This paper is based upon two empirical studies, which identify care-giving responsibilities as a key mediator of mature students' -a target group within the widening participation strategy -experiences of higher education. Employing a feminist lens on care, we identify a disjuncture between how students experience the challenges of negotiating care and study, and the narrow and economistic way care is addressed within higher education policy. We point to the broader recognition of care emerging within New Labour's policies on the reconciliation of paid work and family life and argue that in the context of increasing expectations that learning is for life, care needs to be recognised in a broader form at the interface of both education and employment. Drawing on the notion of a 'political ethics of care', we conclude by identifying elements that should be included in a higher-education 'care culture'. IntroductionDrawing on the findings from two recent research studies, this paper explores the ways in which care-giving responsibilities mediate students' experiences of higher education (HE) in England, and interrogates current HE policy, examining in particular how care is recognised within it. 1 Informed by feminist understandings of care, we expose a disjuncture between the challenges confronted by students in negotiating their responsibilities as students and carers, and policy's framing of the care challenge. In particular, we argue that the policy lens on care is narrow and economistic when viewed against a feminist conceptualisation of care, which is more multidimensional in its understandings of how care-giving is practised, and the costs that it entails.In the paper, we focus specifically on mature student carers. 2 Attracting more mature and part-time students (who are, in the main, mature) has been a stated target of the widening participation strategy -the government's strategy of broadening and expanding access to HE (Gorard et al. 2006). While improving the number of school leavers staying on in education has been the prime focus to date (Lewis 2002, 218), responding on the one hand to evidence of the falling number of 18-year-olds, and on the other hand to the Leitch enquiry's (2006) recommendation to improve opportunities for lifelong learning as part of a strategy to ensure an appropriately skilled workforce, the government recently announced its intentions to focus more sharply on recruiting mature students to HE (BBC News 2007).

Drawing on the results of a small qualitative research project involving four workbased book groups -three in the UK and one in the USA-this article examines the ways in which participation in workplace reading groups facilitates women's networking within work organizations, in terms of both formal and informal as well as expressive and instrumental networking. It has long been recognized that women's employment progression is hampered, in part, by their exclusion from maledominated networks. Taking a gendered approach to the analysis of workplace networking, this study suggests that book groups can function as an alternative to traditional old boys' networks, in some instances. Within the workplace the collective reading of literature, I suggest, can potentially function as a means to extend the social as well as the more career-focused opportunities of its participants.

When Communism collapsed in Central and Eastern Europe women seemed to lose the control they had gained over their reproductive lives. Abortion rights became more limited as did access to childcare and maternity benefits. The authors argue that this picture conceals two key points. First, the effects of both Communism and post-Communism for women's reproductive lives need to be understood as byproducts of state initiatives geared towards the fulfilment of quite different political goals – and not attempts to intervene in women's health and well-being per se. Second, these effects are very varied and cannot be attributed to a single cause. ‘Central and Eastern Europe’ comprises a whole range of political, ethnic and religious groupings, the result being that women's reproductive lives have been shaped within a diversity of political processes. Some women have faced pressures from the state to reproduce, some have lost the conditions necessary for them to continue paid work after childbirth, others have lost abortion rights. To understand these very different outcomes of post-Communism, this article looks beyond women's issues per se to unravel their role as symbolic resources which have been drawn upon in power struggles taking place in political arenas which exclude the majority of women. This argument is elaborated through empirical evidence from Poland, Serbia and East Germany.

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In this article, we explore the relation between bodies and selves evident in the narratives surrounding aesthetic surgery. In much feminist work on aesthetic surgery, such narratives have been discussed in terms of the normalising consequences of the objectifying, homogenising, cosmetic gaze. These discussions stress the ways in which we model our bodies, under the gaze of others, in order to conform to social norms. Such an objectified body is contrasted with the subjective body; the body-for-the-self. In this article, however, we wish to make sense of the narratives surrounding such surgery by invoking the expressive body, which fits on neither side of this binary. We wish to explore how the modification of the body's anatomical features (physiology) is taken to be a modification of its expressive possibilities, and therefore a modification of possibilities for inter-subjective relations with others. It is such expressive possibilities that, we suggest, underlie decisions to undergo surgical procedures. The possibility of modification of the expressive possibilities of the body, by the modification of its anatomical features, rests on the social imaginaries attached to anatomical features. In the context of such imaginaries, individual decisions to undergo or promote surgery can be both intelligible and potentially empowering. However, the social consequences of such acts are an increasing normalisation of the 'body under the knife' and an intolerance of bodily difference. This, we suggest, can only be changed by a re-visioning of bodily imaginaries so that expressive possibilities can be experienced across bodies with a range of physiological features.