Abstract
In this paper we offer a unique contribution to understandings of schooling as a site for the production of social class difference, by bringing together recent work on middle-class educational identities in neoliberal times (O’Flynn and Petersen 2007, Reay et al 2007, 2008) with explorations of classed femininity from the field of critical girlhood studies (Harris 2004, Ringrose and Walkerdine 2008). Drawing on data generated in two recent research projects in Australia and the UK our aim will be to explore how class mediates the construction of young femininities in the private girls’ school. Our particular focus will be on exploring how articulations of identity within such schools are configured through discourses of mobility and global social responsibility.
In line with the broader ‘cultural turn’ in the social sciences (Devine 2005) we discuss class and femininity in this paper in cultural and symbolic terms. We draw on Butler’s (1993) notions of performativity to understand the multiple and processual nature of identity constitution and Bourdieu’s (1987) understandings of class (based on symbolic struggles for capital in social space) to enable us to explore the ‘subjective micro distinctions’ through which class is expressed, embodied and lived; viewing class as a set of fictional discourses that inscribe and produce identities (Walkerdine et al 2001). This understanding of class was deemed particularly important in these studies of elite educational institutions, for the research was undertaken in schools where class was apparently ‘everywhere and nowhere’, never named or ‘directly known as class’ (Lawler 2005, Skeggs 2004). This underplaying of class identity is often linked to neo-liberalism, and in this paper we would like to link these constructions of ‘the private school girl’ with neoliberal subjectivity by focusing on two main characteristics.
First we will consider the notion of mobility, where we will discuss the ways in which these girls constructed themselves as ‘cosmo’ girls (global citizens at ease with traversing national borders) and the ways in which the schools supported this through educational practices which enabled the students and their families ‘to exploit and strategically pursue economic and cultural capital’ (Doherty et al 2009). We will also focus on the struggles that the schools and students encountered as they attempted to balance these discourses of global mobility with more traditional discourses of privilege (often associated with national boundaries and based within a predominantly British model of schooling steeped in colonial history). Second, we will look at discourses of responsibility, to explore how these girls were incited to take responsibility for themselves and their futures but also to embrace diversity and to commit themselves to social service. In doing so we will examine the competing discourses of instrumentalism and social justice that were at play in these schools; the ways in which pupils expressed a genuine commitment to social service but also how this was being refigured and reshaped in relation to the need for a ‘portfolio self’ and as part of an individualist quest for ideal neoliberal subjectivity.
Methods
The paper draws upon two recent studies conducted in Australia and the United Kingdom, both seeking to explore configurations of class and gender in the context of the elite private girls’ school. The Australian project, based in one secondary school, adopted a tiered approach for study – generating data at three different levels of institutional practice: at the ‘school level’ (considering media representations of the young women and interviewing members of staff), at the ‘classroom level’ (through observation and collaboratively developed lessons) and at the ‘student level’ (interviewing small groups of girls). The UK project, based in two secondary schools, adopted a longitudinal, ethnographic approach, combining focus group and individual interviews (with parents and students) with observation and participatory film and photographic methods. In this paper we principally analyse three of these forms of qualitative data: school promotional media and interviews with students and staff.
Expected outcomes and conclusions
By exploring the interlinking of these discourses we seek to demonstrate the significance of these schools, as key sites that play a central role in new articulations of classed identity. We will attempt to draw some firm conclusions about the impact that these configurations of classed femininity may have on those ‘others’ who remain outside of these elite settings. Indeed, we will argue that the analytical frame of disgust (the rejection of the working class other), often mobilised in the class difference literature, cannot, on its own, explain how class distinction was being produced in these schools. It is also our contention that these are not purely local concerns (not simply confined to the UK or Australia) but that they are mirrored in different ways in the experience of educational development in a number of Northern European countries (see, for example, Lichfield 2010).We hope that this paper will prompt further questions about the possibilities of social and educational mobility in ‘global times’ and for elite educational practice outside of this British model of private schooling.

