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Care experienced and estranged students encounter profound material inequalities throughout their higher education journeys which demand our attention. However, cultural discriminations also pose problems. Both operate as social injustices which preclude them from being included, valued or seen as 'ideal' students, contributing towards inequitable outcomes. Drawing on feminist methodologies, this paper analyses 11 narratives of care experienced and estranged students at a post-1992 English university. This offers confirmatory evidence of material inequalities, including financial precarities and mismatched wellbeing provision. It also adds new insights into how such students are simultaneously subjected to processes of misrecognition. This includes being misinterpreted, disrespected or rendered invisible, excluding them from university lifeworlds and undermining a sense of belonging. Inspired by Nancy Fraser, the paper concludes that we must (continue to) tackle material exclusions alongside processes of misrecognition in order to further a social justice agenda for care experienced and estranged students in higher education.

In recent years, gender mainstreaming has increasingly been positioned as a central policy imperative in many countries. At the same time, gender as a focus of academic study has come under attack in the USA and Europe, and some suggest there to be a crisis in feminist teaching. This renders it vital to explore in the context of contemporary higher education where gender and feminist content and approaches are present and absent. This research set out to develop insight through a cross-disciplinary, qualitative case study including documentary analysis alongside staff and student interviews. Findings highlighted contradictions, including that people often claim to champion gender and diversity generally whilst simultaneously rejecting responsibility for the same issues in their own teaching. These insights identify challenges, including attribution of responsibility for inequalities around the representation of gender as belonging elsewhere, with others, in terms of both teaching spaces and temporality.

Although postgraduate expansion swiftly followed the massification of undergraduate provision, with classed inequalities in access, postgraduate taught (PGT) education has rarely received the same level of scholarly attention as the critical mass of undergraduate research. To address this partial research lacuna, the paper traces 41 biographical narratives of first-generation students enrolled on taught Master's programmes at four English universities, complemented by four dialogic analysis workshops. Theorising social inequalities as lived and navigated structure and process, the paper traces a continuity of familiar refrains of inequality from undergraduate to postgraduate study. However, it illustrates how these may be reformulations, rather than replications. Firstly, it discusses material and symbolic barriers to PGT affordability including high fee levels, familial histories of debt and religious beliefs. Secondly, it emphasises that geographical mobility may be impossible or undesirable for Master's students due to relatively more 'complicated' lives, emplaced commitments, the subjectivity of social space and affective ties to place. Finally, it underscores that 'fitting in' still matters at PGT, as students may either divert from or feel uncomfortable in 'high-status' spaces where they feel they do not belong. In concluding, the paper argues the case for fully integrating PGT into HE equity agendas.

