Thinking Past Educational Disadvantage,and Theories of Reproduction

Taking Our Own Thought Seriously

A critique of critical sociology of education, which is our field for research, is urgent for several reasons. First, critical inquiry is never up to the task it sets itself and suffers from a ‘hermeneutical lag’ (Wexler, 1996: 5), which is to say that social analysis is always behind social change and governmental rationalities (Peters et al., 2009) and the contributions of new social movements. Second, the contemporary policy logic that goes under the rubric of neoliberalism has very cleverly incorporated elements of the progressive ideals of a critical sociology of education. As Lambert observes:

Across the industrialized world we find ourselves at a moment in history when progressive ideals permeate neoliberal educational discourse and policy (Canaan & Shumar, 2008). Indeed, as ‘progressive’ debates permeate the ‘innovative’, ‘flexible’ and ‘twenty-first century’ developments necessary to ‘enhance the student experience’, it remains hard to maintain a critical purchase on the notion of ‘progressive’ as it becomes subsumed into a market logic. (2012: 215)

We do not want to reify ‘neoliberalism’ here, but we do find that invoking the process of ‘neoliberalizing’ (Peck and Tickell, 2002) is useful. Doing this exposes certain logics, or the ‘neo-liberal imaginary’ (Ball, 2012: 2), that is informing social policy – specifically how such policy logic transforms structures that enact new technologies of control regarding the values and cultures of the public sector, in ways that are forming new subjectivities (Rose, 1999). Third, critical sociology of education demands an ongoing critique of its own reasoning on the grounds that we must avoid proclaiming emancipation in advance of practice (McWilliam, 2004). Or put more simply, it is all well and good to claim emancipatory intent, but then how does such reasoning translate into practice? This means engaging in a critique of theories of educational inequality/equality, theories that we have been working with for many decades. There is currently a heightened interest in critical sociology of educational studies, to engage in thinking otherwise about ideas such as emancipation and equality, and this article provides us with an opportunity to engage with some of those debates (Biesta, 2010).

In pursuing this agenda in this article we are taking up Foucault’s challenge to ‘[n]ever consent to be completely comfortable with your own certainties’ (2007: 127), which for us means reflecting on our own discipline, critical sociology of education. For those of us committed to critical inquiry, there is a demand for reflexivity, or, as Ball (2006) puts it, dealing with the ‘necessity and violence of theory’. Put simply, our theorizing is not outside of power relations. This theme is encapsulated by Aronowitz in his argument that critical inquiry ‘is caught between a critique of categories as fulfilling an ontological need, and its own will to explanation, a program which requires positive, unhistorically mediated, categories’ (1992: 297). Both Ball and Aronowitz were alluding to the necessity for self-awareness in thinking against the grain of orthodoxies, and of the need to use social theory while understanding how it is we think sociologically, so as to avoid the damaging effect of foreclosure.

This article has four main moves. First, we reflect on recent critical inquiry on schooling and specifically focus on ‘disadvantage’ as a key word in critical education theory. We argue that key words such as ‘disadvantage’ are not only empirical in the sense that they name aspects of reality, but they are also key sites for political/pedagogical work (see Comber, 1998; Thomson, 2000). In being self-conscious about this issue in our own thinking, we want to problematize the use of key terms such as ‘disadvantage’ that often ‘unleash powerful, and at times dangerous, effects in educational sites’ (Comber, 1998: 3), even against our own best intentions. We want to invoke Lather’s (1986) idea of dialectical theory building as a way of challenging existing critical positionings by highlighting historical weaknesses and providing a basis with which to update theory in light of changing contexts. Second, we problematize theories of reproduction that are still the doxa in the critical sociology of education. We do this mindful of Bronner’s point that (re)production and resistance theory are not a ‘set of fixed claims or iron-clad proscriptions’ (1994: 322), and our intent is to problematize key words and accepted conceptual frameworks in critical sociology of education, such as ‘educational inequality’, ‘disadvantage’ and associated notions of reproduction. Our third move is a thought experiment, and a brief rehearsal of Rancière’s ‘new logic of emancipation’ (Biesta, 2010), as a way of thinking past theories of reproduction. Finally, we reflect on where our thinking leads us in terms of critical research in education and the need to develop a positive educational project out of critique.

