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This chapter focuses on donkey traders and trading in Kashgar in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, an area which has experienced unrest and also seen sporadic incidents of violence that reflect the social and political instability in China since the 1990s. The Uyghurs are a Turkic speaking Islamic people who are classified as one of the country's 56 ethnic groups. Since the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, mass migration of Han Chinese to this remote Central Asian region has intensified relations between the indigenous Uyghurs and the migrant Han Chinese, with many socioeconomic and political consequences. Through an exploration of the Uyghurs' cultural and religious understanding of donkeys and the multidimensional transactions of donkeys in livestock markets between Han Chinese and Uyghurs, the chapter argues that the practices and meanings of culture are both accommodated and contested when economic and political realities are simultaneously in play. Examining the changing characteristics of the intermediaries at donkey markets also sheds light on the ways in which these actors are becoming agents who bridge peasant communities in remote parts of southern Xinjiang and national markets amidst otherwise unfavourable social and economic conditions.

Sustaining a spinal cord injury (SCI) at any point in time is life-altering – physically, emotionally, and financially – for all persons affected by the injury, but it can place unique challenges on younger married couples. This study examines the transition to injury for 18 couples (ages 21–55). Data were collected using individual interviews with each partner at three time points following injury and observation in the rehabilitation setting (Creekview). This resulted in 96 individual interviews and 300 hours of observation. Using the life course perspective as a guiding theoretical framework and thematic analysis, I examined how the healthcare institution influenced the couples' relationship during their rehabilitation stay and the subsequent transition home. Creekview staff and couples accepted and reinforced the dominant cultural narrative that women are natural caregivers, but larger social structures of class, gender, and the division of paid and unpaid labor worked together to push some women into caregiving faster or prevented other women from engaging in caregiving. This study examines how younger couples move through the caregiving career during an off-time transition when the expected outcome is not long-term care placement or death. This study identified three main types of caregivers, each with their own path of caregiving – naturalized, constrained, and resistant caregivers. Overall, the transition to injury is complex and this study highlights some of the ways the marital relationship is affected by a nonnormative, unexpected transition.

The tradition in academic institutions seems to favour individual effort and achievement. In counterpoint, a group of four Māori women from Aotearoa New Zealand – Nan Wehipeihana, Kataraina Pipi, Vivienne Kennedy and Kirimatao Paipa – share their experiences of journeying together as a kaupapa whānau, ¹ enhanced by their whakapapa ² links to collectively navigate a higher education pathway. They asserted their ways of working and being supportive to each other through a postgraduate diploma in evaluation and research. Their collaborative way of working challenged the academic system where learning is focused on individual effort and achievement. Pushing the boundaries to ensure the benefits of a culture of inclusiveness, collaboration and collectivity in an academic sphere of learning requires a mixture of willingness and cooperation between students and the institution. This chapter describes how this group of four mature Māori students overcame challenges in asserting a cultural stance that was a key enabler to them in successfully attaining their higher educational learning goals.

This article describes several lessons learned during my career. Some describe ways of approaching intellectual issues and others express values and attitudes underlying these approaches. Although the lessons have evolved in a largely academic context, they seem equally appropriate in the world of practice. The personal rules of thumb and ideas inherent in these lessons are typically developed and practiced implicitly. However, readers should find these explicit statements relevant in different ways. Some lessons might be candidates for adoption outright. Others might be constructive points of departure for evolving a related lesson better suited to one's own working style. All lessons, whether or not they are agreeable or appropriate, can serve as thought starters by challenging readers to surface their own implicit career lessons for comparison.

Scholars have made important inroads to theorising and understanding working-class people's experiences of higher education (HE), as well as the broader complexities of navigating overlapping and sometimes competing middle- and working-class spaces.

In this chapter, we hope to add to this body of literature through examining the experiences and histories of two working-class women currently in the early stages of academic careers. Through the use of ‘experimental autoethnographies’ (Read & Bradley, 2018) and based on an assemblage of autoethnographic artefacts, we trace our journeys from undergraduate to post-PhD employment, picking up on key moments of pain, disconnect and isolation on the one hand, and celebration, support and pride on the other.

Through the tracing of these key moments in our recent academic trajectories, we make visible the difficulties of navigating elite spaces of academia as women with no family history of HE participation, exploring the ways in which we take on the role as ‘academic translator’ for those around us when discussing the labyrinthine meanings of academe. At the same time, and reflecting on these experiences from the perspective of navigating the margins of academia, we reject the pathologising narratives of working-class people and communities as uninterested in or hostile to HE through the unpacking of joyful moments shared with those around us related to our academic successes.

Finally, we point to ways in which we, as academics – however early career or precariously employed – are now in the position to support marginalised students or colleagues, ending our chapter with a series of practical suggestions for making academia ‘thinkable’ for future generations.

This chapter puts practices of everyday violence at the center of its analysis of colonial order. It examines the micro-mechanisms and manifold forms of threatening and hurting people. While a quotidian part of colonial life, such practices – accepted and normal within the colonial moral economy – are not normally seen as state actions. However, they reveal the workings of a powerful state: one that was built in an improvised fashion by low-level state representatives.

Based on an analysis of everyday police work in German Southwest Africa, this chapter offers a theoretical reframing of the colonial state that aims to provincialize the modern European state. It shifts the perspective away from the legal and institutional aspirations and structures of the state, instead turning attention to less rationalized processes: the idiosyncratic, makeshift, affective procedures of low-ranking officials. On this plane, everyday violence played a key role in generating a new social order. Ultimately, it had constructive effects which were a fundamental and inherent part of the colonial state’s power.

In this chapter, we utilize qualitative and quantitative data from a yearlong study in four urban Chinese middle schools to investigate the learning environments for girls at these schools; the behavior and performance of girls and boys in these environments; and what factors impact that behavior and performance. This study particularly focuses on socialization through moral education and the examination system as two sources of authority motivating students’ behavior and performance in school. In the analysis, girls attending three co-educational schools are compared with girls attending one single-sex school, and outcomes for girls are also considered alongside those of boys in the co-educational institutions. Findings indicate that although moral education is particularly emphasized by teachers at the all-girls school, female misbehavior and engagement with teachers is no different for girls attending the single-sex school compared to girls in co-educational schools. Furthermore, differences in outcomes between females and males across schools transcend school-level differences for misbehavior and engagement. However, at the same time, girls at all co-educational schools report higher Chinese and English grades compared to their math and science grades, whereas all-girls school students report no such differences in grades. In regression analysis, socialization variables appear to explain more about students’ misbehavior, whereas the desire to progress to higher levels of schooling explains more about grades and engagement with teachers. That said, socialization variables including moral attitude and attachment to teachers matter more for girls’ math and science grades and their engagement with teachers as compared to boys. This research provides a rare comparative look at education for urban Chinese students and offers new insights about what matters most for girls’ behavior and performance in school.