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This study employs the social ecology model to comprehensively explore the complex challenges young Black men face in South Africa and aims to highlight the importance of collaboration in addressing these multifaceted issues.

A multidisciplinary approach combines insights from sociology, education and the health literature with regard to government reports and academic data, and provides a holistic analysis of challenges faced by young Black men. Furthermore, it emphasises formal and informal learning, social and environmental influences and health disparities.

Young Black men in South Africa encounter complex challenges throughout their developmental journey, including limited family support, educational barriers, financial constraints, societal expectations and health disparities. Therefore, collaboration among stakeholders is essential for creating an equitable and inclusive environment that supports their development.

This research provides a comprehensive understanding of the challenges faced by young Black men in South Africa by emphasising the interconnectedness of informal education, economic empowerment and healthcare. Future research should focus on longitudinal studies, cultural influences and international comparisons, informing evidence-based interventions for a more equitable society.

While scholarship has identified the bias that maternal women (Arena et al., 2023; Grandey et al., 2020) and racial minority employees (King et al., in press) endure, few have taken aim at understanding how these identity characteristics might combine to concomitantly shape work experiences. Drawing from stigma theory (Goffman, 1963), the primary purpose of our chapter is to examine how the stereotypes of maternity might interact with race-based stereotypes to shape the experiences of working women. In doing so, we will be able to identify which stereotypes of maternity (i.e., incompetence or disloyalty; Grandey et al., 2020) might be exacerbated or weakened when varying race-based stereotypes are considered. After reviewing the potential for intersecting stereotypes, we then argue that mothers might experience different work and health outcomes – both pre- and postpartum – based on their race. We close by providing insight for future scholars and identify additional identity characteristics that may shape mothers' workplace experiences.

This study aims to examine how critical love theory is operationalized in K-12 classrooms to support Black children. The authors use BlackCrit and a conceptual framework of critical love to describe the strategies educators used as pro-Black pedagogies of resistance.

The authors conducted a thematic analysis to identify how critical love praxis is used by K-12 educators as a tool to address anti-Blackness, neoliberal multiculturalism and ahistoricism as defined by the framings of BlackCrit theory. The authors produced a literature synthesis of qualitative research that responds to this study’s research questions: How are critical love theories operationalized? What educator practices do researchers identify as material manifestations of critical love?; and How and to what extent do critical love praxis address anti-Blackness, neoliberal multiculturalism and ahistorical approaches to social transformation as defined by BlackCrit theory?

Critical love theories manifest as critical love praxis. Educators used critical love praxis to address anti-Blackness, neoliberal multiculturalism and ahistoricism by cultivating and supporting the co-creation of homeplace for Black students in K-12 education. Homeplace is cultivated through critical love praxis as classroom-focused, person-focused and politically focused approaches.

This study’s findings extend current theoretical research on critical love by describing its material form in K-12 education and by identifying how a critical love praxis can work to directly challenge anti-Blackness. The authors find implications for their work in teacher education and teachers’ in-service professional development.

Several African American educators served as an inspiration in the development and scholarship of an African American female who teaches at a Predominantly White Institution (PWI) of higher learning. This chapter shares the author's foundational beginnings and persistence in academe while teaching and leading in a race-conscious society. She shares some of her upbringing, education, and early teaching experiences. She also shares her motivation to learn and serve (Bethune, 1950, 1963), while walking in circles. Sizemore (1973, 2008) to provide a roadmap of her journey to support new and developing African American female professors. She uses poetry and the dimensions of African American culture (Boykin, 1983) to guide her sharing. The author uses her exploration of identity development as an African American womanist who advocates as an African American first, to share how she has developed as a scholar whose renewal of purpose targets becoming a full professor.

This study aims to make the case for real-time rights-based recordkeeping governance as a new foundation for the regulation and systemisation of multiple rights in recordkeeping for the Alternative Care of children and young people.

This article aims to make the case for real-time rights-based recordkeeping governance as a new foundation for the regulation and systemisation of multiple rights in recordkeeping for the Alternative Care of children and young people. It investigates this concept using the Australian context as a critical case study to highlight some of the current limitations in Australian Alternative Care systems in the way recordkeeping rights are represented in existing regulatory frameworks and monitored in practice. This paper will argue for the need for systemic transformations in child protection and information legislation and regulatory systems to better represent and enact alternative care recordkeeping rights.

This analysis of the legislative provisions for participation in recordkeeping and access to records of Care experiences against the Australian Charter of Lifelong Rights in Childhood Recordkeeping in Out-of-Home Care reveals a number of limitations. While the direct provision of rights to access records and the strengthening of principles of participation in some of the jurisdictions are welcome, it illustrates how the risk-oriented focus of the legislation on child protection investigations and substantiations encodes opaque recordkeeping practices and works against the provision of the full suite of childhood recordkeeping rights envisaged by the charter. Furthermore, without provisions for systemic and dynamic oversight, those with Care experiences are left to pursue individual outcomes against significant bureaucratic odds.

