Jane Kenway

Jane Kenway
Monash University (Australia) · Faculty of Education

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151
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Publications

Publications (151)
Article
The sociological literature on elite private schooling is frequently informed by Bourdieu’s signature concepts of cultural, social and symbolic capital. Yet, his insistence that economic capital is the ‘root’ of these other capitals is often overlooked or downplayed. This paper addresses this lacuna. While it gestures to Bourdieu’s other capitals,...
Article
Elite universities are often believed to represent education’s gold standard and to produce highly educated luminaries who rightfully take their places leading all the institutions that matter in societies across the world. We begin by explaining how this is so. Then we discuss what we call monster methodologies, suggesting why and how we employed...
Article
The Covid-19 pandemic is intensifying existing problems of economic asymmetry, and other injustices, between and within countries and regions around the world. It is thus imperative that sociological studies of education document its socio-cultural implications in different locations and on different scales. It is equally imperative that such studi...
Article
England and Wales have a sizeable fee-paying private school sector including well- resourced elite schools conferring considerable advantage on their students. The majority have charitable status, yielding substantial tax breaks. This significant source of funding for the sector has attracted comparatively little attention from educational research...
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In this chapter, the authors outline why and how they developed and deployed the notion of multi-sited global ethnography to study elite schools, globalization, and social class formations and expressions. They offer some selected glimpses of the narratives and insights that arose through their inquiries. The authors look at the intersections betwe...
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We concentrate on school principals in this chapter and on the various ways they seek to position their schools, staff and students on the global stage while, at the same time, trying to remain faithful to the schools’ and the nations’ roots. Their own biographies prove central to the manner in which, and how successfully, they navigate the tension...
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We conclude the book by drawing together the connections, conjunctions, juxtapositions and disjunctions that are involved when elite schools undertake class choreography on the global stage. And we consider how they might choreograph their futures as their own contradictions become more manifest and the challenges to their supremacy mount.
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This chapter shifts the focus from England to the various (former) colonies in which we conducted our fieldwork. Here, we examine the coiled conditions of these interlinked but diverse histories of British colonialism, capitalism and Christianity in the contexts of Australia, Barbados, England, Hong Kong, India, Singapore and South Africa. The unev...
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Students in elite schools live their lives largely through the prism of privilege and, in this chapter, we concentrate on what this means for their politics. We probe the ways students engage their privilege, what they currently do with it and what they plan to do with it in their futures, pointing to the political spectra across which they range....
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Mobility is the chief concern of this chapter in which we identify some of the elite global circuits that the schools participate in. We show how the schools use the mobilities made possible through prestigious, transnational organizations of elite schools to assist them to produce leaders. And we draw out the details of some students’ itineraries,...
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This chapter examines how public schools and the public school system evolved in England and indicates how they were linked, over time, to shifting national and colonial social power relationships. We offer this history for a number of reasons. First, the particular model of elite schooling in the seven different former British colonies that we add...
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In this chapter, we point to the institutional tussles involved as the schools seek to reshape their curricula so that they intersect in the most propitious ways with global, national and local imperatives. The most significant disputations, we illustrate, involve examination systems, language studies and national versus international curricula. We...
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In this chapter we illustrate how, through their iconography and rituals, our research schools marshal represent and use their history and heritage as markers of prestige and success. Thus, we call attention to their manipulation and modulation of history to meet present challenges and the pressure of globalizing change. The chapter shows how the s...
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Elite schools are contentious institutions and elicit intense debate. They are seen to either represent schooling's gold standard and to produce highly educated luminaries who rightfully take their places at the apogee of all the institutions that matter. Or they are seen as socially isolated, luxury enclaves that breed and feed privilege and power...
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Studies of elites and elite education have largely not involved rigorous debate, either with regard to the conceptual resources deployed or methodologies adopted. Even the concepts elite and elite schools have not been problematized much. Further, there is a tendency for people to cite, rather than engage or dispute each other. So while the number...
