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The purpose of this study is to reflect on and analyse the sensory experiences related to the transition to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research seeks to understand how these experiences have influenced the integration of work practices into home and family life and the subsequent adaptations and embodied learning that arise in response.

The authors' research approach incorporates autoethnographic methods to explore the sensory, affective and emotional experiences of transitioning to remote work. The authors draw on principles of embodied learning, as influenced by Gilles Deleuze, and utilise a range of ethnographic tools including note-taking, audio memos, photography, shared conversations and written reflections to gather their data.

The study illuminates the ways bodies learn to accommodate the new organisational contexts that arise when the spaces, affects and forces of home and work intersect. It demonstrates how the integration of work into the private domain resulted in new affective and material arrangements, involving novel sensory experiences and substantial embodied learning.

This study provides a distinct, sensory-oriented perspective on the challenges and transformations of remote work practices amid the pandemic. By focussing on the affective resonances and embodied learning that emerge in this context, it contributes to the emerging discourse around post-lockdown work practices and remote work in general.

Educational institutions are investing heavily in the internationalization of their campuses to attract global talent. Yet, highly skilled immigrants face persistent labor market challenges. We investigate how immigrant academics experience and mitigate their double precarity (migrant and academic) as they seek employment in higher education in Canada.

We take a phenomenological approach and draw on reflective interviews with nine immigrant academics, encouraging participants to elaborate on symbols and metaphors to describe their experiences.

We found that immigrant academics constitute a unique highly skilled precariat: a group of professionals with strong professional identities and attachments who face the dilemma of securing highly precarious employment (temporary, part-time and insecure) in a new academic environment or forgoing their professional attachment to seek stable employment in an alternate occupational sector. Long-term, stable and commensurate employment in Canadian higher education is out of reach due to credentialism. Those who stay the course risk deepening their precarity through multiple temporary engagements. Purposeful deskilling toward more stable employment that is disconnected from their previous educational and career accomplishments is a costly alternative in a situation of limited information and high uncertainty.

We bring into the conversation discussions of migrant precarity and academic precarity and draw on immigrant academics’ unique experiences and strategies to understand how this double precarization shapes their professional identities, mobility and work integration in Canadian higher education.

Recent research has captured the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in widening gender inequalities, by highlighting that academic women have been disproportionately affected. During the COVID-19 pandemic, women assumed most of the care labour at home, whilst working at normal patterns, leaving them unable to perform as normal. This is very concerning because of the short and long-term detrimental consequences this will have on women’s well-being and their academic careers. This article aims to stimulate a change in the current understandings of academic work by pointing towards alternative – and more inclusive – ways of working in academia.

The two authors engage with autoethnography and draw on their own personal experience of becoming breastfeeding academic mothers throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

To understand the positioning of contemporary academic mothers, this study draws on insights from both cultural studies and organisation studies on the emergence of discursive formations about gender, that is “postfeminist sensibility”. Guided by autoethnographic accounts of academic motherhood, this study reveals that today academia creates an individualised, neutral (disembodied), output-focused and control-oriented understanding of academic work.

This paper adds to the conversation of academic motherhood and the impact of the pandemic on working mothers. The study theoretically contributes with the lens of “motherhood” in grasping what academic work can become. It shows the power of motherhood in opening up an alternative way of conceptualising academic work, centred on embodied care and appreciative of the non-linearity and messiness of life.

This paper aims to explore how young students experience the contribution of a pedagogical assemblage based on design thinking (DT) while contributing to the transition to a more just and sustainable university.

This qualitative research considers the case of two pedagogical experiences developed at Universitat Politècnica de Valencià, Spain. In both experiences, a methodological proposal that includes practices of care, just transitions and DT was implemented. The data obtained through in-depth interviews, surveys and digital whiteboard labels was analyzed under the lens of three relational categories in the context of sustainability.

