Despite proliferating attention within the social sciences toward the sources and consequences of climate change and environmental crises, educational sociologists have been slow to confront ecological questions. This omission may seem surprising given the prominence of global perspectives within the field. However, we argue, such a focus is…

Niklas Luhmann's late concept of inclusion/exclusion in world society compensates for the lack of a systems theory of social differentiation, but ultimately remains incomplete. Moreover, it is remarkable that Luhmann apparently never linked the inclusion/exclusion concept to his late theory of the education system. The following considerations…

In an effort to address the relationship between globalisation, education and Niklas Luhmann's branch of systems theory, we present his essay, published here for the first time in English translation, 'Education: Forming the life course', next to the nine contributions that compose this special issue and build on this and his other writings to…

Social reproduction theory names at least two distinct traditions, one of which has a long history in educational research. Social reproduction theory in "education" emerged out of a concern with education's relationship to capitalist inequalities. By contrast, social reproduction "feminism" developed out of feminist…

This paper traces the evolution of discourses around the role of critical social theory in the field of lifelong education that have played out in the pages of the "International Journal of Lifelong Education" and elsewhere in the field, beginning with early critical theoretical discourses, a consideration of the impact of some key…

The international branch campus is a model of transnational higher education that establishes institutional outposts abroad to expand student access, collaborative research, language proficiency, and recognized degree programs to participants. The growing body of literature on IBCs presents this phenomenon as an exercise in intercultural…

This editorial introduces the "European Educational Research Journal" special issue that hosts four articles co-authored by emerging researchers in the field of educational research in Europe who participated in the Summer School in European Education Studies. We present the Summer School in European Education Studies project, its…

The article explores academic identities in Ukrainian research universities whilst means-ends decoupling takes place at the state level. The latter term implies that the practices of state policies are disconnected from the state's core goal of creating public welfare. Such means-ends decoupling occurs in oligarchic economies, Ukraine being one.…

Geographical knowledge is powerful if it is critical and empowering. This article develops this argument with reference to the philosophy of knowledge and Laura Wheelahan's advocacy of critical realism as the philosophical strand of her social realist curriculum theory. While the GeoCapabilities Project has drawn on the sociological strand of that…

In "Voices of Modernity," Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs write their grand overview of the birth and maturation of modernity. Bauman and Briggs understand modernity as a discursive construction that opposes traditional and modern developments, ways of being, and modes of understanding. Central in this narrative project of modernity…

In this article, I explore alternative ways of understanding ethics in preschool. In this, I draw on a posthumanist understanding of ethical concerns as entangled intra-actions of the world, rather than as a human affair. The examined data are part of an ongoing preschool project called 'Children's relations to the city', in which children begin…

This article argues that certain established vocabularies that are used to interpret the circulation of educational discourse and its transformation in different settings have significant limitations to capture the complexity inherent to new geographies of power/knowledge in education and that, consequently, we need to develop new concepts to…

Neo-institutionalist theory of global "isomorphism", or so-called World Culture Theory (WCT), has been much debated in comparative education. One notable feature of the debate is that the vast majority of its participants belong to a handful of closely knit comparative education communities. Ironically enough then, a debate that…

This article argues that while there exists considerable overlap and potentially productive dialogue between political theory and language policy scholarship, any such effort will be hampered by the dominant approaches to political theory that assume individualistic and instrumentalist conceptions of language. Augmenting the language ideologies…

In this piece I raise a number of rural education issues that I think might be productively engaged through a sociological lens. The paper has developed from notes on 'international trends in rural education' for a pre conference workshop of AARE in December of 2014. My general conclusion is that the field of rural education, at least as it exists…