The construction of ethnic boundaries in classroom interaction through social space

Abstract

This article adds a social-spatial dimension to ethnicity construction while acknowledging the production of ethnicity as constructed through a relation of the ‘‘here and now’’ and an imagined (common) past. Empirically, social-spatial analysis is elaborated by looking at how social difference is produced in multi-ethnic schools through classroom interaction both in the USA and in the Netherlands. In our analysis, we are concerned with how ‘‘school’’ becomes evoked or produced in student discourse while ethnic positions are established. At the same time we show how spaces such as migrant neighborhoods and homelands are evoked and related to school spaces. The results show that more general mechanisms can be distinguished of how students use these spaces in their constructions of otherness across the data sets, but that the quality and complexity of these mechanisms are specific and can be related to the more general (migration) histories of the ethnic groups.

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