Conflicts,situated inequality and politics of everyday life

Theoretical challenges

Much research on problems and inequality in school seems to employ concepts insufficient for addressing the contextual conditions in a concrete and situated way in order to understand how various children meet unequal conditions for taking part in societal institutions. A widespread understanding of inequality is related to intergenerational transmission of social problems (Barnes et al., 2012; Bird, 2007; Juhl, 2016; Serbin & Karp, 2003). However, statistical analyses of extensive registry-based national data challenge such understandings because they indicate that more children transgress, rather than reproduce a problematic family background and that about half of the pupils in marginalised positions in the education system do not come from families with so-called risk factors (Benjaminsen et al., 2015; Ejrnæs, 2003; Ejrnæs et al., 2004).

Hence, the activities involved in production of inequality can neither be predicted nor controlled; they are part of an ongoing social practice and happen in social processes that follow neither causal relationships between the children’s social background and the culture of the school nor are they coincidental. Unequal conditions are structural and in this sense systematic, but historical structures are still constantly transformed through social practice. Hence, it is necessary to investigate the conditions for inequality by addressing how different parties are involved and have a subjective relationship to their conditions and develop their collaboration in different directions. To analyse the dynamics of these processes, we must have concepts that enable us to open ‘the black box of the education system’ (Benjaminsen, 2006; Braster & Grosvenor, 2012; Larsen et al., 2019). Still, this remains more than an empirical matter involving fieldwork on the everyday life of schools, it also includes theoretical and conceptual development to pave the way for concretely analysing societal, historical and cultural issues from the perspective of subjects and related to their interplay in everyday life (Hviid & Villadsen, 2014; Valsiner, 1997, 2019).

Quite different, context-sensitive approaches share the aim of analysing how things interact in social life (Wagoner & Brescó de Luna, 2018). However, different theoretical approaches represent various views on concepts of power, regulation, reproduction, politics and inequality.

Many critical approaches, including ones inspired by Bourdieu’s theoretical concepts, are effective for analysing the structural reproduction of social inequality (e.g. Lareau, 2011; Reay, 2004). Such approaches address relationships between structural conditions and agency, illustrating how peoples’ agency and possibilities of asserting themselves in a certain field (e.g. school and school culture) depend on their habitual dispositions originating from their social family background (discussed in Højholt & Kousholt 2019). In yet another conceptual framework, analysis of various processes of subjectification and of how power works by effectuating dynamics that secure compliance by discursively framing the dominant scope of thoughts and desires is convincing in relation to illustrating the link between history and everyday thinking (Busch-Jensen, 2015; Foucault, 1980, 1982). Still, from our point of view, it is important to develop concepts for the subjective aspects of social life to understand social change and transgression as related to the subject’s intentional, engaged and political activities (Røn Larsen, 2019; Stetsenko, 2008, 2013).

Lave (2019) wrote about social life as changing historical processes and anchored historical reproduction and change in the situated everyday life in which different participants engage continuously. This leads to the question of what kind of concepts a psychology of everyday life would need to grasp the dialectical relationships between historical and cultural conditions and subjective interplay in situated everyday practice when trying to understand school life as a changing societal practice.

Lave posed this as a central issue concerning how we: ‘… weave together the production of persons in their everyday life and the generation in practice of the historical processes and practices that make the world’ (2019, p.133).

We argue that the concepts of conflicts and politics of everyday life can aid in moving beyond the tendency in psychology to separate history and situated practice, structure and activity, often termed macro and micro levels, and in contravening the trend that regards social life as unambiguous or as governed through hegemony, Such understandings seem to limit our possibilities for conceptualising the situated processes, sometimes leading to unequal conditions for taking part in school life.

The concept of conflict in and about school

To understand situated inequality in school, the concept of conflict is crucial – since children’s possibilities of participation are essentially shaped by collaboration and conflicts among the involved adults, among teachers and children and among children (Højholt & Kousholt, 2020).

