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Employment of newly arrived migrants can be seen as one of the key aspects to managing both national labour market needs and the inclusion of individuals in both work and society. In Sweden, efforts to manage recent migration – for example, from Syria – has resulted in various labour market 'fast tracks' that aim to facilitate labour market integration. In this article, we consider how individual migrants attempt to negotiate the new national demands of professional identity to become teachers in Sweden by following a Swedish introduction course to teaching. The study builds on qualitative interviews and fieldwork following two different cohorts of students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studying biology entails negotiating knowledges, identities, and what paths, more or less well‐trodden, to follow. Knowledges, identities, and paths within the very practices of science are fundamentally gendered and it is, therefore, critical to recognize when exploring students' learning and participation in natural sciences. Even though students' numbers in undergraduate Higher Education Biology are female‐biased, it does not mean that gendered processes are absent. In this study, we focus on early undergraduate biology students' identity work at a Swedish university, analyzing 55 study motivation texts discursively. Embedded in a Figured Worlds framework, we explore how students imagined and authored themselves in(to) the Figured World of Higher Education Biology along two imagined identity trajectories, the Straight Biology Path and the Backpacking Biology Path. While the first and numerically dominant imagined trajectory entails typical stories of a scientific child striving toward a research career, the latter recognizes broad interests and biology competences to be collected in a backpack for transdisciplinary use. Students imagining the Backpacking Biology Path authored themselves in relation to and explicitly not as having a linear trajectory, which positions the Straight Biology Path as dominant and culturally recognized. Our findings reveal gendered myths about science practices present in Higher Education Biology, yet also contested through alternative imaginaries. We, thereby, show that it is crucial for Higher Biology and Science Education to be aware of how students imagine their trajectories and how they negotiate masculine norms of science to create spaces for diverse and alternative identity trajectories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents and analyzes experiences of involuntary childlessness at work and, through that, attempts to increase our understanding of emotional and silenced experiences in organizations. While primarily being an exploratory study with a purpose to get an initial glimpse into working life through involuntary childless individuals' point of view, this article also engages with Arlie Hochschild's (1979, 1983) conceptualization of emotion work to analyze experiences of involuntary childlessness at work. The empirical data used in this paper are mainly collected through an anonymous diary studies method in Finland, and thematically presented in this article in three segments where three categories of emotion work related to involuntary childlessness are analyzed and discussed. In addition to offering an initial glimpse of involuntary childlessness at work, this paper hence contributes with a demonstration and analysis of the multifaceted emotion work related to these experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the focus on events and outcomes shaping most of the existing family business research on intra-family succession, the subtleties of the incumbent–successor relationship and the dynamic nature of succession as a process of becoming is somewhat neglected. In particular, we have limited understanding of how successor identities are constructed as legitimate between incumbent and successor during father–daughter succession. This article addresses this gap in understanding by exploring how the daughter successor engages in identity work with the father incumbent during the process of succession and the role of father–daughter gendered relations in shaping her successor identity. Using a two-stage research design strategy, we draw upon empirical evidence derived from 14 individual and joint semi-structured interviews to present a narrative analysis of five father–daughter dyads. In so doing, we unveil how the daughter's successor identity was co-constructed as legitimate and how father–daughter gendered relations influenced this process. Although daughters rely on certain father–daughter relations (preparation, endorsement and osmotic credibility) for legitimacy, they also need to develop independently of their father to heighten their own visibility and establish credibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on an autoethnographic study of early career researchers' field research experiences, we show how individuals deal with moments of discrimination that present identity threats. This is accomplished through participating in the construction of a shared holding environment to provide emotional shelter and resources for resultant identity work. We show how they collectively develop anticipatory responses to future identity threats and inadvertently how this allows the effects of discrimination to be both unchallenged and amplified. We draw implications for identity work theory, adding to current understandings of identity threats, tensions, and challenges and the dynamics through which these are addressed, avoided, or worked around, as well as the shadow side of such activities. We also offer practical implications about the business schools' role in nurturing early career researchers' identity work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how senior executives learn (not) to be different in Action Learning Set spaces (ALSS) as part of a business school Executive Education