This edited volume brings together international perspectives on how discrimination and inequality shape children’s lives and educational opportunities. Using the concept of orders of difference, the chapters explore how social orders emerge, are constituted, maintained, and transformed. They examine the production of normality and difference, institutional discrimination, and structural inequality, showing how educational institutions continue to reproduce unequal opportunities through processes of classification and social ordering despite growing commitments to diversity and anti-discrimination.

Claudia Machold is Professor of Educational Science at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany. 

Raphael Bak is an Interim Professor of Childhood Studies at Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences, Germany.