Revisiting inequality in the 21st century: Cartographies of schooling in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area

GRINBERG, SILVIA

Kassel

Congreso; Spaces for Education. Spaces of Education - German Educational Research Association (GERA) Congress 2016; 2016

German Educational Research Association (GERA

In addition to increasingly globalized circulation of goods and knowledges, these times have brought the extension of opportunities and the deepening of inequalities. In our current learning societies, schools are a field of tensions where, paradoxically, teachers, as part of their ?divine calling,? must give up teaching in a strict sense to become their students? coaches. On the basis of field work conducted in the periphery of the Buenos Aires metropolitan area, I will present notes towards a cartography of schooling intended to discuss educational inequalities in contemporary societies. Through statistical information and semi-structured interviews, I address a layer of distribution and circulation of students in the urban space and, through students? audio-visual production and from an ethnographic perspective, I address a second layer of the intersection of schools life and neighbourhoods. My purpose is to provide a history of the present in relation to practices of power, as well as lines of flights and struggles over shaping schooling. I suggest that, in times of selective metropolisation, centrifugal dynamics tend to enclose groups of students and to heighten inequalities. Also at play, however is a centripetal dynamic that escapes from the abject fear about the slums and struggles for access to school and to knowledge.