Cultural Capital Definition

As Winkle-Wagner (2010) noted, contextually-valued cultural capital can provide more nuanced approches to cultural capital which allow for multiple types of cultural capital that are changeable and differentially valued depending on the particular social and educational setting. For example, Anderson (2005) demonstrates how inclusion of multicultural and diversity-related texts and courses in American universities can lead to their appropriation as a particular form of cultural capital by the White students. In this way, a new type of knowledge and atitudes became cultural capital that can be used to maintain social reproduction of racial inequality through education in the American social context. In a similar vein, Goldstein (2003) investigated how minority students in …show more content…
As Goldthorpe emphasizes, Bourdieu's intention was to embed the cultural capital theory into a more general framework of social reproduction process. Notwithstanding the persisting differences in relative educational chances of children from different social backgrounds, a massive educational expansion and educational upward mobility that took place in developed countries refutes the omnipotence and durability of the family-related habitus. Thus, Goldthorpe concludes that original parts of Bourdieu's work are not empirically sound, whereas theoretically sound parts are not original, since they are in line with the existing sociological explanations that draw from subcultural differences and their influence on educational