Norms of Convivencia as Technologies of Abjection

• In Event: Conceptualizing Convivencia in Formal and Nonformal Education Spaces Internationally

Abstract

The purpose of this presentation is to explore how convivencia in education works as a strategy of modern governmentality in the production and differentiation of citizens through the mobilization of “norms of convivencia.” I depict how legislation and implementation of norms in convivencia in school policy serves as a technology to exclude diverse children, in the name of exclusion—what I call technologies of abjection (Kowalczyk & Popkewitz, 2005).

I approach this analysis through the case of Najwa, a young Muslim immigrant girl, who was suspended from a public high school in Madrid (Spain) for wearing the hijab in class. As prescribed in her high school’s norms of convivencia, students could not wear caps or other head-coverings at school. Because Najwa refused to uncover her head, she was suspended from class and remained in a room in the administration office doing homework. When her parents enrolled her in another local high school without a head-covering ban, the School Board changed its convivencia policy to prohibit the use of any form of head-covering. When Najwa’s parents took the issue to court, both the local court and the Supreme Court in Madrid ruled against veiling in public schools in the name of “public safety.” The judicial ruling resolved that the school’s decision had not violated Najwa’s right of freedom of religion, and that her suspension from school had been a necessary decision because her veiled body posed a threat to society and could have an “improper proselytizing effect.” Drawing on Najwa’s case, I ask: How have norms of convivencia contributed to the making and unmaking of citizens in uneven ways? What specific strategies assembled in the logic(s) that made it possible to suspend Najwa from school in the name of public safety?

Drawing on François Ewald's (1990) theorization of norms, I depart from an understanding of norm as a synonym of rule to conceptualize it as a productive and creative means of producing a common standard, a “sphere of the bio-political” (p. 139). Drawing on ethnographic and genealogical modes of inquiry (Tamboukou, 2003a; 2003b), I organize my analysis is two sections. First, through the historization of the problematization of convivencia since the last decade of the dictatorship (70s), I trace how norms of convivencia have reassembled from a technology of disciplining the responsible citizen in the 70s into a technology of racializing the Other in the 2000s. Second, I explore the logics of norms of convivencia in the present by analyzing the judicial sentence of Najwa’s case. I group my analysis into four genres: National educational law and policy since 1970, school policy, printed media coverage of Nawja’s case, and Najwa’s judicial sentence.

The significance of this paper is less about how Najwa’s case contributes to the vast literature on the politics of the headscarf (Fraser, 1997; Mernissi, 1991; Okin, 1999; Phillips, 2003; Scott, 2009) than about how deploying norms of convivencia differentiated some people in the name of conviviality and women’s freedom by gendering and racializing their civic attributes.

Author

• Belén Hernando-Lloréns, University of Iowa