In general, in much conflict theory, situations of conflicts represent the exceptions where a hegemonic consensus collapses. Here, conflict and collaboration represent antipoles (Malen, 1994; Marshall & Scribner, 1991). Furthermore, conflicts are often associated with struggles for power, confusing agency and capacity to act and participate in social practice with power over, dominance, incompatible interests and adversarial conceptions (Busch-Jensen, 2015).3

The concept of conflict is often related to different and unrelated interests and values between unrelated individuals, each pursuing their interests (Sargent et al., 2011). In this figure of understanding, conflicts are seen as a question of opposing, incompatible interests seen in isolation from one another.

This is in contrast to understandings anchoring the activity of human beings in common historical practices (Dreier, 2008; Lave, 2019; Stetsenko, 2008, 2013; Stetsenko & Arievitch, 2012). In this social practice approach, conflicts are understood as part of historical process potentiality arising from people’s collective engagement in a societal practice such as school (Højholt & Kousholt, 2020). Following from this, the concept of ‘conflict’ points to neither just relational problems nor just a question of diverse interests. Societal institutions are historically constituted through social practices around common and ever-changing problems, and when the participants strive to make things work, they are dealing with contradicting societal concerns. Thus, conflicts are connected to historical contradictions that are bound together in a many-sided matter and express diverse ways of dealing with such contradictions. In this dialectical thinking, people are part of a world moved by contradictions. The handling of problems may open up possibilities for investigating how apparently irreconcilable aspects of social life form content for conflicts. In this way, conflicts also constitute possibilities for uniting different aspects of practice and through collaboration developing it in more integrative directions (Axel & Højholt, 2019; Ollman, 2003 – see also Valsiner, 2014 p 247, 248). This is in contrast to dualistic understandings, which refers to conceptions of incompatible phenomena or principles, while we use the term contradictions for seemingly incompatible but still connected and interdependent aspects of the same matter.

To make things work, the involved participants work continuously with the challenges involved in uniting contradictory and incompatible aspects of their activities. Mardahl-Hansen (2019) illustrated how teachers continuously work to unite an academic focus with the social dynamics of learning communities. Learning and teaching take place in a social life, and various aspects of school life are concurrently contradictory and interdependent. To accomplish teaching, teachers must work flexibly with the academic focus, relating it to social possibilities in the classroom in collaboration with those involved (Mardahl-Hansen, 2019).

Thus, in this line of thinking, conflicts are not just linked to struggles for power over, control and domination but also to the way human beings are interconnected through a common everyday life with common matters that they deal with together. Children, teachers, parents and psychologists are situated in a historical division of labour, and when dealing with their tasks and common matters their actions are intertwined and give meanings to and form conditions for each other.4

Hence, conflicts are an inescapable feature of collaboration and related to the contradictory aspects of a common matter and the way different parties are organised in relation to it – with different tasks and perspectives (Axel, 2011; Ollman, 2003). Because we hold different positions, we have different action possibilities and access to knowing about the matter and therefore need access to each other’s perspectives to contribute relevantly (Røn Larsen, 2016; 2017). In this understanding, positions are related to historical and practical conditions, tasks and responsibility. The concept of position is used as an analytical term helping to relate subjective actions to their social conditions, but a position is not unequivocal (cf. Hermans, 1999). A person may be positioned differently in different contexts or even in the same contexts and often this is conflictual. Dealing with these social conditions – and pursuing different and sometimes contradictory personal issues – makes personal actions conflictual as well.

In this theoretical line, an essential aspect of the processes of inequality and exclusion is related to the ways in which the people involved are able to investigate, exchange and collaborate about inherent conflicts. To overcome unresolvable situations, they must be analytical, flexible, creative and employ new ways of understanding and handling the contradictions. Professionals illustrate this every day in their collaborative, investigative and experimental handling of the dilemmas of school life. However, when problems are pointed out as isolated characteristics of individual children and the investigation of problematic situations in school leads to conflicts concerning who or what is responsible for the situations and about where to place the problems, then feelings of powerlessness, dualistic understandings and potential exclusion may occur.

