Individually Ourselves: Personhood, Ethics, and Everyday Life in School 9781805391029

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Individually Ourselves

Lifeworlds: Knowledge, Politics, Histories Series Editors: Narmala Halstead, University of Sussex Eric Hirsch, Brunel University London Knut Rio, University Museum of Bergen Lifeworlds: Knowledges, Politics, Histories aims to capture anthropological explorations of contemporary social life around the globe. The Series Editors welcome manuscripts on pertinent happenings and movements of people in diverse contexts with an emphasis on fine-grained ethnography. An openness to the study of knowledges, politics and histories – to small-scale as much as large-scale contexts – is central to making sense of peoples’ habitations. Thus, the series is interested in the tensions between scales of social life; lifeworlds are as much about the intimacy of social relations (including in digital worlds) as wider socio-political institutions including the law and state. The series invites studies that explore connections as much as tensions between the social and the political and how this unfolds in contemporary settings. Volume 2 Individually Ourselves Personhood, Ethics and Everyday Life in School Sarah Winkler-Reid Volume 1 A Magpie’s Tale Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives on the Kazakh of Western Mongolia Anna Odland Portisch

Individually Ourselves Personhood, Ethics and Everyday Life in School

z Sarah Winkler-Reid

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2024 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2024 Sarah Winkler-Reid All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Winkler-Reid, Sarah, author. Title: Individually ourselves : personhood, ethics and everyday life in school / Sarah Winkler-Reid. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2024. | Series: Lifeworlds: knowledges, politics, histories ; volume 2 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023021756 (print) | LCCN 2023021757 (ebook) | ISBN 9781805391012 (hardback) | ISBN 9781805391029 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Teenagers—Great Britain—Attitudes. | Schools—Social aspects— Great Britain. Classification: LCC HQ799.G7 W57 2024 (print) | LCC HQ799.G7 (ebook) | DDC 305.2350941—dc23/eng/20230523 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023021756 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023021757 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80539-101-2 hardback ISBN 978-1-80539-401-3 epub ISBN 978-1-80539-102-9 web pdf https://doi.org/10.3167/9781805391012

Contents

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Introduction1 Chapter 1.  Histories, Life-Course and Ethics 16 Chapter 2.  Locating Time and Place 42 Chapter 3.  Our History 67 Chapter 4.  Girls’ Friendships, Making, Breaking and Intimate Power 95 Chapter 5.  Place, Colour, Authenticity and Style 116 Chapter 6.  Sex Talk, Judgement, Sanction and Threat 136 Chapter 7.  Becoming an Individual among Others 152 Conclusion160 Index

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Acknowledgements

Huge thanks to the students at Collingson School who welcomed me into their adult-free spaces, shared their experiences and gifted me with their analysis, reflections and wisdom, so much more than I can fit into this book. I am also grateful to the head teacher and head of Year Eleven who granted me access to the school, and to all the teachers who allowed me to attend their classes with the students. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Sharon who introduced me into the school and was a wise and supportive friend throughout my fieldwork and writing-up. The research was made possible by a Social Science studentship from Brunel University.  I would also like to extend my thanks to the following people for their ideas, suggestions, support, guidance, collaboration and feedback in various guises which have helped this book come to fruition: Peggy Froerer, Will Rollason, Christina Toren, Melissa Parker, Gillian Evans, Ditte Strunge Sass, Vanessa Mongey, Loes Veldpaus, Grit Wesser, Patrick Alexander, Sarah Ralph-Lane, Tessa Holland, Amanda McBride and Berghahn Books’ anonymous reviewers. I would especially like to thank Eric Hirsch for generous intellectual guidance and a welcome push towards the completion of this project. Heartfelt thanks to Mwenza Blell and Cathrine Degnen for their friendship, advice, insightful engagement with my work and continual encouragement during the ups, downs and plateaus of this process.   NU women’s writing group and the Writing Warriors virtual writing group during the pandemic were both valuable spaces for dedicated writing and encouragement. I would also like to thank my friends and family. Anna Oesten-Creasey and Catherine Cox are kind and loving friends to my fifteen-year-old self, current self and all the years in between. The Winklers all provide a lively space of love and intellectual curiosity. My mother, Elisabeth Winkler, has offered limitless love and support, and I am also grateful for her masterful writing and editing guidance throughout my academic career. The spirit of my late father, Adrian Reid, is with us whenever we focus on the craft of writing, as they used to. Finally, my wholehearted thanks to Rob Sharp for your great company, and unwavering love and support.

