'They Employ Cleaners to Do That' Habitu

‘They Employ Cleaners to Do That’: Habitus in the Primary Classroom Reay, D. (1995). ‘They employ cleaners to do that’: Habitus in the primary classroom. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 16(3), 353-371.

Empirical work that utilises Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital abound while there are far fewer research studies which operationalise habitus (among the few examples are Atkinson, 1983; Delamont, 1989; McClelland, 1990; Engler, 1990. (359)

At the centre of the concept are the social practices, which are the outcomes of an interaction between a habitus and a field. (359)

Bourdieu [1981, Men and Machines] outlines a ‘fit’ between agents’ subjective vocations (what they feel ‘made’ for) and their objective ‘missions’ (what is expected of them), and recounts how this harmony may be expressed in two modes of behaviour; firstly of doing what they have to do happily, often manifested in a sense of being ‘at home’, and secondly of acting with a resigned conviction, which Bourdieu explains as a feeling of not being able to do anything else (Bourdieu, 1981, p. 308).

    -> This would be useful for Michelle Friend’s analysis of seeing certain people (men) as having always been drawn to computing. 

    -> With the addition of a medium. This is where literacy becomes important. 

Ideas like those of habitus, practice, and so on, were intended, among other things, to point out that there is a practical knowledge that has its own logic, which cannot be reduced to that of theoretical knowledge; that in a sense, agents know the social world better than the theoreticians. And at the same time, I was also saying that, of course, they do not really know it and the scientist’s work consists in making explicit this practical knowledge, in accord- ance with its own articulations. (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 2)

    -> Habitus as grounding design-based research

Question: unconsciousness of habitus.  There’s always habitus, we live and swim in it. 

The iconicity of sensationalism: the content doesn’t matter, it’s the form.  Can I draw on Deluze for the argument for word vector habitus? 

Theory of mind and embodiment.