Capital,inequality and education in conflict-affected contexts

Abstract

Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century has brought the issue of inequality to the centre of political debate. This article explores contemporary research on the relationship between education and inequality in conflict-affected contexts with a view to seeing how Piketty’s work speaks to these issues as a field of research and practice. The article provides a critique of Piketty’s approach, arguing for a broader, interdisciplinary and holistic approach to exploring and addressing inequality in education in conflict-affected contexts in their multiple economic, cultural and political dimensions. In doing so the article also lays out an analytical framework inspired by cultural political economy for researching education systems in conflict contexts which seeks to go beyond narrow human capital framings of education and address the multiple potential of education to promote sustainable peace and development in and through education.     

The ideology of student engagement research

In a series of recent papers, Nick Zepke has criticised those researching student engagement in higher education for uncritically supporting neoliberalism. The current highly politicised nature of higher education means that clarity about the political implications of engagement research is crucial. This conceptual paper argues that in focusing on literature on students’ engagement in learning, Zepke overlooks another substantial body of engagement literature, on students’ participation in decisions about learning and teaching. By exploring the political alignment of two of the key models used to conceptualise students’ engagement in decision-making, the paper argues that a central element of the research into student engagement is in fact directly opposed to neoliberal approaches to higher education. Student engagement has been deployed both for and against neoliberalism. Zepke has argued that the research on engagement sides with neoliberalism; I show that the research that focuses on student engagement in decision-making supports the opposition.     

Performativity,Performance and Education

This article explores Lyotard’s notion of performativity through an engagement with McKenzie’s analysis of performance as a ‘formation of knowledge and power’ that has displaced the notion of discipline as the tool for social evaluation. Through conditions of ‘performance’ capitalism, education is to conform to a logic of performativity that ensures not only the efficient operation of the state in the world market, but also the continuation of a global culture of performance. I further trace Lyotard’s postmodern aesthetic of experimentation through performance as an ‘event’ in an analogous attempt to track the process of cultural production in terms that acknowledge the temporality of the event so as not to reduce the artwork to a commodity, knowledge to information, and ‘performance’ to be managed. Where this has critical traction is in education, a site that deals with the intersection of politics, art, theory, philosophy and history—in short, a site where all aspects of ‘performance’ are fully realized. This article engages with the key ideas of these thinkers’ approaches to notions of performance, and assesses their relevance for an understanding of the ambiguities of ‘performance’ in contemporary education institutions.     

The education of women for citizenship: the National Federation of Women’s Institutes and the British Federation of Business and Professional Women 1930–1959

This article focuses on how citizenship education was built into the organisational practices as well as the formal instructional programmes of women’s organisations in Britain in the pre‐ and post‐Second World War period. It compares the efforts of two such organisations, the National Federation of Women’s Institutes (NFWI) and the British Federation of Business and Professional Women (BFBPW), to train women in the skills of citizenship. Despite their differences in constituency and structure, these two organisations had remarkably similar views on citizenship education and shared similar educational approaches until the end of the 1950s. This article argues that the NFWI and BFBPW’s understanding of political engagement and their efforts to educate the woman citizen are important historical examples of how women have negotiated issues of involved versus informed citizenry. The educational model they used is relevant today given the renewed interest in the strengthening of civic society as a key mechanism for political engagement.     

The ‘Employer Engagement Cycle’ in Secondary Education: analysing the testimonies of young British adults

Work experience placements are mandatory in the UK for all young people aged 16–18 in education, and their employability effects and associated wage premia are well noted in the literature. Through Bourdieu’s lens, this article analyses and conceptualises a unique data set of reflective testimonies submitted in response to a YouGov survey of over one thousand young people. Different capitals are detected, their distributions are observed, and correlations with key variables such as social background and school type are reported. Emerging through young people’s perceptions of employer engagement is a complex web of human, social and cultural capital accumulation. Overlaps are frequent, with newly acquired forms of capital often activating others. We argue that because of the cyclical nature of employer engagement gains, benefits accumulate exponentially for some young people while leaving others increasingly detached from the capitals that are most important for labour market success.     