This paper builds on Delamont’s (2010) strategies for fighting familiarity, particularly her argument that we need to revisit educational ethnographies of the past. The paper argues that wider historical accounts, from both inside and outside of education, can also cultivate the sociological imagination in this way. Inspired by feminist historical inquiry the author will demonstrate how she has used history (e.g. feminist autobiography) to make the ‘familiarity’ of contemporary girlhood ‘strange’. The paper will draw on examples from the author’s own experience of interpreting and representing the lives and experiences of girls in elite educational settings, to show how this subject, which was once considered strange, can become all too familiar and thus prey to historical amnesia. An argument is made here for the need for strategies which help us fight familiarity in our interpretations and theorisations of the lives of those we study. The paper suggests that historical accounts represent one way in which we can bring an openness and playfulness to this process, in order to question the self-evidence of what we see.

A small number of attempts have been made to take stock of the field of gender and education, though very few have taken methodology as their focus. We seek to stimulate such discussion in this paper by taking stock of the use of visual methods in gender and education research (particularly participatory and image-based methods). We undertake this exercise by looking at the claims researchers have made about the ways in which visual methods have advanced gender and education research, and by examining the use they have been put to in research practice. Our argument is that the visual has become somewhat invisible in accounts of gender and education research. We conclude by considering different ways in which we might develop image-based research in the future.

‘Taking stock is to think carefully about a situation or event and form an opinion about it, so that you can decide what to do’ (Cambridge Definition Online). The phrase is an English idiom, but its meaning has international resonance. ‘Taking stock’ is an everyday activity, but this special edition focuses on ‘taking stock’ as an important and timely aspect of our practice as scholars of gender and education.
This Special Issue begins a process of taking stock of the gender and education field. Our approach stresses the importance of taking stock as a broad range of practices and foci that embrace the past, present and future. This is potentially a huge undertaking and far too large to be accommodated in a single issue of Gender & Education. The aims of this Special Issue are, therefore, more modest and geared towards enabling an ongoing process. The articles featured in this volume provide examples of taking stock of different aspects of gender and education from a range of perspectives. We hope these will spark productive discussions but also encourage further reflections on where we have come from, where we are and where we are heading.
to this end, we hope that this special issue will create further openings for dialogue and that others will be inspired to move beyond the ideas represented here and submit articles on this theme in the future. In this introduction we suggest a number of ways in which authors may consider taking up this exercise, but it would seem particularly apt that this future work is done from a range of different vantage points in order to extend the work started here (e.g. further ‘looking’ and ‘asking’ from beyond the Global North).
To facilitate this ongoing project in gender and education, here we present a framework for taking stock and address some of the challenges involved in this practice. Before doing this we reflect briefly on previous appraisals of the gender and education field and why it is timely to engage in a more extensive taking stock.

The dominant concern with understanding the ‘problem of youth’ has inevitably meant that some groups of young people have been researched more than others (France 2004). Those young people who are viewed as ‘elite’ are also those who are often regarded as unproblematic and unworthy of research attention. Whilst these young people often account for an isolated and unrepresentative minority of the population, as Howard (2008) suggests it is not enough for researchers to solely focus on oppressed groups. Instead there is a real need to divert attention back towards privilege.
A growing body of literature now exists to address what it means to conduct research with elite adults, but there remains a dearth of information on research with elite youth. Drawing on a year-long qualitative project with young women in two elite sixth-form colleges in the UK this paper will attempt to redress some of these silences by focusing on issues of access, timing and relationships, in order to explore the complex subjectivities and social locations of the researcher and the research participants. The paper will particularly focus on issues of participation and power relationships; asking important questions about how these play out with more powerful groups and the wider lessons that they afford youth researchers.

The practice of using participatory visual methods in research with young people is one that has come under scrutiny in recent years. Many scholars have examined these practices in order to question the singular and simple notions of voice that are often represented in these accounts. Taking up the challenges laid down by these scholars, this paper attempts to critically disturb some of the claims that have been made about this supposedly inherently collaborative and empowering practice. Drawing on research with a group of privileged young people the paper will argue that there is a real need for researchers to examine the ways in which different subjectivities are performatively produced in the participatory research process - to explore the ways in which the methods themselves may work to constitute difference and to position young people as powerful or powerless in this process. A call is also made for researchers to inspect their own practice and use of visual methods, in order to recognise the particular knowledges, subjectivities and truths that are constituted as a result. © Sociological Research Online, 1996-2012.

