XVIII ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 13-19, 2014)

July 13 - 19, 2014

88

Sociologies of Education: After the Fragmentation of Modernity and Its Educational Projects

RC04 Sociology of Education (host committee)

Language: English

This session mobilises sociological thinking to re-theorise educational spaces, educational work and educational politics that accompany global transitions to neo-liberal states. Our aim is to map the sources and debates that structure sociological work, which explains the re-making of educational projects, practices and politics in the 21st century as a way of re-grounding conversations about sociologies of education in ways that can step outside the discourse of 20th century schooling. The transition to neo-liberal states is reconstituting national educational projects from schooling to skilling. Through the 19th and 20th eurocentric states mobilised schooling as an instrument of governing and staffing. These systems of schooling were designed to induct children and adolescents into nationalist practices of citizenship and to allocate appropriately prepared graduates of schooling to a stratified labour market and. Now, organisations dedicated to educational functions, such as schools, colleges and universities universities, are being re-engineered to service skill supply chains that coordinate globally distributed lifelong learning and its human capital flows. These institutional changes integrate working and learning more intimately than in the modernist educational project and mobilise various forms of “applied learning” to bridge between skilling spaces and workplaces, opening up opportunities for work-related and work-integrated learning. Meanwhile, the cultural work achieved through 20th century schooling is reworked and sometimes sloughed off into emerging educational spaces that are differentiated for learners at the top, middle and bottom of the social order: global centres of learning for elites, private schools for the middle and aspirational working class, and a mix of welfare, learning and policing organised through community settings and the penal system. Understanding these transitions and emergent educational spaces is now central to debates related to global sociology of education. These debates step beyond the national frames and methodological nationalist assumptions that prevailed in 20th century sociology of education and are beginning to develop concepts for understanding education outside discourses of schooling. It is an agenda that is being actively developed through journals such as Globalisation, Societies and Education, and book series, including the Routledge World Yearbook of Education, which since 2005 has been consolidating concepts and transnational debates and empirical research on education and globalisation. The European Sociologies of Education network, which had its inaugural meeting at ECER 2012 in Cadiz, has begun the process of identifying core themes in this emerging trajectory of sociological theorising.