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The COVID-19 pandemic is intensifying existing problems of economic asymmetry, and other injustices, between and within countries and regions around the world. It is thus imperative that sociological studies of education document its socio-cultural implications in different locations and on different scales. It is equally imperative that such studies have a historical perspective that asks what pre-existing social problems have been intensified and how such intensification is happening. This paper responds to these imperatives through the deployment of conjunctural analysis and related crisis and articulation theory. We discuss the global COVID-19 conjuncture as it emerged in the first seven months of 2020 and show how it articulated with the preceding conjuncture. Subsequently, we focus on the issues associated with closing and reopening schools and show how they were intertwined with reconfigurations of the school/home/work nexus. We consider these reconfigurations in two very different locations, Australia and South Africa.

This paper draws on fieldwork done in Greystone School in South Africa, a single sex girls' school. I explore how the legacy of coloniser and colonised is reconfigured through the history of the school and the particular racialised politics of South Africa, where race and class have always been imbricated in differently nuanced ways before, during and after apartheid. The young women have, for the most part, been produced and produced themselves as white young "ladies" -- with the politesse and habitus that this implies. Thus, despite the current intake of a significant number of black girls from further north in Africa, some local Indian (in South African terms) pupils and a very few local black (African) young women, the school continues to support the production of whiteness and (middle) class amongst their students. Throughout, I show how global colonial and postcolonial narratives of whiteness have (and have had) their own particular form and relationship to narratives of whiteness in the changing South African context.

This paper joins a barely begun conversation about multi-sited and global ethnography in educational research; a conversation that is likely to intensify along with growing interest in the links between education, globalisation, internationalisation and transnationalism. Drawing on an ongoing multi-sited global ethnography of elite schools and globalisation, this paper explores the role of travel in multi-sited global ethnography and offers a feminist engagement with it. It considers the idea of fieldwork as a travel practice through three different travel registers; the traveller's tale, critical travel studies and travel as exile. In so doing, it illustrates the reflexive affordances each register offers with regard to the directions of our feminist inquiries into elite schools and our feminist ethnographic practices. (Contains 8 notes.)

This article draws on the five other papers from South Africa in this issue of "Gender and Education" to consider how Southern theory has been developed and is developing in relation to gender and education in South Africa. We argue that Southern theory is not an on-the-shelf solution to global geopolitical inequalities but a work in process that is important both for the global South and to simultaneously dethrone and enrich Northern, mainstream theory. The article begins with a prologue explaining the origins and profile of the particular politics of knowledge production discussed in this issue. In the next section, we consider the notion of the "global South" and trace the way in which knowledge itself is imprinted with the legacies of imperialism and colonialism, both in the North and in the South, with different agendas for theory arising from the historical positions of each. We then offer a very brief contextualisation of the issue in the specific context of South Africa, drawing on the articles to explore the particular nuances and issues raised by its particular historical and geopolitical location. In so doing, we point to some of the very difficult questions raised by the relationship between indigenous and modernist (Northern) knowledges. We move on to suggest some ways of thinking about intervening to challenge and potentially alleviate inequalities, showing that policy is not enough. In conclusion, we return to Southern theory, noting some of the limitations to which a journal like "Gender and Education" can contribute and the journey yet to travel while celebrating the fact and nature of this issue as a contribution to the development of Southern theory from and in South Africa. (Contains 2 notes and 2 tables.)

In this paper, based on a project funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council considering how people position themselves in relation to popular representations of mathematics and mathematicians, we explore constructions of mathematicians in popular culture and the ways learners make meanings from these. Drawing on an analysis of popular cultural texts, we argue that popular discourses overwhelmingly construct mathematicians as white, heterosexual, middle-class men, yet also construct them as "other" through systems of binary oppositions between those doing and those not doing mathematics. Turning to the analysis of a corpus of 27 focus groups with school and university students in England and Wales, we explore how such images are deployed by learners. We argue that while learners' views of mathematicians parallel in key ways popular discourses, they are not passively absorbing these as they are simultaneously aware of the cliched nature of popular cultural images. (Contains 13 notes.)

This paper makes both a critical analysis of some popular cultural texts about mathematics and mathematicians, and explores the ways in which young people deploy the discourses produced in these texts. We argue that there are particular (and sometimes contradictory) meanings and discourses about mathematics that circulate in popular culture, that young people use these as resources in identity making as (non-)mathematicians, negotiating their meaning in ways that are not always predictable, and that their influence on young people is diffuse and nevertheless important. The paper discusses the discourses that prevail in some of the popular cultural images of mathematics and mathematicians that came up in our research. We show how mathematics is represented as a secret language, while mathematicians are often mad, mostly male and almost invariably white. We then explore how young people negotiate these discourses, positioning themselves in relation to mathematics. Here we draw attention to the fact that both those who continue with mathematics after it ceases to be compulsory and those who do not, deploy similar images of mathematics and mathematicians. What is different is how they respond to and negotiate these images. (Contains 7 notes.)

