A Post-Socialist Residential School and the Continuum of Violence
A Post-Socialist Residential School and the Continuum of Violence
Author(s): Artūrs PokšānsSubject(s): Education, Recent History (1900 till today), Studies in violence and power, Sociology of Education
Published by: Tartu Ülikool, Eesti Rahva Muuseum, Eesti Kirjandusmuuseum
Keywords: residential school; post-socialism; violence; inequality; auto-ethnography;
Summary/Abstract: This article discusses the tolerance of violence. Specifically, it explores the way violence is enacted and perpetuated in residential education in Latvia. The article explores the perception and experience of violence in these schools by combining ethnographic fieldwork and auto-ethnographic data. Violence within the institution coalesces around three main aspects of experience: violence as necessary for regulating relationships, the embodiment of violence, and the expression of institutional violence. I illustrate how the application of violence is often justified as developing independence in students and by offering opportunities that mask the role of the school system in the reproduction of inequality in society. I conclude with an exploration of how the tolerance of violence arises from reproduction of an unequal social order that is maintained through the duplicitous position of the residential school as simultaneously necessary and unnecessary, closed and open, violent and nurturing.
Journal: Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics
- Issue Year: XVII/2023
- Issue No: 2
- Page Range: 44-63
- Page Count: 20
- Language: English