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Narrative-biographical perspectives have taken on a very prominent role in both the research on and practices of teacher education (both preservice and in-service) over the past decades. This chapter briefly situates and explains this “narrative turn,” and continues with the presentation and discussion of concrete pedagogical applications of narrative-biographical approaches. A storied example of one approach is followed by a general discussion of its educational rationale and the necessary conditions for its use. References are made to narrative language as a genre, its contextualized nature as well as the connection with (student) teachers’ developing sense of self.

Gender-diverse people experience unique cultural and interpersonal stigma in mainstream society and sometimes within their own communities; they face allegations of inauthenticity based on their nonconformity to either cisnormative or transnormative gender regimes. Based on 21 in-depth life history interviews, we unveil the intricate interactional process of negotiating identity and authenticity in the biographical work of gender-diverse individuals. In this study, gender-diverse people engaged in a “gender audit” with their gender-diverse interviewer. Gender audits yield verbal performances of gender with oneself and others. Ambiguity was “accounted for” or “embraced and created” in their biographical work to organize their life stories and undermine binary essentialism – a discourse that was “discursively constraining.” Gender audits took place in participants' day-to-day lives, either through self-audits, questioning from others, or both. In the final analysis, we assert that we all engage in gender auditing. Gender audits are intersubjective sites of domination, subordination, resistance, and social change. Gender diversity, then, can be viewed as a product of gender in flux.

The person of the teacher is an essential element in what constitutes professional teaching and therefore needs careful conceptualisation. In this chapter the author argues for this central thesis, presenting a wrap up of his theoretical and empirical work on the issue over the past decade. These studies have been inspired – both conceptually and methodologically – by teacher thinking-research as well as the narrative-biographical approach to teaching and teacher development. The result is an empirically grounded conceptual framework on teacher development and teacher professionalism. Central concepts are ‘professional self-understanding’ and ‘subjective educational theory’ as components of the personal interpretative framework every individual teacher develops throughout his/her career. This personal framework results from the reflective and meaningful interactions between the individual teacher and the social, cultural and structural working conditions constituting his/her job context(s). As such the framework is the dynamic outcome of an ongoing process of professional learning (development). Furthermore, it is argued that the particular professionalism or scholarship of teachers is fundamentally characterised by personal commitment and vulnerability, which eventually have consequences for the kind of reflective attitudes and skills professional teachers should master.

Populism is one of the main symptoms of the contemporary crisis in Europe. How can the rise of populism best be understood? Whereas existing analyses predominantly utilise rationalist and behaviouralist approaches and focus on political, economic and cultural interests, this contribution proposes a different approach. The author focusses on affects and emotions. The author shows that where other parties or political movements opt for rational and dispassionate debates on merits of political programmes, populists instead offer, invoke and respond to strong emotions across multiple political settings. Emotions feed and propel populism in its bid for power by forming collective identities through the clustering of love for ‘us’ and hate for the ‘other’.

Ontological Security Theory (OST) is used here as a framework for understanding populist behaviour in the sphere of security perception, identification and community-building. In recent debates, OST has been used because it allows the motives for certain behaviours to be located in the need to maintain or recreate positive identity constructed via biographical narratives. OST suggests that any lack of narrative continuity regarding the shape of the self-images for both individual and collective identities will therefore constitute a source of ontological threat; the lack of a sense of security. In this contribution, the author uses the examples of populist policies and discourses in Hungary and Poland that illustrate this dynamic to analyse the past- and future-oriented collective identifications underpinning the recent rise of populism in Europe.

This paper contributes to the symbolic interactionist literature on authenticity and the self by drawing from ethnographic research conducted with 46 faculty members at an American public research university. I offer an analysis of the changing meanings of professors’ sense of self across careers, ranks, and hiring cohorts and I suggest the following: (a) professors’ experiences of authenticity and inauthenticity remain similarly frequent throughout their careers; (b) professors’ concept of true self changes considerably from the time they are hired to the time they retire; (c) younger professors need to face different demands and challenges than older professors, as they need to adapt to a different academic social world marked by new practices and conventions surrounding tenure, research, teaching, and service.

As the processes of globalisation continue and social networks evolve, the communities in which we live are becoming increasingly complex places. The ongoing processes associated with globalisation indicate that an unprecedented number of people are increasingly drawn economically, socially and culturally towards countries and areas that are perceived to offer the greatest opportunities for them and their families.