SKOLAN GÖR SKILLNAD - DiVA

SUMMARY
Constructions of difference, with an emphasis on how ethnicity is turned
into a basic category for the social organisation of the school, are the main
focus of this study. Interest is also focused on how constructions of ethnicity
are bound up with social complexity and how they interact with other
relations, especially gender and class.
The study is based on one year of ethnographical field studies in a comprehensive
secondary school; the objective being to study how, for example,
ideas of culture and national background were assigned significance in the
school personnel’s speech, actions and interactions with pupils. The field
work primarily consists of participant observations of classroom situations,
different types of staff meetings and informal discussions where teachers talk
about their work and pupils. This has been complemented with interviews.
During the field study I also undertook some teaching duties.
The choice of a school in a medium-sized town with a broad social and
ethnic composition as subject for the field study, reflects an ambition to pay
particular attention to a school category that is seldom highlighted in ethnicity-related
studies. Such attention is usually reserved for schools in the suburbs
of large cities.
The study takes its departure in an understanding of ethnicity as being socially
constructed and as generating processes whereby people are divided
into different groups or communities on the basis of, for example, language,
religion, culture, appearance and geographical origin. The analysis is inspired
by a critique that many scholars of racism have raised towards the
ethnicity concept, particularly with regard to its indistinct association with
what not very long ago was defined as racial difference. This critique underlines
that ethnicity is always a product of its social and historical context,
and highlights the significance of power relations for constructions of ethnicity
as well as other social formations. From this starting point, an interrelated
viewpoint is applied which means that constructions of ethnicity are
analysed as being intertwined with other categories and social relations.
In the study the school is not only constituted as an arena where the ethnic
organisation of society can be studied. Constructions of ethnicity also
come to particular expression in the institutional context of a school. Furthermore,
the school practice is highly institutionalised, which means that
203