While the higher education (HE) literature highlights how the sector is designed for a typified imagined student, the issues are particularly acute for care‐experienced students. The dominant HE discourse assumes that all students will be able or want to participate in 'stereotypical' aspects of student life and have stable networks to offer emotional, practical and financial support. Here, we deploy Holland et al.'s formative heuristic of figured worlds to interrogate how socially and culturally constructed realms and artefacts establish 'givens'. People 'figure' who they are through navigating different realms which are conceptually and materially produced. We take particular inspiration from figured worlds' focus on unequal power in social space; socially and institutionally endorsed understandings of how things 'should' be celebrate certain subjectivities and ways of 'doing' university while marginalising others. The paper discusses biographical‐narrative interviews and collaborative analysis with six students with experience of foster, residential and kinship care, all studying at a post‐1992 English university. Crucially, conversations highlighted participants' exceptional maturity, educational passion and tenacity. Yet challenges remained. This paper focuses on four domains where our participants felt forced into peripheral subjectivities: student accommodation, wellbeing support, societies and curricula. Halls became hostile spaces through high rents, late‐night/loud drinking cultures and their transitory nature. Wellbeing services felt inimical when designed for quotidian anxiety and stress, neglecting more complex stories. Similarly, society membership fees, requisite team kits and 'cliques' materially and symbolically constricted participants. Finally, specific areas of curricula and pedagogical delivery posed problems, namely when traumatic and/or painful content (e.g. domestic violence and safeguarding) was not assumed to relate to anyone in the classroom. Despite these barriers, participants continued to navigate their HE journeys with skill and creativity. Although this paper's perspective is partial, we argue for theorising the holistic student experience through the lens of figured worlds. This reveals how norms and practices make dominant subject positions hard to access for care‐experienced students, contradicting and undermining their obvious value. In concluding, we discuss how locating problems as structural speaks back to deficit discourses, challenging us to reimagine and reconfigure HE through alternative discourses of worth. Attention is needed within and beyond the classroom; students' lives are multifaceted and played out in multiple figured worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research aimed to describe and evaluate research on the Postgraduate Taught (PGT) sector in the UK from January 2008 to October 2019. The focus on PGT allowed a detailed analysis of an often overlooked part of the HE sector. Methodologically, the research is original in its use of an innovative machine learning approach to a systematic scoping review. The review scrutinised subject areas, topics studied and methodological approaches taken. Initial searches found 9,814 potentially relevant studies which were reduced to 693 for analysis. The machine learning approach was successful in reducing time without compromising accuracy. We conclude that this methodological approach is appropriate for similar reviews within education. Findings show a dominance of research into professional education programmes; a majority of research with PGT as the context rather than focus; a small number of comparative and large-scale studies; and substantial research categorised as 'scholarship of teaching'. While further research is required to ascertain if the findings are transferable to other national contexts, this study provides a reproducible methodology and identifies areas for future research to examine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There remains a significant knowledge gap in HRM regarding the inclusion of transgender (henceforth 'trans') workers. We examine and apply the emerging concept of allyship (a specific form of active support and advocacy for minority groups) to trans workers, and in doing so we advance a new model of allyship intentions and perceptions. We test our model across two studies. The first extends theorising on perceived diversity and inclusion climate (PDIC) and social dominance orientation (SDO) to explain how non-trans workers can exhibit trans allyship intentions. When non-trans workers were presented with a scenario of a co-worker disclosing their trans identity, we find that SDO is negatively related with allyship intentions, yet PDIC moderates this relationship, such that the negative impact of SDO is buffered by the positive influence of PDIC. The second study builds upon theorising on psychological safety and authenticity to explain how perceived allyship facilitates the wellbeing of trans workers. We find, in a survey of trans workers, that perceived allyship is positively associated with psychological safety and authenticity at work; and is indirectly related to work engagement via the former and to life satisfaction via the latter. We provide critical insights into how allyship can be advanced to understand and support trans inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Care experienced and estranged students encounter profound material inequalities throughout their higher education journeys which demand our attention. However, cultural discriminations also pose problems. Both operate as social injustices which preclude them from being included, valued or seen as 'ideal' students, contributing towards inequitable outcomes. Drawing on feminist methodologies, this paper analyses 11 narratives of care experienced and estranged students at a post-1992 English university. This offers confirmatory evidence of material inequalities, including financial precarities and mismatched wellbeing provision. It also adds new insights into how such students are simultaneously subjected to processes of misrecognition. This includes being misinterpreted, disrespected or rendered invisible, excluding them from university lifeworlds and undermining a sense of belonging. Inspired by Nancy Fraser, the paper concludes that we must (continue to) tackle material exclusions alongside processes of misrecognition in order to further a social justice agenda for care experienced and estranged students in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, gender mainstreaming has increasingly been positioned as a central policy imperative in many countries. At the same time, gender as a focus of academic study has come under attack in the USA and Europe, and some suggest there to be a crisis in feminist teaching. This renders it vital to explore in the context of contemporary higher education where gender and feminist content and approaches are present and absent. This research set out to develop insight through a cross-disciplinary, qualitative case study including documentary analysis alongside staff and student interviews. Findings highlighted contradictions, including that people often claim to champion gender and diversity generally whilst simultaneously rejecting responsibility for the same issues in their own teaching. These insights identify challenges, including attribution of responsibility for inequalities around the representation of gender as belonging elsewhere, with others, in terms of both teaching spaces and temporality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Higher education practitioners concerned with addressing gender on the curriculum inevitably come up against a complex range of institutional barriers. Research presented here, drawing on in-depth staff interviews, sheds light on such 'gender work' and the challenges and its complexities in the current moment in the UK context. Through an institutional case study, we identify multiple ongoing and contemporary challenges arising for those engaged in this work. A constellation of intersecting obstacles are elucidated, wherein gender, far from being 'mainstreamed', is continually side-lined and deprioritized due to being positioned as peripheral, optional and of questionable value in the neoliberal episteme. Yet with urgent challenges inherent in gender equity and social justice education in the contemporary socio-political context, we contend that addressing such barriers and moving the gender mainstreaming agenda forwards is crucial. Renewed emphases on curricula may yet offer an opportunity to re-open discussions, reimagine and reinvigorate gender mainstreaming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]