Borderlines become effective not only at the edges of nation states but also in social systems, institutions, and the everyday life in the migration society. Schools are social spaces that are themselves crisscrossed by various borders. The effect of these boundaries in Austrian schools is particularly evident for children with German as second language, mostly when the educational and socio-economic resources in their families are low. (Biedermann et al. 2016) The school system in officially German speaking countries strongly support social segregation through early selection processes and institutional discrimination. (Gomolla 2015, Bruneforth et al. 2016) However, racism and evidence-based knowledge about the contribution of the education system to social inequality has rather intensified segregative strategies among schools and parents: Schools manage “difference” in order to attract privileged families. (Karakayali 2020) Despite iconographies of diversity and its celebration, public schools are motors of segregation. Further, intra-school segregation, the separation of pupils within a school, is a phenomenon that has hardly been researched or discussed publicly, both scientifically and academically. (Biedermann et al. 2016, Blaisdell 2016) By interrogating the dispositive of segregation from an intersectional perspective we ask how linguicism in particular shapes policies and strategies of segregation in Austrian schools. Based on discourse analysis (Foucault 1991) and autoethnographic work, on the one hand, we examine the micropolitics of segregation in urban schools. On the other hand, we introduce the scientific and political discourse on recent policies of segregation in language support: Policies such as the “Deutschförderklassen” (separated support classes for German language) are widely criticized for their segregative impact. (Dirim & Füllekruss 2019) In our conclusion we discuss the link between Austrian politics, structural discrimination, and the culture of segregation in schools.

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