The implications of Autonomist Marxism for research and practice in education and technology

This article considers the relevance of Autonomist Marxism for both research and practice in education and technology. The article situates the Autonomist perspective against that of traditional Marxist thought – illustrating how certain core Autonomist concepts enable a critical reading of developments in information and communication technology. These include notions of the ‘social factory’, ‘immaterial labour’ and ‘cognitive capital’, the ‘general intellect’ and ‘mass intellectuality’, and the ‘cybernetic hypothesis’. It is argued that these perspectives are particularly useful in enabling a critique of the place of education and technology inside the circuits and cycles of globalised capitalism. The Autonomist approach can be criticised – not least for its apparent network-centrism and its disconnection from the hierarchical, globalised forces of production. Nevertheless, this position offers a powerful ‘way in’ to understanding education and technology as key sites of struggle. It lays bare the mechanisms through which technology-rich educational settings are co-opted for work, while also suggesting possibilities for pushing back against the subsumption of contemporary education for capitalist work.     

Beyond Orientalism in comparative education: challenging the binary opposition between Japanese and American education

This article challenges the common-sense observation that Japanese and American education have been moving in “opposite directions” in recent times. Drawing on postcolonial discourse studies and cultural studies, the article extracts from this observation an Orientalist binary epistemology that continues to set discursive limits on the way Japanese and American observers make sense of each other's education. It is argued that the predominance of this Orientalist binary paradigm in comparative discussions of Japanese and Anglo-American education has resulted in the unfortunate lack of scholarly efforts to take full account of the common global structural changes in education driven by neo-liberal and neo-conservative impulses. As a crucial step towards the critical, reflexive engagement with the continuing colonial legacy, this article proposes a structurally oriented research paradigm that enables us to discuss localised and nationalised differences in education changes within the common frame of global structural changes in economy, state and education.     

Varieties of academic capitalism and entrepreneurial universities

This article begins with a brief review of research on the development of ideas about the knowledge-based economy (analysed here as ‘economic imaginaries’) and their influence on how social forces within and beyond the academy have attempted to reorganize higher education and research in response to real and perceived challenges and crises in the capitalist order since the mid-1970s. This provides the historical context for three ‘thought experiments’ about other aspects of the development of academic capitalism. The first involves a reductio ad absurdum argument about different potential steps in the economization, marketization and financialization of education and research and is illustrated from recent changes in higher education. The second maps actual strategies of the entrepreneurial university and their role in shaping academic capitalism. The third speculates on possible forms of ‘political’ academic capitalism and their changing places in the interstices of the other trends posited in these thought experiments. The article ends with suggestions for a research agendum that goes beyond thought experiments to substantive empirical investigations.     

A feminist posthumanist political ecology of education for theorizing human-animal relations/relationships

This paper contributes to a nascent conversation in environmental education (EE) research by using ethnographic data and extant theory to develop a feminist posthumanist political ecology of education for theorizing human–animal relations/relationships. Specifically, I (1) engage feminist methodologies and theories; (2) give epistemological and theoretical attention to nonhuman animals; and (3) address the field of EE’s minimal engagement with the interdisciplinary research agenda of political ecology. The paper begins with a literature review examining how feminist and/or posthumanist scholars have theorized human–animal (or human–nature) relations/relationships. Next, I outline the conceptual frameworks guiding the analyses of ethnographic data I collected at Long Beach, California’s Aquarium of the Pacific and follow with a brief overview of the study. I conclude by outlining the major tenets of this article’s conceptual framework, which contributes to a growing conversation in EE regarding human–animal relations/relationships and lays the groundwork for other political ecologies of education.     

The new political economy of higher education: between distributional conflicts and discursive stratification

The higher education sector has been undergoing a far-reaching institutional re-orientation during the past two decades. Many adjustments appear to have strengthened the role of competition in the governance of higher education, but the character of the sector’s emerging new political economy has frequently remained unclear. Serving as the introduction for the special issue, this article makes the case for a multidimensional strategy to probe higher education’s competitive transformation. In terms of conceptualizing the major empirical shifts, we argue for analyzing three core phenomena: varieties of academic capitalism, the discursive construction of inequality, and the transformation of hierarchies in competitive settings. With respect to theoretical tools, we emphasize the complementary contributions of institutional, class-oriented, and discourse analytical approaches. As this introduction elaborates and the contributions to the special issue demonstrate, critical dialog among different analytical traditions over the interpretation of change is crucial for improving established understandings. Arguably, it is essential for clarifying the respective roles of capitalist power and hierarchical rule in the construction of the sector’s new order.     

