1st Edition
Recontextualising and Recontesting Bourdieu in Chinese Education Habitus, Mobility and Language
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.
Introduction
1. Bourdieu and Chinese education: Recontextualising and recontesting sociological traditions
Guanglun Michael Mu
Part 1: On class and habitus
2. Social reproduction or social experiment? Understanding the idiosyncrasy and hybridity of habitus in Chinese education
Jinting Wu
3. Parental engagement in children’s transition to school: A Bourdieusian analysis of a Chinese sample in Beijing
Liwei Liu, Guanglun Michael Mu, Lyndal O’Gorman and Julie Dillon-Wallace
4. The relevance and dissonances of ‘class’ in China: An imaginative dialogue with Bourdieu and Bourdieusian studies
Jin Jin
Part 2: On mobility and migration
5. Raising children for future mobilities: A Bourdieusian case study of Shanghai-Chinese middle-class parental strategies
Hannah Soong
6. A comparative analysis of Teach for China and the Special Post Teacher Plan: Cross-field capital, orchestrated habitus, and transverse movements
Guanglun Michael Mu, Melody Yue Yin and Denghui Liu
7. ‘Localised’ field strategies and diversities in educational policy enactment: Towards multi-level/directional cross-field analysis
Hui Yu
Part 3: On language and postmonolingual theorising
8. Family language policies in China: A Bourdieusian re-framing and review of research
Danwei Gao, Karen Dooley and Radha Iyer
9. Postmonolingual curriculum theorising, crisis communications and language(s) education: Learning from Bourdieu’s method of thinking
Michael Singh (מיכאל ਸਿੰਘ) and Xiǎolí Lǐ (李晓黎)
Conclusion
10. Researching Chinese education from within and afar: Enacting Bourdieu’s ‘practical reflexivity’
Guanglun Michael Mu and Karen Dooley
Biography
Guanglun Michael Mu is Associate Professor and Enterprise Fellow at the University of South Australia. His expertise includes sociology of resilience and relational quantitative methodology. He is the chief editor of the Routledge Book Series ‘Bourdieu and Education of Asia Pacific’, and the co-chair of the AERA’s SIG ‘Bourdieu in Educational Research’.
Karen Dooley is a Professor in the School of Teacher Education and Leadership (STEL) in the Faculty of Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice (CIESJ) at Queensland University of Technology.
