Publications

This article reports on a study of how young people in a post-industrial UK town reflect on their sense of health, place and identity. Drawing on 56 qualitative interviews with 14–15 year olds, we explore how young people negotiate public space and how public lighting and darkness affect interactions with their surroundings. The young people…

This paper draws on materialist feminist theories to rethink relationships between girls’ bodies and agency. New feminist onto-epistemologies redefine agency as ‘becomings’ that dynamically emerge through assemblages comprising moving bodies, material, mechanical, organic, virtual, affective and less-than-conscious elements. Vignettes from a multi-modal, ethnographic study conducted over three years are used to demonstrate how place influenced…

The south Wales’ valleys had been at the centre of the Industrial Revolution in the 1920s and so at the cutting edge of skilled practices developed in the mining and steel industries. Men came to these remote and typologically impressive places, settled, created communities, brought up families and passed down their skills. The last working…

During an ethnographic research project exploring young people’s perceptions of living in a post-industrial semi-rural place, boys aged 13/14 years revealed their semi-clandestine motorbiking activities across mountains trails. It was found that riding motorbikes and fixing engines were potential resources for young boys’ transitions into adult working-class masculinity and sources of competence, pride and enjoyment…

Learning English in Taiwan has become a primary economic concern as industries have recognized the need to compete within global markets in which trade is predominantly carried out in English. The growth in demand for, and supply of, English language education in school settings is escalating. The National Curriculum of Primary and Secondary Schools (Grades…

Following the corporeal turn in social theory, this paper explores how the body is implicated in pedagogic practice and leaning. Focusing on the body has usually been recognised as part of the regulative rather than instructional discourse in schools. Work has begun to redress the mind–body imbalance through the ‘corporeal device’ developed from Bernstein’s ‘pedagogic…

This chapter can be located in the growing literature on relational approaches to human development. It argues that school curricula provide cultural resources that act as staging posts for children and young people en route to adulthood. Learning involves demonstrating legitimate practices that are congruent with the codes (Bernstein, 1996) of the subject discipline. Subject disciplines can…

Qualitative mobile methods are heralded as innovative ways to involve participants, disrupting the power dynamics of the static interview and allowing the production of a co-constructed knowledge, between the researcher, the participant and the landscape. Much of this practice is informed by an understanding of place as something fluid, mutually produced and constructed. Previously we…

Issue 13 of WISERD’s Qualitative Researcher contains: Revisiting innovation in qualitative research – Amanda Coffey Stripping out the social: Innovation and reduction in contemporary qualitative methods – William Housley and Robin James Smith Visual methods: Innovation, decoration or distractions? – Max Travers Computer assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS): A personal view – Kate Ness…

The paper explores the ways girls appropriate gender through actions, gesture and talk to achieve things in primary school science classrooms. It draws on socio-cultural approaches to show that when everyday classroom practices are viewed from multiple planes of analysis, historical, institutional and in the micro dynamics of classroom interaction, gender comes into view in…