Understanding the Role of Everyday Practices of Privilege in the Perpetuation of Inequalities

Stephens, Christine; Gillies, Annemarie

doi:10.1002/casp.1107

Cited by 11 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Hansen (2014), for example, shows that parents happily pay substantially more to purchase a house located near to better-performing primary schools, even before their children reach school starting-age. This confirms Stephens and Gillies’ (2012) New Zealand study, which showed how this process starts at a very early age via access to either the best or worst kindergarten. Those with more economic capital were able to transition their children from kindergarten into the ‘right’ schools.…”

Section: The ‘Field’ Of Education and Privilegesupporting

confidence: 87%

“…Other work has attended especially to how the parents of girls position them for a future life of advantage (Maxwell and Aggleton, 2016) or researched how class privilege operates for young people in the Australian schooling system (McCarthy and Kenway, 2014). In New Zealand, Stephens and Gillies (2012) have examined how privilege worked for girls in the independent sector. This work starts to increase our understanding of the processes used by the wealthy to advantage their children, but there has been a tendency to focus attention on the compulsory schooling system.…”

Section: Towards a New Agenda In Youth Sociologymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Youth, social class and privilege in the antipodes: Towards a new research agenda for youth sociology

Roberts

Wood

2018

Journal of Sociology

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In recent decades, youth sociology in the antipodes has paid inadequate attention to social class and the question of privilege. We critique narrow and utilitarian ways that social class has been analysed in the antipodes, arguing that the primary focus on the marginalised has overlooked the significance of privilege in perpetuating and maintaining social reproduction. While there is some evidence of a growing interest in the subjective experiences of class, we propose a new research agenda for youth sociology in the antipodes which includes a much more explicit focus on class and approaches that recognise its complex, longitudinal and intersectional nature, and its relationship with privilege. As an example of how such a research agenda could be developed, we conclude by drawing upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu to show how his theoretical tools can provide deeper insights into how privilege operates through institutional and intergenerational processes

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Section: The ‘Field’ Of Education and Privilegesupporting

confidence: 87%

Section: Towards a New Agenda In Youth Sociologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Youth, social class and privilege in the antipodes: Towards a new research agenda for youth sociology

Roberts

Wood

2018

Journal of Sociology

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“…Perhaps unsurprisingly most of these participants were Pākehā or Asian (in particular Chinese). Falling in line with prior research, these students were more equipped with the material resources to game the university system and a valued set of cultural capitals which perpetuated their social advantages (Stephens & Gillies, 2012).…”

Section: The Privileged Classmentioning

confidence: 58%

“…Bourdieu (1986) described capital as the resources one may acquire, whose values are contingent upon existing norms within a cultural milieu, or what Bourdieu might refer to as a field. For those young people who aspire towards tertiary studies and make it to one, the university becomes a field where students learn the "rules of the game," identifying activities and qualifications (capitals) to obtain that help secure meaningful employment following graduation (Stephens & Gillies, 2012). However, as Bathmaker, Ingram and Waller (2013) point out, students from workingclass backgrounds find it far more difficult to game the system, or mobilise the requisite university-based capitals that will yield value in a postuniversity workplace setting.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Colonial Privileges in a Settler Society: Disparities of Cultural Capital in a University Setting

Mayeda

Pukepuke

Cowie

et al. 2020

IJRS

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Drawing on forty one-on-one interviews with third year students from The University of Auckland, this study contrasts the experiences of students from working- and upper-class backgrounds. In particular, the study demonstrates how working-class students, most of whom come from Indigenous Māori and Pacific ethnic backgrounds, are forced to navigate obstacles infused with interpersonal and institutional racism. These students also report a stigmatising awareness of their lack of privilege and sense of obligation to give back to their ethnic communities. In contrast students from upper-class backgrounds, though hard-working, discuss a litany of opportunities extending their academic and occupational privilege. These capital-building opportunities are tightly connected to consistent family support in the form of gifted money, flexible work options, and networks that enhance professional experience. Working with kaupapa Māori and Bourdeausian conceptual frameworks, the study highlights privileged students’ ability to access and extend their objectified cultural capital, as less economically privileged students work their way through colonial blockades and classed pitfalls. Given the clear disparities expressed by study participants, the research suggests universities radically reframe how resources are allocated to students from diverse backgrounds.

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“…The embodiment of inequality offers an approach to better understand how proximate factors and dynamics include social and cultural forces (Gravlee 2009; Krieger 2005). Such an approach can draw on (1) radical contextualization, where the use of ethnography, studying up, and biosocial analysis can help highlight how social processes underpin health disparities (Chapman and Berggren 2005); (2) the anthropology of adverse environments, which incorporate “a range of physical, social, and temporal factors that are highly localized and sensitive to community‐level influences on growth and health” (Moffat and Galloway 2007:676); (3) the social embodiment of biology, to understand how context and environment can get under the skin (Gravlee 2009; Kuzawa and Sweet 2009); (4) risk focusing, where culture plays a fundamental role in the cumulative experience of disadvantage over development (Schell 1992); and (5) the everyday practices of privilege, discrimination, and status that play a role in perpetuating inequality (Schultz et al 2006; Stephens and Gillies 2012; Sweet 2010). Together, these approaches offer the way to understand, first, how the social is present in the everyday life of inequality, and second, to connect that to a much wider range of proximate factors and local environments that shape development and embodied biology.…”

Section: The Neuroanthropology Of “Poverty Poisons the Brain”mentioning

confidence: 99%

Poverty Poisons the Brain

Lende

2012

Annals of Anthropol Pract

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The concept of "poverty poisons the brain" has become a major area of research in neuroscience and the health sciences, and an increasingly utilized metaphor to argue for the importance of addressing inequality and poverty in the United States. This article systematically presents the research behind poverty poisons the brain, which includes the impact of socioeconomic status on human development, the developmental models used to understand how poverty impacts children, and the proximate social factors and brain mechanisms that represent the core causal model behind this research. This overview examines the uses of this research for neuroanthropology, highlighting the impact of inequality and how experience becomes embodied. Nevertheless, a simplistic cause-effect approach and the reduction of the social to the biological often hamper this type of research. A critical approach to how poverty poisons the brain provides the basis for making the shift to a more robust neuroanthropological approach to poverty. Neuroanthropology can utilize social embodiment, the dynamics of stress, and the production of inequality to transform research on poverty and children, and to make policy recommendations, do applied research, and craft and test interventions to deal with the pernicious impact of poverty. [poverty, human development, stress, inequality, critical theory] In February 2008, Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate economist and New York Times columnist, wrote an op-ed entitled, "Poverty Is Poison." He summarized research presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference by Martha Farah, a University of Pennsylvania neuroscientist, and her colleagues. These data showed that "unhealthy" levels of stress hormones in poor children can harm neural development. Krugman then argued:The effect is to impair language development and memory-and hence the ability to escape poverty-for the rest of the child's life. So now we have another, even more compelling reason to be ashamed about America's record of failing to fight poverty [Krugman 2008].

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Understanding the Role of Everyday Practices of Privilege in the Perpetuation of Inequalities

Cited by 11 publications

References 37 publications

Youth, social class and privilege in the antipodes: Towards a new research agenda for youth sociology

Youth, social class and privilege in the antipodes: Towards a new research agenda for youth sociology

Colonial Privileges in a Settler Society: Disparities of Cultural Capital in a University Setting

Poverty Poisons the Brain

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