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This paper aims to provide context for papers in this special issue on Australasian e‐learning. The paper aims to examine the background to Australian flexible and transnational education and to evaluate the educational and intuitional flexibility of three typical products of the Australian educational software industry.

The history of Australian distance education is summarised and drivers for flexible education are presented. A model of flexible educational software is introduced with three dimensions: educational, institutional and support/training. Three educational software products are informally reviewed using this model to establish that the current generation of Australian educational software offers significant educational and institutional flexibility.

The three examples of Australian educational software rate highly in both educational and institutional flexibility and also offer excellent support.

The existence of hot spots of educational technology innovation in relatively isolated areas such as Perth and Tasmania warrants further investigation.

The Australian educational software industry produces extremely flexible products with excellent support that are worthy of consideration by international customers. Policy makers in Australia are alerted that current policies in ICT off shoring and the Australian Research Quality Framework (equivalent to the British Research Assessment Exercise) may threaten this industry, which contributes to sizable exports in transnational education.

The paper brings the flexible nature of Australian educational software to light for an international audience.

Constructivist grounded theory method (GTM) as outlined by Kathy Charmaz has its explicit roots in the American pragmatism and symbolic interactionism primarily developed at the University of Chicago during the early and mid-twentieth century. Symbolic interactionism considers people as active and interpretative agents who co-construct selves, identities, meanings, social actions, social worlds, and societies through interactions. Charmaz argues that symbolic interactionism is an open-ended theoretical perspective that fosters studying action, process, and meanings, with a focus on how people co-construct and negotiate meanings, orders, and actions in their everyday lives. In this chapter, I argue that constructivist GTM, including its theory-method package built upon symbolic interactionism and the Chicago School tradition, can be further combined with the new sociology of childhood to study children's social worlds and negotiated meanings, orders, and actions.

The purpose of this study is to mirror the late guitarist Peter Green’s life experiences through insights from Andrew Voyce, who recovered from mental illness, and expertise from Peter Bryngelsson, a Swedish professional musician and author.

The authors used a mixed method of collaborative autoethnography, psychobiography and digital team ethnography.

Despite having not previously attracted academic interest, Peter Green’s experiences of mental health problems and his return to recording and performance provide a rich data source when mirrored and compared to the lives and experiences of Andrew Voyce and Peter Bryngelsson.

The main limitation of this piece of work is that Peter Green died in 2020. During the process of writing, the authors have had to follow different, mostly unacademic, sources that have described various parts of Peter Green’s life. The authors have given examples and drawn conclusions from their own lives as well as from academic sources, which they have found appropriate.

Both Andrew Voyce and Peter Bryngelsson’s stories would be helpful when it comes to a deeper understanding as to why Peter Green “took a left turn”, i.e., turned his back on an accepted lifestyle.

Acid casualty is a problem connected to both mental distress and to the music industry. Peter Bryngelsson’s story tells us that one can remain sane and drug free and still be an influential and creative musician.

The analysis has brought together two stories of mental distress in combination with insights.

This research aimed to analyze the interactions of “pre-adolescent” students in the classroom through relationships sustained by structure, agency, and power exercises based on Anthony Giddens’ Theory of Structuring.¹ A qualitative research approach was used with the characteristic of a case study in a municipal public school in the city of Itabira (MG), Brazil. As procedures for recording the evidence, we used the application of a questionnaire, observation of the classroom and listening to students and teachers in a class of the sixth year of elementary school II during the 2017 school year. The results indicated that the vision of “pre-adolescence” marked by biological and psychological changes remains institutionalized for school professionals. The students demonstrated the need for the teacher to use his teaching authority to set limits in the classroom, however, this exercise of agency-power by the teacher must be negotiated and mediated by the participation of “pre-adolescents.” In view of this procedural context, “pre-adolescent” students cannot be held responsible for the instability of the interactive process in the classroom if the historical and social context through which these students pass is not considered in comparison to the institutionalized characteristics solidified through the process, time, and space by the school and/or some of its representatives (teachers).

Mainstream pornography is popular, freely accessible, and infused with themes of male dominance, aggression, and female subservience. Through depicting sex in these ways, mainstream pornography has the potential to influence the further development of harmful sexual scripts that condone or endorse violence against women and girls. These concerns warrant the adoption of a harms-based perspective in critical examinations of pornography's influence on sexual experiences. This chapter reports on findings from interviews with 24 heterosexual emerging adults living in Aotearoa/New Zealand about how pornography has impacted their lives. Despite a shared awareness among participants of mainstream pornography's misogynistic tendencies, and the potential for harm from those displays, men's and women's experiences were profoundly gendered. Men's reported experiences were often associated with concerns about their own sexual behaviors, performances, and/or abilities. Conversely, women's experiences were often shaped by how pornography had affected the way that men related to them sexually. Their experiences included instances of sexual coercion and assault which were not reported by the men. These findings signal the need for a gendered lens, situated within a broader harms-based perspective, in examinations of pornography's influence.