programme. We take a relational social constructionist approach in an empirical study and analyse senior executives' narratives. This illuminates how executives co-construct action learning set spaces of openness, honesty, confidentiality and challenge and engage in relational processes of learning, vulnerability and identity work. In doing so executives learn to be different in relation to dominant discourses and norms of what it means to be a leader or manager which is personified through claims of vulnerability in the education context. Executives make sense of and work through learning to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, practising learning over time in a 'safe enough' space. We offer insights into identity work spaces, as leaders reconceptualise vulnerability as positive and as strength and how claiming vulnerability can defuse the power of fear and negative connotations often associated with vulnerability. With agency, executives express feeling better equipped to decide how and when to be different (vulnerability) or not be different (invulnerability) in their organisations. Practically we extend consciousness to the value of vulnerability for leader and manager identity and learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within organizations there is reciprocal interplay between identity construction and learning. Processes of learning are enabled and constrained by identity practices; concomitantly, the possibilities for learning are shaped by the identity positions available to individuals. There is a dynamic between the impositions of organizations and people's freedom to shape their identities and learning plays a crucial role in this. Our purpose in this special issue is to contribute to the understanding of the intersection of identity work and learning as a response to experiences of being different. Experiences of difference include moving into a new role, encountering a disjuncture with others while in a role or a difference in broader life which is reacted to as if it were a problem in an organizational setting. Being different produces a variety of challenges and the papers in this special issue trace how people cope with vulnerabilities, develop resilience and often collaborate in their learning. We focus on how people reflect on their own identity and learn and how, by learning together with people who have similar experiences, micro-communities can support, develop and enhance their insight and identity-positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent literature on hybridity has provided useful insights into how professionals have responded to changing institutional logics. Our focus is on how shifting logics have shaped senior medical professionals' identity motives and identity work in a qualitative study of hospital consultants in the United Kingdom's National Health Service. We found a binary divide between a large category of traditionalist doctors who reject shifting logics, and a much smaller category of incorporated consultants who broadly accept shifting logics and advocate change, with little evidence of significant ambivalence or temporary identity 'fixes' associated with liminality. By developing a new inductively generated framework, we show how the identity motives and identity work of these two categories of doctors differ significantly. We explore the underlying causes of these differences, and the implications they hold for theory and practice in medical professionalism, medical professional leadership and healthcare reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotions have always been invested in politics. Politicians and politically biased public intellectuals manage citizens' emotions for various purposes: to alienate them from the rival political camp and to make them participate in elections or in politics in general. Ressentiment is an affective style of great political potential and it is present throughout democratic European societies. By analysing the discourses of the culture war between the political camps in Hungary since 2018, this article presents the components, drivers, mechanisms, and some typical outcomes of ressentiment on the levels of the individual and the political communities. It argues that in political communication both political sides are trying to appeal to the citizens' ressentiment. Both camps use communicative means to incite, channel, and reorient ressentiment by, e.g., scapegoating, identity work, and transvaluation to attract citizens, stabilize their own support, and nudge followers towards specific political activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This project explores the post-separation needs of Chinese women in Hong Kong who have left their abusive partners and how they might be addressed The project aims to provide insights for improving the local domestic violence service, whose main focus is on crisis intervention. Cooperative Grounded Inquiry (CGI) was developed as a novel participatory action research methodology (PAR) for fostering collaboration between social work practitioner-researchers and women service users. Its purpose is to generate useful knowledge and provide support for abused women and their children. The project involved 7 Hong Kong Chinese women as participant-researchers. The inquiry group met at least once a week for 6 months to explore the post-separation needs of the women and their children, and to implement and evaluate the practices/services developed through this project together in a participatory manner. Women participants identified the problems of doing either 'victim' or 'survivor' that respectively underpin the 'safeguarding' and the 'empowerment' models; and they developed practices for 'doing being oneself' beyond the victim-survivor dichotomy. This paper presents the changing self-narratives of women participants over the research project, from victimhood to survivorhood and from survivorhood to survivor-becoming. These narratives demonstrate the