Abstract:
Many long-established elite schools are products of the Global North. Often, they were established in areas of the Global South to symbolise and serve the might and merit of colonial, Global North powers. While scholarship on elite schools was previously dominated by elite schooling in, and researchers from, the Global North, contemporary scholarship is extending beyond the metropole, giving more presence to work in and from the Global South. Concurrently, scholars are broadening the range of conceptual devices used. In this quest for authentic research and geographic and sociological expansion, it might be asked: is it unethical for researchers of elite schooling in the Global South to select theorists other than those from the Global South? This paper introduces some of the complications I, an Anglo-Australian researcher aware of the ‘hegemony of metropolitan knowledge’, navigated when I undertook research in the Global South. My choice of analytic framework - Derrida’s concept of hospitality and Iris Young’s theories of responsibility for social justice - emanated from my research context and fieldwork. Accepting these cues required recognition of the influence of intellectual interrelations and the value of ‘connected sociologies’. Despite these theories’ development in the Global North, I contend they travel to Global South contexts in relevant and representative ways. This paper explores the fitness of this conceptual combination for researching elite schooling in the Global South via an ethnographic study of a historically elite Indian school faced with equity legislation. The lenses of hospitality and responsibility for social justice, assisted by analytic devices I name ‘circles of worry’ and ‘sentiment tools of oppression’, help reveal what I characterise as conditional hospitality. This conditional hospitality results in subversion at the school of the mandate’s stated intentions of progressing social justice through the acceptance, and exercise, of responsibility to the Other. By this analysis, I suggest that matching the origin/location of the theorist and the research need not be paramount in ethical theoretical selection. Rather, the connection between the theorist’s philosophical orientation, the researcher’s intentions, the research context and the voices from the field may appositely and constructively determine a theory/theorist’s suitability. Such a perspective can promote strong, civil, globally-connected sociologies and contribute to scholarly debates in postcolonial arena. It can enhance the sociology of elite schooling by offering a fresh perspective that traverses binaries and boundaries.