In the context of the conference theme, my research question asks 'how can sociologists understand parents' moral engagements with primary schools, as both forms of social reproduction and signals of alternative forms of engagement that escape repressive, neo-liberal and conservative education logics? This paper draws upon case studies of parenting in diverse Irish primary school communities. It uses both Bourdieusian and Deleuzian analytical tools to understand (a) embodied normative moral tendencies in parent-school engagements towards the reproduction of classed, racialised and religioned positions and (b) the potential for horizontal embodied relations, which defy and evade such forms of reproduction, to be articulated. The study is concerned with the visual dimension to moral embodied subject formation, focusing on the creation of parent subjects who must ‘choose’ a particular school according to a particular moral logic. Visual moral subject formation (Skeggs 2005) involves the negotiating of images and narratives of schools that address certain types of parents, articulate certain moral norms and ‘tastes’, and reproduce middle class, gendered and racialised forms of habitus (Bourdieu 1984).

Behind the rhetoric of choice and moral authenticity, paradoxes are common for parents when navigating school decisions (Wilkins 2010, 2011). For example, white parents’ well-intentioned commitments to community schooling and ethnic diversity can work to accrue their child social and cultural capital. Thus as Reay et al. (2008) demonstrate, is not possible to simply to categorise a particular logic for choosing a school as good. The same ambiguity around how bodies experience moral norms is apparent when examining the apparently ‘bad’ logics of choice, individualism and meritocracy. For example, Mirza’s (2009, 16) work with black females in British education notes the irony “that… (black females’) outwardly individualistic ideology which centres around the notion of credentialism and meritocracy, expressed in the desire for personal academic qualifications, should engender a collective social movement (for black female education)”. From a Bourdieusian perspective, we can see these subjective moral investments in education as implicated in objective processes of maintaining and advancing position and distinction. Such processes are struggles for legitimation, recognition or symbolic power. Being able to dictate aesthetic rules (or field boundaries) that are favourable to one’s specific composition of capitals is in everyone’s interest, even when one’s moral stance(s) appear disinterested in material or symbolic gain.

It is argued parent visual moral subject formation is dependent on the strategic deployments of dichotomous moral logics (e.g. ‘choice’ of child over community, religious over secular), which tend towards individualising and reproducing white-Irish, adult, middle class, gendered and/or Catholic-centric positions and corresponding disadvantages. However, Deleuze’s concern with the always-limiting, hierarchising normativity of moral logics offers a significant means of understanding parent ‘choices’ differently. Whereas morality involves struggles over relatively predefined, normative principles, ethics is concerned with life itself: with the potential for heterogeneous embodied encounters to alter political dynamics. Beasley-Murray (2010, 190) argues the key difference between Bourdieu and Deleuze’s work is that “(w)here Deleuze emphasizes escape and a flight toward the immanent virtuality of affect as an empowering relation of what the body can do, for Bourdieu the immanence of habitus is characterised above all by inertia”. A Deleuzian analysis is used to alternatively understand parents’ bodies as constituted through mobile, ontologically non-reproductive assemblages of affective (visual) relations, which becomes arranged in not simply hierarchical, but also horizontal ways. I argue that while the force of particular moral logics frequently capture parents in market, choice logics and processes of dis/advantage reproduction, the lived ethics or 'becomings' of this assemblage may evade or work in-between such habitualised, dichotomous moralities, and offers possibilities for perceiving and pursuing alternative, horizontal cultures of parent-school engagement. 

Anderson, K. (2010) Irish secularization and religious Identities: Evidence of an emerging new Catholic habitus: Social Compass 57(1): 15-39. Beasley-Murray, J. (2010) Posthegemony: Political theory and Latin America, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Translated by R. Nee. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari.(1983) 2004. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (French: 1972). Translated by R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. R. Lane. London: Continuum. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. (1987) 2004. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Translated by B. Massumi. London: Continuum. Gearon, L. (2012) European religious education and European civil religion. British Journal of Educational Studies 60 (2): 151-169. Skeggs, B. (2005). The making of class and gender through visual moral subject formation. Sociology 39(5): 965–982. Mirza, H. S. (2009) Race, gender and educational desire: Why black women succeed and fail. London: Routledge. Wilkins, A. (2010) Citizens and/or consumers: mutations in the construction of concepts and practices of school choice, Journal of Education Policy 25(2): 171-189. Wilkins, A. (2011) School choice and the commodification of education: A visual approach to school brochures and websites. Critical Social Policy 32(1): 69-86.