In summary, we relate the concept of conflict to coordination between subjects who are connected through a common but many-sided matter, that is, the matter itself (in our case, school life) is contradictory, uniting the involved parties in a common engagement, as well as splitting them (Axel, 2020; Axel & Højholt, 2019). From different perspectives, they may learn about the matter and develop their coordination, but they may also end up stuck in dualistic conflicts.

When conflict and collaboration are seen as principled antipoles, the complexity of common matters become incomprehensible, and it appears as though problems can be solved through compromise and consensus. As Lave stated: ‘Contradictory relations are problematic. They are not problems that can be solved [once and for all], or that have complete stable solutions. Contradictions are dilemmas that can only be resolved for now’ (2019, p.156). For instance, Larsen et al. (2019) analysed the dual societal aims of school as inclusion and equal rights for all in school and as sorting and differentiating between various pupils to optimise learning. This duality relates to the contradiction between creating a school fit for qualifying the individual versus creating a school with equal rights for participating and having influence for all pupils.

In practice, however, these aspects do not represent such clear oppositions; they are connected by the many different participants’ constant struggles. Participants work and coordinate to make various aspects go together (Axel, 2020) and, as part of that, they must deal with contradictory legislation, governments and categorisations that sometimes tear the diverse aspects apart. Thus, the next section looks at the implementation of legislation and the political aspects of everyday life.

Politics of everyday life

Conflicts concerning public education illustrate the mix of political and legislative strategies for regulating and governing school life and the widespread disagreements that exist between, for example, politicians, parents, teachers and school leaders about public education.

In Denmark, the school is part of a welfare society, and the present historical situation is characterised by immense conflicts about this welfare society, public schools and new laws on the content of and access to education, as well as about regulations on performance and working hour for teachers. The conflicts involve, for example, how to prioritise between promoting results relevant to compete globally and possibilities for inclusion and equal opportunities. Still, the laws are quite contradictory (Larsen et al., 2019; Røn Larsen & Jørgensen, 2018) and implementation varies widely across municipalities, schools and classrooms (Landsforening, 2018; Pedersen & Szulevicz, 2016). To understand this complexity, we need to analyse the specific processes of everyday life. From a micropolitical perspective, Ball and Bowe stated: ‘Implementation for us is taken to be a matter of struggle and conflict with material, vested, and self-interest at stake (…). Policy is not just something that is done to people – it is essentially contested both in its formation and in its implementation’ (1991, p. 23ff). Although we might disagree about the relationship between conflicts and self-interests, we share their curiosity about studying politics and policy as related to people’s situated struggling. As Ball stated:

I take schools, in common with virtually all other social organisations, to be arenas of struggle: to be riven with actual or potential conflict between members; to be poorly coordinated, to be ideologically diverse. I take it to be essential that if we are to understand the nature of schools as organisations, we must achieve some understanding of these conflicts (1987, p. 19).

Conflicts about school life take place in many social practices – from parliament and municipal school management to classrooms, teachers’ rooms and parent meetings to negotiations among children in the schoolyard. Policy and legislation are constantly mediated in all these practices – through a multiplicity of conflicts, relationships and activities. Although the social practice of school is not independent of new legislation or management strategies, it is created through different participants’ conflictual collaboration about concrete dilemmas and contradictions – in what we conceptualise as the politics of everyday life.

By this formulation, we wish to generate attention to the ways in which interplay of everyday life relates to more comprehensive political and societal questions. When parents for instance discuss trouble in the classroom and whether they want more discipline or rather more flexibility, they often enhance the pressure on the teacher and thereby decrease the possibilities for including different ways of taking part in school life. When psychologists facilitate the collaboration between parents and teachers on the development of a diverse classroom community, they influence who can be part of the school and how the school should prioritise – highly political questions of a society. Through the handling of concrete conflicts of everyday life conditions for taking part and in this way also situated inequality is continuously re-negotiated.

