Intensive Parenting Across Cultures: Global Varieties in Mobilizing Cultural Capital

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium aims to understand how intensive parenting operates across diverse global contexts. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical framework, the session explores how parenting strategies respond to and reinforce social inequalities.
The empirical data come from Asia, Europe, and North America, utilizing rich qualitative methods. The four cases include Chinese middle-class investment in private tutoring, German families’ subtle educational strategies, Canadian immigrant plurilingual practices, and Indian returnee families’ network activation.
Fostering a comparative angle, the contributions apply Bourdieu’s concepts to examine whether power operates similarly across classed societies despite contextual differences. The session structure features four research presentations followed by expert discussion, providing fresh perspectives on the evolving intersection of family life, cultural capital, and global competition.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Bourdieu in Educational Research

Chairs

• Frederick de Moll, Bielefeld University

• Guanglun Michael Mu, University of South Australia

Papers

• The Privileged Path: Live-in-Home Tutors and Cultural Capital Transmission in Affluent Chinese Families - Lu Liu, University of Liverpool; Lixin Ren, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University

• Distinction Reconfigured: Habitual Privilege, Cultural Capital, and the Performance of Middle-Class Parenting in Germany - Frederick de Moll, Bielefeld University; Janice Aurini, University of Waterloo

• Learning in the community: Middle-class immigrant parent engagement and devaluation of cultural capital in schools - Max Antony-Newman, University of Glasgow

• Schools, capital, and the perpetuation of advantage: the case of return migrant families in India - Adrienne L. Atterberry, University of Massachusetts - Lowell

Session Organizer

• Frederick de Moll, Bielefeld University

Discussant

• Erin McNamara Horvat, Drexel University