Conference Program

Global education systems have experienced significant structural transformation as corporatised reform imperatives increasingly penetrate the field of public education (Lingard and Hursh, 2019). Privatisation agendas have progressively displaced democratic logics, installing market-oriented doxa as the organising principle of educational governance (Gunter et al., 2016). This reconfiguration has transferred legitimate authority away from democratically constituted institutions toward corporate actors, whose accumulated economic capital affords disproportionate symbolic power in shaping educational policy trajectories (Au and Ferrare, 2015).

This paper explores the hysteresis effect and the symbolic violence experienced by parents engaged in decision-making within the empowered and public spaces of a corporatised school governing body in England. Specifically in England, the field conditions structuring school governance have become simultaneously corporatised and professionalised (Hetherington and Forester, 2025a; Healey, 2024), producing a systematic privileging of skill over stake (Simkins et al., 2019). Subsequently, valorising particular parents in participating in school decision-making, reproducing the dominance of white, middle-class professionals across both the formal empowered and informal public spaces of governance (Kultz, 2021; Reay, 2004; Hetherington and Forester, 2025b), and generating fundamental questions concerning whose voice legitimately represents the local (Woods et al., 2014).

I draw on Bourdieu’s concepts of field, habitus and hysteresis to explain and theorise the positioning of parents in the field and their response to misrecognition and associated symbolic violence. I argue that those privileged and valorised parents navigating the corporatised field of school governance having the dispositions and symbolic capital to enter the field successfully accumulating further capital and positioning themselves higher in the field. Those others or marginalised parents from subordinated communities, find their dispositions and capital out of place in the field, experiencing both the hysteresis effect and misrecognition of their capital, experiencing significant symbolic violence. Symbolic violence in the form of anti-democratic, civilising and silencing practices is metered out to all parents, irrespective of their illusio for the game. Furthermore, I argue that the response to this symbolic violence is dependent on individual parents’ historical trajectories, habitus and capital. This argument is revealed through the analysis of data from the accounts of three parents contributing to the decision-making in school governance. The data originated from a wider study exploring alternatives to corporatised models of school governance in neoliberal contexts of education (Hetherington and Forester, 2025b).

Using hysteresis in this way allows me to make significant and original empirical and theoretical contributions to the field. Thinking with Bourdieu, firstly I contribute that parents navigate hysteresis, misrecognition and symbolic violence, whether acquired to the field (Healey, 2024) or not. Secondly, symbolic violence, I argue, is mandated through inculcated corporatised leadership practices, is designed to advance the orthodoxy of dominant field structures, reinforcing dominant field positions whilst further subordinating others. Significantly and finally drawing on Bourdieu and his lacuna regarding individual acts of resistance, I argue that the concept of hysteresis be expanded to include notions of agentic resistance, habitual reflexivity and postulate a habitus of resistance.

The object of the study concerns interventions aimed at newly arrived highly educated migrants in Sweden. I have investigated participants attending a so-called ‘establishment program’, with the optimistic designation ‘The fast track’.

From a theoretical point, the individuals’ encounter with the establishment program, ‘The fast track’, is seen through the lens of Abdelmalek Sayad: the immigrant must be understood in relation to his or her previous emigrant status (Sayad 1999). As Sayad clearly points out, the immigrant is above all a migrant whose social history sets the conditions for immigration. Pierre Bourdieus’s concept habitus (Bourdieu 1980), is used in the study to understand the forced habitus transformation that migrants experience during their establishment in a new community.

The empirical material consists of 60 interviews with newly arrived academics. The time during ‘The fast track’ invoked to a great extent their shared experience of not being Swedish. ‘The emigrant’ was given little space or none at all. For the participants, their educational background is important, which can be understood in terms of a matter of honour, where education is the resource that makes one honorable and that one hopes will be recognised in the new country. The participants wish to rehabilitate their cultural capital with the emigrant’s feeling that the background is important, but learn to cope with being just an immigrant. In general, education is closely connected to cultural values and traditions, but this link is here decoupled, which leads to a process of misrecognition of the immersion of education in culture.

