G.02. Bourdieu and Beyond: Connecting Critical Theories to Rethink Educational Inequalities

Bourdieu’s work has been central to understanding how education contributes to the reproduction of social hierarchies. His analyses showed that schools not only distribute knowledge but legitimise unequal relations by valuing particular social practices, cultural dispositions, and forms of learning. Although education is often celebrated as a site of democratic participation, empirical research continues to demonstrate how institutional routines of classification and evaluation sustain exclusion. To grasp these dynamics today, Bourdieusian concepts must be revisited not as fixed explanatory models but as theoretical tools that remain open to ongoing revision, refinement, and critique, so as to better capture the evolving configurations of power that shape contemporary education.

At the same time, Bourdieusian sociology has been criticised for overemphasising reproduction while underemphasising transformation, for attributing limited agency to learners and educators, and for insufficiently engaging feminist, postcolonial, and decolonial knowledge. Rather than rejecting Bourdieu on these grounds, this panel seeks to take these critiques as entry points for theoretical dialogue, that moves Bourdieu into conversations with epistemologies that unsettle dominant norms and expand what counts as educational knowledge. We argue that understanding the relationship between education and democracy today requires frameworks that forge theoretical bridges to (re)imagine social justice not merely as redistribution but as relational justice and collective transformation.

The panel invites theoretical contributions that put Bourdieusian concepts into dialogue with critical perspectives such as care ethics, intersectionality, and post-structuralist approaches. Through this dialogue, the panel aims to refine analytical vocabularies for studying inequality while expanding imaginaries of democratic education.