Paper short abstract:

The contribution summarizes the findings of a child-centred long-term ethnographic research in a Swiss kindergarten in a diversified neighbourhood. In doing so, it works out how social practices of differentiation and social imaginaries of a perspective society are mutually dependent.

Paper long abstract:

The proposed contribution aims at discussing two intertwined ideas using data of a long-term ethnographic research project on children’s social belonging in a Swiss kindergarten (Jaeger 2024): on the one hand, it addresses the question of the "double relation of symbiosis and opposition" (Wacquant 2004, 17) of school and out-of-school practices of social differentiation. On the other hand, it seeks to tease out local modes of "social imaginaries" (Taylor 2004; Vertovec 2012), which are negotiated in school practices of "civil enculturation" (Schiffauer et al. 2004). Analytically, a child in the kindergarten class is placed at the center and it is elaborated how teachers simultaneously invoke and neutralize references to the extracurricular that are assumed to be problematic. It will hence be worked out how local assessments of social imaginaries inform school culture, and how teachers arrive at their perceptions of what children would and could need from kindergarten. These empirical findings are to be used in the contribution to reflect somewhat more distantly on school differentiation practices in diversified societies and which topoi of threat cause and drive them.

bibliography

Jaeger, Ursina. forthcoming 2024. Children as Social Butterflies: Navigating Belonging in a Diverse Swiss Kindergarten. Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.

Schiffauer, Werner, Gerd Baumann, Riva Kastoryano, and Steven Vertovec, eds. 2004. Civil Enculturation: Nation-State, Schools and Ethnic Difference in Four European Countries. New York: Berghahn Books.

Taylor, Charles. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Duke University Press.

Vertovec, Steven. 2012. ‘"Diversity” and the Social Imaginary’.