Paradoxes in the educational discourse about discrimination: a disciplinary background?

Abstract

This paper analyzes paradoxes in the concrete and situated configuration of the legal principle of equality and non-discrimination, as well as the paradigm of respect for diversity through which conflicts about discrimination are addressed at school. With an ethnographic approach that privileges social categories and meanings over legal terms such as discrimination, it analyzes interpersonal relationships and the emotions that children verbalize. It starts by considering aspects of the state discourse on discrimination such as the legal approach to discriminatory acts and their tendency to constrain it to terms of treatment and attitudinal bias. These aspects are reconstructed in everyday practices and relationships in a public school in an impoverished neighborhood of Buenos Aires, where discrimination is systematically linked to individualizing matrices of meaning about children as students, and the paradoxical effects on the regulation of their discriminatory verbalizations. It concludes by reconstructing the tensions between the disciplinary background of educational discourse and the collective and historical demands against discrimination.