Clusters of Violence; A New Ranking of Iran’s Top Universities in Symbolic Violence Reproduction as A Mean of Status Quo Preservation

Intro:

 Based on Bourdieusian definition of symbolic violence, the research aims to introduce an index of symbolic violence, capable of quantification and numerical analysis, to give a comprehensive and comparative insight to the social reproduction and the degree each social institution—here specifically the universities— tend to do such a reproduction.Thus, the research targets to give a ranking of Iran’s top universities in accordance to their symbolic violence index.En route to this target, researchers in response to the current socio/political situation and conditions of Iran, established the theoretical framework in the foundation of the “stats-quo” and its philosophical and sociological development of the status-quo in Foucauldian,Derridean & Bourdieusian perspectives. It’s only then become clear the relation between the status-quo, the power relations and the educational system as the reproduction platform of the status-quo.With such a philosophical/theoretical inquiry, the problematique of the research is reformulated into assessing Universities share in maintenance of the status-quo through the medium of “symbolic violence” in education.In accordance to such quest of introducing most symbolically violent university ranking, … criteria extracted from the Bourdieu’s Reproduction (1990), surveyed in Iran’s top universities. Based on MCA analysis of the data and the theory of distinction from Bourdieu, most distinguished criteria have been chosen and implied for a cluster analysis. In the procedure of the cluster analysis, categorial independent variable of the correspondent’s university name has been fixed in order to observe which university has the most dense distribution of other dependent or independent criteria of symbolic violence. That being said, the analysis is a combination of multi correspondence analysis and a clustering analysis based on Xi-2 distribution of the target sample responds to the questionnaire of symbolic violence criteria. Eventually, the symbolic violence criteria is defined by the vector addition of distributed respondents as a characteristic of how dense the whole distribution is over the symbolic violence criteria for each university.

With the above in mind, the research has been designed to meet the following milestones in the journey to the final ranking of the universities degree of symbolic violence and their share of status-quo maintenance:Clarification of Iran’s undesirable status-quo 2.Definition of the status-quo 3.The relationship between the status-quo and the educational system social reproduction through the symbolic violence 4.extraction of objective symbolic violence criteria in respect to Iran’s higher educational system 5.Recognition of the most critical symbolic violence criteria 6.Ranking Iran’s top universities based on their symbolic violence criteria

Findings indicate that in spite of the collectively high level of the total symbolic violence reproduced in Iran’s top universities; Iran’s most violent universities in respect to the symbolic violence notion, are those of STEM colleges in which they have receive the most application for and have the best reputation in the society. Humanities and Art schools come last in such ranking. Which means the status-quo establishment is dependent to the STEM knowledge-based cultural and social reproduction which is being reproduced mainly at technic universities and Med-schools of Iran.