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.

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.

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.

In this paper we focus on Bourdieu’s concept of illusio. We are interested in its utility for making sense of the ways institutional conceptions of ‘belonging’ have become the ‘go-to’ policy and practice response for managing entrenched inequalities and disparities in student experience in Higher Education. Within different national contexts belonging has a long conceptual history within educational research and it has been considered by sociologists of education with nuance and care (e.g. Hurtado & Carter 1997; Finn 2017; Thomas KC 2018; Gravett & Ajawi 2021). Notwithstanding this longstanding academic engagement, belonging has however, come to represent a codified set of initiatives and discourses that are increasingly taken up and deployed by policy makers and sector leaders as part of a crisis management apparatus that seeks to ‘deal with’ deeply ingrained structural inequalities (e.g. mental health and well being, attainment differentials by race, class and gender). This is particularly heightened within the UK where the commodification and individualisation of HE has continued unabated for thirty years. In this context belonging is misrecognised as an individualised commodity to be acquired through induction to the ‘feel for the game’ (Bourdieu 1990, p.66) in the higher education field rather than something that requires deep structural change.

We bring illusio into conversation with institutional conceptions of belonging to offer a theorisation of the processes through which the structural conditions that shape inequalities are silenced and misrecognised in policy and practice responses. Illusio denotes the condition of being so caught up and invested in the game, that the game itself goes unquestioned, and can account for the misrecognition of belonging as a commodity delivered through conformity to existing field structures. This framing of belonging is dressed as a means of delivering change whilst simultaneously maintaining the existing field structure and doxa. We argue that this creates a toxic illusio where the surface appearance of commitment to institutional change obscures the reality of immovable institutionalised structures of inequality. We show that for the maintenance of inequalities not only is it necessary for those directing or implementing policy to be under the spell of the illusio, but for the system to continue to exist and reproduce itself, institutions need the perceived beneficiaries of belonging agendas to similarly recognise, buy into and ultimately conform to the rules of the game. The paper demonstrates that through countless acts of recognition (Bourdieu 1990) - brought about by everyday practices that reproduce the commonsense position that belonging is something to strive for and for institutions to endow – a toxic illusio of belonging is generated. This creates the conditions under which belonging as an agenda goes unquestioned and institutional belonging practices and activities are misrecognised as addressing inequalities when they are all the while obfuscating the structural conditions of their existence.

In this contribute we use Bourdieu as a bridge between the sociology of education and the linguistic anthropology of education to analyze the ways in which first-generation university students narrate their entry into and experience in the university field. By analyzing sociological interviews, course assignments and focus-groups with methodological lens from the language sciences (analysis of narrative), we ask: what becomes tellable about language, self-presentation and belonging when FGS recount their first steps into university? And how do those tellings reveal both symbolic exclusion and the micro-conversions through which students navigate ‘the game’ of university participation? The analysis outline how FGS, during the transition from school and family to university, recognize the university as a relatively distinct field and consequently adopt, embody, and enact a habitus which—given their social and schooling trajectories—enables them to take up positions within it.

Transitions to university continue to be structured by classed, racialised, and gendered inequalities, even in systems marked by expansion and widening participation. For upwardly mobile students, entry into higher education is frequently tied to experiences of dislocation, misrecognition, and struggle (Bathmaker et al., 2016). Bourdieusian scholarship has been central to analysing these processes, particularly through the concepts of habitus, field, and capital (Reay, 2018). At the same time, Bourdieu has often been criticised for privileging reproduction over transformation and for leaving insufficient room for the contingent, conflictual, and psychosocial dimensions of practice (Rieger-Ladich, 2017). Consequently, scholars have sought to read Bourdieu in more dynamic ways. This includes, most prominently, Lahire’s work on dispositions (Lahire, 2003), as well as more recent contributions in the sociology of education that aim at grasping the complexity of subject formation under conditions of inequality (Manzano et al., 2026). This paper adds to these debates by bringing Bourdieu into dialogue with Judith Butler in order to develop a more differentiated account of educational upward mobility.

The paper draws on a biographical case study from a wider qualitative study on first-generation students in Austria (Petrik, 2025). Its empirical focus is the educational trajectory of a female student from a Turkish working-class family who enters university through a non-traditional route and encounters repeated forms of institutional and interpersonal devaluation. Methodologically, the paper works with biographical-narrative interview material and reconstructive interpretation. Theoretically, it asks how experiences of first-generation students can be understood when habitus-theoretical perspectives (Bourdieu, 1984) are connected to Butler’s account of subject formation (Butler, 1997).

Upward mobility is approached as a contradictory process of subjectivation unfolding in the tension between recognition and resistance. Bourdieu makes it possible to grasp how students’ dispositions are shaped by classed histories and how universities privilege forms of cultural ease and familiarity that first-generation students are less likely to inherit. Butler helps to sharpen the analysis of how students are called into being through powerful acts of interpellation: as deficient, unsuitable, extraordinary, or legitimate. This perspective directs attention to the question of how first-generation students become intelligible as students, how they are positioned within the university, and how they negotiate injurious and enabling interpellations.

The dialogue between Bourdieu and Butler proves particularly productive when approached through two concepts: dispositions and fields. Dispositions shape receptivity to acts of interpellation in both Butler’s sense of psychic disposition and Bourdieu’s understanding of a system of socially formed dispositions. In their interplay, they condition whether subjects become susceptible to forms of address that reproduce educational inequality or to those that enable them to overcome educational barriers. Acts of interpellation, however, do not unfold on neutral terrain. They are embedded in specific biographical, institutional, and social contexts that correspond to the social space. Bringing field theory into dialogue with a theory of subjectivation therefore allows educational transitions by upwardly mobile students to be analysed as powerful processes in which social (non-)reproduction and subject formation are mutually constituted.