Job adverts demand communication, leadership, and resilience. But who actually gets credit for them? Drawing on Bourdieu, Puwar, and Rivera, this article argues that soft skills are not recognised neutrally — they are filtered through class, race, and cultural capital. The result is a hiring system that mistakes social advantage for individual merit.
This article uses Johanna Noble’s recent column on Plan 2 student loans to ask who is really put off university by talk of a “graduate tax”. Drawing on research on first-in-family and working-class students, it shows how fear of debt, school guidance, and weak vocational routes combine to reproduce classed access to higher education.
What if the rules that govern school life aren’t neutral? This article explores how symbolic violence—subtle norms and expectations—rewards middle-class students while sidelining others.
Doctoral progress reviews are framed as supportive and developmental. Yet for candidates pursuing reflexive, critical, or non-linear research, they often become spaces of misrecognition—where methodological ambiguity is pathologised, and intellectual risk is penalised. This article interrogates how audit logics, shaped by structures like the REF, reframe scholarly inquiry as compliance. It argues for a higher education culture that values complexity, temporal nuance, and epistemic diversity over bureaucratic legibility.
Comment sections are designed – both algorithmically and editorially – to reward anger, blame, and divisive language. This erodes civic trust, reduces democratic participation, and fosters cynicism towards both media institutions and social solidarity.
Viva-style exams are promoted as an AI-proof assessment solution, but do they reinforce class, linguistic, and neurodiversity exclusions? This sociological analysis unpacks how language, power, and educational justice intersect in the AI age.