Conference Program

Bourdieu’s work has been central to analysing how education reproduces inequality through the unequal distribution and recognition of capital. Yet less attention has been paid to the intimate, relational practices through which power is negotiated within feminised educational workplaces. This paper brings Bourdieusian theory into dialogue with feminist perspectives on care and relational labour to rethink everyday informal talk, commonly dismissed as ‘gossip’, as a site of symbolic power. Drawing on qualitative interviews with women practitioners in the early years workforce in England, the study examines how gossip shapes professional relationships, mediates authority, and produces social distinction within a gendered and classed field. Mobilising Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, symbolic violence, and masculine domination, the analysis demonstrates how gossip simultaneously reproduces professional hierarchies and enables subtle forms of resistance. Through everyday exchanges, practitioners negotiate moral worth, competence, and belonging: processes central to the maintenance and contestation of symbolic power. However, the paper also argues that Bourdieusian accounts of reproduction require expansion to adequately capture the relational and affective dimensions of care work. Feminist insights into intimacy and relational labour illuminate how women’s gossip constitutes a form of situated knowledge production, often devalued within professionalisation discourses. Recent moves to regulate practitioners’ talk in the name of professional standards risk silencing these relational practices and reinforcing symbolic hierarchies. By repositioning gossip as both a mechanism of distinction and a resource for collective knowledge-making, this paper suggests that attending to everyday intimacies is crucial for reimagining social justice in education as relational and collective, rather than solely redistributive.