In educational research, girls are frequently depicted as success stories, able to effortlessly navigate academic excellence as empowered females. However, these depictions lack nuance and often fail to capture the complexity of young women's experiences as they shift from compulsory schooling into higher education. Using a methodology of…

This article adds to the literature on smart girlhood by exploring the topic through Karen Barad's theory of post-human performativity. We focus on the transcripts of two participants from a larger study on girls and academic success in Canada in order to highlight the material, discursive, embodied, and temporal entanglements that co-produce the…

This paper analyses the pedagogical pathways of a group of first-generation Iranian migrant doctors in the UK. It explores the complex system of class production and growing up as a classed subject in Iran, a process that ties young women's educational aspirations to female independence on the one hand and to the modern feminine, heterosexual…

This article explores perceptions of the role of education as a potential medium of transformation and a vehicle to challenge and renegotiate symbolic and cultural notions of gender identity. Drawing on data collected at two time points over 10 years, it considers four young women from working-class backgrounds in England who aspired to and then…

Under the combined effects of commercialisation, urbanisation, migration and employment, significant changes are taking place in India's process of modernisation. One change is the emergence of a population of women with degrees in higher education. These degrees, and the individuals' desire to pursue professional positions that relate to their…