Learnings are acquired through five categories: place-based learning, prior learning, embodied learning, collaborative teamwork and intersectionality. The research shows how the subjective knowledge of young students positions them as co-designers and leaders of a University that drives a more just and sustainable transition.

The originality of the paper lies in the shift of DT from a human-based approach to a justice-oriented relational approach.

We argue this method of inquiry better represents the participants' learning, lives and experiences in the formal neoliberal education system prioritising performativity, categorising and ranking students.

The paper explores using poetry as a research method to reveal the learning experiences of adult learners, who have often had disruptive experiences of the formal schooling system and return to study in community-based education spaces. Inspired by Laurel Richardson’s transgressive technique of presenting sociological data through poetry as method, we use poetic representations of these learners' lives alongside case study research methodology. The research was conducted in conjunction with Neighbourhood Houses in Victoria, Australia. Qualitative data were generated through conducting multiple case studies of learners across various adult community education (ACE) sites. In this research, some case studies were presented in the traditional method of writing biography, others were written in the form of found poetry, which we refer to as data as poetry and text. The paper uses found poetry through participant-voiced poems written from interview transcripts. We argue this method of inquiry better represents the participants' learning, lives and experiences in the formal neoliberal education system prioritising performativity, categorising and ranking students. Our findings highlight the benefits of using poetry to communicate data in case study research as it effectively represents the experiences of adult learners' lives in a creative and concise form, transgressing normative practices of writing education research. These poetic representations of data reveal learner experiences in an embodied and agentic way while providing readers with a deep and rich understanding of these crucial adult learning spaces.

Our findings highlight the benefits of using poetry to communicate data in case study research as it effectively represents the experiences of adult learners' lives in a creative and concise form, transgressing normative practices of writing education research.

This research paper is empirical research and has not been submitted elsewhere for publication.

While exploring the information experience within multispecies families, the subjective nature of humans and non-human entities, living beings and non-living objects becomes evident. This paper aims to reveal the underlying significance of information within socio-physical living environments shared among humans, cats and dogs as companions.

Gaining inspiration from the information experience approach and posthumanism, this is a phenomenological paper. Empirical material related to lived experiences of participating families were gathered through multispecies ethnography methods, followed by phenomenological reflections. The paper has been written based on excerpt-commentary-units and the inclusion of videos and images as an approach to convey the richness of the lived experiences and multiple perspectives.

Findings are organised into three main sections, each capturing lived experiences of information and its utilization from various frames. The paper shows how living beings, both human and animal, use their physical, sensual and moving bodies to acquire and convey information to and from each other. Moving beyond the living beings, the study discusses how non-living objects in the physical environment of a multispecies family also shape information. Material objects, spatial locations and even plants became sources of information for the family members. Lastly, the paper delves into the social environment of the family, where all members, human and animal, are actively shaped by information within their social interactions and companionship.

Considering information distributed across species and material objects in a shared, more-than-human environment, the article suggests implications for an information experience approach. It emphasizes how information shapes the in-between humans, animals and their environment, highlighting their reliance on each other for understanding and living a good shared life. There is a need for future research to explore the information experience within the internal subjective minds of members of multispecies families, bridging the gap in the understanding of these external information and their internal information processes.

This paper aims to trace how Asian American girls engaged with civic learning in a virtual out-of-school literacy community featuring a curriculum of diverse literary texts.

The researcher used practitioner inquiry to construct a virtual literacy education community dedicated to the civic learning of Asian American girls.

The paper explores how participants mobilized critical practices of textual consumption and production rooted in their intersectional identities and embodied experiences to make meaning of the civic constraints and affordances of marginalized identities and to read and (re)design author choices for civic purposes. These findings – examples of youths’ critical civic meaning-making – indicate how they claimed space for Asian American civic girlhoods in literacy education.

This paper foregrounds how Asian American girls mobilize critical processes of text consumption and production to assert civic identities in literacy education – a significantly under-examined topic in literacy studies. This work has implications for how literacy practitioners and scholars can prioritize Asian American civic girlhoods through pedagogy and research.

