Social Reproduction Through Citizenship Education: Performing the Habitus of Pragmatic Compliance

Abstract

Schools stand for an important institutional space through which youth identity is performed and social order is reproduced (Aitken, Geographies of young people: the morally contested spaces of identity. Routledge, London/New York, 2001). The focus of this chapter is interactions between resistance and subjection to official discourses of good citizenship. According to Holt (Prog Hum Geogr 32(2): 227-246, 2008), conceiving multifaceted identity locations, such as citizenship, as embodied social capital opens up the opportunity to synthesize Butler's performativity theory with Bourdieu's habitus concept. In Bourdieu's conceptualizations habitus represents the internalization of the social order, which in turn reproduces this order. Bourdieu attempts to delineate how agents have dispositions that often serve to reproduce particular structures of common sense which produce and are produced by the relatively powerful in society. Butler (Bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of "sex." Routledge, New York, 1993) contends that subjects cannot pre-exist their performance, and the performed reproduction does not necessarily result in an exact copy of the original. In contrast to Bourdieu, she insists that repetitions of performances serve not always to reproduce social order but have the power to transform them. Identity performances, however, are often done without consciously realizing the processes. It is suggested in this chapter that neither approach can satisfactorily explain why social norms of good citizenship, which are seemingly internalized, relatively uncritically, by youths in Singapore, can also be expressions of resistance that cover deep resentments. The concept of pragmatic compliance as performed subjection to social norms is brought forward as both partially resisted and partly internalized effects of official discourses mobilized through formal education.