Problematizing Key Words in Critical Sociology of Education

Critical sociology of education is a repository of explanations for the persistent nature of educational inequality, especially related to poverty and the impacts of racism and cultural difference, and provides descriptions and theories about ‘disadvantaged schools’ (see for instance Forsyth and Furlong, 2003; Mills and Gale, 2010; Smyth, 2010). That having been said, we need to interrupt the all too easy slide into the naming of ‘disadvantaged’ schools. Unless we do this then we are guilty of not taking Ball’s (2006) advice on the way our theories do violence. Peel is illustrative of someone who does what Ball calls ‘spontaneous sociology’ (2003: 3) by interrupting the way so-called ‘disadvantaged’ communities (people living in poverty) are portrayed in the public culture as being concentrated geographically. So labelled, these ‘badlands’, ‘wastelands’, or ‘wantlands’, constitute a ‘dangerous form of storytelling’ (2003: 28) and especially poverty news by journalists. Often poverty news provides negative reports on welfare cheats that fuel anti-welfare views, or promotes notions of a permanent ‘underclass’. Poverty news provides a vocabulary of disadvantage that is linked into other narratives of poverty. At best, these narratives speak to what it means to live ‘decently’ in a context of growing socio-economic inequality. At their worst, they present the experience of poverty as a product of the welfare system itself, focusing on what is wrong with poor people and on their ‘bad decisions, rather than on what might be wrong with the context in which those decisions have to be made’ (2003: 23). Peel argues that the major problem with poverty news is the tendency ‘to portray poor people as “trapped”, “excluded” or “powerless”, rather than as people who might know something very important about the problems and their solutions’ (2003: 24). Poverty news often also presents ‘an ominous unease’, where the key narrative is what ‘they’ may do to ‘us’, or the way poverty undermines ‘the perceptions of Australia as an egalitarian or decent society’ (2003: 24). In both versions of poverty, ‘the danger lies in its capacity to do moral or even physical harm to people who are not poor, rather than [highlighting] its basic injustice’ (2003: 24). For Peel, poverty news often emphasizes deficit policies and inaccurate public understandings, with ‘what is said about poverty also shap[ing] what poor people feel they can say and must say, or even the way people feel they must act’ (2003: 26). But then, trying to escape from this representational game can end up leaving us with no words to describe real problems of poverty, or arguing that injustice is merely a matter of image and perception.

Our experience is that ‘[p]arents and students in schools and localities labeled as “disadvantaged” … [are] distressed and angered by … being categorized as somehow deficient’ (Thomson, 2002: 174), which presents difficulties when we try to explain our research to others. Our theories also run into trouble with the teachers in these schools because they can find our theories patronizing and representing ‘them’ as deficits, even though our whole argument is counter to such thinking (Hattam and Prosser, 2008). Mac an Ghaill (1996) addressed this problem in a ‘voiced research’ study with some of his ‘working-class’ sociology of education graduates, in which he asked them how contemporary educational sociology represented their lives. They thought that both the texts, as well as their teachers, projected ‘invalid’ and ‘conceptually flawed’ (1996: 301) views. In particular, they:

Mac an Ghaill’s (1996) analysis foregrounds significant problems for critical sociology of education in relation to the problem of representing poverty. In more recent research, titled New Poverty Studies, Goode and Maskovsky argue that poverty, in neoliberal times, becomes even more prominent as ‘a function of the whims and lifestyles of the rich’, because the poor become an ‘object for obsessive contemplation’ while putting their ‘agency under erasure’ (2001: 2). In effect ‘the problem lies not in poor people’s invisibility but in the terms on which they are permitted to be visible in public discourse’ (2001: 2), ‘blaming the poor for their own impoverishment’, and not permitting poor people ‘full political, economic or moral citizenship’ (2001: 3). Such studies reject ‘imagining the poor as invisible, passive, pathological, or in need of charity or moral reform’ (2001: 3), and instead treat poverty ‘as a political, economic, and [an] ideological effect of capitalist processes and state activity’ (2001: 3); or put most succinctly, we need analyses that discern the ‘making of poverty’ (Susser, 1996: 416).