To handle a group of individuals from different parts of the world, with various needs, the solution becomes an acculturation process in ‘the Swedishness’ which at the same time means a deculturation process for the migrants, in short a forced habitus transformation process.

Higher education has undergone a massive expansion in recent decades. However, dropout rates remain high. In countries within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development one-third of students who enroll in university drop out (Aina et al. 2022). Studies identifying individual factors contributing to dropouts, such as health, finances, and academic capacity (e.g., Li & Carroll 2020, Von Hippel & Hofflinger 2021), have been complemented by research acknowledging the importance of contextual factors (Behr et al. 2021). Yet there is a lack of studies that consider the status and position of an education program within the field of higher education.

Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of fields, strategies, and capital (Bourdieu, 1996; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992) this study explores throughput and dropout in preschool and primary teacher education programs in Sweden. These programs were characterised by low throughput and a subordinate position within the field of higher education. The aim of the study is to examine how throughput and dropout are related to the positions of the programs within the field of higher education and to the educational strategies of students attending the programs.

The study is based on 47 interviews with students and staff at the preschool and primary teacher programs at Uppsala University. Most of the interviews were carried out digitally and lasted 50–60 minutes. The themes for the student interviews were the students’ professional and educational backgrounds, pathways to and expectations of the teacher program, experiences of the studies, views on the preschool and primary teaching profession, and experiences of dropped studies. Interviews with educational officials focused on student throughput and dropout. The interviews were analysed using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke 2022).

The study offers three key insights. First, a significant gap existed between students’ expectations of easy program completion and the actual demands. This gap was fuelled by the programs’ marginalised status in higher education alongside staff efforts to uphold educational quality. Second, students with relatively much cultural and social capital developed educational strategies in which they collaborated with each other to bridge this gap. Lastly, staff efforts to protect education quality, and the strategies of well-resourced students created internal tracking systems that instigated dropout among less-resourced students.
The results resonate with previous Bourdieusian research which indicates that students lacking social and cultural capital are more likely to drop out (Thomas 2002, Lehmann 2007, Longden 2004, Romito et al. 2020). However, the study develops this by identifying that a scarcity of resources not only fosters a sense of alienation within the higher education system but also that students with more capital may distance themselves from those with fewer resources, thereby possibly contributing to their risk of dropping out. This distancing serves both to manage the resource rich students’ own academic commitments and to protect the status of the preschool and teacher program and the preschool and teacher profession.

This paper examines educational inequalities through the case of Southern Italian migrations to the North (Italy and Europe), developing a Bourdieusian and intersectional framework to analyse how territorial origin shapes social recognition, educational trajectories, and opportunities for social mobility. In particular, the paper highlights the role of territorial stigma in reproducing inequalities and constraining opportunities for social change within educational systems. Drawing on documented micro-aggressions against “new Southern Italian migrants,” the paper examines how these stereotypes have persisted over time—becoming more latent yet remaining deeply effective in structuring social reality and producing forms of structural exclusion (Mazzola et al., 2019; Veneziano Labanca et al., 2025; Berti & Zanotelli, 2008).

In the Italian context, historical North–South divides and entrenched anti-Southern racism manifest in unequal access to educational opportunities, including educational services, underinvestment in school infrastructure in the South, and higher levels of educational poverty. This divide also persists in more recent educational migrations, including at the university level. In this context, migration has often functioned as a strategy for social mobility, with individuals and families moving to Northern Italy or Northern Europe in pursuit of better educational and economic opportunities.

The theoretical framework integrates Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice with insights from social stratification and migration sociology. While Bourdieu documented the reproduction of inequalities through habitus, symbolic power, and different forms of capital, this paper extends his framework to a geographical dimension by conceptualizing Geographic Capital as a distinct form of capital. Geographic Capital interacts with cultural and symbolic capital, is field-dependent, closely tied to social class and gender, and operates through mechanisms of symbolic violence that structure recognition and legitimacy within educational contexts. This approach allows us to integrate social class, gender, and territorial origin as interdependent axes shaping educational outcomes, highlighting how inequalities are reproduced within schooling.

