Forms Of Cultural Capital Research Articles

‘Yo soy la única burra’ [I’m the only dumb one]. Not Anymore. An Intersectional Approach to Digital Inclusion

This paper applies intersectionality theory to analyze the challenges and successes of vulnerable communities in developing techno-capital—a form of cultural capital that influences individuals’ technology adoption and usage. Through ethnographic methods, such as participant observations and interviews among a group of working-class US Latinas in central Texas, this work aims to explore why digital inclusion programs should go beyond the first and second levels of the digital divide. Our findings show that this group of women faced unique barriers to digital inclusion, such as skills, time, perceived self-exclusion, and self-doubt. Even when Internet access, devices, and knowledge existed in their homes, they felt they lacked the abilities to access them, thus reflecting complex gendered family dynamics. A two-year ethnography with a non-profit serving the youth and parents of their neighborhood revealed that even this organization had trouble recognizing multiple, interconnected issues arising from gender, household roles, and age on top of the other categories of issues faced by working-class Latino immigrants in a large urban enclave. However, intersectional analysis by the lead author, when working for the non-profit, enabled her to better see and make decisions to serve these women’s needs for digital inclusion and parent education.

New forms of distinction: How contemporary cultural elites understand ‘good’ taste

Taste is a subject of longstanding academic interest. The question of how cultural interests and preferences are socially stratified is at the heart of the sociology of culture. This article adds to this literature by examining the tastes of a specific social fraction, those working in cultural and creative occupations ( N = 203). The analysis finds that, in keeping with existing quantitative research on changing cultural hierarchies, cultural workers are open and eclectic in their expressions of taste. They are reflexive, able to play with, and question, ideas of taste alongside conceptions of artistic or cultural legitimacy, connecting their understandings to broader questions of social division and distinction. At the same time, this ‘emerging’ form of cultural capital is a new dividing line, substantiated by modes of consumption, depth of appreciation, and willingness to articulate commitments to engagement with culture. These distinctive tastes of cultural workers matter because, as creators, commissioners and curators of what ends up on stage, page and screen, cultural workers’ tastes shape the cultural hierarchies of which they are a part. In the context of cultural and creative industries, we can expect that these new forms of distinction will serve to create group identities, providing yet another way that cultural elites are socially closed, in addition to well-known exclusions based on demographics such as race, class, gender, age or disability.

Religion and cultural capital in the UK today: identity, cultural engagement and the prevalence of multiple religious identities

ABSTRACT Scholarship on social class occupies a particular pedestal in British sociology. However, recent research into the connections between religion and social position is conspicuously absent. Using a UK-wide survey, I employ Bourdieu and various statistical methods to investigate the complex cultural capital compositions of various religious identities. The findings identify a four-group typology of cultural engagement. I also identify those holding multiple religious identities as a new and prominent religious identity in the UK today, one that is highly culturally active. I explain these results through neo-Bourdieusian theories of the reconfiguration of distinction in the forms of openness and cosmopolitanism, and through arguments for the importance of cultural and social variety in accumulating capital. The unique group that has these multiple religious identities is also a prime candidate for further research into how religious dispositions may operate as its own form of cultural capital.

A cosmopolitan bubble? Constructions of locality at an international school in China

The notion of cosmopolitanism captures the duality of the global world. On one hand, it represents an inclusive orientation towards the cultural Other, while on the other, it has become a form of cultural capital that is owned by the global elite and frequently used to demarcate social distinctions. This article, based on ethnographic research in an international school in China, introduces the concretization of this paradox. The article shows how teachers and students in a gated school – in which local students, by Chinese law, were not permitted to study – used different practices to signify invented Chineseness as legitimate and non-legitimate. This process is explored by deciphering practices of boundary-making that produced a unique bubble. Based on three mechanisms of boundary-making and groupness, I show how a cultural process of identification and differentiation challenges previous empirical assumptions of selective boundaries in reference to the locale. Instead, the presence of ambiguous perceptions of Chinese locality in school suggest the existence of elastic, continuous and unfixed boundaries.

Sinitic Poetry in Early Heian Japan: Kidendō Literacy, Banquet Culture, and the Sugawara House

In this paper, I explore the intimate connection between the Sugawara House and the composition of Sinitic poetry for institutionalised poetry banquets in early Heian Japan. While poetry remained a marginal occupation for the Confucian scholars trained at the Bureau of Education, its performance at banquets constituted a prestigious niche that could be occupied by those who sought to exploit it as an autonomous form of cultural capital. Here I sketch the contours of this connection and analyse a number of anthologizing strategies at work in the personal collection of the renowned early Heian scholar and poet Sugawara no Michizane (845-903) known as Kanke bunsō (Literary Drafts of the Sugawara House).

