Rethinking Educational Inequality: Class, Race, and Gender through Bourdieu - Reproduction, Resistance, and Transformation in Unequal Times
BSA Bourdieu Study Group Annual International Conference
9-11 June 2027
Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
Keynote Speakers
- Professor Nicola Ingram, University College Cork
- Dr Annabel Wilson, University of Oxford
Conference Rationale
The Bourdieu Study Group of the British Sociological Association invites submissions for its 2027 conference, to be held in Manchester, a city with a rich history of industrial transformation, working-class politics, migration, and educational change. This event brings together scholars engaging with Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical and methodological tools to understand the enduring and evolving dynamics of inequality.
Manchester provides an appropriate stage for examining Bourdieu’s enduring relevance. As a city shaped by historical and contemporary inequalities, it offers a powerful lens through which to explore how class, race, and gender intersect within educational systems and everyday practices. From widening participation initiatives to persistent attainment gaps, Manchester, and the wider UK, continues to reflect the complex dynamics of social reproduction and transformation that Bourdieu’s work helps us to theorise.
More than four decades after Distinction, Bourdieu’s work remains central to understanding how inequalities are produced, legitimised, and contested. In a period marked by intensifying and persistent inequalities, policy reform, and global socio-political change, education remains a key site in which power is reproduced and contested. We welcome contributions that critically engage with Bourdieu’s work to rethink how inequalities are structured, experienced, and challenged within and beyond education systems.
This year’s conference focuses on the intersections of class, race, and gender in education, exploring how Bourdieusian concepts such as field, habitus, capital, and symbolic power can illuminate contemporary forms of stratification, exclusion, and transformation across educational contexts.