Class in Education: Knowledge, Pedagogy, Subjectivity
Edited by Deborah Kelsh, Dave Hill, and Sheila Macrine
In contemporary pedagogy, "class" has become one nomadic
sign among others: it has no referent but only contingent allusions to
similarly traveling signs. Class, that is, no longer explains social
conflicts and antagonisms rooted in social divisions of labor, but
instead portrays a cultural carnival of lifestyles, consumptions,
tastes, prestige and desire, or obscures social conflicts through
technicist accounts of incomes and jobs.
Class in Education brings back class as a
materialist analysis of social inequalities originating at the point of
production and reproduced in all cultural practices. Addressing a wide
range of issues – from the interpretive logic of the new humanities to
racism to reading, school-level curricula to educational policy – the
contributors focus on the effects that the different understandings of
class have on various sites of pedagogy and open up new spaces for a
materialist pedagogy and critical education in the times of
globalization and the regimes of the digital.