Substantial research has shown that changes in contemporary western societies have prolonged transitions from youth to adulthood and altered the conditions and timing of transitions in education, work and family formation. Thus, contemporary society is creating new temporal conditions with important implications for social institutions,…

This paper explores how young asylum seekers learn to belong to a local community. It takes its point of departure from a biographical and socially situated learning perspective and uses four analytical aspects of belonging: biographical experiences, engagement, imagination, and alignment. The data on which this paper is based are biographical…

Sweden possesses a highly deregulated school system in which students in the compulsory school system are free to choose almost any school they prefer. This study focuses on the long-term difference in educational level twelve years after finishing elementary school for students who made a school choice compared to those who did not. The study…

In Sweden, as in many other European countries, poor neighborhoods with ethnically diverse inhabitants and high crime rates have grown up around big cities in the last decades. We hypothesized that, compared with adolescents in advantaged neighborhoods, adolescents in disadvantaged neighborhoods would perceive their schools as relatively safe, due…

Central values promoted in a national curricula are often uncontested (Arnot, Hopman, & Molander, 2007; Colnerud, 2004; Popkewitz, 2009). Therefore, a critical understanding of these values is crucial, as is an understanding of how students are affected by interpretations of certain values as fundamental. The aim of this study is to cast light…