Intermediate Spaces in Unequal Contexts: The Management of the Socio-Educational Program Community School Support Network in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, Argentina

The configuration of educational spaces in contexts of inequality is a key challenge for contemporary educational policy. This paper, focused on an Argentine socio-educational program, presents empirical advances of my doctoral thesis in progress. From a qualitative methodological approach, we ask how are the local articulation spaces configured between state agents, referents of civil society organizations that manage the Community School Support Network (CSSN) program of the Ministry of Education of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (Argentina), and school actors that sustain primary schooling from 2013 to the present in different neighborhoods. The research is part of the debate on the role of the State and other actors in the regulation of educational policies, focusing on a program administered from the management associated with civil society organizations.

At the moment, the fieldwork consists of 15 interviews with the CSSN technical team and with representatives of two social organizations. For these actors, spatiality is transversal to the program since, far from being considered as a fixed scenario, it evidences issues related to infrastructures, materialities, constructions and space policies. That is why we will analyze school support centers as intermediate or third spaces between the Program and civil society organizations.

The analysis is organized on the basis of native categories, according to the experiences of the actors in the implementation of the program: “own spaces” and “non-own spaces”. While the former are lent by the social organizations involved in the management of the CSSN, the latter are provided by clubs, libraries or parishes. We will focus on the meanings that the subjects give to the construction of bonds and community in the different spaces, and how this is crossed by unequal material, social and symbolic conditions, which generates a particular social morphology in the local management of the socio-educational policy.