Trangression is an act of challenging boundaries that separateapparently distinct oppositional categories objects. Examples arecategories such as such as civilised/primitive, male/female, master/servant, Lordship/bondage. The article deals with suchtransgressions related to the evolution of class consciousnesstransgressive critical thinking. It is said to be particularly importantand at risk in higher education today, as performativity reforms haveclosed the spaces for transgressive reflexivity, making it difficult forstudents to make sense of the possibilities and costs for the self thathigher education can create. However, although the nowprofessionally managed entrepreneurial university might appear toform a difficult space for developing critical thinking, critique is alsoa basis for the expansion of capitalism in the university, and throughtransferability this can create spaces for critical reflection.

In this symposium we will attempt to paint an updated broad picture of ethnography in education research and its development, covering all Nordic countries, by looking initially at the general past growth of ethnography of education there, along with discussions of present developments and possible future ones too. This will also involve presentations that have been invited to think forward in relation to ethnography of education in the region, whilst also looking back at ethnographic practices in education and their social relations and material histories (Beach, Bagley and Marques da Silva). After this, research addressing respectively and conjointly Gender Equity and Justice in Education will be given particular attention.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyse how globalization affects local interactions and the formation of experiences and meanings in education settings by modifying and changing the sense of education in a glo-local perspective, and in the present specific instance particularly in relation to aspects of education inclusion and equity in a rural educational context. Rural schools are important to investigate in these respects. For decades rural schools have been made invisible to/in educational research by a generalized urban school modelof investigation and policy making that has failed to engage with the voices and experiences of teachers, students and families about the teaching practices carried out in rural schools.

The research has used a multi-sited multi-center ethnographic study on rural schools in Spain in combination with a multi-sited investigation in Sweden to create possibilities for a meta-ethnographic analys of the experiences and actions carried out in schools around the contents in teaching practices. The results show the voices of teachers, students and families in rural schools from a creative perspective through pedagogical practices that recognize the importance of the knowledge of space and familiarity with space; the value of students' lives outside of school; and teacher reflection. However, there are different interpretations in different schools related to the experiences and interactions that teachers, families and students have about the teaching and learning practices. 

Quite simply, different schools from different types of rural areas seem to form different types of educational subjectivation with different socialisation effects. Some rural schools present their own surroundings as valuable for residents there and for the nation as a whole. Rural nature are culture are represented as a tangible material and social assets and this is reflected in the teaching content. In other schools the valuation of place is less positive. This is particularly the case in areas that have in the past become deeply embedded and active in capitalist industrial production relations; such as the semi-urban industrial towns in Aragon and what in Sweden are sometimes refered to as Bruksorter (production towns). These spaces that have developed a tightened relationship to capitalist production have tended to hollow out local values forms; such as natural beauty, fisking, recreation; and replaced them by economic exchange value as the main value form for the area and its people. In Marxist theory this is a form classical alienation. Economic possibilities and an external relationship not an intrinsic quality determine the place value.

The education of the poor is usually the target of global education politics for a more socially just and equal, and effective and productive society. But according to the present article the real problems in these respects are not about the education of the poor, so much as they are those of the rich upper-class and global elites, whose inheritance of social, cultural and economic power are secured in part through the reproduction in academic education of the values of bourgeois culture and the assumed superiority of its educational code: first in schools and their curricula and then in higher education and theirs. Schools and their curricula are in focus in the article. Using ethnographic and meta-ethnographic analyses an insight into a two-way relationship between the logic of action of elite schooling and the dangerous polarizations of value that can develop through social and academic segregation are presented and a critique of elite educational differentiation, segregation and socialization is given in terms of how elite schools provide skewed access to elite knowledge and future social positions for the children of the dominant socio-cultural and economic class fractions, in ways that counteract meritocracy and educational efficiency, and that also produce alarming concepts of the value of the self and other amongst their students with significant knock on effects for future democratic polity.

