Conference Program

When considering the relationship between schooling and politics, sociologists, from Durkheim to Bourdieu, have seen the school as an institution that socializes students to the norms, values, and hierarchies of society, thereby ensuring the stability of the social order (Durkheim, 1966/1922, 2012/1902; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1970).

However, despite the growing importance of education in Western societies, we cannot ignore the rise of protest, social conflict, and defiance against the state (Roudet, 2012; Siblot, 2015; Sallenave, 2019). This context invites us to revisit the question of political socialization in schools. Based on ongoing ethnographic research, combining observation and interviews in two socially differentiated schools in French-speaking Belgium, I aim to show how the educational institution can foster both adherence to and resistance against the educational order. Through the concept of symbolic recycling (Lignier & Pagis, 2017), these dispositions can extend to the broader social order.

Drawing on the works of Bourdieu (1970, 1977, 1982) and Willis (1977), as well as recent literature investigating political socialization in a broader context (Sapiro, 2004; Bargel & Darmon, 2017; Boughaba et al., 2018; Barrault-Stella et al., 2020; Haegel, 2020), I argue that the outcomes of the school’s socializing function depend on students' subjective schooling experiences. These experiences are differentiated by a number of factors such as class, gender and race. The diversity of unequal experiences produces a diversity of relationships to school and to its principles of vision and division structuring both the academic and the broader social world.