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Parts of Chapters 4 and Chapter 7 appeared in Winkler-Reid, S. (2016) ‘Friendship, Bitching, and the Making of Ethical Selves: What It Means to  Be a Good Friend among Girls in a London School’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 22(1), pp. 166–182. Reprinted with ­permission.

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Introduction

School is literally the biggest club on earth without music. There are so many chances to make conversation, so many chances to make bridges with people, so many chances to make relationships. It’s quite a­ mazing … it shapes you out to be who you are in a way … you never think it will, you always think ‘f**k it, it’s just school’, but it really does shape you to be who you are. —Jerome, Year Thirteen

At the time of my fieldwork, if you walked through a warren of school

buildings, patch-worked together over decades of expansion, and slipped to the side of the sports hall, you would find the Misfits gathered. It was here one lunchtime, that James and Michael1 explained to me their position in the school. James, towering over us, his long hair hanging over his eyes and past his shoulders, said, ‘when you have to be friends with people because no one else wants to be with you that’s when you tend to find genuine friends, most of the other groups, they’re not genuine friends, everyone is a bitch … it’s like a blessing in disguise. I’m by no means Mr Universe, but I’ve got genuine friends.’ Michael, white shirt gleaming and hair neatly cut in a short back and sides agreed, ‘we’re a group of individuals. Does that sound ironic? We don’t fit in anywhere else, so we all hang out together.’ Continuing around the side of this building, you leave this enclave, and suddenly find yourself exposed, at the top of a school field, with a view past the school grounds and over the city of London, distant skyscrapers grazing the horizon line. While normally used by boys playing football or cricket, on a sunny day, the field is full of groups of students basking in the sun. It was here, on another lunchtime, that I was talking to Samiya, the

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perfect flicks of her eyeliner framing her lively eyes and Tanya, her polish and maturity belying her fifteen years. This was not the usual spot of their friendship group ‘the It Girls’, who had a bench at the centre of the school grounds, but still, it was not a bad one for watching and being seen. They were reflecting on their history within the school and offered me some thoughts on growing up. ‘In younger years,’ said Tanya ‘you always had to look good, otherwise people would be like “urgghh”. There was a time when everyone wanted to look good, but as we got older people gave up on that. They found out there was no one to impress at the school.’ ‘So, what do you think people care about now?’ I asked. ‘Actually, still looks, kind of, in the sense of not looking good, but looking good for yourself,’ answered Samiya. This book is the story of one year group, ‘Year Eleven’, fifteen- to sixteen-year-olds in their final year of compulsory schooling, within ­ Collingson School, a high school in London. James, Michael, Samiya and Tanya were all members of this year group at the time of this fieldwork. It is an account of their friendships, hierarchies and shared history, all things that mattered to them greatly. It tells of the love and care involved in many of these relationships, but also the painful and sometimes brutal ways they sought to shape each other. And it is an account of how, through these relationships, these students were coming to understand themselves as particular kinds of people. As I will argue in this book, it is through attention to these actions, relationships and reflections that we can gain insight into the way individuality, as a specific kind of personhood, is produced in practice. This is not the abstract, generic kind of individuality often evoked as a superficial counterpoint to more sustained ethnographic explorations of other kinds of personhood, but rather, historically constituted and produced through specific understandings of sameness and difference. Some familiar dimensions of individuality, as described in the academic literature, were part of this. The above reflections from students evoked particular understandings of the appropriate way persons should be, authentic and with a hidden and essential inner self which one must strive to remain true to. As James and Michael conceptualized it, they were being true to themselves in a way many of the higher-status pupils were not. This meant that they did not fit in, but in not fitting in they found each other. As genuine selves, they were able to create genuine friendships, whereas by implication, the ‘fakeness’ of the high-status pupils led to bitchy, fake friendships. The appropriate self thus enabled the right kinds of friendships, premised on this authenticity, rather than superficial appearances. Samiya and Tanya drew on a similar set of ideas; it was immature to be motivated by the superficiality of what others think, growing up was about doing things, such as looking good, for yourself. However, in these examples, we can also see how evaluations of self and others were fundamentally

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structuring of the way these notions of individuality come into being in everyday life. Thus, as we will see in the course of this book, every aspect of the self, including authenticity, could be evaluated (and potentially found wanting) by peers. As I will argue, for the young people in this book, there was an ontological quality to individuality, understood in terms of authentic depth, separateness from others and uniqueness. Notions of persons as existing prior to social relations, independent, responsible for their actions, with a true, inner and authentic self were elaborated through a peer ethics that subjected persons and actions to persistent evaluation. As we will see, notions of appropriate personhood were interwoven in the qualitative distinctions of worth that were a pervasive feature of everyday life in school. Thus, I argue that the emergence of individuality in practice can only by understood through attention to the relationships and interactions that enable it to appear and take shape. It is through the mutually constitutive nature of separation and connection, being part and being apart, shaping and unpicking, that young people come to understand themselves as particular kinds of individual persons, in a particular place, at a particular time.