In this study, STEM resources reviewed in Goodreads were investigated to determine their authorship, linguistic characteristics and impact. The analysis reveals gender disparity favoring titles with male authors.

This paper applies theoretical concepts of knowledge commons to understand how individuals leverage the affordances of the Goodreads platform to share their perceptions of STEM-related books.

The analysis reveals gender disparity favoring titles with male authors. Female-authored STEM publications represent popular science nonfiction and juvenile genres. Analysis of the scholarly impact of the reviewed titles revealed that Google Scholar provides broader and more diverse coverage than Web of Science. Linguistic analysis of the reviews revealed the relatively low aesthetic disposition of reviewers with an emphasis on embodied experiences that emerged from the reading.

This study contributes to the understanding of the impact of popular STEM resources as well as the influence of the language of user-generated reviews on production, consumption and discoverability of STEM titles.

The purpose of this paper is to explore teacher candidates’ response to young adult literature (prose and comics) featuring fat identified protagonists. The paper considers the textual and embodied resources readers use and reject when imagining and interpreting a character’s body. This paper explores how readers’ meaning making was influenced when reading prose versus comics. This paper adds to a corpus of scholarship about the relationships between young adult literature, comics, bodies and reader response theory.

At the time of the study, participants were enrolled in a teacher education program at a Midwestern University, meeting monthly for a voluntary book club dedicated to reading and discussing young adult literature. To examine readers’ responses to comics and prose featuring fat-identified protagonists, the author used descriptive qualitative methodologies to conduct a thematic analysis of meeting transcripts, written participant reflections and researcher memos. Analysis was grounded in theories of reader response, critical fat studies and multimodality.

Analyses indicated many readers reject textual clues indicating a character’s body size and weight were different from their own. Readers read their bodies into the stories, regarding them as self-help narratives instead of radical counternarratives. Some readers were not able to read against their assumptions of thinness (and whiteness) until prompted by the researcher and other participants.

Although many reader response scholars have demonstrated readers’ tendencies toward personal identification in the face of racial and class differences, there is less research regarding classroom practices around the entanglement of physical bodies, body image and texts. Analyzing reader’s responses to the constructions of fat bodies in prose versus comics may help English Language Arts (ELA) educators and students identify and deconstruct ideologies of thin-thinking and fatphobia. This study, which demonstrates thin readers’ tendencies to overidentify with protagonists, suggests ELA classrooms might encourage readers to engage in critical literacies that support them in reading both with and against their identities.

The purpose of this paper is to use Bourdieu’s Theory of Capital–Field–Habitus to explore how refugees, asylum seekers and migrants accumulate and mobilise social, cultural, symbolic and economic capital to find meaningful work in the Australian construction industry.

The paper reports the results of a survey of refugees, asylum seekers and migrants who have either successfully or unsuccessfully searched for employment in the Australian construction industry.

The findings dispel widely held negative stereotypes of about this group by describing a highly capable workforce which could address significant skills shortages in the industry, while concurrently diversifying the workforce. However, it is found that refugees, asylum seekers and migrants face considerable barriers to finding meaningful employment in the construction industry. In circumventing these barriers, education institutions, charities and community-based organisations play an especially important role, alongside friends and family networks. They do this by helping refugees, asylum seekers and migrants accumulate and deploy the necessary capital to secure meaningful work in the construction industry. Disappointingly, it is also found that the construction industry does little to help facilitate capital accumulation and deployment for this group, despite the urgent need to address diversity and critical skills shortages.

Employing Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Capital–Field–Habitus, the findings make a number of new theoretical and practical contributions to the limited body of international research relating to the employment of refugees, asylum seekers and migrant workers in the construction. The results are important because meaningful employment is widely accepted to be the single most factor in the successful integration of refugees, asylum seekers and migrants into a host society and the construction industry represents an important source of potential employment for them.