It is easy for those of us with a critical sensibility to critique accounts of poverty that ‘[accord] with and even [endorse] the ambient neoliberalism’ (Wacquant, 2002: 1521), ‘in which the poor are first cleaved into two subgroups, the good and the bad, before the good ones are revealed to be just like you and me’ (2002: 1521). Walkerdine’s meditation on the subjectivity of working-class people is useful here, illustrating that they are often (mis)understood by both ‘the right’ and ‘the left’ through fictions imbued with ‘fantasies of Otherness which invest the [working] class with everything which is either good and revolutionary or bad and reactionary’ (1997: 15–16). ¹ Most importantly for our argument is Walkerdine’s insight that across these accounts ‘there always needed to be a group of others whose job it was to make people see, to understand their position’ and that this role is ‘usually taken by the middle-class intellectual left’ (1997: 18). Walkerdine is scathing in arguing that for the intellectual class, ‘ordinary working class people are always potentially the solution and always the actual problem’ (1997: 18). Walkerdine highlights the two counterposed alternatives that both fetishize or exoticize the working-class Other: ‘the right’ presents the working class as dangerous, lazy, lacking, stupid, whilst ‘the left’ reclaims the working class in the name of sub-cultural resistance. Either way, there is ‘something fundamentally wrong with their minds, with their psyche’ (1997: 20). So whilst ‘idealised’ working-class people are being constituted at the intersection of these competing progressive and reactionary claims to truth, ordinary working-class people are coping and surviving.

For Walkerdine, the challenge for critical researchers is to reject the binary logic that frames the field and to adopt instead the ‘view of ordinary working people as neither proto-revolutionary fodder nor duped masses’ (1997: 23). Rather, we need to ‘try to understand the conditions of their subjectification, how they become subjects and live, their subjectivity at both a social and psychic level’ (1997: 23), to actually examine ‘how working-class life has been constituted, how it has been and is lived, how oppressed and exploited peoples survive, cope, hope, dream, and die’ (1997: 26). We do not have space here to pursue this examination, but Walkerdine provides a challenge for us: to acknowledge the limitations of the dominant framing for reading working-class young people and schooling. So, rather than render working-class young people in terms of how they might become something else, how they might be governable, we might start with understanding how they materially survive, live and psychologically cope in specific communities. Making sense of poverty and the survival of people living in poverty of course demands some analysis of the function of schooling in the (re)production of poverty, in which case, what does critical sociology say about schooling and inequality?

Thinking with/against Theories of Reproduction and Re-thinking Equality

In Making the Difference, Connell et al. (1982) provided a brief early exposition of how inequality in education was being problematized by Australian researchers, with some key moments including:

The authors of Making the Difference question ‘why educational inequality?’ and conclude ‘that schools are designed to produce it. They are set up to sort and sift …’ (1982: 189), with the inevitable result that ‘educational inequality is the proper business of schools performing their function of reproducing an unequal social order’ (1982: 189–90). While all of this is a fairly straightforward statement of reproduction theory, Making the Difference goes on to argue that schooling ‘also does many other things that contradict’ (1982: 190) such a thesis, most notably providing a ‘vehicle for significant changes in established social relationships’ (1982: 190). The argument was really around the need for research that is able to discern an egalitarian impulse behind meritocratic secondary schooling that is in tension with the prevailing class structure, which was really the line being put by Giroux (1983) in his treatise on educational inequality that became a ‘synoptic text’ for the field and portrayed reproduction theories as taking four major forms: the economic-reproductive; the cultural-reproductive; the hegemonic-state reproductive; and resistance theories. He argued:

In the final analysis, none of these positions develops an adequate theory of ideology, hegemony, or resistance … If theories of social and cultural reproduction exclude from their problematics the issue of conflict and consciousness, theories of resistance make this issue the starting point for a critical study of the relationship between schooling and capitalist society. (1983: 12)

Willis’s (1977) ground-breaking Learning to Labour addressed how ‘schooling outcomes for working-class kids [is] not … an instance of failure or victimhood … [by] … show[ing] that working class kids … are exercising “agency” by choosing to “fail”’ (Aronowitz, 2004: ix). For Aronowitz, not only is Learning to Labour about how schooling reproduces class structures but it is the reproduction of an ‘oppositional working-class culture inherited from families, neighborhoods, and peers’ (2004: xi) that is not presumed to be inferior to dominant middle-class aspirations. Willis saw young people as ‘political actors’, not simply ‘dupes of a wholly reproductive system’ (Dolby and Dimitriadis, 2004: 1). In an interview, Willis admitted that researching young people in school requires critiques of essentialism while acknowledging that ‘durable identities’ are ‘formed somatically and materially’ (Sassatelli and Santoro, 2009: 282). Importantly, Willis also argues that Bourdieu’s notion of habitus is ‘lingeringly positivistic’ (2009: 282) in the way it sells the subjective dimensions of young people’s lives short. Put simply, he argues that we need theory that provides:

