Taking Sides: To School or Not to School Squatters' Children

Abstract

Families of squatters who had settled in a quiet neighborhood of Paris wished to send their children to the local school. Our ethnohistorical inquiry explores how the mobilization in favor of schooling the children was embedded in other controversies and mobilizations that arose from the squatters' presence in the occupied building. Many collective social actors (associations, unions, administrations, and politicians) were involved in conflicting mobilizations in an ongoing struggle of competing arguments. The contemporary crisis of the French model of political representation has enabled the emergence of new forms of collective protest: new ways of defining social problems and a new repertory of civil actions, that is, the “mediatization” of social action and the recourse to litigation. Our study suggests some of the possible extensions and limitations of this movement, especially in the context of action taken by teachers' unions and parents' associations.