How Do We Learn How to Behave?
How do we learn the unwritten rules of social life? This article explores socialisation, identity, family, education, peers, media and the ways society shapes how we behave.
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Tag: Habitus
Where Do Young People Belong Anymore? Skills for Life, Capital and the Social Spaces of Growing Up
We expect young people to reach adulthood with confidence, communication skills, resilience and leadership, but rarely ask where they were supposed to develop them. Drawing on Bourdieu, research on youth participation and the idea of opportunity structures, this article explores how skills, relationships and social capital are built, recognised and unequally distributed.
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Satisfied? Student Surveys, Social Position, and the Limits of Experience Data
The National Student Survey ranks institutions, shapes league tables, and features in marketing materials as evidence of teaching excellence. But satisfaction is not the same as learning, and the social position of the student completing the survey shapes what they report in ways the instrument cannot detect. This article applies a Bourdieusian lens to the NSS — and finds that the data is telling us something rather different from what it is used to claim.
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The Hidden Curriculum of Soft Skills: Recognition, Capital, and Who Gets Left Out
Job adverts demand communication, leadership, and resilience. But who actually gets credit for them? Drawing on Bourdieu, Puwar, and Rivera, this article argues that soft skills are not recognised neutrally — they are filtered through class, race, and cultural capital. The result is a hiring system that mistakes social advantage for individual merit.
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The Debt Trap and the Class Gap: Why Student Loan Warnings Are a Form of Gatekeeping
This article uses Johanna Noble’s recent column on Plan 2 student loans to ask who is really put off university by talk of a “graduate tax”. Drawing on research on first-in-family and working-class students, it shows how fear of debt, school guidance, and weak vocational routes combine to reproduce classed access to higher education.
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Understanding Bourdieu’s Forms of Capital: How Inequality Is Reproduced Through Culture, Networks, and Status
Bourdieu’s concept of capital—economic, cultural, social, and symbolic—reveals how privilege is passed on and class boundaries maintained. This article explains each type of capital, critiques the theory, and shows its relevance in today’s educational inequalities.
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Society Wasn’t Built for Us: A Bourdieuian View of Neurodivergence
Exploring how Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of capital, habitus, fields, and symbolic violence reveal the hidden barriers faced by neurodivergent people.
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