527.5
Disputed Ambivalence. Berlin Hauptschüler As Strangers
The multifaceted problem of the ambivalence of the stranger – how it is produced, how it can be researched and how it is lived – will be the focus of my paper, dealing specifically with “Hauptschüler” (secondary students, often migrants) in Berlin, Germany. These students are faced with a variety of exclusionary mechanisms – besides discrimination on the job-market also media stigmatization and the denial of full citizenship.
I will treat the morally loaded ambivalence of the cultural figure of the “Hauptschüler” from three different perspectives: How are “Hauptschüler” made into strangers? How could one describe the ambivalent positions and positioning of the students? And how do the students themselves deal with their situation? In the first part, based on a media analysis of a public debate about the “Hauptschüler”, I will show how structural problems of the school system are construed as problems of ethnicity and religion. In the second part, I will describe the actual intermingling of class, ethnicity and gender in school. In the third part, I will turn the view on the question how the students themselves deal with negative stereotypes and racial or social classifications of being inferior.
The ambivalence of the „Hauptschüler“ as a stranger appears in all three perspectives in a different light: In the media debates ambivalence appears as a problem, in the ethnographic section ambivalences and intersections are treated as a challenge for sociological analysis and in the subversive practices of the students ambivalence is used to resist negative ascriptions and processes of self-victimization. The morally loaded processes of constructing, reproducing and deconstructing ambivalence are thus at the core of understanding the Berlin “Hauptschüler” as a stranger. The task of sociology is to show these processes are functioning and what kind of subjectivities they produce.