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This work examines the principles of proportionality and active case management that were introduced by the Civil Procedure Rules 1998 (the 'CPR'). The aim is to consider precisely what 'proportionality' means in a case management context, how it has been applied to date, and whether there is any need or scope for improvement. Consideration is given to proportionality as a general principle of law. This establishes a conceptual background against which to consider the principle in an English procedural context. After reviewing the introduction and development of both proportionality and active case management in English civil procedure, case management proportionality is placed against that background. In doing so, and in identifying similarities and differences, the principle is given greater definition. The heart of this work is a review of case law dealing with case management issues. This identifies inconsistencies in both how proportionality has been applied and the extent to which courts have taken on the management role required of them by the CPR. It also highlights the fact that litigants and their legal representatives retain a crucial role in ensuring that litigation proceeds in a proportionate manner, but that in many instances that role is not fulfilled. The review also provides a wealth of information that may assist in tackling these issues and inconsistencies. That information, together with points drawn from a review of management techniques in other common law jurisdictions, is taken forward into some proposals for the improvement of case management proportionality. Those proposals fall into two general categories: the publication of guidance and amendments to the CPR. The aim is to provide practical suggestions that may have a tangible impact on improving the consistency with which case management proportionality is applied, and thus improving the provision of access to proportionate justice.

Recent research focusing on young femininities has successfully argued that the 'post-feminist' success story of girls 'having it all' and 'in the conditions of their own making' is substantially misleading (Epstein and Ringrose 2006, Harris 2004). Nevertheless, the popular conception of girls' single-sex, private education as nothing less than a place of pleasure, privilege and perfection still persists. This thesis is an ethnographic exploration of the possibilities for identity construction for girls in this setting. Undertaken across two school years (Years Six and Seven), in one single-sex, selective, private school, this thesis examines the 'classed', 'gendered', 'sexualised', 'generational' and 'academic' discourses and discursive practices that constituted these girls' identities (as 'upper-middle class', 'girls', 'pupils' and 'children'). An eclectic theoretical approach has been adopted for the purposes of this study integrating feminist post-structural theory, Bourdieu's notions of capital, habitus and field, and the concept of 'social generationing' developed by proponents of the 'new' sociology of childhood (Alanen 2001). By exploring the significant and inter-related role that the body, academic achievement, sporting practices and age-based transitions played in the processes of identity constitution, the thesis will also explore the pleasures and pains articulated by these girls as they 'grew-up' and moved schools. In particular discourses of heterosexualised hyper-femininity featured strongly in the ways in which girls' identities were constructed in this setting -with many girls suggesting that they (even more than their co-educational counterparts) had to present themselves as outwardly 'heterosexual' due to the frequent (homo)sexualisation of close same-sex relationships, positionings that were intensified within a single-sex environment. Throughout the thesis the discourse of success and its relationship to femininity within the context of this elite single-sex setting is shown to be highly performative (Butler 1990), positioning girls in multiple, shifting and contradictory ways.

This thesis sought to gain critical insights into Algerian EFL (English as a Foreign Language) students' lived experiences, challenges and hopes of learning about research methodology and writing dissertations at master's level. Within Algerian universities, master's EFL students are expected to conduct a piece of independent research and write an MA dissertation demonstrating multidisciplinary contents and research skills which they acquire during both their BA and MA programmes. However, according to many scholarly local studies, master's students studying towards a degree in English Language Education encounter several challenges which hinder their dissertation progress despite previous research learning inputs. A decolonising methodology grounded in an Indigenous approach was adopted in order to avoid perpetuating 'otherness', but rather position participants as research collaborators and educators who can shape the research selection, design, analysis and production of knowledge. In fact, twenty-five students and eleven research methodology lecturers were invited to unpack their lived experiences and critically reflect upon assumptions, attitudes and paradigms shaping research methodology teaching and learning within and beyond classrooms. To reach such aim, participant-observation was used to gain an in-depth insight into the daily learning and teaching experiences of the participants, followed by a series of conversational interviews to explore into more depth the nuanced experiences of the knowledge-holders. The findings reveal a multi-dimensional picture. They show the multiple challenges which the students encountered over the course of their research learning and dissertation stage. Furthermore, these challenges were critically analysed based on both macro and micro levels revealing issues of teacher-student power dynamics, voice, the social and cultural reproduction within and beyond classrooms and the nature of the overall learning and teaching practices which were grounded in knowledge transmission. To analyse such major themes, Freire's Critical Pedagogy (CP) and other critical ideas advanced by some key luminaries such as Biesta, Bourdieu, or Giroux were utilised to provide a pluriversal critical analysis of the accounts. In light of the findings, the study demonstrates implications for lecturers and universities as well as recommendations for future research. The thesis also provides reflexive accounts regarding the tensions and intents of doing a critical and decolonising work.

