Conference Program

This paper reconceptualises the educational field as an affective field, arguing that care, emotional labour and relational dynamics are not peripheral to schooling but constitutive of its structuring logic. While Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capital and field have been central to analyses of educational reproduction (Bourdieu, 1986), the affective dimensions of schooling have rarely been theorised as integral to the organisation of the field itself. Building on Diane Reay’s work on emotional capital (Reay, 2000, 2004) and Kathleen Lynch’s theorisation of affective equality and love labouring (Lynch, 2009), this paper extends a Bourdieusian framework to foreground care as a central mechanism through which educational hierarchies are reproduced and contested.

The paper makes three conceptual contributions. First, it proposes the notion of the affective field of schooling as an analytical lens that integrates affective relations into the core dynamics of habitus formation, capital accumulation and position-taking. Rather than “adding” emotion to Bourdieu, I argue that affective relations shape the field’s hierarchies of legitimacy, recognition and belonging, and are therefore constitutive of learner identities and educational trajectories (Bourdieu, 1986; Reay, 2004). Second, the paper distinguishes analytically between emotional capital (as resource), care-related emotional labour (as practice) and affective inequality (as outcome), demonstrating how these dimensions interact to reproduce classed and gendered hierarchies within schools (Reay, 2000; Lynch, 2009). Third, drawing explicitly on Lynch’s framework of affective equality, it argues that educational disadvantage entails not only cognitive deprivation but also affective marginalisation: unequal access to recognition, emotional security and relational support that are foundational to learning (Lynch, 2009).

These theoretical developments are grounded in empirical sensitivity through the LEARNER project, which examines learner identities and trajectories in secondary education. Using selected vignettes from interviews and observations with teachers, students and families, the paper illustrates how care circulates, is demanded and differentially valued within everyday school life. Teachers are increasingly positioned as emotional buffers in contexts of intensified socio-economic inequality; families’ unequal emotional resources shape expectations and learner identities; and students themselves engage in peer care and emotional labour that often remains institutionally invisible.

By foregrounding care as a structuring principle of the educational field, this paper repositions affect at the centre of debates on educational inequality and learner formation. In doing so, it advances a dialogue between Bourdieu, Reay and Lynch and offers new analytical tools for mapping the affective economies through which schooling reproduces – and potentially transforms – social hierarchies.