A HUN-REN Társadalomtudományi Kutatóközpont (MTA Kiváló Kutatóhely) 

Szociológiai Intézete 

tisztelettel meghívja 152. Jour Fixe eseményére

 

Poor Roma boys - Cleft habitus as an intersectional tool for understanding educational inequalities
 

Előadó: Erőss Gábor (HUN-REN TK SZI)

Hozzászólók: Neményi Mária (HUN-REN TK SZI, Professor Emerita);  Hadas Miklós (HUN-REN KRTK külső munkatárs)

Időpont: 2025. április 24. csütörtök 13:00

Helyszín: Az eseményt hibrid formában tartjuk meg.

Személyesen: Szociológiai Intézet 1097 Budapest Tóth Kálmán utca 4.;  B.1.15 tárgyaló

Online: Zoom link: 

HAMAROSAN

Absztrakt:

Pierre Bourdieu the sociologist left little room for race and gender, but Pierre Bourdieu the anthropologist and the autobiographer offers us key tools for understanding the complexity, i.e. the intersectional nature of educational inequalities. Thus, this article has a triple approach: (1) East-Central Europe as a highly relevant field for empirical studies of the interaction of class, race/ethnicity, and gender; (2) the focus on early childhood education where complex educational inequalities emerge; as well as (3) Bourdieu’s concept of cleft habitus reinvented as a heuristic tool for the study of complex school inequalities.

Thus, in this article I will show that Bourdieu, from The Logic of Practice, where he states that the generative principles of habitus derive from “the structure of relations between the groups, the sexes or the generations, or between the social classes” (p. 95.), to the elaboration of the concept of habitus clivé, a “cleft habitus, inhabited by tensions and contradictions.” (Bourdieu 2008, p. 100.) and many more, especially his Weight of the world (see Derek Robbins, 2004) opened up a field of concomitant analysis of class, race and gender. Bourdieu studied ethnicity and gender in the Algerian context (Algerian sketches, 2013) and in the French one, as he understood himself, a stigmatised young man in Paris coming from the countryside, talking a dialect, as a product of cultural alterity (Esquisse pour une auto-analyse, 2004). Bourdieu’s follower, Didier Eribon (Returning to Reims, 2019) outlined a theory of plural habitus (M. Hadas, 2021) in an autobiographic context, where his working class habitus and sexual orientation as an LGBT+ person interact in the course of his educational career. Sam Friedman also highlights that “the concept of a divided habitus, or habitus clivé, may be particularly useful for understanding [social] mobility experience” in various contexts (The Sociological Review, Volume 64 Issue 1).

The empirical basis of the article will cover early childhood education in Hungary as well as the kindergarten-school transition, with glancing out to other East-Central European countries where Roma children make up a significant part of school population (G. Eröss, in Kathy M. Anderson-Levitt, 2012).

The case of middle class Roma students in Budapest kindergartens shows that race and class have a complex relationship. Also, the unequal spatial distribution of various factions of the lower class highlights the fact that inequalities are both vertical (hierarchy) and horizontal (segregation). Moreover, Roma and non-Roma lower class students vary in their attitudes towards illness and thus school attendance. Finally, cleft habitus, i.e. the inherent contradictions of a socially constructed self, based simultaneously on class, race, age and gender, leads to complex distribution patterns of students via SEN-categorisation, e.g. the labelling of lower class and/or Roma boys as SEN, ‘potentially SEN’ or even as ‘dangerous’, as early as at the age of 6, whereas the gender-biased perception of lower class Roma girls devalues them around the age of 13, labelling them at risk of teen motherhood.