It is soon time for another season of FinEd Online Research Talks (FORT)! Our FORT events comprise one-hour online talks on current topics, showcasing the wide variety of research in educational sciences conducted in FinEd’s member universities. The FORT events are targeted particularly for PhD researchers, but other members of the scientific community, as well as all other interested parties, are also warmly welcome. Participation is free, hope to see many of you there!
Monday 31.3.2025 at 12:00–13:00
Class in the class: middle-class habitus and the silence of social class in schools, Professor Sonja Kosunen (University of Eastern Finland)
In this presentation, I examine the boundaries of social class, its silence and the differences it produces in schools. In general, social class is still rarely discussed in connection with schools and teaching in Finland, although it influences several school-related phenomena, such as school choice, school segregation and the differentiation of students’ educational paths. In this presentation, I present an analysis on teachers’ perceived social class and its visibility (and invisibility) in teachers’ work from a Bourdieusian perspective. I also discuss class as a factor mediating career-related choices, i.e., how teachers view social class as having shaped their education, housing and moments related to applying for and choosing a job. I understand that the habitus mediated by the teacher’s class background functions, on the one hand, between the middle-class school and the students, and on the other hand, in relation to the middle-class school itself. Although the teachers currently perceive themselves as middle-class in terms of their professional status, income and education in the interviews, not all of them originally had a middle-class background. In this case, the habitus formes a hybrid, in which the working-class background was combined in the discourse with the current ‘lived class’, which many of them consider to be partly useful and partly harmful when working in a school environment.
Link to Prof. Kosunen’s talk https://uef.zoom.us/j/65397350964?pwd=oh8MTwPxsOMmAaf1ffKEWXJEjpVMvN.1, Meeting ID: 653 9735 0964, Passcode: 243044
Monday 5.5.2025 at 12:00–13:00
(Digital) Ethnographies in a postdigital age: Examples from four studies, Associate professor of education Fredrik Rusk (Åbo Akademi University)
Abstract to be added later.
Link to Assoc.Prof. Rusk’s talk https://uef.zoom.us/j/67947363242?pwd=tX0JCvuLlgRa6y97eQVyHr3puJo64M.1, Meeting ID: 679 4736 3242, Passcode: 981196