Article
Privileged benefaction in elite schools and the moral dilemmas, contradictions and power politics involved are the focus of this paper. The notion of ‘the gift’ provides our analytical lens. We concentrate on two girls’ schools – one in South Africa and one in England. These were both built, in various ways, on the British model of public schooling...
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How are elite schools caught up in the changing processes of globalisation? Is globalisation a new phenomenon for them? This paper focuses on the globalising practices that selected elite schools adopt. It also explores how globalisation is impacting on the social purposes of elite schools, which conventionally have been to serve privileged social...
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This special issue is based entirely on the research project called ‘Elite independent schools in globalising circumstances: a multi-sited global ethnography' and this opening essay introduces both the project and the essays to follow. It offers a justification for studying elite schools, elites and elitism and explains some of the project's guidin...
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This chapter suggests some ways in which the notion of global assemblage can be deployed to enhance policy analyses of the knowledge economy and, by inference, other policy discourses. It also makes knowledge an 'object of inquiry' identifying some of the key theories of knowledge that have fueled the knowledge economy policy discourse. In so doing...
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In this article we draw on Bourdieu’s The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power and his associated conceptual apparatus to examine Singapore as a ‘field of power’ and the formation of Singapore’s ‘state nobility’ through an elite secondary school. We ask how well Bourdieu’s conceptual apparatus travels, given Singapore’s geo-political...
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In this paper I look at the most recent policy attempt to address the intractable issue of inequality in Australian schools, the Review of Funding for Schooling Final Report (2011), colloquially known as the ‘Gonski Report’, or simply ‘Gonski’. I highlight its important insights and some of its analytical limitations. I show how a fixation on secto...
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This paper joins a barely begun conversation about multi-sited and global ethnography in educational research; a conversation that is likely to intensify along with growing interest in the links between education, globalisation, internationalisation and transnationalism. Drawing on an ongoing multi-sited global ethnography of elite schools and glob...
Chapter
I often think that I became an academic because I was a naughty girl at school. My parents, both teachers, regularly had to deal with the difficult consequences of their defiant daughter’s behaviour. Leaving aside occasionally “wagging school,” and sporadically disobeying my various “land ladies,” my main school transgressions were flouting some us...
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Elite schools are banks of emotion where the individuals and social classes that they serve deposit their desires and gain social dividends. They are also registers of social recognition and serve as spaces of collective capacity for their privileged clients. Elite schools have long been sites for the exercise of a form of affective agency by the w...
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This paper explores the leadership cultivation practices of one elite school in Singapore. We point to the links between the habitus of the Singapore state and that of the school showing how different components of the school’s leadership curriculum deploy the transnational in order to produce leaders for the nation. In essence, we argue that the s...
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Our purpose in this paper is to offer an historical and cultural account of the relationships between globalisation, the nation-state, emotion and the academic mobility policies that are driven by the knowledge economy. In so doing we seek to contribute to the emerging literature on the links between emotion, policy and globalisation. These links a...
Article
While emotional geography is a burgeoning field of inquiry, to our knowledge no emotional geographies of education exist. Educational research on space and place largely ignores emotionality. In this special issue we begin to rectify this situation through the development of what we call socio-cultural-spatial analyses of education and emotion.
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The notion of raising the aspirations of socially disadvantaged students is a key policy strategy in for enhancing such students' participation in higher education. However, this strategy runs the risk of being simplistic and ineffective unless it is informed by research on the links between aspirations and such students' changing life experiences...
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How does the beauty industry ‘narrate the skin’? What does it teach women from different cultural groups about the female body? How does skin function as a site where female subjection and abjection are produced and reproduced? In this paper we examine the skin industry pointing to its extreme commodification of the female body and to the inexcusab...
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It is now well recognized that public pedagogies help to inform the ways in which people engage and transform both culture and politics. But the roles of globalization and of emotions are under-researched in the literature on such pedagogies. Through a discussion of the notion of emotional geography and the emotional dimensions of globalization we...
Chapter
Agony. Since the invitation to write this biographical reflective paper I have agonised over what I can and can’t say, about what should remain unsaid and even perhaps unthought, about the impossibility of representing adequately what Deakin and ‘the Deakin project’ meant to me and others and what life at Deakin did for and to me. I have, what I th...