importance of safeguarding women's space for undertaking symbolic action and of empowering them through using volcabulary that can help them describe themselves/their experiences differently from mainstream discourses. Women's narratives highlight the existing 'planetary difference' between the safeguarding model, which treats women as helpless and vulnerable and in need of external support, and the empowerment model which treats them as powerful, resilient and with resources and solutions to problems. The study transcends the victim-survivor dichotomy and service models by proposing an alternative relational model that emphasises power sharing in making sense of abusive experiences and finding one's own voice in a supportive community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The stories we tell about our origins can shape how we think and act – helping us make sense of and communicate who we have "become" over time. To better understand the role that origin stories play in individuals' work lives, we explore how 92 men and women leaders make sense of "becoming" a leader (origin stories) and "doing" leadership (enactment stories). We find that, despite the uniqueness of their experiences, their narratives converge around four frames, being, engaging, performing, and accepting, through which they understand, articulate, and enact their leader identities. We theorize that these narrative frames serve as sensemaking and identity work devices which allow them to create temporal coherence, validate their leader identity claims, and offer them behavioral scripts. Our findings also unearth key gender differences in the use of these frames, in that men used the performing frame more often and women tended toward the engaging frame. These findings provide novel insights into the ways in which the gendered context of leadership becomes embedded in leaders' understandings of who they are and what they intend to do in their roles. We discuss the theoretical implications of our findings on scholarly conversations around identity, leadership, and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transpeople in India forge identities at the confluence of contradictory social forces. Interviews conducted in the state of Kerala suggest that the experience of transphobic stigma results in self‐employed transpeople being abjectified. Social abjectification, in turn, triggers their identity work within liminal social spaces located between the everyday lifeworld and postcolonial legal institutions. Through this work, the participants in this study navigated the contradictions between two identity‐constituting external structures: culture and law. Culture is a source of identity threat, but it also supplies a socially legitimated identity template—the hijra—used in the vital self‐formative work of mirroring and witnessing. Similarly, trans‐supportive social policies and laws provide institutional scaffolding for identities. Yet, despite the agential nature of the participants' identity work, the inherent limitations of the law and the vulnerability of embodiment render them susceptible to the ongoing threat posed by the transphobia emanating from ambient cultural norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An organization's identity, as defined by its members, must be aligned with its collective identity prescribed by institutions. This alignment is broken when an institutional change threatens the collective identity and jeopardizes the existence of a group of organizations. They then undertake to carry out identity work, both internal and external, in order to establish a new alignment. Based on a single case study, this research article explores the interplay between the two forms of identity work: internal and external. The findings of this study reveal that introspective internal identity work feeds the work to repair the collective identity with traditional values that have been rediscovered thanks to a reflexive examination of self by the organization. By internal extrospection identity work, the external identity repair work is fed with new values that the organization internalizes and enacts in its practices. Based on these findings, this article puts forward new theoretical propositions, as well as a model of the interplay between internal and external identity work that aims to realign the organization's identity with that of the collective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from 77 supervisors in seven hospitals across the U.S. that participated in a national workforce development program for low-wage frontline workers, we explain how supervisors justified and reproduced social inequalities by accepting culture of poverty and neoliberal discourses and how supervisors used these discourses to resolve identity-work dilemmas. We demonstrate how supervisors engaged in identity talk that justified deprivation for workers and shielded management from blame. We discuss how supervisors subtly invoked class, race, and gender stereotypes—and thus reproduced ideologies supportive of structural inequalities—as they crafted accounts that drew attention away from economic and organizational problems and focused on the victims. This research extends the literature on blame attribution, explained here as victim-blaming in disguise, which subsequently shaped supervisors' perceptions of their staff, defined workers' opportunities, and inadvertently, reproduced inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Culturally different professionals often encounter stigma as they negotiate work lives. Professionals commonly seek to repair stigmatized identities by constructing more positive and relatively coherent self-views. This study draws on interview, observation and diary data from Romanian professionals in the UK, in order to understand how they construct their identities when faced with ethno-cultural stigma. We find that these professionals engage in counterintuitive identity responses which consist of simultaneously