Abstract
This paper looks at forms of reflexivity and the moral positioning of social actors, displayed in conversational narratives about school conflict, co-produced by Latin American girls during sociolinguistic interviews with a female researcher of Latin American origin, in a multicultural school in the centre of Madrid. Understanding narratives as communicative practices makes them suitable discursive spaces for revealing the moral positioning and moral orders constructed in discourse. These discursive positionings need to be considered in the light of the ethnographic conditions under which such narratives emerge (Patino-Santos, 2016). Herein, I analyse narratives recounting conflicts from two different groups – female secondary school students and their teachers – based on the notion that it is in recounting and evaluating moments of conflict that social actors call upon their systems of beliefs and values. The failure of the girls’ secondary school and all the negative repercussions of such failure are central to problematising the social circumstances in which their narratives are produced.
Highlights
The closure in 2008 of the secondary school Evangelista, located in the centre of Madrid, demonstrated the shortcomings of the local government’s policies of reception and schooling for migrants arriving from the mid-1990s onwards
The main purpose of this paper is to contribute to the research on language, youth, mobility and reflexivity in late modernity from an integrated narrative and linguistic ethnographic perspective, which claims that the analysis of conversational narratives (CNs) must bring to the fore the ethnographic conditions under which such narratives emerge and circulate (Patiño-Santos, 2016)
The analysis of the shared confrontational experiences of a group of girls of Latin American backgrounds, gathered in group interviews, as part of an ethnographic fieldwork in a secondary school in Madrid, has allowed me to bring to the fore relevant issues on how young, migrant girls display reflexivity in their narrative practices
Summary
The closure in 2008 of the secondary school Evangelista, located in the centre of Madrid, demonstrated the shortcomings of the local government’s policies of reception and schooling for migrants arriving from the mid-1990s onwards. In creating a concentration of students of migrant backgrounds, it precipitated the flight of children of Spanish backgrounds whose parents preferred to send them to state funded or religious schools in the area. By the end of the school year 2006-2007, a building designed for 650 students hosted only 66 students for the four years of Compulsory Secondary Education (1-4 ESO). The confrontational interactions between the students and the teachers both within and outside the classroom, as well as mass media reporting of violence in the school, helped to destroy its reputation
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