Everyday and Cosmo-Multiculturalisms: Doing Diversity in Gentrifying School Communities

Abstract

Gentrification is transforming the class and ethnic profile of urban communities across the world, and changing how people deal with social and cultural difference. This paper looks at some of the social consequences of gentrification in Sydney, Australia, focusing on local schools. It argues that in this urban Australian context, the influx of middle-class Anglo-Australians into traditionally working-class, migrant-dominated areas is significantly changing how people relate to each other within local schools, often fragmenting and dividing school communities. These shifts are intensified by the public policy of school choice, which has enabled some parents to bypass their local school for a more 'desirable' one. This paper presents a close local study of two schools within one gentrifying Sydney suburb, examining how the schools have become more polarised. In particular, we examine how this demographic polarisation has given rise to two distinct modes of 'doing diversity', namely, everyday and cosmo-multiculturalisms. While the former is about daily, normalised encounters across difference, the latter is a form of multiculturalism based on strategic and learned 'appreciation' and consumption of difference, characteristic of gentrified communities.

Angry Anglos and aspirational Asians: everyday multiculturalism in the selective school system in Sydney

“…Reay et al (2007) argue that white privilege shapes encounters within diverse schools, such that white middleclass families 'extract value' from their multi-ethnic other. Similarly, Ho et al (2015) show that even among parents professing to value diversity, a 'cosmo-multiculturalism' is common, whereby diversity is a commodity to be consumed (e.g. learning a foreign language) rather than an everyday lived experience with cultural others.…”

“…In particular, it examines social relations within school communities using the framework of 'everyday multiculturalism'. Schools have been theorised as a significant site for everyday multiculturalism, because of the daily, routinised interaction of students, families and staff that occurs within and around school communities (Amin, 2002;Neal & Vincent, 2013;Noble, 2009;Ho et al, 2015). This paper is based on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 20 students and parents (11 parents and 9 students) who had direct experience of selective schools and classes in Sydney.…”

‘They try to avoid.’ How do parents’ feelings about ethnicised and classed differences shape gentrifying school communities?

“…These 'cosmo-multiculturalists', Hage shows, deem others as 'monocultural', racist, unsophisticated and backward, and unable to 'appreciate' (that is, consume) diversity correctly. Indeed, in an earlier publication arising from this research (Ho et al, 2015), we analysed divergent modes of 'doing diversity', noting the ways in which gentrifying parents embrace the idea of ethnicised cultural difference and multiculturalism-terms vested with positive value for cosmopolitan liberals-while maintaining a consumptive orientation to difference. By contrast, another subset of parents in this study sought to live out an everyday experience of the 'multicultural real', although even these parents were often disappointed in their efforts to form deep friendships with cultural/ethnic others.…”

“…'It's not the ethnic mix it probably once was', she continued. Birchgrove has Opportunity Classes (OC) in years 5 and 6, which runs an accelerated curriculum for 'gifted' students.Elsewhere, we have extensively detailed the positive worth accorded to contact with ethnic others among our white middle-class interviewees (seeHo et al, 2015).This desire for contact with cultural difference was not always easily fulfilled. Stacey went on to note, 'it's a little bit of a disappointment, that it's not quite as integrated as we thought'.…”

‘Weird’ to be Asian: Racism and Interculturality in an Elite Girls’ School

“…Yet these curriculum directives are frequently criticised by politicians who claim they are too ideological and do not have a place in Australian classrooms. While the numbers of Australian children and young people from minoritised backgrounds is increasing, schools are becoming more and more segregated along race and class lines (Ho et al 2015). Asian Australian students, in particular, are the focus of intense media attention with regards to their academic achievement and dominant enrolments in select-entry schools (Ho 2020).…”