英国中小学公民教育中的政治教育——治疗政治冷漠的良方?

21世纪以来,针对公民政治冷漠的现象,政治教育成为英国公民教育改革的重要举措。本文介绍当前英国推行政治教育的社会背景,并以英国议会教育服务机构开发的青少年政治教育材料《你获得了权力》为例,分析当下英国政治教育的特点。本文发现,总体上英国政治教育强调:掌握政治知识、技巧,培养积极参与政治的态度。但是,对这一套材料的分析,也反映出英国政治教育的问题,即较少鼓励学生参与社会、政治实践,以及培养批判性思维。这令人怀疑仅仅局限于政治通识的教育,是否是解决政治冷漠难题的良方。     

Emerging relationships between religious education and citizenship education: teachers’ perceptions and political dilemmas in Cyprus

This article explores the ways in which a group of primary school teachers in Cyprus interprets the relationship between religious and citizenship education. The contextualisation of the meaning of religious education shows the extent to which social, historical and political elements shape teachers’ perceptions about the entanglements between religious and citizenship education. In particular, the present study reveals two important findings – one concerning the conceptualisation of each school subject and their perceived relationship and the other concerning the contextualisation of this relationship in the cultural and political contexts of Cyprus. The findings also reveal important constraints and political dilemmas for the possible trajectories of ‘religious citizenship education’ in Cyprus. The article discusses the implications for curriculum and policy deliberations, as well as further research on ‘religious citizenship education’ in specific cultural and political settings.     

Interrupting Everyday Life: Public Interventionist Art as Critical Public Pedagogy

In this article we explore two urban interventions art projects in the public sphere designed by our Masters’ students at New York University as they set the stage for a discussion on how urban art interventions can function as a form of critical public pedagogy. We argue that these kinds of public art projects provided a space for dialogue with people on the streets about the increased corporatisation of the public sphere. This kind of urban interventionism, we believe, is needed in art education today, as the public sphere is increasingly being eroded by private interests and it is only by reclaiming the public sphere that we can develop a cultural politics that in turn renews our democracy.     

Rising from the Ashes: the Michigan Memorial Phoenix Project and the corporatization of university‐based scientific research

A plethora of books and articles have appeared recently that announce the global triumph of corporate capitalism and its attendant ideologies. Nowhere are these articles more scathing in their critique of corporatization than in the field of education. However, few have taken a historical perspective in examining the institutional policies and practices that paved the way for private‐sector influence and the adoption of business and administrative sensibilities in higher education. This article examines the University of Michigan (U‐M) between 1945 and the early 1960s as a case study of the kinds of physical and philosophical changes that occurred to usher in the process of corporatization at a major research university. I focus predominantly on one major research effort‐‐the Phoenix Memorial Project‐‐that set in motion many of the forces that would effectively reshape the school's philosophy and practices. The article begins with a discussion of the ideological and political tensions that characterized the course of U‐M scientific research after World War II, particularly the complex intermingling of university, government and corporate interests. Next, I document the Phoenix Project itself and the emphasis on institutional restructuring for capital investment that it inspired. Despite conflicting and contradictory ideas about links between education and both military and corporate research interests, U‐M's top administrators restructured the university to attract venture capital by constructing innovative mechanisms for integrating investors’ needs into the work of academic (mostly scientific) inquiry. Finally, I want to look at some of the cultural narratives that enabled this triumph of corporate interests to infuse itself into the U‐M's institutional and social mission.     

