Situated Inequality and Politics of Everyday Life

Through a focus on conflicts, the aim of this paper is to discuss theoretical challenges in conceptualizing the dialectic relationship between historical conditions and situated interplay in concrete everyday practice. We argue that the concept of conflict can help us move beyond the tendency within psychology to regard history and situated practice, structure and activity, and so-called micro and macro processes apart – and to regard social life as unambiguous or as governed through hegemony. A situated study about conflictuality illustrates both societal conflicts about the school and how children in school deal with quite unequal conditions when it comes to handling the conflictuality of school life. Analyses of coordination and conflicts between the parties (children, parents, teachers, psychologists, etc.) elucidate the connections between intersubjective means of making things work in everyday practice, and historical struggles relating to the school as a societal institution. To understand processes of reproducing and transgressing inequality in school, we therefore need concepts that enables us to understand these processes as both historically AND as politicalprocesses driven by intersubjectivity related to specific possibilities and dilemmas – what we call politics of everyday life. From a social practice perspective we discuss how to grasp the ways persons constitute the conditions for the acting of each other in a situated interplay in which, together, they deal with common historical problems.