Kathleen D. Hall

The Ethnography of Imagined Communities The Cultural Production of Sikh Ethnicity in Britain

A shift in ethnographic vantage point from an exclusive focus on everyday worlds to the broader historical and cultural processes in which these worlds are embedded brings to light forms of politics that challenge traditional ways of understanding immigrant incorporation in modern nation-states. The author argues that the cultural politics of immigration and citizenship in the global era require this shift in ethnographic perspective. Multisited ethnography enables researchers to illuminate the more complex cultural processes of nation formation and the contradictory and, at times, incommensurate forms of cultural politics within which immigrants are made and make themselves as citizens. Viewing immigration from the perspective of nation formation, moreover, brings into question the explanatory power and political implications of traditional assimilation models of immigrant incorporation.

Science, Globalization, and Educational Governance: The Political Rationalities of the New Managerialism

The modern school has been a critical site for imagining possible publics and publicly-defining national purposes. Public education is presumed to provide a collective good to “a public”—“a public” of which the discourse about educational purposes conjures and addresses. Yet the imagined publics and purposes of education have varied considerably at different historic junctures. These variations have been shaped in part by the rise and fall in prominence of two contrasting political horizons and the quite distinctive roles they have envisioned for the state and the market. The first, articulated in classic form by Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations, privileges the role of the free market, arguing that state efforts to promote the social good are ineffectual compared to unbridled market forces. The second stresses the state’s central role in protecting its citizens from the vicissitudes of the market by insuring social security and increased well-being. Over the past century, assumptions about the state’s responsibility for the social good have been intrinsic to various forms of governance across the globe. Political systems from socialism to social democracy to social liberalism—while differing in ideology and approach—have been founded upon the fundamental principle that issues of governance should be decided on the basis of benefits to “the social.” As Nikolas Rose has argued, “Whatever their differences, in each case the term ‘social’ implied a kind of anti-individualism: the need to conceive of human beings as citizens of a wider collectivity who did not merely confront one another as buyers and sellers on a competitive market.” The social state, to a greater or lesser extent, has been envisioned as a force for social progress, con-

Reflections on Student Futures and Political Possibilities: An Afterword

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).