This paper focuses on the concept of the flâneur, deriving largely from the works of Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, and attempts to reveal its contemporary relevance for sociological practice. The flâneur is treated as an instructive metaphor for the sociologist's relationship with modernity and urban life, and therefore as providing insight into the social, historical and theoretical contexts for the analysis of the world today. More than this, the idea of the flâneur is treated as highly instructive of research strategies confronting urban life, namely ethnography. The paper seeks to expose a critical space between ‘realist’ and ‘textual’ ethnographies and provide a locus for the discussion of associated methodological problems. A burgeoning literature and tradition of work in this area is examined which will also be of interest to the sociological theorist.

This study provides a narrative synthesis of the findings published in journal articles from a broad range of scientific fields about the impact of extracurricular activities (ECAs) on the academic success and employability of university students. The analysis included 39 articles from the Scopus and Web of Science databases, published over the period 2010–2021. Results show that the vast majority of ECAs have a positive impact on the academic success and employability of university students. ECAs showing a negative impact are residual. In light of these results, higher education institutions should promote activities with an educational purpose outside the strictly curricular objectives and beyond the classroom, fostering a more holistic development of students that combines academic success with a better capacity/preparation to enter the labour market.

Approaches to youth engagement typically focus on withdrawal from conventional politics and participatory transformation. In this paper, we argue that such approaches fall short in grasping how groups with blended styles of relationship with politics assess their political ownership. This became apparent when, in the context of European elections, the rise of extreme right wing in Europe and intensification of austerity in Portugal, we discussed the circumstances framing youth’s relationship with politics with 40 youngsters outside regular school. Quantitative data from regular-school students on the same topic were used to trigger focus groups and later used by participants to interview their peers. Participants displayed ‘ordinary’ approaches to engagement, attributing an unexpected relevance to vote. Socioeducational disadvantages and self-blaming perspectives were actively contested, and the gap between youth and politics is to be filled by a normative equipment, with the school indicated as a fundamental, structured and unbiased locus of political education.

Access to higher education is affected by inequalities worldwide. Here we present a longitudinal study based on large databases of scores in upper secondary education and access to higher education in Portugal. Our findings show how access to higher education builds on and reinforces social inequalities: (1) private, fee-paying secondary schools inflate their students’ scores; (2) this inflation unfairly improves their chances of accessing higher education; (3) the Portuguese national compensatory education programme is ineffective in bridging the gap in academic performance between the less privileged and the rest of the schools. This study, then, provides further insights into how the upper classes are disproportionately benefited by the massification of higher education. To achieve greater equity, issues such as the State supervision of grading practices, the assessment and reconfiguration of compensatory education programmes, and the admission process into higher education have to be addressed.