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: Dr. Babak Dadvand
Thesis Title: Participation on the Margins: Young People’s Citizenship Experiences in Schools
Awarding university: The University of Melbourne, Australia
Degree and Year: PhD, 2017
This thesis examines young people’s everyday school practices to: offer a situated account of how those who face various forms of marginalization experience citizenship through school participation; and identify the factors that contribute to their participatory experiences. The research is an ethnographic study with 12 ‘disengaged’ students in a metropolitan secondary school located in a low socio-economic status suburb of Melbourne, Victoria. Findings from the data gathered through participant observation, focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews showed that the social geographies which have emerged in schools under neoliberal policy reforms tend to differentiate among students on the basis of how well they can satisfy the needs and requirements of the institution in terms of performance and benchmarking. What follows from this process of differentiation is the construction of ‘the other’ who lacks the dispositions of the socially sanctioned ‘norm’, and is, therefore, positioned and treated differently in schools and classrooms. I maintain that a conceptually comprehensive understanding of citizenship participation needs to take into account the continuous and dynamic interactions among factors that impact on the political geographies of schools, factors such as belonging, inclusion, relationality, recognition of difference, voice and discipline.
Email: [email protected]