Ayo Mansaray

Gentrification and education; Urban schooling and educational policy and reform; ethno-racial identities, attainment gaps, and trajectories in higher education and schooling; Theorising the roles and positions of teaching assistants in schools; Young people’s educational trajectories and aspirations; theorising the social functions of humour; Bourdieu and micro-sociology.

I am a sociologist of education with extensive research experience of education focused projects, drawing on ethnographic, qualitative and mixed-method aapproaches.  Substantively I am concerned with how educational realities are locally produced through social interaction, and the differentiated cultural, symbolic and material resources which frame those encounters. I am thus interested in developing empirically grounded, and theoretically contextualised, understandings of educational processes, policies, and practices.