denying and acknowledging personal stigmatization (doublethink), and evading engagement with the stigmatized identity (dodging). Unlike the restorative identity work highlighted by previous studies, these atypical responses require less effort, provide less coherence and do not attempt to restore the blemished ethno-cultural identity. Our analyses further indicate that being professional and being White confer on individuals privileges that sustain doublethink and dodging. We contribute to scholarship by underscoring the need to consider both stigmatized and privileged identities when investigating reactions to stigma. We also reflect on the practical implications for organizations of what it means for stigmatized individuals to deny stigmatization or to dodge engagement with stigma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how leaders construct 'loss' identity narratives which defuse the scope for external attack and sustain self-meanings. We draw on a sample of 31 United Kingdom business school deans, who although often depicted as multi-talented, high-status achievers, are also targets for criticism and have high rates of turnover. Our study makes two principal contributions. First, we argue that leaders may employ a specific pattern of identity work involving talk about loss to construct identities that bolster their leadership by presenting them as making sacrifices for their institutions. Losses are ubiquitous and malleable discursive resources that constitute both identity threats and opportunities for constructing preferred identities. Second, we deepen understanding of 'preferred identities', i.e. normative self-narratives that specify who people want to be, and to be seen to be, and which serve self-meaning and impression management functions. Preferred identities, though, do not necessarily serve people's interests, and deans tied themselves to demanding requirements by authoring themselves as research credible, scrupulously moral, hard-working professionals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines career transitions in creative industries that involve geographical relocation from large metropolitan creative cities to small, remote and marginal urbanities. Drawing on 31 in-depth interviews with freelancers who have relocated to peripheral Southern European locales, the article explores the ways in which creative workers make sense of and justify their career transitions away from the metropolis, while reassessing reflexively over their lifespan the shifting meaning of their career success. We propose the adoption of Nussbaum's capability approach in the study of such career transitions as a means of strengthening current theorizing about the role played by urban contexts in individual conceptualizations of career success and meaningful professional identities. Applying this analytical lens, we tease out the ways in which our informants perceived the influence exerted by different urban contexts on their capacity to enact a set of capabilities for the attainment of well-being and quality of life at different stages in their careers while striving to preserve a stable professional identity as creative workers. We argue that a good life evaluation, which includes a reflexive and comprehensive reassessment of the capabilities to live life well while pursuing a creative career, underlies creative workers' shifting interpretations of geographical career transition that contravene conventional measures of career upward mobility, development and growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Athletes’ identity development upon retirement from elite sport was examined through a model of self-reformation that integrates and builds on the theoretical underpinnings of identity development and liminality, while advancing seven propositions and supporting conceptual conjectures using findings from research on athletes’ transition out of sport. As some elite athletes lose a salient athletic identity upon retiring from sport, they experience an identity crisis and enter the transition rites feeling in between their former athletic identity and future identity post-sport life, during which a temporary identity moratorium status is needed for identity growth. Given the developmental challenges encountered in moratorium and psychosocial processes necessary to establish a new, fulfilling identity for life after elite sport, we identified key conditions, triggers, and processes that advance how a journey of identity growth paradox experienced during liminality serves as a catalyst toward identity achievement. Elite athletes must be encouraged to persevere in this challenging identity search and delay commitments for as long as it is necessary to achieve identity growth despite experiencing uncomfortable feelings of confusion, void, and ambiguity during the liminal phase. Reforming into an achieved identity for life after elite sport would corroborate the successful navigation of transition, as elite athletes evolved into a synthesized sense of self by cementing, through a negotiated adaptation pathway, constructed identity commitments that will provide new beginnings and meaningful directions to their life after elite sport.

This article considers how personal name changes are situated within their sociological context in the United States. Reviewing both popular and scholarly texts on names and name changes, I draw on recent work on identity and narrative by Oriana to argue that voluntary personal name changes are made in relation to a sense of narrative elasticity oridentity elasticity, and act symbolically to make a shifting identity or self-narrative manifest in the social context. Drawing out these themes through an exploration of name changes for ethnic self-definition or religious purposes, I conclude with a reflection on the unstable social balance between an individual’s interest in self-expression and society’s priority on the stable identification of persons within a given social sphere.

