What is it about?
The educational exclusion based on social and spatial location is a phenomenon documented in each society, However it is manifested in different ways. Drawing on qualitative research with male residents of one disadvantaged neighbourhoods in Łódź (Poland) the paper uncovers spatially embedded forms of their educational exclusions. It uncovers typical careers of such youth as ‘doomed-to-fail school careers’, where stigmatization (Goffman, E. 1963. Stigma. Notes on Management of Spoiled Identity. Englewood Cliff, NJ: Prentice Hall) in educational institution based on their disadvantaged neighborhood is an issue.
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Why is it important?
It highlights the significance of stigma-based spatially embedded school practices on the educational failure and low-paid employment of students from such localities and it uncovers forms of school control over stigmatized students as well as the students’ resistance to these. It might add to educational sciences, human geography (especially to ‘geographies of education’ /Holloway, S., and H. Jöns. 2012/) as well as to social work. Taking into account that Goffman’s theory of stigma is a theoretical foundation of the research the article might be interesting for sociologists too, as it gives an example of how this theory might be used to describe and explain the educational experiences of marginalized students.
Perspectives
Writing this article was a great pleasure for me. First, it was one of the reason to get back to my 'boys in the hood'- males I had met almost 15 years old when I was both their neighbor and a researcher. After this time I entered the role of the researcher again and I had the opportunity to understand their life (including school careers) from longitudinal perspective. Second, it was a fantastic intellectual adventure for me, as for an education researcher (social pedagogue), to understand their school careers from the perspective of human geography. It let me to understand the disadvantaged neighborhoods and their inhabitants in more complex way and became an incentive for new reflections and future papers in which my educational background and human geography will by combined.
Dr Anita Maria Gulczyńska
University of Lodz
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Stigma and the doomed-to-fail school careers of young people from disadvantaged neighbourhoods, Children s Geographies, October 2018, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/14733285.2018.1536775.
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