In research on interdisciplinary and parental collaboration, conflicts are generally conceptualised as a question of institutional power and resistance. In theories of micropolitics in education, for example, cooperation is often equated with consensus, representing situations involving compromise and giving into the dominance of another perspective, of giving up ‘partisanship’ (Blase, 1991; Malen, 1994). A problematic aspect of this approach is that reproduction and change appear to be unambiguous divisions.

From a social practice perspective, continuity and change play together. Efforts to change social practice are intertwined with the reproduction of the same (Kontopodis et al., 2011; Stetsenko, 2008). Collaborating and making things work in social institutions does not appear to be sufficiently represented as blindly reproducing or giving up on changing social practice and making a difference. Correspondingly, disagreements, striving for change and arguing for additional perspectives on the common matter are poorly conceptualised as just a matter of resistance. These activities are not just against another dominant perspective; they represent perspectives in their own right, related to engagements in making relevant contributions to the common matter (Stetsenko, 2008, 2013). The central issue is that the dualistic conceptualisation of power and resistance does not offer opportunities for analysing different perspectives related to engagements in developing the common matter. In accordance with Arendt (1958/2008), politics encompass not just legislation and government but also what human beings are able to create together – political power is related to acting in concert, in plurality (Mori, 2003).

In our approach, collaboration is related to finding relevant possibilities of development in a collaborative practice for handling a matter with contradictory aspects. Collaboration is necessary for dealing with contradictions in new ways. Conducting everyday life – including work life – involves arranging and adjusting conflictual conditions together with a plurality of others.

As a conceptual proposal for integrating social conditions and subjective activity, Holzkamp (2013) launched the concept conduct of everyday life to mediate sociocultural aspects and the everyday efforts of dealing with these and conducting a personal life (Schraube & Osterkamp, 2013). The conduct of everyday life unfolds across various historical and cultural contexts arranged in relation to different societal matters. In our conceptualisation, the matters contain incompatible aspects that are simultaneously interdependent (Ollman, 2003). Contradictory aspects and wicked problems cannot be resolved through unambiguous means, and participants must continuously deal with contradictions in a conflictual collaboration with other participants in their conduct of everyday life (Axel, 2011). People juggle various historical problems in their endeavour to make their everyday live hang together and to address multiple contradictory demands and to pursue personal aims (Dreier, 2011). Striving for existential issues – often related to making a difference, as a psychologist explains later in this article – and making conduct of everyday possible are, in this figure of understanding, connected to the political aspects of everyday life (Friesen et al., 2019). This is why it is relevant – in relation to professional work in societal institutions – to focus on the political aspects of the personal conduct of everyday life.

As we will illustrate, psychologists who work with children in difficulties express how they strive to make a difference to expand the possibilities available to children and their families. To do that they must relate to the contradictory aspects of school life and the many involved parties that constitute conditions for each other.

Before turning to the everyday life of school psychologists, we present some conceptual dilemmas in relation to understanding unequal conditions for participation in the institutions of society in a situated way.

Situated inequality as related to conflicts

Analysing school life as a situated social practice leads to new ways of analysing social inequality in the classroom and the institutional arrangement of school. As mentioned, many general conceptual frameworks on inequality are based on understandings of various forms of intergenerational transfer, though an extensive statistical analysis by the Danish Center for Social Science Research challenges this understanding (Benjaminsen et al., 2015).

Furthermore, concepts concerning, for example, social background, poorly functioning families, psychological deficiencies, lack of cultural capital and deviant and isolated variables and circumstances can be seen as decontextualising and displacing social conflicts and problems of school life into individual categories of problematic behaviour. Even critical research sometimes analyses social differences in ways that refer to a lack of personal resources for the individual children – often related to concepts of a quite unambiguous power of the school and quite unambiguous effects of poverty (Lareau, 2000, 2011; Reay, 2004, 2005). Thus, a conceptual framework for hegemonic reproduction and resistance seems to confuse our possibilities for analysing the very complexity of school life and how children have different conditions and action possibilities at their disposal in relation to handling the contradictions of their everyday lives.

