Originally published in 1973 Knowledge, Education and Cultural Change surveys the present state of the field of the sociology of education. The book addresses the claim that much of the research in the sociology of education should be extended to issues of wider theoretical significance, the book provides theoretically informed analysis of situations or processes, developing new theoretical perspectives and concepts. The papers also reflect the appropriate theoretical framework for the sociology of education. Underpinning this framework, it looks at the importance of social stratification, arguing that too much work in the sociology of education is carried out using oversimplified models.

This book examines critical theories in education research from various points of view in order to critique the relations of power and knowledge in education and schooling practices. It addresses social injustices in the field of education, while at the same time questioning traditional standards of critical theory. Drawing on recent social and lit

Makers, Crafters, Educators brings the do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos of maker and crafter movements into educational environments, and examines the politics of cultural change that undergird them. Addressing making and crafting in relationship to community and schooling practices, culture and place, this edited collection positions making as an agent of change in education. In the volume¿s five sections¿Play and Hacking, Access and Equity, Interdependence and Interdisciplinarity, Cultural and Environmental Sustainability, and Labor and Leisure¿authors from around the world present a collage of issues and practices connecting object making, participatory culture, and socio-cultural transformation. Offering gateways into cultural practices from six continents, this volume explores the participatory culture of maker and crafter spaces in education and reveals how community sites hold the promise of such socio-cultural transformation.

How culture evolves through algorithms rather than knowledge inherited from ancestors. From our hunter-gatherer days, we humans evolved to be excellent throwers, chewers, and long-distance runners. We are highly social, crave Paleolithic snacks, and display some gendered difference resulting from mate selection. But we now find ourselves binge-viewing, texting while driving, and playing Minecraft. Only the collective acceleration of cultural and technological evolution explains this development. The evolutionary psychology of individuals—the drive for “food and sex”—explains some of our current habits, but our evolutionary success, Alex Bentley and Mike O'Brien explain, lies in our ability to learn cultural know-how and to teach it to the next generation. Today, we are following social media bots as much as we are learning from our ancestors. We are radically changing the way culture evolves. Bentley and O'Brien describe how the transmission of culture has become vast and instantaneous across an Internet of people and devices, after millennia of local ancestral knowledge that evolved slowly. Long-evolved cultural knowledge is aggressively discounted by online algorithms, which prioritize popularity and recency. If children are learning more from Minecraft than from tradition, this is a profound shift in cultural evolution. Bentley and O'Brien examine the broad and shallow model of cultural evolution seen today in the science of networks, prediction markets, and the explosion of digital information. They suggest that in the future, artificial intelligence could be put to work to solve the problem of information overload, learning to integrate concepts over the vast idea space of digitally stored information.

The way in which the ruling ideas of a social system are related to structures of class, production and power, and how these are legitimated and perpetuated, is fundamental to the sociological project. In this second edition of this classic text, which includes a new introduction by Pierre Bourdieu, the authors develop an analysis of education (in its broadest sense, encompassing more than the process of formal education). They show how education carries an essentially arbitrary cultural scheme which is actually, though not in appearance, based on power. More widely, the reproduction of culture through education is shown to play a key part in the reproduction of the whole social system. The analysis is carried through not only in theoretica

An examination of the Western world’s contemporary fascination with psychological life, and the historical developments that fostered it. In this book, sociologist Katie Wright traces the ascendancy of therapeutic culture, from nineteenth-century concerns about nervousness, to the growth of psychology, the diffusion of an analytic attitude, and the spread of therapy and counseling, using Australia as a focal point. Wright’s analysis, which draws on social theory, cultural history, and interviews with therapists and people in therapy, calls into question the pessimism that pervades many accounts of the therapeutic turn and provides an alternative assessment of its ramifications for social, political, and personal life in the globalized West. Special Commendation, TASA Raewyn Connell Prize

In the Fourth Edition of Cultures and Societies in a Changing World, author Wendy Griswold illuminates how culture shapes our social world and how society shapes culture. She helps students gain an understanding of the sociology of culture and explore stories, beliefs, media, ideas, art, religious practices, fashions, and rituals from a sociological perspective. Cultural examples from multiple countries and time periods will broaden students′ global understanding. They will develop a deeper appreciation of culture and society, gleaning insights that will help them overcome cultural misunderstandings, conflicts, and ignorance; equip them to be more effective in their professional and personal lives, and become wise citizens of the world.