Schools around the world have transitioned to emergency distance teaching due to the COVID-19 outbreak. In particular, the first lockdown (in early 2020) came unexpectedly for all actors and stakeholders in Austria. School authorities, parents, students and, above all, teachers were faced with considerable challenges. The aim of the present study is to evaluate the perception of Austrian elementary school teachers about distance teaching during the first lockdown. Using two different qualitative data sets from the Inclusive Home Learning (INCL-LEA) study, the following research question was investigated: what are the main challenges that elementary school teachers faced in distance teaching in Austria due to COVID-19? A multimethod qualitative research was carried out to answer the research question, and the data were evaluated using the topic analysis method. The teachers identified five greatest challenges: i) a lack of personal contact with the students; ii) additional workload and more stress, iii) non-existent technical equipment; iv) a lack of digital skills; and v) an inability to offer individual support for students at risk. This study has shown that better policies are needed to avoid these problems. Such solutions not only require the purchase of digital devices, but also the development of pedagogically well-thought-out and planned curricula and the provision of opportunities to improve digital skills. Furthermore, it also showed that sustainable working conditions needed to be created to counter the long-term effects of the heavy workload on teachers. However, the difference between distance teaching in times of the pandemic and regular online teaching also needs to be considered when developing and implementing policies.

Lifelong learning (LLL) programmes can be perceived as a means of governing youth transitions. Young adults can use such programmes to try to overcome different constraints in their life course. This article explores the decisions of young adults in Vienna (Austria) and Malaga (Spain) who are participating in different LLL programmes that seek to address their transition from unemployment to employment. In order to understand these decisions, we want to explore: (1) how the young adult’s experiences influenced their decision to engage with an LLL programme, (2) what role these programmes played in their biographies and (3) how young adults imagine their future. We use two theoretical lenses to explore these questions: bounded agency and projectivity. A comparative study of these two regions provides insight into how different contextual conditions influence young adults’ decisions. We perform three different analyses: of the young people’s past trajectories and transitions, of their imagined futures, and of their decision to enrol in the programme. Exploring young people’s subjective accounts of their pasts and their imagined futures helps to improve our understanding of the role young people believe these programmes play in their lives, why they have decided to enrol in them, and how they use and interpret these pathways through, and in the framework of, different contextual conditions.

Nation-Empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies was written by the historian Sayaka Chatani, based on her PhD thesis, in which she analyzed the complex process of youth mobilization and how Japanese colonialism has influenced the Chinese/Taiwanese and Korean youths at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. By employing methods of transnational history, Chatani examined comparatively the ideological formation of the Japanese colonial empire and traced how village youth associations (seinendan) became a model for transforming rural youths. The book showed case studies of young Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese farmers who turned into "young pillars of the nation empire" (p. 231). By looking at the social tensions and local dynamics (urban vs. rural, educated youth vs. uneducated youths), she has examined the motivations of these young people in joining their local seinendan. The 347-page book is divided into three parts and nine chapters, which nicely navigates the reader through the book using a cohesive storyline. Chatani begins the book in Part 1 with helpful contextual information including the national social trends at that time and how Japanese colonialism or Japanization takes over its own people and of its colonies. In Part 2, the author discusses historical evidence to demonstrate how powerful the impact of an imperial state is to village societies (p. 8). This is where the detailed analysis of her case studies of three rural areas in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea also comes in. These cases show how the Japanese Empire has achieved the Japanization of young people across its colonies. Finally, in Part 3, Chatani talks about the wider consequences and impacts of youth mobilization, especially how it has affected the identity of the Korean and Taiwanese youth. For example, one of the questions unpacked in this part is their motivations for volunteering as soldiers for the Japanese Empire. The book provides a comprehensive overview of the social history of the Japanese Empire's attempts to mobilize youths, particularly young men from the rural area for the service of the Japanese nation. Chatani was able to elucidate the knowledge about the youth cultures in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea at that time, which she demonstrated impressively, especially through original interviews with survivors using the oral history method. In this book, she explored the question of why many hundreds of thousands of young people voluntarily

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