This ethnographic study explored how Black Ugandan British parents support their children’s learning in England. It is important to study this group because the parents in this study are Black migrants from Uganda and have an asylum seeking background, thus adding to our knowledge of asylum seeking and education. Moreover, little attention has been paid to this particular group before. The study comprises ten Black Ugandan British families with refugee and asylum-seeking backgrounds in two London boroughs. Adopting an ethnographic and an interpretive approach allowed me to explore how Black Ugandan British parents supported their children’s education over time through data collected via long-term interactions, observations and semi-structured interviews with the ten families in their natural home environment settings. I adopted Yosso’s concept of community cultural wealth to analyse data from my study and the data was theorised using Critical Race Theory. Through this theoretical framework, I challenge the traditional interpretations of cultural capital, particularly in relation to educational support or provision, by highlighting various and different forms of capital Black Ugandan British parents use to support their children’s learning, which are unknown. This thesis contributes to knowledge by highlighting the different nature of parental educational support, educational strategies and the underlying factors that inform Black Ugandan British parents’ nature of parental educational support and educational strategies. I argue that Black Ugandan British parents’ culturalistic approach towards their children’s education within their homes and communities and additionally, the contribution they make towards their children’s learning are unrecognised in English schools and English education policy. Further, this thesis highlights class complexities and contributes to debates on class. The study found that Black Ugandan British parents with middle class backgrounds from Uganda, but positioned as working class parents in the UK, bring their Ugandan middle class backgrounds to supporting their children’s education in the UK, which calls for the need to understand Black Ugandan British parents’ middle class backgrounds and the influence they have on their ways of supporting their children’s education. My study shows that Black Ugandan British parents’ cultural, employment, educational and class backgrounds have a huge influence on how they support their children’s education. My study illuminates how class, ethnicity and culture shape Black British Ugandan children’s learning, and makes an original and important contribution to knowledge in this field.

This Covering Document offers a narrative addressing the contributory contexts, thematic coherences, and original contribution to knowledge made by the body of work presented for this award. It discusses the place and importance of critical enquiry concerning childhood and children’s lives in the curricula of Education Studies and cognate disciplinary fields. The body of work comprises eight formal outputs from nearly a decade of writing and publication that, in turn, draw on a longer career as teacher and academic. Its trajectory leads to the proposition that the declaration of The Anthropocene encourages us to reconsider and recast Enlightenment modernity and particularly those constructions of human nature and the natural world that inform commonplace thinking about children and their childhoods which, in turn, justify many of the practices, language and time-space organisation structuring educational institutions. The Anthropocene offers a framework within which to understand the historical provenance of the ideological condition identified as ‘Modern childhood’ and to reflect on its emerging implications for children’s lives in times of technological change, intercultural encounter, globalization and climate change. The Covering Document identifies recurrent topical themes in the body of work and offers a rationale for the historical, spatial, and social modes of analysis that are threaded through it. It also offers reflections on the way that the published material addresses its audience as pedagogically mediated content knowledge. The Covering Document asserts that The Anthropocenic proposition revitalises the place of the New Social Studies of Childhood within Education Studies, thereby offering a coherent and relevant direction for further growth that encourages us all to ‘take a wider look around’.

This thesis explores the social construction of classed, ‘raced’ and gendered identities of Bengali female learners of ESOL (English for Speakers of other languages) from a post-structuralist feminist position. My research is conducted within the post-compulsory educational context, exploring how Bengali women construct identities in relation to educational experiences of learning English as a second language, and considering how Bengali women are positioned, in turn, by contemporary popular, academic and political discourses. This study is intended to contribute to creating ‘a third space’, within which shifts in cultural meanings that occur through colonialisation and diaspora, offer possibilities for reworking and resisting notions of passivity, inactivity and docility assigned to women within popular and some white academic discourses (Hall, 1992; Khan, 1998; Gilroy, 1992; Spivak, 1999). To open up spaces for non-hegemonic readings of Bengali femininities I identified discursive strategies actively employed by Bengali women to trouble/unsettle dominant discourses that reduce Bengali women to ‘docile bodies’ (Foucault, 1979). Applying a feminist post-structuralist framework has illuminated differences and similarities between, and within, Bengali women’s accounts of ESOL education, to substantiate the view that there is no one truth and no unitary subject. I also draw upon post-colonial, black feminist perspectives to argue that the voices from the margins that have traditionally been excluded from the knowledge making processes can bring into dispute the current discourses about ’race’, class, gender, culture, religion, patriarchy and femininity. The research was undertaken at two educational sites in East and central London over five years. In total, 20 Bengali female learners of ESOL participated in life history interviews over the period of 2 years. The sample was diverse in terms of age, class, education, employment, marital and maternal status. In addition, I also conducted one-to-one interviews with two members of teaching staff per institution. I do not present my interpretations of Bengali female accounts of employment and education as ‘truth’ since post-structuralist approaches challenge the notion of singular truth for all South Asian women. Rather I present these accounts as alternative truths which expand and challenge deep-seated inequalities that position South Asian women as passive victims within existing, dominant oppressive discourses.