This study articulates the journey, across more than six decades, of one black woman from birth through schooling to international school leadership. The purpose of the study is to open a debate about the challenges faced by women of colour in leadership roles in international schooling to be seen and heard. This is necessary firstly because it is only in the last decade that women of colour have started to be deliberately seen and heard in these roles, and secondly because the matter of colour and gender has largely been invisible in the decolonisation of leadership within international schooling. This act of invisibilisation undermines the perspectives of black women. It can therefore be argued that if such perspectives remain absent from the discourse, the decolonisation of leadership in international schooling cannot begin. This study introduces the reader to the role silence and invisibility play in international school leadership. Using the methodology of autoethnography, I am able to explore decolonisation through personal and professional narratives and show how these narratives uncover the role of silence and invisibility in a life led and attempts to illuminate the drive to decolonise international schools, from the perspective of one woman of colour. The narratives that are structured across the four phases that cover four distinct periods: 1. Colonial period and early life in Guiana (1956-1968) 2. United Kingdom: student and early career (1968-1981) 3. International career in schools and beyond (1981-2010) 4. Return to Europe and beyond (2010-2021).

Based on ethnographic research with Class V students (generally aged 9-11 years old), their teachers and parents, this thesis explores how gendered and classed identities are constructed in two MCD government elementary schools and one Kindergarten-Class XII (K-XII) private school in West Delhi, India. I consider how local, national and global understandings of gender, class and education shape and are shaped by these identities. Through this thesis, I highlight a conformity of aspirations, among both boys and girls, in the two government and one private school, in which education is viewed as a route achieve middle class lifestyles and careers. Across the schools, students’ identities are shaped within a middle-class culture of schooling in which students are expected to be on track to become individual, self-responsiblised, entrepreneurial subjects who are committed to the development of the nation. However, more importantly, schools encourage students to develop relational identities in which they pursue individual aspirations within the broader context of an emphasis on the prioritisation of family, the nation and religion. As a result, both a (neoliberal) middle class culture of schooling and- more importantly- (Hindu) religious nationalist notions of national identity play a central role in shaping the classed and gendered identities of students in these primary schools. Within the framework of Hindu cosmopolitanism, it is the Hindu, middle-class boy that emerges as the normative school child, against which both girls and the ‘poor’/working class are placed in deficit.

This project aimed to explore the educational experiences of ‘looked after children’ in one local authority in England. Young people, in the care of the state, have consistently lower educational achievements than their peers who live with their birth families. This situation is not unique to the UK context; it is replicated across Europe and North America. Aiming for an ethnographic study, the project generated much needed qualitative data in order to consider the educational experiences of children in care in Devon. To date much research in this area has focussed on statistical analysis of measured outcomes, and contributory factors which show a bleak picture of underachievement and poor adult outcomes. The design allowed for a more rounded picture of the full educational experience, not just in terms of achievement, but a view of wider educational experiences, giving an in-depth insight into the value that a looked after child places on ‘education’ in its widest sense. The results of this study add to the small body of research in this area which takes a more sociological view. The researcher worked with young people and older alumni of care, with participants’ ages ranging across five decades: 11 to 59, allowing an element of temporality to be considered in a relatively short term project. Experiences were gathered by means of qualitative interviews, focussed on the present with the young people, and using a life history lens when working with adults. The findings were analysed in such a way as to identify educational themes across generations, for those young people who are in the care of the local authority. The study found that for young people in local authority care education is perceived as occurring across their life experiences, a much wider definition than that which happens within formal ‘school’ environments. This broader view of education encompassed life skills, social skills, sporting skills and digital skills. Participants storied themselves as achievers within this wider view of education. The study showed that young people in care could be reflexive in their learning, they storied themselves as agentic, and exhibited a habitus which helped them to learn who they were, and to recognise their achievements. The study adds to current understanding about the way children in care learn. A visual model of ‘Conditions for Learning’ has been developed, based around the three theoretical constructs: reflexivity, agency, and habitus. This model has the potential to be applied to larger groups and other young people, to explore the conditions which support their learning. These findings provide important insights which could inform decision-making within both the care and education professions.

