How Postapartheid Schools Mediate Xenophobia. Site Effects on Learners’ Subjectivities Towards Foreignness in Low-Income Schools of Johannesburg

Abstract

The paper explores how notions of foreignness and belonging among high school learners vary according to the location of their schools, based on a comparison of four low-income areas in Johannesburg: parts of the townships of Alexandra and Soweto and of the pericentral suburbs of Denver and Yeoville. Conceptualizing xenophobia as a political discourse that has become hegemonic in contemporary South African nationhood and state formation processes alongside Michael Neocosmos and Judith Hayem, this paper focuses on how this political discourse is being locally mediated in specific urban areas and school contexts. It draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of “site effects” and Prudence Carter’s bourdieusian inspired analysis of “schools’ organisational habitus” and builds on a 11 months of fieldwork in seven schools located in the four areas, and among state administrations and NGOs in Johannesburg, involving a wide methodology: questionnaires, interviews, ethnographic and action research methods. The paper reveals that high school learners develop more inclusive attitudes towards international migrants in pan African Yeoville, more exclusive attitudes towards international and some internal rural migrants in the two townships’ sections under study, and mixed attitudes in Denver. It identifies a range of site effects and organisational habitus dynamics that differ locally and contextually and account for such a gradient of political subjectivities among the learners: the demographic transformations of the neighbourhoods, the local politics of (anti)xenophobia mobilisations, the local interactions with (international) migrants, more or less rigid institutional gatekeeping practices in schools, and the pedagogic practices of the school staff.