Contesting social exclusion

Description

The first stage of analysis demonstrates the inherent contradictions and uncertainties arising through the application of the most popular version of social exclusion as an individual kind. Repositioning this categorical idea and its assumptions as integral to the processes of social exclusion itself, the following chapter provides an analysis of the four forms of social exclusion---economic, spatial, socio-political, and subjective---as denied access to legitimate means of appropriating various species of capital from dominated positions in the market-state social field . In the third findings chapter, the specific role of the state in the dynamic processes of social exclusion is evidenced as the meaning, vilification, and racialization of difference, and ultimately the production of the classifying habitus. Finally, through an in depth exploration of conflicting meanings of work in competing social fields, the practices that appear to be expressions of self-imposed social exclusion are reinterpreted as the necessary means for the appropriation of capital---for survival---in the places in-between the various social fields in which many people inevitably participate.Popular articulations of social inclusion as an indisputable social value and inspired direction for social policy are contingent on its undesirable counterpart, and can be realized only through imposing a "vision of divisions" constituted by oppositional social groups or kinds. This study begins from the premise that in order to move beyond the 'commonsense' idea of social inclusion as a conserving system of social classification, application of the term must remain attached to its economic, political and social contexts, and a reconfigured notion of social exclusion as both kind-and-process is applied through Pierre Bourdieu's anti-dualist, reflexive approach to social research.This project is an exploration of the idea and social realities of social exclusion, particularly its self-imposed expressions, as experienced by various ethno-religious communities of Low German Mennonite migrant workers in southern Ontario. Readily visible among many in this population are the external markers of poverty and social exclusion. Their tenacious commitment to a distinct way of life and a predisposition for endless migration suggests that their social exclusion is, on the surface, collectively self-imposed and furthermore, voluntary.

Subjects

Links

• URL