The making of 'incompetent parents': intersectional identity, habitus and Chinese rural migrant's parental educational involvement

This paper extends existing Bourdieusian theorisations of the educational involvement of working-class parents by adding the less-examined axes of rural origin and migration status with an intersectional approach. It focusses on the 'labourer' families involved in internal rural-urban migration in China. Semi-structured interviews were conducted in Beijing and Shanghai with 32 migrant parents, teachers and head teachers. It examines how the intersection of rural origin, migration status and working-class identities shapes the parents' habitus and their exertion of capital in the urban education field. The findings show that the intersection of two aspects of their habitus-one, resulting from their rural background, leads them not to treat themselves as academic educators, and a second, arising from their migrant working-class status, the necessity to 'strive for survival'. Since the parents' actions do not match with the teachers' expectations of home-school cooperation, they are identified as 'incompetent'.