To mix or not to mix? Exploring the dispositions to otherness in schools

Abstract

This paper discusses literature around school mix (the school’s social diversity) and school mixing (the interactions between students/parents from different backgrounds), and their possible relationship with the development of democratic dispositions. I draw on the current global context, which is moulded by a tension between national ideologies driven by democratic values and the challenges posed by increasing levels of social diversity. Studies addressing the possible effects of school mix argue that both democratic and exclusionary dispositions may emerge depending on the form heterogeneity takes, particularly depending on whether school mix is translated or not into school mixing. Based on Bourdieu’s concept of habitus or dispositions, the paper outlines an analytical framework to conceptualize the possibilities for democratic dispositions to emerge through the experience of social difference.

Introduction

Social diversity and cohesion have become notable subjects of concern globally, either because of the arrival of immigrants and/or refugees to a particular territory, or because of the increasing conflicts among the already-present ethnic and socioeconomic groups. In this context, how can democratic 21st-century countries respond to high levels of social diversity and promote social cohesion? And, specifically, what is the role played by the educational system? This paper explores a key element of these questions: the analysis of the micro-level of people’s everyday practices and beliefs to understand the possibilities for constituting more democratic societies. In particular, it deals with the theoretical resources that I am bringing to a study of socially diverse schools in Chile – whose data will not be presented here – hoping to contribute to the literature on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and social segregation/mixing. My aim is to discuss analytical tools to conceptualize the possibilities for democratic dispositions towards otherness to emerge through the experience of social difference in the school.

Next, I present relevant literature examining the relationship between social diversity or mix in educational institutions and the potential development of what I will discuss below as democratic dispositions, and how this relationship is mediated by concrete interactions or mixing practices. I also analyse literature around concrete micro-processes shaping the ways social diversity is experienced in schools; specifically, family practices and perceptions regarding school mix and mixing. I conclude with some general reflections about the potentialities of such a kind of analytical framework to address the challenges posed by social diversity in the current global context.

From mixed settings to mixing practices

There has been significant research on the consequences of students’ diversity, either emphasizing the possible positive or negative effects in terms of democratic learning for students, their families and, ultimately, the society. This topic has become an important focus of attention in societies currently experiencing growing social and cultural diversity, for example, as a result of global migration waves, currently a major concern in the case of Europe. However, this is not a new topic of interest. At the beginning of the 20th century, the US philosopher and educator John Dewey (1916) already recognized challenges associated with increasingly heterogeneous societies. He argued that socially diverse schools could contribute to strengthening democratic attitudes and democracy itself in societies with great diversity of populations.

For Dewey, public spaces like schools are key social environments which provide broader social relationships compared to the intimate social context of families, and would be essential for offering the individuals the ‘opportunity to escape from the limitations of the social group in which [they were] born’ (1916: 24). This would benefit subjects since more diverse social relationships would enable them to learn skills for social exchange, which in turn could contribute to the fostering of democracy and social equity. When the members of a society have the ‘opportunity to receive and to take from others’ (1916: 97), he argued, their interactions will promote particular changes in their habits, developing into more democratic ones, i.e. habits based on sharing a large variety of experiences and values, as well as on the recognition of mutual interests. In this framework, I understand democratic dispositions as schemes of feeling, thinking and acting based, on the one hand, on the recognition of the existing diversity of social groups and, on the other, on the commonalities across such diversity, allowing to go beyond the prosecution of a group’s interests and ‘their domestic concerns’ and connect ‘with a larger life’ (p. 99).

This philosophical approach finds support among recent empirical research on social diversity that argues for its benefits in preparing citizens to democratically participate in societies that are becoming more and more heterogeneous. For instance, Hurtado argues for the US context that ‘diversity in the student body provides the kind of experience base and discontinuity needed to evince more active thinking processes among students, moving from their own embedded worldviews to consider those of another (of their diverse peers)’ (2005: 598). Similarly, Wilson (2012), in the UK, argues that the cultural shock due to heterogeneous relationships may be productive for social dialogue (also Bottero, 2009). Thus, in line with Gordon Allport’s ‘contact hypothesis’ (1979), establishing socially diverse relationships is thought to contribute to reducing prejudices, learning to coexist with others and developing values such as mutual tolerance, respect, empathy and an inclusive attitude (Allport, 1979; Amin, 2002; Garces and Jayakumar, 2014; Gurin et al., 2004; Hurtado, 2005; Janmaat, 2014; Pettigrew and Tropp, 2006; Rojas, 2009). In other words, ‘experiences with diversity educate and prepare citizens for a multicultural democracy’ (Gurin et al., 2004: 18). It has to be noted here that these values are not to be taken as synonyms. For example, Janmaat (2014) distinguishes between inclusive and tolerant attitudes arguing that the first understands inclusion as accepting the other as equal, but that this is not a necessary element of the second.

