Class in Education: Knowledge, Pedagogy, Subjectivity

In contemporary pedagogy, “class” has become one nomadic sign among others: it has no referent but only contingent allusions to similarly traveling signs. Class, that is, no longer explains social conflicts and antagonisms rooted in social divisions of labor, but instead portrays a cultural carnival of lifestyles, consumptions, tastes, prestige and desire, or obscures social conflicts through technicist accounts of incomes and jobs.

Class in Education brings back class as a materialist analysis of social inequalities originating at the point of production and reproduced in all cultural practices. Addressing a wide range of issues – from the interpretive logic of the new humanities to racism to reading, school-level curricula to educational policy – the contributors focus on the effects that the different understandings of class have on various sites of pedagogy and open up new spaces for a materialist pedagogy and critical education in the times of globalization and the regimes of the digital.