Positioning of researchers in the social space of the Instituto de Investigaciones sobre la Universidad y la Educación, Mexico

Abstract

The institutionalization of educational research in Mexico has led to a professionalized and professionalizing practice, with a peculiar recognition and status, in this aspect, the objective was to identify the influence of material and symbolic conditions, as well as the appropriation of capital that regulates the production and reproduction of the academic practices of the researchers of the Research Institute on the University and Education, of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM-IISUE). For this purpose, Bourdieu’s Theory of the Economics of Social Practices was recovered, which establishes that social relations do not occur spontaneously or casually but are conditioned by a social environment that gives guidelines to think, perceive, decide and act in a particular way. Methodologically, techniques were recovered that potentiate the relationship between analytical variables and interpretative categories, thus enabling the articulation between objective conditions and the production of subjectivity. Of the main results, the analytical construction of social classes in the academic space of the IISUE stands out, namely: consolidated, beginners and heretical; in addition, this construction allowed to relate the provisions of the researchers that regulate the practices of differentiation and classification of the scientific community. By way of conclusion, it was identified that the volume and capital structure of researchers configures and reconfigures the academic field and it is through their social practices that they tend to reproduce the mechanisms of power and inequality of the field under analysis.