Rising Complexities in Education: Opportunities and Inequalities
BSA Bourdieu Study Group’s Mid Term International Conference 2025
3-5 September 2025
AK Wien Bildungsgebäude, Theresianumgasse 16-18, 1040 Vienna
Keynote Speakers
- Professor Ann-Marie Bathmaker (Emeritus Professor of Vocational and Higher Education in the School of Education, University of Birmingham)
- Steven Threadgold (Associate Professor in Sociology and Anthropology, University of Newcastle)
Conference Rationale
Recent events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine (with a dramatic impact on energy and food prices), and extreme weather events in many parts of the world have accelerated social inequalities. This has contributed to widening educational inequalities, and the role of educational institutions in counteracting crises has become an ever more pressing question. In addition, an expansion and diversification of educational pathways has led to exclusionary mechanisms becoming more subtle. Educational opportunities have increased, but questions of who profits from this expansion, who is equipped to successfully navigate them and who is left behind arise. In this context, combating educational inequalities has become more complex and the intersectional interplay of various social relations (e.g. class, gender, race, and disability) creates new forms of both disadvantage and privilege. Therefore, to initiate meaningful change, it is crucial to understand the ambivalent role of the education system in creating opportunities and perpetuating inequalities.
More than 50 years ago, Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron uncovered that educational practices and structures play a substantial role in perpetuating social hierarchies. Their studies demonstrated that while education is often seen as a tool for emancipation and progress, it also acts as an accomplice in reproducing inequalities. However, the ways in which educational institutions perpetuate unequal relations must be continually re-examined, locally contextualised and empirically explored in order to successfully tackle them. Bourdieu’s work remains highly relevant today for understanding how education generates and transforms opportunities as well as inequalities. His relational perspective allows us to examine the contemporary challenges posed by the polarisation of opportunities, the expansion of educational pathways, the marketisation of education under neoliberal developments and the increasing diversity of both learners and educators.
The BSA Bourdieu Study Group wants to bring a community interested in unpacking educational inequalities together to create collective reflections on the contemporary mechanisms of reproduction and transformation. Particularly, we aim at discussing how Bourdieusian theory and its further developments can capture, analyse and potentially contribute to overcoming educational inequalities.
The fourth international biennial conference will convene at the Viennese Chamber of Labour, from 3 to 5 of September 2025, giving continuity to previous BSA Bourdieu Study Group Mid-term events (Bristol, 2016, Lancaster, 2018 and Barcelona, 2023).