… a somewhat more creative and collective agentic role for subordinate cultural actors [such as working class young people] unfolding over time and in concrete situations where they are not just subject to symbolic violence and species of self-blame but, through their cultural practices if not in words, actually ‘see into’ aspects of enclosing structures and ideologies but in ways that produce unexpected and ironic outcomes. (2009: 283)

Reproduction theory is still very much dominant in critical sociology of education and the social sciences more broadly, and, even though there have been some critiques, this dominance is still evident in the special issues of journals focusing on Bourdieu, including Theory, Culture & Society 23(6), Critical Studies in Education 51(1), British Journal of Sociology of Education 25(4), Journal of Education Policy 20(6), Theory and Research in Education 3(1), and the International Journal of Leadership in Education 6(4), all of which mostly argue for the explanatory power of Bourdieuian conceptual tools. To make our point here we rehearse three pertinent examples of Bourdieuian scholarship that we think is mostly well regarded in our field.

We begin with a review of the scholarship of Reay, whose work we both use often in our own scholarship. We do not have the space here to review how she engages Bourdieu across her entire scholarship, but we have selected one article (Reay, 2004), in which she attempts to take on some of the critiques of Bourdieu, but then mostly advocates for his explanatory power. She begins by stating that Bourdieu is often criticized for his ‘latent determinism’ (2004: 432), which she finds ‘ironic in view of Bourdieu’s rationale’ (2004: 432), for his work is ‘an attempt to transcend dualisms of agency-structure, objective-subjective and the micro-macro’ (2004: 432). What Reay does not concede is the difference between having a rationale and the actual success of the theoretical project. On this very theme we need to remember Giddens’ attempts to do something similar with his concept of structuration, which, whilst we would argue is theoretically very neat, did not solve the problem it intended to solve; it failed to provide any real explanatory power. We think Reay’s account of the concept of habitus, the main focus for this article, does help to get past some of the claims to over-determinism in Bourdieu’s work. She asserts, somewhat persuasively, that, for her anyway, this concept can bring into our analysis of social phenomena a demand to acknowledge constraints, in which habitus ‘predisposes individuals towards certain ways of behaving’ (2004: 433), but that there is a level of ‘indeterminancy’ (2004: 433) as well, and hence ‘new creative responses’ (2004: 435) are possible. Later in the article she does rehearse some of what she refers to as limitations. She mentions his tendency to focus on ‘pre-reflective’ dimensions of ‘practice’ (2004: 437), or more simply put, borrowing from Sayer, Bourdieu ‘overplays the unconscious impulses and aspects of habitus, neglecting the mundane everyday reflexivity’ (2004: 437). In which case, Bourdieu ‘denies or marginalizes the life of the mind in others’ (2004: 437), and for this article, especially those with less cultural capital, those living in poverty, the working class, or those rendered educationally disadvantaged. In her discussion, and against her rehearsal of significant criticisms, criticism that we think she has not taken seriously enough, she still wants to advocate on behalf of Bourdieu and literally bolt onto the notion of habitus notions such as ‘ethical dispositions or “moral sentiments”’ (borrowing from Sayer, 2005), as a way of providing ‘a broader conceptualization of habitus’ (2004: 438). Whilst we think this is clever theoretically, we are not sure that this move adequately responds to the key problem here, which Boltanski and Chapello state in terms of whether Bourdieu begins with the assumption that people have ‘critical capacities’ (2007: xx).

