Emma Taylor is a Lecturer in Education at King’s College London. She is currently leading on the development of an induction programme for all new teaching staff at King’s. She joined King’s from LSE where she held the position of teaching fellow on LSE’s flagship interdisciplinary course for all undergraduate students, LSE100. She was a Leverhulme Doctoral Scholar in the department of Sociology at the LSE and she has a particular interest in the reproduction of inequalities through the education system. Her PhD research sought to investigate the micro-practices of elite formation within an independent boys’ school setting in England. Based on in-depth, long-term ethnographic analysis, the research provides a unique insider’s perspective on the conditions that enable and scaffold the formation of elite dispositions among students. Thus, the work uses innovative qualitative methods, such as peer facilitated research, to address key questions relating to the acquisition of such dispositions and how these may have the potential to be converted into powerful symbolic capital, professional success and the consequent perpetuation of the conditions that enable privilege. The work is under advanced contract to be published as a book with Princeton University Press.

Emma also has fifteen years of experience teaching in secondary schools in the UK where she has developed a specific interest in evidence-based pedagogical practice. As co-convenor of the BERA Practitioner Research Special Interest Group she works with other teachers and academics to create a space where practitioners can present and discuss their work at different conferences and events across the academic year.

Publications:

‘No Fear’: Privilege and the navigation of hierarchy at an elite boys’ school in England (2021). British Journal of Sociology of Education, 42 (7), 935-950. Shortlisted for the British Journal of Sociology of Education Best Early Career Article.