Egalitarian Habitus: Narratives of Reconstruction in Discourses of Aspiration and Change

Abstract

This chapter will examine how I ope rationalise habitus — in conjunction with capitals and field — to examine the constitution of learner identities in neoliberal times with a focus on the nexus of working-class aspirations, symbolic violence and constituting value. As a social theorist, Bourdieu’s theory of practice intends to show how relations of privilege and domination are produced through the interaction of habitus — a matrix of dispositions that shape how the individual operates in the social world — capital that is economic, cultural, social, and symbolic, and field (i.e., social contexts). In his scholarship, Bourdieu refused to ‘establish sharp demarcations between the external and internal, the conscious and the unconscious, the bodily and the discursive’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 19). Instead, his tools are designed to theorise human action as a dialectical relationship between objective structures and subjective agency. The conceptual tool of habitus represents an attempt to extend understandings around internalised behaviours, perceptions, and beliefs that individuals carry with them and which, in part, are translated into the practices as they transfer to and from the fields in which they interact. From the standpoint of a social researcher, habitus is at once the ‘anchor, the compass, and the course of ethnographic journey’ (Wacquant 2011, p. 81) while functioning as a ‘conceptual linchpin’ that can translate concepts with highly economic connotations into non-economic paradigms (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 120).