Processes of Exclusion in Danish Schools
from Part III - Learning from the Margins in Cross-Contextual Struggles
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 August 2026
This chapter explores processes of learning in everyday life from the point of view of children that participate from marginalized positions in school. The chapter analyzes how these marginalized positions develop over time through slopes of exclusion (Kousholt 2012). The slope of exclusion is an analytical concept formed by many years of theoretical and ethnographic work, as I moved in and across the different social practices of children’s everyday lives. The concept is meant to grasp social processes of exclusion and alienation produced over time and across contexts. It involves restrictive conditions and conflicts on many levels that interweave and produce a slippery slope of exclusion, where children end up giving up on their belonging with other children. The chapter shows how individualized understandings and explanations of children’s behavior displace problems outside of the school, limiting or preventing explorations of how different personal struggles are also connected to dealing with common matters in a contradictory school life.
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