The articles in this collection conceptualise and describe notions of human agency within educational exchanges and relationships. They are based on ethnography, which is now a common approach to educational research that has also been featured in previous special issues of the present journal. According to these special issues, ethnography is important to educational research as it takes us inside everyday educational contexts and brings us close to everyday practices and the people involved in these, in a manner that helps correct the oversimplifications of more distal approaches and that provides insider perspectives on everyday action and institutional arrangements (Beach et al, 2004). In the terms of Beach (2010a), Trondman (2008) and Willis & Trondman (2000), ethnography is in this sense about developing close-up detailed descriptions of education identities and activities through situated investigations that produce knowledge about basic educational conditions and practices and the perspectives of the participants involved in them, in order to identify and develop previously unexplored dimensions of education without over steering from purely personal ideas or pet theories. It provides valuable and detailed inside knowledge of what are often otherwise seen as closed social processes by opening up the black box of institutional educational activities and practices. Participant observation field notes and interview transcripts are usually the main data sources for analysis in educational ethnography, which is also often closely linked to particular theories (Trondman, 2008) and related methodologies (Beach et al, 2004; Jeffrey & Troman, 2004). Common amongst these theories at present are forms of discourse analysis, analytical induction, constant comparative method and processes of immanent criticism deriving from the Frankfurt school of critical theory and employed in the Birmingham (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies) school of critical cultural ethnography (e.g. Willis, 1977). There are thus key theoretical, practical and methodological differences within ethnography (Beach, 2010a). It is not a seamless, neutral observational practice (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1983...

This article focuses on research about welfare state restructuring in education and its implications for the teaching profession. Several things are described and discussed. However, amongst the most important are pan-European developments in the social relations of production in education over the past 50 years with respect to the socialisation, habituation and commercialisation of education labour, and a suggested lowering of general standards of public education and increasing class differences in the amount and quality of education consumed by citizens. The idea expressed about this is that neo-liberal restructuring is leading to the creation of apparatuses through which education is objectified for economic accumulation through an outsourcing of functions that were formerly carried out within first domestic and voluntary, and then state arrangements to capitalist enterprises. This is part of a successive privatisation of education services for processes of capitalisation. It consists of an updating of the moral and legal determination of education services by the prevailing standards of market capitalism and an abdication of responsibility for the plight of negatively affected individuals, who, nevertheless, in some intriguing way still often support the system of transformation in question.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in six different types of rural area and their schools in different parts of Sweden, this article identifies how rural schools relate to the local place and discusses some of the educational implications from this. Recurrent references to the local community were present in some schools and people there explicitly positioned themselves in the local rural context and valorised rurality positively in education exchanges, content and interactions, with positive effects on young people’s experiences of participation and inclusion. These factors tended to occur in sparsely populated areas. An emphasis on nature and its value as materially vital in people’s lives was present as was a critique of middle-class metrocentricity. Such values and critique seemed to be absent in other areas, where rurality was instead often represented along the metrocentric lines of a residual space in modernizing societies.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in six different types of rural area and their schools in different parts of Sweden, this article identifies how rural schools relate to the local place and discusses some of the educational implications from this. Recurrent references to the local community were present in some schools and people there explicitly positioned themselves in the local rural context and valorised rurality positively in education exchanges, content and interactions, with positive effects on young people’s experiences of participation and inclusion. These factors tended to occur in sparsely populated areas. An emphasis on nature and its value as materially vital in people’s lives was present as was a critique of middle-class metrocentricity. Such values and critique seemed to be absent in other areas, where rurality was instead often represented along the metrocentric lines of a residual space in modernizing societies.

With schools and universities closing across Europe, the Covid-19 lockdown left actors in the field of education battling with the unprecedented challenge of finding a meaningful way to keep the wheels of education turning online. The sudden need for digital solutions across the field of education resulted in the emergence of a variety of digital networks and collaborative online platforms. In this joint article from scholars around Europe, we explore the Covid-19 lockdowns of physical education across the European region, and the different processes of emergency digitalization that followed in their wake. Spanning perspectives from Italy, Germany, Belgium, and the Nordic countries, the article’s five cases provide a glimpse of how these processes have at the same time accelerated and consolidated the involvement of various commercial and non-commercial actors in public education infrastructures. By gathering documentation, registering dynamics, and making intimations of the crisis as it unfolded, the aim of the joint paper is to provide an opportunity for considering the implications of these accelerations and consolidations for the heterogeneous futures of European education.

