Theorizing psychosocial processes in Canadian, middle‐class, Jewish mothers' school choice

Abstract

This paper presents a psychosocial analysis of interview data of three Canadian, middle‐class, Jewish mothers engaged in processes and practices of ‘school choice’. We consider how middle‐class, white identity intersects with Jewish ethnicity. We also examine how commitments to Canadian ideals of multiculturalism sit in contradiction with investments in neo‐liberal discourses of school performance and individual academic success and competition. Through analysis of narratives we illustrate how the mothers invoke binaries to differentiate self and others: self in the form of the middle‐class, Jewish self; others in the form of the risky and dangerous ‘multicultural’ body encountered in their children's primary school. We examine how contradictions are salient in the mothers' attempt to perform a morally legitimate selfhood in the face of competing commitments to individual attainment versus a collective good represented by ethnocultural diversity. Narratives reveal mothers' aspirational fantasies for their children that inform their class‐ and ethnic‐based choices and decisions around schooling. School choice is thus thoroughly inflected with imperatives to preserve middle‐classness and Jewish ethnic identity, and constituted through binary‐making. Yet as we illustrate, these processes are not stable but subject to constant to psychical re‐negotiation and flux.

Keywords:

• exclusion
• middle‐class
• mothers
• multiculturalism
• Jewish ethnicity
• psychoanalysis

Acknowledgements

This research was conducted with the assistance of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Standard Research Grant no. 108313, and completed with a Queen's University Research Initiation Grant and Advisory Research Committee Grant. Research assistance was provided by Lauren Perry, Jeff Moon, and Georgina Blanchard.

Notes

1. All names are pseudonyms. In some cases, only general information on the women's occupations, backgrounds, and families is provided in order to protect confidentiality.