LABOURING TO LEARN: A SOCIOLOGICAL ASSESSMENT OF EDUCATIONAL UNDERACHIEVEMENT AMONGST TAMIL YOUTHS IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

This thesis qualitatively examines how social capital mediates the interactive effects of race and class on educational underperformance amongst Singaporean Tamil youths using the conceptual dimensions of ‘bridging’ and ‘bonding’ capital. The biographical narratives of ethnic Tamil students from lower ability tracks in secondary schools suggest that racialization in colonial and post-colonial Singapore structurally limits their access to and activation of institutional forms of bridging and bonding capital impeding academic mobility. Ethnic Tamil youths then turn towards investing and nurturing ties with co-ethnic peers and family (i.e. bonding ties), which provide practical benefits of friendship and social support but also engenders collective articulations of ‘racialized’ modes of resistance that makes learning in school a laborious process further precluding them from achieving academic mobility. The account of educational underachievement amongst ethnic Tamils contributes towards understanding social inequality in a “non-western” multicultural context where marginalization is differentially experienced across ethnic minority groups and traced to broader socio-historical contexts of migration, assimilation and minority-majority relations.