Reshaping the Field from the Outside in: Aboriginal People and Student Journalists Working Together

Abstract

This chapter examines field struggle in an education program called Aboriginal Community Engagement (ACE), established to foster collaboration between journalism students and people long marginalised by a field that valorises arm’s-length practice (Thomson et al. 2016). We put Bourdieu’s concept of field to work (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 96) as conceptual, analytical and explanatory tool, and employ related concepts in Bourdieu’s theory of practice to identify and examine the power relations, positions and other field contexts, structures and dynamics enacted and made evident through ACE and the symbolic challenge it represented to orthodox journalism education. These concepts include capital, habitus, homology, orthodoxy and heterodoxy, misrecognition and symbolic violence (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; Swartz 1997).