Travelling with Bourdieu: Elite schools and the cultural logics and limits of global mobility

Abstract

Much of Bourdieu’s thinking on the socially dominant class (‘the state nobility’, ‘the inheritors’), elite schools (universities) and the ‘field of power’ speaks, intimately, of the education system in France (e.g. Bourdieu 1996). But more and more, elite secondary schools’ clients (parents, students and ex-students) are on the move around the globe and such schools are increasingly globalising their practices (Kenway and Fahey 2014). Such changes have led those who currently study elite schools and their class practices to try to transcend Bourdieu’s ‘methodological nationalism’ (Amelina et al. 2012) on the education/class nexus. The conceptual moves usually involve a discussion of the ‘cap..