However, it has been argued that the existence of social heterogeneity (structural diversity as Gurin et al., 2002, call it) does not guarantee the emergence of these values (Janmaat, 2014; Neal and Vincent, 2013; Reay, 2007; Reay et al., 2011; Vincent and Ball, 2006). Heterogeneity may, on the contrary, induce negative and counterproductive effects: for example, racial tensions and micro-aggressions (Garces and Jayakumar, 2014), the isolation of particular groups and the consolidation of prejudices and antagonisms, reinforcing segregation (Posey-Maddox et al., 2014; Wilson, 2012). According to the so-called ‘conflict theory’ (e.g. Blalock, 1967), ethnic mix may foster intolerance and exclusionary practices towards immigrants:

the larger the proportion of the out-group in a given population is, the more the dominant group will feel threatened in this privileged position, culturally and economically, and consequently the more exclusionary and hostile it will become towards the out-group (Janmaat, 2014: 812).

For example, in focus groups with White British parents in one state school in Birmingham, UK, Wilson (2012) reveals that, despite the school celebrating the existence of a multicultural society, the participants perceived the erosion of the ‘English’ culture and felt anxious about losing their own identity.

Research has identified some elements modelling the possibilities for cultural change and development of inclusive values from a socially diverse setting. Particularly, it has been argued that it is necessary to pay attention to the conditions in which school mix takes place and how certain social interactions are shaped, this is, the way school mix (social diversity) is followed (or not) by school mixing (i.e. more intimate interactions rather than superficial encounters). In her quantitative analysis on the development of democratic skills and dispositions in nine public universities in the USA, Hurtado (2005) found that substantial and positive informal interactions with diverse students increased the probabilities to develop democratic skills and conflict resolution. Also, in the USA, Garces and Jayakumar contend that:

Rare or superficial interracial interactions are also not conducive to prejudice reduction because many people have biased judgements that result in a) perceiving that their observations support and justify pre-existing stereotypes…, b) attributing counter-stereotypical behavior to situational or circumstantial factors as opposed to personal characteristics… and c) rationalizing that an individual who strongly contradicts prevailing stereotypes is merely an ‘exception to the rule’ (2014: 120).

An important element conditioning how school mix takes place to produce segregation/mixing has to do with the institutional strategies in this respect. The assumption of studies on this area is that interaction with diverse people is more difficult and unlikely than interaction with similar ones, thus it has to be actively promoted (e.g. Garces and Jayakumar, 2014; Gurin et al., 2002, 2004; Hurtado, 2005), for example, through curricular (e.g. courses on social diversity and integration) and extra-curricular activities (e.g. inter-group dialog).

Following British geographer Ash Amin’s (2002) contributions on interculturalism, I argue that not only are schools potentially a key social space to provide broader social relationships compared to the intimate social context of families (Dewey, 1916), but also a potential critical threshold space of interdependence and habitual engagement, which makes meaningful interactions more likely: ‘the ideal sites for coming to terms with ethnic difference are where “prosaic negotiations” are compulsory, in “micropublics” such as the workplace, schools, colleges, youth centres, sports clubs’ (Amin, 2002: 969). As can be appreciated in the next quote, this mandatory component of interactions in schools is at the basis of daily local negotiations of difference and intercultural understanding, which are key elements for subjective change:

Habitual contact itself is no guarantor of cultural exchange. It can entrench group animosities and identities, through repetitions of gender, class, race, and ethnic practices. Cultural change in these circumstances is likely if people are encouraged to step out of their routine environment, into other everyday spaces that function as sites of unnoticeable cultural questioning or transgression. Here too, interaction is of a prosaic nature, but these sites work as spaces of cultural displacement. Their effectiveness lies in placing people from different backgrounds in new settings where engagement with strangers in a common activity disrupts easy labelling of the stranger as enemy and initiates new attachments. They are moments of cultural destabilisation, offering individuals the chance to break out of fixed relations and fixed notions, and through this, to learn to become different through new patterns of social interaction…, potentially more receptive to new influences and friendships (Amin, 2002: 970).