Rooted in adult fear, adult authority aims to protect and control youth (Gannon, 2008; Valentine, 1997). Continuously negotiating for freedom, youth search for adult-free public spaces and are therefore extremely attracted to social networking sites (boyd, 2007, 2014). However, a significant portion of youth now includes adult authorities within their Facebook networks (Madden et al., 2013). Thus, this study explores how youth navigate familial- and educational-adult authorities across social networking sites in relation to their local peer culture.

Through semi-structured interviews, including youth-centered and participant-driven social media tours, 82 youth from the Northeast region of the United States of America (9–17 years of age; 43 females and 39 males) shared their lived experiences and perspectives about social media during the summer of 2013.

In their everyday lives, youth are subjected to the normative expectations emerging from peer culture, school, and family life. Within these different and at times conflicting normative schemas, youth’s social media use is subject to adult authority. In response, youth develop intricate ways to navigate adult authority across social networking sites.

Adult fear is powerful, but fragile to youth’s interpretation; networked publics are now regulated and youth’s ability to navigate then is based on their social location; and youth’s social media use must be contextualized to be holistically understood.

Recent intensification of the “politicisation of childhood” has been observed by analysts in numerous social science disciplines, and in a variety of public policy domains. Sociologists of childhood, for example, often attribute this greater politicisation both to shifts in the social construction of “social problems” and visions of children's agency (for example Mayall, 1994; Oakley, 1994, p. 17; Qvortrup, 1994; Livingstone, 2002, p. 13). Others observe this politicisation in changing patterns of defamilialisation and refamilialisation of social care and their implications for patterns of social solidarity (Leira & Saraceno, 2002 or Wincott, 2006, for example). Indeed, the politicisation of childhood – defined as the move from childhood being understood as primarily a family or parental responsibility to it being also a matter of public importance and concern – has emerged as a major theme in debates about “modernising” social policy paradigms (for example, Leira, 2002; Jenson, 2004; Esping-Andersen, Gallie, Hemerijck, & Myles, 2002).

It could be argued that the sign of ‘maturity’ of an academic paradigm is when it moves to some kind of integration with existing theories or re-engages with elements which may initially have been perceived as ‘dangerous’ or antithetical to the original demarcation of the area. As with the re-integration of feminism and reproduction, and disability and embodiment, so perhaps also for the social study of childhood and family research. The necessary political emphasis on the agency and voice of the child in the emerging social study of childhood research may well have been overstating the case (Seymour & McNamee, 2012) and ignoring significant structural and generational impediments in children’s relationships and interactions particularly in domestic spaces. To redress this, as occurred with feminist and disability studies, a contemporary standpoint is required which merges an emancipatory agentic approach to the subject of study with conceptual developments from the previously separated substantive area. This chapter will outline the development of the return of children ‘back into the families’ which has occurred in the last decade. It will show how approaches using family practices, personal lives, family display and generagency can be combined with privileging children’s perspectives and voices at home.

The expansion of research with children offers new opportunities for the development of child-centred practice. Children's participation in research has been championed as a positive way to challenge the processes and practices that affect their everyday lives. Yet opportunities for collaborating with children, and leveraging their voices, remains heavily guided by adult-led priorities. In this chapter, we offer a critique of ‘child-centredness’ and related voice-based and participatory discourses in the absence of a full-fledged engagement with the power imbalances between adults and children. We draw on examples from our research with children on contemporary global challenges (COVID-19 pandemic, health and migration) to expose the ways that adult-led agendas for, and definitions of, participation can affect children's engagement in research. We highlight how children also effect change and display their agency through the sharing of their experiences with adult researchers. The dynamic nature of social change highlights children's considered engagement with contemporary challenges but also the importance of reciprocity and willingness of adults to listen and respond to the issues that children identify as being central to their lives. We attend to the ways our methodological decision-making offers opportunities for leveraging children's perspectives, but also highlight the dangers of reproducing dominant adult/child power relations when seeking to be ‘child-centred’. We conclude by offering some critical questions to prompt further debate in this field, In doing so, we highlight the value of reciprocity and critical reflexivity as necessary first steps towards a more considered engagement with adult/child power relations in ‘child-centred’ research.