Educational inequalities and living spaces conference / Rennes, September 10 and 11 2015

Just a reminder of this conference that is taking the place later this year in Rennes.


ABOUT THE CONFERENCE

This conference is about educational inequalities in general, especially those related to children's and adolescents' living contexts and spaces. Education is understood fairly broadly here, as encompassing all the influences that an individual experiences throughout his or her lifetime, whether they stem from deliberate educational actions (in the family, school, educational structures, etc.) or from the environment, without any real educational intention. It also relates to the acquisitions resulting from interactions between individuals and their physical and human environment, including transmission by voluntary action and by immersion. This global, cross-cutting approach requires particular attention to be paid to the analysis of the plurality of contexts in which children and adolescents live. The notion of context relates to the effects of constraints and stimulations exerted by the social spaces and institutions constituting individuals' and groups' frameworks of action. The context is therefore at once social, geographical (spaces, living spaces, territories), demographic, sociological, cultural, economic and political.

continued below (after key details) ...


DEADLINES for proposal submissions
• Proposals must be received by: 27 April 2015
• The authors selected will be informed by: 18 May 2015

GUIDELINES for proposals
They must include the following details:
• Title
• Author(s) surname and first name
• Institution
• Position
• Abstract (no more than 3,000 characters).
To be emailed to the following address: [log in to unmask]

PRACTICAL Details
• The conference will take place at the Université Rennes 2, on the Villejean campus.
• The conference is being organized by the ESO-Rennes and CREAD laboratories.
• Conference email address: [log in to unmask]

LANGUAGE
In addition to regular participation (papers), we will also welcome other forms of presentation, such as posters, situated presentations, video or sound media, forums, etc. The main language of the conference will be French but proposals in English will be accepted, accompanied if possible by material in French (slides, abstract, etc.). There will not be simultaneous interpretation during the working sessions.

FULL BRIEF (continued)

• Under the label "context effect", in general, or "neighbourhood effect", in particular, educational inequalities have a spatial dimension. These inequalities may be between the académies (the regional educational authorities) in metropolitan France and those in the overseas territories, or within metropolitan France between rural areas, peri-urban areas, ZUS ("sensitive" urban zones) or inner cities. Apart from statistical correlations, this conference aims to illuminate the processes at work in the production of inequalities. What is the impact of local educational action on these disparities? We know for example that funding, the training offer and the teaching profession are not the same from one institution and one académie to the
next. What is the share of the characteristics of the place and that of the social composition of the population in that place? What is the weight of families, neighbours, peers, and professionals in these context effects? How do the strategies of adolescents and their parents, the choice or no choice of families, the influence of siblings and friends, and the expectations
of professionals contribute to producing these educational inequalities? The symbolic significations of places of abode and schooling, as well as their impact on the practices of the actors concerned, would also need to be analyzed to further our understanding of "context effects".
• In the field of free time and leisure, inequalities are just as prevalent. Several recent studies have emphasized the significant differentiation of individual practices according to gender, age and position in the life cycle. While these inequalities are usually analyzed and explained in terms of social and cultural determinants, this conference is intended also to examine their spatial dimension. The possibilities of access to services and facilities, as localized and unequally distributed resources, depend closely on the place of abode and the material and social configurations of the populations' living spaces. How do these influence choices of activities and leisure practices? Do they interfere with the nature, structure and
places of practices? How do they correlate with social, cultural and gender differences? Linking up leisure practices with the characteristics of living spaces should, in turn, make it possible to reveal the existence of "context effects". In other words, do the educational resources mobilized in the framework of free time depend on the level of facilities, the available services,
the diversity of the activities proposed, the nature of local policies implemented in the territories on a daily basis, and the meaning they have for adolescents?
• Within adolescents' leisure activities, we would like in particular to investigate digital practices and their link to other recreational and school activities. How do territorial contexts influence digital practices? For example, based on recent research, it seems surprising that adolescents' digital activities in rural areas point in two radically different directions: either the combination of a lack of facilities, cultural capital and access to internet increases aversion to digital technologies, and no compensation effect makes up for these young people's isolation; or the territorialized actors make an effort to provide adequate facilities and digital mediation to compensate partially for isolation, through these digital technologies.

As a social product, space and its organization inevitably have differences that reproduce and generate inequalities. The main purpose of this conference is to decipher social logics in so far as they influence, produce, use and play on spaces, in order to understand and shed light on the nature of differences in the educational field. In other words, how does the diversity of spaces, with the different dimensions constituting them, participate in the production of inequalities? From the point of view of the context that is both social and spatial, these inequalities can be understood through
the lens of diversity of types of distance separating individuals and determining their attitudes to school, leisure, and cultural and sports activities, in the use of services and facilities or in the mobilization of various educational resources. By putting the spatial dimension of social relations at the heart of our reflection, we hope to receive proposals that will enable us to cover various scales (from local to global, micro to macro, etc.) and to reveal the diversity of the social and political
contexts in which such processes play out.

In order to cover the spatial dimension of educational inequalities, in the broad sense of the term, the conference would also like to cross-compare the perspectives and contributions of the various social sciences and humanities. The aim is to analyse how the different socio-spatial contexts influence young people's educational trajectories: the school context, the sports, cultural and recreational context, and the digital environment, which cuts across the former two. To explain and understand
the correlation between educational inequalities and living spaces, we need to take into account the support provided for young people within and outside of the space-time of school, in their activities, the services they use, and the resources they mobilize. The territorial contexts and the economic, social and cultural disparities of living spaces and families, which have been growing recently, directly influence the living conditions of adolescents and their sports, cultural and leisure activities. Proposals concerning school and/or other activities that socialize children and adolescents would be welcome,
to show the effect of family, school, recreational and digital contexts on the construction of objective and subjective disparities, and the consequent production of educational inequalities. Reflection must be soundly supported by methodologies that highlight the articulation between formal educational environments (school, extracurricular, sports or artistic) and more informal ones (family, peers, free time, leisure and digital), to understand the origins and functioning of educational inequalities in relation to living spaces and contexts. Particular attention will be paid to pluridisciplinary
approaches.


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