1st Edition
Rethinking Sociological Critique in Contemporary Education Reflexive Dialogue and Prospective Inquiry
This book explores a new repertoire for critique in the sociology of contemporary education, focusing on emerging social theories that respond to contemporary challenges in education, education policy and governance.
Presenting a variety of approaches in the sociology of education including pragmatist critical sociology, neo-Marxism, post-digital sociology, new materialisms, affirmative critique of education, and post-colonial studies, the chapters in this book engage in a novel, collective dialogue and reflection on the affordances, limitations and challenges of emerging social theories in contemporary education. The book further justifies this novel approach through inclusion of a series of interviews with leading scholars and thinkers from within and outside the field of education on the subject of critique in contemporary society and education. The book offers relevant global and decolonial perspectives to study current transformations, drawing on innovations in theorizing and empirical illustrations from different countries.
Highlighting alternative visions of these transformations in an era of globalization, fragmentation, and growing nationalism, this cutting-edge book will be of great interest to researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the fields of the sociology of education, the philosophy of education, social theory, political science and comparative policy and politics more broadly.
Foreword Martin Lawn
1. Critical Social Theory and Public Debate – Issues in Contemporary Education. Introduction Radhika Gorur, Paolo Landri, and Romuald Normand
Part 1: Theorising the potential for new repertoires of critique
2. Between reflexivity and critique: French pragmatic sociology and the plurality of engagements in the quest for justice Romuald Normand
3. Educational commons as critique and aspiration: Confronting the Civil War, decolonization, and ecological crises Alexander Means and Graham Slater
4. The critique of digital education: time for a (post)critical turn Neil Selwyn
5. Back to the matter of education Paolo Landri
Part 2: Knowledge, Critique and the Empirical: New possibilities for Critique
6. The human and education sciences: A historical odyssey of activism, agency, and elisions in social life Thomas - S. Popkewitz and Junzi Huang
7. Knowledge for policy and the question of critical education research Sotiria Grek
8. An Affirmative Critique of the Politics of Scaling in Higher Education Policy Studies: Exploring a Performative Notion on Scale and Topological Spatio-Temporalities beyond Scale Katja Brøgger
9. Unsettling Euro-Western educational paradigms: Decolonial critiques and praxis Sharanya Menon
10. Development and its discontents: A South American perspective Jason Beech
Part 3: Putting Critique to Work
11. Evaluation through regimes of engagement and grammars of commonality: critical tensions in community- and self-formation – an interview with Laurent Thévenot
12. Acceleration, Alienation, Education and being in and to the world – an interview with Hartmut Rosa
13. Towards a reparative sociology of education – an interview with Arathi Sriprakash
14. Situated critique of education and the future – an interview with Keri Facer
Afterword Susan Robertson
Biography
Radhika Gorur is Associate Professor of Education, Deakin University, Australia.
Paolo Landri is Research Director, CNR-IRPPS (National Research Council, Institute of Research on Population and Social Policies), Italy.
Romuald Normand is Professor of Sociology, University of Strasbourg, France.
