ABSTRACT
I have employed the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu extensively in my work to date. In my recent ethnographic study of ‘marginalized’ youth in school and in health and physical education (HPE), I found Bourdieu’s theoretical tools enormously useful in enabling me to understand the lives of diverse and socioeconomically disadvantaged young people at the intersection of class, place, gender and ethnicity (Fitzpatrick 2013). Prior to beginning this study, I had consciously avoided Bourdieu and was looking more to the ideas of postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha and Edward Said, and to the poststructuralist ideas of Foucault and the feminist ideas of Judith Butler. I put Bourdieu aside initially because I was concerned that applying the field/capital/habitus triumvirate would lead me into a deterministic explanation of the class-located actions, and school achievement, of the youth in the study. This assumption had stemmed from reading critiques of Bourdieu (for example, Giroux 1981), which I now feel put undue emphasis on certain parts of his ideas at the expense of the whole. I was worried, most centrally, about where this analysis would lead me and where, as a result of taking this path, I would not travel. This is, of course, a question to ask about the application of any social theory or mode of analyses. In analyzing the complex lives of youth, I wanted my study to present some kind of ‘answer’ to the intractable underachievement and social marginality to which these young people are both subject and complicit. I wanted the theory to offer and allow for a way out. Of course, I was asking too much. Social theory may help us to understand social contexts; it is unlikely to offer direct solutions to issues of social justice. Zygmunt Bauman states that ‘all theory is selective’ and goes on to assert that theory serves to shine a light ‘in a way that would assist orientation and help find the way’ (2004: 17). I returned to Bourdieu in this study for the simple reason that his ideas worked, they resonated deeply with me – my own habitus – and with the approach I took to the research. Bourdieu’s theoretical tools offered a way into the young people’s stories, while simultaneously highlighting the importance of the wider social and political contexts. My engagement, however, with other social theories also allowed me to see where the edges might lie. Bourdieu’s ideas, then, shine a light in particular places to assist orientation around, through and within empirical materials. Conversely, this also leaves dark spaces, corners that remain unlit. Bourdieu himself encouraged us to not limit our thinking to singular ideas, but instead to attempt excavation of ‘the unthought categories of thought’ which, he noted, ‘limit the unthinkable and predetermine what is actually thought’ (1987/1994: 178).
