For more than 40 years, researchers have explored the utility of Bourdieu’s sociology for settings beyond the French and Algerian contexts of its origin. This edited collection has a focus on China, applying Bourdieu’s analysis of practice as Chinese education gains relevance and attention around the globe. Grounded in empirical research, Recontextualising and Recontesting Bourdieu in Chinese Education advances Bourdieu’s analysis of practice beyond national scales while producing new knowledge about the generation of habitus, mobilities, and languages in relation to Chinese education. Locating Chinese education within national and transnational contexts, this collection grapples with the structural invariances and inequivalences between Chinese education and society on the one hand, and social spaces in other parts of the world on the other hand. Through chapters that examine social mobility in the context of cross-border movement and delve into questions of language and power, this book recontests and problematises the use of Bourdieu’s sociology to theorise social classification and differentiation in China. This book is essential reading for Chinese educational researchers and practitioners, Bourdieusian scholars with particular interests in education, and sociologists of education broadly.

This book is the first international reference work to showcase the diversity of ways of using Bourdieu's sociological toolkit in educational research. Written by scholars based in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Indonesia, Hong Kong, the UK, and the USA, the handbook provides a unique and cutting-edge picture of how Bourdieu has been both used and adapted in educational research globally. The book will be useful for those who may only have a cursory knowledge of Bourdieu's tools as well as those who are already familiar with Bourdieu's work. The chapters cover a wide range of topics including educational leadership, teacher preparation, space/place, educational policy, literacy education, marginalised students, and student mobility.

Based on a three-year life story study of students from working-class backgrounds at four elite universities in China, this book offers a new way to understand and be inspired by Bourdieu. This book shows how Bourdieu’s ideas can be used to go beyond the analysis of domination and imagine a positive sociology of emancipation. Drawing on life stories of high-achieving students from working-class backgrounds, who experienced extreme social mobility in the education system and beyond, this book tracks multi-scalar and multi-layered class domination while documenting vivid experiences of living with and over structural disadvantages, forms of working-class ‘intelligence’, reflexive strategies, ‘failures’ of social reproduction, and moments of ‘mutations’. Through constant comparisons between life stories and Bourdieu, hopes and costs of upward social mobility, and possibilities and boundaries of transcendence, this book reflects on different conceptualisations of working-class reflexivity and suggests a vision of emancipation that can allow and encourage ways and values of ‘commoning’. This book highlights a relational perspective of understanding class and class struggles, which in turn introduces a relational perspective of (re)imagining reflexivity and transcendence. This book will appeal to students and scholars of Bourdieu, sociology of education, and education in China.

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.