Fair chances and hard work? Families making sense of inequality and opportunity in 21st-century Britain.

In British social mobility discourse, the rhetoric of fair access can obscure wider issues of social justice. While socio-economic inequalities continue to shape young people's lives, sociological work on class dis-identification suggests social class is less obviously meaningful as a source of individual and collective identity. This paper considers subjective understandings of the post-16 education and employment landscape in this context, drawing on qualitative research exploring the aspirations of young men and women as they completed compulsory education in north-west England, and the hopes their parents had for their future.

Framing the Other: cosmopolitanism and the representation of difference in overseas gap year narratives.

This paper engages with debates surrounding contemporary cosmopolitanism and the outcomes of cultural encounters. It considers if overseas gap years, often put forward in the UK as a way of becoming a global citizen, enable young Britons to 'broaden their mind'. I explore representations of the people and places encountered during these periods of time out through an analysis of young people's travel blogs.

Adoption and use of Web 2.0 in scholarly communications.

Sharing research resources of different kinds, in new ways, and on an increasing scale, is a central element of the unfolding e-Research vision. Web 2.0 is seen as providing the technical platform to enable these new forms of scholarly communications.