Interrogating Individuality Anthropologists have long argued that while the individual is often taken as the self-evident, natural and universal form of personhood, the ethnographic record shows that this is not the case. Ethnography has enabled anthropologists to examine diverse forms of personhood – ‘[t]he full variety of ways in which humans comprehend and create themselves as self-­conscious agents in the world’ (Bialecki and Daswani 2015, 272). Anthropologists have thus examined the public models and concepts of personhood, observable in law, jurisprudence, religion and collective ideology (such as kinship and caste) as well as the more intimate and private processes of self-making through which actors come to understand themselves as particular kinds of persons. Personhood ‘arguably extends a moral value to persons that non-persons are excluded from’ (Degnen 2018, 7). As such, the processes by which humans are made into persons, including description, evaluations, judgements and commitments, can be understood as ethical, and as constituting ethical persons (Lambek 2013). A key question this literature has explored is the ways in which persons are understood as connected to or separate from each other. When the individual, atomistic and indivisible person is taken as the starting place, relationships are imagined as external to, and happening after, the person (Lambek 2015). Key questions then become how individuals

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­ ecome ­connected to each other. Thus, a huge amount of academic attenb tion, across a range of disciplines, has sought to understand and explain the socialization or enculturation of children. These concepts rest on an idea of the baby as a pre-social ‘bio-bundle’ (Gottlieb 2004) that needs to be ‘socialized’ or ‘enculturated’ to become connected to other people. Persons are a priori individuals who need to be made social by society, with society the necessary whole that encompasses and connects individuals as units (Strathern 1992; Toren 1999, 2012). However, as anthropologists have shown, different imaginations of the person posit a completely different order of relationships and units. When relationships are imagined to precede and create persons, the notion that a child will need to be ‘socialized’ into relationships makes little sense (Strathern 1988). These different models of personhood have often been characterized in anthropological debates in terms of a distinction between ‘individual’ (autonomous, sovereign and indivisible) and ‘dividual’ (relational, composite and divisible) personhood. While it would be hard to overstate the influence of this individual-dividual contrast in structuring discussions of personhood in anthropology (Degnen 2018), there has been much debate about what these distinctions describe. Individuality and dividuality, as mutually exclusive categories, have been employed to characterize whole societies, modes of life, or types of person (Schram 2015). And they join other c­ ontrastive pairs that are often mapped onto distinctions between ‘the West’ and ‘the Rest’: egocentric versus sociocentric, bounded versus relational, monist versus dualist, or autonomous versus dependent (Lamb 1997). These dichotomous distinctions have been challenged from a number of perspectives. For example, attending to histories and flows of colonialism, missionization and capitalism, scholars have highlighted the range of individuating practices, ideologies and cultural formations that such things as nationhood, liberal democracy, civil rights, electoral politics and Christianity both rest upon and continually recreate (LiPuma 1998; Sykes 2007 and contributors; Bialecki and Daswani 2015). Others have highlighted the way logics of individuality (for example autonomous intentionality) are not unique to the West and emerge through their own histories (Course 2010; Walker 2012). Furthermore, scholars have been critical of the flattening effects of labelling all different kinds of persons as dividual/relational, without attending to the particular forms of connection and divisibility observable in specific places (Busby 1997; Boddy 1998). As such, over the last few decades it has been widely recognized that it is not possible to maintain a sharp binary between ‘individuals’ and ‘dividuals’ and instead, attention can be paid to how persons can be both, although these different dimensions of personhood may be variously foregrounded or cultural elaborated

