TY - CHAP

T1 - Bourdieu Plus

T2 - Understanding the Creation of Agentic, Aspirational Girl Subjects in Elite Schools

AU - Forbes, Joan

AU - Maxwell, Claire

PY - 2018

Y1 - 2018

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

KW - Faculty of Social Sciences

KW - bourdieu

KW - aspirations

KW - Social class

KW - elite education

M3 - Book chapter

SN - 9781350040335

SP - 161

EP - 174

BT - International Perspectives on Theorizing Aspiration

A2 - Stahl, Garth

A2 - Wallace, Derron

A2 - Burke, Ciaran

A2 - Threadgold, Sten

PB - Bloomsbury Academic

ER -