The purpose of the project this book is based upon was to develop a deeper understanding of rural youth and their participation and agency in school and wider society. As noted in Chapter 1 and discussed in detail in Chapter 7, a major motivation for this was to address metrocentricity in previous research and thus broaden theoretical understanding of spatial justice and relations in education. As also noted in Chapter 1, the Swedish education system seems to be ostensibly open and inclusive, providing well-attended institutional education or day-care, regardless of children’s social class, gender or racial or ethnic heritage or any possible disabilities (Beach & Dyson, 2016). The OECD (2005) suggests this is internationally remarkable (also Beach, 2018). However, perhaps equally remarkably, the investments have not significantly reduced levels of gender, racial and ethnic disparities in social and material distributions of power in society at large (Swedish Ministry for Social Affairs and Health, 2010; OECD, 2005). Moreover, as various authors have pointed out (e.g., Åberg-Bengtsson, 2009; Beach, From, Johansson & Öhrn, 2018; Fjellman, Yang Hansen & Beach, 2018), rural-urban disparities seem to have both diversified and expanded in recent decades.

Collectively the chapters in this book provide insights into several neglected aspects of education in rural spaces. First, they show that relevant conditions in rural areas are much less homogenous than often implied in metrocentric research. However, despite the variations there are consistent patterns of continued social and educational inequities between rural and urban areas. Previous research has shown that cities have grown and developed, whilst almost half of the country’s rural municipalities have smaller populations today than three decades ago (Fjellman, Yang Hansen & Beach, 2018). Moreover, partly due to changes driven by the increasing marketisation of education, schools are closing in rural areas and pupils have to travel more often, for longer times and distances (at greater costs with less state subsidy) to obtain their education than before (Fjellman et al, 2018). Thus, in terms of access to educational resources, there is discrimination against pupils from rural areas. The analyses described in the previous chapters detected two main responses by pupils and teachers in the rural areas to their inferior position in relation to peers in urban settings. Some seemed to accept it, and tried to mitigate its adverse consequences, while others criticised the metrocentricity, current denial of their rural material and social hardships, and neglect of their assets....

The chapter has attempted to draw out and focus on some of the major relevant themes that have emerged from the analyses in the previous chapters. There are many but we will discuss five of them here. One of them is that rural areas, the schools in them, the pupils that go there, and the relationships (real and present and imaginary and future) that they form with education institutions and their agents to create educational opportunities and experiences are not uniform within let alone also across rural areas (as seems to be understood by national policy makers), but quite different. As the chapters show, there is no one standard form of rurality or rural educational relation or output. Rather this summarising and disfiguring norm is a chimera produced and reproduced through metro-centric lenses. Another relates to the identification of an ‘us and them’ discourse in rural areas that challenges the dominant urbanite /metro-centric representations of people from rural places and rural regions with cultural deficiencies (Corbett, 2015).

The next theme is connected to the first. It is that despite differences, there are some consistencies with respect to rural education and schools, the people in them, and the educational and life opportunities they create that are not simple metro-centric aberrations and some of them seem to be present in schools and education social relations in urban areas as well. It is the hegemony of private ownership and private value within a current global politics of market governance in education and a general fall in educational performance standards and increasing inequalities in schools (Yang Hansen & Gustafsson, 2018) and between densely and sparsely populated areas (Fjellman, Yang Hansen & Beach, 2018). Although not dwelt on extensively in the chapters as such, there are two sub-points. The first is that market politics is now the ubiquitous policy context for and framework of the educational macro level. The second is that market governace has completely failed to live up to the promises made for it by the governments who proposed and introduced it. This applies both nationally (SOU 2017:35; Yang Hansen & Gustafsson, 2018) and internationally (Verger, Fontdevila, Zancajo, & Steiner-Khamsi, 2016), particularly in rural and poor sub-urban spaces (Åberg-Bengtsson, 2009; Fjellman, 2019). Market governance has not produced a uniformly rich expansion of choice options, national system efficiency and quality improvements of the kind promoted in proposal by the national government (see e.g. Swedish Government Proposition 1991/91: 95), but rather instead a lack of educational (choice) possibilities for economically subordinated groups in territorially stigmatised “off-places” in urban areas and in remote rural areas that also strikes unevenly in terms of social class, ethnicity and educational special needs (Berhanu, 2016a, 2016b; Lundahl, 2016; Beach, 2018; Beach, From, Johansson & Öhrn, 2018; Bunar & Ambrose, 2016; Fjellman et al., 2018; Forsberg, 2018).

