Conference Program

Students’ dispositions towards school and learning are neither neutral nor equally distributed (Tarabini, 2023). Building on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of education (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; 1979; Bourdieu, 1984), research has long shown how schools privilege ways of feeling, thinking and acting historically associated with the middle classes, thereby contributing to the reproduction of social hierarchies. Yet, the processes through which these affinities become embodied as durable dispositions remain underexplored. This paper proposes to revisit Bourdieu’s concept of taste, as elaborated in Distinction (1984), to analyse the unequal construction of students’ emotional dispositions towards learning at school.

Conceptualising taste as a symbolic-affective disposition embedded in the habitus opens up a notion that is often psychologised or naturalised through the ideology of natural gifts (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). Following Bourdieu, taste is understood not as an individual preference but as a socially constituted disposition that appears natural and self-evident (Bourdieu, 1984). Precisely because of this misrecognised character, taste plays a key role in legitimising power relations and obscuring the social conditions underpinning educational inequalities. In school settings, what counts as “good taste” in learning -valued forms of knowledge, expression, participation, and relation to school- is defined by dominant groups and protected by symbolic boundaries (Skeggs, 2004). As such, taste operates as a mechanism of differentiation and exclusion, positioning students hierarchically within educational institutions.

Empirically, the paper draws on findings from a qualitative research project that examines the unequal constitution of young people’s dispositions towards school learning in terms of their taste and distaste. The study combines seven focus groups, twenty-one semi-structured interviews, and a four-month ethnography conducted in two secondary schools with different pedagogical projects. Participants were students aged 13-14 from diverse social backgrounds. Particular attention is paid to the intersections of class and gender, and to how these interact with institutional contexts to shape differentiated relations to knowledge, pedagogical methods, and school cultures.

The findings reveal patterned inequalities in how students develop symbolic-affective orientations towards school learning. While some students experience consonance between their habitus and the dominant norms of schooling, facilitating smooth trajectories and a sense of belonging, others experience misalignment, producing forms of distaste that manifest as disengagement or the feeling that “school is not for them.” By foregrounding taste as an analytical bridge between habitus, affect, and institutional practices, the paper contributes to refining Bourdieusian approaches to the study of educational inequality. More broadly, it suggests that recognising and challenging the symbolic boundaries that define “legitimate” taste in schooling may open possibilities for more relational and democratically just educational practices.