Search

This paper provides an introduction to this special issue of the Cambridge Journal of Education on ‘Evoking and provoking Bourdieu in educational research’. In the course of providing a critical synopsis of each paper, we consider how and why the authors work with and after Bourdieu, both evoking and provoking his thinking tools (particularly field, capital and habitus,but also doxa, misrecognition and illusio) and his methodological disposition that rejects ‘epistemological innocence’. We note that Bourdieu himself invited such provocation and that this is especially needed as the social continues to change, given the new spatialities of globalisation and growing social and economic inequalities. That is, we acknowledge that the empirical and the theoretical are always imbricated in each other, a theme pursued throughout the collection. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper reports on a recent study of aspirations for higher education by secondary school students from disadvantaged backgrounds in regional Australia. At the same time, it goes in search of explanations that transcend a Bourdieuian account of aspirations as produced by and reproductive of cultural histories and dominance, given the apparent inadequacy of these accounts in redressing disadvantage. To this end the authors distinguish between historicising and spatialising aspirations, taking up Appadurai’s notion of navigational capacity as a way of advancing greater agency for disadvantaged groups. Data from the research inform the analysis, including the mediation of students’ desired futures by their perception of what is possible given their differentiated locations and access to resources. It is concluded that while this spatial turn in theorising aspiration has potential for changing the terms of recognitioninternalto disadvantaged communities, there remain structural limits on change ‘from below’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

‘Raising aspirations’ for education among young people in low socioeconomic regions has become a widespread policy prescription for increasing human capital investment and economic competitiveness in so-called ‘knowledge economies’. However, policy tends not to address difficult social, cultural, economic and political conditions for aspiring, based in structural changes associated with globalization. Drawing conceptually on the works of Pierre Bourdieu, Raymond Williams, Arjun Appadurai and authors in the Funds of Knowledge tradition, this article theorizes two logics for aspiring that are recognizable in research with young people and families: a doxiclogic, grounded in populist–ideological mediations; and ahabituatedlogic, grounded in biographic–historical legacies and embodied ashabitus. A less tangible third ‘logic’ is also theorized:emergentsenses of future potential, grounded in lived cultures, which hold possibility for imagining and pursuing alternative futures. The article offers a sociological framework for understanding aspirations as complex social–cultural phenomena, and for capacitating emergent and hopeful aspirations through school- and community-based research and dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]