1st Edition
Bourdieu and Chinese Education Inequality, Competition, and Change
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.
1. Introduction: China, Education, and Bourdieu 2. Market Economy, Social Change, and Educational Inequality: Notes for a Critical Sociology of Chinese Education 3. Bourdieu's Sociological Thinking and Educational Research in Mainland China 4. Make It Back? The Social Positioning of the New Generation of Rural Teachers in China 5. Educational Practice in a Field of Mediation: Elite University Graduates' Participation Experience of an Alternative Program of Schoolteacher Recruitment for Rural China 6. Rural Children's Academic Success, Transformative Habitus, and Social Mobility Cost 7. Resistance as a Sociological Process of Resilience: Stories of Under-resourced Migrant Families 8. Academic Competition and Parental Practice: A Study of Habitus and Change 9. Capital Conversion and School Change: A Bourdieusian Analysis 10. Using English at an International Doctoral Workshop: A Three-Level Field Analysis 11. Learning to Theorise from Bourdieu: Using Zhōngwén (中文) in English for Research Publication Purposes 12. Appropriating Bourdieu for a Sociology of Chinese Education
Biography
Guanglun Michael Mu is Senior Research Fellow at Queensland University of Technology, Australia.
Karen Dooley is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at Queensland University of Technology, Australia.
Allan Luke is Emeritus Professor at Queensland University of Technology, Australia.
"The volume explores Bourdieu’s treatises across space and time with chapters that illuminate possible fusions befitting a transactive global approach. The authors within the volume address the application of western thought to eastern developments in a fashion that is both probing and provocative. They do so adroitly exploring the resonance of Bourdieu’s theoretical work with the People’s Republic of China’s circumstances, political history and scholarly traditions. The volume ventures into these waters reservedly and respectfully with multilayered analyses of the PRC accompanying tempered considerations of the mobility of Bourdieu’s contributions across cultures."
--Rob Tierney, Uiversity of British Columbia, University of Sydney and Beijing Normal University
"This book seeks to take up the Bourdieusian promise of purchase on social change to understand the reshuffling of Chinese society ushered in by Reform and Opening Up. The authors address some of the major themes of education in contemporary China and beyond: inequality, competition, and change. I am very impressed that this book has addressed a broad range of issues relating to educational changes in China."
--Xiaoming Sheng, Cambridge University, UK
