Rate My Professor Grant Banfield

Dr. Grant Banfield holds a PhD from the University of South Australia and has worked as an academic in the Australian higher education sector for nearly 30 years. He served as a lecturer in the School of Education at Flinders University, Adelaide, where he taught sociology of education and sociology of health. He also held positions as an adjunct academic at the University of South Australia and Research Fellow at the National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education, hosted by the University of South Australia. Earlier, Banfield was a high school teacher in rural and urban South Australia. His research utilizes qualitative and ethnographic approaches to examine educational practices and social dynamics.

Banfield's research specializations encompass Marxist sociology of education, critical realism, neoliberalism and immiseration capitalism's impacts on education, socialist pedagogy, social class relations, student wellbeing, dialogic engagements, globalization in education, and the belonging experiences of young refugee students in mainstream Australian schools. Ongoing funded projects explore the evolving nature of academic labor in UK and Australian universities and the effects of transformational pedagogy on first-year student learning. Key publications include his book Critical Realism for Marxist Sociology of Education (Routledge, 2015), which employs critical realist principles to resolve issues of naturalism in Marxist educational analysis. Additional major works feature 'Marx and Education: Working with the Revolutionary Educator' (Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 2015), 'The (Im)possibility of the Intellectual Worker Inside the Neoliberal University' (2016), and contributions to Immiseration Capitalism and Education: Austerity, Resistance and Revolt (Institute for Education Policy Studies, 2013), such as 'Neoliberalism, Immiseration Capitalism, and the Historical Urgency of a Socialist Education' co-authored with Curry Malott and Dave Hill. He has published on 'Taking Wellbeing Seriously' (Curriculum Perspectives, 2009), ideological work in health education at Hillside High (1999), and stress concerns among teacher education students (2000). In 2006, he co-organized a conference-workshop on qualitative educational evaluation in the Philippines with Flinders University. His 22 ResearchGate-listed publications have accumulated 349 citations and 6,350 reads, contributing to discourses on educational resistance and class-based transformation.