First Paper.

I've managed to get my first conference paper through the peer-review process and I'll be speaking at the Australian Sociological Associations annual conference hosted at the University of Adelaide this  November in the sociology of education stream. The paper is a condensed and sharpened version of my honours thesis.  The abstract is as follows: 

"Sociologists often view the authority of knowledge as a reflection of social power.  Educational research mirrors with theories that treat knowledge as primarily “knowledge of the powerful” (Young 2009:13).  This study employed conceptual tools from Legitimation Code Theory (Maton 2014) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (Eggins 1994; Martin 1993) to explore university student’s perceptions of knowledge claims and if knowledge is deemed to be shaped both by social relations and epistemic relations.  Sixteen semi-structured interviews were conducted in 2012 for an honours research project with participants from four Sydney based Universities.  Results indicated that students perceive knowledge to have its own organizing principles, its legitimacy and power not reducible to who has the social power to claim knowledge." 

The citation will end up being something like this:
Toll, M. (2014), “Discerning Knowers: Exploring University Students’ Perceptions of Knowledge Claims”, The Australian Sociological Association Conference Proceedings, University of South Australia,  Adelaide, November 24- 27.