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…

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…

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…

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…

This study presents an analysis of hidden elitism in music education through the free choice argument -- that individuals are fundamentally free to choose to study music -- as a meritocratic power structure. Qualitative Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) is applied to understand music education as a social system with a special structure in which its…

This media review focuses on one of "Atlanta"'s episodes entitled "FUBU." The episode is utilized as a proxy to provide a critique of American society and its power relations in everyday life. "Atlanta" and its writers use television as their vehicle to create critical and constructive discourse in spaces that they…

As someone whose training is in political science and who writes about the history of my own discipline, I admit to some hesitation in recommending future avenues of research for historians of education. For that reason, the following thoughts are directed toward disciplinary history broadly and social science history specifically. Moreover, the…

This paper provides a basis for a tentative framework for guiding future research into principals' identity construction and development. It is situated in the context of persisting emphases placed by government policies on the need for technocratic competencies in principals as a means of demonstrating success defined largely as compliance with…

Scholars writing on agency argue that normally, individuals who experience social structures as comfortable will tend to want to reproduce them while those who experience these structures as oppressive will want to change them. This is a bleak outlook because it suggests that those in positions of power and influence are less likely to seek to…

Researchers often find themselves reflecting on either/or questions. This article examines the multiple discursive reality of gender equality, a topic comprising several juxtapositions connected to either/or thinking which also provide the topic its legitimacy. The examples come from the context of gender equality work and gender equality policy,…

The recent revival of Confucianism in the PRC raises questions regarding the legitimacy of cultivating Confucian virtues such as "ren" ([Chinese characters omitted] benevolence), "li" ([Chinese characters omitted] propriety) and "xiao" ([Chinese characters omitted] "filial piety" or "family…

This article examines shifts in the meaning and relevance of institutionalised knowledge about social inequalities as it circulates globally. In so doing, it contributes to research critiquing an unequal geopolitics of knowledge that grants greatest authority to theories produced in the global north (Connell, 2007; Mignolo, 2003). I discuss the…

The author engages critical media education and norm-critical pedagogy to map out possible methods of critical engagement of students during interpretation of the pedagogical facets of "The Boxtrolls" (film--2014). The paper discusses rich analytical material that may be explored by employing "The Boxtrolls" story. The paper…

Purpose: Keeping Spivak's essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in mind, the purpose of this paper is to examine the itinerant curriculum theory (ICT) as a subaltern momentum unveiling how ICT informs subaltern ways of being and thus, potentially, the research lens for qualitative approaches. In this context, the paper examines how curriculum…

In this paper, the author demonstrates how education is presented by Freire as the key both for changing society and leading people toward true humanity. The author's interest is not to further develop the method that Freire elaborated in the sixties and seventies, but, rather, to show the degree to which his theory is coherent with his vision of…