Situated Inequality in Children's Institutions

The research community explores how unequal conditions for participation in educational institutions relate to collaborative processes across children’s life contexts. Inequality as a central societal problem requires basis research to develop psychological concepts for understanding the relationship between people and their life conditions. People conduct their everyday life in ongoing collaboration with others, and ‘behind’ processes of marginalization and inequality, our hitherto research points to conflicts among parents, professionals and children, as decisive to processes of inequality. These conflicts appear to have unnoticed consequences for some children’s access to collaborative resources in school and for their personal possibilities to conduct life across contexts.
The aim of the project is to provide knowledge on how processes and social dynamics of inequality develop in everyday life. This social psychological perspective contributes with conceptualisations of inequality related to concrete possibilities for participation in school life, conduct of everyday life across contexts, children’s communities and conflictual collaboration about children’s school life. The project thus delivers a human scientific contribution to the social scientific debates on inequality and human agency and aim to develop a scientific platform for Psychological Everyday Perspectives on Inequality.

The purpose of this research-community is to explore how unequal conditions for participation in school are related to everyday life in school and to collaborative processes between the various parties of the school, such as children, parents, teachers, school psychologist. An aim is to develop new social psychological understandings of the relationship between subjects’ conduct of everyday life, conflictuality in social processes in school and situated Inequality in Children’s School Life.