House, home and the shadow of the school: the reality of place home and body for working-class mothers in negotiating the school.

In the last two decades, understandings of parents' involvement in their children's education have become more complex and nuanced, with attention being been paid to differences of gender, social class, race, and family status (e.g., Hanafin and Lynch 2002). In Ireland, this more nuanced focus, generated studies on parents, schooling, and social class (e.g., O’Donoghue 2013, Byrne and Smyth 2010). This paper employs a Bourdieusian analytical framework to address the complex intersections of positionality, symbolic violence, practices around school, the body, the home and the working class mother.
This paper explores a small body of qualitative data that emerged out of an exploratory study of working class mothers and their children’s schooling. Mothers feel positioned negatively in relation to education. This operates in complex ways; that is the high cost of education, adverse encounters with the ‘school’, throwaway comments from teachers, being ‘called up to the school’, ridiculous rules and demands and past educational experiences. Other insights emerged from this data about how place, home, and body intersect and how the chaotic home and place become embodied and constitute a lens through which the world is encountered. Across all their conversations are subtle and powerful articulations of how houses, immediate environs, and place are know and read, and constitute ‘the practical operator of the transmutation of things into distinct and distinctive signs’ (Bourdieu: 1984: 175). Working class mothers are described as the shock absorbers of poverty and much research supports how they often go without themselves, how they extend out of themselves daily. In conversation with these mothers practical mappings of ‘what’s reasonable for the likes of us’, what’s not for me, what’s worth considering are laid down internally. Conditions for participation in social life are “deposited” in the body.
For Bourdieu (2000) the body, the biological individual is fundamentally situated in a place, it is where that individual takes place, exists, but that place occupies a distinct and distinctive location which can be characterised by the symbolic position it occupies relative to other positions. Bourdieu’s sociology of the body is a central pivot of his sociology of domination, the body and bodily schemes are linked to a place by a direct relationship of contact. ‘Corporeal knowledge’ (Bourdieu: 2000) provides a pivotal way of comprehending the world and offers considerable insight in terms of understanding domination