ABSTRACT This mixed methods study from 2017 to 2018 documents the living conditions and Czech Roma mothers’ experiences of the education system. Based on a comparative analysis of quantitative survey data and in-depth biographical interviews, we focus on the mothers’ reflections of macro, meso and microsystem level primary education conditions and experiences. We especially draw upon racially/ethnically framed oppression and its interrelation with modes of communication between education facilities and families, as well as educational aspirations. The negative schooling experiences of Roma mothers and their children appear to oscillate at the intersections of race, ethnicity and social class. Our findings indicate the development of resilience and coping strategies, the overriding feature of which is a mode of family damage control and prevention rather than the pursuit of ambitious prospects when assisting children through the education process. At the same time, when seeking support, Czech Roma mothers preferably turn to informal education and the private sphere, rather than the formal education sphere.

ABSTRACT This paper explores Greek Roma mothers’ aspirations and expectations regarding the education of their children, analysing responses regarding three core issues: the value they ascribe to education, their educational aspirations, and their perceived resources for supporting their children’s education. The analysis is based on 27 in-depth interviews with Greek Roma mothers of 3–6 or 9–11 years-old children living in the broader Athens metropolitan area. The Super and Harkness’ theoretical framework of developmental niche guided the study. Thematic analysis according to Braun and Clark was employed for data analysis. Consistent with previous research, this study showed that Greek Roma mothers recognised the importance of school attendance and the positive effect it could have on their children’s lives in terms of upward social mobility and improvement in their standard of living. Their educational aspirations were high, and the role of poverty was a major factor in shaping attitudes towards schooling. Understanding their values and beliefs provides a more thorough perspective on designing social-educational interventions with the use of more culturally appropriate approaches.

ABSTRACT Academics’ career trajectories follow diverse paths, and understanding them is challenging. Animal metaphors, notably the contrast between hedgehogs and foxes, have helped to distinguish patterns but need reappraisal as universities change. Reflecting on prominent sociologists’ careers, the argument is developed that academic trajectories differ according to whether work is blue skies or applied, and how it relates to innovation and consolidation. Four types of academic animals are identified: bears, beavers, jackdaws and eagles. Ann Oakley’s career is used to illustrate how individuals’ trajectories may move between these. For researchers anticipating how their academic futures may unfold, role models framed in these terms offer alternative scenarios.

ABSTRACT Since the 1980s, the digital revolution has been both a negative and positive force. Within a few weeks of the Covid-19 outbreak, lockdown accelerated the adoption of digital solutions at an unprecedented pace, creating unforeseen opportunities for scaling up alternative approaches to social and economic life. But it also brought digital risks and threats that placed new demands on policymakers. This article assembles evidence from different areas of social science expertise about the impacts of Covid-19 in digitised societies and policy responses. The authors show how the pandemic supported changes in data collection techniques and dissemination practices for official statistics, and how seemingly insuperable obstacles to the implementation of e-health treatments were largely overcome. They demonstrate how the ethics of artificial intelligence became a primary concern for government legislation at national and international levels, and how the features enabling smart cities to act as drivers of productivity did not necessarily give them an advantage during the pandemic. At the micro-level, families are shown to have become ‘digital by default’, as children were exposed to online risks and opportunities. Globally, the spread of the pandemic provided a fertile ground for cybercrime, while digital disinformation and influencing risked becoming normalised and domesticated.

