Bourdieu and Sino–Foreign Higher Education


Book Description

Bourdieu’s sociology has traditionally been confined to the limits of its French national context. This edited collection seeks to challenge these boundaries, applying Bourdieu’s analysis of practice to Chinese education as it gains relevance and attention around the globe. This book stems from the conviction that empirical investigation and conceptual inventiveness are needed to understand the historical and contextual particularities of Sino-foreign higher education. It brings the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu to the specificity of higher education in and for China and the multi-scalar complexity of higher education beyond the nation. Aggregating recent Bourdieu-informed investigations of empirical worlds of Sino-foreign higher education, the volume mainly considers two problems: structures and strategies of advantage behind institutional and individual action in Sino-foreign higher education; and student participation in the practices of that higher education. The volume probes the potential of Bourdieusian theory and methodology for understanding Chinese higher education beyond the nation. This book is written to engage with the intellectual work of both established scholars and higher degree research students within China and beyond. The empirical studies provide useful insights for educational leaders in Chinese higher education sectors and in the universities of English-dominant western countries where students and researchers from China have been a growing presence. The theoretical and methodological discussions will be pertinent to scholars who are interested in Bourdieu’s sociology and sociology of higher education.




Bourdieu and Sino-foreign Higher Education


Book Description

"Bourdieu's sociology has traditionally been confined to the limits of its French national context. This edited collection seeks to challenge these boundaries, applying Bourdieu's analysis of practice to Chinese education as it gains relevance and attention around the globe. This book stems from the conviction that empirical investigation and conceptual inventiveness are needed to understand the historical and contextual particularities of Sino-foreign higher education. It brings the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu to the specificity of higher education in and for China and the multi-scalar complexity of higher education beyond the nation. Aggregating recent Bourdieu-informed investigations of empirical worlds of Sino-foreign higher education, the volume mainly considers two problems: structures and strategies of advantage behind institutional and individual action in Sino-foreign higher education; and student participation in the practices of that higher education. The volume probes the potential of Bourdieusian theory and methodology for understanding Chinese higher education beyond the nation. This book is written to engage with the intellectual work of both established scholars and higher degree research students within China and beyond. The empirical studies provide useful insights for educational leaders in Chinese higher education sectors and in the universities of English-dominant western countries where students and researchers from China have been a growing presence. The theoretical and methodological discussions will be pertinent to scholars who are interested in Bourdieu's sociology and sociology of higher education"--




Bourdieu and Chinese Education


Book Description

This book uses Bourdieu’s sociological approach for research as a jumping-off point for framing our understandings and analyses of China and Chinese education. Three major themes—inequality, competition, and change—are explored across several theoretical and contextual bases. Bringing together top scholars in the field, the volume examines empirical studies that analyse social (im)mobility through education for students affected by the social divides of class, culture and rural/urban locations; teacher identity and the field of schooling in the current Chinese environment and going forward; and the university as an institution for the production of knowledge about education in the globalising academy. Offering insights into the historical and cultural context for China’s educational landscape, the contributions of this book revisit Bourdieusian concepts from a new empirical vantage point and bring together key studies that illuminate new pathways for the study of Chinese sociology of education.




Recontextualising and Recontesting Bourdieu in Chinese Education


Book Description

For more than 40 years, researchers have explored the utility of Bourdieu’s sociology for settings beyond the French and Algerian contexts of its origin. This edited collection has a focus on China, applying Bourdieu’s analysis of practice as Chinese education gains relevance and attention around the globe. Grounded in empirical research, Recontextualising and Recontesting Bourdieu in Chinese Education advances Bourdieu’s analysis of practice beyond national scales while producing new knowledge about the generation of habitus, mobilities, and languages in relation to Chinese education. Locating Chinese education within national and transnational contexts, this collection grapples with the structural invariances and inequivalences between Chinese education and society on the one hand, and social spaces in other parts of the world on the other hand. Through chapters that examine social mobility in the context of cross-border movement and delve into questions of language and power, this book recontests and problematises the use of Bourdieu’s sociology to theorise social classification and differentiation in China. This book is essential reading for Chinese educational researchers and practitioners, Bourdieusian scholars with particular interests in education, and sociologists of education broadly.