This paper examines young South African school children's understanding of HIV/AIDS. Based on ethnographic work in two schools in Greater Durban, it explores the impact of HIV/AIDS on the ways in which gender and sexuality are articulated against the backdrop of race and class specific contexts. The first part of the paper examines the children's discourses of sex, sexuality and HIV/AIDS. We show that young children's meanings of sex and sexuality are not straightforward and are actively produced and defined through a range of social processes. These processes shape the extent to which young children experience sexuality within discourses of fear and pleasure. Young children's meanings of HIV/AIDS are explored in the second part of the paper. Here we show how their knowledge of HIV/AIDS is socially structured through class/race and gender and these forms of social relations provide the framing and reference points for children's constructions of meanings around HIV/AIDS. We finish the paper by raising some theoretical and practical/political questions about the implications of what we have found for HIV/AIDS education in South Africa. (Contains 1 table and 9 notes.)

This paper problematises globalisation and the democratisation of the research imagination, highlighting the potentials for harm and good. We do so, first, by exploring two philosophical/epistemological issues: the definition of "knowledge" and the role of "research" in knowledge creation. The paper then considers some of possible consequences of the democratisation of knowledge by examining the case of HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa and using it to test a heuristic device we have developed as a way of distinguishing between "really useful" and "potentially harmful" knowledges. (Contains 1 table.)

This paper argues that, during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, universities have been captured by neo-liberal regimes of truth. We suggest that this may inhibit the "research imagination" within universities and, consequently, their role in the democratisation of knowledge. We consider the role of capital in the globalisation of higher education, and the resulting global circulation of people and knowledge. We then examine how what we have termed the "neo-liberal colonisation" of higher education has been achieved, ending with a discussion of the implication of these processes for the idea of the research imagination in universities. (Contains 3 notes.)

The article examines understandings of class, race, gender and sexuality in the writings of secondary school students in two working-class schools in Durban. The analysis of students' questions and responses to a problem page "agony aunt", indicate how class and race come to be expressed through accounts of sexuality. In the letters many children highlight the importance of family relationships and their belief in schooling. These themes, while not surprising in themselves, contrast with the neglect of these issues in the literature on the sociology of education in South Africa, which has mainly been concerned with class and race inequalities.

Argues that schools are highly sexualized sites, within which struggles around sexuality are pervasive, of consuming interest and, at the same time, taboo. Suggests that struggles around gender, explicit homophobia, and implicit heterosexism within schools derive from and feed macho and misogynistic versions of masculinity. Argues that sexism in schools must be understood through compulsory heterosexism. (GR)

To authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2009.01869.x Byline: Rebecca Boden (*), Debbie Epstein (*), Joanna Latimer ([dagger]) Abstract: Abstract This paper examines the operation of power and its consequences arising from the growth of new ethical bureaucracies in universities. We use the UK as a case study to illustrate more general points about the globalised nature and impact of such bureaucratisation. Our focus is on the social sciences as this is where, we argue, the impact is likely to be most marked. The paper is organised in five sections. The first introduces our concerns. Section 2 traces the genealogy of these new regimes of control in the UK. We then problematise the new ethical bureaucracies, making an analysis in terms of the shift in the locus of power away from researchers to becoming centralised in bureaucratic structures. In section 4 we explore some of the ways in which researchers might respond to the changing regimes of ethical control. Finally, we offer considerations of the ways in which ethical governance of research might be differently conducted so as to avoid the adverse consequences of new regimes of control on research practice. Our aim is to provoke debate and thereby contribute to a platform from which to reassert ways to ensure that research is ethical and that do not interfere with the production and consumption of critical social science. Author Affiliation: (*)University of Wales Institute, Cardiff and ([dagger])Cardiff University Article History: Received 30 May 2008Finally accepted 16 February 2009

Cet article examine le travail fait dans les ecoles de l'Afrique du Sud ces cinq dernieres annees pour juguler la progression du VIH /sida . Les auteures declarent que ce [...]

The 'Oprah Winfrey Show' broadcasts several different ways the American people aim at achieving what is known as the American Dream. Initially the show seems to reinforce traditional ideas of American life and liberal politics but it also allows those who are on the outside to talk of their experiences and feelings. The show often features the consequences of failure but offers the people involved a chance to change themselves. Sometimes the focus on differing views of the American Dream can lead to contradictions. The 'Oprah Winfrey Show' is televised in over 120 nations.