The public positioning of refugees in the quasi-education market: linking mediascapes and social geographies of schooling

ABSTRACT

This article analyses some ways in which racialising discourses around refugees interact with the spatial and social dynamics of marketised schooling. It identifies conflicting discourses that contribute to the polarisation of school social composition and resourcing in the Australian state of Victoria. Media narratives around ‘ethnic’ gangs contribute to wider discourses surrounding working-class neighbourhoods and schools as dangerous and violent ‘hotspots’. At the same time, some elite private schools discursively produce themselves as providing a ladder of opportunity for talented and deserving refugee youth, offering volunteer tutoring and scholarships. These discourses work together to legitimate the funding of socially exclusive sites at twice the rate of the schools that cater to virtually all refugee-background students. The article draws on critical discourse analysis, based on media reporting on refugees, and interviews with parents selecting a secondary school for their children. The findings have implications for the management of school choice as a policy framework, suggesting that its exclusionary effects are heightened in the context of intense media and political attention to refugees as racialised subjects.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugees
• critical discourse analysis
• school choice
• racialisation
• media representations

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Joel Windle is an Assistant Professor of Modern Languages at the Fluminense Federal University and Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at Monash University. He coordinates the Centre for Critical Studies in Language, Education and Society and undertakes research focused on inequalities and diversity in schooling.

Notes

1 Articles were identified using the Factiva database.

2 The study surveyed families in culturally diverse Melbourne neighbourhoods with a child transitioning from primary to secondary school (a moment of ‘school choice’); recruitment was via schools in these neighbourhoods. The focus of the survey and interviews was sources of information and factors influencing choice (or lack of choice).

3 Outer circuit schools are defined as those with socially exposed enrolments (low or zero social and academic selectivity); and local recruitment of students from geographically peripheral and low socioeconomic status neighbourhoods.

4 School resourcing comes from data provided on the Myschool website.

5 All figures from Myschool, 2016.