Materialities and Mobilities in Education
Materialities and Mobilities in Education develops new arguments about the ways in which educational processes can be analysed. Drawing on a recent interest in mobilities across the social sciences, and a conterminous resurgence in academic accounts of materialities, the book demonstrates how these two ostensibly differing perspectives on education might be fruitfully deployed in tandem. Considering the interaction and convergence of materialities and mobilities, the book highlights the relationship between structural constraints and opportunities and the creativity of individuals, providing a unique and essential insight into contemporary education.
Examining a range of education spaces from the formal to the informal and the different types of mobility that manifest in relation to education, the book introduces readers to a range of theoretical resources and detailed case studies used to analyse the spatiality of education from across the disciplines of human
geography, education and sociology.
Drawing on a wide variety of material from different national contexts, Materialities and Mobilities in Education is an engaging and relevant text, which will appeal to postgraduate students, researchers and academics interested in the development of education policy and practice.
Rachel Brooks is Professor of Sociology, University of Surrey, UK and an executive editor of the British Journal of Sociology of Education .
Johanna Waters is Associate Professor in Human Geography, University of Oxford, UK.
Foundations and Futures of Education
Peter Aggleton, UNSW, Australia
Sally Power , Cardiff University, UK
Michael Reiss , UCL Institute of Education, UK
Foundations and Futures of Education focuses on key emerging issues in education as well as continuing debates within the field. The series is inter-disciplinary, and includes historical, philosophical, sociological, psychological and comparative perspectives on three major themes: the purposes and nature of education; increasing interdisciplinarity within the subject; and the theory-practice divide.
School Trouble
Identity, power and politics in education
Deborah Youdell
Schools and Schooling in the Digital Age
A critical analysis
Neil Selwyn
Being a University
Ron Barnett
Education
An Impossible Profession?
Tamara Bibby
Re-designing Learning Contexts
Technology-rich, learner-centred ecologies
Rosemary Luckin
Education and the Family
Passing success across the generations
Leon Feinstein, Kathryn Duckworth and Ricardo Sabates
Learners, Learning and Educational Activity
Judith Ireson
Gender, Schooling and Global Social Justice
Elaine Unterhalter
Education, Philosophy and the Ethical Environment
Graham Haydon
Schooling, Society and Curriculum
Edited by Alex Moore
Materialities and Mobilities in Education
Rachel Brooks and Johanna Waters
First published 2018
by Routledge
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2018 Rachel Brooks and Johanna Waters
The right of Rachel Brooks and Johanna Waters to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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ISBN: 978-1-138-18309-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-64607-7 (ebk)
Typeset in Galliard
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
For Hana, Alys, Daniel, Betsan, Martha and Hannah
Contents
We are grateful to the series editors, Peter Aggleton, Sally Power and Michael Reiss, for commissioning this book, and Ravinder Sidhu for writing the Afterword. Rachel would also like to thank Wiley for permission to reproduce some text from an article in the British Educational Research Journal (Brooks, R. [2015] Social and spatial disparities in emotional responses to education: Feelings of guilt among student-parents, British Educational Research Journal , 41, 3, 505519). Peidong Yang and YiEn Cheng provided us with some reading suggestions and Dave Roberts provided a photograph used in the book thank you. Finally, we would like to extend a big thanks to each other for support, encouragement, constructive criticism and friendship over the course of writing this book.
Aims and purpose
Materialities and Mobilities in Education embraces recent thinking prevalent within the social sciences on the role of mobilities in the constitution of societies, whilst at the same time foregrounding the significance of materiality in these debates. An oft-neglected aspect of recent work on mobilities (emerging out of an interdisciplinary mobilities turn) is the emphasis it gives to materialities. Mobilities, of any kind, require a conjunction of material things an infrastructure, if you like, of various physical moorings. These might include, for example, bus stops, petrol stations, car parks or airport terminals. Furthermore, mobility is itself material in nature. To travel is an active process (not simply an absence between point A and point B), involving material props (shoes, roads, bikes, cars and buses) and the physicality invoked by travelling through and within a landscape. Thus, there is a close and dependent relationship between mobilities and materialities, which we are keen to explore, conceptually, here. In this book, we argue that materialities and mobilities should be considered co-constitutive of contemporary societies. This argument is pursued through a focus on a range of contemporary scholarship on education.
Education, however, represents more than just a case study in this book; it reflects a growing belief in the importance and centrality of education to the function and operation of societies. This central role is increasingly being recognised, by geographers, sociologists and anthropologists not to mention educationalists, and this is reflected in the growth, over the past two decades, of innovative scholarship in this area. In 2009, Hanson Thiem called for a decentered and outward-looking literature [on education in geography] one in which education systems, institutions, and practices are positioned as useful sites for a variety of theory-building projects (p. 154). This statement captures to a certain extent what we are attempting in Materialities and Mobilities in Education. Education is a preeminent site for the development of theory-building and testing around the co-constitutive nature of materiality and mobility, as we hope here to demonstrate. And as our engagement with the academic literature will show, we are not alone in our belief in the fundamental importance of education for understanding contemporary society.