Another example, this time from Mills (2008) who ponders the transformational potential of theoretical constructs of Bourdieu against ‘fierce criticism for apparently mechanistic notions of power and domination, an overly determined view of human agency, and an oversimplification of class cultures and their relationships to each other’ (2008: 79). We think in some places in this article she actually undermines her argument. As for Reay’s article above, Mills claims that Bourdieu is hoping to ‘escape the mechanistic tendencies of Saussure’s structuralism without relapsing into subjectivism’ (2008: 80), or, simply, to get out of the structure-agency dualism. Mills then goes on to rehearse her understanding of habitus and states emphatically that habitus implies ‘habit, or unthinking-ness in actions’ which ‘operates below the level of calculation and consciousness’ (2008: 80). Even though she admits that the concept provides ‘for limited capacity’ (by those with less cultural capital [our words]) she goes on to credit Bourdieu with ‘an enthusiasm for resistance, especially in his later work (such as Weight of the World). In her subsequent discussion she states, rather tellingly we think:

… the habitus may make some students feel constrained by their circumstances and largely incapable of perceiving social reality, in all of its arbitrariness, as anything other than ‘the way things are’ … Many marginalized students, for example, take things for granted, rather than recognizing that there are ways that their situation could be transformed. (2008: 82)

Mills goes on to quote Bourdieu directly on this very point:

Students ‘even the most disadvantaged, tend to perceive the world as natural and to find it much more acceptable that one might imagine, especially when one looks at the situation of the dominated through the social eyes of the dominant’ (Bourdieu, 1990a: 130–1) (2008: 82)

Our final example is from an article by Kenway and McLeod (2004), published as part of one of the special issues we mentioned above. In their opening move they are less generous than the previous two examples and their article does, we think, respond seriously to significant critiques of Bourdieu’s work. They mention the ‘striking neglect of debates within a range of poststructural methodologies’ (2004: 530) and especially taking seriously ‘whether the subaltern can speak?’. In their words, and against Bourdieu, they ponder ‘how one perspective is naturalized and that the “other” systematically silenced’ (2004: 530), rather than just asserting that the ‘other’ is ‘largely incapable of perceiving social reality’ (Mills, 2008: 82). Perhaps, most significantly, Kenway and McLeod remind us of the critique made by McRobbie (2002) of Weight of the World, a text that Mills wants to claim helps Bourdieu get out of some of his problems with over-determination and transformation. Kenway and McLeod make special mention of McRobbie’s claim that some of the chapters invoke ‘crude and commonsense sociological understanding’, and are overconfident in their ‘assumption of knowledge of the other’ (2004: 533). They go on to argue, with McRobbie, that Bourdieu fails his own test of a reflexive sociology (see also Archer, 2010), with ‘some major blind spots … with its focus on misery’ (2004: 533) and the problems Bourdieu has with interdisciplinarity.

But if we are going to think past reproduction theory then we probably need to be thinking past Bourdieu and specifically engaging with those critiques of his conceptualizations of inequality, misrecognition and habitus. There are some further critiques we will flag briefly here. First, Foucaultian scholars sometimes engage with Bourdieu. For example, in a recent meditation on Foucault’s work as an attempt to forge a new modality of criticality, Rabinow references Bourdieu as an example of the ‘universal intellectual’ as evident by his ‘Pascalian overview (surplomb) of others’ irremediable illusio[misrecognition]’ (2011: 62). Such a position is only possible, he proposes, if ‘the sociologist can free himself from the illusio [misrecognition] and social constraints of all other actors’ (2011: 101). In a similar view, De Certeau, again reading Bourdieu against Foucault, asserts that Bourdieu has problems with his theory of misrecognition or docta ignorantia (1984: 56) that Bourdieu variously refers to as a ‘learned ignorance’ or as ‘a mode of practical knowledge that does not contain knowledge of its own principles’ (1990: 102). Even more stridently, Boltanski and Chiapello, in their now famous book, The New Spirit of Capitalism, assert that ‘Bourdieu reveals an aristocratic contempt for the popular classes’ (2007: 453) and they wonder what is the very point of Bourdieuian analysis if ‘all relations are reducible to conflicts of interest and relations of force, and this is a “law” immanent in the order of the “social”’ (2007: x). Boltanski and Chiapello are especially clear in their criticism of the concept of misrecognition that seems to be so central to a Bourdieuian approach and yet out of reach by any criticism by those advocating for Bourdieuian analysis:

… we credit people with genuine critical capacities, and critique has an impact on the world. We start out from the principle that people are able by themselves to measure the discrepancy between discourses and what they experience … (2007: xx)

For De Certeau, Bourdieu’s theory of misrecognition must mean that the sociologist claims an understanding or theory that is ‘foreign and superior to the knowledge the society had of itself’ (1984: 56). As a result, De Certeau worries about the efficacy of Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, as Varenne and McDermott point out:

