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

Abstract

Processes of rapid urban change reorganise the distribution of racialised disadvantage across urban geographic spaces. This article reports on interview-based research into the everyday consequences of 'gentrification', as seen through the prism of local public primary schools, in inner Sydney, Australia. We explore the feelings involved in negotiating relations across racialised and classed difference within four school communities. Contradictory themes common to the interviews include: the positive worth accorded to contact with cultural difference; the avoidance of interpersonal contact across racialised and classed difference; and the positive worth accorded to social sameness. The cultural politics of the feelings expressed within these interviews-discomfort and comfort, desire and disdain,point to the 'sociality of emotion', in Ahmed's (2014) terms. We seek, especially, to understand how parents' self-reported feelings of discomfort play a role in shaping everyday school communities. To realise this aim, we focus on parents' involvement in the schools' Parents and Citizens Associations (P&Cs). We argue that P&Cs constitute social spaces dominated by parents embodying a class-based disposition towards entitlement and authority. The P&Cs' atmosphere of exclusivity can provoke considerable feelings of angst among parents who join them because of a putative commitment to contribute to the whole-of-school community.