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This paper draws from the ARC Discovery project calledMoving Ideas: Mobile Policies, Researchers and Connections in the Social Sciences and Humanities — Australia in the Global Context (2006–2009). This project explored the ways that ideas travel and how knowledge transforms through travel. One aspect of the study was the critical examination of va...
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In order to enhance understandings of the international mobility of researchers and the implications of their mobility for knowledge production and circulation, we need to develop more sophisticated conceptual resources. Here we draw on and seek to develop ideas generated from literary theory and geography in order to highlight the links between in...
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We seek to contribute to political and policy analyses of globalisation by attending to global flows of emotions and by developing the concept global emoscapes. In so doing we build on Arjun Appadurai’s theorisation of the disjunctive scapes of the global cultural economy. As a way of illustrating the benefits of our approach, we deploy it to analy...
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Drawing from our 'place-based global ethnographies' of out-of-the-way places in Australia, this paper explores ways that spatialized leisure-pleasures inform the production of intergenerational masculinities in globalizing remote places. We examine three kinds of amusement and three accompanying shades of masculinity; the sacrosanct, subversive and...
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In this article we explore the ways in which the notion of the imagination might be mobilized to support researchers to develop transgressive research imaginations and communities with the capacities to think, 'be' and 'become' differently in a world of research increasingly governed by rampant reductionist rationality. To assist us we draw from th...
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Through selected theories of melancholia, this paper seeks to shed some fresh interpretive light on the reproduction and disruption of gender, violence and family turmoil across generations of mothers and daughters. The originality of the paper lies in its exploratory deployment of theories of melancholia to consider issues of women, violence and g...
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Contents: Introduction: youth, mobility, and identity / Nadine Dolby and Fazal Rizvi -- New times, new identities -- The global corporate curriculum and the young cyberfleneur as global citizen / Jane Kenway and Elizabeth Bullen -- Shoot the elephant: antagonistic identities, neo-marxist nostalgia, and the remorselessly vanishing past / Cameron McC...
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This highly original book provides an engaging and critical introduction to the knowledge economy. The knowledge economy is a potent force pervading global and national policy circles. Yet few people outside the field of economics understand its central ideas and practices. This book makes these accessible. But it does much more. It provokes 'conve...
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This paper focuses on the shifting terrain of mobile researchers beginning with an overview of research and research policy on ‘brain mobility', and then discussing what we call their optical illusions/delusions. Subsequently, our main purpose is to elaborate on a line of inquiry that offers richer notions of researcher mobility, connectivity and g...
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The knowledge economy is a dominant force in today's world, and innovation policy and national systems of innovation are central to it. In this article, we draw on different sociological and economic theories of risk to engage critically with innovation policy and national systems of innovation. Beck's understanding of a risk society, Schumpeter's...
Book
This book gives insights on youth, masculinity and place by exploring spatially marginalized masculinities in stigmatized and romanticized out-of-the-way places in 'developed' Western countries. It shows the impact of globalization on place and identity through global ethnographic studies and media representations of young men in peripheral places.
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Numerous Internet sites and web-based newspapers tell stories of economic and industrial change in the US town of Philomath in Oregon. These electronically mediated accounts illustrate the ways in which timber corporations virtually annihilated the forests surrounding the North American country town and neighbouring smaller logging towns. This corp...
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The small town of Ashland in North America was once a quiet, leafy, green, out of the way location. A country-loving visitor described it as a perfect example of small-town America, a spot that had a ‘sense of unique place’ and a feeling of ‘what makes my town different’ (Store Wars 2001). That was before Wal-Mart came to town. Space and place were...
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High country cattlemen on their horses rallied in the city of Melbourne in June 2005 and left a lot of horseshit in their wake. Their protest was over the Victorian government’s proposed ban on cattle grazing in the Alpine national park. Many of the signs of the Australian bushman were on display — Drizabone coats, Akubra hats and R. M. Williams bo...