Similarly, Wilson argues that the diverse schools facilitate cultural interchange by encouraging the effort it involves. Thus, ‘the school is a space of potential transformation and one where many established assumptions are drawn into question precisely because of the sustained contact that they demand over a number of years’ (2012: 265).

Thus, this literature argues that the development of what I understand as democratic dispositions requires explicit efforts from the school staff, parents and students, in order to transform a mixed school into one where mixing practices take place. Next, I consider what the literature tells us about the micro-processes shaping mixing.

Living school mix: family negotiations of social difference

The importance that families give to peer group has been documented by several studies in different countries such as the UK (e.g. Gewirtz et al., 1995; Hollingworth and Mansaray, 2012; Papapolydorou, 2014; Vowden, 2012), the Netherlands (e.g. Boterman, 2013), France (e.g. van Zanten, 2003), the USA (e.g. Schneider and Buckley, 2002; Jencks et al., 1972), New Zealand (e.g. Ladd and Fiske, 2001) and Chile (e.g. Carrasco et al., 2015; Flores and Carrasco, 2013; Rojas, 2009). This body of research has analysed families’ attitudes towards degrees of diversity of school populations – generally in terms of social class and ethnic background – mostly focused on middle-classes, who are found to often seek a critical mass of others like them.

In general, research predominantly supports the prevalence of homophily (‘love towards the similar’) rather than mixophily (‘love towards the different’) (Bauman, 2003), which means that parents tend to choose schools where the populations have similar backgrounds to their own. A sense of anxiety has been identified among White middle-class parents, who appear to feel distaste for certain ethnic and socioeconomic ‘others’, especially working-class people. Some of the identified fears at the basis of this anxiety are: (a) the fear of their children losing their manners and values (Boterman, 2013; Rojas, 2009; Vowden, 2012); (b) the fear of their children being hindered by lower achieving students and of not fitting in (Boterman, 2013; Carrasco et al., 2015; Vowden, 2012); (c) the fear of being physically and/or psychologically damaged by ‘dangerous others’ (Vowden, 2012); and (d) the fear of being ‘derailed’ from the ‘right track’ (Carrasco et al., 2015). Furthermore, families express uncertainties around whether a mixed environment is able to offer ease and comfort: a diverse school is often perceived as a potentially uncomfortable space in which some parents and students may not fit, especially when they are a minority (Boterman, 2013; Reay et al., 2011; Vowden, 2012). The main concern here is ‘that their children might feel isolated and that they might find it harder to make friends’ (Vowden, 2012: 739), demonstrating that parents tend to think that friendship across difference is much harder than friendship within a homogeneous social environment, both for themselves and their children. These arguments add evidence regarding the barriers for school mix.

Notwithstanding the prevalence of homophily, studies reveal the existence of mixophily attitudes. For example, it is argued that certain urban middle-class families (e.g. Boterman, 2013; Neal and Vincent, 2013; Rojas, 2009; Vincent et al, 2015, 2017; Vowden, 2012) are particularly prone to ‘consume other cultures’ and value their children experiencing social difference as a way of developing multicultural capital, i.e. the ability to engage with people from different social and ethnic groups (Reay et al., 2011). In a dilemmatic and often anxious way (as the qualitative research shows), these families appear to value socially mixed schools but at the same time recognize risks and adopt strategies to guarantee the ‘right’ mix (Ball, 2003). ‘Love’ of social mix is not automatic and unrestricted but depends on the form mix takes. According to the literature, some of the elements defining the ‘right’ mix are:

1. The proportion of students from different backgrounds, with a tendency to prefer a higher proportion of families from their own social class and/or ethnic group (Boterman, 2013; Raveaud and van Zanten, 2007; Vowden, 2012).

2. The particular socioeconomic and ethnic groups co-existing in the school. For example, families from different backgrounds appear to be more prone to mix with people more socioeconomically advantaged (Ball, 1993; Chumacero et al., 2011; Elacqua and Fabrega, 2004; Flores and Carrasco, 2013; Gallego and Hernando; Hastings et al., 2007; Jellison, 2002; Ladd and Fiske, 2001; Lankford and Wyckoff, 2006; Raveaud and van Zanten, 2007; Saporito and Lareau, 1999).

