Ethnic Friendship and Recognition: A Bourdieusian Perspective on Ethnic Diversity’s Problems in Higher Education

• In Event: Peer Groups, Boundary-Work, and Educational Mobility

Abstract

In this paper, we present an analysis of the friendship-making and identity explorations of ethnically minoritized students at an ethnically diverse campus of a four-year university. We forward the concept of "friendship pursuit," which designates the agentive processes of freshman college students’ friendship-making, typically through a shared ethnicity or racial category, and through both informal social interaction and participating in formal organizations and practices where ethnicity and race are institutionalized (e.g., the Indigenous Students Residence, an ethnic-themed dormitory). We posit that these friendship pursuits represent agentive practices of attaining friendship through ethnicity, thereby constituting social capital, and also attaining "recognition" through ethnicity. We use Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of recognition as symbolic capital in this paper, such that identitarian recognition through ethnicity means being actively identified by others as a member of an ethnicity, and especially one whose representation of and ability to speak for that ethnicity is legitimized.

Authors

• David Song, University of Oklahoma

• Anthony Lising Antonio, Stanford University