Bourdieu must end with habitus because he could not imagine a situation where people could be shown to submit themselves practically, in their everyday life, to a cultural arbitrary that they either understood and accepted or (mis) understood and resisted. Paradoxically, he seems to accept the pedagogical notion that knowledge (both substantive and cultural) is ‘inculcated’ in schools, that is, that knowledge moves from outside into a person through education. There are other solutions … (1999: 174)

One of these solutions is based on a critique of the logic of Bourdieu advanced by Rancière (1991, 2004, 2010), who has begun to unsettle the logic of reproduction theory. Rancière’s scholarship is beginning to gain attention in education studies, although there are still only a few serious engagements with his work (Bingham and Biesta, 2010; Gershon, 2012: Lambert, 2012; Simons and Masschelein, 2011; Special issue Educational Philosophy and Theory 2010 42(5–6)). His critique is multidimensional, but for the purposes of this article we will foreground his provocative yet straightforward thesis on equality, which leads to his critique of theories of misrecognition and its implications for progressive pedagogy.

Rancière’s Rejection of a Knowledge of Inequality

Rancière’s interventions into this set of debates can be found in various places but perhaps the most significant is in his book, The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991), which provides his own account of Jacotot, a French educator who in 1818 experimented in teaching ‘without providing explanation to his students’ (1991: 3). Kirstin Ross, the translator of The Ignorant Schoolmaster, observes that Rancière ‘explained nothing about the failures of the school system’ (1991: vii) and hence adds nothing to any explanations about how schooling contributes to the continual ‘reproduction of social inequalities’ (1991: vii). Instead, Rancière provides what Ross terms a ‘parable’ or ‘an extraordinary philosophical meditation on equality’ (1991: ix) that takes as its point of departure a serious disagreement with Althusser, Rancière’s friend and teacher, and evolves into a sustained critique of sociology, taking the work of Bourdieu as the exemplary case. In respect of our article, there is not much contemporary educational sociology that still draws on Althusser, but, for Rancière, there is a strong Althusserian sensibility within Bourdieuian sociology that Rancière finds disturbing. Put simply, Rancière discerns a strand of Althusserian sociology that runs through Bourdieu’s scholarship (see Rancière, 2011).

Rancière split with Althusser during the student riots in Paris in 1968 on the basis of Althusser’s advice to French students at that time, which was ‘to develop their knowledge of Marxism-Leninism’ (Ross, 1991: xvii), in which he argued for a distinction between science and ideology and to ‘justify the eminent dignity of the possessors of that knowledge’ (1991: xvii). Hence, the only way for students to criticize their master’s knowledge (i.e. Althusser) was to become his peer. For Rancière and Panagia, such a position was clearly aligned with a division of labour identified by Plato: ‘Plato’s logic of the proper – a logic that requires everyone to be in their proper place, partaking in proper affairs’ (2000: 115). Claiming the authority of the ‘master explicator’ (Rancière, 1991: 11) is, for Rancière, antithetical to an emancipatory project and to the project of democratic politics (Rancière, 2007).

Rancière’s critique of both Althusser and Bourdieu is focused most significantly on the authority derived from presuming a naïveté or ignorance of their objects of study – that is, ‘working class students excluded from the bourgeois systems of favours and privileges, who do not (and cannot) understand their exclusion’ (Ross, 1991: xi). An example of such logic is provided by Thomson who argues that:

According to Bourdieu, … doxa works as misrecognition; doxic narratives deliberately obfuscate how the game (re)produces social inequality through the (re)production of the hierarchy of positions and capitals. Furthermore, he suggested, the doxa provides a teleological rationale through which failure is able to be attributed to poor playing, rather than the nature of the game itself. (2005: 746)

For Rancière, these theories of reproduction and the concomitant demand for a theory of misrecognition, are ‘all too obvious’ (Ross, 1991: xi) and produce a tautology that Ross refers to as the ‘Bourdieu effect’, summed up in this perfect circle: ‘they are excluded because they don’t know why they are excluded; and they don’t know why they are excluded because they are excluded’ (1991: xi). Or put more simply by Rancière: ‘they were dominated because they did not understand, and they did not understand because they were dominated’ (2012: viii).