In the academic year 1996/1997, the number of women undergraduates enrolled on degree courses at UK universities for the first time in history surpassed the number of men (Dyhouse, 2006). Year-on-year, statistics continue to indicate that women outnumber men in higher education (HE). Feminist scholars have noted that, as a consequence, women’s participation in HE has in recent years been constructed as an unequivocal ‘success story’, with women widely regarded as both outnumbering and outperforming men (Dyhouse, 2006; Leathwood and Read, 2009). This thesis seeks to trouble the notion that women really are the educational ‘winners’ by virtue of their gains at the point of access by highlighting some enduring gender inequalities within HE – that is, women's uneven experiences of the cultures and structures of HE by gender, class, ethnicity and discipline. Using a qualitative case study design, this thesis seeks to explore the everyday ‘lived’ experience of a small number of women undergraduates studying either a science, technology, engineering or mathematical (STEM) discipline or arts/humanities discipline at one high-performing British university. Using a combination of focus group interviews and 14 longitudinal case studies of individual women (comprising participant-kept diaries, in-depth interviews and email interviews), this study seeks to provide a detailed understanding of women's lives both inside and outside of their course and their negotiations of academic achievement, disentangling some of the complex processes involved in identifying with, and specializing in a discipline over time. In this study, a ‘patchwork’ theoretical approach has been adopted in order to conceptualise women’s identities, incorporating insights from feminist post-structural theory, new material feminisms and Becky Francis’ (2012) concept of gender monoglossia and heteroglossia as re-worked from Bakhtin (1981, 1987). This study indicates that women's gender and academic identities are intricately interwoven and often complex, contradictory and precarious – with women differently taking up and discarding dominant discourses of the ‘ideal’ and ‘successful’ university student in line with their distinct classed, ethnic and ‘aged’ backgrounds. This study also highlights the role that academic disciplines play in shaping women’s lived university experience both inside and outside of formalized learning contexts. In particular, the data suggests that the discourses of academic success open to the women were uneven, and powerfully shaped by the science/arts divide. Yet this study also highlights how the high-performing university was constructed by many women as a positive and freeing space, offering up a variety of discourses of student success.

This thesis develops a better understanding of the lived experiences of NNES teachers, coming from diverse racial, cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and the complex negotiations and constructions of their professional identities against the prevalent NS fallacy in the Arab Gulf states. This study employs a Postcolonial theoretical framework. In order to unravel NNESTs’ perspectives and understand how they make sense of their experiences, this study adopts a life history approach. The results suggest that participants view nativeness as a fixed identity, dependant on elements, such as being born into a language and learning it in early childhood. The participants had both confidence and concern about their linguistic abilities, which indicated that their non-native identity resulted in complex situations for them to deal with. The findings also revealed that the participants managed to find ways in which to inhabit these non-native identities confidently and to construct themselves as effective teachers who did not have to be NSs by nature. The participants narrated that the issue of pronunciation and accent had a significant impact on their professional identities. NS norms in accent was seen as eliciting stereotyped judgements of NNESTS as the inferior Other, and resulting in hiring policies that were greatly skewed against NNESTs. The participants also believed that stereotyped notions about the superiority of education acquired from the Center privileged NESTs in employment and led to the devaluation of indigenous knowledge. The participants also spoke about encountering direct and indirect challenges, which made it difficult for them to position themselves as legitimate teachers of English. They also believed that perceptions about the superiority of the NS would be impossible to overcome in the near future since the language policy of the Gulf states was strongly intertwined with its economic and political interests. The study, therefore, provides recommendations for theory, practice, and policy.