ABSTRACT The qualifications that British children gain at school are strong determinants of their futures in both education and the labour market. Studies of the relationship between parental social class and children’s outcomes in school qualifications report the general finding that pupils from families in less advantaged social classes on average have poorer outcomes. This paper investigates social class inequalities in Scottish school qualifications. Scottish data provide an interesting case study because Scotland has its own set of school qualifications and has a widespread system of comprehensive secondary schools that do not select children through academic testing. This paper is innovative because it analyses new linked administrative data on individual pupils from the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) with parental information from the Scottish Longitudinal Study (SLS). Standard Grades were the main qualifications undertaken by Scottish pupils at the end of compulsory schooling. We present multivariate analysis of pupils’ overall school Standard Grade scores. We find an overall negative relationship between parental social class and children’s outcomes in Scottish school qualifications. Pupils from families in less advantaged social classes, on average, have lower overall Standard Grade scores. A more nuanced finding that emerges from the analyses is that there is a cleft between the Standard Grade scores of children from families in the white and the blue collar classes. We conjecture that the complexity of parents jobs, especially in the more advantaged social classes, fosters forms of family and home life that are conducive to children having more favourable outcomes in school qualifications. Standard Grades have been replaced by the ‘National’ qualifications framework. Changes in the structure and content of the curriculum and assessment could affect the pattern of parental social class inequalities. Further detailed empirical analyses of social class inequalities in outcomes in Scottish school qualifications is therefore imperative.

ABSTRACT Teachers play an important role in the development of human capital yet the rate of teacher attrition continues to be a problem in Ghana. The research seeks to explore the extent to which ease of attrition from the teaching profession influences the choice of the teaching profession as a career by student teachers. This study adopted a quantitative research design and deployed a multi-stage sampling strategy. The sample size was 864. Deploying the ordered-logistic regression model, the study finds that the ease of attrition from the teaching profession does not influence the choice of the teaching profession as a career.

ABSTRACT This paper explores the shifting ecological proximities of urban-human-animal relations in Perth via a story of Carnaby’s Black Cockatoos, urban planning and extinction. The story is framed around a challenge and a provocation. The challenge, calls for a deeper consideration of urban planning in the shadow of extinction. Such a consideration involves two entangled elements: a deepening ethical and practical engagement with diverse urban lifeforms and temporalities; and an exploration of the more-than-human communities that emerge, are threatened or made possible in extinction’s shadows. The provocation, involves asking questions about what kinds of responses to extinction in urban contexts are desirable, or even possible? The paper experiments with the concept of planning in and with ‘ethical time’ as one way of thinking about how commitments to urban nature and urban justice might be re-imagined in a time of mass extinction. With the help of Carnaby’s Black Cockatoos, I argue that planning multispecies cities requires re-setting coordinates for ethical decision-making, coordinates that are embedded in the rhythms, knots and relations of ecological time and in the responsibilities involved with living in more-than-human urban communities of difference.

ABSTRACT Urban infrastructures such as wastewater services are essential to the functioning of cities. Through waste work, sewage gets transformed and revalued. Non-humans are potentially unruly agents in the transformation of “dirty” sewage into biogas, a “clean” energy resource in environmental terms. But these values are not given or applied in any simple sense. What goes on under the surface, beneath the street or inside a pile of dirt is the invaluable work that constitutes a city’s multispecies waste management. The article argues that rats, worms and microbes perform labour in the urban wastewater economy, as they eat, digest and breed. This article investigates the role of these non-human waste workers and the cultural and economic values they produce in the intersections between the socio-technical infrastructures where the urban and the animal meet. The article makes use of “trash-tracing” as a method and follows the multiple steps taken in the chain of sewage management in the city of Gävle, Sweden. It contributes new knowledge on the waste ecologies of cities by paying close attention to shifting and paradoxical valuations of wastewater, as it is configured through nonhuman work.

ABSTRACTBrexit presents significant challenges and uncertainties for the future governance of policy areas currently managed by the EU. This is especially the case with fisheries policy. The UK government has stated an ambition for post-Brexit fisheries policy to be based on sustainability and the use of scientific evidence. Yet how these aims will be achieved and formalised into post-Brexit governance structures remains to be seen. This article investigates fisheries governance arrangements in three non-EU countries: Iceland, Norway and the Faroe Islands. These cases offer lessons for the UK on governance and institutional arrangements for fisheries post-Brexit. However, none of these cases account for devolution and division of fisheries policy competences across multiple territories. This places significant limits on the potential for direct policy transfer from these countries to the UK.