Athletes' identity development upon retirement from elite sport was examined through a model of self-reformation that integrates and builds on the theoretical underpinnings of identity development and liminality, while advancing seven propositions and supporting conceptual conjectures using findings from research on athletes' transition out of sport. As some elite athletes lose a salient athletic identity upon retiring from sport, they experience an identity crisis and enter the transition rites feeling in between their former athletic identity and future identity post-sport life, during which a temporary identity moratorium status is needed for identity growth. Given the developmental challenges encountered in moratorium and psychosocial processes necessary to establish a new, fulfilling identity for life after elite sport, we identified key conditions, triggers, and processes that advance how a journey of identity growth paradox experienced during liminality serves as a catalyst toward identity achievement. Elite athletes must be encouraged to persevere in this challenging identity search and delay commitments for as long as it is necessary to achieve identity growth despite experiencing uncomfortable feelings of confusion, void, and ambiguity during the liminal phase. Reforming into an achieved identity for life after elite sport would corroborate the successful navigation of transition, as elite athletes evolved into a synthesized sense of self by cementing, through a negotiated adaptation pathway, constructed identity commitments that will provide new beginnings and meaningful directions to their life after elite sport. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses oral history to consider the relative merits of symbolic interactionism in revealing new insights regarding the Irish immigration experience in England during the 1950s and 1960s. Using a variety of rubrics attributed to Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman, I critically examine the nature of identity work performed by Irish men and women when in their new host country. The paper highlights the interface between citizenship and sociocultural identity epitomised by both the use props (corporeal modifications) and the power of sign vehicles, notably Irish accents in shaping the nature of social interactions. The extent to which Goffman neglects sensory driven constructs of identity is highlighted. The way in Irish immigrants negotiated two simultaneous worlds front and back stage in response to the anticipated reaction of the given audience evokes the metaphor of a revolving door of identity fluid and chameleon like in nature. Actions were at times driven the anticipated reactions of others following presentation but then reclaimed elsewhere manifested by front and back stage behaviours. The Irish men and women worked inside and alongside systems of control where their identities were contested, ambiguous, or problematised to create a fluid sense of self (selves). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the workplace, demand for globally mobile workers continues to grow. This article examines the consequences for the individual of being named as global talent. Findings from a qualitative study within a large, multinational organisation, reveal the identity struggles these individuals engage in as they seek to reconcile the tensions inherent in such challenging careers. By combining and building on extant literature in naming, identity and global talent, the article offers a greater understanding of the lived experiences of global talent, as they construct and re-construct their identities in an on-going cycle. By drawing on the emerging field of socio-onomastics, a greater understanding of the meaning and connotations of being named as global talent is offered. By highlighting how names do not merely mirror identities, but are negotiated and resisted through a process of identity work, a contribution is made to the fields of identity studies and global talent management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do people living in a company town come to desire to work for the firm that controls it? Based on an in-depth case study of Volkswagen in Wolfsburg, Germany, we make two principal contributions. First, drawing on Foucault's concept of governmentality we investigate the mechanisms of power within which desired identities are shaped. Desired identities, we argue, are one means by which organizations exercise control over local populations. Second, we examine the multiple interlocking discourses by which Volkswagen sought to regulate the life of Wolfsburgers and to form their desired identities. In doing so, we contribute to identity research by demonstrating how biopower and discipline work in combination in neoliberal societies to make the governmentality of employee identity possible. Our research underlines the importance of studying company towns for understanding the relations of power that shape the lives and the identities of employees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The re-professionalisation of those who work in education is a common theme explored in the literature. This paper reports on research undertaken at an English Business School that was concerned with how academics responded to external accreditation and the introduction of five categories that demarcated them according to their academic achievements, professional experience and standing within the sector. In reporting on this way of re-professionalising academics, this research makes a contribution to the discourse on working in Higher Education, and how academics view this process. The research adopted an approach based on interviewing and analysed through Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. The findings suggest that although academics often question the imposition of an artificial identity, they adopt a pragmatic position of compliance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conceptualizing organizational representations of disabled workers as a form of socio-ideological control, this study investigates the identity regulation of disabled employees. The comparative analysis of a bank, a labour market intermediary organization and a local public administration unveils distinct ways in which the able-bodied/disabled dichotomy is used to regulate disabled workers' identity in function of organizational goals and the organization of work: by subsuming them into the ideal employee, by constructing them as the negation of the ideal employee, and by constructing the disabled and the able-bodied employee as distinct and mutually dependent ideal workers. These 'varieties of ableism' produce specific understandings of disabled employees that give them differential access to an ideal worker identity, and are resisted in multiple and surprising ways, including reclaiming the ideal