One of the driving aims of International Studies in Sociology of Education is to foster a scholarly space in which new thinking on educational theory and practice can be presented, debated and advanced. We are pleased to introduce the fourth issue of Volume 26 which takes up this generative project so directly and in such diverse ways. Though emerging from different contextual issues and drawing on varying approaches, the papers in this issue are linked by their interest in two interrelated questions that we hope readers will continue to respond to in future pages of this journal: how do educational ideas and practices travel, and what challenges and contestations emerge from these movements?
The paper by Gerardo Blanco Ramírez, for example, draws on the perspectives and metaphors of the French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard to suggest that the field of sociology of education needs to consider theory less as a ‘representation’ of the world and more as a ‘challenge’ to it. Here, the travel of ideas is itself an analytic method. We are urged to move beyond deterministic ways of mobilising our theoretical resources in order to open up new vectors of intellectual engagement. Ramírez shows how these ideas help us think anew about normative categories in education – namely the notion of ‘world class’ universities in contexts of internationalisation and global competition.
This task of theoretical reflexivity is also taken up by Leonel Lim, albeit with respect to a very different set of ideational resources. Lim’s article examines the concept and practice of ‘critical thinking’ in the Singapore school education context. His research, drawing on the sociology of Basil Bernstein, offers a response to sociological theories that pay too little attention to the resistances and transformations that are always present in structures of domination. Importantly, the piece argues for an attentiveness to the contextual contingencies of theoretical ideas. What does it mean for Bernsteinian theories, for example, to be taken up in very different spatial, temporal and diverse cultural and political contexts? How do Bernstein’s concepts travel and get recontextualised in places like Singapore? Lim argues that Bernsteinian sociology continues to offer a powerful framework for understanding curriculum reform. Key to this endeavour is applying this framework in ways that respond to, and account sufficiently for, the different relations of state authority in education. The strong developmental state of Singapore is a vivid case in point.
Pushing the boundaries of sociology of education, the paper by Jae Park puts forward an intellectually provocative idea of a heart-mind epistemology that runs through Confucian-heritage cultures. Park examines the concept of ‘high-ability’ in educational discourses, and in a departure from sociological accounts that historicise the concept in order to argue against its ‘innateness’ and thus divisiveness, the paper seeks to develop a culturally and psychologically inflected understanding of ‘high-ability’ to show it is something to be nurtured. The sociological ramifications of this argument emerge as Park aims to fundamentally challenge how educationalists approach ideas of ‘giftedness’. Key to this idea is a contentious but stimulating notion that such ‘heart-mind epistemologies’ travel across generations and place through culture.
In contrast, the article by Alexis Siteine warns against the foregrounding of ‘identity’ through culturalist discourses in education. Examining the enactments of New Zealand primary school policies that seek to recognise and affirm student identity, Siteine argues that such a focus on identity risks creating ethnic division and displacing subject knowledge in classrooms. Through insights into teachers’ agency in negotiations of policy directives, Siteine’s analysis foregrounds the power dynamics and the contestations and challenges of educational practice. Divergence is a key concept in the discussion, and for us it draws attention to how the ‘travels’ of educational ideas can take different routes with sometimes unintended consequences.
Indeed, these different routes can lead to apparent contradictions, as Emmanuel Mayeza and Deevia Bhana show in their analysis of gender violence in South African primary schooling. Examining the meanings attributed to gender violence in schools by teachers, Mayeza and Bhana show how teachers recognised social hierarchies such as violent masculinities but reproduced other social hierarchies within their concepts of childhood innocence. In doing so, power differentials – and their symbolic and material violence – were reproduced or remained unchallenged. This article raises for us the question of what makes an educational critique sustainable across spaces (e.g. a critique of hegemonic masculinities and corporal violence). As Mayeza and Bhana’s article demonstrate, these are the questions urgently facing prevention programmes against gender-based violence in South Africa.
We are delighted to present a review symposium of Natasha Warikoo’s 2016 book, The Diversity Bargain: And other Dilemmas of Race, Admissions and Meritocracy at Elite Universities (Chicago, University of Chicago Press). Amy Stich, Eric Lybeck and Derron Wallace each offer contrasting perspectives on Warikoo’s work which focuses on comparative understandings of race inequalities in elite higher education institutions in the United States and the United Kingdom. Warikoo seeks to understand how four ‘race frames’ are variously engaged by students across two contrasting cultural contexts. This exercise highlights not only how theory and ideas might travel and be applicable in different national contexts but also the extent to which the cultural roots of those applying these theoretical frameworks influence their social constructions of reality.
International Studies in Sociology of Education looks forward to continuing to engage in such questions about the travels, translations and contestations of ideas. We are in the midst of planning a special section of the journal that will take up some of these ideas more explicitly and in specific relation to the geopolitics of knowledge production in the field. We look forward to keeping readers posted about these developments in the near future, and we hope in the meantime you find this issue as rewarding as we did to think with and through.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Joint Editors, International Studies in Sociology of Education
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