Noël Clycq

‘My daughter is a free woman, so she can’t marry a Muslim’: The gendering of ethno-religious boundaries

Discourses often uncover underlying social boundaries related to concepts such as ethnicity, gender and religion. By applying an intersectional approach, this article shows how the gendering of ethno-religious boundaries is central in the narratives of parents of Belgian, Italian and Moroccan origin, living in Flanders, Belgium. These processes are extremely salient when discourses on partner choice are discussed, as is the focal point in the current study. The construction of boundaries and identities are deeply influenced by dominant social representations. The results show how the construction and justification of boundaries can also have restrictive consequences for individuals. Parents want to restrict daughters for their own good, and exogamy seems to be the prerogative of sons.

School leadership and equity: the case of Antwerp: a report on good practices in three primary schools

This article focuses on the good practices in three primary schools in the city of Antwerp, Belgium. First we start with a walk through the Flemish educational system and sum up the legislation concerned. After that we give a detailed overview of the pupil population of the three schools selected. Finally, the data from the interviews are analysed on three levels: the public, the school and the classroom-level. We study the impact of the Equal Educational Opportunities decree on the Schools and the initiatives taken by the school personnel to meet the needs of a multicultural pupil population.

‘You can’t escape from it. It’s in your blood’: Naturalizing ethnicity and strategies to ensure family and in-group cohesion

This article studies the construction of ethnicity within majority and minority families and more in particular the strategies developed to ensure intergenerational continuity via an in-depth analysis of the narratives of Belgian-Flemish-, Italian- and Moroccan-origin parents in Flanders, Belgium. Parents were asked to discuss the upbringing of their children and the main elements they want to transmit, with a focus on their ethno-cultural identity. These narratives shed light on how parents perceive themselves, their children and other groups in society, and, more importantly, what these perceptions entail for the upbringing of their children. This article studies the strategies developed to ensure ethno-cultural continuity within the family and/or ethnic group, and discusses in which way these strategies become ‘logic’ in the eyes of these parents. The analysis shows how internalized perceptions and dispositions about one’s ethnicity, cultural background and religious affiliation influence strategy development to ensure linguistic and religious continuity and family cohesion, given the specificities of the social context. Overall, parents try to make sense of the burden of ethno-cultural continuity they feel resting upon their shoulders, but the article discusses how minority and majority parents’ perceptions and strategies tend to differ according to one’s social location and to power differences.

‘We value your food but not your language’: Education systems and nation-building processes in Flanders

Education systems are crucial social and cultural apparatuses. They are designed to homogenize at least to a large extent the discourses and praxis of the citizens of a nation by channelling them as much as possible through a unified educational system. However, in ethnically and culturally diversified societies, these homogenizing social institutions can become counterproductive as they are primarily designed by and for the dominant ethnic group. This issue is particularly important in nation-building processes, something that is still explicitly ongoing in Flanders (Belgium), as these institutions put forward a unified nation with one culture and language. In this article we study how these macro-level processes can be related to the interaction processes in and between families and schools. The central research question this article tries to answer is: is the idea of a culturally and linguistically unified representation of the Flemish nation relevant when studying teacher-pupil-parent relations? We aim to build upon the existing literature by relating meso-level processes of institutional racialization and culturalization to micro-level interactions in educational settings and to macro-level processes of nation-building in Flanders. To answer these questions, we rely upon data from two qualitative research projects: (1) one study that focuses on the family socialization processes in ethnic majority and minority families and collected 42 interviews with parents; and (2) a second study that focuses on the educational trajectories of students, with specific attention on the school environment, and collected 114 interviews with students and 57 interviews with school actors. The findings show clear similarities between the macro-level processes and the interactions between families and schools in such a way that the article discusses if ongoing and explicit nation-building processes are capable of appreciating the existing diversity in a nation.

Meritocracy, deficit thinking and the invisibility of the system

Socio-ethnic stratification and segregation processes present in Flemish society are reflected in the everyday school environment. Pupils with a different socio-ethnic background than the dominant majority and middle class seem to be confronted with a lot of difficulties in this school system. The dominant meritocratic discourse frequently applies a deficit thinking perspective to frame educational success and failure, focusing on deficiencies originating outside of the school. In this paper we analyse newly collected survey data (N = 11,015 pupils) and a large amount of qualitative data (from pupils, parents, teachers, principals) to answer our two main research questions: (i) how is educational success/failure defined, and (ii) how is educational success/failure explained? The factor analyses as well as the qualitative analyses illustrate how the idea of meritocracy relates to individualistic features such as effort, merit and competence. However, the findings also reveal that this individualistic approach goes hand-in-hand with a focus on the family environment and ‘culture’ which seems to limit individual agency to a large extent. In these discourses, pupils, parents and even teachers are presented as being largely determined by their direct social environment with almost no regard for social inequalities within the educational system. The paper ends with a discussion on how processes of victimization and the denial of systemic bias, influence educational trajectories and proposes a different approach to multiculturalism and the appreciation of cultural background and specific family resources as positive elements in these trajectories.