Managing and Disciplining Diversity: The Politics of Conditional Belonging in a Catalonian Institut

Abstract

This article traces the ways in which notions of diversity inhered in educational policies and practices to mediate the everyday schooling realities of immigrant youth in a Catalonian public secondary school. Diversity, even as it was celebrated and shrouded in liberal appeals to tolerance and cosmopolitanism, was also something requiring management. Diversity discourses produced and marked immigrant youth in disciplining ways, reinscribing narrow notions of difference that ultimately delimited the school's available approaches for addressing diversity.

The Intersection of Cultural Diversity and Special Education in Catalonia: The Subtle Production of Exclusion through Classroom Routines

“…Yet on the other, they framed their difficulties in the discourse of SEN, thus making other needs associated to their context be considered problematic, such as bilingualism or poverty, which in turn seemed to reinforce their views of their families as dysfunctional or less able. Of course, biological racism is no longer visible in popular and professional discourses, but cultural racism in the form of deficit views concerning LCSD families continues permeating the way schools “discipline” cultural diversity in Spain (Ríos‐Rojas ), as eloquently exemplified above by Ms. Esther.…”

“…Without training, guidance, resources, and funding support for teachers and schools, the LOGSE resulted in the development of various sets of resources to attend different needs, such as special education classrooms and teachers for children with disabilities, welcoming classrooms for newly arrived children, and support classrooms for struggling learners. In the end, these specific, though sometimes overlapping, services transferred the responsibility for inclusion to specialists (Poveda et al ) and perpetuated a one‐way integration, thus framing diverse children as Others who needed to adapt to the school requirements (Ríos‐Rojas ).…”

Is Development “The New Peace”? Global Citizenship as National Obligation in Postwar Guatemala

“…However, reorienting citizenship education through a global framework rarely offsets the lived experience of exclusion, which is often imposed and reinforced in schools (Abu El‐Haj ; Dyrness ; Osler and Starkey ; Ríos‐Rojas ; Rubin ). As Torres () reminds us, “racism and ethnic tensions, sexism and patriarchy, and class exploitation… [are] constitutive of the daily experience of people, both at the level of the elites and the socially subordinated sectors” (85).…”

The Nicaraguan Diaspora in Costa Rica: Schools and the Disruption of Transnational Social Fields

“…The case of Nicaraguan students in Costa Rican schools is representative of scholarly concerns about the types of (trans)national affiliations that immigrant children are “permitted” to build and display in public spaces in receiving countries (Dyrness and Sepúlveda, ; Jaffe‐Walter, ; Koh, ; Moinian, ; Ríos‐Rojas, ). Schools often construct immigrant students as subjects to be governed (Foucault, ), conditioning their belonging and disciplining their aspirations (Jaffe‐Walter, ) in ways that greatly hinder their cultural citizenship rights (Ong, ; Rosaldo, ).…”