Paper short abstract:

Having as a case-study an ethnography of school-violence in Romanian secondary-schools, this paper proposes an analysis of the history of the symbolical representation of the (corporal) punishment in the space of the classroom.

Paper long abstract:

In the space of each (school) culture, education was historical associated with different uses of punishment as an element of discipline and control in the scholar system. My analysis will follow this idea taking as a case-study the Romanian school. During the XXth century, the classroom has been a dual space, a space of protection and learning as well as a space of discipline and punishment.

Violence in the Romanian school is a research subject in continuous evolution, as the school-violence was officially de-legalized only in 2004. My paper, theoretically informed by anthropological and educational sciences studies on school violence, is constructed around an analysis of the history of the symbolical representation of the (corporal) punishment in the space of the classroom along XXth century Romanian school. What are the punishment practices and their relation with the classroom space? How were those practices legitimatized and performed during time? How did evolve the spatial reorganization of the punishment in the classroom, in relation with its different actors, school climates (rich vs. poor, urban vs. rural) and purposes? What is the memory of those 'punishment-spaces' in the life-histories of the Romanian pupils of today and yesterday?

The analysis is based on a long-term fieldwork, started in 2007, on five secondary schools from North-East Romania, being part of my doctoral research on Corporal Punishment in the Romanian School at University Bordeaux 2 (International Observatory on Violence in School).