By Rodolfo Benites, School of Education, University of Bristol
On November 8th, 2024, the University of Bristol hosted two events to celebrate Professor Diane Reay, Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge, for her trajectory. This blog post shares insights about both spaces and why learning about her legacy might be essential to new education researchers.
Engaging with Diane Reay’s work
I ran into Reay’s work in 2019 while preparing applications for my doctoral studies. I was interested in learning why the results of widening participation policies in higher education were so limited, even in societies where they were implemented for decades. It was then a marvellous revelation when I read her book Miseducation: Inequality, Education and the Working Classes.
Miseducation is a sharp, honest, and rigorous book that shows how the English education system systematically reproduces class inequalities. It is based on more than 500 qualitative interviews with children and relevant quantitative data. The book provides engaging writing and brilliantly moves from academic literature and statistics to the lived experiences of social inequalities, including their emotional and physical pains.
I could not give a fair account of Prof. Reay’s work, which involves a long list of scholarly publications on social justice and education, Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory, and cultural investigations of social class, race, and gender. However, I would say that her work on higher education choices, meritocracy, and elite universities was pivotal in shaping my current doctoral research.
Knowing Prof. Reay was coming to Bristol was an excellent opportunity to meet with the researcher behind the research, which was so influential for me.
The passion for social justice and education research
In the morning, a postgraduate workshop was organised with Professor Diane Reay and Nicola Ingram, Professor of Education at University College Cork, and Jessica Abrahams, Lecturer in Education at the University of Bristol.
The workshop was an opportunity to learn from the three education sociologists about their research work, experiences and academic trajectories. It attracted a dozen postgraduate students from the University of Bristol’s School of Education and School of Sociology, Politics, and International Studies, who are researching class-based inequalities.
Reay’s work is vast, prolific, and has a clear social justice agenda. Her passion for researching education and society came from being a working-class woman from a mining community who was once told she was unfit for university. It was also shaped by her two decades of working in schools in London before doing her PhD at the University of Cambridge and entering academia.
Her passion for understanding the social production of inequalities and their effects in Britain emerged from her personal experiences with social inequalities, particularly her struggles and humiliations in school and university. The same was true for Ingram and Abrahams, whose passion for studying students’ experiences and the challenges they face in schools has been closely connected to their personal and familial experiences of symbolic violence in these educational settings.
Overall, I had a truly uplifting experience. I learned about the importance of passion for researching educational injustices and the importance of academic fellowship. As a participant, I was able to share and gain awareness of how my research interests are profoundly connected to a similar sense of social justice. I learned from Prof. Reay that this connection can and should enrich my research endeavours and how it can make me a better researcher and academic writer.
The hope of what academia could be
The workshop was a genuinely refreshing experience in a time when academia is embedded in values of competition and individualism. Prof. Reay gave the participants a glimpse of how powerful and nurturing academia can be for doctoral and early-career researchers.
Her legacy breaks the boundaries of research production. She deliberately decided to grow with others and work in the “collective” aspect of academia. As Ingram and Abrahams fully recognised, she expressly contributed to her colleagues’ work and career development. Prof. Reay has been in their careers, sometimes as a supportive mentor and sometimes as a rigorous critic.
As a doctoral researcher, I was privileged to learn how warm and supportive academia can be if such empowering community leaders and peers surround us. Their spirit and demonstration of academic fellowship and mutual care were undoubtedly among the outcomes of this workshop.
Celebrating a lifetime
On the same afternoon, the British Sociological Association, with the support of the University of Bristol, celebrated Prof. Reay in Bristol for her outstanding trajectory. Her internationally recognised academic production, political activism, and inner passion for impacting the sociological academic community were the centre of a gathering of colleagues, former students and friends.
In her keynote speech, Prof. Reay gave us a “howl of rage,” a critical revision of social mobility and Bourdieu’s habitus with a more gendered lens. She walked us through Cynthia Cruz‘s, Fran Locke‘s Beverley Skeggs’, Arline Geronimus’ and Annie Ernaux’s works on social mobility and Reay’s own experience in education. Her speech was a brilliant dissertation on how social mobility can be understood in its complexities and nuances from deep sociological and ethnographic work. It was also a profound critique of how much the study of social justice issues in education requires a feminist approach.
The keynote speech followed a panel discussion, during which the academic community acknowledged the numerous examples of how Prof. Reay’s work and practice have shaped them academically and personally.
Overall, perhaps unknowingly, I would argue that part of Prof. Diane Reay’s legacy lies in directing researchers to understand how the various injustices in education have shaped the lives of children and young people, to connect these experiences to our own encounters with injustice and struggle; and to reveal the rhetorics, myths, dominant discourses, and academic interpretations that have allowed them to persist until now.
After reading Reay’s work in 2019, I learned how challenging it might be to commit myself to researching social injustices in higher education. But, after meeting her and the community she has forged and cared for, I realised it would be a collective, passionate and hopeful commitment.