Immigrant Incorporation, Education, and the Boundaries of Belonging

Stefan Lund

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030367282
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030367299
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this edited volume, authors analyze how symbolic boundaries of belonging are negotiated and reflected upon by school actors in different educational contexts and how that contributes to a richer understanding of the ways in which "we-ness" acts as a fundamentally structuring force in immigrant incorporation. The analyses draw on cultural sociologist Jeffrey Alexander's work on civil sphere theory, thus grasping both the solidaristic dimensions of incorporation and processes of exclusion. Chapters are guided by two major themes: school choice/ethnic school segregation and religion/faith in schooling. Both of these themes provide rich examples of how immigrant school actors negotiate the symbolic codes that define boundaries of belonging/non-belonging in different communities. This focus will broaden the understanding of how educational practices and formal schooling works in relation to immigrant incorporation into different school cultures, as well as in the Swedish civilsphere.

© The Author(s) 2020

S. Lund (ed.)Immigrant Incorporation, Education, and the Boundaries of Belonginghttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36729-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Stefan Lund¹

(1)

Department of Education, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

Stefan Lund

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

Immigrant incorporationEducationSymbolic boundariesFeelings of belonging

End Abstract

I don’t mind Swedes, but I felt like… There were only two of us immigrant girls at the inner-city school. We couldn’t make any friends. The other students didn’t want to talk to us, they didn’t even say ‘Hi’…nothing! And then I switched back to Ash Public School…and as you see, I’m still here. (Yasmina)

It’s not like Swedes are bad or anything…it was just…yeah…I don’t know…different. During the break we would hang out, but after school I went straight home, never stopped to hang out. Never hung out with friends after school. The schoolyard was small and boring, and when I got back here to Bridge Valley School it felt nice; I felt at home. (Araf)

Well, it feels like many people make it hard for you because you’re religious… They make you into something different. You don’t see yourself as different, but you become it from [sic] their eyes. (Sahla)

I met with the students in both the home and school environments. I saw that there was a problem there […]. They sort of had two roles […]. Understanding your religion and culture gives you pride and security, which are necessary if the students are to be open to society as well as bridge the divergences between their original culture and Swedish society. (Anwar)

So, what are these voices actually articulating? In my interpretation, they symbolize the ongoing negotiation and reflection over what Jeffery C. Alexander (2013, p. 536) describes as the “affective and moral meaning of ‘us’”, which takes place on a daily basis in Sweden’s immigrant-dense school system. From this perspective, the school actors in this edited volume (students, teachers, parents, principals) reflect upon boundaries of belonging in educational practices as crucial for the development of or obstacles to friendship, recognition of cultural identities and civil incorporation. In this sense, schooling is viewed by the school actors as a practice whereby values, social characteristics, manners and beliefs are expressed and negotiated in civil relations (cf. Alexander & Tognato, 2018; Lund, 2019; Thumala Olave, 2018), and in which symbolic codes structure the boundaries of belonging in such practices. By doing so, they also prove to be conscious, skeptical and reflexive agents describing a complex and fragmented social world that goes beyond “hidden powers and deterministic homologies between language and power” (Kivisto & Sciortino, 2015, p. 12). Such perspectives have long dominated the sociology of education agenda in understanding social reproduction, stratification and counterculture (cf. Mehta & Davies, 2018). In other words, “gaining power is a matter not only of controlling resources and dominating fields, but also of performing discourses individually and collectively, of entering into the thicket of social meanings” (Alexander, Lund, & Voyer, 2019, p. 9). These voices address precisely this, namely, that feelings of belonging in educational practices are embedded in meaning structures that function as a fundamentally structuring social force for processes of both inclusion and exclusion.

This edited volume draws on Alexander’s (2006) theory of immigrant incorporation, which builds on the assumption that democratic societies include a civil sphere that “defines itself in terms of solidarity, the brotherly and sisterly feeling of being connected with every other person in the collectivity” (Alexander & Tognato, 2018, p. 17). As will be discussed, civil inclusion is not primarily about citizenship or access to a welfare system or the labor market. These aspects are of course important but need to be supplemented with an understanding that incorporation into a shared we-ness is also defined by the core group’s values, social characteristics, manners and beliefs. Altogether, the symbolically distinct relation between pure and impure civil codes defines a binary discourse that “conceptualizes the world into those who deserve inclusion and those who do not” (Alexander, 2006, p. 55).

Wimmer (2013), who has written a book about ethnic boundaries, argues that boundaries always have a categorical and a behavioral dimension. The former divides people into social and/or ethnic groups of “us” and “them”, and the latter tells us how these social and/or ethnic groups act and behave. Wimmer (2013) states: “Only when the two schemes coincide, when ways of seeing the world correspond to ways of acting in the world, shall we speak of a social boundary” (p. 9). In the perspective of this edited volume, such widely shared narratives of belonging are constructed within a binary discourse that specifies, for example, what are regarded as acceptable and unacceptable values, social characteristics, manners and beliefs. These narratives are expressed through inter-subjectively shared meanings that structure both the core and out groups’ feelings of belonging.

Thus, one important theoretical starting point of the chapters in this volume is that immigrant incorporation is primarily structured through collectively shared cultural meanings in which individuals and groups define the criteria for belonging and, thus, also symbolic boundaries between “us” and “them” (Alexander, 2006). Symbolic boundaries are something we make in the subtle communication and social interactions of everyday life. Thus, they are never entirely stable but are rather continuously negotiated and contested, because “cultural structures do not determine, but rather inform action” (Kivisto & Sciortino, 2015). The mutual aim in the following chapters is to describe and analyze school actors’ negotiations and reflections regarding the symbolic boundaries of belonging in different educational practices. In doing so, the volume has an ambition to enrich the empirical and theoretical understanding of immigrant incorporation in schooling. The school actors’ negotiations and reflections around the cultural identities, civil values, social interaction and deep beliefs that take place in complex institutional practices influence their meaning-making, and will expose how feelings of belonging are formed in discourse and practice. Analyses will include both the solidaristic dimensions of incorporation and processes of stigmatization.

The Swedish Case

With its roughly ten million inhabitants, Sweden is well known not only for its generous welfare system but also for its liberal migration policy. In 2015 the country received 163,000 refugees, and in 2017 18.5 percent of the Swedish population had been born outside Sweden (Statistiska Centralbyrån, 2018b). In total, 23 percent of the Swedish population had been born abroad or had parents who were both born in another country. Now, in 2019, 25 percent of compulsory school students (6–15 years) and 32 percent of high school students (16–18 years) were born abroad or live in families in which both parents were born abroad (Skolverket, 2019a, 2019b). The top ten countries represented in Sweden’s immigrant population in 2017 were Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, India, Poland, Iran, Eritrea, Somalia, China and Finland (Statistiska Centralbyrån, 2018a). These immigrants have moved to a country that is foun...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. School Choice, We-Ness and School Culture
• 3. To Belong or Not?
• 4. “Different from the Eyes of Others”: Negotiating Faith in a Non-denominational Educational System
• 5. To Construct Civility or Be Constructed as Anti-civil
• 6. Immigrant Incorporation, Education, and the Boundaries of Belonging
• Back Matter