Helen Lucey

• University of Bath

This article places identification at the centre of a discussion about sisters, families, shaky class locations, and resistance and conformity towards schooling. Drawing on ideas from group psychology, and placing sisters centre stage, it seeks to shed light on some of the push and pull of unconscious processes and flows of affect across and betwee...

Transformations in local secondary schools markets in the UK have not simply been accomplished at a structural and policy level: social changes are crosscut by fiction and fantasy that resonate with and implicate subjects at the level of the personal. Drawing on a study of children's transitions to secondary school, we analyse the emotional process...

In this chapter we explore some of the ways in which power is experienced within the intersubjective relations between the doctoral research student and her supervisor(s). Taking a case-study approach, we will address some of the gaps in current accounts of those relationships and their place in the construction of academic subjectivities. Rather t...

Sibling Identity and Relationships explores the special place that siblings occupy in the lives of children and young people, providing new insights into sibling identity and relationships. Drawing on social constructionist and psychodynamic perspectives, it discusses who constitutes a sibling, emotional connections and separations, conflict and ag...

Using the theoretical framework of social capital, this paper explores the resources and support children and young people derive from their siblings. A prevailing representation of siblings as passive dependents competing for limited reserves of family social capital is undermined by our empirical study of being and having a brother or sister. Dra...

In this article, originally submitted to B J S E‘s Research Section, Chris Abbott of King's College, London, and Helen Lucey of the Open University report on the outcomes of a survey of special schools in England. The aim of the research, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, was to understand the nature and extent of symbol use for communication and...

The transition to secondary school is rarely conceptualised as an important influence in maintaining and contributing to wider processes of social exclusion in the inner city. This article argues that the seeds of social exclusion are sown in under-resourced, struggling inner-city schooling, and their germination is found in class practices, partic...

Drawing on a longitudinal study of middle-class and working-class girls growing up, this article focuses on those few working-class young women who managed to get to university and face the prospect of a 'professional' career. The authors examine the concept of 'hybridity' as it is used to understand shifts in the constitution of contemporary femin...

Published without an abstract.

This paper attempts to retheorize school `choice'; to begin to unpack dominant contemporary misconceptions through an examination of the `choices' available to 454 inner city 10 and 11 year-olds engaging in the process of primary-secondary school transfer in England. The prevalent focus within educational theorizing on `choice' as a form of agency...

This paper explores the experiences of children living on inner London council estates. Prevalent discourses of social exclusion position such children as both ‘at risk’ and a risk to others. They are portrayed as a mixture of deviant delinquent and passive victim. In contrast, this research study found that children have a reflexive awareness of t...

In the current performance and "excellence" culture that has so bewitched politicians and beset educators, there are no discourses available to voice and to make sense of the anxieties that consistently arise for children who are pushed towards ever-higher performance. Drawing on the findings from a study of children"s transitions from primary to s...

This reader samples a wide range of modern theological, religious and philosophical discussion on the problem of evil, understood both in terms of the practical or spiritual problem of coping with evil, and the theological problem of explaining its presence in God’s world.

Throughout the de-industrialised world, huge transformations are taking place in the social fabric, leaving few lives untouched. The shift from a manufacturing base to service and communications industries is accompanied by the decreased participation of men and the increased number of women in the labour market. Girls growing up today face huge ch...

There has been a tendency in the sociology of education to stress the anxieties and fears that are so potently aroused in relation to the transition to secondary school. While this work is extremely important we suggest that an emphasis on fear and anxiety cannot get to grips with the very real sense of excited anticipation with which the children'...

Research into school choice has focused primarily on parental perspectives. In contrast, this study directly explores children's experiences as they are going through the secondary school choice process in two inner London primary schools. While there were important commonalities in children's experience, in this paper we have concentrated on the d...

This Working Paper considers the issue of who is a sister and a brother? At first sight this may seem like a question with a simple answer – siblings are related by biology, through their parents, or at least one parent. Indeed, this technical fact is often an assumption underpinning statistics that are collected on children and their families, and...