The concept emerges from structural inequalities both within the nation-state and across European regions, helping to explain the “territorial penalty” observed in historical internal migrations of the 1960s as well as in more recent mobility patterns, including second-generation educational outcomes (Badino, 2014; Berti & Zanotelli, 2008; Ceravolo et al., 2011; Panichella, 2014, 2018; Romito, 2012). By positioning geographic origin as a central axis of inequality within an intersectional perspective, the paper combines decolonial and gender analyses with Bourdieusian sociology (Bourdieu, 1972; Kimberlé Crenshaw, 1989; Conelli, 2022; Chambers, 2014; Giuliani, 2011; Mezzadra, 2002). Historical patterns of internal migration and the formation of peripheral neighbourhoods demonstrate how territorial stigma and layered social networks are reproduced across generations, shaping educational aspirations, trajectories, and opportunities for mobility.

The key contribution of the paper is both conceptual and analytical. Geographic Capital provides a tool to understand how territorial origin mediates recognition, capital convertibility, and social trajectories within educational fields. By foregrounding the spatialized dimension of inequality, the paper contributes to debates on the reproduction of educational inequalities and offers insights for addressing persistent territorial disparities in contemporary European education.

Neoliberal restructuring has shifted welfare provision from state responsibility to a market-driven model involving private actors (Harvey, 2005; Jessop, 2002). This has transformed the management and understanding of social issues. Increasingly, entrepreneurial actors are seen as key drivers of innovation and responsibility within evolving policy networks (Rose, 1999; Ball, 2012). Social entrepreneurship that creates social value through different business methods, positions private providers as essential in addressing gaps within the welfare system (Dees, 1998). However, as Bandinelli (2020) observes, the term 'social enterprise' captures a tension between market-oriented profit motives and traditional public sector norms. This raises questions about how social entrepreneurs reconcile such tensions and what their motivations can reveal about the welfare state more generally.

In this presentation, we aim to address these questions by listening to private actors in the Swedish School Health Service (SHS) field. In Sweden, all students must have access to SHS, including medical, psychological, psychosocial and special‑education support. Private actors offer their services to schools and principal organisers who struggle with the complexities of various health promotion strategies and preventative measures, addressing increasing problems such as declining mental health, bullying, absenteeism, and low academic achievements. Services may include staffing, CPD, methods, programmes, and digital tools (Lindgren et al, forthcoming).

The presentation analyses interviews with 18 private SHS actors representing companies with varying sizes and focus. The interviews addressed how the private actors described their work, mission, aims and experiences from collaborating with schools and the principal organisers.

To analyse the interviews, we draw on the notion of illusio, i.e. the collective conviction that the stakes within a particular field are worthwhile (Bourdieu & Wacquant,1992). Illusio describes a practical engagement, interest, and emotional investment that connect individuals to the field, rendering their involvement meaningful.

The tentative results show that the private actors act based on a distinctive illusio, shaped by a mix of economic, symbolic, moral, and professional motivations. They pursue expansion and contracts, and they seek legitimacy and recognition from schools and principal organisers. They are committed to narratives of care, child wellbeing, and social responsibility, and their engagement is characterised by expertise, evidence-informed practices, and innovation. Their convictions help explain why they prioritise branding that prioritise care over commerce, accept regulation and share professional norms, tolerate slim profits, and present expansion as a means rather than merely an end. Taken together, we argue that illusio offers a powerful theoretical tool to analyse SHS as hybrid welfare–market field, where economic, professional, moral, and regulatory logics are intertwined.

The SHS field is a “state-constructed market” (cf Bourdieu, 2014), and the results display a close relationship between state policy and actors’ illusio. Regulation and procurement practices thus serve to produce the ideals and stakes worth believing in. In sum, these results provide important insights to understand the transformation of the welfare state, including how the dominance of New Public Management has colonised and instrumentalised professional domains – a situation where a social entrepreneurship-career may constitute an alternative and even an act of resistance.

This contribution starts from a question that emerged from the encounter with students' metaphors and silences: what are we really evaluating when we measure school experience? Behind grades, learning outcomes, and standardized performances, what remains unheard?