3. The perceived cultural dispositions of the different families, that is, similar daily habits, moral values, routines and, particularly, expectations about education and future life conditions (Carrasco et al., 2015; Hollingworth and Mansaray, 2012; Reay et al., 2011; Vowden, 2012).

4. The setting where mix is experienced, as a result of parents’ strategies to limit the interaction with different others to certain spaces (e.g. the school) to keep some other ‘safe’ spaces in which to interact with similar people (Boterman, 2013; Jackson and Butler, 2014; Vincent et al., 2017).

In short, mixophily appears to be constrained by certain minimum conditions of homophily, by a basis of similarity either regarding positional (e.g. different ethnicity but the same social class) or dispositional aspects (e.g. different ethnicity but the same educational expectations).

Moreover, most of the reviewed studies show that mixing and cross-background friendships in socially diverse settings are relatively unusual, revealing more subtle segregation mechanisms even in apparently non-segregated spaces (Vincent et al., 2018). Instead, there is a propensity to establish differential associations (Bottero, 2005), that is, friendship in homogeneous groups, either with people of a similar social class and/or ethnic background (Asante and Nooral-Deen, 1984; Hollingworth and Mansaray, 2012; Schrieff et al., 2005, 2010; Smith and Moore, 2000).

For example, in a secondary school in the UK, Hollingworth and Mansaray (2012) identified a racialized use of the spaces during break and lunch time, each ethnic group having its territory: as a student described,

the cafeteria was all Black people and the outside all the White people would be on the veranda trying to sunbathe and stuff… Inside the lunch hall there’s generally the majority White people like having packed lunches or whatever (p. 7).

Even when the students attributed these divisions to the ‘normal’ clustering of students with different interests, the authors highlight them as a result of lifestyles structured according to social position, shaping – as a consequence – differential associations deeply rooted in social class and race distinctions. Thus, conviviality in this mixed school seems to rely on the management of social distance and, through it, to reinforce the social reproduction of intra-school differences between groups (‘us’ and ‘them’) rather than mixing and cohesion.

Vincent et al. (2018) also identify the perceived ‘naturalness’ of homogeneous clustering among different groups, including White British middle-class parents (of 8/9-year-old children), in three London socially diverse primary schools. Rather than a conscious and articulated stratagem of exclusiveness, homophily here appears as forming strong social networks of ‘people like me’: similar parents are perceived as ‘natural’ friends in a context of ‘normal’ horizontal diversity.

Beyond the educational field and drawing on local processes of urban segregation spatially, Butler and Robson (2003) created the concept of ‘social tectonics’, later revised as ‘elective belonging’ (Jackson and Butler, 2014) to explain the restricted contact between White middle classes and Black and working-class people in two localities in London. First, in Brixton, the authors found that even though the middle classes declared they valued living in a mixed neighbourhood, each group moved past each other in social space, living parallel lives, like tectonic plates; 11 years later, research in Peckham suggested that they did not simply ignore social and ethnic ‘others’ but that their presence had become a way to construct their own cosmopolitanism and to distinguish oneself from a more mainstream middle-class living in white homogeneous neighbourhoods. In fact, middle-class people actively negotiated an accommodation with social mix by tracing ambivalent articulations against and with the ‘others’ in concrete physical spaces, either avoiding or attending the places where they usually were, for example a shopping street called Rye Lane. The spatial boundaries defined by Rye Lane traced a symbolical space for subjectivity negotiations: a space in which White middle classes were able to symbolically place themselves in relation to others.

Applying Jackson and Butler’s (2014) contributions to the educational field is useful in order to understand social mixing not only as physical interaction but also as the production of narratives around who ‘the others’ and ‘us’ are. Within this framework, exploring the micro processes shaping mixing and the potential development of what I have called here democratic dispositions, requires the analysis of the dispositions to otherness and the processes of negotiation of difference at the basis of subjectivity formation, i.e. the relationship between the way ‘one’ imagines oneself and the way one imagines the ‘other’ (Neal and Vincent, 2013; Papapolydorou, 2014; Wilson, 2012).

Analysing the dispositions to otherness

I propose a theoretical framework to explore the mechanisms through which democratic dispositions may emerge in socially mixed schools. In particular, I analyse the concept of habitus or dispositions – i.e. subjective schemes of doing, thinking and feeling at the basis of people’s practices ¹ – developed by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu, 1984a, 1984b, 1986, 1990, 1998, 2001), along with other complementary theoretical resources, paying attention to the ways habitus may be altered through encounters with otherness.

