Forming recognition: exploring bonds with others at school

Abstract

This article is inserted in an investigation project centered on the problem of hospitality in the way students act in school grounds, viewed through inhospitable and hospitable experiences these actors lived throughout school sociabilities. In the framework of this problem, we intend to observe, in particular, how students who qualify as foreign connect to the school, and, through these bonds, the way they relate to others, in the figure of their peers, within a context of a transformation in school morphology in the last few decades stemming from the rise in the number of foreign students enrolled in the cycles of mandatory schooling in Portugal. Through the theoretical framework commonly designated pragmatic sociology, we intend to analyze how students are engaged in different and compounded regimes of action that seek to make the common in the plural in their respective teaching establishments. For that purpose, we have articulated data from semi-structured interviews and ethnographic observations conducted in two public schools within the Portuguese Secondary Education system, with a common trait of hosting large contingents of students originating from contexts of immigration and of different nationalities. Shining a sociological light on several typified spaces that make up the school territory, it is in the exteriorizations by these foreign students when inquired regarding pressing events and about the way in which they inhabit the school that we address and point out the problem of recognition—namely the forming of the recognition of students in their status as foreign and the several experiences in which this recognition is or is not experienced.