Overcoming mistrusted masculinity: contesting ethnic minority fathers’ involvement in home–school cooperation in Denmark

ABSTRACT

This ethnographic study investigates cooperation between homes and schools in a Danish context from the perspective of ‘ethnic minority fathers’. I analyse how experiences of an ‘implicit’ mistrust can make ethnic minority fathers reluctant to cooperate with child institutions such as schools. It is argued that this mistrust is related to a hegemonic negative image of these fathers as oppressive, aggressive, and/or absent and careless. To conceptualize this mistrust, I argue for the concept of ‘mistrusted masculinity’. The analysis directs attention to the rhythms of the fathers’ everyday lives, offering examples of how the absence of some ethnic minority fathers in home–school cooperation may be explained by long working hours and ‘constraining jobs’. The research found that a ‘new role of the father’ is evident in the behaviours and attitudes of both ‘native Danish fathers’ and ethnic minority fathers.

KEYWORDS:

• Fatherhood
• masculinities
• race and ethnicities
• parents
• education policy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Anne Hovgaard Jørgensen is a PhD student of Educational Anthropology at Aarhus University and University College Copenhagen. She holds an MA in Anthropology from Aarhus University. Before starting her PhD, she was working in social projects in ‘challenged social housing areas’ in Denmark.

Notes

1 All names and places are anonymized.

2 ‘Boligsociale helhedsplaner’.

3 In the Danish grade 0, the pupils are generally six years old. It is located at the school and the pupils learn, among other things, the alphabet and basic maths (equivalent to ‘grade 1’ in many countries).

4 Or ‘men as men’ (Gutmann 1996) contrary to fatherhood as ‘men as fathers’.

5 It may be argued that by connecting the ethnic minority fathers to crime-prevention projects their masculinity is somewhat expected to be authoritative and strict.

6 All children are associated with a particular state school district by virtue of their domicile or residence. They have unconditional right to admission to this school. The child also has the right to register at another state school, and is usually accepted, if there is room (Danish Ministry of Education 2016).

7 A kind of meeting place in the West End with a large sports hall and a café.

8 This category calls for a further analysis of how ethnic status, class, and ‘sensitive neighbourhoods’ combined to form a mixed and blurred category that could leave some pupils in a deprived position. This blurring has, among others, been studied by Wacquant (2001).

9 Some of the fathers who had attended a school in another country explained that these demands had not been a common thing there.

10 Through a special ‘teacher-profile’, a teacher may determine how often each parent logged in to the parent-intra.