This paper examines how the Durkheimian approach to the 'ideal' delineates a possible way of straddling the dilemma between the normative orientation of 'powerful knowledge' accounts and the critical orientation of 'knowledge of the powerful' accounts. It argues that the normative aims are embedded in the fabrics of the sociological description…

Richard Sennett's theory that industrial capitalism triggered the gradual elimination of shared cultural symbolism and thus contributed to the impoverishment of civic involvement deserves to be revisited in light of its implications for music education in an age of global information capitalism. In 1974 Sennett produced an extensive examination of…

The paper provides a systematic theoretical analysis of the main visions of the concept of scientific literacy developed in the last 20 years. It is described as a transition from a transmissive educational vision of scientific literacy (Vision-I) to a transformative vision (Vision-III), with a stronger engagement with social participation and…

In his liquid-turn writings, Zygmunt Bauman has come to identify liquid modernity as a period of interregnum. Education has a central role to play within the contemporary interregnum by opening up a new public sphere for dialogue. However, the processes of liquefaction manifest themselves in conditions that severely limit a person's ability to…

This article is an academic commentary on the concept of sociology of education. The authors have ventured through the lens of Hannah Arendt's "The Human Condition" and discuss its impact might have had if the corresponding mode of education and pedagogy be carried out in reality according to what Arendt had inspired her readers. A cross…

Why does education fail to realize educational justice? Why does religious education not play a part in contributing to educational justice to some degree, as it is technically located in the logic of its handed down biblical message? On the one hand, education is socially testified as being at a crucial moment of educational justice, on the other…

How and when does affirmative action emerge in different national contexts? This paper is the first to analyze the emergence of affirmative action in higher education across national contexts. We find that three distinct clusters of affirmative action policies developed historically: (1) early nation-building projects, (2) mechanisms to attenuate…

This essay centers the defense of black educational possibility in the work of historian, pioneering sociologist, and scholar, W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) as a conduit igniting what critical social theorists Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013) call Fugitive Black Study. The critical appreciation of Du Bois forces us to consider the weight of…

In 2014, Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-first Century" rocked the economic and political world, with its argument that inequality is destined to increase; in the field of education, however, this book has been almost entirely ignored. I argue that Piketty's treatise is relevant to educational theories for three reasons: his…

This article builds upon the international dialogue around 'curriculum crisis' initiated by Michael Young in "Journal of Curriculum Studies" ("JCS") in 2013 and followed up in "JCS" in 2015. It seeks to expand the dialogue in three avenues. First, when considered from a sociological perspective, Young is correct to…

Sociology of education is caught in a dilemma. The study of education and society that unfolded through the twentieth century produced educational vocabularies that spoke into education policy and practice about inequality and social justice. Now that sociologically informed educational discourse is marginalised by individualistic…

The paper addresses the question of what we should make of Michael Young's recent work with respect to curriculum theory by considering the particular case of South African curriculum reform. The paper thus traces two trajectories: the evolution of Michael Young's ideas over time and South African curriculum reform in the post-apartheid period.…

This volume offers a timely collection of research-based studies that engage with contemporary conditions of precarity across an array of locations, exploring how it is understood, experienced, and acted upon by educators in schools, universities, and nonformal educational spaces. Precarity presents as layered, unpredictable, destabilizing, and…

This volume includes three sections of the 2022 NORDSCI international conference proceedings: (1) Education and Educational Research; (2) Language and Linguistics; and (3) Sociology and Healthcare. Education and Educational Research includes 7 papers covering a full spectrum of education, including history, sociology and economy of education,…

South Africa is an important social space in world history and politics for understanding how the modern world comes to deal with the questions of social difference, and the encounter of people with different civilizational histories. In this essay I argue that a particular racial idea inflected this encounter. One of the ways in which this…