Reflections on Student Futures and Political Possibilities: An Afterword

Abstract

It has been 20 years since the publication of another edited volume, The Cultural Production of the Educated Person, which approached issues of education, culture, and the economy through a temporal lens—one related to theories of cultural production and social reproduction, or the perpetuation across time of durable forms of inequality. This now classic volume, edited by Bradley A. Levinson, Douglas E. Foley, and Dorothy C. Holland, is a product of its time. The ethnographic studies draw in innovative and highly productive ways on the work of the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in an effort “to fill out an underdeveloped part of Marx’s thought—a focus on consciousness and subjectivity” (The cultural production of the educated person: Critical ethnographies of schooling and local practice, 1996, p. 12). British cultural studies approached the study of consciousness and subjectivity as well as identity through a concern with everyday practice, rituals, and expressive media, “social forms through which human beings ‘live,’ become conscious, [and] sustain themselves subjectively” (Johnson, 1986–1987, p. 45) as they make sense of and respond to historically specific social and material circumstances (Levinson et al., 1996, p. 12).