Using Denmark as case, this project focuses on educational choices and social imaginaries as a prism to understand the social and cultural dynamics behind social divisions. The project comprises of four complementary, ethnographic studies addressing the ways children, young people and parents of various social and ethnic backgrounds make their choice of school, secondary education, further and higher education.

Using observations and interviews of people in different educational settings, we will explore how small mundane as well as pivotal educational choices across educational levels might accumulate to form larger patterns of social inequality and segregation. Our proposition is that the everyday educational choices based on social imaginaries both reflect and influence people’s sense of social positions and identifications, their notions of future opportunities and hierarchies as well as the social and cultural dynamics that pull and push them towards specific class positions and social groups.