Book Description

In Rethinking Hegemony, edited by Thomas Clayton, a group of prominent educationists explore the complex and powerful process of hegemony, or ideological domination, as it operates in schools and other educational settings. In this collection of national and international empirical studies the authors grapple with the central process of hegemony – that of social maintenance or transformation by means of prominent social ideas which shape our understanding of what constitutes just, proper, and legitimate ways of thinking and acting. While the authors agree that these ideas are continually renewed, recreated and defended by dominant groups in society, they also consider the way other groups respond to this process in what often becomes a struggle for hegemony or ideological ascendancy. Chapters include Daniel Schugurensky’s analysis of the university restructuring in Latin America, Carmel Borg’s examination of the diffusion of Catholic values in Malta’s state schools, Joseph and Rea Zajda’s study of the rewriting of history textbooks in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, Peter Mayo’s case study of a state-sponsored adult eduction program in the University of Malta and Richard Maclure’s examination of the role of international and African NGOs in serving the interests of African elites and transnational capital. Ethnographic studies by Barbara Burgess and Mark Ginsburg, and Peter Demerath examine the education of emotionally disturbed children in the USA, and the struggles of New Guinean youth to negotiate between the Western ideas of individualism and hierarchical power structures and the egalitarianism of their village origins. Ryohei Matsuda and Ahmed Mah’s chapters consider both the marginalisation and the attempts at recognition of indigenous agricultural knowledge in Agricultural Science faculties in Africa universities. Chapters by Victor Cordova and Mark Ginsburg, Pamela Young, Joseph Slowinski and Thomas Clayton consider campus struggles in a Mexican university, the role of Protestant missionaries in the 19th and 20th century Ottoman Empire, the influence of EU educational assistance in Eastern Europe, and the role of Vietnamese interventions in Cambodian education and culture.