Putting Bourdieu Into Action

Offering a unique and original perspective on Bourdieu, language-based ethnographies,and reflexivity, this volume provides a nuanced, in-depth discussion of the complex relationship between these interconnected topics and their impact in real-world contexts. Part I opens the book with an overview of the historical background and development of language-based ethnographic research and Bourdieu’s work in this space. Part II presents a series of case studies that highlight a Bourdieusian perspective and demonstrate how reflexivity impacts language-based ethnography. In each study, Bourdieu’s conceptual framework of reflexively-informed objectivity examines the ways in which the studies themselves were constructed and understood. Building on Parts I and II, the concluding set of chapters in Part III unpacks the messiness of the theory and practice of language-based ethnography, and provides insights into what reflexivity means for Bourdieu and in practical contexts. Arguing for a greater reflexive understanding in research practice, this volume sets an agenda for future literacy and language research.

Pierre Bourdieu was one of the most influential social thinkers of the past half-century, known for both his theoretical and methodological contributions and his wide-ranging empirical investigations into colonial power in Algeria, the educational system in France, the forms of state power, and the history of artistic and scientific fields-among many other topics. Despite the depth and breadth of his influence, however, Bourdieu's legacy has yet to be assessed in a comprehensive manner. The Oxford Handbook of Pierre Bourdieu fills this gap by offering a sweeping overview of Bourdieu's impact on the social sciences and humanities. Thomas Medvetz and Jeffrey J. Sallaz have gathered a diverse array of leading scholars who place Bourdieu's work in the wider scope of intellectual history, trace the development of his thought, offer original interpretations and critical engagement, and discuss the likely impact of his ideas on future social research. The Handbook highlights Bourdieu's contributions to established areas of research-including the study of markets, the law, cultural production, and politics-and illustrates how his concepts have generated new fields and objects of study.

This book will give unique insight into how a new generation of Bourdieusian researchers apply Bourdieu to contemporary issues. It will provide a discussion of the working mechanisms of thinking through and/or with Bourdieu when analysing data. In each chapter, individual authors discuss and reflect upon their own research and the ways in which they put Bourdieu to work. The aim of this book is not to just to provide examples of the development of Bourdieusian research, but for each author to reflect on the ways in which they came across Bourdieu’s work, why it speaks to them (including a reflexive consideration of their own background), and the way in which it is thus useful in their thinking. Many of the authors were introduced to Bourdieu’s works after his death. The research problems which the individual authors tackle are contextualised in a different time and space to the one Bourdieu occupied when he was developing his conceptual framework. This book will demonstrate how his concepts can be applied as "thinking tools" to understand contemporary social reality. Throughout Bourdieu’s career, he argued that sociologists need to create an epistemological break, to abandon our common sense – or as much as we can – and to formulate findings from our results. In essence, we are putting Bourdieu to work to provide a structural constructivist approach to social reality anchored through empirical reflexivity.

Through Pierre Bourdieu's work in Kabylia (Algeria), he develops a theory on symbolic power.

Pierre Bourdieu has been making a distinguished contribution to European sociology for the past 25 years. He is Professor of Sociology at the Collge de France in Paris and author of many influential books including, most recently, Distinction and Homo Academicus, which have both been translated into English. This book serves to introduce this important body of work to the Anglo-American world. In a cross-disciplinary collaboration Richard Harker, Cheleen Mahar and Chris Wilkes provide the reader with the necessary tools to understand this complex and rewarding body of French sociology. Post modernist sociology has already been influenced by the French theorist Foucault; it is likely that the generation to come will be reading Bourdieu.

Pierre Bourdieu, one of the most influential critical social theorists of the second half of the twentieth century, once described sociology as “a combat sport.” This comprehensive collection of his writings on politics and social science, from early 1960s articles on the Algerian War of Independence to the last text he published before his death, proves that this vision was enduring throughout his life—as well as a serious scholar Bourdieu was always an outspoken public intellectual. Political Interventions includes many texts hitherto unavailable in English and, placing them in their historical context, reconstructs Bourdieu’s vision of academic study and political activism as two sides of the same process: the decoding and critique of social reality in order to transform it.

This work by Pierre Bourdieu develops the anthropological theory which has formed the basis of his scientific research. It discusses the problems posed by "structuralist" philosophers in order to solve or dissolve them.

What is the nature of the modern state? How did it come into being and what are the characteristics of this distinctive field of power that has come to play such a central role in the shaping of all spheres of social, political and economic life? In this major work the great sociologist Pierre Bourdieu addresses these fundamental questions. Modifying Max Weber’s famous definition, Bourdieu defines the state in terms of the monopoly of legitimate physical and symbolic violence, where the monopoly of symbolic violence is the condition for the possession and exercise of physical violence. The state can be reduced neither to an apparatus of power in the service of dominant groups nor to a neutral site where conflicting interests are played out: rather, it constitutes the form of collective belief that structures the whole of social life. The ‘collective fiction’ of the state Ð a fiction with very real effects - is at the same time the product of all struggles between different interests, what is at stake in these struggles, and their very foundation. While the question of the state runs through the whole of Bourdieu’s work, it was never the subject of a book designed to offer a unified theory. The lecture course presented here, to which Bourdieu devoted three years of his teaching at the Collège de France, fills this gap and provides the key that brings together the whole of his research in this field. This text also shows ‘another Bourdieu’, both more concrete and more pedagogic in that he presents his thinking in the process of its development. While revealing the illusions of ‘state thought’ designed to maintain belief in government being oriented in principle to the common good, he shows himself equally critical of an ‘anti-institutional mood’ that is all too ready to reduce the construction of the bureaucratic apparatus to the function of maintaining social order. At a time when financial crisis is facilitating the hasty dismantling of public services, with little regard for any notion of popular sovereignty, this book offers the critical instruments needed for a more lucid understanding of the wellsprings of domination.