We have agreed that the journal will invite and include notices of recently completed theses in the Sociology of Education. This will be an important resource for readers to follow through as well as to provide the names of colleagues who are new entrants to the discipline.
This is an open invitation starting with theses completed from 2017 onwards. We would like the following information:
Name of author;
Thesis title;
Awarding university;
Degree and year:
A 200-word synopsis of the thesis (which must include an indication of overall purposes, theoretical elements, research design and method, nature of conclusions and significance for the sociology of education);
An email address.
Please forward these to Helen Oliver, BJSE Editorial Office. Email: [email protected]
We will include this call for the above information in forthcoming issues of the journal.
Executive Editors
Name of author: Anthony E. Healy
Theses title: What’s Behind School Choice? Middle-class Parents in France, Race, and Decisions over Public Middle Schools
Awarding university: Georgia State University, Atlanta, USA
Degree and year: PhD, 2019
In this qualitative dissertation, the author interviews 29 middle-class parents at three public lower-secondary schools in the diverse Parisian suburbs to investigate the role of race in school choice. Semi-structured interviews are used to broach carefully the topic of race in a country where its study is near taboo. The study finds that race is obscured within school choices because the dominant social and political ideology and prevailing cultural conventions effectively hide it. The study also finds that the US critical race theories that guide this inquiry lack as much salience in France as cultural theory. This study is significant because it extends globally our understanding of the role of race in school choice, and has methodological, theoretical, and substantive implications for the critical transnational study of race, schooling, and school choice. As it is, parents act on ‘red flags’ which signal that a school’s reputation and their children’s educational progress may be in trouble. One such red flag is student diversity, which tells parents that a school may not have the best teachers. However, these banal choices of middle-class parents are increasing school segregation. France’s growing minorities, many now from Africa, cannot but feel progressively racialized.
Anthony E. Healy
Email: [email protected]