Bourdieu conceptualizes the social world as a relational and stratified social space composed of different fields (educational, academic, economic, political, etc.) with differentiation principles according to which agents define their relative positions in each of these fields. Those positions are defined by the resources (social, cultural, economic and symbolic capitals) possessed by an agent, which delineate the probabilities of obtaining a particular benefit in a certain field with a specific capital species defined as valid in the field (e.g. whoever has more economic capital in the economic field will be better positioned in it). It is in association with social positions that Bourdieu defines subjective dispositions or habitus as ‘structured structures’ which are adapted to the possibilities and impossibilities inscribed in social position. As such, dispositions are a ‘socialized subjectivity’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 126) which tends to regularity. At the same time, they are also ‘structuring structures’ in that they work as generating principles which produce a range of attitudes and practices, to a degree unpredictable but limited in their diversity, so ‘mad’ or unlikely practices are excluded as unthinkable for particular actors. In this regard, the habitus defines limits to what is possible to perceive, to think and to do, and these limits are, in turn, the limits of the habitus’ historic and socially situated production, namely one’s past experiences.

In this framework, I wish to argue that while Bourdieu’s conceptualization opens both the possibility for stability and change of subjective dispositions, the concrete mechanisms at the basis of stability (importance of prior experiences) appear to be more clearly explained than those of change. Regarding the topic of this paper, his framing suggests the importance of analysing the families’ dispositions towards otherness in the school context in relation to the families’ social position (e.g. the parents’ educational level and incomes) and past experiences (e.g. the parents’ school experience), as well as with their experiences in other areas of their life (e.g. use of free time). However, it is less clear how to analyse the possibilities for habitus to change and, eventually, for the agent to develop dispositions that are not directly inscribed in social position. This is why I propose to complement Bourdieu’s conceptualization of habitus with additional theoretical resources discussing habitus disruption and reflexivity (Bottero, 2007, 2009, 2010; Decoteau, 2016; Farrugia and Woodman, 2015; Lahire, 2003; Mouzelis, 2008; Reay et al., 2009; Sweetman, 2003).

According to Bottero (2009) and Mouzelis (2008), the impression given by Bourdieu’s writing of the over-stability of habitus is a result of his neglect of substantive social networks. Despite stressing the relational nature of fields – understood as relations between positions – he does not focus on concrete interactions and intrinsic properties of groups. His interest in social capital is mostly based on the resources it provides (i.e. access to those capitals possessed by others); also, the prevalence of homophily is assumed, according to which agents tend to associate with others with similar social position and habitus, that is, following a pattern of differential association and elective belonging:

proximity in social space predisposes to closer relations: people who are inscribed in a restricted sector of the space will be both closer (in their properties and in their dispositions, their tastes) and more disposed to get closer, as well as being easier to mobilize (Bourdieu, 1998: 10–11).

This is due to the fact that Bourdieu attributes high importance to early experiences in life – mostly related to the intimate and socially homogeneous family context – to shape dispositions and to favour experiences likely to reinforce those dispositions: ‘the habitus tends to protect itself from crisis and critical challenges by providing itself with a milieu to which it is as pre-adapted as possible’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 61). In this scenario, habitus disruptions occur due to infrequent dissonances between habitus and field – a poor fit between position and disposition, and a consequent poor ‘feel for the game’ in a definite field (hysteresis, in Bourdieu’s terms). As such, these are defined by Bourdieu as moments of crisis that shape a cleft or divided habitus, that is, a habitus that is felt as contradictory and strange within a certain field (Bourdieu, 1999). As a consequence, the habitus has to abandon its taken for granted orientations and to become reflexive, calculating modes of operation (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). Thus, the assumed homogeneity in one’s own social world would act as a barrier for reflexivity:

The objective homogenizing of group or class habitus that results from homogeneity of conditions of existence is what enables practices to be objectively harmonized without any calculation or conscious references to a norm in the absence of any direct interaction or, a fortiori, explicit co-ordination (Bourdieu, 1990: 58–59).

