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…

The article explores how children use different types of knowledge of place to make sense of their relations to other children. The participants are children aged 11-12 in a small town in southern Sweden. The methodology used is place mapping with group interviews. A significant outcome is that the children connect emplaced and spatial knowledge…

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…

This article presents research from a school in a multicultural suburb on the outskirts of a large Swedish conurbation that used a particular pedagogy with strong classification and framing to address an identified problem of academic failure amongst its pupils. The analysis shows that the pedagogy was chosen based on an assumption that pupils…

It is widely acknowledged that context matters, that it affects leadership practices. A large body of descriptive studies documents common elements in the work of school superintendents. What is less well known is how superintendents' leadership may be expressed very differently given the varying contexts in which they work. The purpose of this…

A study was conducted to examine the interdependence between "actors'" (persons responsible for solving problems within their municipalities) conceptions and local strategies for development. Two peripheral municipalities with development problems are compared. The municipalities have a shared history and culture and a similar economic…

To assess the influence of personal and environmental factors on the composition of children's networks and the relative amounts and use of time spent with people of various ages, sexes, and roles, 72 Swedish children between the ages of 8 and 11 replied to interview questions about their family members, relatives, friends, and the nonrelative…