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Sociologies of education:
Situated enactments for global times
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.
www.monash.edu.au
Terri Seddon
Monash University
Melbourne
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
1. Defining the object of explanation
1. 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
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Educational work making educational territories
Educational work doing practices of governing
Educational work selecting, organising, distributing knowledge
Educational work fixing identities through pedagogical practice
Educational work building collective capacities for action
1. Claiming space for educational work
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Making space for sociologies of education
Reopening the ’science question’ in sociology of education
building 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 authority
to 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).
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