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Rural-urban disparities in Sweden, as in many other countries, have been somewhat of a blackspot—one that seems to have both diversified and expanded in recently. Schools are often fighting to survive in rural areas which are losing value in terms of wealth and cultural capital and rather than offering a route to social mobility and equality, they risk reproducing inequality and future life difficulties.First, there are distinctive differences between various types of rural area, their education, and the responses and resistance to the present situation by those living there. Second, despite these differences we can still point to consistent patterns. Third is the issue of mobility into and between rural areas. Different social groups and places have different and distinct mobility forms and patterns, and educational availabilities are amongst the factors involved. Some are effectively imprisoned in their now increasingly depleted areas and experience intense alienation and flight instincts. Fourth, the introduction of market politics is also an important contextual feature in rural education and school experiences. This travelling package of metro-centric policies cuts very differently in rural areas compared with urban, as it also does in respect of rural towns compared with other kinds of rural area.

Teaching and learning practices around arts in various formal and informal contexts are increasingly at the centre of ethnographic research. In parallel, artists and arts researchers are engaging with ethnography as a part of their research toolkit. Ethnography helps reveal the potentialities of the arts and interconnects several disciplinary practices but also involves complex tensions and uncertainties that emerge from extending conventional research practices.In this book definitional issues around learning, education, social participation and expressive practices are reflexively re-examined deepening our understanding of artistic practices and art contexts in a contemporary world. Studies on and in the arts often blur conventional disciplinary borders, providing a terrain for new insights to arise from interdisciplinary dialogue. By combining the study of social practices and discourses related to art-making, and applying ethnography as the main methodological approach, researchers stimulate intellectual debate. This book reveals a diversity of artistic contexts and practices explored by social scientists and artists in settings across locations in Europe and Latin America. The edited volume provides a balance of methodological discussions around ethnographic methods stemming from the examination of artistic practices and settings, detailed accounts of how art is experienced in local settings or critical accounts of how art emerges as a methodological and conceptual tool for social intervention, thus promoting social participation and educational change. The book will be of value to students and researchers in the social sciences and the arts, as well as appealing to a broader audience interested in these issues.

Purists and Peripherals examines audience engagement with two cultural forms, hip-hop and grime. The book initially addresses the continued academic validity of the term subculture in light of recent moves to realign cultural studies to an understanding of youth cultural engagement as fragmented and increasingly transient. Through a combination of academic analysis and engagement in the field, it is argued that different aspects of subcultural theory, from seemingly competing paradigms, can help explore and understand the varied behaviours, attitudes and values of young people engaged with this music. Emphasising activity on a continuum, the purist and the peripheral model developed in this book allows a more nuanced appreciation of subcultural affiliation to develop.For years, rap music and more recently grime, have been demonised by some elements of the mainstream media and the messages inherent in texts, along with the responses of audiences, has been largely viewed as problematic. Research in the field of hip-hop studies has traditionally tended to favour academic dissection over the opinions of those actively engaged in the music and associated cultural forms. This book seeks to address these imbalances through an engagement with the opinions and values of members of five research groups in the South East of England.The research is based on ethnography and focus group interviews addressing areas relating to audience interpretation of hip-hop and grime music. Through an exploration of issues such as representation of gender, ethnicity and the cultural use of the term 'authenticity', Purists and Peripherals seeks to examine these variant musical forms whilst privileging the voices of those who live and breathe this music.

The Nordic countries have traditionally been regarded as archetypal representatives of social democratic welfare states. But particularly since the 1990s the concept of universal welfare and education has increasingly been infused with neo-liberal ideas and technologies, even if the extent to which this has happened and its expressions vary from one Nordic country to the next. Marketisation, new public management and an emphasis on individualism and individual responsibility have profoundly affected education, with increased focus on competition, knowledge, performance and assessment. This is the context, the educational landscape of this book.Through ethnographic studies in varied educational institutions in Finland, Norway and Sweden we ask, how these political aspects are visible, how they are negotiated and contested in the practices and everyday lives of students and teachers in schools, and what are their implications for democratic influence? Can the competitive school be at the same time fair? The chapters are written from a critical ethnographic perspective, using ethnographic data and analysis to address power relations in education with reference to the political aim of social inclusion and democracy. The authors address diversities and differences and their interpretations are informed by an intersectional understanding of gender, ethnicity and social class.

