The sociology of education is currently caught up in struggles over truth, expertise and forms of realism (social, critical, agential, speculative). On the one hand, what constitutes valid educational research is being narrowly defined by government and private funding agencies in the logic of randomised, control trials, and learning analytics. A common-sense, putative, naïve realism dominates these versions of research. On the other hand, the sociology of education is being opened up by scholars who are re-reading, re-writing, and re-formulating the work of significant scholars such as Bernstein through different sets of theoretical/methodological resources. The long shadow of Bernstein’s theoretical corpus has influenced our own research for the past 25 years. And while some scholars working within the Bernstein tradition have positioned themselves as either critical or social realists and argued against the relativism of post-structural theorizing (see Moore, 2009), we take an alternative position on realism, and argue for an approach that draws on performative, agential and speculative realism(s). From this perspective, reality is not external to the researcher, viewed from a god’s eye position (Haraway, 1991). Rather, realities are indeterminate and open, not fixed or locked down (see Barad, 2007). This perspective places ‘us’ as researchers in the realm of epistemological politics (what knowledge is produced and for what purposes), as well as ontological politics (matters of fact, matters of concern, and the mattering practices of research through new material configurations). Arguably, Bernstein aspired to grand theory making. Our aim is to pay attention to those aspects of his work that exceed the coherent descriptive principles that guide the theory’s complex and subtle architecture and point to the generative, openness of his work. For example, Bernstein created concepts to explain power struggles that enable middle class factions to design and enact curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation codes and so maintain their positions within social-class hierarchies. By contrast, we highlight that which escapes such classifications to detect for example, ‘the agentive power of technical objects’ (Ivinson & Singh, 2018: 464), particularly the effects/affects of global, pervasive non-human actors (data harvesting technologies, league tables, public reportage of national testing, policy prescriptions) on the work of teachers in primary schools servicing high poverty communities. We diffractively cut Bernstein’s work together and apart (Barad, 2007) with concepts from object relations, psychoanalytic theories (Bollas, 2007) and new material feminism(s) (NMF) to propose a re-tuning of the sociology of education.

Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham and London, Duke University Press. Bernstein, B. (2000) Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique. Revised Edition.2nd edition. Oxford: Rowan & Littlefield. Bollas, C. (2007) The Freudian Moment. London: Karnac Books Haraway, D. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London; Free Association Press. Heimans, S., Singh, P. and Glasswell, K. (2017) Doing education policy enactment research in a minor key. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 38(2): 185–196. Ivinson, G. & Singh, P. (2018) Special Issues on ‘International policies – local affects: Regenerating the sociology of Basil Bernstein’. European Educational Research Journal, 17(4): 461– 469.