“Me and my friends”: social capital, life styles and educational trajectories

Abstract

This text aims at exploring the analytical dimension ignited by the notion of “social capital” on the reconstitution of educational trajectories among underprivileged students from urban backgrounds. Drawing on both the national and the international literatures, it seeks to evidence not only the relevance of the social networks that diffuse informational flows on institutions, careers and modes of selection of the Brazilian system of higher education (a fact which tends to reduce both the social and the cultural distances between underprivileged students, engaged within such networks), as well as how such networks may operate as the relational instances that support the projection of juvenile life styles which symbolize and express the incorporation of dispositions towards the prolongation of the educational trajectories among underprivileged students.

Keywords

• sociologia da educação
• jovens de camadas populares
• acesso ao ensino superior
• capital social