This paper examines the links between language, social difference and political domination in the practices of parental school choice at the heart of a global city, Vancouver. Vancouver is a highly diverse city, especially in terms of language. Its inner city is replete with multiple languages whose exchange values are not equal. In this context, our case study of two elementary schools observes that white middle-class parents choose a predominantly white school -whose students are non-ESL and have a second language choice of French -in a socially and ethnically mixed inner city neighbourhood, creating a stark imbalance in the student population of local neighbourhood schools. This paper examines parents' accounts of their choices, which they rationalise on the basis of linguistic competency and differentiation from multilingual others. We draw from Pierre Bourdieu's theory of language and symbolic power and Ghassan Hage's spatial theory of nationalist practice to understand the linguistic dimension of school choice rationalisation made by white middle-class parents. In the context of these insights, we argue that the way anglophone white middle-class parents choose their children's schools is intricately linked to active processes of reproducing a stratilingual society in Canada.

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This paper examines the K-12 school choice practices and patterns of marginalized urban families whose relative living conditions have worsened in recent decades with growing income disparities. In particular, the paper draws from critical geography and the sociology of education to examine the significance of habitus, capital, field as well as site as space and place in understanding the choices made by low-income and racialized minority families. We apply an innovative mixed-methods critical geographic approach to better understand marginalized urban families’ phenomenology of school choice, while also analyzing their school choice mobility patterns through a geo-spatial analysis in Vancouver, one of the most rapidly diversifying and polarizing cities in the world.