Institutional Choice, Social Boundaries, and the Navigation of Co-existence in a Suburbian Educational Landscape

This presentation explores educational choice as a process intimately intertwined with the dynamics of co-existence in a demographically diverse town in Greater Copenhagen. Selecting an educational institution emerges not simply as an academic decision but as a means of orienting and positioning oneself within a complex social landscape shaped by notions of affinity, avoidance, and identification. Perceptions of similarity and difference, social categorisation, and boundary-making are thus central to how parents and young people navigate the process of institutional selection. The analysis draws on two ethnographic studies conducted in the same local community. The first investigates parental decision-making around primary school enrolment; the second explores how students in Years 8 and 9 consider their options for upper secondary education. Across both studies, participants demonstrate a heightened awareness of their locality and its inhabitants, recognising how institutional contexts not only structure everyday life but also shape social belonging and developmental pathways. Parents seek school environments that reflect their values and support their children’s well-being, while also being contexts where they themselves feel at ease. Likewise, young people look for institutions inhabited by peers they identify with, or who may exert a positive social or academic influence. Navigating this social landscape involves extensive exchange of information among participants and in the local community as they seek to map the institutional and social terrain. Thus, the paper focuses on the experiences and imaginaries of co-existence within educational institutions by exploring the reflections, affiliations, acts of categorisation, and boundary-drawing articulated by informants as they assess the local community and its educational institutions.