Identifying this tautology, though, is not the most significant problem Rancière has with Bourdieu and critical sociology. More problematic is a corollary. Those trapped by doxa, or the dominant ideology, require those intellectuals, those ‘scientists able to perceive the logic of this circle … [to] lead them out of their subjection’ (2012: ix). For Rancière, Bourdieu takes up a position as ‘master explicator’, who in effect ‘speaks for’ and also then explicates the position of the worker, the working class, the poor. For Rancière, ‘the science that claimed to explain subjection and guide revolt was complicit in the dominant order’ (2012: ix). The science in this case is educational sociology. Bourdieu provides a lesson in inequality: ‘that is, by beginning with inequality, proves it, and by proving it, in the end, is obliged to rediscover it again and again’ (Ross, 1991: xix). Rather than explicate inequality as the starting point for thinking about emancipation and education, Rancière proposes instead to consider equality as the point of departure: ‘What would it mean to make equality a presupposition rather than a goal, a practice rather than a reward situated firmly in some distant future so as to all the better explain its present infeasibility?’ (1991: xix). For Rancière, ‘[a]ll people are equally intelligent’ (1991: xix).

This presupposition makes little sense when read through contemporary psychology. But the idea does make sense when read against Plato and the naturalizing of a distribution of roles. As Rancière put it: ‘There is not a popular intelligence concerned with practical things and a scholarly intelligence devoted to abstract thought. It is always the same intelligence at work’ (2012: x). By reframing the debate in this way, Rancière proposes that we refuse knowledge of inequality; that we refuse theories of reproduction/misrecognition:

About inequality, there is nothing to know. Inequality is no more a given to be transformed by knowledge than equality is an end to be transmitted through knowledge. Equality and inequality are not two states. They are two ‘opinions’, that is to say two distinct axioms, by which educational training can operate, two axioms that have nothing in common. All that one can do is verify the axiom one is given. (2010: 4–5)

Being educated then is not so much about giving people the necessary instruction, but rather providing opportunities ‘to verify the equality of intelligences’ (Rancière, 2012: x). Rather than pedagogy as explication and stultification based on an inequality of intelligences, Rancière argues for a critical pedagogy as a verification of equality, in which case we address our students ‘not from the point of view of the person’s ignorance but of the person’s knowledge; the one who is supposedly ignorant in fact already understands innumerable things’ (2010: 4). Rather than an equality-to-come, we need to be working instead on a verification of equality in the present. Rather than understanding educational inequality in terms of misrecognition and deficits in cultural capital, Rancière provokes us to work with equality as evident in the present and to see our students’ knowledge assets and positive learning capacities instead. To invoke Boltanski and Chiapello here, we assume that our students do have genuine ‘critical capacities’ (2007: xx) as learners.

Conclusion

In this article we have made a modest attempt to think past the logics of critical sociology of education by putting our own positions (theories of reproduction and resistance) and key words (‘disadvantage’) under critique. Too often those of a critical persuasion confuse their emancipatory knowledge interest with its realization and fail to recognize the circuits of knowledge we all inhabit. For us the key problem is how we interrupt the politics of knowledge that sustains deficit accounts of people living in poverty that feed into the stratification process that still very much characterizes schooling (inter)nationally. Our somewhat incomplete review of some of the broad contours of critical sociology in education suggests that it too gets to play its part in advancing a logic of inequality and deficit that is now distorting educational policy and practice. Rather than being purely oppositional – as a counter logic, and part of a counter public – as we would hope and intend, in fact there are a couple of key ways in which critical sociology of education is implicated in maintaining the status quo.

First, critical sociology in education has played its part in a framing of the problem of educational disadvantage that is not so neatly separate from the deficit logic that is antithetical to its project. Borrowing from Peel, Walkerdine and Mac an Ghaill, critical sociology provides the ‘left’ or progressive side of what has become a binary opposition. For Peel ‘the problem’ is representational. For Walkerdine and Mac an Ghaill, critical sociology does not go past deficit views of working-class people and reinforces its own stereotypes, failing in the process to offer the very form of political agency all too often assumed. Pinar goes even further in suggesting that critical sociology suffers from a ‘compulsive repetition of the same concepts’ (2009: 195). Critical sociology thus contributes to the dominant framing for theorizing working-class young people in schools rather than engaging in interrupting the ‘frame-up’. How critical sociology might interrupt this framing is suggested by Rancière’s critique.