Important aspects of producing both possibilities and restrictions in relation to overcoming inequality must be understood through a much more detailed analysis of the situated and conflictual processes in school as related to historical contradictions.

In continuation of this, we relate the concept of situated inequality to deadlocks in conflictual processes where individual categorisations and the displacement of problems may lead to unequal conditions for taking part in the conflicts and influencing the development of the school (Højholt, 2016, 2020). Hence, we relate situated inequality to concrete restricted possibilities for contributing to the social situations of school life and, through this, to gain influence on what one is part of, that is, to influence social change and personal life conditions. This is not just a question of inclusion in the sense of being accepted but a question of making a difference and, through this, of contributing to one’s own learning processes, to have life conditions at one’s disposal and to develop a personal conduct of everyday life (Højholt & Kousholt, 2018).

Observations of children’s social life illustrate how they, in their conduct of everyday life, struggle with a plurality of demands, relationships, possibilities and contradictions, and also how they are quite differently positioned compared to one another in relation to juggling these. Children being met differently in school are not necessarily problematic. However, when differences between children are understood using locked categories, it may lead to unequal possibilities of participation, in and across the children’s many social contexts (McDermott et al., 2006). This is not to claim that children met by such categorisations are unable to act or do not have agency – of course they do, but they may sometimes deal with contradictory and restricted conditions for taking part in social communities important to them. What we want to emphasise is that the situated conditions for taking part and influencing social situations of the school become central in the analyses of inequality.

Influencing practice, for instance, is difficult when children’s perspectives are viewed as deviant and understood in isolation from the common conflicts or when parental objections during interventions are rejected as resistance or denial of the problem. Specific psychological terms are used in crucial ways in this context, a point that underlines the dilemmas and contradictory aspects of the psychologists’ contributions. In a critique of cultural and institutional categorisation in school, McDermott and Varenne stated:

For us the matter is one of grammar and not of vocabulary. It makes little difference whether one writes of the child “blind”, “visually handicapped”, or even visually “challenged”. In all cases the attention is placed on a characteristic of the child rather than on the processes that might make this characteristic consequential (1998, p. 142).

From this perspective, they suggested a much stronger focus on the cultural and institutional processes through which certain categorisations become consequential for the people involved. As a mixed blessing, psychological concepts and the efforts of psychologists play an important part in producing and overcoming processes of differentiation, inequality and exclusion.

School psychologists and situated inequality

In Denmark, school psychologists are employed by local authorities and assigned to all schools. In many ways, school psychologists are placed in the eye of the storm in processes of situated inequality. They play a key role in determining inclusion and exclusion and the children’s different possibilities of participation in school (Farrell, 2004, 2006; Szulevicz & Tanggaard, 2017).

Generally, school psychologists describe how they work with contradictory demands in relation to processes of inequality and inclusion and exclusion. On the one hand, they are expected to contribute across a broad spectrum to inclusion as counsellors and mediators for children, parents, teachers, principals and other participants in the organisation around school. They are obliged to support the possibilities of a school for all children. On the other hand, the psychologists are required to participate in processes of categorising and differentiating among children, which makes them part of the exclusion process when they provide assessments and test results on the individual children’s special needs to differentiate them and place them in special educational interventions.

