ProfessorClaire Maxwell

For many years I have focused on ‘elite education’ - examining how education plays a critical role in the formation and reproduction of social class privilege. This has included comparative analyses of developments in different parts of the world, as well as a focus on how imperatives to internationalise and produce ‘global citizens’ are re-shaping the provision of elite forms of education.

I am currently writing a book, together with Dr. Karen Lillie, for Princeton University Press. Provisionally entitled Uncharted Spaces: The Limits of Wealth in Entering the Global Elite, we explore what happens when children from wealthy families in non-Western countries attend an elite international school in the West, hoping to secure a future as part of a global elite.

Another core part of my research has examined the empirical basis for a ‘global middle class’ – a dominant social group argued to be de-territorialised from the nation state. Through a focus on globally mobile professionals, living in different parts of the world, I am studying how family practices, school choices and articulations of identity are shaped by relations to ‘home’, degree and type of mobility, and national and ethnic positioning.  Recently, I have focused in more specifically on the incorporation of highly-skilled professionals and their families into Danish work-life and society.

Finally, with a group of scholars located around the world, we have developed the concept of ‘cosmopolitan nationalism’ – a frame through which to examine how internationalisation and desires to be globally engaged are differentially drawn on by institutions, policies and dominant social groups to advance their own interests. There are also instances, however, where such attempts have demonstrated the potential to disrupt relations of inequality.