This paper explores how young asylum seekers learn to belong to a local community. It takes its point of departure from a biographical and socially situated learning perspective and uses four analytical aspects of belonging: biographical experiences, engagement, imagination, and alignment. The data on which this paper is based are biographical interviews with five asylum seekers and field notes from a small mill town in Sweden. The findings show three types of learning: learning to be marginalised, learning to be disconnected, and learning to become a co-participant in the local community. Furthermore, the paper discusses how these learning processes are shaped by biographical experiences as well as access to the various communities of practice in and outside the local community, and how the asylum process negatively impacts their learning to belong to the local community and wider Swedish society.

This paper explores learning trajectories in becoming ‘rural women’ in Sweden, by using a biographical and socially-situated learning perspective. The data is based on in-depth biographical interviews with three young women who moved between rural and urban areas, and finally decided to return to a rural area. The findings show three learning phases: the mythical, the questioning and the self-positioning phase. Furthermore, the paper identifies four types of learning spaces of urban and rural areas: an imagined, a career-related, a cultural-emotional and a biographical learning space. The paper offers valuable insights about everyday life learning and identity development in young adulthood, and how stereotypes of rural areas negatively impact on young adults’ views of themselves and their life choices.

How non-traditional students experience participation in higher education(HE) including access, retention, learning, support and teaching, achievement, drop-out and graduation, as well as the plans and dreams they have in life are questions explored here empirically and theoretically. This chapter is based on the Swedish results from the two European projects RANLHE and EMPLOY. The analysis is based on data gathered using in-depth biographical interviews with several non-traditional students, some conducted longitudinally. This, together with theorizing results, may contribute to a better understanding of the situation for non-traditional students and ways to enhance their participation in HE.

During 2014 and 2015, 240,000 migrants sought asylum in Sweden, and the integration of the newcomers into the labour market and society has become a heated debate since then. Higher education has become one of the means for integrating migrants with higher levels of formal education, which is a new challenge. Higher education policies in Sweden are, however, also challenged by balancing between equality and employability. We claim that these challenges are not new, but part of Swedish education policy since the 1960’s. The challenge of balancing between equality and employability also affects the way that the challenge of an ageing population is handled in educational policy. Here, there have been contradicting reforms between getting students enter higher education as early as possible as a way to benefit the national economy, and enhancing lifelong learning with special regard to mature students. In this chapter, we will discuss the challenges for higher education policies further.

The notion of employability has been dominating the higher education policies and strategies of the European Union and other western countries for two decades. From an employability perspective, individuals are responsible for acquiring the skills to find and move between jobs, market themselves, and effectively express their social, personal, and cultural capital. This article focuses on non-traditional students' perspectives of their transition from higher education to working life, especially on the pathways they have taken and the struggles they have experienced in becoming employable. A biographical learning perspective is used to analyse biographical interviews with five female students who were 25 years of age or older, with a non-Swedish background, studying full time. In the students' stories, four transition pathways from higher education to working life were identified: a linear, a parallel, a further education, and a changing career pathway. The five non-traditional students struggled with becoming employable and seemed to be anxious about not being good enough at Swedish; being an outsider as a student; being overqualified; and facing discrimination in the labour market. These employability struggles mainly arise due to the assumption that all graduates are young, Swedish, without children or disabilities, and competing only with their employability within an equal labour market. Thus, the notion of employability still gives little attention to non-traditional students and has negative consequences for them.

The aim of this article is to examine non-traditional graduates’ life transitions before, during, and after higher education (HE) in Sweden. The article builds on a theory called biographical work, which is used for understanding non-traditional graduates’ identity formation and transformation. The article is based on the narratives of two non-traditional graduates who were selected from biographical interviews with nine non-traditional graduates, 2–5 years after graduation from HE. By exploring significant events, learning paths and the formation and transformation of identities in the two graduates’ lives, we identified two expressions of their ongoing life transitions: being in recurrent formation and being in constant transition. Being in recurrent formation means returning to well-known paths in life and learning reactively by reflecting on experiences, whereas being in constant transition means a constant focus on what is next in life and a constant commuting between reactive and proactive learning, i.e. by both reflecting on experiences and preparing oneself for the next move. In the article, we discuss what it means to be in transition as a non-traditional graduate. We conclude that the theory of biographical work helps to understand identity formation and transformation processes in periods of transition, and also how periods of transition occur as parts of biographical learning.

This article examines adult learning and sleep habits. It is commonly assumed that learning occurs during the daytime. However, how does a good night’s sleep or shortage of sleep contribute to our learning? Do we learn during sleep? This paper seeks to critically examine previous research into two myths concerning adults: adults cannot learn when they get older, and the second older adults need less sleep. But what can research say about this? What do we know about sleep in the first place? What do we know about adult learning and especially biographical learning? How do sleep patterns/habits influence adult learning? The author discusses these questions below as well as the consequences of a good quality and quantity of sleep for adults’ memory and biographical learning. The author also seeks to identify some guidelines and advice from previous research into better sleep to enhance learning in older age.

The aim of this paper is to present an autobiographical account on the prospects and process of academic career in Nordic countries, and specifically in Sweden. The method used is biographical, or self-ethnographic, dealing with life transitions including struggles and experiences when making the career. The point of departure is the final step in the academic career, i.e. Professorship, and reconstruction of the life events backwards, both as diachronic, a moment in time, as well as synchronic, over time dimensions. This includes research initiation, PhD writing, Postdoc experience, habilitation, and struggling to get a position of a senior lecturer and finally a professor. Involvement in various projects and international networking are presented. Biographical work and learning are used to understand how a woman researcher is navigating in a difficult male dominated terrain, including both negative and positive experiences.

The chapter is concerned with European policies for employability of graduate students from higher education to the labour market and a Swedish higher education system which has traditionally invluded widening access students. The chapter highlight issues of inequality relating to employability particularly in relation to working class an minority ethynic students. The study indicates that in relation to employability non-traditional students experience greater challenges than traditional students in the labour market resulting in a segregated labour market.