Many psychologists experience this as a dilemma that is related to conflicts between demands concerning inclusion and social approaches to school problems versus demands concerning understandings of individualised problems (Hamre et al. 2018; Larsen et al.; 2019; Szulevicz, 2018). School problems are multifaceted, and personal and social aspects are connected, but in the organisation of support, as well as in the conflicts about school problems, the many-sided matters often become split into a question of either–or. Still, the practice perspectives of the psychologists challenge the individual categorisations by illustrating that there are numerous other underlying dilemmas in terms of children in difficulties, beyond the specific ‘special needs’ of a single child (Røn Larsen, 2018). One psychologist talked about a boy she considers to be wrongly excluded from his class and incorrectly placed in a special educational setting after a long and conflictual process at his previous school, stating: ‘It would never have happened had he just been placed in one of the other district schools in the first place’. This quote indicates that processes of differentiation and categorising children are intimately connected to local demands, relationships and conflicts. In this way, processes of exclusion and inequality are anchored in specifically situated interplays between various participants located in specific institutional arrangements. Often the situation is influenced by conflicts between teachers and parents, among other parents and among children, and a series of uncoordinated shifts between different professionals, not to mention the available forms of intervention. This emphasises how work for children in difficulties calls for a much closer analysis of local situated complexities to develop relevant interventions.

In such way, connections between conditions for participation, social dynamics and conflicts in specific communities of school life, different perspectives on the children and conflicts about how the school should prioritise must be analysed in order to develop many-sided understandings of the problems. This also involves analyses of how the common contradictions may have quite different meanings to different persons and form personal conflicts of their conduct of everyday life as well as personal reasons for their way of taking part (for the analytical concepts, see Dreier 2008).

However, the possibilities of exploring and working with the complex aspects of the problems appear to differ immensely when we study psychologists’ different conditions across specific situations, collaborative relationships and specific localities. Many psychologists experience that these possibilities are highly limited. They describe how they are constantly trying to create possibilities of relating the contradictory aspects of their work in relevant and productive ways – work that we conceptualise as corridor casework that forms part of the politics of everyday life.

The next section zooms in on processes of and institutional conditions for the everyday ways psychologists deal with social dilemmas and conflicts since these processes have significance for the children’s unequal conditions for taking part in school life.

Corridor casework: striving to make a difference to the children

Both in Denmark and in an international context, there has been extensive focus on development of interdisciplinary processes of prevention and intervention around children in marginalised positions (Edwards et al., 2010; Hansen et al., 2014). In Denmark, on a ministerial and municipal level, this focus is represented by a general endeavour to develop firm standards and procedures for these processes. In many municipalities, interdisciplinary work is supposed to follow certain prescribed procedures, where the number and sequence of various interdisciplinary meetings – and the specific composition of professional participants – are stated in advance (e.g. Madsen et al., 2015; Wittek-Holmberg et al., 2017).

Such attempts to create ‘order’ beforehand using a bureaucratic approach seem insufficient for developing practice and even produce restrictions on the professionals’ situated, collective and local exploration. Participatory observations illustrate that besides standardised, described and defined tasks for counselling, testing and providing a knowledge base for decision-making, psychologists are constantly engaged in supporting collaboration between other parties and investigating and relating conflictual perspectives, that is, searching for relevant possibilities of development, which represents work that is often invisible in the prescribed standards (Røn Larsen, 2019). The psychologists describe a practice where they both follow and transcend the standardised procedures. They report that they have multiple strategies for creating possibilities of collaborative investigation in spite of the planned, standardised procedures.

The psychologists appreciate managerial attempts to widen the perspectives by arranging expanded possibilities of interdisciplinary collaboration – and involving the perspectives of children and parents to a greater extent. However, the psychologists also discuss the problems that sometimes arise from such attempts when restricted to following specific standards for procedures, schedules and the amount of participants. These standards restrict the possibilities of adapting procedures and interventions to the concrete situations. As one psychologist mentions:

Well, you can have certain standard procedures and overall programmes for these kinds of working procedures, and that sort of thing … It can give you a general structure. However, there are always … Well, for example for the network meeting … WHO should attend the network meeting? Or how should it be prepared? That cannot be schematised. It cannot be described [beforehand].

