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Sociologies of education:Situated enactments for global times

Terri Seddon

Monash University

Melbourne

Reformation of the ‘common school’ in Europe;

State-less sociologies of education - privatization; voluntarism, civic movements, not via states-societies

Sociologies of learning - learning spaces, technologies, reconstructions of self, relations to systems, and lifelong learning;

Sociologies of comparison - data, knowledge production, ‘fast’-‘slow’ knowledge, travellers and translation, classification.

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Core argument

Refocusing on the ‘science question’ in sociology of education

Sociological practice: doing science from somewhere transnational

Moving towards global sociologies of education:

1. Claiming a global standpoint

2. Defining the object of explanation

3. Establishing a mode of explanation

Making space for sociologies of education

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Sociological practice as situated enactment:Building knowledge

Spiegel, 2007 : A mobilisation of place, procedure and product:

• A ‘labour of death and a labour against death’

• The intellectual movement between past and present creates a space of inquiry, which is filled by ‘recapitulating the past as a form of knowledge’

• Knowledge develops as we are ‘recruited’ into a particular place as a ‘researcher’, take up ‘analytical procedures’ and engage in a process of writing (De Certeau, 1988)

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Sociology of education:…. loosing the ‘science question’?

‘Rests on dedication and social commitment and is a redemptive practice’ (p. 3)

Entails an ‘organic public sociology’ - ‘in which critical analysis (and the critical analyst) in education must engage’ (p5).

Task 1 is ‘bear witness to negativity’. … to illuminate the ways in which educational institutions, policies and practices are connected to the relations of exploitation and domination – and to struggles against such relations – in the larger society. We use the words exploitation and domination technically. They point to structures and processes that Nancy Fraser (1997) refers to as a politics of redistribution and a politics of recognition (p. 5).

Apple, Ball and Gandin, 2010

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Sociological practice:…. As a science of the social

Durkheim, 1895: The Rules of Sociological Method– What are the explanatory objects of sociology?– What are the means by which these things are explained?

Turner, 1995: While Durkheim’s argument didn’t come off completely,

… the great importance of this text, and indeed of this period of Durkheim’s thought, is in his attempt to conceive of the stuff of society in a consistent way, to think of society as made of representations, a radically constructivist idea, but also to carry through with a reflexively consistent account of the epistemological implications of this idea and to give a coherent account of the causal implications of his model..

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Sociological practice:….As a science from somewhere

Harding, 1991:

‘How can we use for emancipatory ends those sciences that are apparently so intimately involved in Western, bourgeois, and masculine projects? And women appear not as a special interest group pleading for a hearing for their own interests alone but as thinkers expressing concerns about science and society that are echoed in the other countercultures of science - in antiracist and Third World movements, in anti-capitalist movements and in the ecology and peace movements

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Sociological practice:…. Research as work and politics

Connell,1993 (also 1984; 2007): Research is:

a kind of industry. There is a labour process: what researchers do. There is a workforce: who researchers are. There is a distribution and consumption process: how the knowledge gets circulated, and how it gets used …. Knowledge is a social product not in a vague and metaphorical sense, but in hard and intrusive detail. What is known, by whom, about whom, with what effects – these are social, indeed, political questions (Connell, 1993: 109).

Harding, 1991: The power of knowledge comes with:• An epistemology • A sociology of knowledge building• A practice by ‘traitorous identities’

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Towards global sociologies of education

Sassen, 2013:

Being out of place, slightly but also permanently, led me to see conditions and to seize on actions that were not of the place. … I [used] theory to compensate imperfect knowledge of language and being slightly out of place. …. It frames my way of thinking. It shaped my perhaps peculiar way of theorizing in which theory gets constituted through the text itself, rather than through a model that stands outside the specifics of the subject under consideration. It is a way of working with words through the process of research and building knowledge that has shaped my need to develop new categories for analysis, such as that of the global city, and, more recently, the denationalized state.

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Claiming a global standpoint

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Defining the object of explanation:Globally distributed human service work

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Finding a mode of explanation:Transnational knowledge building

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Emerging concepts

Hotspots of change: Textured globalization effects that disturb work and transform politics in material, embodied and emplaced ways.

Liquid learning: learning as the contemporary condition of life – driven by governing practices, perpetual learning, unleashed knowledge frames

Spaces of orientation: Locales for building ‘we’ through the ‘art of politics’

… not about defining the ‘right’ goal and then implementing it; the art of politics is about building connections, about creating a space of orientation which can re-contextualise fragmented struggles (Haug, 2010: 222).

Educational work: The labour of making, orienting and enabling spaces, which yield learning – a particular form of globally distributed human service work

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Liquid Learning and Educational Work

1. From public education to lifelong learning: Spaces of orientation then and now:

2. Boundaries and boundary work: making and occupying spaces

3. Educational work making educational territories

4. Educational work doing practices of governing

5. Educational work selecting, organising, distributing knowledge

6. Educational work fixing identities through pedagogical practice

7. Educational work building collective capacities for action

8. Claiming space for educational work

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Making space for sociologies of education

Reopening the ’science question’ in sociology of educationbuilding knowledge as a means to politics rather than ‘critical sociology’ as a way of doing politics

Developing sociological practice as a science of the social for global times

an explicit standpoint, scientific practice, and criteria of competence

Revisiting the relationship between science and moral authorityto recognise the risks of conflating research and rhetoric, and the charge of special interest pleading, which undercut sociologists claim to be agents of history and knowledge

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Claiming space for sociologies of education:

…if there is to be a social science, we shall expect it not merely to

paraphrase the traditional prejudices of the common man but to give us

a new and different view of them; for the aim of all science is to make

discoveries, and every discovery more or less disturbs accepted ideas.

Unless, then, sociology attributes to common sense an authority which it

has not enjoyed for a long time in other sciences – and it is impossible

to see how such authority could be justified – the scholar must resolutely

resist being intimidated by the results to which his researches lead,

demanding only that they be conducted scientifically. As it is a

characteristic of the sophist to invite paradoxes, it is a sign of intellectual

cowardliness to avoid them when they are imposed on us by the facts

(Durkheim, 1964: xxxvii).