Elite Schools in Globalising Circumstances ─ New Conceptual Directions and Connections

Elite Schools in Globalizing Circumstances foregrounds the richly theoretical and empirically-based work of an international cast of scholars seeking to break out of the confines of the methodological nationalism that now governs so much of contemporary scholarship on schooling. Based on a 5-year extended global ethnography of elite schools in nine different countries—countries defined by colonial pasts linked to England—the contributors make a powerful case for the rethinking of elite schools and elite class formation theory in light of contemporary processes of globalization and transnational change.

Prestigious, high-status schools have long been seen as critical institutional vehicles directly contributing to the societal processes of elite selection and reproduction. This book asserts that much has changed and that these schools can no longer rest on their past laurels and accomplishments. Instead they must re-cast their heritages and tradition in order to navigate the new globally competitive educational field enabling them to succeed in a world in which the globalization of educational markets, the global ambitions and imaginations of school youth, and the emergence of new powerful players peddling entrepreneurial models of curriculum and education, have placed contemporary schooling under tremendous pressure. This insightful and though-provoking volume provides a well-researched perspective on the nature of contemporary schooling in the globalizing era. This book was originally published as a special issue ofGlobalisation, Societies and Education.

Jane Kenway is a Professor in the Education Faculty at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. She is recognized internationally for her research on the politics of educational change in the context of wider social, cultural, and political change. Her more recent books are Asia as method in education studies: A defiant research imagination(Routledge, 2015) and Globalising the Research Imagination (Routledge, 2008). She has recently edited special issues of the British Journal of the Sociology of Educationand the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, and has published in a variety of journals, includingBritish Journal of the Sociology of Education, Gender and Education,Journal of Education Policy, and Education and Societies. She leads the international team project Elite independent schools in globalising circumstances: a multi-sited global ethnography,and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences.

Cameron McCarthy is Communication Scholar and University Scholar in the Department of Education Policy, Leadership and Organization (EPOL) and in the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA. He has published widely on topics related to globalization, canon formation, race and the class conquest of the city, postcolonialism, problems with neoMarxist writings on race and education, institutional support for teaching, and school ritual and adolescent identities in journals including Harvard Educational Review, Oxford Review of Education,Studies in Linguistic Sciences, and The British Journal of the Sociology of Education. His latest book is an edited volume entitledMobilized Identities, Mediated Subjectivity and Cultural Crisis in the Neoliberal Era (Common Ground Press, 2014). He is currently one of the lead-investigators of the "Elite Schools in Globalizing Circumstances" global ethnography study of youth and education in nine countries and across six regions: Australia, Africa, Asian, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean.