Abstract
This chapter draws on Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’ as both focus of analysis and analytical method to examine how an elite girls’ school in Scotland shapes its students’ aspirations by producing intellectually able, socially connected and self-reflective young women. Taking a hybrid approach, we extend our analyses by drawing on theorizations of space and time, agency, affect and reflexivity to understand the intensive institutional discursive and affective work to intertwine school and family. Insights are gained on how this school habitus works spatio-temporally, extending and usually successfully aligning with its students’ anterior family habitus, to produce agentic and assuredly optimistic orientations. Informed by our earlier studies on girls’ elite schooling in England and Scotland and analysing data from our current UK-based Leading Women Study, we make a case for our ‘Bourdieu-plus’ bricolage which loosely couples Bourdieu’s concepts with those of other social theorists. This approach, we argue, is generative of new and more nuanced insights on how habitus fosters and embeds aspirations.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | International Perspectives on Theorizing Aspiration : Applying Bourdieu’s Tools |
| Editors | Garth Stahl, Derron Wallace, Ciaran Burke, Sten Threadgold |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Publication date | 2018 |
| Pages | 161-174 |
| Chapter | 10 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9781350040335 |
| Publication status | Published - 2018 |
Keywords
- Faculty of Social Sciences
- bourdieu
- aspirations
- Social class
- elite education