What and when, which are relevant vary from process to process, depend on an analysis of the concrete situation, which is often restricted because of a lack of time and flexibility. Another psychologist explains, for example, how the procedures sometimes lead to deadlocks since the difficulties of gathering all required parties delay the processes – shutting down the possibilities of seizing the moments where children, parents or professionals are engaged.

The psychologists make strategies to bend, and sometimes even break, the standards and rules to allow exploration of complex situations and to create possibilities to delve into what Schwartz (2019) calls the social development history of problems in school. They scrutinise the compound social situation comprising problems and conflicts in an effort to make sense of it to contribute relevantly to the interventions required. One psychologist explains: ‘Sometimes I gain insight into the situation of the whole class by mere coincidence because I was invited to observe several “isolated” children’. Others develop everyday strategies to gain access to processes before situations become deadlocked in abstract, unmanageable oppositions. ‘Often I stop by just to hear how everything’s going in the fourth grade’, explains one psychologist, while another states:

I always arrive a little ahead of time and stand next to the coffee machine in the teachers’ room. Then we discuss the weather and I get a chance to hear how things are coming along with Melissa in sixth grade, or what they think about the resource programme we developed for third graders.

In this way, important investigations and interventions take place in ways that are not easily described in manuals, documented in forms or turned into a standard relevant for diverse cases. The themes and questions she poses are not just invitations to coincidental informal conversations; they are invitations to explore the social context for the children’s common life situation. In these cases, the psychologist gains necessary insight into the conditions of the children, the perspectives of the teachers and how an intervention is experienced by those who work with the children in their everyday lives. This gives possibilities for rearranging conditions and developing collaboration, contributing to the development of the common processes of prioritising in school, connecting contradictory concerns and paving the way for access to participation in school life. In this way, corridor casework represents strategies for handling the political issues embedded in everyday life.

Consequently, the politics of everyday life is closely related to corridor casework and, thereby, makes a difference for children and their families. This kind of work requires exploration but also the flexibility and courage to investigate conflicts and relate perspectives in new ways. It also entails working with the positions as psychologists, with expectations concerning their interventions and with the constitution of problem understandings. Corridor casework points to common, unnoticed aspects of social practice, and as an analytical concept, it may aid in analysing aspects important to the development of practice – with respect to what makes social practice work. Currently, too many efforts for developing practice seem to be counterproductive to the flexibility required for making relevant changes.

Politics of everyday life in relation to children in difficulties in school

As illustrated, the politics of everyday life is closely related to the issue of making a relevant difference to children and their families. Still, defining what is relevant cannot be done from the outside or beforehand. The politics of everyday life is conflictual – different participants have different perspectives on it – and deeply dependent on the available possibilities in the specific situation. In other words, relevance and available possibilities are continuously being investigated through collaborative and conflictual processes among the various participants in everyday life. Furthermore, relevant priorities also appear to be specifically related to political issues and disputes about the overall purpose of the school, which illustrates how the politics of everyday life is played out through social processes that manage and negotiate societal problems.

Stetsenko (2008) touches on these aspects in her ‘Transformative Activist Stance’, which is anchored in cultural historical activity theory, with Vygotsky’s (e.g. 2004) thoughts on the subject and societal relationships as her starting point. According to Stetsenko, all human activities have a political dimension since they are related to people’s attempts to envision and create a better future for themselves and to be part of common historical, cultural visions of society: ‘… human beings – already by virtue of being human – always act and know in ways that are meaningful and that matter within their evolving life agendas and visions for the future tied up with the social dynamics and politics of our communities’ (2013, p. 21).

According to Stetsenko, the collaborative and activist actions of people matter in a political sense because these historically anchored actions reproduce and change societal structures and institutions. In this sense, in Lave’s words, structures and institutions are not containers; they do not determine people’s actions, that is, institutions and structures are ‘what we do’.5 We create conditions for each other, and social structures are neither arbitrary nor fixed and do not determine our action possibilities.