Previous academic research which focused on girls’ behaviour tended to do so by looking at behaviour in terms of the extremes: by either exploring the perceptions and experiences of girls who appear to behave well, or alternatively, by researching girls who are categorised as extreme misbehavers, in institutions such as Pupil Referral Units. This ethnographic study was undertaken in a state secondary school setting over one academic year. The research centred on girls who were in Years 10 and 11, and is an exploration of the micro performances of their behaviour in the school. The ethnographic nature of the research allowed an in depth focus on girls’ micro performances in school. The feminist influenced thesis seeks to explore girls’ constructions of gender, how this is negotiated alongside their wider performances as pupils in the school and is subsequently recognised (by themselves and others), as performances of particular behaviour. The research draws on Goffman’s (1959) conceptualisation of performance and impression management, Butler (1990), theoretical notions of performativity and Foucault’s (19757:1978) theories of power, discourse and surveillance, to explore how gender and behaviour are being understood in this context. The study sought to explore the world from the girls’ viewpoint to understand the complexity of their experiences more fully. The research examines not only how the girls were positioned in terms of their perceived behaviour, but also how they responded to this positioning (their resistance and accommodation of these positions, and the shifting nature of these positionings across time) and how these were often perceived in relation to particular gendered expectations. The originality of the research stems from findings about issues of self-harm, panic attacks, authenticity, social media, middle class girls and fighting, which lie in the rich and detailed empirical data arising from the study. The significance of these findings draws these multiple threads together, giving insight into gender positioning and behaviour, and the study privileges the girls’ voices as they discuss their feelings and the effects of these issues on them, complicating previous research.

This study examined the narratives of three women music teachers’ professional practice, drawing on the research question: Through examining processes of subjectification: (a) How do mid-career women music teachers construct narratives of their professional and musical practice? (b) What are the implications for women music teachers’ professional and musical sustenance? Participants Hayley, Becky and Lynne, all with 12 years teaching experience, told stories of diverse musical participation within and beyond their schools and within a range of social groups and institutional settings. Taking a post-structural feminist theoretical perspective, these narratives were viewed as 'technologies of the female self' (Foucault, 1988; Tamboukou, 2008, 2010). The research question was shaped and answered through the concept of subjectifcation and considered how these women constructed a portrait of ‘self-in-practice.’ This questioned how they fashioned their personal pedagogical approach, how they created and projected a music departmental identity within the school, and how they conceptualised their musical and teaching selves. Data collection took place over a seven-month engagement with three participants and involved: a narrative/biographical interview; the compilation of a ‘memory box’ in which participants gathered artefacts related to the theme, ‘My music, my teaching’; and a follow-up conversational interview. In the final interview participants presented their artefacts and told stories related to their gendered experiences in music and teaching. Narratives showed the ‘woman music teacher’ is a site of struggle, where material roles within different discursive fields such as the home, the community as well as the school, pulled at other subjectivities. Through an analysis of processes of gendered subjectification, these women music teachers presented a complex narrative of their professional lives, within discursive fields of competing and complementary institutional discourses. While individually teachers conceptualised their musical and teaching subjectivities in personal, biographically-shaped ways, collectively they used similar discursive strategies to create a music subject department identity. They all told stories of their practice sustained by moments of ‘musical space’ and enabling others. Extra-curricular music provided valued moments of musical and aesthetic gratification and professional autonomy, functioning as a way to project the standing of the music subject department in the school and the local community, but this also added to an already burdensome workload. The education system in Northern Ireland is undergoing a prolonged yet stilted process of reform, and with the increase in the collaborative sharing of curriculum with other schools, it is likely that in the future secondary music teachers will be teaching in very different circumstances. This may be particularly challenging for established music teachers who have worked to create musical worlds in their subject departments drawing on personal and affective biographical resources. It is suggested that identity work with teachers’ narrative understandings of their self-in-practice, as a form of professional development, may allow space for teachers to imagine and negotiate alternative personal/professional identities, values and beliefs within new managerial and collaborative structures.

