Historically, upwardly mobile working-class men have navigated the binary distinctions between a cerebral middle-class masculinity and a manual working-class masculinity. However, within an increasingly globalised world, the boundaries between the two are increasingly blurred and, therefore, distinctions between the two can often be quite complex. Part of the reason for this is the onset of post-industrialisation and increases in low-skilled service work which require certain facets of working-class masculinity to be readjusted. This conceptual article draws on existing historical and contemporary scholarship to delineate aspects of the borderlands between a working and middle-class manhood. We are interested in the identity work that occurs at the borderlands and what this may mean for upwardly mobile working-class men. The article acknowledges the role of sociological theory but instead foregrounds a social anthropological approach where we consider what the conceptual lens of liminality has to offer in light of historic and contemporary research.

The article is about the various ways tools can be used in the interactions between teacher and students during workshop sessions in vocational education. Through video observations in classrooms, we investigate how tools are used as objects of learning in four technical vocational programs. The theoretical foundation of the study is the variation theory of learning. In the video-recorded lessons, situations where tools have been foregrounded in the interaction between students and teachers have been categorised in relation to the research question: In what different ways is the use of tools foregrounded as an object of learning in vocational workshop teaching? The result points to four categories about 1) finding any object to solve a task, 2) contributing to the understanding of using a specific tool for a specific task, 3) understanding the complexity of using tools to solve a task and 4) creating and recreating a tool to complete a task. The conclusion is that there are different kinds of learning content and abilities related to tools which can be understood in the enacted vocational workshop teaching. Our study shows that tools are dynamic, created, and shaped in various contexts, and the tools are often spontaneously used as an object of learning, in different teaching situations and in interactions between teachers and students. In the workshop, the vocational students get different opportunities to learn to use tools in different ways in here-and-now situations based on the requirements of the vocational work.

Drawing on sociological perspectives on literacy in which reading is viewed upon as a social and cultural practice, situated in the specifics of time and place (Barton & Hamilton, 2012) this symposium will address the significance of volitional reading in peoples’ lives across life stages and diverse national contexts. It attends to an expanded definition of the concept of reading which acknowledges the social, affective and relational dimensions of reading alongside cognitive dimensions (Cremin & Scholes, 2024). The first paper, Informally Talking about Books and Reading (Teresa Cremin & Helen Hendry), will share insights from two studies of UK classrooms that explored children’s book conversations and the social connections among  communities of engaged readers. The second paper, Lived Experiences of Young and Working Adults’ Print and Digital Recreational Reading (Chin Ee Loh), examines Singapore adults’ reading preferences to understand when, why and how they read for leisure, and the platforms through which reading is done. The third paper, Practical performative reading practices in rural woodlands (Stig-Börje Asplund, Birgitta Ljung Egeland, Gabriel Bladh & Martin Stolare) will present results from a three-generational study on rural working-class males in Sweden and their local, place-based reading practices. The symposium constitutes a theoretical, methodological and empirical contribution to contemporary reading research by facilitating nuanced and in depth descriptions of peoples’ volitional reading practices in relation to local and global changes in schools and society.

This paper explores the significance of reading in the lives of three generations of working-class males in four families living in the Swedish rural woodlands. By adopting a life history approach and taking an ecological perspective on reading that links narratives of reading experiences to places, times, and historical changes, the paper addresses how rural males’ reading practices intersect with ways of living in Swedish rural woodlands, and in what ways they have been maintained and changed across generations. Findings show that the males engage in practical performative reading practices where reading is transformed into embodied activities in which knowledge practices and embodied skills, entangled with socio-material and historical cultures, are constructed and reconstructed through intergenerational repetitions. In this way, reading emerges as an essential, community-building, and situated social practice through which the males, across generations, construct and reconstruct place-based knowledge practices vital for creating a sustainable lifestyle in the Swedish rural woodlands. The paper contributes insights into the role of reading in the construction of rural places, in formations of rural masculinities, and for the practices of staying, as well as how reading is influenced by the specific socio-cultural, historical, and material spaces available. 

Education - and the promise that it holds - has always been a source of tension for working-class populations, given its acquisition often involves changing the self. In surveying contemporary and historic scholarships, this paper explores the ways in which education has been portrayed as a civilising force for the working-classes - specifically working-class males - where it has strong inflections of being both a moral good and a vehicle for social mobility. First, we provide a brief overview of research on working-class males and their disengagement from education before foregrounding what remains a largely underexplored aspect - those who are compliant, studious and engaged in their education. Second, we focus on The Working Men's College in London, founded by Christian Socialist F. D. Maurice in 1854 to foster responsible citizenship for Victorian working men through a liberal education focused on the development of both honour and Christian morality. For the working-class men who attended, they mainly accessed forms of knowledge associated with the upper classes, which had little bearing on their lived realities. The aim of the article is two-fold: first, to capture key aspects of the field of working-class masculinities and how their identities are produced in relation to formal educational contexts. Second, to bring this knowledge into dialogue with what we know about The Working Men's College as a rich case study. Working across these aims, we highlight how notions of honour and morality, albeit socially constructed, remain central tenets of working-class men's encounters with education both historically and in the contemporary moment.

Internationally, boys from working-class backgrounds are often the most likely to disengage from their formal education. Research on the educational experience of working-class boys has focused heavily on their identity barriers, often positioning these young men as either vulnerable or volatile in their formal education. Social theorists have sought to address the historical and cultural embedded (gendered) practices which influence the identity work of working-class boys. This conceptual article contributes to the study of working-class boyhood and education through first synthesizing key themes present in the historic and contemporary literature before adopting a feminist post-structural stance to consider how these themes are informed by our understandings of the discursive production of masculinities. Then, in the second half of the paper, we make visible what has been at the margins in the scholarship - identity versatility - which we define as contextual and agentic adaptation. Attention to versatility, we feel, offers the potential for a nuanced analysis regarding working-class boyhood, learner identities and educational engagement.

This paper explores young people’s narratives about BookTok and volitional reading. The data consist of narrative interviews with eight students (all girls) from two different classes in year 1 and year 2 of a preparatory programme for higher education, that is, students aged 17–18 years old. Using the framework of Wenger’s notion of communities of practice and Bamberg’s theory of narrative positioning, the findings indicate that the volitional reading practices described by the participants are strongly characterised by social, physical, and emotional dimensions that are generated and made possible by the book as an artefact. The findings also show that young people use the digital media platform TikTok and its subcommunity BookTok as a resource in constructing their own volitional reading practices and as a means to strengthen their reader identities. In view of their use of BookTok, this article contributes insights into young people’s volitional reading practices and the construction of reader identities outside of school. The results also contribute to the ongoing discussion about how to support and motivate young people to read literature.