Drawing on a school guidance project launched in 2024 involving over 300 high school students in Italy, the paper explores how a performative logic pervades contemporary school experience. The interpretations presented are not imposed from above but emerge from a situated, participatory process based on students’ responses to open-ended questionnaires, revisited in classroom workshops, and negotiated with students through dialogue. This methodological approach ensures that students' voices are not merely illustrated but actively shape the analysis.

The findings suggest that performative pressures operate on two interconnected fronts: emptying the future of orientation while crushing the present under the weight of bureaucratic, impersonal, and relentless evaluation. On one side, the future becomes evanescent. Students describe school as an "exercise bike" on which they "pedal a lot but remain stationary", a "hell where, at the end of it all, there is light", a "roundabout" where, not knowing which direction to take, they "keep going round in circles". They invest effort without real belief and work without a clear horizon. When asked about their dreams and their likely future jobs, a consistent gap emerges: the multiplicity of possible futures (MotoGP racing, K-pop idol, tattooing) collides with the pragmatism of the "Plan B" (kindergarten teacher, choreographer). The future is not a project but a source of anxiety – too distant, too uncertain, too abstract to grasp.

On the other side, the present is saturated with judgment. Students' most difficult moments are almost always moments of evaluation: the first failure ("the first 3.5"), the accumulation of tests, the threat of being held back. The pervasiveness of evaluative anxiety extends beyond grades to the very relationship with teachers: students describe being "targeted", "humiliated", "abandoned". One student, reflecting on a teacher's comment – "what kind of man will you become?" – adds: "I would kill myself if I were held back." Another recalls: "no teacher wanted to help me, and I felt abandoned to myself."

In this context, authenticity – understood in a Sartrean sense as the capacity to assume responsibility for one's own choices and future – becomes a fragile and conflictual process. Students are asked to project themselves into an uncertain future while being constantly judged in a present they struggle to inhabit.

This paper presents an original theorisation of class-based inequality in higher education (HE) by integrating Pierre Bourdieu’s "Theory of Practice" with the concept of "temporal fields." Drawing upon findings from a study at a Russell Group institution in England, we argue that the modern university continues to function as a middle-class space that strategically excludes working-class agents through affective experiences. While other Bourdieusian analysis has focused on "hysteresis"—the lag between habitus and field—we contend that the academic field is a dynamic "temporal field" where the "rules of the game" are increasingly structured by accelerated pace and long-term strategic horizons by players within a specific field. Bourdieusian scholarship emphasises "hysteresis" as an externalised lag between habitus and field, this paper shifts the analytical focus toward the internal “time-space" of the class-mobile agent (Keil, 2023). We propose that this exclusion is best understood through a shared structural homology between staff and students, manifested in a "cleft habitus" (Bourdieu, 2002) that operates as a temporal bridge between a persistent past and a desired academic future.

This paper presents initial findings from methods utilising staff-student research events, specifically "Story Circles" which saw staff and students discussing their experiences of being working-class in a shared space. Our research reveals a profound structural homology: working-class staff and students face strikingly similar barriers to belonging and success, despite their differing hierarchical positions within these elite spaces. Both groups inhabit a "cleft habitus" characterised by a fractured sense of identity and the constant emotional labour of navigating an alien cultural terrain.

Our research reveals a profound structural homology: working-class staff and students face strikingly similar barriers to belonging, despite their differing hierarchical positions. We theorise this experience through an "in-between temporal space"—a state of "in-between-status" generated by the cleft habitus. This space acts as a site of collision between the primary habitus’s affinity for the past and the secondary habitus’s orientation toward a desired academic future. Crucially, the desired academic future is based on unknown changes within spaces responsible for symbolic violence and disruptive, affective experiences (Threadgold, 2020). This internal "time-space" is where the "transfuge" (Köbli, 2025) negotiates the tension between the "notion of the possible" rooted in their origins and the "logic of practice" demanded by the elite field. By positioning the cleft habitus as a temporal bridge, we illuminate how agents manage a "doubled temporality": a persistent loyalty to class roots alongside the strategic cultivation of a future-oriented academic self. This theorisation aims to move beyond reproduction to capture the active, temporal "becoming" of the class-mobile agent.