Pierre Bourdieu and School Choice: Marginalized Urban Families

• In Event: 69.056 - Roundtable Session 31
  In Roundtable Session: 69.056-7 - The Interplay of Structure, Culture, and Agency in School Choice Policies and Practices

Abstract

Objective
This presentation offers an interdisciplinary way of theorizing school choice practices and patterns from the perspective of socially and racially marginalized families in a rapidly changing urban context. It starts from the sociology of education and school choice and makes a new theoretical bridge to critical human geography to consider how and where historically marginalized urban families participate in school choice (André-Bechely, 2007; Gulson, 2007; Reay, 2007).

Theoretical Approach
In particular, I draw from Bourdieu’s sociological theories to analyze the social world as a field that is relational between two or more individuals (or institutions) with the forces and possession of material, symbolic power, and domination, referred to as capital (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). In building upon this notion of the structured, stratified social world (field), I further draw from Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, the dispositions that are shaped in a stratified social world, i.e. a field, and that guide everyday practices, generate meaning, and allow people to exercise choices (Bourdieu, 2000; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). Indeed, this Bourdieusian framework has been applied to explain middle-class school choice (Ball, 2003; Gewirtz, Ball, & Bowe, 1995; Reay, 2004). While I extend its application to explore marginalized urban families’ choices, I draw from Bourdieu’s theory of site to understand their choices.

Site is a theoretical concept that captures spatial structures as corresponding to social structures (Bourdieu, 1999). Sites refer to neighborhoods as having different levels of status with varying concentrations of symbolic, social, economic, and academic capital (Bourdieu, 2006/1986). It is thus best to view site as a spatialized notion of Bourdieu’s concept of field. The notion of site can be used to further theorize how neighborhoods, as uneven and stratified geography, shape individual habitus (dispositions) in the way that fields do. Residing in different neighborhoods, which results from being constrained and enabled by one’s economic capital, further reinforces social practices as place-based (Butler, 2003; Holme, 2002; Reay, 2007). One’s neighborhood or site comes to shape dispositions, sense of belonging, and further choices, including school choice.

From among Bourdieu’s theoretical concepts discussed, I further draw on critical human geography to theorize that urban neighborhoods are both physical spaces with measurable attributes and meaning-laden places with symbolic values (Bell, 2009; Reay, 2007; Soja, 1996). At the objective level, local neighborhoods can be compared according to their geographical features and levels of capital. At the phenomenological level, they are constituted by meanings that are associated with social and racial divisions and inequality (Gulson & Symes, 2007; Soja, 1996). Hence, locally circulating meanings of urban neighborhoods can influence how marginalized urban families perceive different neighborhoods and how they perceive choosing schools in different sites as space and place (Author, 2015).

Significance
This essay offers a new interdisciplinary conceptual lens to study marginalized urban families’ school choice, specifically, how this choice is shaped by capital and habitus (which are in turn shaped by historical geography of race and class), and by everyday meaning-making and sense of belonging in the rapidly diversifying cities across the globe.

Author

• Ee-Seul Yoon, University of Manitoba