Academic and PhD Student
Response
Elite Schools Project
Dr. Claire Maxwell, Reader,
London Institute of
Education
This is the first study to engage with elite secondary
schooling in an international social space. The
ethnographic and longitudinal research design was
complemented by an attentiveness to the ways
colonial and postcolonial histories are shaping the
social, economic and cultural contexts in which the
schools were located and how they are being
constructed as ‘elite’ institutions. The breadth and
depth of data collected, and the exciting theoretical
ideas the team has brought to bear on their work is
the reason it has been such a pleasure as well as been
so generative for my own thinking. These are just
some of the key ideas I have been inspired by
(libidinal economy, global girls, fieldwork as travel
practice, the ways in which schools position
themselves and the kinds of curricula they develop
are linked to broader struggles around nationhood). I
look forward to reading the forthcoming books and
papers still to emerge from the project.
Elite Independent Schools in Globalising
Circumstances Project has mapped out
new terrain in elite schooling. The
project has offered not only new ways of
thinking about elite schooling but also
unearthed possibilities for researching
elites. Most importantly, the project has
reinvigorated scholarly discussions about
elite schooling throughout the world and
highlighted the importance of departing
from limited approaches for studying
elites that are nation bound. Inspired by
this project, I began a multi-site research
on the self-understandings of students at
elite schools in six countries. This project
provided me the necessary foundation
for undertaking such an inquiry.
Adam Howard, Associate Professor
of Education, Colby College, USA
Ruben Gaztambide-Fernandez,
Associate Professor, OISE,
University of Toronto, Canada
The elite independent schools in globalising
circumstances project has provided a very
important corrective in the study of elites, elite
education, and elite subject formation.
Specifically, it has shifted the tide of the
methodological nationalism that has pervaded
the study of elites in the global north, particularly
in the United States and Britain. The work of
Professor Kenway and her colleagues has forced
me to think carefully about the specificity of my
analysis to the North American context and to
think carefully about how elite formations are
closely tied to state formation and to the
particular hierarchies that give each nation-state
its particular character. This work has also opened
the door for the analysis of how empire and
colonization produce distinct modes for the
formation of elite subjects around the globe.
I worked on the elite schooling project for
close to three years. During that time, I was
able to do field work in Barbados, as well as
read up on and explore the field notes
generated by the researchers at the other
sites. This experience enabled me to think
more deeply about the ways that globalization
shapes schooling in general, and elite
schooling specifically. I had an up-close look
into the ways that geography, history, and
economics of a nation state also shape
schooling. This research project was a great
experience to really see the ways that both
local and global forces shape the site of the
school. In my own work, this focus on the
glocal (global and local, and the ways that both
interact together) has prompted me to
examine and analyze the ways that
infrastructure, access to digital technology, and
local discourses about purposes of schooling,
shape the uses of online spaces for education.
I am very grateful to have been a part of this
work.
Heather Greenhalgh-Spencer,
Assistant Professor, Texas Tech
University, USA
Ergin Bulut, Assistant Professor,
Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey
This project forced me to rethink two
things: the relationship between
social theory and etnographic work
and the centrality of history to doing
ethnographic research. Starting with
theories of the global, going to the
field pushed me to revise my
assumptions regarding the global, the
elite, the “newness” of the global and
the whole theoretical literature on
transnational capitalist class. The
local, with its messiness, was
destabilizing all of these ideas coming
from a highly Eurocentric body of
thought.
As a graduate student whose research focuses
on transnational student migration and the
lasting impacts of British colonialism in
schooling, I have learned so much from my
experience with the Elite Schools Project,
which I joined in January of 2014. Closely
looking at the data from Barbados, I was drawn
into more closely examining education as a
cultural “object of desire” with constantly
shifting impacts. The voices of students and in
the iconography of the schools revealed a
remaking of what we have understood as the
lasting impacts of British empire and new
global trends circulated by the vicissitudes of
capitalism. This conceptualization and
connection to entrepreneurship, is inflected in
my work, as I attempt to understand the
racialization of Kenyan students who come to
the Unites States for higher education and
remain to work.
Brenda Nyandiko Sanya, PhD
student, University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign , USA