Female educational achievement has often been portrayed as a celebratory success story with no cause for concern. As Mcrobbie (2007) remarks, over the last decade it is young women who have come to be widely understood as the bearers of educational qualifications. It is girls who are now seen to have ‘the world at their feet’ and to be able to attain the glittering prizes of academic success associated with elite universities and top occupations (Harris 2004). and it is upper middle-class girls, in particular, who appear to be achieving the most; a ‘super class’ of pupils who are supposedly able to effortlessly succeed in everything that they do (Power et al 2003).
Drawing on ethnographic research that took place in one single-sex, private primary school in the South of Britain this paper seeks to question this post-feminist success story (Ringrose 2007). The paper will critically explore how one class of twenty-five girls (aged ten and eleven) negotiated their academic identities as high-achieving, successful schools girls. It will begin by outlining the girls’ outstanding achievements and by examining the neo-liberal discourses that they cited in the construction of these ‘successful’ identities. It will then move on to explore the multiplicity of discourses which fused together in order to determine the possible identities open to the girls as good/bad students and achievers (Youdell 2006).
The paper will argue that the girls in this school often struggled with owning academic success for themselves, for despite attending a school where success was openly celebrated, many of the girls felt restricted to perform success in narrow and competitive ways that clashed with dominant discourses of femininity (Walkerdine et al 2001). The paper will conclude by questioning what this means for other girls who remain outside this super-class of pupils and who are constantly denied access to these academic prizes, but are still expected to live this dream of feminine success.

Drawing on recent ethnographic research in one single-sex, private primary school this paper will explore what it meant for the girls in this setting to embody the discourse of the ‘lady’. The paper will propose that classed and gendered discourses of respectability featured strongly in the girls’ lives as they were expected to behave like ‘proper’ upper-middle class ladies. However, the paper will also suggest that these discourses were being reworked through post-feminist, neo-liberal notions of modern girlhood, meaning that the girls also felt compelled to make themselves as heterofeminine girly girls; as sassy, sexy and successful as well as respectable and upper-middle class(y) enough. By exploring the clash between these two sets of discourse, the paper will specifically seek to examine the lived embodiment of intersections of class, gender and sexuality and to explore the relevance of Butler’s (1990) heterosexual matrix for these upper-middle class girls.

This paper interrogates the ways in which school is produced as a particular bounded place (or collection of places) where sexuality, and particularly non-heterosexuality, is kept outside the boundaries. Drawing upon data generated in primary schools during a nationwide action research project (No Outsiders), we focus on three very different school places: the classroom, the staff room and a school-based after-school art club. Our analysis engages with the contingency of place-making to show that place is neither a unitary experience nor a neutral stage upon which social relations are enacted. The three vignettes analysed offer insight into the critical potential of consciously and persistently working across (apparently) boundaried spaces within and beyond schools.

This paper refocuses attention on and problematizes girls’ experiences of school achievement and the construction of schoolgirl femininities. In particular, it centres on the relatively neglected experiences and identity work of high achieving primary school girls. Drawing upon ethnographic data (observations, interviews, and pupil diaries) from a broader study of girls’ and boys’perceptions and experiences of schoolwork and achievement from two contrasting primary schools in a city in South Wales (UK), the paper will explore the gendered subjectivities of high achieving girls from diverse social and cultural backgrounds. Three narrative case studies are re-presented
and analysed to explore the feminization of success and thus the tensions and contradictions as girls negotiate the pushes and pulls to be both ‘bright’ (i.e. succeeding academically) and ‘beautiful’(succeeding in ‘doing girl’). of key interest are the possibilities, costs, and consequences of girls producing ambivalent femininities and the rearticulation and transgression of normative ways of ‘doing clever’ and ‘doing girl’ in 21st century primary schools.