This is important in discussions on corridor casework and the politics of everyday life because it highlights the dual nature of activities as both historical and related to the specific situations in which people aim to make a relevant difference.

Encounters among participants in corridors are not coincidental. These situations are saturated with engagement and intentionality. People meet up, arrange and rearrange their common and conflictual strategies because they are trying to solve problems in specific situations and for, for example, specific children, teachers and families. They meet up, because in their attempts to make a relevant difference, they are dependent on one another. Since children’s difficulties cannot be isolated into a single context and because their trajectories of participation cross various contexts, the difficulties stretch into other arenas with other responsible participants, which means the different participants, for example, teachers, parents and psychologists, cannot fulfil their different tasks without each other (see e.g. Fleer & Hedegaard, 2010; Højholt & Kousholt, 2018; Røn-Larsen, 2016; Stanek, 2019).

In this sense, problem-solving features collaborative, conflictual processes for investigating the problems and possibilities by drawing on available social resources in specific situations. Meanwhile, these processes are political contributions to transformations in the local school for other children, families and professionals – and also to the more comprehensive development of the Danish school system. These everyday life processes are related to questions such as: Who is school for? What must be done to obtain access to influence negotiations about school? How should schools prioritise in conflictual situations?

Thus, the politics of everyday life is about prioritisations, categorisations, access, distributions, knowledge and generalisations, all of which are concrete issues, situated in everyday life problem-solving and historical, connected to more pervasive changes in how society, for instance distributes resources, conceptualises people in difficulties, categorises differences and appreciates knowledge from different perspectives.

In the social conflicts concerning these issues, the possibilities for contributing are not equally distributed and arranged. Displacement of problems to individual categorisations may lead to the exclusion of perspectives and restrictions on possibilities of participation. Specialised categorisations tend to produce understandings of some people’s perspectives as unconnected or irrelevant to the collective political practice of developing the common societal matter of the school.

Consequently, involving conceptualisations of conflicts, historical contradictions and the politics of everyday life is meant to sharpen the critique of situated inequality in school and to make the critique and the possibilities for transgressing the standards more concrete.

A conflict perspective on politics of everyday life and situated inequality

The overall point of this discussion is that to understand the dynamics of exclusion and inequality – and to open the black box of inequality in education – we must study situated and conflictual collaborative processes among different parties related to historical contradictions of school life. The involved parties are entangled in the historical distributions and conditions that they are simultaneously constantly challenging, changing and reproducing.

Although a general point, these reflections may have quite concrete significance to the practices of investigating, understanding and intervening in relation to school problems. The concept of conflict exceeds divisions into, for example, everyday issues and political issues and divisions between social and personal problems. In this way, the concept might help us go beyond individualisation and the replacement of problems by investigating conflicting aspects of social practice as connected and by investigating the conditions for taking part.

The theoretical challenges relate to conceptualising the conflictual processes involved in the coordination of contradictory school life and the unequal access to influencing the social conflicts and social change in the school. The work psychologists do in school appears to simultaneously conceal conflicts and work creatively with them by taking part in the politics of the everyday life of the school.

Conducting everyday life across contexts implies making things work in social institutions, where the involved takes part in political issues concerning the regulation and content of the institutions, for instance in terms of having an influence on, for example, the continual changes in the social life of the institutions, the possibility to speak up and the opportunities available to have one’s perspectives make a difference. As a result, the concept of politics of everyday life constitutes a conceptual aid for weaving the subjective activities of everyday life and the historical changes of culture together. The concept represents an attempt to understand political contributions in new ways by anchoring critique and political endeavours of transformation in social praxis of everyday life.

Instead of displacing problems and responsibility to dominant or powerless isolated individuals on the one hand, or hegemonic power structures on the other, we must expand understandings of people’s concrete problems and their attempts to solve them. In this way, psychological problems can be analysed in relation to people’s collective and conflictual conduct of everyday life in the historical structures that they reproduce and transform through exactly these processes.