It's been a busy season of book releases for Professors and Readers in the Sheffield Institute of Education. Five new titles are out now.

Dr Eleanor Formby

Exploring LGBT Spaces and Communities: Contrasting Identities, Belongings and Wellbeing (Routledge)

The phrase 'LGBT community' is often used by policy-makers, service providers and LGBT people themselves, but what does it mean? What understandings and experiences does that term suggest, and ignore? Based on a UK-wide study funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, this book explores these questions from the perspectives of over 600 research participants.

Eleanor Formby is Senior Research Fellow at Sheffield Institute of Education.

Professor Cathy Burnett and Professor Guy Merchant

New Media in the Classroom: Rethinking Primary Literacy (Sage)

The rise of new media technologies has changed the ways in which children engage with texts and this has implications for literacy provision in schools. This new book draws on research exploring new media practices within and outside school. It explains and encourages classroom activity that makes purposeful and appropriate use of these literacies and is underpinned by a set of guiding principles for teaching literacy in contemporary times.

Cathy Burnett and Guy Merchant are Professors of Literacy and Education at Sheffield Institute of Education.

Professor Jacqueline Stevenson

Possible Selves and Higher Education: New interdisciplinary insights (Routledge)

New collection co-edited by Holly Henderson, Jacqueline Stevenson and Ann-Marie Bathmaker

Drawing together example studies from international contexts, this edited collection provides a new and cross-disciplinary perspective on the concept of the possible self, exploring its theoretical, methodological and empirical uses with regards to Higher Education. Building on research which examines the ways in which possible selves are constructed through inequalities of class, race and gender, the book interrogates the role of imagined futures in student, professional and academic lives, augmenting the concept of possible selves, with its origins in psychology, with sociological approaches to educational inequalities and exclusionary practices.

Jacqueline Stevenson is a Professor of Education Research at Sheffield Institute of Education.

Professor Jacqueline Stevenson

Evaluating Equity & Widening Participation in Higher Education (UCL IOE Press)

New collection co-edited by Penny Jane Burke, Annette Hayton and Jacqueline Stevenson

Evaluation is a contested field. This collection considers the relationship between evaluation and research, and the ethical and moral dilemmas raised when evaluating equity and widening participation in higher education. The growing demands for ‘evidence of impact’ frame expectations that we can justify government funding of particular university-led equity initiatives and understand ‘what works’ well enough to ensure that resources are being allocated and used appropriately. Drawing on the international seminar series they designed and facilitated over 2014-16, the editors have created a framework of praxis around contested understandings of ‘access’, ‘equity’ and ‘widening participation’ in HE.

Jacqueline Stevenson is Professor of Education Research at Sheffield Institute of Education.

Dr Colin McCaig

Equality and Differentiation in Marketised Higher Education: A New Level Playing Field? (Palgrave)

New collection co-edited by Marion Bowl, Colin McCaig and Jonathan Hughes

The latest in the series Palgrave Studies in Excellence and Equity in Global Education, this new collection unites leading scholars in the field who:

• Explore how discourses and practices of marketisation, differentiation and equity are manifested in higher education today.
• Expose the contradictions which arise between equity and an increasingly marketised higher education.
• Examine the impact and implications of marketisation on equity in higher education and the conception of education as a vehicle for advancing equality and social justice.

SIoE colleagues Jacqueline Stevenson, Carol Taylor, Jean Harris-Evans, Iain Garner, Damien Fitzgerald and Manuel Madriaga contribute chapters to this collection.

Colin McCaig is Reader in Higher Education Policy at Sheffield Institute of Education.