PASSING IDENTITY AND ETHNIC CULTURE IN LATVIAN EMIGRANT FAMILIES

The paper discusses the problem of preserving native Latvian language and the transfer of cultural identity in Latvian diaspora. One of the central tasks for Latvia’s diaspora policy is to support preservation of Latvian language and culture in diaspora with the aim of strengthening the Latvian identity and the sense of belonging to Latvia. Support is provided to diaspora schools for preserving Latvian language, culture and identity outside of Latvia. However, for children not to lose their Latvian language skills it is important that the language is used also in the family.This paper uses a combination of a quantitative survey and in-depth interviews with the parents of children in diaspora. The aim is to ascertain the language situation in the diaspora, explore practices and perspectives on sustaining Latvian language and ethnic culture.In the theoretical aspect, the research data is approached with reference to P. Bourdieu’s view on language skills as linguistic capital, a form of cultural capital. Parent’s attention to sustaining their heritage language in emigration is analysed in relation to children’s identity formation and family communication with family members left behind. The data confirms that parents play a big role in language acquisition and sustaining by children in emigration, and parents hold the main responsibility in the process of realizing ethnic identity as a value.

“Mi Mestre no es brasileño”: Sobre la autenticidad y legitimidad de la capoeira en México

Griffith propone los marcadores de autenticidad como formas de capital cultural que permiten ganar legitimidad en el campo social de la capoeira. Entre ellos, destaca el grado de Mestre como último marcador de autenticidad/legitimidad. Pese a la globalización de la práctica, la literatura reporta la existencia de pocos Mestres no-brasileños, especialmente en las regiones del Norte Global. En este contexto, el caso de México es atípico por contar con un número equiparable de Mestres mexicanos y brasileños. Este estudio analiza las historias de vida de dos de estos Mestres mexicanos, que han sido pioneros en la formación de profesionistas de la capoeira en el país, con el objetivo de comparar sus estrategias de legitimación con las observadas por Griffith. Con ello, el presente estudio prueba el alcance analítico de la propuesta de Griffith y contribuye a un mejor entendimiento de la economía de la autenticidad de la práctica. En contraste con las observaciones de Griffith, se sugiere que la innovación puede operar como marcador carismático para ganar legitimidad, mientras que el género puede mermar la legitimidad de un/a Mestre/a, abriendo nuevas perspectivas sobre las dinámicas del campo social de la capoeira y otras prácticas similares.

Race Off: The fantasy of race transformation

Race OffThe fantasy of race transformation Namwali Serpell (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Genevieve Gaignard, People Make the World Go Round, 2019. [End Page 44] What if you could change your race? Some disturbing scandals of late have put this hypothetical to the reality test. A cluster of white American academics and activists, all women it seems, have been revealed to have spent years cosplaying a different race—Latinx, North African, black—deceiving their colleagues and comrades. The valedictorian of this recent class of racial fakers remains Rachel Dolezal, the former college instructor, activist, and president of an NAACP chapter, who was outed by a reporter in 2015. She confessed that she was "born white to white parents," but still declares herself to be "racially human" and culturally black. [End Page 45] Such deceptions are nothing new. Racial hoaxes have been around for a long time, as Laura Browder explains in Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities (2000). In the mid-nineteenth century, P. T. Barnum showcased people of concocted races, such as "the Circassian Beauty," and promoted a "Negro" who claimed to have discovered "a weed that turns a black person white." Newspapers at the time called out runaway slave imposters, who went around "soliciting money," "purchasing relatives and friends." White writers published fake slave narratives, with some unconscious tells, according to Browder: their narrators tend to discover that slavery is bad (as if this were not obvious) and to betray both "disgust with the African-American body" and "an obsession with physical pain." As late as the 1920s, the Britishborn Archibald Stansfeld Belaney disguised himself as Grey Owl, a Native American man. In his 2017 history Bunk, Kevin Young notes that "the hoax regularly steps in when race rears its head—exactly because it too is a fake thing pretending to be real." Indeed, historical evidence and scientific consensus tell us that race is a social rather than a biological reality. Yet we harbor a nearatavistic obsession with the mechanics and psychology of race impersonators. How do they change their skin color, their hair texture, their voice? And why? Is it minstrelsy? Is it racial self-hatred, white guilt, the fetishism of others? In The Atlantic, Helen Lewis diagnoses the new crop of race fakers with "social Munchausen syndrome," likening it to the condition in which a person fakes an illness in order to garner sympathy. Others have argued that being not-white has come to seem politically profitable in our present moment. Hence the co-optation of social justice rhetoric in what we call the "Oppression Olympics" and "white grievance" politics. To wit, suffering is now a form of cultural capital. While history, psychology, and sociology provide some context, we can also see these women as the latest players in a game I call the fantasy of American race transformation. If we take a lead from Barnum, we can taxonomize this genre along various axes: when these texts appeared and who produced them, which race [End Page 46] gets transformed and into which race, what mechanism catalyzes it and how, whether it's imposed or self-motivated and to what end, whether it's reversible or permanent, and so on. While there's a veritable circus of racial chimeras to consider, I'll train my spotlight on the transformations between black and white people, in popular narrative works created by black and white Americans, from the 1850s to now. From "passing" to cross-racial reportage to speculative fiction, the fantasy of changing your race cuts an electric line—thrilling, dangerous, illuminating—through the American popular imagination. At first glance, there's something radical in the very idea of changing your race, which assumes that race is changeable and therefore unfixed: in short, a construct. But all the aesthetic energy in race transformation stories—their alchemy, ambiguity, and absurdity—springs from the surprise of a black person "inside" a white person or vice versa. And this assumes an essential racial self or soul lurking within the lightened or darkened skin. To change your race either becomes a kind of thought experiment, geared to make you empathize with another race or to punish...

