Preface.- Leaders in the Sociology of Education: Lessons Learned.- Continuity and Change: The Making of a Neoliberal Academic Subject.- Intellectual Self-Portrait.- Thinking about Schools and Universities as Social Institutions: An Intellectual Self-Portrait.- Com Muito Axé: Or "Can a Woman Be an Intellectual?".- Searching for Equity in Education: Finding School, Family, and Community Partnerships.- Striving Towards the Big Questions.- The Sociology of a Life.- Engaging the Sociological Imagination: My Journey into Design Research and Public Sociology.- The Accidental Sociologist of Education: How My Life in Schools Became My Research.- Power, Purpose and the Rise of the Rest.- Education, Gender, and Development.- Discovering Unseen Social Contexts and Potential Levers for Social Change.- Holocaust Memories: Honoring My Mother through Applied Scholarship and Building Academic Programs.- Beginning a Journey and Choosing a Path.- The Making of a Political Sociologist of Education.- Reading and Producing Research across Boundaries That so Often Divide.- Critical Theory and Education.- My Life with the Sociology of Education.

Leaders in the Sociology of Education: Intellectual Self-Portraits contains eighteen self-portraits written by some of the leading sociologists of education in the world. Representing the United States, the United Kingdom, and Hong Kong, the authors discuss a variety of factors that have affected their lifetime of scholarship, including their childhoods, their education and mentors, the state of the field during their "coming of age," the institutions where they have worked, the major sociologists during their lifetimes, the political and economic conditions during their lifetimes, and the social and political movements during their lifetimes. These autobiographical essays reveal a great deal not only about their work and their influences, but also about themselves. Taken as a whole, the book provides sociology of knowledge about the creation of sociology of education research since the 1960s. It reveals a number of important themes central to all of the authors' work, including educational inequality; the influence of the classical sociological theorists, Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim; and the influence of more recent classical sociologists of education, Basil Bernstein, Pierre Bourdieu and James Coleman. The authors' research represents a variety of theoretical and methodological orientations including functionalism, conflict and critical theory, interactionist theory and feminist theory, as well as quantitative, qualitative and mixed-methods research. Finally, the editors discuss a number of lessons to be learned from the lives and works of these sociologists of education.