Groupings between floating children and urban children: A Bourdieusian social network analysis of physical and social distance in space.

• Focus on community work for the betterment of floating children. • Use social network analysis within a Bourdieusian lens. • Analyse social groupings and the structures behind them. • Look at "small things" that are sociologically meaningful for social change. Drawing on Bourdieu's sociology, the concept of space in particular, this paper discussed the positions and dispositions of floating children in the urban space. It used social network analysis to test the homophily hypothesis that socially similar agents are physically proximate. Data were collected from 45 floating children and urban children in a community school in China. The results rejected the homophily hypothesis, calling for collective activism for small-scale but sociologically meaningful change to disrupt the correspondence between the physical and social distance established through the "site effects" of the hukou (household registration) system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]