Öffentlicher Gastvortrag von
Karen Lillie
University College London
Mittwoch, 11. März 2020, 14.00 – 15.30 Uhr
Universität Zürich, FRE-D-14 ,
Freiestrasse 36, 8032 Zürich
When discussing the social role of elite schools, extant literature often focuses on the production of a future elite. This paper, however, examines the important notion of concurrent recruitment from an existing elite. Doing so highlights critical tensions between institutional agency and wider social structures over time. As its lens, this paper discusses an international boarding school in Switzerland. The school slowly and unevenly shifted from one for the American elite in the Cold War era to one for the global financial elite during the rise of international capitalism. I argue that this shift allowed the school to continuously recruit from a changing elite but also precipitated tensions between its desire to serve a particular kind of student-subject and its need to recruit those who could pay the fees.