Background: Worldwide, over half of the adolescent pregnancies recorded are unintended. The decision to continue the pregnancy to term or to opt for an abortion is a constant dilemma that is directly or indirectly influenced by stakeholders and also by the wider social environment. This study aimed at understanding the perceived decision-making preferences and determinants of early adolescent pregnancy in the Jamestown area of Accra in Ghana. Methods: A vignette-based qualitative study design was used. Eight focus group discussions were carried among various purposively selected groups of participants: parents, teachers, adolescent students who had not been pregnant before, and adolescents who had had at least one pregnancy in the past. The vignette was a hypothetical case of a 15-year-old high school student who had not experienced her menses for the past 6 weeks. The data were analyzed using a thematic analysis approach. Results: Lack of parent-daughter communication, the taboo on discussing sex-related issues in households and weak financial autonomy were considered to be the main contributing factors to the high early adolescent pregnancy rates in the community. Partner readiness to assume responsibility for the girl and the baby was a key consideration in either continuing the pregnancy to term or opting for an abortion. The father was overwhelmingly considered to be the one to take the final decision regarding the pregnancy outcome. Irrespective of the fact that the respondents were very religious, opting for an abortion was considered acceptable under special circumstances, especially if the pregnant adolescent was doing well in school. Conclusion: Inadequate and inappropriate communication practices around sexuality issues, as well as weak financial autonomy are the major predictors of early adolescent pregnancy in this community. The father is perceived to be the main decision maker regarding a young adolescent’s pregnancy outcome. Policy-makers should carefully evaluate the implications of this overwhelming perceived desire for the father to be the final decision-maker regarding adolescent pregnancy outcomes in this community.

Social Entrepreneurs address ‘wicked’ societal problems and achieve social impact using innovative practices. This study contributes to the analysis of the role of government in the ecosystem of Dutch social entrepreneurs by looking at the support initiatives that the Amsterdam municipality offers. Our paper reveals how municipal officials and social entrepreneurs position themselves in this ecosystem and how they make sense of their collaboration. We think that these issues are important to dwell on to be able see the limits of collaborative governance approaches in the Dutch Social Entrepreneurship eco-system. The results of qualitative interviews conducted with municipality officials, social entrepreneurs and members of network organizations show that the ties between the municipality of Amsterdam and social entrepreneurs are not strong enough to overcome the institutional barriers and that the relationship between them is disrupted by the different logics used. Social entrepreneurs operate from both a social as well as a commercial logic. Social entrepreneurs see themselves as running noble social enterprises that put impact first, but the municipality values a commercial logic when granting subsidies. This means that the social enterprises do not always fit within the frameworks offered by the municipality because their commercial logic is seen as less legitimate when it comes to support. The results of this study confirm that in the governance of wicked problems, there is an ongoing actor positioning process where, in this case, social enterprises and municipalities, hold on to their actor-based understanding of the nature of issues and collaboration.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, higher education in many countries suddenly moved online. The sudden move to online education forced teachers to adapt their teaching to an online context. The concept of belonging has been described as the next evolution of, and a characteristic that is central to, inclusion. Many have argued that inclusion can never be truly achieved without the presence of belonging. In this paper we ask important questions, such as how does the move to online education, with its lack of personal cues and heightened anonymity, influence minoritized students’ sense of belonging? What is the role of the sense of belonging for inclusion in education? From our data about the minoritized student experiences of belonging in online classrooms, three patterns emerged. (1) The most dominant experience was that the lack of connection in online classrooms reduced students’ sense of belonging. (2) In a few instances, however, the lack of connection and the heightened anonymity of online classrooms led to an increased sense of belonging and safety in online classrooms. (3) However, not all students experienced the switch to online education as a major change.

Despite universities’ increasing commitments to diversity, racial and gender inequality persist in higher education. In the Dutch academic context, such inequalities are maintained through the continuous (re)drawing of racialized and gendered boundaries that normalize the exclusion of women of colour. This article examines how whiteness functions as an affective orientation that structures Dutch academia and disciplines women of colour into normative academic subjectivities. Drawing on 13 interviews with women of colour working in Dutch universities, we show how whiteness as an orientation operates through: (1) epistemic evaluations that mark non-white female bodies as lacking legitimacy, (2) white incredulity that affectively reinstates racialized and gendered boundaries when these are disrupted and (3) racial surveillance that spatially and institutionally repositions women of colour as ‘bodies out of place’. These dynamics discipline women of colour but also provoke acts of resistance and refusal. We argue that challenging whiteness in higher education requires disorienting the academy’s white orientation in both research and diversity practice. This study contributes to scholarship on whiteness, academic inequality and the experiences of women of colour in higher education.

Classrooms are fundamental components of university campuses. The creation of inclusive and equitable campus environments is incumbent upon the teachers who need to navigate through “hot moments”, which typically refers to situations or incidents that generate intense emotions or strong reactions among the students or between the students and teachers. The literature suggests that many “hot moments” occur due to microaggressions in the classroom and that issues of difference, power, and privilege underlie “hot moments”. Based on qualitative research done with university teachers in a Dutch institution, our research shows that teacher-described “hot moments” can be analyzed under three interrelated dimensions: individual, interactional, and institutional. We suggest educators and higher education policy makers read through these experiences as a way to better understand the challenges their colleagues face, most often alone as the classroom’s leader; in the hope of advancing change efforts to create more inclusive and equitable class environments which will change how minoritized students experience university education.

Purpose: This paper aims to understand how social enterprises working in the food waste sector in the Netherlands make sense of discourses around social impact measurement and explicate what they actually practice in this domain. Building on the literature on impact measurement and differentiating between outcome and output level outcome measurement, the authors want to understand, albeit current marketization and rationalization discourses surrounding social entrepreneurs, why there is a palpable reluctancy to measure social impact at the outcome level in this specific sector. Design/methodology/approach: In this qualitative study, 18 semi-structured interviews were carried out with the founders and employees of the social enterprises that were operating in food waste sector. The authors use phenomenological constructivist approach. Findings: The results indicated that in the Netherlands, social enterprises that combat with food waste did not measure their social impacts at the outcome level, and almost all of them resorted to arguments that delegitimized impact measurement, as theorized by Molecke and Pinkse (2017) on the outcome level. However, the findings also show that these enterprises did measure their social impact at the output level. Following Ebrahim (2014), The authors think that the nature of the sector in the Netherlands has too provided an impetus for social entrepreneurs to measure impact only at the output level, since in this sector the causal link between output and outcomes was clearly established through evidence, making outcome-level measurement irrelevant for the enterprises in question. Originality/value: Sector-specific empirical analysis of social entrepreneurship is rather scarce. By using various theoretical approaches, the authors show internal dynamics of this sector, as they relate to social impact measurement at the output and outcome levels.