In turn, further developments of Bourdieu’s concepts have argued that reflexivity sparked by a lack of fit between habitus and field may be understood not in terms of crisis but as a more and more habitual process characteristic of modern societies, where individuals transit through a number of varied social environments or fields. As a consequence, the habitus itself would become reflexive (Sweetman, 2003). Likewise, Reay and colleagues’ (Reay et al., 2009) research on working-class students in prestigious UK universities sustain that, due to previous experiences of not fitting in, often experienced as stressful, these students possess dispositions where reflexivity have become habitual, helping them to manage tensions between habitus and field.

It has also been argued that reflexivity is not only triggered by habitus/field mismatches but also by a reflexivity-oriented socialization (e.g. focused on the importance of self-knowledge) (Mouzelis, 2008) and/or by tensions between dispositions within an individual’s habitus (e.g. Decoteau, 2016; Farrugia and Woodman, 2015; Lahire, 2003; Mouzelis, 2008). In relation to the latter, habitus has not to be understood as a uniform and static concept but as complex and in constant restructuring, which is something that was acknowledged by Bourdieu, although not fully developed. Bottero highlights the role of intersubjective negotiation in this restructuring, that is the relational nature of habitus formation, in that ‘agents modify and reconstruct their dispositions throughout their lives, as they traverse different social contexts and contacts… [Thus] our practice is subject to the characteristics and dispositions of the (contingently variable) people around us’ (Bottero, 2009: 418). Therefore, in spite of the importance of early experiences, people’s dispositions continue being shaped by experiences with other people, as agents move through a variety of more or less heterogeneous social milieu. In this framework, disruptions of habitus – meaning ambiguities and ambivalences that may foster reflexivity and a critical distance from one’s own situation – are related to shifts in social connections. Hence, reflexivity is the ‘internalization of a dialogical process’ (Crossley, 1996: 47), the ‘incorporation of the role or perspective of the other within our own habitus’, so ‘habits fit into an ongoing dialogue between social agents and their world’ (Crossley, 2001: 112, 116, cited in Bottero, 2010: 12).

According to Lahire (2003), such a multi-socialization implies that an individual’s habitus is never completely unified or coherent but plural, as

depending on the people with whom an individual lives on a permanent or a temporary basis…, depending on the position he has in his relations with these people, or by virtue of what they do together…, his heritage of dispositions or competencies will be exposed to different influences of varying strength (p. 353).

Such situations of socialization may be more or less coherent/contradictory, affecting the relative coherence/contradiction between dispositions. Similarly, authors such as Reay (2004) and Decoteau (2016) understand habitus as a multi-layered and hybrid concept, respectively, in that ‘habituses are permeable and responsive to what is going on around them… [so] current circumstances are not just there to be acted upon, but are internalized and become yet another layer to add to those from earlier socializations’ (Reay, 2004: 434). Decoteau argues that hybridity of dispositions in an individual’s habitus is a result of their interstitial positionality ‘at the intersection of multiple overlapping fields, with disparate valuations [doxa, in Bourdieu’s terms] and distributions of capital, which can provide each of us with multiple (and quite often contradictory) ontological orientations and perspectives’ (2016: 316), which shape layers of dispositions. As individuals move through different fields, a multi-layered concept of habitus implies that dispositions generated in one field are also in use when individuals are participating in other fields. This may enable a reflexive distance and conscious understanding of our positioning in these other fields and, potentially, to questioning such positioning and to open the possibility for change.

In this framework, whenever agents take part in social space, habitus is never determined and closed but, to some extent, flexible, and as such the possibility for transformation is inherent to it instead of being exceptional. However, the inherent possibility for change is not to be confused with an inevitable process of change: ‘reflexivity may also be bound into habitual action, reinforcing habits and acting to perpetuate norms’ (Bottero, 2010: 11). In other words, heterogeneous social interactions may produce reflexivity and such reflexivity may lead to subjectivity negotiations and changes in habitus, but it could also reinforce the conservative impulses of the habitus (Vincent et al., 2018).

Thus, whilst a pure Bourdieusian approach would focus on socialized subjectivity, meaning the habitus’ pre-reflexive nature and tendency to regularity, a consideration of the more reflexive aspects of subjectivity highlighted by these authors implies defining habitus as ‘situated intersubjectivity’ (Bottero, 2010), which means that subjectivity construction and change processes may be understood as based on the experience of otherness: identification is

intrinsic to social life [because] one may be called upon to identify oneself – to characterize oneself, to locate oneself vis-à-vis known others, to situate oneself in a narrative, to place oneself in a category – in any number of different contexts (Bottero, 2010: 7) ² .