This study was an exploration of the professional identities of secondary school mid-career art educators through arts-based educational research [ABER]. The aim of this research was to gain understandings of mid-career art educators’ perceptions of their professional identities. Inspired by my personal experiences as an art educator, this study engaged other art educators to visualise their professional identities, as secondary mid-career art educators in England, and contribute new perspectives to the research community. Theoretically, this study is aligned with the writings of Dewey (1934, 1944), Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 1994). Deleuze and Guattari’s post-structural concept of the rhizome formed the basis for the development of the ideas associated with identity. As an assemblage, the rhizome is a complex system based on non-linear, reactionary growth patterns. The non-linear growth of the rhizome is facilitated by the activation of the in-between. As such, the rhizome connects to a view of identity as an unstable, flexible and fragmented entity that is in a constant state of becoming (Bauman, 2000). Dewey’s pragmatism was connected with Deleuzian post-structural theory through the writings of Semetsky (2006). Dewey (1944) and Greene’s (1973, 2003) writings associated with democratic education and artistic development connected these theoretical considerations with constructivism, the arts and education. Sachs’ (2003) writing on progressive and bureaucratic education provided a framework for the discussion of professionalism and professional identities. As a contribution to ABER this study was based on a/r/tography (Springgay et al., 2008) as a methodology and actively integrated image and text to the data collection and data analysis. Collage was used as the main arts-based method to develop responses from the participants and to visualise the participant data. This research asked mid-career art educators with busy lives and demanding occupations to consider who they are and express their views through art. These images of identities reflected the complex in-between-ness of professionalism in education.

It is widely accepted that Higher Education should provide students with a challenging experience. Research on threshold concepts provides a framework for exploring challenging content within a discipline and has contributed to understanding how to support students with conceptual difficulties. However, less is known about how individual students experience challenge and difficulty in their academic studies, in particular how they respond and feel when they become stuck. This study explores students’ experience of challenge, difficulty and stuckness, how they responded and managed challenges and any associated feelings. The study, carried out in a university in the Southwest of England, used a Qualitative Longitudinal Research design to follow 16 students through the second year of a degree for Allied Health Professionals. Data were collected using the semi-structured and email interview methods. Data were analysed longitudinally and cross-sectionally using a constant comparison process. The findings and discussion are presented using a ‘natural’ style which aims to capture the student journey over the academic year. The study found that some form of challenge, difficulty or stuckness was commonplace in the students’ educational experience. The value of challenges which create uncertainty in education is recognised, particularly where students are grappling with boundaries around knowledge. Variation in students’ experiences was partly explained by their ‘spiky profiles’ (influencing factors such as prior education and work experience) and partly by differences in factors relating to strategy use. The students were creative and resourceful in developing a range of specific and generic strategies in several areas: the use of time and space; the management of expectations and acceptance of feelings; and monitoring and reflection. The study adds to current understanding of stuckness through an examination of the liminal spaces students encountered. The discussion argues for a more nuanced and holistic approach to understanding students’ engagement with a complex cycle of challenges and strategy use, which creates a range of expectations, tensions, feelings and opportunities. It identifies implications for Higher Education practice and calls for an understanding of the impact and interconnectedness of factors influencing students. It stresses the importance of providing structures for students to explore how they learn and develop their academic practice, in addition to discipline specific knowledge and skills.