Inheriting or re-structuring habitus/capital? Chinese migrant children in the urban field of cultural reproduction

Highlighting the fluid nature of habitus/capital, this paper critiques a ‘rucksack approach’ (Erel, 2010) in the Bourdieusian studies of Chinese migrants’ cultural reproduction and social inclusion, which takes a determinism and fatalism standpoint and neglects the re-structuring of the migrant habitus and cultural capital over generations. Semi-structured interviews were conducted in Beijing and Shanghai with 62 teachers, rural migrants and local parents and students. This paper conceptualises an urban field of cultural reproduction, which is marked by the reproduction and validation of urban-specific cultural configurations, including knowledge, skill, language, aesthetic/taste, value and lifestyle. In this field, migrant children have experienced re-structuring of habitus and accumulation of new forms of cultural capital. This is illustrated by their manner of speaking, ways of behaving, self-presentation, and their appreciation of extra-curricular hobbies. A well-integrated relationship between migrant and local children can be identified, which contributes to the production of a generation of ‘new urban citizens’, yet in the meantime reproduces the migrant families’ class status as low-skilled labourers.

Cultural capital, habitus and reading futures: middle-class adolescent students’ cultivation of reading dispositions in Singapore

The acquisition of cultural capital can only be understood in the light of the formation of habitus, including the socialisation process, and in the context of the field in which any such capital has value. Yet, the relation between cultural capital and habitus is seldom discussed in research. Drawing on the data from focus groups with 96 students and a survey of 5,779 students from six Singapore secondary schools, we analyze how reading as a form of cultural capital is distributed among High-SES, Mid-SES and Low-SES students in Singapore. We show how middle-class practices of intensive immersion in school-valued reading practices is a form of habitus that prepare some students better than others for engaged reading. The findings highlight how reading as a form of cultural capital is operationalized through students’ familial habitus and argues that making visible familial habitus provides insights for transforming institutional habitus for students’ reading futures.

Community-based standards and community cultural wealth in freedom schools

ABSTRACT This project contributes to the understanding and support of the social and academic development of racialised, minoritized students using criteria grounded in community goals and standards for their children. Results are from a 2-year case study of a Children’s Defence Fund-sponsored Freedom School (FS) in the US that engaged in critical multicultural education and culturally relevant pedagogy. Collaborative research worked to identify 1) FS staffs’ criteria for themselves, each other, and their students, 2) forms of cultural capital in this FS summer programme, and 3) to understand the relationship between staffs’ standards and the identified forms of cultural capital. The importance of such efforts for oppressed communities’ claims to educational sovereignty is highlighted.