Although again not extensively dwelt on in the earlier chapters the deterioration of educational quality and equality in Sweden following marketization is apparent and has also been identified in other works, such as by Östh, Andersson and Malmberg (2013) in relation to school choice and Yang Hansen & Gustafsson (2018), who identified increases in inequities particularly from the late1980s onwards that were distinctly acute in sub-urban spaces and for children from families with a migrant history (Bunar & Ambrose, 2016; Beach, 2017). Increased segregation with respect to student composition and academic outcomes across different schools was found to be a main driver and differential trends in the relationship between family educational background and school outcome between immigrant and non-immigrant sub populations were also indicated. Between-school differences in achievement levels have increased in all regions and school segregation with respect to SES composition of students has increased too (Yang Hansen & Gustafsson, 2018)....

Neoliberalism and Market Forces in Education provides a wide perspective on the dramatic transformation of education policy in Sweden that has taken place during the last 30 years, with a specific focus on marketization. The marketization of education in Sweden is set in the wider international context of changes in education systems. Markets have shown themselves to be very poor arbiters of justice and equity in education. This chapter shows one example.

Ethical appraisal boards are often argued as being modelled on utilitarian ethical conventions and as operating from a perspective of national political sovereignty that is potentially marginalising and possibly even harmful toward critical qualitative educational research, particularly ethnography. However the argument we advance is that the legislative responsibility of human rights in research shouldn’t be confused with unnecessary bureaucratic intervention, for although the work of ethical appraisal can be experienced as intrusive, threatening toward researcher autonomy and professionalism and unnecessarily bureaucratic, using qualitative research methods to elicit people’s perspectives on their environment is not uncomplicated from the perspectives of human rights, not the least those of young people in school. This tension between a notion of imposed bureaucracy and a necessary protection of rights is considered in the present chapter, which tries to bring a balanced critique of the work of ethical appraisal into view by keeping sight of the value of appraisal without denying that there are some potentially troubling tensions.

In this article we draw on actor-network theory (ANT) in order to challenge the methodological and empirical orthodoxies of anthropocentrism and interactionism that have long informed dominant discourses of ethnographic work. We use ANT to open new possibilities for understanding education as emergent in relational fields where non-human forces are as equally necessary as and possess an agency equivalent to, human forces: the principle of symmetry. We argue that this generates important conceptual as well as political possibilities in constituting different possible outcomes in the accomplishment of ethnographies of education. We draw attention to the problematic of the decentring of the human subject and the critical investigation of the interface between people and objects that frame this special issue, and also propose a methodological response framed by a commitment to empirical research through ethnography as well as a theoretical response framed by relational materialism, operationalised here through recourse to ANT.

In this article we draw on actor-network theory (ANT) in order tochallenge the methodological and empirical orthodoxies ofanthropocentrism and interactionism that have long informeddominant discourses of ethnographic work. We use ANT to opennew possibilities for understanding education as emergent inrelational fields where non-human forces are as equally necessaryas and possess an agency equivalent to, human forces: theprinciple of symmetry. We argue that this generates importantconceptual as well as political possibilities in constituting differentpossible outcomes in the accomplishment of ethnographies ofeducation. We draw attention to the problematic of thedecentring of the human subject and the critical investigation ofthe interface between people and objects that frame this specialissue, and also propose a methodological response framed by acommitment to empirical research through ethnography as wellas a theoretical response framed by relational materialism,operationalised here through recourse to ANT.