In his 'Towards the Critique of Violence', Walter Benjamin introduces the concept of 'educative violence' as a contemporary manifestation of 'divine violence'. In this paper, we aim to interpret 'educative violence' by examining other instances where the young Benjamin addresses pedagogical issues. By connecting the concept of divine violence to…

This article aims to contribute to the theorization of power in workplace learning. We examined the ways in which civilian investigators participate in criminal investigation practice, and how these modes related to the social ordering in the police organization. Civilians, mostly women and well educated, are being hired in large numbers to help…

This article suggests three orientations within sociology toward issues of morality and character development. The first stems from Durkheim, one where sociological tools diagnose the operation of any society and its constituent parts, including typifications of the individual. This tradition holds that sociologists can help diagnose…

It is generally accepted that Canadian universities are less stratified than their southern neighbours, a hypothesis popularized in the mid-2000s and verified by subsequent comparative empirical research. Through this piece, we revisit the Canadian "flatness" hypothesis, embracing a more sociological definition of status hierarchies and…

Schools' overt or explicit practices are a dominant lens through which education researchers and policymakers attempt to understand how schools are racially inequitable. Yet, Lewis and Diamond argue that contemporary racial inequalities are largely sustained through implicit factors, like institutional practices and structural inequalities. Ray's…

This article discusses how a gender-historical perspective may still be productive in today's historiography of education. In doing so, it relies on theoretical approaches developed in feminist and gender-historical debates and in debates about the ontological turn in historiography. Categories are thus understood as "world-giving" and…

Young children are faced with the challenges of collaborating with others usually for the first time as they enter preschool. They must learn to think beyond their own needs and recognize the needs and wants of other children. Most educators soon realize that the naturally occurring interactions among the children tend to establish hierarchies. A…

Elizabeth Anderson and Debra Satz continue in the tradition of Plato with their work on the role of education in a just society. Both argue that a just society depends on education enabling citizens to realise democratic or civic equality and that this equality depends on sufficiency in the distribution of educational goods. I agree that education…

Bourdieu's critical analysis of capital (BCAC) is a useful tool for unmasking how schools legitimate class structure and identifying the institutional, societal, and cultural forces that structure class reproduction and oppression. In this paper, we examine the ways educational researchers have constrained the critical application of Bourdieu's…

This article seeks to contribute to the growing scholarship on elite schooling through an ethnographic study into the distinct micro-practices of the formation and reproduction of privilege taking place within an elite boys' school in England. The article focuses on the significance of the teacher-student hierarchy as a prism through which to view…

Purpose: The present study aimed to find out the relationship of public service motivation (PSM) with other positive aspects, that is workplace spirituality and employee well-being among academic staff of public sector higher education institutions. Design/methodology/approach: In order to capture the full picture of the institutional factors that…

A national system of education in modern nation-states is usually geared towards nation-building and schools play a significant role in grooming children as future citizens. While the dominant and powerful usually emerge as the 'ideal citizen' in the national imagination, the marginalized are constructed as the 'other', vilified, and stigmatised.…

This study discusses some of the paradoxes found in the rhetoric of participatory research. Research-with-children views them as competent and agentic and as social actors, as citizens with opinions that must be listened to and given due weight. This image of the child as a social actor fails to acknowledge the structural, contextual and…

Internationally, assessment and the use of diagnostic data are recognized as critical capabilities for teachers. This is not a recent development, with assessment recognized for some decades as playing a significant role in informing learning and learners.This paper will examine whether teachers and members of the school leadership team utilize…

This paper explores how English language has gradually become a linguistic form of cultural capital in China's zigzag journey to modernization. It situates English's status in flux in historical context, with an analysis at both the international and intra-national level. It showcases the necessity to embed cultural capital within Bourdieu's full…