There has been an increasing amount of interest shown in vocational education and apprenticeships in the early twenty-first century by successive governments and other parties connected with occupational training. However, the English further education sector has been described as ‘chronically under-researched’ (James and Biesta, 2007: 7), particularly in regard to narrative accounts of college education and pedagogy (Richardson, 2007) and there has been very little empirical research on pathways into the plumbing profession. This study explored teachers’ and students’ perceptions and experiences of both full-time college courses and apprenticeships in plumbing in order to deepen understanding of these particular types of vocational preparation. It also endeavoured to investigate whether the two different routes into plumbing appeared fit for purpose. Within an interpretive framework, data were collected using two main research methods. Ethnographic snapshot observations were recorded during lessons in three further education colleges and at the workplaces of five plumbing students and formal 1:1 semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 tutors and 14 students. The data were thematically analysed. From the many issues relating to the opportunities offered and the challenges posed by the different pathways into plumbing that this study identified, three key findings emerged. First, there was strong evidence of a dislocation between theory and practical learning, both within the college setting for full-time students and between the workplace and college settings for apprenticed learners. This had implications for both the quality of learning and the learners’ levels of motivation. Second, the study revealed the importance of supervised work experience that was centred on long-term acquisition of knowledge and relationship development for apprentices with support from their college tutors and co-workers. Finally, the findings showed the importance of authentic assessment. It was found that simulations in college could not adequately replicate the experience of doing the job in the real world. Given the inherent risks and problems regularly encountered in the plumbing profession, this signalled significant health and safety implications.

The current thesis aims to explore issues regarding the development and support of second languages when two individuals from different linguistic backgrounds come together in romantic, intimate, and meaningful relationship. Based on a thorough conceptualisation of multilingual couplehood and its place within the interdisciplinary topic of intercultural relationships and marriage, this exploratory study seeks to highlight the issues pertaining to communication, and even more precisely, language, how this impacts individual and couple identity, and its significance in multilingual couple contexts The study and presentation of the research is built on the foundation of a relational philosophy of being and knowing, particularly in line with Gergen’s (2009) understanding of ‘being-in-relation’. Arguments are presented for a relational ontology and epistemology in hopes of identifying the merits of this perspective, and to promote what I consider a more fitting understanding of identity, relationships, and second language education. On this theoretical basis, the study adopts the qualitative methodological approach of narrative inquiry to investigate the meaning of language, relationship, and identity in the contexts of four self-identified multilingual couples currently living in the UK. Data was collected by means of three stage interviews: one with each individual of the couple and a final interview with both partners present. The audio-recorded interviews were transcribed and subjected to a two-stage narrative analysis. The findings have uncovered a wide variety of issues regarding intimate relationships and matters related to the development and support of second languages. While it is clear that each couple has differing attitudes and perceptions of multilingual couplehood, and ways of addressing them, there are some commonalities that have emerged, particularly in regards to the negotiation and sharing of languages, which has appeared to be a very complex issue in terms of the manifestation of language support and learning motivation within the couplehood. It has also been found that there are various ways in which partners develop and create their multilingual couple identities, which affects and also is affected by the linguistic and cultural identities of the individuals themselves. It is clear that second language development and support is a fundamentally relational process in the intimate context of couple relationships, as the detailed narratives of the couples and their linguistic journeys are highly revealing of what is clearly a complex, intricate, and relational ongoing process.

