Thinking with Stephen J. Ball: Lines of Flight in Education [Paperback]

This edited volume explores how Stephen Balls work has shaped the field of the sociology of education worldwide.

Maria Tamboukou is Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of East London, UK, and holds a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (20222025).

This edited volume explores how Stephen Balls work has shaped the field of the sociology of education worldwide.

Written by internationally based researchers who are Balls former PhD students, it draws on different strands of his work to show what it means to think, write, and do research inspired by Balls theory, methodology, and epistemology. The contributions revolve around a wide range of themes including: the ethics of doing educational research, disability studies, the bio-politics of the childs soul, lived experiences of marginalisation in education, educating migrant and refugee women in the borderlands, and post-Brexit reflections on the Bologna process. Chapters draw on different lines of thought from the corpus of a significant and influential figure in the sociology of education to present, explicate, and discuss a wide range of research projects, themes, theoretical directions, as well as methodological approaches in the field of the sociology of education today.

More than celebrating Balls scholarship, this volume shows new and innovative directions in the sociology of education. It will be highly relevant reading for researchers, scholars, and students in the sociology of education, educational policy, and politics and educational theory.

Part I: Theoretical and epistemological diffractions  1. Doing Sociology of Education differently: An essay about a study on the educational trajectories of youths from the villas of Buenos Aires  2. Character as calculable: The performative and biopolitical management lsC