Liminality, Peer Relations, and Ethno-Gendered Bullying Among Children in Schools

• In Event: 63.031 - Children Negotiating Everyday Borders: How the Anthropology of Education Contributes to Research on (Im)Migrant Children in Schools

Abstract

This paper examines low grade acts of violence, that I characterize as ethno-gendered motivated bullying, committed against two Moroccan immigrant girls in a Spanish elementary school. The purpose is twofold; first, I pay attention to how children come to occupy different subject positions and to enact different participant roles in these violent interactions (e.g. perpetrators, victims, witnesses, etc.). I also consider how immigrant children negotiate the boundaries of safe peer relations in a school culture fraught with tensions. A larger objective underlying these two goals is to develop hypotheses about when this kind of conflict is most likely to occur and about what kind of immigrant children are at most risk for this type of bullying.

Because children occupy (biologically, culturally, and developmentally) vulnerable subject positions, there are many theoretical and analytical difficulties in studying on the ground acts of violence initiated and perpetrated by children against other children. To date, the study of bullying in schools has been dominated by psychology (Juvonen & Schacter 2017; Juvonen & Graham 2014), which has shed only limited perspectives on children’s situated agency in bullying encounters. Here, I bring an anthropological perspective to children and violence (Korbin 2003; Cheney 2007) to understand how children act contextually and make meaning of these aggressions. To provide a fine-grained ethnographic account of the interactional dynamics of everyday ethno-gendered violence between children, I bring together ethnomethodologically informed sociological and anthropological studies of conflict among children (Corsaro 1994; García-Sánchez 2005, 2017; Goodwin 1990, 1998) and micro-sociological theories of violence (Collins 2009).

This paper builds on a language socialization-inspired ethnography documenting the social lives of Moroccan immigrant children in a Southwestern Spanish town, where I have been conducting research since the mid-2000s. Using videoanalysis and ethnographic methods in discourse analysis, I focus on videotaped violent interactions among 4th grade children I observed for a period of twelve months. The long-term ethnography allows me to examine bullying in relation to the institutional culture, to the relational history between individual children, and to how bullying relates to other face-to-face encounters that occur quotidianly among the children.

Bullying must be considered in the context of a school culture where Moroccan immigrant children encountered pervasive racialized exclusion enacted by their Spanish peers, but where ethnically motivated fights were rare (García-Sánchez 2014). I show that the attacks: (1) occur in liminal spatio-temporal school contexts; (2) that degree of liminality influences how participation is structured to (de-)escalate violence; (3) that the victims of violence tend to be immigrant girls who are newcomers to the school, to the country, or to both.

While being able to learn in a safe school environment is crucial for all children, my analysis highlights this bullying as key in interpellation processes that both reflect and sustain symbolic violence, and at the crux of which we encounter the ethnolinguistic and gender vulnerability of immigrant children. This vulnerability has important implications for immigrant children’s ability to negotiate peer social capital, feelings of belonging, and educational enfranchisement (Gibson, Gándara, & Koyama 2004).

Author

• Inmaculada Maria Garcia Sanchez, Temple University