Fields of Contention

1. Fields of Contention Students in Argentina and the Relative Autonomy of the Educational Field Gabriela GonzalzVaillanr

2. Focus of thepaper • It studies a manifold of student contentious events in Argentina in the last decade (1997-2007), in order to assess what students are mobilizing; when they are mobilizing, for what reasons and with whom. • Theoretical preoccupation: how can Bourdieu´s theory of fields shed light on the dynamics of educational contention and, more specifically, student movements?

3. Methodology • Descriptive statistics based on information collected from newspaper events used to construct a quantitative database of student mobilization event variables. • In-depth interviews to students that were active in the student movement during 2001-2002 and to key informants are used to complement the information analyzed.

4. Education as a (sub) field of contention • Bourdieu has offered a multi-institutional politics approach- move beyond the understanding of power as vested primarily in the state. • Society is composed of multiple fields • actors engage in power struggles over the interest at stake (particular to each given field) • specific legitimating capital capital (material, symbolic) which the actors possess in different measure and which they exercise in order to position themselves within the field. • interact according to certain rules (“doxa”) Education is not entirely autonomous but rather that it is intrinsically dependent on other fields

5. Social Movements and Fields • Each field is capable of generating different and focused social movements that contest the often times interiorized logics of a field. • The degree of overlap between the educational field and the political field is intrinsically related to the amplification and contraction of their demands

6. Students within the educational field • More common to find student contention in the City (71% of student contention took place within the Province of Buenos Aires ) • Students’ contentiouspoliticstendstofollowtheschoolyear • Very high demand and target elasticity, suggesting that they often participate in fields outside the education. Their main demands and the field in which they mobilize shifts in the three years considered: • educational field in 1998 • political field in 2002 • specific institutional sub-fields in 2007 Broader political system that leads to a change in the correlation of forces between students and authorities

7. Finding: Autonomous Field • One of the main finding is that, independently of important recent contextual shifts in Argentina, it is possible to identify a relatively autonomous student field with independent dynamics. • Relative autonomy is supported by the fact that by the fact that: • a) there is a certain amount of student-specific contention endemic to the field and stable across time; • b) student contention follows a similar cyclical pattern every year • c) students are unwilling to mobilize alone for demands that transcend their particular grievances; • d) when students decide to go outward of the educational field they are allied with other actors.

8. Finding: RelativelyAutonomous • Relativnessof their autonomy is explained by the fact that: a. there is great demand and alliance elasticity strongly linked to the context in which contention unfolds and; b. the overlap between the student field and other fields (educational, political, economic).