This understanding of habitus as situated intersubjectivity allows a more subtle observation of mixophily and suggests that the analysis of the families’ dispositions towards otherness has to consider not only their positional characteristics but also the intersubjective negotiations involved in the interactions among people from different backgrounds (e.g. do they interact only in the school or also at home?), as well as in their narratives (e.g. how do families define the ‘desirable’ and ‘undesirable’ students?).

These theoretical contributions also imply understanding habitus as composed of a plurality of dispositions, which means that habitus is a dynamic concept in dialogue with the fields and agents that social actors encounter. Therefore, it is worth wondering how the socially diverse environment of a school might contribute to a self-distancing perspective and whether this may stimulate the development of a particular layer of schemes of perception and action that allows individuals to relate democratically to people from different social backgrounds, that is, on an equal basis with respect of their differences. In this sense, the potential process of subjectivity change related to the interaction with others with different life experiences and dispositions has not to be understood as a necessary radical transformation of the self but as a complexification of it. The question, then, is how such a complexification moulds a person’s habitus as a whole, for example, by acting in tension with and/or complementing other layers of dispositions. Paraphrasing Lahire’s questions in this respect (Lahire, 2003: 345): How do democratic dispositions combine with other dispositions? Are democratic dispositions independent of other dispositions or do they combine in different ways according to the particularities of the fields? In the context addressed in this paper, it is relevant to not only wonder whether socially diverse schools are allowing the development of democratic dispositions but also to understand how these are relating to other dispositions of the students and their families, as well as how such democratic dispositions transcend – or not – the school and mould the way individuals move through other fields.

Concluding remarks and implications for future research

The current global context encourages the emergence of questions around the inclusion of different social groups and the role of education in facilitating such inclusion. As argued above, socially diverse settings, particularly schools, may contribute to developing democratic dispositions among students and their parents; however, this is not a necessary consequence of social diversity (school mix), which may even promote exclusionary dispositions when it is not accompanied by significant interactions and deeper understanding between people from different backgrounds (school mixing). The literature reviewed shows that both school mix and school mixing are scarce. Generally, families appear to prefer socially homogenous schools where they can find families with similar background to theirs. However, there is some evidence of mixophilic preferences, for example, among some middle-class fractions, although research has found that, despite the internal diversity of the school, the students tend to differentially associate, that is, to avoid mixing with people from other backgrounds and thus to reproduce patterns of segregation.

At first glance, such evidence appears to discourage any initiative oriented at promoting social diversity in schools as a way to develop democratic dispositions on the students. Nevertheless, as the concept of elective belonging (Jackson and Butler, 2014) suggests, social mixing has to be understood not only as physical interaction but also as the production of narratives around the identity of ‘the other’ and ‘us’. Therefore, understanding the development of democratic dispositions in socially diverse schools requires subtle analysis of the ways students and their parents negotiate their differences with other students and parents. In other words, it is necessary to go beyond the most obvious interactions (e.g. chatting in the playground) and deeply enquire into the ways people perceive and define who the other is, and the ways this may be moulding their own self-image and subjectivity: Who are the others in my school? Who are the others that I am willing to tolerate? Why? Do I think sharing the same space with these others may affect the way I am? To sum up, what are the families’ dispositions to otherness?

This paper argues that an analytical framework based on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of dispositions (habitus), complemented with further developments on the relationship of reflexivity and change, is useful to shed light on these questions in that it articulates both processes of stability and transformation in shaping dispositions. Unlike a pure Bourdieusian approach which would assume that social position and first experiences (generally family-related and socially homogeneous) are the main elements creating dispositions, the addition of a focus on the role of the various social environments that individuals face throughout their lives opens the possibility to explore not only the reproduction of certain dispositions but also the production of new dispositions. Such an approach is probably more necessary now than ever, certainly more necessary than when Bourdieu wrote The Reproduction in 1970 to argue against the Human Capital Theory and its neglect of the structural conditionings of educational attainment. In the current global scenario, highly moulded by tensions posed by increasing levels of social diversity, we as educational researchers need epistemological and theoretical tools capable of apprehending even the slightest expressions of mixophily and democratic dispositions to otherness. As argued in this paper, understanding Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as composed of a plurality of dispositions may contribute to this aim by revealing nuanced and complex processes of subjectivity formation and development of democratic dispositions.