Drawing on research findings from an ethnography conducted with young children that explored patterns of interaction and notions of difference and identity, this study uncovers how four and five year-olds conceptualise and operationalise identity in a multi-ethnic Early Years classroom in the North of England.The study provides in-depth insight into the experiences of a diverse group of children from North and Sub-Saharan African countries who have come together in a single school setting. It highlights how these children are influenced by social structures such as those pertaining to racism, gender inequality, Islamaphobia, 'the war on terror' and events in the Arab Spring. The research shows that children's everyday social interactions are enabled and constrained by these wider structural discourses as they (re)negotiate their unfolding identities over time against this complex backdrop. Dynamic local and global politics, the arrival of new classmates, changes in family structures and Koranic school attendance all influence children's everyday sense of self and are reflected in the development of peer relationships at school.Developing a theoretical framework that understands identity as performative, situated and dialectical, this study discusses the dual roles of structural discourses and social agency in the context of identity (re)negotiation. Identity is framed within a 'strong structuration' framework that seeks to understand ontology-in-situ as the study uncovers how young children understand notions of self and others and how wider social discourses of discrimination and hierarchies of difference play a part in how young children understand ethnic, religious and gender difference. The study unearths how young children explore their own and their peers' identities amongst themselves and raises questions for how policy and practice can best support them in this aspect of their social development.

This book is the result of extensive ethnographic research that has analysed the experiences of young people from immigrant families in the Nordic cities of Copenhagen, Gothenburg and Oslo. Concepts of cultural and urban studies, sociology, education and other disciplines are used - inclusion/exclusion, territorial stigmatisation, post-colonialism and critical race theory. In many ways suburban youth are to be viewed as a class-in-itself: objectified by curricula and school practices, often vilified, downtrodden and symbolically exploited in the mainstream media and common understanding. At the same time their youth cultures evoke the other half of the Marxist class concept, the class-for-itself, in understanding youth sub-cultures as creative collective responses and resistance to a shared social situation. The hip-hop cultures of youth in multicultural areas are often postmodern in identity-play and aesthetics, but by no means de-politicised, and furthermore these youths display creativity in the social media where they challenge dominant discourses of place, identity and belonging in society.The Nordic countries are often seen as the home of egalitarianism and decent hosts of immigrants, but this book reveals a more complicated picture. Inclusion and multiculturalism may be key words in Nordic educational policy, but analyses of curricula and teaching practices show that these goals are far from realised. Curricula stress a Nordic, Western and Christian cultural heritage, school practices recommend migrants to adapt to life style of the natives and residential segregation is a central factor in mechanisms of exclusion. All major cities in the Nordic countries have immigrant-dense areas, primarily in suburbs that were originally built for the upwardly mobile native working class. This segregation means less opportunities in the educational system and it is difficult to apply for a job from 'the wrong address'. At the same time these areas have become the nests of creative and resistant youth cultures.

Young people talk frankly, eloquently and often movingly about sex and relationships in this detailed investigation of the social construction of sexuality. Drawing on empirical studies the authors develop a feminist theory which shows the power of heterosexuality as masculine, and the relevance of this power to young people's management of sexual safety. Based on research into young people's sexual cultures undertaken over ten years, the authors argue that 'sexual activity and empowerment do not necessarily go hand in hand'. While a minority of young people succeed in negotiating safe and pleasurable sexual relationships, for many the experience of adolescent sex continues to be 'nasty, brutish and short'. Old taboos about premarital sex may have been broken, but old ideas about sex being a man's pleasure and a woman's duty live on. Young women are left with the worst of both worlds. They are expected to be sexual but not taught to enjoy it, vulnerable to pregnancy but not in control of sexual safety. When it comes to sex young women have a 'male-in-the-head', a voice that tells them that using condoms 'is like chewing toffee with a wrapper on' and that sex is finished 'when he has finished'. Despite the effects of feminism, boys do not yet have a 'woman-in-the-head'. Even those 'new men' and 'new lads' who recognise that women have changed are still liable to revert to double standards when it comes to sex. As one young man points out 'I don't believe in sex differences ... but you can't go to bed with someone the first time you get off with them and expect them to give you respect and love, you can't have it both ways'. Women still can't have it both ways but men can-just. The evidence from this study suggests that times are changing, that femininity is moving on and that masculinity is dragging its feet. While girls are outstripping boys in the classroom and the workplace, they are still being kept in their place in the bedroom.

The idea of democratic schooling with its emphasis on equality is seriously attacked by the marketisation of education. New policies of educational restructuring emphasise accountability and close links between school and industry, where schools and students become targets of constant evaluation and competition. This book challenges such policies and practices through analyses of their negative consequences for social justice and democracy. It explores the effects of restructuring on everyday life in schools and other educational institutions and presents analyses of how differences based on gender, social class, ethnicity, nationality and embodiment are dealt with in educational settings.The authors draw on a range of theories, including poststructuralist, postcolonial, feminist and Marxist perspectives, and the localised ethnographies are contextualised in changing educational politics. How policies are contradicted by practices is discussed in relation to the classroom, teacher education and issues of inclusion and exclusion. A critical gaze is directed at Nordic countries where restructuring processes contradict a political discourse based on equality and comprehensive education.It is the immersion in the daily life of institutions and their participants that gives ethnography a particular edge in obtaining insights into what changes and what stays the same. This book provides a looking glass into the tensions and contradictions that New Right policies have introduced in educational institutions. Actors in the field experience frustration in introducing changes and controlling the direction of those changes. It is their voices that ethnographers try to hear and disseminate.