Session Information
SES F 04, Paper Session
Paper Session
Contribution
Influential surveys on education like PISA in particular identified students of colour or certain ‘ethnic groups’ as over-represented in lower educational tracks. However, it is quite difficult to track the educational underachievement of students of colour back to forms of concrete discrimination in school. Several studies on institutional discrimination or racism were necessary (Feagin/ Booher Feagin 1986, Gillborn 1995, Gillborn/Youdell 2000, Gomolla/Radtke 2007) to reveal how routines and implicit normalities in school can shape learners’ identities as much as their educational achievements.
This paper provides a biographical perspective on such processes of institutional discrimination, in order to empirically reconstruct how students of colour constitute their selves under potentially discriminatory circumstances. I focus on how student subject positions are shaped in, and through schooling processes. Inquiring the constitutions of self from a biographical perspective helps to uncover subtle mechanisms of racism and classism from a subjective point of view and their individual and concrete consequences.
The analysis is underpinned by a Foucauldian understanding of discourse and Butler’s concept of subjection. The concept of subjection implies a subject who is constituted through the productive power of discursive practices (Butler 1997a). Butler adapts Althusser’s model of “interpellation” (Althusser 1971) and Derrida’s idea of “iteration” (Derrida 1988) to suggest that a subject is simultaneously enabled and constrained through discourse (see also Butler 1997b, 1993). Subjection therefore offers a limited or derivative agency for the subject who needs to be interpellated to become recognizable and social: This agency is preserved in the option of failing to reinstate the norm “in the right way” (Butler 1997a: 28). A theoretical framework like this insists on the (potentially discriminatory) limitations supplied by discursive everyday practices without fully rejecting the abilities of agency.
Based on biographical interviews with young men of colour in their early twenties, my analysis focuses on such interpellations and their potential discriminatory impact on student’s constitution of self, especially in becoming ‘migrants’ or ‘others’. The discussion of data draws on approaches in educational biographical research, indicating dominant biographical structures and their transformation in single case studies (see Marotzki 1990, Koller 1999). In combining a theoretical framework that suggests the dominance of discourse with more agency-centred biographical perspectives, both discriminatory limitations and creative individual answers can be analysed.
Due to the intensely qualitative nature of biographical case studies, general conclusions are rare. But contrasting two case studies highlights how the fact of visibility normalizes and forms the space in which student selves are mapped: One man is shaped as opponent ‘other’ in a vital process of interpellation and identification facing discrimination regularly while the other one is shaped as an ‘invisible migrant’ due to his strong acculturation. Though none of these discursive practices can be identified as directly causing specific biographical identifications they give an idea of the hegemonic knowledge and speech reproduced in school settings. It is not only schooling, but also the complex interplay of relationships in family, community and schools that seem to shape these subject positions in a particular manner.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Althusser, Louis (1971): Ideology and Ideological State Apparatures. in: Althusser, L.: Lenin and Philosophy, (trans.) B. Brewster, New York/ London, pp 127-187. Butler, Judith (1993): Bodies That Matter. On the Diskursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York/ London. Butler, Judith (1997a): Excitable Speech. A Politics of the Performative. New York/ London. Butler, Judith (1997b): The Psychic Life of Power. Theories in Subjection. Stanford. Derrida, Jacques (1982): Signature Event Context. in: Derrida, J. (ed.) Margins of Philosophy. (trans.) A. Bass, Chicago, pp 307-330. Feagin, Joe and Booher-Feagin, Clarence (1986): Discrimination American Style. Institutional Racism and Sexism. Malabar. Gillborn, David (1995): Racism and Antiracism in Real Schools. Theory, Policy, Practice. Buckingham. Gillborn, David and Youdell, Deborah (2000): Rationing Education. Policy, Practice, Reform and Equity. Buckingham. Gomolla, Mechthild and Frank-Olaf Radtke (2007): Institutionelle Diskriminierung. Die Herstellung von ethnischer Differenz in der Schule. Wiesbaden. Harding, Jennifer (2006): Questioning the Subject in Biographical Interviewing. Sociological Research Online, vol. 11/3. Koller, Hans-Christoph (1999): Bildung und Widerstreit. Zur Struktur biographischer Bildungsprozesse in der (Post-) Moderne. München. Rose, Nadine (2004): Grenzgänge. Bildungstheoretische Überlegungen zur Herstellung von Fremdheit im Kontext von Migration. Unveröffentlichte Diplomarbeit an der Universität Hamburg. Marotzki, Winfried (1990): Entwurf einer strukturalen Bildungstheorie. Biographietheoretische Auslegung von Bildungsprozessen in hochkomplexen Gesellschaften. Weinheim. Schütze, Fritz (1987): Biographieforschung und narratives Interview. In: Neue Praxis 13 (1983), pp. 283 - 293.
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