Cultural capital in non-white majority schools: a critical exploration of cultural ethos and pedagogy

Abstract

ABSTRACT This is a critical exploration of how and to what extent the embodied cultural capital of non-white students is positioned within the meso-level space of cultural ethos and pedagogy of two majority non-white schools in Leicester. It does this in relation to wider metanarratives of colonial and monocultural ideology and racialised society. Drawing on the postcolonial literature, Bourdieu’s critical sociology and Lefebvre’s concept of ‘spatial codes’, this study searches for evidence of institutional, symbolic, and objectified non-white cultural capital within the research sites. It concludes by noting how non-white students must continually attempt to prove the worth of their embodied cultural capital by inserting it into the cultural ethos and pedagogy of each institution in the absence of structures that allow for the democratic production of culture, even in majority non-white institutions such as these.