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in ­specific ways (Englund and Leach 2000; Smith 2012; Lambek  2015; ­Degnen 2018). At the same time, however, there remains a lack of ethnographic research on personhood in ‘Western settings’. Personhood in ‘non-Western’ locations has been examined through close ethnographic attention to the words, actions and lived experiences of interlocutors. In contrast, ‘paradigmatic conceptualizations’ (Sökefeld 1999) of Western personhood have been readily accepted, evidenced through reference to ideas, texts, jurisprudence or anecdote (Ouroussoff 1993; Kusserow 1999a, 1999b; Sökefeld 1999; Carsten 2004; Laidlaw 2013). As such, in the anthropological literature on personhood, recourse to the possessive, bounded Western individual can arguably still be viewed as a ‘rhetoric so routine as to have become reflex’ (Laidlaw 2013, 33). This lack of attention is not trivial. Assumptions of the rational Western individual have provided the unexamined lens through which the ‘other’ is understood as different, and further reinforce, rather than deconstruct, longstanding (and long critiqued) notions of rational, free West versus exotic, culture-bound rest (Ouroussoff 1993; Sökefeld 1999; Laidlaw 2013). This then obscures the histories through which individuality has been produced through the abjection and exclusion of racialized, enslaved and colonized ‘others’ (Hartman 1997; Wynter 2003). While anthropological debates on personhood have worked to challenge and parochialize the assumptions of the universal individual, they have also reinforced this subject, by using it as the unexamined counterpoint against which contrasting ideas of relational, dividual person are elaborated (LiPuma 1998; Laidlaw 2013). Thus, I use ‘West’ and ‘Western’ with caution in this monograph, recognizing them as highly problematic terms that have shaped, and continue to shape, academic debates on personhood and conceptions of individuality (see also Degnen 2018). As I aim to explore, this category informs what is hidden in the making of persons and so requires interrogation. As Adrie Kusserow further highlights, when attempts have been made to disaggregate notions of individualism, this often takes the form of identifying particular groups in society (such as women, or the working class) which are more ‘relational’ or ‘sociocentric’, rather than examining the actions, concepts and discourses through which differing modes of individualism may be manifested (Kusserow 1999a). Importantly then, uninterrogated and empirically unfounded notions of the individual work to reproduce understandings of the individual not only as abstract and unchanging, but as tacitly white, male, middle-class and middle-aged (Kusserow 1999; Degnen 2012). Scholarship that does attend ethnographically to personhood and self in Western settings has produced work that highlights how dimensions

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of ­relationality, connectedness and plurality emerge as part of Western people’s concepts of themselves, and also interrogates and disambiguates manifestations and conceptions of individualism (Degnen 2018). For example, considering adoptees’ narratives of searching for their birth kin, Janet  Carsten argues that their articulation of their selves as ‘fractured and ­partial … suggests a notion of personhood where kinship is not simply added to bounded individuality, but one where kin relations are perceived as intrinsic to the self ’ (Carsten 2004, 107). As Carsten further argues, there is a ‘very ordinary quality’ to this kind of relationality that is woven into Western everyday life; however, this is often obscured in the ­anthropological literature that draws on more ‘rarefied’ sources. Meanwhile, drawing on her ethnographic material from four different pre-schools in three socio-economically different neighbourhoods in New York, Kusserow argues that while individualism is a structuring discourse for parents in all neighbourhoods, and shapes their child-rearing practices in important ways, these notions are refracted through classed experiences of inequality. As such, in the two working-class neighbourhoods of Queens, parents often focused on ‘the importance of moving from soft selves to hard and tough selves’ (Kusserow 2004, 35). Porosity entailed danger, the penetration of negative influences from the street (e.g. drugs, prostitution). Meanwhile, parents in privileged upper East-side Manhattan described the importance of a child opening up to the world and emphasized the importance of developing ‘psychological uniqueness and individuality’ (Kusserow 2004, 82). Similarly, Hyang Jin Jung (2007) focused on the role of teachers, administrators and parents in shaping young personhoods in a Junior High School in Midwest United States. As Jung shows, educators sought to encourage individuality through the regulation of emotions, placing value on both self-expression and self-discipline. Students were encouraged to act as individuals, the separate and internal self being ‘the source of power and locus of control in dealing with the external world’ (2007, 42). As Jung further argues, the hegemony of this white middle-class way of understanding personhood and emotions, and associated interactional expectations, had important implications for students of different racial, ethnic and classed backgrounds whose self-­ understanding and interactional style may differ from the specific kind of normative individuality valued in school. Thus, in contrast to the taken-for-granted way individuality has been present as a counterpoint for other kinds of personhood, these ethnographic accounts foreground and make visible the intersubjective making of particular kinds of individuality. As I will discuss further in the next chapter, individuality is so tied into standard modes of analysis that without conscious interrogation its invisible assumptions may be inadvertently

