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This paper aims to answer the questions of what clothing practices related to sustainable fashion can be observed in young consumers' daily lives in Finland’s capital region and what prevents their further proliferation.

This is qualitative research that draws from 22 semi-structured interviews with high school students in the capital area of Finland. The data were analyzed with the use of thematic analysis, a flexible method of data analysis that allows for the extraction of categories from both theoretical concepts and data.

This paper contributes to studies of young people’s consumption with the practice theory approach, putting forward the category of following sustainable fashion as an integrative practice. The three-element model of the practice theory allows answering the question of challenges that prevent the practice from shaping. The paper further advances this approach by identifying a list of context-specific dispersed practices incorporated into sustainable fashion.

The study suggests practical ways of improving clothing consumption based on the practice theory approach and findings from empirical research. Sustainable practices require competences, knowledge and skills that the school, as an institution working closely with high school students, could help develop.

The study contributes to the current studies of sustainability and youth culture of consumption with a practice theory approach and findings, related to a particular context of a country from Northern Europe.

Purpose: This chapter explores how Russian fashion designers, as cultural intermediaries operating in the marketplace, interpret patriotism, which has become a noticeable phenomenon in Russia.

Methodology/Approach: Patriotism is approached as an appeal to patria and is considered as a socially constructed category. To explore the construction of patriotism, this research uses Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality. In the market, the state, commercial companies, media, and consumers co-produce the dispositif of patriotism, which conducts the creative conduct of fashion designers and encourages them to follow patriotic fashion. At the same time, fashion designers have freedom to conduct themselves and act in different ways.

Findings: Interpretations of patriotism within a patriotic dispositif are explored vis-à-vis the interpretations of patriotism articulated by fashion designers. In addition to patriotic fashion, the forms of their creative conduct or counter-conduct are manifested in such subtypes of patriotism in fashion as cosmopolitan patriotism, economic patriotism, cultural patriotism, and fashion localism.

Research Limitations/Implications: The research is mainly limited to a perspective of fashion designers, and to some extent of the government, and does not consider the perspective of consumers.

Originality/Value: The research develops a theoretical argument of patriotism as a tool of governmentality, juxtaposing it to the approach of patriotism as an ideology. This chapter also contributes to the studies of resistance, adding the perspective of cultural intermediaries contrary to the commonly studied perspective of consumers.

In 2010, the Russian Federation began introducing the new educational standards as a national reform designed to improve education quality. This study aims to identify how teachers feel about the reform to evaluate its intermediate effects.

The study took place in Tatarstan, one of the regions of Russia. The mixed-methods sequential explanatory design was used: the first phase involved a survey for 123 teachers and at the second phase 10 teachers participated in semi-structured face-to-face interviews.

The findings of the study reveal that most teachers are still adapting to the new standards and feel only partly prepared to work within the new system. Teachers acknowledge that the reform is necessary, but there are some confusion and disagreement about what the new standards imply and how they should be implemented.

The study argues that teachers have to both feel positive about reforms and perceive themselves to be prepared to address them before they can feel motivated to support them. The results might have been affected by social desirability bias as the number of those viewing the new standard positively is overwhelmingly high. At the same time, teachers report low levels of motivation.

There is a clear dearth in scholarly literature dealing with the Russian educational context and available in English. In addition, there is hardly any research on Russian teachers’ motivation and attitude towards the new educational standards.