Bourdieu in Aotearoa New Zealand: A systematic review of theoretical applications in educational research, 2000–2025

This article presents the first systematic review of scholarship applying Pierre Bourdieu's theoretical framework in New Zealand educational research, drawing on 30 peer‐reviewed studies published between 2000 and 2025. Following PRISMA guidelines, studies were coded for Bourdieusian concepts applied, depth of theoretical application (descriptive, explanatory or generative), theoretical engagement depth and whether authors explicitly acknowledged tension between Bourdieu's framework and New Zealand's settler‐colonial, bicultural educational context. The findings reveal that capital is applied in 97% of studies, habitus in 93% and field in 87%; secondary concepts (symbolic violence, doxa, logic of practice and misrecognition) each appear in fewer than 30% of the corpus. The dominant mode of application is explanatory rather than generative, with only six studies (20%) proposing new theoretical constructs or generative extensions of Bourdieu's framework. Eleven studies (37%) acknowledge theoretical friction with New Zealand's bicultural educational context, and no early childhood education study met the criteria for inclusion in the corpus. Drawing on Said's (1983) travelling theory, we argue that New Zealand's parallel educational systems and Treaty‐based bicultural obligations generate a productive contact zone where Bourdieu's concepts are analytically powerful yet structurally incomplete, with the most theoretically significant contributions emerging where researchers engage with this friction rather than bypassing it.