Symbolic Violence, Discourses, and Linguistic Exchanges between Teachers and Students: Scope and Consequences

Abstract

The interruption of university studies is a problem that involves broad sectors of young people from the population of Jujuy who attend the National University of Jujuy (UNJu) and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (FHyCS). We therefore believe that, as members of the university community, this is an issue we cannot overlook and one that requires inquiry and analysis.

The project entitled “Symbolic Violence in Communication, Identity Conflicts, and the Interruption of University Studies” aims to investigate how symbolic violence in linguistic and communicational processes may give rise to identity conflicts that, in turn, often become real obstacles to knowledge and learning. From a methodological perspective, the research is situated within qualitative studies, which make it possible to constantly articulate theory and empirical data in a dialectical relationship, with the aim of giving meaning to and understanding the topic under investigation.

In this paper, we propose to reflect on one of the hypotheses concerning the factors that generate the interruption of studies at the university level. Among our initial assumptions, we have selected for this work the one related to differences in cultural capital made evident in linguistic exchanges between teachers and first-year students. These exchanges often express features of symbolic violence insofar as they are structured by the academic linguistic habitus.

The importance of language lies in the fact that it is through language that we represent action and experience as the product of how we interpret that experience. From a school perspective, a discourse may be defined as “a system of regulated positions” that establishes differences among the fields and theories of education. The struggle over how to name and transform experience is regarded by McLaren as one of the crucial problems in critical pedagogy and in the struggle for social change.

For this reason, we consider that the topic—the inquiry into linguistic and discursive aspects and into exchanges between teachers and students—deserves to be investigated, insofar as it will produce knowledge about the student reality of incoming students.