Le social et le spatial

Abstract

Whereas the question of the social inequalities of schooling was the subject in France of significant work since the 1960s, scientific research on school segregation in urban spaces has recently taken the spatial dimension of these inequalities and the differentiation of school flows as main objects. From the 1980s, descriptive surveys of segregation were carried out by geographers, and political approaches were denouncing the processes of marginalisation and discrimination, but school space remained relatively little studied. It is only in the 1990s that education inequalities in urban environment were truly approached by geography as by sociology of education: These two disciplines have focused on the study of school flows of pupils between schools, just as the national policies of “school democratization” made of school a topic with strong local stakes. The object of this article is first of all to make an assess- ment of these works and of their results: geographical analysis of space differentiations on the one hand, sociology of school avoidance (“évitement scolaire”) on the other hand, in order to analyse the representations of the space and the contexts of social practices involved in this study.

Keywords

• local politics
• schools
• social inequalities
• spatial segregation