The Bloomsbury Handbook of Bourdieu and Educational Research


Book Description

This book is the first international reference work to showcase the diversity of ways of using Bourdieu's sociological toolkit in educational research. Written by scholars based in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Indonesia, Hong Kong, the UK, and the USA, the handbook provides a unique and cutting-edge picture of how Bourdieu has been both used and adapted in educational research globally. The book will be useful for those who may only have a cursory knowledge of Bourdieu's tools as well as those who are already familiar with Bourdieu's work. The chapters cover a wide range of topics including educational leadership, teacher preparation, space/place, educational policy, literacy education, marginalised students, and student mobility.







Education and Upward Social Mobility in China


Book Description

Based on a three-year life story study of students from working-class backgrounds at four elite universities in China, this book offers a new way to understand and be inspired by Bourdieu. This book shows how Bourdieu’s ideas can be used to go beyond the analysis of domination and imagine a positive sociology of emancipation. Drawing on life stories of high-achieving students from working-class backgrounds, who experienced extreme social mobility in the education system and beyond, this book tracks multi-scalar and multi-layered class domination while documenting vivid experiences of living with and over structural disadvantages, forms of working-class ‘intelligence’, reflexive strategies, ‘failures’ of social reproduction, and moments of ‘mutations’. Through constant comparisons between life stories and Bourdieu, hopes and costs of upward social mobility, and possibilities and boundaries of transcendence, this book reflects on different conceptualisations of working-class reflexivity and suggests a vision of emancipation that can allow and encourage ways and values of ‘commoning’. This book highlights a relational perspective of understanding class and class struggles, which in turn introduces a relational perspective of (re)imagining reflexivity and transcendence. This book will appeal to students and scholars of Bourdieu, sociology of education, and education in China.




Urban and Rural Students’ Access to Elite Chinese Universities


Book Description

Studies have shown the disparities between urban and rural students accessing elite universities in China, a phenomenon which Xu explores in this groundbreaking book. She argues that such disparities follow a Bourdieusian capital approach showing how urban parents increased capital benefits the advancement of their children’s education. This book qualitatively explores urban and rural students’ life stories prior to their elite university entry through interviews with both parents and students. It seeks a ‘reflective reappropriation’ of Bourdieu’s notions in understanding Chinese urban and rural students’ academic success. In addition to the implications for Chinese domestic and international scholars’ understanding of the mediating role of rurality, higher education access, and Chinese policy makers’ ongoing initiatives on the hukou reform, this book promotes the global reflections on the development and promotion of national analytical concepts in understanding contextualised educational issues to advance knowledge co-production. This engaging text will be of interest to students and researchers across the fields of global higher education and sociology of education in East Asia, as well as policymakers working towards increased participation, equity and social justice in higher education worldwide.




Creative and Inclusive Research Methods in Sport, Physical Activity and Health


Book Description

This book demonstrates how creative research methods can be used to better understand the experiences of children, particularly in the context of sport, physical activity and health. Extending recent developments in arts-based methods, mobile digital ethnographic methods, participatory visual methods and autoethnography in research with children, the book focuses on British Chinese children – an often-neglected group in research studies – providing new perspectives on diversity and inclusion, innovative research methods and the Chinese diaspora. The book draws on concepts from health and physical education, sport, sociology, and psycho-social studies to shed new light on social dynamics, cultural diversities and contextual changes in British Chinese children’s health-related experiences. It shows how globalisation and international mobility has complicated diversity and difference in the Chinese diaspora, and how creative research methods and reflexivity can be powerful tools for unlocking our understanding of children’s everyday lives. This is fascinating and useful reading for any researcher or advanced student with an interest in innovative research methods, sport, physical activity, health, migration and diaspora studies, childhood and youth studies.




Bourdieu and Education


Book Description

Specially selected by Diane Reay, this is a collection of innovative and thought-provoking recently published papers that 'use' Bourdieu to put theory into practice in order to understand and analyse educational problems. Bourdieu's work is renowned for its focus on inequalities and its centering of social justice. The contributions utilise a wide range of diverse concepts in Bourdieu's theoretical 'tool-kit', and address educational inequalities across different aspects of the educational system – from higher education and parental choice of schooling, to teachers' professional development and the PE classroom. Illuminating key aspects of Bourdieu's scholarship, they reveal how good Bourdieu is 'for thinking with’; illustrate the merits of reflexivity, the move beyond binary ways of reading the social world; and demonstrate the significance of power in any analysis of education. The chapters in this book were all originally published as articles in Taylor and Francis journals.