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For nearly 50 years, the Thomas Coram Research Unit (TCRU) has been integral to the IOE (Institute of Education), UCL's Faculty of Education and Society (University College London, UK). This article is written from the perspectives of four researchers who have served in the TCRU's formative years and over its lifetime. It chronicles the TCRU's history and meaning, situating these reflections within the wider and much changed context of academia, politics and society. It begins with an overview of the TCRU's origins as a dedicated government-funded research unit in 1973, the rationale and aims of its founder and first director, Jack Tizard, and the TCRU's subsequent evolution, and its work in the fields of childhood, families and children's services. This is followed by a consideration of some important features of the TCRU, which have created its distinct identity, for example multidisciplinarity, working with mixed methods, international collaborations, a convivial and collegiate environment and a continuing capacity to generate new ideas and directions for research. The article also reflects on some of the challenges faced by the TCRU and how it has responded to them. The article concludes by considering whether there is still a place today for a dedicated, university-based social research unit with a long-term and strategic orientation.

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement is generating a new appetite for understanding the ubiquity of systemic racism. In this short piece, a professor and three newly graduated students from different racialized groups reflect on the reproduction of social inequalities in key institutions and on what decolonization means for the nation, not just for education.

Bhekizizwe Peterson's interdisciplinarity was wide ranging and displayed his easy familiarity with the Arts, Social Sciences and Philosophy. The breadth of his interests and oeuvre make him genuinely psychosocial, interested, for example, in psychoanalytic issues of mourning and melancholia and bringing this together with deep understandings of narratives and the ways in which the archive demonstrates that assumptions of intergenerational ruptures are overblown since, for example, mourning, melancholia and the rewriting of the archive was a feature of pre-1994 Black South Africa so that pre-1994 has left a wake in the present and for the future. This article takes up Bhekizizwe's focus on haunting by considering how people position themselves in psychosocial, intersectional histories. provoked by everyday subjection to racism. It analyses 'found narratives', traces of particular people and/or groups, captured in, for example, filmed documentaries or social media as well as media interviews. It argues that their accounts of everyday subjection to racism are linked to psychosocial, intersectional histories in ways that demonstrate the importance of recognising that unacknowledged histories of racism haunt the present, reproducing the dehumanizing of groups subjected to racism and potentially spurring those affected to consciousness and calls for political action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender inequalities in schools have implications for life chances, emotional well-being and educational policies and practices, but are apparently resistant to change. This paper employs Judith Butler's conceptualisation of performativity in a study of young people and consumption to provide insights into gendered inequities. It argues that how the young people "do" gender in focus groups frequently involves the discussion of young women's bodies and clothes in ways that are "culturally intelligible". The focus on young women's bodies produced joking relationships and a taken-for-granted understanding of gender in some same-sex interactions, but sometimes created tension and divisions in mixed-gender groups. Discussions of sexualisation in single-sex and mixed-sex groups were similarly emotionally loaded. The paper argues that attention to gender inequalities requires detailed attention to the differential power relations in which boys express desires to control feminine bodies and girls police their own and other girls' bodies. Methodologically, the paper suggests that focus group discussions constitute an ethnographic site for analysis and that researchers co-construct young people's narratives of embodied gender practices in ways that mediate young people's gendered performances. (Contains 2 notes.)