D.07. Minorities Political Socialisation At School: Educational Inequalities And Critical Stances

The diversity of class, gender and race between pupils has been extendedly studied from the perspective of (re)production of educational inequalities. However, school can also be conceived as a socialisation agent and a place of everyday life where pupils meet people from new horizons. By bringing together individuals with diverse sociological backgrounds, schools inevitably reproduce tensions inherent in social, gender, and racial divisions. This encounter with otherness involves not only the heterogeneous group of pupils but also school actors (teachers, principals, counsellors) and families. Hence, the question arises regarding the consequence of the mix of mass schooling and persistent and transforming educational inequalities (of race, gender and class) on political socialisation.

This panel seeks to explore the processes of political socialisation arising from the subjective experience of educational inequalities. While the school system constructs distinctions and hierarchies among individuals, their transmission is not automatic. Facing the power of the institution, actors retain the capacity to critique, subvert, or attenuate the category of judgment. With this panel, we explore among other things what causes the shift between incorporation of the social, gendered and racial order to a more critical stance. How must the processes of political socialisation within minority groups in the school context be understood? Under which conditions does socialisation foster a critical stance toward the social, gendered and racial order? These are some of the questions this panel aims to analyse to improve our comprehension of the political dynamics occur during and after the school years.