Theorizing Social Class and Education

Diane Reay is Professor of Education at Cambridge University, UK. She is a sociologist working in the area of education but is also interested in broader issues of the relationship between the self and society, the affective and the material. Her priority has been to engage in research with a strong social justice agenda that addresses social inequalities of all kinds. Carol Vincent is a Professor in the Faculty of Policy and Society at the Institute of Education, University of London, UK. She is a sociologist, with a particular research interests in the relationship between parents and educational institutions and how these relationships are mediated by social class and ethnicity.

Introduction 1. Class, gender, (hetero)sexuality and schooling: paradoxes within working-class girls’ engagement with education and post-16 aspirations 2. The moral dimension of class and gender identity-making: poverty and aggression in a secondary school in the city of Buenos Aires 3. Teachers and the emotional dimensions of class in resource-affected rural Australia 4. Social class and participation in further education: evidence from the Youth Cohort Study of England and Wales 5. White middle-class parents, identities, educational choice and the urban comprehensive school: dilemmas, ambivalence and moral ambiguity 6. Devising inequality: a Bernsteinian analysis of high-stakes testing and social reproduction in education 7. ‘It's all becoming a habitus’: beyond the habitual use of habitus in educational research 8. Working-class boys, educational success and the misrecognition of working-class culture 9. From sociological fictions to social fictions: some Bourdieusian reflections on the concepts of ‘institutional habitus’ and ‘family habitus’ 10. Between the estate and the state: struggling to be a ‘good’ mother