Conference Program

This paper brings Pierre Bourdieu into dialogue with care ethics to examine the implications of educational integration policies targeting students from disadvantaged backgrounds (low socioeconomic status, immigrant origin, and their intersection). Drawing on 71 in-depth interviews with teachers, administrative staff, students, and parents in four lower secondary schools on the periphery of Milan, the empirical analysis explores how institutionalized practices intended to promote integration may paradoxically constrain care’s transformative potential.

The argument is not that teachers do not care; their intentions and efforts are evident. However, analysis of the empirical material suggests that care is shaped by the habitus of those who provide it. Where significant misalignment of habitus exists between teachers and students from disadvantaged contexts, care risks operating through reciprocity rather than responsiveness. In Joan Tronto’s (1993) ethics of care, responsiveness requires attending to the other’s expressed position rather than extending to them what one would consider care for oneself.

Reflexivity – the capacity to interrogate one’s dispositions and assumptions – is crucial for responsiveness and thus the enactment of care that is transformative; yet institutionalization may weaken it. In Zygmunt Bauman’s (1993) terms, institutional arrangements can anesthetize moral reflection by delegating responsibility to procedures. At the same time, teachers act as street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky, 1980), whose discretionary space can enable context-sensitive and responsive practice. However, analysis of interviews suggests that the proliferation of institutional solutions may limit the potential of this space by implying that inequalities have already been adequately addressed.

Under these conditions, a double-layered symbolic violence may emerge: first, through the universalism of schooling, which presents itself as neutral while reproducing inequality; and second, through integration policies shaped by the habitus of those who design and implement them. What appears as integration may therefore function as another veil obscuring relations of domination.

The paper concludes that care can become transformative only when institutional arrangements cultivate reflexivity, enabling teachers to respond to students’ needs rather than relying solely on standardized procedures. By situating Bourdieu in conversation with care ethics, the analysis refines the conceptual vocabulary for understanding educational inequalities and highlights the importance of institutional design in enabling or constraining the transformative possibilities of care in schools.