RE: Appropriating Bourdieu for a Sociology of Chinese Education

Abstract

The concluding notes in this chapter review some of these distinctive issues and differences. The chapter presents a composite of our notes and correspondence drawn from our discussion as we worked through the essays included in this volume, from our continuing dialogue with our contributors and co-authors, and from our diary exchanges during ongoing travels and seminars in China. While our work begins from Bourdieu’s sociology, this is an opportunity for a parallel reconsideration of Bourdieu’s work in the light of reproduction and transformation in Chinese education. Our aim here is a reflexive sociology that weaves between theory and context, the sociological imagination and the facticity of the social and material realities of the new China. Here we explore the grounds for expanding, critiquing, and reappropriating Bourdieu’s ideas as part of the project of a new critical sociology of education in China. With all respect to the field and our Chinese colleagues, this is but a first collective attempt to build new theory and to table new premises, deliberately polemical and speculative, historical and wide-ranging.