Karen Lillie, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
Truly good research – the kind that offers new insights into long-standing ideas, that pushes us to see a little differently – can rarely be labelled as purely one thing or another. In synthesising wide-ranging ideas and approaches, it brings cohesion to otherwise disparate thoughts. And yet, so often we are asked to label our work as belonging to one particular field. This happens when we join departments, present at conferences and even decide in which journals to publish. Such categorisation lends us a home, a community and the legitimacy of a clear intellectual lineage – but also draws borders delineating between inside and outside.
This blog post highlights the border zone. I recently published an historical article in the History of Education Society’s historical journal, though that article grew out of a decidedly not-only-historical thesis.[1] That thesis, completed at the UCL Institute of Education in December 2020, was instead both sociological and historical in nature. Such interdisciplinarity – which I would guess is inherent to much of our work in one form or another – is worth discussing. When we consciously recognise it, we can consciously embrace it and choose to settle in a space that, though perhaps uncomfortable, is at least always interesting.
Let’s Get Concrete
My PhD work took an historical and sociological approach to the study of an elite school’s role in transnational class formation. The starting point for the thesis was a theory, published in 2017, that elite schools produce a sense of transnational class-commonality and consciousness amongst their students.[2] That theory was built from a study of elite schools connected to the former British empire. My thesis explored whether it also captured class formation processes at a school unconnected to the British empire. I ultimately argued that it did not. Instead, I found, the school leadership was strategically negotiating the school’s place within shifting socio-political and economic frameworks, while the students were strategically negotiating their positions within those institutional frameworks.[3]
My thesis interlaced sociological and historical claims in service of its overarching argument. There is long-standing precedent for this. In a key text, Peter Burke argues that history and sociology have always been informed by one another, though to fluctuating degrees.[4] He reminds us that the two began as one discipline. This can be seen in seminal works published before the late nineteenth century, such as Marx’s Capital, Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and Weber’s The Protestant Ethic. William H. Sewell Jr. writes that it was around this time, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that distinct disciplines crystallised under the influence (or, pressure) of newly established university departments and chairs.[5]
Some excellent contemporary work in educational studies, however, has embraced this tradition of cross-pollination. Ciaran O’Neill, for example, cites Bourdieu and Foucault as major theoretical influences in his research on nineteenth century Catholic education in Ireland.[6] Jonathan Doney’s historical doctoral thesis at the University of Exeter even operationalises Foucault’s archaeological method, to trace ‘how certain practices become possible’ in religious education.[7] Louis Smith found that including a historical dimension in his ethnographies of schooling transformed and deepened them.[8]
As seen in these examples, there are a number of ways and degrees to which sociological and historical thinking can be interwoven. However, interdisciplinary work is not without challenges. Some of those challenges are large but practical – such as familiarising oneself with the literature, underlying theories, methodologies and vocabulary of more than one field. Other challenges are small but existential – for instance, choosing a citation style. Citations are an immediate, visual signal of to which discipline one belongs. And when something like APA comes up against Chicago style, there is no middle ground to be had – only a stark choice to be made.
Join the Revolution!
With the benefit of a year’s worth of hindsight, there are certainly things that I would and perhaps should have done differently in my thesis. I would, for example, have interwoven my sociological and historical data differently to achieve an even more cohesive whole. What I would not change is having given interdisciplinary work a go. And I would urge others – that means you, reader – to consider doing the same. Perhaps you even already are. In some ways, this is selfish; it is to enrich the space in which I find myself. But in other ways, this is just a nudge to label your work for what it really is: multifaceted.
Karen Lillie’s latest paper for the History of Education on ‘Adaptations to global changes: strategic evolutions of an elite school, 1961–2011‘ is available open access.
Author Biography
Dr Karen Lillie is a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany, in the Wealth and Social Inequality research group. Her ESRC-funded doctoral work at University College London took a historical and sociological approach to the study of transnational class formation processes at an economically elite boarding school in Switzerland. Karen has published articles on elite class formation, elite mobilities and ethical issues around researching elite groups, among other topics. She has also been featured on the podcast FreshEd (episode 224).
[1] Karen Lillie, ‘Adaptations to global changes: Strategic evolutions of an elite school, 1961-2011’, History of Education (2022).
[2] Jane Kenway et al., Class Choreographies: Elite Schools and Globalization (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2017).
[3] See also Karen Lillie, ‘Mobile and Elite: Diaspora as a Strategy for Status Maintenance in Transitions to Higher Education’, British Journal of Educational Studies 69, no. 5 (2021): 641-656 ; Karen Lillie, ‘Multi-Sited Understandings: Complicating the Role of Elite Schools in Transnational Class Formation’, British Journal of Sociology of Education 42, no. 1 (2021): 82–96 ; Karen Lillie and Pere Ayling, ‘Revisiting the Un/ethical: The Complex Ethics of Elite Studies Research’, Qualitative Research 21, no. 6 (2021): 890–905.
[4] Peter Burke, History and Social Theory, 2nd ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).
[5] William H. Sewell Jr., Logics of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
[6] Ciaran O’Neill, Catholics of Consequence: Transnational Education, Social Mobility, and the Irish Catholic Elite 1850-1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
[7] Jonathan Doney, ‘That Would be an Ecumenical Matter’: Contextualizing the Adoption of the Study of World Religions in English Religious Education Using ‘Statement Archaeology’, a Systematic Operationalization of Foucault’s Historical Method (Doctoral Thesis, University of Exeter, 2015).
[8] Louis Smith, ‘Ethnographic and Historical Method in the Study of Schooling’, in Defining the Curriculum: Histories and Ethnographies, eds. I. Goodson & S. Ball (London/New York: Routledge, 2012), 149–177.