argue that such a prevailing view has become institutionalised in the approaches of practitioners and researchers. They examine the ideological and factual bases of such an attitude towards teenage mothers and conclude t...

Recent studies of youth culture suggest that consumption is central to the construction of adolescent identities. Many of these studies have focused on the links between consumption, style and identity, and have concluded that style is a crucial means of sustaining and defining group boundaries. Drawing on a series of group interviews with young pe...

Intersectionality is an increasingly popular feminist approach to theorising and analysing the fact that everybody is simultaneously positioned in multiple social categories. It is, however, a much debated concept. This paper considers recent literature on intersectionality to discuss current debates on the concept. In particular, it considers whet...

When Rob was about 14‐years‐old, at an all male boarding school, he was so glad that he did not have a tiny penis like another boy who was called girl. He was popular because he was good at sport, missed his mum and dog terribly but never showed it (except a little to his mum and dog) and talked a lot about girls he fancied. These memories were tri...

ABSTRACT From the perspective of psychotherapists involved in working with young men, it is particularly interesting to consider ways in which boys may construct versions of their masculinities through an amalgam of social and personal discourses. Amongst the issues relating to young masculinities to arise systematically in research studies and in...

Reprinted from Youth, Citizenship and Social Change in a European Context, edited by John Bynner, Lynne Chisholm, and Andy Furlong. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1997. © Youth, Citizenship and Social Change in a European Context, edited by John Bynner, Lynne Chisholm, and Andy Furlong, 1997, Ashgate.

Focuses on the documentary issues significantly considered to the current study of teenagers and their identities. Interpersonal identity formation during early adolescence; Criticisms on feminist perspectives in its relevance for contemporary identity development research; Examination of the ego identity status paradigm.

Book synopsis: Boys do not read anymore, they squat for hours on end before computer games and become increasingly violent. So the usual stereotypes - but is it really so? As the phase between childhood and adulthood, adolescence, for boys and young men, their social conditions and changes, the milieus-specific manifestations as well as the chances...

The last decade has seen the growth of knowledge societies within neoliberal economies. As a result, learners are increasingly individualized and expected to be responsible for their learning. The main part of the article uses findings from a study of young masculinities to argue that boys are not free to choose to work toward qualifications but ar...

Critical pedagogy must engage with informal pedagogy because the results of schooling are not solely the effects of teaching and the hidden curriculum but also of the negotiations of the complex social relations in which students are involved. The notion of critical pedagogy is an attractive vision but little has been written on how to put the idea...

Résumé La présente contribution se base sur des publications et sur des données provenant de trois études empiriques, pour suggérer que les identités sexuées des jeunes occupent une place importante dans leur vie de tous les jours et influent par conséquent sur la transition vers l’âge adulte. Les recherches disponibles indiquent que la « relationa...

In the context of the second Gulf war and US and the British occupation of Iraq, many 'old' debates about the category 'woman' have assumed a new critical urgency. This paper revisits debates on intersectionality in order to show that they can shed new light on how we might approach some current issues. It first discusses the 19 th century contesta...

Book synopsis: Our world is an increasingly unstable place, but current changes offer new opportunities as well as new challenges. This key volume provides an accessible exploration of identity as a contemporary concern in everyday life and as a key concept in social science. Drawing on work from a range of disciplines and focusing on the key socia...

This paper is concerned with thinking through the cultural construction of personal identities whilst avoiding the classical social-individual division. Our starting point is the notion that there is no such thing as 'the individual', standing outside the social; however, there is an arena of personal subjectivity, even though this does not exist o...

This paper reports a qualitative analysis of data from a study of masculinity in 11–14 year old boys attending twelve London schools. Forty-five group discussions (N= 245) and two individual interviews (N= 78) were conducted. The findings indicate that boys' experiences of school led them to assume that interviews would expose them to ridicule and...

Research in ethnic relations in Great Britain - state of the art today ethnicity and labour migrants' mode of settlement politics and ethnic minorities minority ethnic groups in Birmingham blacks in British society - categorization and ethnicity meanings and mechanisms of action.

This study used a discursive approach to analysing doctors' and nurses' accounts of men's health in the context of general practice. The analysis worked intensively with interview material from a small sample of general practitioners and their nursing colleagues. We examine the contradictory discursive framework through which this sample made sense...

This paper discusses how the construction (pervasive in London schools) that masculinities and doing schoolwork are antithetical to each other has an impact on boys' subject positions. It considers the ways in which boys attending schools in London negotiate what they see as the contradictions involved in attempting to reconcile doing schoolwork wi...

In many countries, boys have come to public attention because they are gradually slipping behind girls in terms of the educational qualifications they achieve. Two decades ago, it was girls’ educational underperformance which was identified as problematic in many of these countries; currently, however, commentators are concerned that many boys are...

In contemporary society, the construction of gendered identities involves a narrowing of choices which takes place in the context of other, overlapping layers of identity construction, most notably and obviously those of class and, especially, ‘race’ (e.g. Back, 1995; Cohen, 1997). This is not, however, a process whereby pre-existing essential diff...