This thesis is an investigation into women’s experiences of repeatedly attempting to lose weight and maintain a weight they find acceptable, and the implications of this for health education. This was an interpretivist inquiry which generated data through narrative interviews. The data was analysed using three different strategies to enable deeper understanding of the participants’ experiences. To set the context health education resources relating to body weight, healthy eating and activity were collected from local community and health settings. A former local practice nurse was also interviewed about her role in assisting women with weight loss. A literature review revealed an emphasis on research and policy that focuses on the dangers of overweight and obesity, prioritising individual behaviour and energy-deficit approaches to losing weight. A qualitative method was used to collect data from a convenience sample of five women. Data from interviews and autobiographical writing were recorded, transcribed and analysed within a narrative analysis framework. Analysis of the findings using three interpretive lenses are presented first as re-storied accounts of the women’s narratives, and secondly thematic analysis addressing issues of control, pleasure and pain, and embodiment and alienation. Finally a relational analysis reveals the ways in which participants position themselves in relation to themselves, other characters and the interviewer in order to build their desired identities. The data shows that the participants had followed a wide and diverse range of diets, eating and exercise plans, none of which had been successful in both reducing their weight and maintaining it at a level they were happy with, even after repeated attempts. Whilst biomedical literature suggests a dividing line between pathological eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa/bulimia and normality, the disordered eating and emotional difficulties described by the participants supports the view that a broad range of eating and body-image problems may be more culturally normative than is generally recognised. Dieting and weight cycling were common experiences. The findings of the thesis suggest that contrary to current public policy, the views of these women who are unhappy with their body weight are complex, idiosyncratic and demonstrate resistance to health messages that target individual responsibility for weight management. Their views are developed from personal experiences - the findings suggest that these women are stigmatised. However, one response to this can be to stigmatise other people whom they see as more overweight than themselves. Normative femininity is increasingly centred on appearance and women who do not comply with the requirements risk alienation and pain. The identities that the women construct are relevant for health education but not taken into account when national policy and strategies are developed to address overweight and obesity. The risks to health of weight cycling are also not addressed by policy. The implications of the thesis are discussed in relation to the embodied experiences and gendered roles of women, the role of health education and its relationship with biomedicine.

This thesis explores an autoethnography which is written in the spirit of ubuntu, with and through others. Viewing this as an ethically responsible methodology for educational research conducted in and between the Global North and the Global South, this autoethnography foregrounds both self and other. The story of a practitioner- researcher unfolds around a move from disillusionment with the examinations factories of the English education system into exploring a human ethic of essential care (Boff, 2005) and a pedagogy of unconditional love (Andreotti, 2011) in a Brazilian non- government organisation. In these shifting contexts, the writer shares a journey of critical reflection (Brookfield, 1995; 2000) on ethical relationships in research and education, deconstructing the hegemonic assumptions underpinning her worldview. Borrowing insight from postmodern philosophy for education and actionable postcolonial theory in education, a journey of (un)learning unfolds as the author grapples with taken-for-granted assumptions about and in the Global South. The aims of the study emerge from a life lived forward (Muncey, 2005) through critical reflection on the ends of education and the role of the practitioner-researcher. As such, the nature of data collection becomes a process of data creation incorporating a rich tapestry of research conversations, images, sounds and other embodied memories. As ethical relations become a central focus of the author’s critical reflection, the author has sought to minimise her inflection on the data and in doing so includes many of the original contributions gifted to her throughout a two year period. Through critical self- scrutiny and reflection the author has been able to examine her own educational and cultural assumptions through a different lens in the Global South. The beauty of this autoethnography lies in exploring the kinds of intercultural spaces the author and others inhabit in twenty-first century research and classrooms.

At present there are approximately 13,000 registered speech and language therapists, the majority of these are female. The current ratio of male to female professionals in the United Kingdom stands at 3:100. A decade ago, the figure stood at 1.9% (Sheridan 1999), indicating that in recent years, the number of male professionals has been gradually rising, however, this figure remains low in comparison to other professions within the health and education sectors. Previous research has offered explanations for the lack of diversity in the profession (Greenwood et al 2006, McAllister and Neve 2005), citing poor remuneration, employment opportunities and knowledge base of the profession; this has resulted in few men choosing to enter the profession. In addition, it means that male students are likely to find themselves as the sole male in a cohort of students. The minority status that such a position entails is thought to lead to negative consequences, reduced motivation and feelings of isolation (Boyd and Hewlett 2001). This research examined the everyday lived experiences of being a male student speech and language therapist in order to develop an understanding of how they constructed their professional identity and to ascertain whether their gender identity influences this journey. Twelve male speech and language therapy students and early career professionals were interviewed with a semi-structured format through a variety of mediums. The participants shared their stories and experiences of being a speech and language therapy student in both the university and clinical settings. The participants shared their experiences of isolation and of dealing with the assumptions that other professionals made about their position within the speech and language therapy profession and these experiences were reported to have had an effect on both their training and their positioning within the wider profession.