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Males in the city and in the country can appear further apart than any measurable distance suggests. The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert (1994) is a film about feminine masculinities and the social, affective powers of landscape. It maps emotional, ideological, financial and cultural differences between males in metropolitan spaces and...
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When you think of ‘soccer fans’ who is it that springs to mind? The most probable image is a rowdy collection of young men in their club scarves, swaying and chanting in a soccer stadium somewhere in Europe. A community of seemingly innocent, young Buddhist monks in Tibet — heads shaven and dressed in burgundy robes — is an unlikely image. Yet, as...
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In 2000, a furore erupted following the publication of the dramatically titled The War Against Boys (Sommers 2000). The book begins with an alarming analysis of an apparently life-threatening ‘war’ being played out in America’s schools: It’s a bad time to be a boy in America. As the new millennium begins, the triumphant victory of our women’s socce...
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Until the miners’ strike of 1984–5, these two young men were close friends. They have now been driven apart by choices that men should never have to make. Gary’s family desperately needs his income. Shamed, labelled a ‘Scab’, he goes back to the mine for his weekly pay cheque. Tony will never forgive him. Spotting Gary in the local grocery store, a...
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En: Kikirikí : cooperación educativa Sevilla 2006, n. 81, junio-julio-agosto 2006 ; p. 32-43 Interpretación de las conexiones existentes entre la escuela y la violencia por medio de una reflexión sobre la violencia desde una amplia perspectiva. Se aplican las ideas de Alcia Miller sobre las 'pedagogías venenosas' en la escuela
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It is a contention of the culturalist strand of underclass theory that the growth of the underclass is not a function of social and economic change, but of features intrinsic to underclass culture. Children born into disadvantaged communities, it is argued, are socialized into the ‘deviant’ culture of their families, families typically headed by si...
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Few change issues are more compelling for schools today than the introduction of new technologies. Computers in particular are widely advocated as harbingers of an educational revolution where children will have independent access to rich sources of information, be able to integrate and apply knowledge in sophisticated ways and where their teachers...
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In discussing contemporary construcutions of the young in the so called developed countries of the West, this paper draws particularly from theories of cultural globalisation. It outlines and compares two competing but intersecting constructions of childhood. The paper compares the competing resources for youthful identity building offered by the c...
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This paper considers Bourdieu's concepts of perspectivism and reflexivity, looking particularly at how he develops arguments about these in his recent work, The Weight of the World (1999) and Pascalian Meditations (2000b). We explicate Bourdieu's distinctive purposes and deployment of these terms and approaches, and discuss how this compares with r...
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This article explores ways of queering the youthful cyber-flâneur, using the television series Queer as Folk as the touchstone for such explorations. The concept of the youthful cyberflâneur, as developed by Kenway and Bullen, links power, pleasure, and consumer politics to pedagogy. However, it has been criticised for its heterosexist register. He...
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Knowledge economy policies are currently very powerful drivers of change in contemporary university approaches to research. They typically orientate universities to a national innovation system which both positions knowledge as the key factor of economic growth and sees the main purpose of knowledge as contributing to such growth. In this article,...
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It is often argued that economically marginalized young women occupy a school and post‐school underclass, and that this underclass has a particular culture associated with it. Such views provoke a profound ambivalence in many of those who work with such young people. On the one hand, they are anxious to acknowledge the culture of the communities to...
Book
Answering Back exposes the volatility of gender reform in many different schools and classrooms. It tells stories in close up and from below, allowing everyone to talk: anxious boys, naughty girls, cantankerous teachers, pontificating principals and feisty feminists. This book challenges many sacred ideas about gender reform in schools and will sur...
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Policy conceptualizations of the global knowledge economy have led to the channelling of much Higher Education and Research and Development funding into the priority areas of science and technology. Among other things, this diversion of funding calls into question the future of traditional humanities and creative arts faculties. How these faculties...
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In Australia's globalising universities many support staff and teaching staff now work with international women postgraduate students. But are they aware of the issues facing these women, and is their understanding of them adequate? Indeed, how do they represent them? In this paper we draw on a small-scale pilot study involving key university perso...

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