Producing the Morally Captive Guest: Discourse and Power in Gratitude Education of Migrant Children in Beijing

Abstract

AbstractTo promote a prosocial conscience and behaviour, gratitude education has long been perceived as an effective intervention in formal schooling. Built upon the Foucauldian account of the mutually constitutive relationship between knowledge and power, this paper investigates how an urban school for largely poor and low-income children of migrant workers in Beijing constructed and transmitted knowledge and discourses on gratitude. The authors argue that the students are positioned as what we term “morally captive guests”1 who possess an inferior position in the moral life compared to urbanites, and who are perceived as an instrument for attracting resources and attention to the lower-ranked school. This schooling reproduces extant class relations, whereas the student resistance questions practices of graduating citizenship and educational inequalities.