This article examines how parents with immigrant backgrounds exercise agency through school choice and how these choices illuminate broader processes of inclusion, exclusion, and belonging within contemporary European education systems. Focusing on the Swedish context, the study addresses the following research questions:

1. How do parents with immigrant backgrounds reason about and justify their choice of school for their children?

2. How do these school-choice decisions reveal and negotiate symbolic and structural boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in the host society?

Rather than treating school choice as a purely instrumental or market-driven decision, the study conceptualises it as both a practical and moral act through which parents seek educational quality, safety, and cultural and religious recognition. These questions are highly relevant across Europe, where education systems increasingly function as key sites for managing diversity, integration, and social cohesion.

The analysis is grounded in Jeffrey C. Alexander’s civil sphere theory, with particular emphasis on his typology of modes of incorporation: assimilation, hyphenation, and multicultural incorporation. This theoretical framework enables an examination of how inclusion operates not only through formal rights and access, but also through symbolic recognition, moral evaluation, and everyday practices. Education is theorised as an interstitial institution within the civil sphere—situated between the state, the market, and civil society—making it a critical arena for negotiating belonging in multicultural democracies. Applying civil sphere theory to immigrant parents’ school-choice practices extends European research on integration by highlighting how parents actively challenge assimilationist norms and advocate for multicultural forms of inclusion.

Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative, interpretive design based on semi-structured interviews with seven parents of immigrant background whose children attend a primary school in a segregated urban area of a major Swedish city. The parents have diverse migration trajectories, national origins, and educational backgrounds, reflecting patterns common across many European urban contexts shaped by post-migration diversity. Data collection included in-depth interviews and informal conversations focusing on school choice, parental engagement, experiences of recognition or exclusion, and perceptions of the education system. The analysis followed an abductive approach, combining deductive coding informed by civil sphere theory with inductive coding grounded in parents’ narratives.

The purpose of the discussion is to contribute to European and international debates on migration, education, and integration by foregrounding immigrant parents as agents of civil belonging rather than passive subjects of policy. The findings demonstrate how school choice functions as a strategy to secure recognition and protect children from marginalisation, while simultaneously revealing the limits of formal equality in education systems where majority cultural norms remain dominant. By situating Swedish empirical material within a broader European context, the article highlights how schools can operate as local civil spheres that either reinforce or challenge symbolic boundaries of belonging, offering insights relevant to policymakers, educators, and researchers concerned with inclusive education in diverse societies.

Alexander, J. C. (2006). The Civil Sphere. Oxford: Oxford University Press. This is the core theoretical reference. Alexander’s civil sphere theory and his typology of modes of incorporation (assimilation, hyphenation, multicultural incorporation) provide the main analytical framework for understanding school choice as a moral and symbolic act of belonging rather than a purely instrumental decision. Osman, A., & Månsson, N. (2015). Somali parents’ perception of the Swedish school. This study offers crucial empirical grounding by challenging deficit-oriented assumptions about immigrant parents’ involvement in education and highlighting structural and cultural barriers to recognition within Swedish schools. Antony-Newman, M. (2018). Parental involvement of immigrant parents. This work supports the paper’s argument that parental engagement is culturally mediated and often misrecognised by host-country schools, a finding highly relevant across European education systems. Lund, A., Osman, A., & Thunborg, C. (2026). Education, civil repair, and inclusion. This reference situates education as an interstitial institution within the civil sphere and strengthens the paper’s European and comparative relevance by linking schooling to processes of civil inclusion and exclusion.