Migrant children in a Chilean school: Habitus, discourses and otherness

Abstract

Drawing on data from ethnographic fieldwork in a diverse school located in the north of Chile, this article explores the ways of narrating and producing otherness, through the analysis of school staff discourses. The article identifies and describes how the discourses on migrant children are produced in a school context, and the sources and references used by teachers. Utilising a focused ethnographic method and based on a critical realist and Bourdieusian approach, this article argues that there are surrounding discourses and pre-existing sets of social relations (state–school relations, socio-spatial relations, intergenerational relations), which are reflexively integrated into the habitus of teachers and the institutional habitus of the school, in order to understand the conviviality with migrant children and to produce social differences.