Bourdieu and Chinese Education

Inequality, Competition, and Change

Guanglun Michael Mu, Karen Dooley, Allan Luke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351597784
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Comparative Education

This book uses Bourdieu's sociological approach for research as a jumping-off point for framing our understandings and analyses of China and Chinese education. Three major themes—inequality, competition, and change—are explored across several theoretical and contextual bases. Bringing together top scholars in the field, the volume examines empirical studies that analyse social (im)mobility through education for students affected by the social divides of class, culture and rural/urban locations; teacher identity and the field of schooling in the current Chinese environment and going forward; and the university as an institution for the production of knowledge about education in the globalising academy. Offering insights into the historical and cultural context for China's educational landscape, the contributions of this book revisit Bourdieusian concepts from a new empirical vantage point and bring together key studies that illuminate new pathways for the study of Chinese sociology of education.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Glossary of Chinese Terms
• 1. Introduction: China, Education, and Bourdieu
• 2. Market Economy, Social Change, and Educational Inequality: Notes for a Critical Sociology of Chinese Education
• 3. Bourdieu’s Sociological Thinking and Educational Research in Mainland China
• 4. “Make It Back”?: The Social Positioning of the New Generation of Rural Teachers in China
• 5. Educational Practice in a Field of Mediation: Elite University Graduates’ Participation Experience of an Alternative Program of Schoolteacher Recruitment for Rural China
• 6. Rural Children’s Academic Success, Transformative Habitus, and Social Mobility Cost
• 7. Resistance as a Sociological Process of Resilience: Stories of Under-resourced Migrant Families
• 8. Academic Competition and Parental Practice: A Study of Habitus and Change
• 9. Capital Conversion and School Change: A Bourdieusian Analysis
• 10. Using English at an International Doctoral Workshop: A Three-level Field Analysis
• 11. Learning to Theorise from Bourdieu: Using Zhōng wén (中文) in English for Research Publication Purposes
• 12. Re: Appropriating Bourdieu for a Sociology of Chinese Education
• Notes on Contributors
• Index