The undervaluing of early years educators reflects entrenched societal beliefs. We analyse representations of early years educators in 32 popular media texts through the lens of scholarship on care work and Bourdieu's notion of symbolic capital, with the view that working conditions for educators and symbolic representations of educators reinforce…

The currently proposed meanings of paid work among adolescent girls who attend school neglect their negotiation of their belonging to their communities, calling for additional exploration of the field while focusing on belonging as achieved through respectability production. We investigate the meaning of adolescents' paid work by examining it in…

Given the growing interest and representation of superheroes in comics and other media, we are interested in the ways young people read superhero texts and how those readings influence their conceptualisations of gender within and outside educational spaces. In this article we explore students' responses to (re)presentations of gender in superhero…

This paper draws on an Irish government-commissioned study of parents' views about the sexualisation and commercialisation of children. We examine how parents understand 'sexualisation' qualitatively, through their evoking of past, present and future images of childhood. The data underlines how sexualisation becomes rationalised as something to…

This study focuses on sexting amongst young people in Northern Ireland about which there is, as yet, very little qualitative research. To address the gap, and using a liberal philosophical feminist framework, focus group interviews were conducted with seventeen (ten girls and seven boys) 16-17-year-olds to explore their views on sexting. The young…

This paper develops and applies the emergent concept of institutional transphobia to explore the barriers to transgender research in early years education. It argues that institutional processes embed and disguise the logic of transphobia by drawing on dominant, taken-for-granted claims of the inappropriateness or irrelevance of gender-focused…

This paper concerns physicality and the tendency to operate within bounds of familiar repertoires of embodiment. It questions the degree to which habitual ways in which we pose, repose, and action our bodies are authentic as opposed to constructed artifacts of our enculturation. With reference to notions of 'neutrality' as raised in Lecoq training…

The concept of domesticity plays out in early childhood educational settings and has a long tradition. Domesticity in its pre-domestic, domestic and post-domestic phases is used here as a site for reconsidering the role of Maria Montessori. The ideas put forward here are intended as a provocation and methodologically the device of constructing an…

The Saudi 2030 vision states it is committed to empowering women through education and employment, but the literature scarcely addresses their everyday realities. This paper utilises a critical realist perspective to examine the mechanisms emerging from the interplay of structural and cultural factors that impact women's empowerment concerning…

Drawing on memory stories told in a collective biography workshop about children's encounters with schooling, this paper experiments with re-imagining the child-student-subject as an 'emergent intracorporeal multiplicity' [Fritsch, K. 2015. "Desiring Disability Differently: Neoliberalism, Heterotopic Imagination and Intra-Corporeal…

This paper explores the experiences of eight Muslim women academics (MWA) within a range of sciences and humanities disciplines. The data draws from my doctoral study which examined the experiences of men and women Muslim academics at UK universities. Findings from in-depth interviews with participants highlight the intersectionality of…

This paper attempts to explore young children's construction of femininities in a kindergarten in Indonesia. Using a postdevelopmentalist and postcolonial approach, this paper seeks to understand how young children in the school develop, negotiate and resist existing gender construction. This paper is based on an ethnography research conducted in…

This study explores female faculty members' pregnancy and pregnant embodiment in academia. Based on semi-structured interviews with 32 faculty mothers from 21 academic institutions in the U.S., I examine their experiences of working while pregnant and highlight the ways that the pregnant body disrupts the masculine disembodied ideal academic…

This qualitative research paper discusses how the material environment of preschool classrooms contributes to early childhood experiences of gender. It applies poststructuralist and posthumanist concepts -- primarily Barad's agential-realism -- to analyse ethnographic data extracts drawn from the author's semi-longitudinal study in a UK nursery.…

Despite explicit focus on addressing gender inequality in educational settings in Australia, without challenging gender binarism, inequality will persist. This article demonstrates the everyday and implicit means through which hierarchical gender binaries continue to be perpetuated. Observational fieldwork undertaken in three Australian early…