In line with international recognition that active participation and proactive provision of rights are a protective factor, this article contends that governance frameworks need to be proactively designed to respect and enact recordkeeping rights, along with requiring mechanisms for real-time monitoring and oversight if the records problems of the past are not to be perpetuated.

The study’s proposal for the need for a real-time, rights-based recordkeeping governance seeks to address the systemic recordkeeping problems that have been identified in research and public inquiry related to Alternative Care systems in Australia as well as in the UK.

Adopting a governance model that prioritises real-time, rights-based principles will ultimately impact how the Alternative Care system approaches records and their value in the processes of care.

Placing real-time rights-based governance at the foundation of a reimagining of the Alternative Care recordkeeping model offers the potential to create a system that places rights in recordkeeping and ethics of care at its core. This has highly transformative potential for the overall Alternative Care system and its relationship with children in out-of-home care.

Children and youth who enter the care system have lower educational outcomes and university participation rates than their peers. This study aims to understand trend exceptions by examining the background of care-experienced undergraduates attending a research-intensive university in Canada.

Informed by social affordance theory, this study examined the presence of four indicators of stability (home, household occupants, school and legal status) during participants’ final three years of secondary education. Care-experienced undergraduates (N = 30) completed an online questionnaire. Associations between stability indicators, child welfare involvement in the final year of high school, educational outcomes and routes into higher education were analysed.

Stability across three to four indicators was experienced by 40% of participants, while 47% reported changes across three to four indicators. Only 20% had a change of school as compared to 47%–60% for other indicators. During their final year of high school, 73% of participants were supported by the child welfare system, with 50% being supported via a support program specifically for 16- to 18-year-olds. Stability scores were significantly lower for this latter subgroup compared to those who spent time in foster or group care and those who did not receive child welfare support during the final year of high school. Ninety percent of participants graduated from high school, 67% with the grades required to attend university. Three trajectories into undergraduate study were identified but could not be predicted using regression models.

This paper focuses on what has supported progression into a research-intensive university for care-experienced young adults and highlights the role of support programs for 16- to 18-year-olds.

In this chapter, we draw on trans-informed theoretical frameworks to provide insights into gender justice and gender democratization in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC). Our purpose is to illuminate the systemic impact of cisgenderist and cissexist beliefs which refer to the legitimation of birth-assigned gender identity and what this means for embracing a critical project of gender expansiveness in the ECEC classroom. More broadly, we explicate how our engagement with trans studies informs a critique of existing debates about masculinities, boys and male teachers in the early years. We draw on the work of trans scholars in the first part of this chapter to ground an epistemological basis for our understanding of gender expansiveness and masculinities that challenges a cisnormative framing of gender justice in ECEC. In the second part, we draw specifically on scholars in the field who have been pivotal in elaborating what we understand to be gender expansive identities and what this means for thinking about gender justice in the early childhood classroom. In the third part, we reflect on the pedagogical implications of boyhood sissiness through a trans-informed lens and explicate its implications for understanding boys and masculinities in the early years. Finally, we draw on transgender studies-informed perspectives on masculinity which call for ‘de-essentializ[ing] masculinity as grounded in a cis-male body’ (Gottzén & Straube, 2016, p. 217) and explore their implications for re-envisioning masculinities as a gender-transformative project in ECEC.

With the ongoing educational disparities and an increasingly diverse special education student population, the need for Black special education teacher faculty at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) has never been greater. The role of Black women in higher education is indispensable as a means of addressing the social injustices faced by students of color with disabilities, diverse communities, families, and historically underserved groups by training Black educators. In this chapter, the author introduces her authentic self and academic journey as foundational to the proposed ideas expressed. The roles of novice special education faculty are discussed, including the challenges these emerging professionals face in obtaining tenure, promotion, and grant procurement. This is followed by suggestions for how to respond to the microaggressions (e.g., classism and colorism) encountered by both Black and White peers. Based on that groundwork, a series of best practices are proposed for creating safe spaces, nurturing and mentoring our future special education teachers. The chapter ends with a reinforcing and supporting summary of lessons learned to promote persistence and retention among Black special education teacher education faculty.

This qualitative study investigated the relationship between beauty standards and identity in the United States from the perspective of 20 self-identified millennial Black women. During semi-structured virtual interviews, participants defined Black, American, and millennial beauty standards distinctly. American beauty was associated with Eurocentrism and mainstream media representation. Interpretations of a millennial beauty standard were aligned with perceptions of the generation as tolerant and politically conscious. Black American beauty standards embraced the range of hair textures and skin tones present in the African diaspora. While participants were cognizant of the different beauty ideals present, their interaction with beauty standards was ambivalent. Interviewees found beauty knowledge accessible through social media. However, they remain confined to a restrictive beauty standard due to workplace expectations around professionalism. Participants negotiated where and when to express their intracultural beauty ideals but participated in the beauty industry through processes of learning how to care for their hair in its natural state. Even though they have autonomy and flexibility in expressing their cultural styles, personal and professional repercussions are still plausible. Future studies can expand on these findings by exploring perceptions of American beauty standards from a different generation, region, or identity.