This paper explores how sociology undergraduate and postgraduate students understand and discuss their possible (sociological) futures in three national contexts of Norway, England, and Hungary. Using an international comparative design based on a total of 38 semi-structured interviews from the three case-study countries, it explores first,…

This paper intends to develop a sociological thinking of child and youth resilience through recourse to Bourdieu. The paper starts by problematising the misconceptualisation that equates resilience with adaptation. It then marks a clear conceptual boundary between the two notions. This is followed by a review of conceptualisations of resilience…

This article makes a case for biosocial education as a field of research and as a potential framework for education practice. The article engages with sociology of education's contemporary interests in embodiment and affect, the possibilities offered by concept studies, and uses of assemblage and complexity theory for thinking about educational…

This article argues that there is a double problem in international research in cultural capital and educational attainment: an empirical problem, since few new insights have been gained within recent years; and a theoretical problem, since cultural capital is seen as a simple hypothesis about certain isolated individual resources, disregarding…

This article draws attention to the relative lack of theoretically and methodologically elaborated approaches to understand and explain the complex relations between transnationalization of higher education and globalization seen especially from the point of view of global capitalism. The main aim of this article is to contribute to the…

Both educational policies and academic literature assume that students take an instrumental approach to their studies at university. However, despite wide-ranging discussions in the academic literature about contemporary arrangements and practices in higher education, empirical examinations of these conditions are notably scarce. This article…

In this paper, the authors argue that despite a resurgence of elite studies, the majority of existing scholarship works to reify and legitimize social inequality through its language and method. In particular, the authors utilize Pierre Bourdieu's concept of relational thinking to review and critique contemporary research on elite education and…

This article engages with Atkinson's recent criticisms of concepts of collective habitus, such as "institutional" and "familial" habitus, in order to defend their conceptual utility and theoretical coherence. In so doing we promote a flexible understanding of habitus as "both" an individual and a collective concept. By retaining this flexibility…

This article, through looking at mothers' modes of engagement with their children's education, proposes an integrative analytical approach to the study of the making of mothers, mothering, and motherhood. The article presents and brings into dialogue four different bodies of anthropological and sociological literature: mothering as a…

Higher education is commonly described as offering combinations of work and leisure, but the implied relationship is often limited. Different conceptions of leisure, especially leisure as pleasurable experience, raise new possibilities for seeing academic activity itself as leisure in several important senses. The importance of identifying…

This article explores the contributions of students' voices in order to highlight some issues that have been central to disability studies--issues of identities, and their correlations to power, temporality, inclusivity, and place among the most salient to contemporary theories in the sociology of disability and education. Building on previous…

This article advocates for socially just pedagogies in higher education to challenge senses of normalcy that perpetuate elitist academic attitudes towards the inclusion of disabled students. Normalcy is equated here with an everyday eugenics, which heralds a non-disabled person without "defects", or impairments, as the ideal norm. This…

Pre-service teacher education is a spatialised enterprise. It operates across a number of spaces that may or may not be linked ideologically and/or physically. These spaces can include daily practices, locations, infrastructure, relationships and representations of power and ideology. The interrelationships between and within these (sometimes…

The sociological study of education involves focusing upon teaching and learning, upon explicit instruction and the acquisition of the tacit knowledge and skills that are essential if learners are to become enculturated into a new "habitus". Sociological insight into these processes can come from research on conventional educational…

This paper illustrates how critical use of Basil Bernstein's theory illuminates the mechanisms by which university knowledge, curriculum and pedagogy both reproduce and interrupt social inequalities. To this end, empirical examples are selected from the findings of the ESRC-funded project "Pedagogic Quality and Inequality in University First…