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Women’s reproductive circumstances and choices have consequences for their experiences of social connectedness, inclusion and support across the life-course. Australia is a pronatalist country and women’s social identity remains strongly linked to motherhood. Yet the number of women foregoing motherhood is increasing. Despite this, women without children are perceived as failing to achieve womanhood as expected by pronatalist ideologies that assume all women are or will be mothers. Defying socially determined norms of motherhood exposes women without children to negative stereotyping and stigma, which has consequences for their social connectedness, inclusion and support. This chapter examines theories of social connectedness, inclusion and support, drawing on Australian empirical data to explore how women without children experience social connectedness, inclusion and support in a pronatalist society within their daily lives.

Whether or not women have children has profound consequences for their employment experiences. Employers may see women with no children as conforming more closely than women with children (and yet not as closely as male employees) to the pervasive ‘ideal worker’ stereotype of a full-time, committed worker with no external responsibilities. However, managers and co-workers may also perceive women with no children as deviating from prevailing pronatalist norms in Australian and other comparable societies, which construct and value women as mothers and stigmatise and devalue women with no children. Accordingly, women with no children may be rewarded or penalised in different employment contexts at different times according to the degree to which they conform to or deviate from the most salient characteristics associated with the ideal worker and mothering femininity. This chapter explores patriarchal and capitalist configurations of femininities, masculinities and workers as drivers of employment experiences among women with no children. It then discusses empirical research from Australia and comparable countries, in order to elucidate the diversity of employment experiences among women with no children.

The purpose of this study is to examine the interplay between the curatorial practices of consumers as collectors and the materiality of the collected objects. In particular, this study explores how the material substances of collected objects shapes curatorial practices and how the ongoing use of the collected objects challenges curatorial practices.

Taking advantage of the publicization of once-private collections on social media, we collect 111 YouTube videos created by plastic shoe aficionados. Drawing from visual anthropology and theorizations of materiality, we analyze consumer interactions with the objects they collect.

This study’s findings elucidate consumers’ interactions with the material substances of the objects they collect and demonstrate how these interactions shape the ways in which consumers curate their collections, including how they wear, care for, catalog, and display the collected objects.

Our findings have implications for theorization on consumer collections, consumer identity, and consumer participation in brand communities and are relevant for consumer researchers who study the interactions and relationships between consumers and consumption objects.

This study is the first to re-examine consumers as collectors to extend and update consumer research on the curatorial practices of physical, wearable collectibles. This study sets the foundations for further research to advance our understanding of consumers as collectors as well as to illuminate other theories and aspects of consumer research that consider consumer–object interactions.

This paper reflects on the Sustainability Research Symposium (SRS), a long-term student-led initiative (seven years) at McGill University in Montréal, Canada, that seeks to foster interdisciplinary dialogue among students and researchers by using the sustainability sciences as a bridge concept. The purpose of this study is to explore the effectiveness of the SRS in fostering sustainability literacy.

Past participants of the SRS were invited to complete a survey to gauge the strengths and weaknesses of the symposia from a participants’ perspective. A mix of descriptive statistics and axial and thematic coding were used to analyze survey responses (n = 56). This study links theory and practice to explore the outcomes of symposia as tools for students to engage with sustainability research in university campuses.

Survey findings indicated that participants are from multiple disciplinary backgrounds and that they are often interested in sustainability research without being identified as sustainability researchers. Overall, the survey findings suggested that student-organized symposia can be effective mechanisms to enhance exposure to interdisciplinary research and to integrate sustainability sciences outside the classroom.

Despite being a one-day event, the survey findings suggest that symposia can offer an “initiation” toward interdisciplinary dialogue and around sustainability research that can have lasting impacts beyond the time frame of the event.

Although research symposia are widespread in university campuses, there is little published information on the effectiveness of student-organized symposia as vectors for sustainability literacy. This original contribution presents a case study of the effectiveness of an annual symposium at one Canadian university, organized by students from the Faculties of Science, Arts and Management.

Caring is an important component of K-12 teaching and learning. An increasing number of K-12 students are enrolling in online courses. The physical separation of students and teachers in the online medium requires a change in the way caring relationships are formed. In this chapter we examine how teachers worked to develop caring relationships with students at the Open High School of Utah, an online charter high school in the United States. Data collection consisted of 22 interviews with 11 instructors. Interviews were transcribed and analysed using constant comparison coding methods. Findings indicate that teachers were able to implement all aspects of Nodding's model of moral education in ways unique to online contexts, and at times with more depth than experienced in a face-to-face context.

Hundreds of thousands of Shan people from Myanmar have crossed the Thai border seeking employment or refuge from war, with numbers increasing following the 2021 coup in Myanmar. Still, little is known about their post-migration experiences. This study explored the ways relocating to Thailand influenced the lives and mental wellbeing of Shan men, the factors affecting their engagement with Thai society and their responses to opportunities and challenges.

Given the lack of published research on this topic, this study used a qualitative approach. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 purposively selected Shan men in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Data were examined using qualitative thematic analysis.

Five themes emerged: the strength of both push and pull factors; the importance of ethnicity, community and acting transnationally; experiencing discrimination and feeling “low”; coping by forgetting problems, hiding from trouble and studying; and wanting to return when conditions allow. The findings reveal how moving to Thailand can improve but also undermine the mental wellbeing of Shan men. Results also highlight the influence of ethnic identity, community and post-migration opportunities and stressors on how these men adapt to life in Thailand and on their attitudes towards return migration. Respondents used a mix of emotion- and problem-focused coping strategies.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first to explore post-migration experiences and mental wellbeing among the Shan in Thailand.

–The paper originated in challenges trying to theorize and research practices and processes of actors engaged in transnational activities for business and everyday life. Key concern was the assumption that actors’ identities remain the same regardless of time/space. While intersectional analysis once seemed a reasonable analytical approach the authors wondered about starting from identity-based categorical schemes in a world where mobility may be ever more the ontological status of everyday experiences and social structuring. Thus, the paper addresses limitations of intersectional analysis in such situations and advances its recasting via mobile conceptualizations, redressing its analytical purchase for contemporary subject formation.

Discusses emergence of intersectionality at a particular point in time, its success and proliferation, and more recent critiques of these ideas. Develops alternative conceptualization – mobile subjectivities – via literatures on mobilities in the context of globalization. Illustrates the value of these arguments with ethnographic examples from a multi-sited ethnographic project and analyses. Concludes by examining implications for new feminist theorizations under neoliberalism and globalization.

Observing the constitution of a “mobile selfhood” in actual transnational business activities is a step toward making sense of complex processes in contemporary subject formation under globalized market neoliberalism.

“Mobile subjectivities” suggest that analyses of oppression and subordination must be ongoing, no matter which “new subjectivities” may appear under “the latest regime.”

Theoretical and empirical analyses facilitated a reconceptualization of intersectionality as a mobile, precarious, and transitory accomplishment of selfhood temporarily fixed by the neoliberal rhetoric of “choice” and “self-empowerment.” This is of particular value for understanding transnational practices and processes of contemporary organizational actors.