3. Pierre Bourdieu and Educational Inequality

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this lecture, we think about Pierre Bourdieu’s more complex account of the role of education in reproducing inequalities in society, focusing in particular on: (i) Bourdieu’s focus on individual agency, in contrast to the more structural Marxist approach, and his ideas of subjectivism and objectivism; (ii) his notions of field and capital and how these can be used to understand inequality; (iii) his work on the roles of culture and taste in sustaining class distinction, particularly through the ideas of cultural capital and habitus, and how education upholds this distinction.

Course

In this course, Dr Eric Lybeck (University of Manchester) explores Marxist and critical approaches to education. In the first lecture, we consider some classical theories of education and its role in society, such as those of Karl Marx, Max Weber and Talcott Parsons. In the second lecture, we look at Marxist analyses of education from the 1960s, including the work of Louis Althusser and Bowles and Gintis. In the third lecture, we think about the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu. Next, we look at how they have been taken on in both qualitative and quantitative critical education research. In the fifth and final lecture, we look at some recent developments in the field, such as critical pedagogy and analyses linked to globalisation.

Lecturer

Dr Eric Lybeck is Presidential Fellow at the Manchester Institute of Education, University of Manchester. His recent research focuses on the sociology of education, especially the university sector. He is author of The University Revolution: Outline of a Processual Theory of Modern Higher Education (2021) and Norbert Elias and the Sociology of Education (2019), and co-editor of Reconstructing Social Theory, History and Practice (2017).