Mairead DunneEmeritus Professor (School of Education and Social Work)
Research
I am a Professor of the Sociology of Education working in the Centre for International Education at the ºìÐÓÊÓƵ, Brighton, UK. My interests are in critical approaches to policy and practice with respect to inequalities. I focus on educational and social differences largely (though not exclusively) through micro-level studies of the intersecting and overlapping social relations of gender, race, ethnicity, socio-economic status, religion, nation and age (youth) with implications for livelihoods, equality and social development locally and globally. In the UK and European context I have focused predominantly on social class and education. However, I have also lived and worked in several countries in the Global South and North which has highlighted for me the sustained work of education in the (re-)production and valorisation of particular privileged /colonial/ 'Western' knowledges that need to be addressed urgently in efforts towards greater global equity. This has significant implications for the work of education and approaches to development in the explicitly or implicitly interconnected fields of theory, policy and practice as they are imagined by and impact upon different (marginalised) people and populations in different local spaces.