Navigating Institutions: Parents’ Knowledge of the Educational System and Students’ Success in Education

AbstractThis study investigates whether families navigate educational institutions more successfully if they have a higher knowledge of the pathways in the educational system that are available to their children. We also study whether this kind of knowledge mediates secondary effects of social origin, i.e. differences in educational pathways once achievement differences between children are accounted for. The role of parents’ knowledge is consistent with various sociological theories concerning educational inequality. Knowledge can affect families’ ability to make rational choices for education but it can also be understood as a form of cultural capital. We use longitudinal student cohort data from the Netherlands combined with individual-level register data on educational attainment to study the importance of knowledge for short-term outcomes (up- and downward transitions in secondary education as well as track placement) and final educational attainment. Our results show that parents’ knowledge is a significant predictor of educational success net of parents’ education, socio-demographic characteristics, and demonstrated ability. If we apply a stricter test to the measure, however, we can see that knowledge matters for downward transitions and obtaining a tertiary degree but that the effect is negligible for upward transitions and track placement if other mechanisms such as cultural capital and aspirations are considered. Further, we conclude that knowledge matters especially for transitions in the educational system that require a move to a new and unknown school environment such as post-secondary or tertiary education. The study shows that knowledge is one useful avenue to investigate when we are confronted with the question why social disparities in educational decision-making arise.

‘You’re in the basement of this grand house…:’ habitus reformation and elite cultural capital acquisition among women of color

ABSTRACT This study explores habitus (re)formation and elite cultural capital acquisition among 37 lower to middle-income women of color who accessed a high-income, predominantly white suburban public high school through one of three ways: as residents, as commuters, or as boarders, with the latter groups gaining access through two voluntary racial desegregation programs. The in-depth interviews reveal that women in all three groups discuss exposure to and comfort in diverse settings, but commuters and boarders are more likely to discuss habitus (re)formation than are residents. Women in all three groups discuss gaining dominant cultural capital in the form of speech and self-presentation skills, at times explicitly discussing the racialized nature of such forms of cultural capital. Commuters and boarders also discuss acquiring academic knowledge and travel opportunities, while residents and commuters discuss institutionalized cultural capital in the form of a diploma or a driver’s license with an elite town name.

How class identities shape highbrow consumption: A cross-national analysis of 30 European countries and regions

Highbrow culture may not always be central to cultural capital and, in such circumstances, the distinctiveness of middle-class consumption of highbrow culture may diminish, becoming more similar to working-class patterns of highbrow consumption. Using data from 30 European countries, I explore this issue through examining three questions: 1) is class identity associated with highbrow consumption; 2) does this association vary across countries; and 3) is the relationship between class identity and highbrow consumption altered when the majority of people in a given society identify as either ‘working-class’ or ‘middle-class’? After accounting for other socio-demographic controls, people who identify as middle-class are more active highbrow consumers than those who identify as working class. Yet, the distinctiveness of middle-class consumption of highbrow culture varies across countries and is negatively correlated with how many people identify as working-class in a society. As more people identify as working-class (rejecting middle-class identities) highbrow culture less clearly distinguishes middle-class and working-class identifiers. In the absence of any class-structured divisions in highbrow culture, whether and how cultural practices function as a form of cultural capital is likely quite different, reinforcing the claim that the centrality of highbrow culture to cultural capital varies geographically.

Kulturní kapitál na vysoké škole: strukturace kulturního prostoru studentů Univerzity Karlovy

Cultural capital is an important part of the conceptual apparatus of research on inequalities and social reproduction. The putative transformation of cultural hierarchies in contemporary society, however, opens up the question of whether it still makes any sense to speak of 'legitimate taste' and eventually of what the nature this legitimate taste might be. This article examines what constitutes legitimate culture in the context of university-level study. It focuses on the differentiation of taste and the way in which the space of cultural consumption is structured by academic disciplines and university faculties. The article draws on data from a questionnaire survey of first- and second-year students at Charles University in 2017 (n = 5127) and conducts a multiple correspondence analysis. It shows that the first dimension of the cultural space of students can be interpreted as the axis of overall cultural capital without any specific differentiation. The third dimension of cultural space, by contrast, convincingly captures a cleavage between traditional cultural capital and a new form of cultural capital. The amount of cultural capital accumulated depends on the kind of academic disciplines studied, but another significant structuring element of cultural capital is the environment of individual university faculties itself.

