Navigating complexity: Tackling educational inequality in a socio-democratic local context

This article examines how practitioners in Loddefjord – a suburb of Bergen, Norway – perceive and address educational inequality within the framework of a local initiative to improve schooling and upbringing. Drawing on interviews, focus groups and field observations, the study reconstructs how practitioners frame inequality as rooted in structural hierarchies, cultural capital and spatial disadvantage, yet often simplify these complexities into individualised explanations emphasising family cultural capital and parental involvement. To analyse this tension, the article combines Fairclough’s account of how neoliberal discourse frames problems and solutions with Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, cultural capital and symbolic violence. The analysis demonstrates how neoliberal framings are reinforced in practice and legitimised through symbolic violence and middle-class habitus, while also revealing spaces where practitioners exercise discretion to contest both dominant discourses and the structural hierarchies underpinning them. By linking discourse, structural reproduction and everyday practice, the article advances conceptualisations of educational inequality by incorporating the agency and constraints shaping practitioners’ work.