Conference Program

This paper examines how working-class parents in Chile make sense of their children’s attendance at predominantly middle-class schools, which stand out as unusually socioeconomically mixed within one of the most segregated education systems in the OECD (Molina & Lamb, 2022). Focusing on parents’ narratives, it asks what forms of inclusion, misrecognition, and ambivalent belonging are generated when families enter fields dominated by middle-class norms, and how these experiences invite a reworking of Bourdieusian concepts in dialogue with critical theories of recognition, emotion, and postcoloniality.

Empirically, the paper draws on a qualitative multiple-case study of two socioeconomically mixed schools in Santiago that enrolled students from diverse class backgrounds. Through in-depth interviews with working-class parents, the study explores how they interpret the benefits and costs of their children’s participation in middle-class school spaces, paying attention to everyday practices of dress, food, parental involvement, and financial contributions as key sites where classed boundaries are negotiated and reproduced.

Analytically, the paper mobilises Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capital, and field to examine how working-class parents acquire a “feel for the game” of middle-class schooling and how misfits between dispositions and institutional expectations produce moments of habitus disruption (e.g., Bourdieu, 1990; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). Building on elaborations such as Ingram and Abrahams’ (2018) notion of habitus interruption, the analysis shows that parents oscillate between reconciliation, destabilisation, and reconfirmation of their working-class orientations as they attempt to support their children’s schooling while preserving dignity and self-worth. These negotiations illuminate not only processes of symbolic domination but also the fragile emergence of “third spaces” in which new, more hybrid ways of inhabiting school fields become possible (Bhabha, 1994).

At the same time, the paper argues that a Bourdieusian lens centred on reproduction and misrecognition is insufficient to fully grasp these dynamics, and thus brings Bourdieu into dialogue with feminist, recognition, and postcolonial perspectives. Drawing on Fraser (1995; Fraser & Honneth, 2003), the analysis conceptualises inclusion as a matter of redistribution, recognition, and representation, showing how school policies that promote socioeconomic mix may still function as “misrecognition regimes” when working-class families are positioned as grateful beneficiaries rather than as equal interlocutors. Insights from Skeggs and Reay highlight the emotional and moral dimensions of class (Reay, 2015; Skeggs, 1997). Postcolonial critiques further expose how class hierarchies intersect with racialised imaginaries and colonial legacies of servitude in Latin America (Bhabha, 1994).

By situating Bourdieusian concepts in conversation with these critical frameworks, the paper contributes to the panel’s aim of rethinking educational inequalities through “Bourdieu and beyond.” It advances a theorisation of inclusion as relational justice that requires not only access to prestigious schools but also the revaluation of working-class identities and practices on their own terms.