In the post-Apartheid era South Africa's universities have faced serious questions about the quality of their student learning in the face of near impossible challenges. The University of Cape Town, widely seen as the country's leading higher education institution, has shown remarkable resilience, however, in the range of initiatives it has…

This article engages critically with Bourdieu's notion of field. It questions the emphasis that Bourdieu places on what he terms 'objective relations' at the expense of the actual relations of those within a field. This not only involves relations between human actors but the interactions of humans with the non-human such as inanimate objects that…

Over the past two decades, two heavily funded initiatives of the Federal government of Australia have been founded on two very different and seemingly conflicting (if not antithetical) visions of education. The first, the Australian Values Education Program (AVEP, 2003-2010) enshrines what may be called an 'embedded values' vision of education;…

Inspired by Theodore Schatzki's "societist" approach--in which he advocates a notion of "site ontologies"--in this article, we outline our theory of practice architectures (a theory about what practices are composed of) and ecologies of practices (how practices relate to one another). Drawing on case studies of four Australian…