worker's identity and the promised rewards associated with it, and disclosing or hiding one's embodiment and disability. The study advances the extant knowledge by showing how ableism variously functions as a principle of organizing shaping whom disabled workers are (not) allowed to be in specific organizational settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-Latino natives often conflate "Latino" with "Mexican," treating Mexican as a stigmatized group. Latinos often engage in "identity work" to neutralize this stigmatized identity. We link these micro processes of identity work with macro structures of stratification through "intersectional typicality." We argue that the selection of which positive traits immigrants highlight to avoid stigma is systematic and tied to intersecting dimensions of race and class stratification at the macro level. We argue that this process is context-specific. We use the case of middle-class Dominicans and Mexicans living in Atlanta. Our findings show that both groups perceive that the pervasive image of the typical Latino in Atlanta is that of a working-class Mexican. While both groups perceive this image to be low-status, they diverge in their strategies for countering this presumption. Mexicans emphasize their middle-class status and often try to change the typical image of Latinos. Dominicans emphasize that they are not Mexican and highlight their atypicality. Interview data show that Dominicans are concerned about the Mexican label because of embedded working-class assumptions. We argue that although many respondents successfully avoid negative stereotyping, their identity work actually reaffirms the low-status meaning of the typical Latino category. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When researching reading events, the depth to which we understand the student experience is all-important. Much insight has come from exploring sociocultural understandings, yet by focusing upon how the critical sociocultural dynamics of identity, agency and power relationships are mediated, we can understand differently the moment-to-moment negotiations undertaken. This article reports on a study that investigated how small groups of diverse students aged ten and eleven from two Melbourne schools experienced talk around two picturebooks that prompt thinking around important social issues. Some often surprising insights were revealed around shifts in student identity portrayals, degrees of agency and individual students' abilities to take some control in this, as well as how these negotiations can be beneficial yet somewhat unsettling at times. The article also shows that these shifts and negotiations can be both challenging and potentially rewarding for students as well as the teacher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We provide a qualitative analysis of resistance to calls for gender-neutral language. We analyzed more than 900 comments responding to two essays—one on AlterNet and another on Vox posted to the Vox editor’s Facebook page—that critiqued a pervasive male-based generic, “you guys.” Five rhetorics of resistance are discussed: appeals to origins, appeals to linguistic authority, appeals to aesthetics, appeals to intentionality and inclusivity, and appeals to women and feminist authorities. These rhetorics justified “you guys” as a nonsexist term, thereby allowing commenters to continue using it without compromising their moral identities as liberals or feminists. In addition to resisting an analysis that linked their use of “you guys” to social harms, commenters positioned the authors who called for true generics as unreasonable, divisive, and authoritarian. We conclude with suggestions for how feminists can challenge the status quo and promote social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Qualitative Research Synthesis (QRS) explored how K-16 students of color make meaning of their disability labels and negotiate the prevailing dominant ideologies surrounding dis/ability labels, race, gender, and other forms of identity. Scholars in Disability Studies in Education (DSE) have explored critical connections between Disability Studies (DS) and Critical Race Theory (CRT) (Annamma, Connor & Ferri, 2013; Erevelles, Kanga & Middleton, 2006). This study identified such critical connections by synthesizing 13 qualitative studies from 2006-2018 and explored the lived experiences of students of color labeled with disabilities. Our goal for this QRS was to advance the theoretical work in DSE through a synthesis of qualitative literature within the field. QRS is a methodologically rigorous approach that "uses qualitative methods to analyze, synthesize, and (re)interpret the results from [existing] qualitative studies" (Major & Savin-Baden, 2010, p. 10). We employed a resistance theory of disability at the intersections (Gabel & Peters, 2004; Giroux, 1983a, 1983b), that foregrounded the psycho-emotional disablism model of disability (Thomas, 1999), to recognize that students' acts of resistance directly relate to systematic oppression within the education system. Findings from our second order thematic analysis suggest that students identified disability labels as an assigned identity, which limited their educational opportunities and left a psychological and emotional impact on their well-being. However, students also used multiple strategies and acts of resistance to negotiate the stereotypical master narratives surrounding their intersectional identities. Through a timely methodological and conceptual counter-narrative of its own within educational equity research, our QRS contributes to theory, research, and praxis, with implications for a more humane and just education system for all students.

In this paper, we aim at exploring whether and how 'organised' clusters can be conceived of as deliberate actors within their contexts. Seeing such clusters as meta-organisations, we suggest that these can make 'organisationality' design choices, or decisions regarding full or partial implementation of the five elements constitutive of formal organisations: membership, hierarchy, rules, monitoring, and sanctions. To explore the relationship between clusters' organisationality and actorhood, we conduct two qualitative case studies of organised clusters in Australia. Our findings suggest that clusters can deliberately 'construct' themselves both as organisations and social actors. Furthermore, drawing upon the institutional work perspective, we propose that clusters can engage in deliberate identity, boundary, and practice work. However, in doing so, they address both internal and external legitimating audiences. Finally, our findings suggest that clusters' organisationality design choices may influence the locus of their actorhood resulting in more or less collaborative approaches to institutional work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]