Towards a framework for critical citizenship education

Increasingly, countries around the world are promoting forms of ‘critical’ citizenship in the planned curricula of schools. However, the intended meaning behind this term varies markedly and can range from a set of abstract and technical skills under the label ‘critical thinking’ to a desire to encourage engagement, action and political emancipation, often labelled ‘critical pedagogy’. This article distinguishes these manifestations of the ‘critical’ and, based on an analysis of the prevailing models of critical pedagogy and citizenship education, develops a conceptual framework for analysing and comparing the nature of critical citizenship.     

扶贫攻坚中的思想脱贫问题及其破解对策

我国的扶贫工作已进入攻坚期,扶贫攻坚的思想脱贫问题与贫困地区的经济发展问题、物质匮乏问题同样重要。文章从调研湖南省慈利县贫困人口的思想问题入手,总结导致该地区贫困的几种典型脱贫思想观念及产生的主要原因,提出解决思想脱贫问题的方法只能是发展思想政治教育,文章结合慈利县贫困地区的实际情况,从思想上重视思想政治教育作为前提,再结合新时期符合我国国情的政治教育理念以及构建全面性地政治教育体系等方面,提出了慈利地区贫困人口思想脱贫的破解对策。     

Mothering and the work of educational care – an integrative approach

This article, through looking at mothers’ modes of engagement with their children’s education, proposes an integrative analytical approach to the study of the making of mothers, mothering, and motherhood. The article presents and brings into dialogue four different bodies of anthropological and sociological literature: mothering as a form of care work, anthropological work on child-rearing in different cultural settings, sociological studies of the class negotiation of home–school boundaries, and the theoretical and empirical literature on consumption in post-industrial society. Bringing together ideas of care, culture, class, and consumption into one analytical framework is crucial for attending to, in holistic fashion, the complex ways in which mothering, in different social–cultural contexts, is perceived and practiced.     

‘Intelligent capitalism’ and the disappearance of labour: Whitherto education?

This speculative paper enquires into the discourse of the ‘end of labour’ or ‘disappearance of labour’ as a result of the development of ‘intelligent capitalism’ clearly seen in ‘intelligent manufacturing’ systems that are now pursued and developed as Industry 4.0 strategy in East Asia, Germany and others parts of the world. When ‘intelligent capitalism’ becomes the norm rather the exception what happens to labour as a factor of production and what happens to economy and society based on capital and labour? The paper briefly reviews the sociology of labour from a Marxist view to examine conceptions of Fordist and post-Fordist capitalism, and explore the advert of ‘intelligent capitalism’ to pose the question concerning education.     

‘I was kind of teaching myself’: teachers’ conversations about social justice and teaching for change

This article shares teachers’ conversations within teacher inquiry groups and considers how this reflective approach has potential for transforming teachers’ practices. Conversations took place at the early stages of a longer teacher inquiry project and centred on the critical interrogation of social justice-oriented children’s literature. These conversations served as a forum to help teacher professional learning communities and to reconcile understandings about social justice, action and agency within larger political and cultural forums of teaching. The teacher inquiry sessions shared in this paper explore teachers’ beginning struggles with conceptualizations of social justice, and the teacher’s role in imparting values to students. Teacher participants imparted their experience and practice as they negotiated their own understanding and implementation of social justice education in their schools. The teacher inquiry groups provided a needed supportive space where classroom teachers’ struggles were shared alongside their beliefs and pedagogical approaches so that a social justice agenda could be achieved.     

Transformative and emancipatory literacy to empower

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on sociological and critical educational frames, particularly Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence, in order to contest the dominant model of literacy education that is driven by the premise of a ‘knowledge economy’. Instead it foregrounds the political, social, and economic factors that marginalise learners. Data from two projects: an ethnographic study in a Further Education (FE) College in England and a study of community-based literacy programmes in Scotland, are probed to show how literacy classes can offer spaces to challenge symbolic violence and facilitate learners to reclaim identities of success. These changes are illustrated from the learners’ views of the contrasts between their experiences of school education and literacy programmes that use transformative and emancipatory approaches. Our research demonstrates how critical education can open up spaces for a more equitable approach based on the co-production of knowledge. It is argued that making changes to policy and practice could inform and shape the literacy curriculum and its pedagogy if adult literacy can disentangle itself from instrumental approaches driven by neoliberal fusion and instead create critical space for contextualised and emancipatory learning.