Second, and drawing on Rancière, critical sociology unfortunately too often foregrounds a theory of inequality which leads us into a circular logic and towards a pedagogy of explication that by definition assumes a deficit position for the subjects of our study. Out of such a circular logic the critical intellectual also gets to play master explicator, again, against the emancipatory logic claimed by critical inquiry. Rather than remaining trapped within our own theory of inequality, Rancière proposes instead that we shift the framing of the problem so as to work with the axiom of equality rather than spend more time on contributing to theories of domination, inequality and reproduction. Our article argues that we need to learn how to research so-called ‘disadvantaged’ schools and their communities in ways that assume everyone’s equality. In which case, our inquiries into the possibilities for social justice in education become a verification of that equality rather than an end to be achieved (Rancière and Panagia, 2000) through: (a) treating all young people as uncanny theorists of their own lives (McLaughlin, 1997); and (b) treating teachers as intellectuals (Giroux, 1988) and key actors in redesigning pedagogies of re-connection. Putting our thesis most succinctly here, for those of us working within a critical sociology of education, Bourdieu actually fails to contribute much to thinking about a positive project for education and especially to what might define a critical pedagogy. Of course Rancière’s (1991) ‘ignorant school master’ cannot be taken up here as a model that might work in institutions we call schools, but thinking past reproduction theory means adopting teaching practices – curriculum, pedagogy especially – that work from the premise of equality. Bourdieu’s notions of cultural capital must mean that in so-called ‘disadvantaged’ schools many of the students suffer from a lack of cultural capital that is normalized by the school. And Bourdieu’s theory of misrecognition means that the students we are advocating for, working-class students, are ‘largely incapable of perceiving social reality’ (Mills, 2008: 82). Instead, as mentioned above, Rancière’s provocation to assume equality means treating all students as uncanny theorists of their own lives.

We need, therefore, to look beyond a Bourdieuian framework. As an example we suggest experimenting with work of Gonzalez et al. (2005) who have been advancing the idea of ‘funds of knowledge’ as a fertile possibility. The development of the funds of knowledge concept involved anthropological research of multiple and ‘thick’ social relationships that constitute US-Mexican households (Vélez-Ibáñez and Greenberg, 1992) and draws on Wolf’s (1966) research into household economy. The category has been adopted and further developed by Moll et al., who use the term ‘funds of knowledge’ to refer to those ‘historically accumulated and culturally developed bodies of knowledge and skills essential for household or individual functioning and well-being’ (1992: 133), pertaining to ‘social, economic, and productive activities of people’ (1992: 139) in local communities. Funds of knowledge include ‘social history of households, their origins and development … the labour history of families’, ‘how families develop social networks’ ‘including knowledge skills and labour, that enhance the households’ ability to survive and thrive’ (1992: 133). This approach explicitly confronts the deficit views that teachers have of some disenfranchised communities. Instead, there is an assumption that ‘people are competent and have knowledge, and their life experiences have given them that knowledge’ (Gonzalez and Moll, 2002: 625). Rather than the traditional curriculum that either misrepresents or ignores far too many communities, the funds of knowledge approach represents ‘communities in terms of the resources, the wherewithal they do possess, and a way to harness these resources for classroom teaching’ (2002: 625). For us this approach is consistent with Rancière:

The primary impulse joins a pragmatic need to engage learners with, most importantly, an ethical imperative to honour their cultural-historical lives (Zipin, 2006) through knowledge content (curriculum) and ways of transacting knowledge (pedagogy) that resonate meaningfully with cultural use-values in people’s lifeworlds. (Zipin et al., 2012: 181)

Rather than see cultural capital deficits and misrecognition, this approach gives ‘value to learning assets in the lifeworlds’ (2012: 181) of students. Multiple lines of flight for critical sociology of education are possible on the basis of our thought experiment but one we want to suggest here is the need to think again about what it means in practice for teachers and researchers to listen to the voices of students (Smyth and McInerney, 2012). Listening to students has a long history in educational research, but as Biesta recently suggested in a re-thinking of this refrain, we might instead refer ‘to our students as speakers’ (2011: 41) – which is to say, having a new ‘starting point – not a conclusion’ (2011: 41). Rather than focus on what the teacher or the researcher might get up to, let us instead foreground political agency for our students and see ‘what could be done under that supposition’ (Rancière, 1991: 46). In Rancière’s terms, the main enemy of emancipation is consensus: in which case critical sociology of education, thus re-conceived, might contribute to an outbreak of unscripted possibilities.