Between life and death: children’s social inclusion in a marginalized school

Abstract

In this paper I try to understand how do the social inclusion/exclusion processes deploy among children in a marginality context. What does “including” mean? Which are the frontiers between identity and difference at school? How do children’s subjectivities produce? I use psychoanalytical theory, that postulates the existence of an unconscious dimension in human experience, where the processes of subjectivation would deploy. I realized a visual and interpretative school ethnog-raphy during 7 months, shifting the gaze from the adults’ world to the children’s subjectivities. The field research, the children’s visual productions and the children’s group interviews reveal the importance of destructivity and death in the setting of identities and differences. In this context of poverty, social inclusion of children would firstly consist of belonging to the living’s communi-ty.