Putting working-class mothers in their place: Social stratification, the field of education, and Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice

This article explores how a small sample of working-class mothers encounters the field of education. In the management of family and their children's schooling, mothers bring to bear and replicate ways of knowing that are embodied, are historical and that offer many-sided insights into profoundly stratified societies. Here I draw on Bourdieu's theory of practice as a heuristic device and focus only on the field while leaving in suspension his other conceptual arsenal. Bourdieu argued that understanding the social space in which interactions occur is pivotal, characterised as it is by 'permanent relationships of inequality'. This study shows that mothers bring to the field their embodied history, their habituated practice, and their access to capitals. The women I interviewed know the precariousness of how they occupy the field of schooling, negotiated through a matrix of intersected positionings and classifications that are embodied.