With schools and universities closing across Europe, the Covid-19 lockdown left actors in the field of education battling with the unprecedented challenge of finding a meaningful way to keep the wheels of education turning online. The sudden need for digital solutions across the field of education resulted in the emergence of a variety of digital networks and collaborative online platforms. In this joint article from scholars around Europe, we explore the Covid-19 lockdowns of physical education across the European region, and the different processes of emergency digitalization that followed in their wake. Spanning perspectives from Italy, Germany, Belgium, and the Nordic countries, the article’s five cases provide a glimpse of how these processes have at the same time accelerated and consolidated the involvement of various commercial and non-commercial actors in public education infrastructures. By gathering documentation, registering dynamics, and making intimations of the crisis as it unfolded, the aim of the joint paper is to provide an opportunity for considering the implications of these accelerations and consolidations for the heterogeneous futures of European education.

The education system in Sweden has taken a strong neo-liberal turn over the past 15 years. This article uses ethnographic research from an Individual Programme (IP) in a Swedish upper secondary school to explore how alliances, collective actions and resistance can be materialised within the changed system. According to the author, the teachers in the study tried to implement consciousness-raising work in three ways: through 'encouraging critical awareness', 'encouraging students' collective actions' and 'working towards a collective'. This view of education stood in sharp contrast to a dominant ideology of education, which was characterised by self-regulation, self-governance, personal choice and other self-monitored activities.

This article is based on ethnographic studies in the context of vocational education: two in Sweden and one in Finland. The Swedish data originate from the Vehicle programme and the Child and Recreation programme; the Finnish data originate from the social and health-care sector. In this sense, the authors' perspective is cross-cultural. The article focuses on temporal and spatial dimensions of these three educational contexts and analyzes how young people exhibit their agency when negotiating their time and constructing their own space. The authors' analysis elucidates how time-space paths in the context of vocational education are classed and gendered. In the female-dominated fields of vocational upper secondary education, disciplinary practices related to time and space are more visible than in the male-dominated fields. Moreover, it is argued that the political atmosphere in Sweden has been more favourable for promoting equality than that in Finland. Despite this, divisions between students and pigeonholing exist in everyday school life.

This article focuses on students' perceptions of gender relations in school over the last three decades. The analysis is based on data from three inquiry surveys in Swedish secondary schools from 1974, 1992 and 2005, and compares how young students (a) perceive the behaviour of boys and girls in a classroom situation, (b) value different aspects of family and work in their future lives, and (c) experience the power relations between girls/women and boys/men. The analysis indicates both stability and change. In some aspects, the students perceive certain classroom behaviour as highly gendered, but in parallel there is a trend that girls have taken on a more active role in the classroom and are more career-oriented than before. But even though girls seem to have expanded their positions of agency over time, they have not improved their overall status in the gender hierarchy. Rather, the results point in the opposite direction, since the general opinion is that it is more favourable to be male than female. Compared to 1974, this is expressed even more strongly in 2005.

The aim of this study is to show how Google’s business model is concealed within Google Apps forEducation (GAFE) as well as how such a bundle is perceived within one educational organisation,consisting of approximately 30 schools. The study consists of two parts: 1) a rhetorical analysisof Google policy documents and 2) an interview study in a Swedish educational organisation.By making an implicit demarcation between the two concepts (your) ‘data’ and (collected)‘information’ Google can disguise the presence of a business model for online marketing and, atthe same time, simulate the practices and ethics of a free public service institution. This makesit problematic for Swedish schools to implement Google Apps for Education, bearing in mindGoogle’s surveillance practices for making profits on pupil’s algorithmic identities. From a frontend viewpoint of Google Apps for Education, the advantages of the services are evident to theusers, and emerge in the study, whereas back end strategies are relatively hidden.

This study explores the integration of migrants in education and the labour market from the perspectives of professionals working with young migrants in Swedish rural municipalities. It compares interview data referring to the situation during the refugee crisis in 2015 with data referring to the period 2019–2022. It addresses the organisation of teaching, how professionals talked about integration in relation to the local labour market and how integration-related practices and discourses developed from 2015 to 2022. The findings indicate a major change over time in the educational integration strategies and practices. Migrant children were mainly taught in separate preparatory classes in 2015, but by 2019–2022 there was a general aim to integrate them rapidly in regular classes. In terms of labour market integration there was also a discursive change. In 2015 the main hope was that the migrants’ reception would create short- and long-term jobs for the local population and contribute to the survival of local services and life. In contrast, in 2019–2022 the main expressed hope was that migrants would stay permanently and contribute productively to their new societies’ labour forces.

This article takes as a starting point the segregation of urban areas and discusses schooling in the neighbourhoods typically associated with problems and challenges, in order to explore young people's responses to their schooling and social positions. Such responses include individual acts, such as rejecting further schooling or dismissing the local school in favour of prestigious ones, as well as the development of shared understandings and collective formations. The article focuses in particular on young people's responses through aesthetic practices, informal education and public political actions. Although research suggests that youths in poor areas are increasingly individualised and shows that schools provide them with little help to understand and act upon their circumstances in school, the analyses here also bring to light young people's rather strong belief in collective actions; students' formations of resistance groups and political knowledge appear as crucial resources, and, although scarce, teacher support and teaching about political actions appear as important.