Related Websites

Ed Buendía Associate Professor 387 MBH, 587-7813 Ed.Buendia@utah.edu

Ed Buendía is an educational sociologist whose primary interest is the production of institutional knowledge and practices within K-12 schools. I began my career as an educator teaching in bilingual (English-Spanish) middle and elementary schools in northern California. I spent seven years teaching in racially and linguistically diverse schools in the area of Sacramento, California. I left the classroom and completed my Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Research

The lines of research that interest me correspond to the area of sociology of knowledge. First, I am interested in understanding the social production of teacher and school knowledge in K-12 settings. I am particularly interested in how local, national and global movements and trends come to interface in how educators and institutions envision students as well as their classroom/school practices. Central to this is the construction and ensuing processes of institutionalization of student identities along the lines of race and social class. I am interested in comprehending how knowledge and practice create school worlds (i.e., subjects, practices and spaces). To engage in this work, I've been drawn to the sociology of knowledge, particularly the work emerging from poststructuralist theorists (i.e., Foucault, Derrida, DeCerteau). The other line of research that interests me is that of alternative, or standpoint, epistemologies. The question of writing and narration of self and community in processes of research has been a another point of focus. The work of feminist (i.e., Third World, Chicana, Feminist Poststructuralist, Indigenous) theorists has informed my thinking. I have completed a book with Nancy Ares entitled, Geographies of Difference: The production of the East Side, West Side and Center City school. The journal article, Geographies of Difference, provides an overview of this book. I also have numerous journal articles focusing on the processes of the social production of the pedagogical and of racialized/classed students. See, for example, Working the pedagogical borderlands in the journal Curriculum Inquiry and the article Enveloping pedagogies in the journal Pedagogy, Culture and Society.