Cultural Capital at Work: How Cognitive and Noncognitive Skills Are Taught, Trained, and Rewarded in a Chinese Technical College

Purpose: Community and technical college student employability is a pressing concern in the United States and China. Policy makers focus on developing students’ human capital in the form of credentials and cognitive skills. However, the focus on completion overlooks the role that noncognitive skills and contextual factors may play in student employability. Method: In this exploratory study, conducted among educators and employers in the manufacturing and biotechnology fields in a large eastern Chinese city, we use a cultural capital framework to address the following questions: (a) What forms of cultural capital are valued by educators and employers? (b) How are these forms of capital being cultivated in the classroom? (c) How do considerations of cultural capital influence hiring and workplace training? and (d) What contextual factors influence these phenomena? Inductive thematic analyses of interviews, classroom observation, and notes from factory tours with eight educators and two employers were completed. Results: This study revealed a shared view that both cognitive and noncognitive skills are essential. Results also reveal a cultural predisposition within Chinese classrooms to lecturing but also a growing use of active learning techniques, a commitment to general education, the importance of “cultural fit” during the hiring process, and job quality and the cultural devaluation of the skilled trades as salient contextual factors. Conclusion: Implications for research, policy, and practice are considered, particularly the need for all students to acquire both cognitive and noncognitive skills as well as a more nuanced and culturally informed perspective on student employability.

Linguistic Cultural Capital among Descendants of Mixed Couples in Catalonia, Spain: Realities and Inequalities

ABSTRACTSpain, along with the region of Catalonia in particular, has seen a significant increase in mixed unions between immigrants and natives, which, in turn, has given rise to a growing number of young people with mixed origins. Yet little is known about how these mixed families and individuals negotiate cultural differences and view their ‘mixed cultural capital.’ Drawing on 29 in-depth interviews with youth of diverse mixed cultural, racial, and religious backgrounds residing in Catalonia and 58 in-depth interviews with immigrants in mixed unions, this paper focuses on the role of language as a form of cultural capital. Do mixed families use a number of languages in their everyday lives? Which languages are transmitted, preferred, and used, and why? We find that mixed families are generally multilingual, as the knowledge of different languages is thought to contribute to communication with relatives, social integration, and social mobility. However, children and youth of mixed descent who belong to minoritized ethnic or racial groups may resist learning or actively using the language of their immigrant parent to avoid stigmatization and socially imposed categories of ‘foreignness.’ Therefore, stigmatization and prejudice may be limiting linguistic cultural capital – a key benefit of mixedness – in Catalonia.

Referential and vehicular languages in the process of migrant integration

In this article I examined the strategies developed by Bulgarian immigrants living in Spain in order to promote the learning of Bulgarian language and culture among their children. Starting from the incorporated cultural capital brought by immigrants in the form of habitus (Bulgarian language and culture), I analyse how this devaluated cultural capital in the migratory context is effectively reconverted in other forms of cultural capital (objectified and institutionalized) through the development of non-formal and formal courses on Bulgarian language and culture. In this analysis I show the articulation between, on the one hand, the contexts where these informal, non-formal and formal courses take place and, on the other hand, the reconversion of different forms of social and cultural capital: the initial bonding social capital between family members and close group of compatriots is effectively reconverted into bridging and linking social capital as the organization of these courses requires and contributes to the diversification of social networks. The analysis has also a gender dimension given that in most cases, and certainly in the case of Burgos, women are the main social actors and makers of these strategies. The main objective of the article is to show the relevance of social interaction and social networks in the development of reconversion strategies of different forms of social and cultural capital. In addition, the article also expects to raise more awareness towards the relevance of mother-tongue learning in the migratory context.

Young Indonesian Musicians, Strategic Social Capital, Reflexivity, and Timing

In this article, we draw on a study of the transition experiences of young Indonesian musicians to argue that the social capital of creative youth may be productively understood in relation to reflexivity and temporality. This is particularly important if they move to other locations to further their careers. In brief, we offer three key contributions to social capital debates. First, social capital—as defined by Bourdieu—is most important as a valuable form of capital to deal with both actual and anticipated Beckian risk. Second, in fields of creative struggle, the development of social capital is closely related to possession of strategy and reflexivity as a form of cultural capital. Third, social capital cannot be operationalized effectively by youth without the element of timing and the temporal capacity to reflexively recognize and seize opportunities as they arise at critical moments of a creative career.

Enhancing Clients’ Perspectives and the Therapeutic Process by Expanding Our View of Cultural Wealth

This article addresses the use of cultural capital to influence therapeutic practices with culturally diverse clients. Using cultural wealth from a Critical Race Theory perspective (Yosso in Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69–91, 2005) highlights unacknowledged forms of cultural capital of diverse groups. Utilizing this perspective impacts counsellors’ positioning within the therapeutic relationship, shapes the discourse within therapy, and can enhance clients’ autonomous motivation within the therapeutic process. This article builds upon Yosso’s (Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69–91, 2005) forms of cultural wealth by situating them within a therapeutic context.