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Two new articles by Laurie Hanquinet

Posted on 14 March 2013

Laurie has recently published two new articles. The first of these looks at ethnicity and education aspirations in Brussels, while the second focuses on how museum visitors understand and conceptualise the art that they see. More information appears below about both of these, which are now available online.

Abstract  

Ethnic disparities in educational aspirations and choices are important to comprehend ethnic education inequality. Based on a mixed-method approach (3121 questionnaires and 40 interviews of pupils), this article investigates ethnic differences among nine ethnic minority groups of pupils in Brussels with regard to their educational aspirations. The multivariate analysis of the questionnaires shows that pupils from only four out of the nine ethnic minorities hold significantly higher aspirations than the majority group. In addition, our mixed-method results did not support the hypothesis on perceived ethnic discrimination in the labour market in explaining the higher educational aspirations of ethnic minority youth. Nevertheless, personal experience of discrimination at school is significantly associated with higher educational aspirations. We conclude by highlighting the relevance of the parental transmission of the intergenerational mobility project in explaining ethnic differences in youth’s educational aspirations.

Abstract 

This article investigates the ways in which art museums' visitors define their relationships to art and culture, and how this affects their perceptions of art museums. Existing approaches have traditionally attempted to define the meaning of art museums on the basis of the socio-economic composition of museum audiences. Using mixed methods analysis, with a particular stress on qualitative data about the audiences of the six main museums of modern and contemporary art in Belgium, I argue for the need for a more complex and comprehensive framework to understand visitors' perceptions. I show that people characterized by similar cultural tastes and practices use similar strategies to interpret their relationship to culture, art and museums (the same principles of classification, legitimation and justification). On this basis, I argue that those with a similar cultural profile belong to the same “interpretive community” (Fish, 1980; Hooper-Greenhill, 2000).