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reproduced. As such, exploring individuality ethnographically, without uncritically re-inscribing individuality analytically, is one of the aims of this book. Submitting individuality to the same kind of critical attention that has been extended to other forms of personhood, I examine how it is produced in everyday life at school, through a mutually constitutive interplay of separation and connection, continuity and discontinuity, uniqueness and sharedness. Emphasizing the ethical aspects of these dimensions of personhood, Michael Lambek has delineated ‘forensic’ and ‘mimetic’ as both ideologies of the person and dimensions of the self (Lambek 2013). ­Forensic dimensions encompass self-sameness, and continuity over time, and foreground the ways people are held accountable for their actions and the commitments they have made. Meanwhile, mimetic dimensions encompass continuity with other people, and the imitative, iterative and discontinuous aspects of selves and foreground the way new commitments can be made, and how what people say and do builds on, and is shaped by, the words and actions of others. As I will argue, individuality was an important part of young people’s experience and self-understanding. Although this does not exhaust the full possibilities of experience, and often we can see alternative understandings of persons and relations come into view, I contend that taking seriously young people’s perspectives is also to take seriously the experience of being an individual and feeling separate from other people. Utilizing forensic and mimetic as analytical strands helps us to understand the fundamentally intersubjective nature of these processes. By paying attention to the specific nature of sociality in school, we will see how students tenaciously shape each other, and at the same time, constitute themselves and others as individually responsible for their own actions. Taking seriously young people’s conceptualization of themselves as individual persons also necessitates recognizing the ethical dimensions of these processes. As we will see, life at school was saturated with ‘people’s evaluative perceptions, reactions, understandings, and claims concerning subjectivities, actions, persons, qualities, and ways of life, in terms of whether these were admirable, despicable, unremarkable, or otherwise distinct in worth’ (Londoño Sulkin 2012, 3). These qualitative evaluations are centrally important to how students were constituting themselves and each other as particular kinds of ethical persons according to a range of historically constituted criteria. Attending to these ethics of everyday life helps us to recognize what matters to young people and what is at stake in the making of persons. The students in this book are centred, as reflexive people being, becoming and making sense of themselves and each other anew, in a ­particular

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time and place. As I will explore, the pervasive ethical judgements that constituted personhood in school were shaped by both ideologies of the individual and historically constituted specificities of social difference. As I will discuss, some kinds of sameness and difference were considered by students to be particularly important to who you were as a person. Boys and girls were understood as different kinds of persons, who were legitimized in doing different kinds of things, acting in different ways and judged according to different kinds of criteria. To be a boy or girl was considered self-evident and unchanging and, as we will see, these apparently binary gendered distinctions were structuring of everyday life and held great explanatory potential for students. Reflecting the intensely cosmopolitan nature of London, where the school is situated, students traced a multitude of global ‘routes and roots’ (Gilroy 1993) and in these classifications and identifications of sameness and difference some people were [black, white, Asian, mixed race], some were from [a location in the world] (in addition to being from London as their taken-for-granted shared location), and some were both. These were understood as fixed aspects of persons, as well as in terms of a geographical history shared with parents, grandparents and ancestors, and they had important implications for the way persons were understood. At the same time as I seek to hold steady the way young people are active, critical and reflexive meaning-makers, and attend closely to their conceptual work, I also seek to locate them within the wide and deep global histories through which they draw meaning. As I will explore in more depth in the next chapter, understandings of individuality, and gendered and racialized/ethnicized repertoires of understanding, have been constituted through and are bound up with processes of capitalism, colonialism and racialization. The claim of this book is not that this exploration of personhood among young people in London can somehow speak for a Western personhood, but rather can speak to it: revealing the processes through which particular kinds of individuality are constituted and come to appear as self-evident in a particular time and place. Thus, this book joins a long history of critical scholarship in anthropology and beyond, that engages in the task of defamiliarization, making visible what appears or has been made to appear as natural, self-evident and given in the nature of things. The focus on young people in the process of growing up offers a valuable way to study processes by which understandings of persons and individuality, which subsequently come to appear as self-evident, are learnt (Toren 1999). It centralizes young people as worthy of being listened to, granting them determination of their own conceptual understandings at the same time as these are traced historically.

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The Importance of School School emerges in ethnographic accounts as a particularly intense site of sociality for young people. Their institutional organization into narrow age-specific groupings enables a compression and thus intensification of peer relations (Amit-Talai 1995). Classmates are often with each other seven hours a day, five days a week. As such, school is the locus of many important relationships, friends, ex-friends, love interests and enemies. Even forty years after graduating high school, Sherry Ortner found that her ­respondents – fellow classmates of the class of ’58 – recalled its friendships, cliques and hierarchies so vividly, they were ‘burned like a tattoo’ on their memories (2002). This recognizable patterning not only emerges in personal histories, but in the cultural imagination of Euro-America, for example in the many influential high school movies made over the last five decades (Bulman 2015). As I argue in this book, by paying attention to peer relationships and everyday life at school, we can recognize the way these are deeply implicated in the production of personhood. This book focuses on everyday life in school, rather than other sites of young people’s lives. Whilst recognizing the partial nature of this exploration (as I will discuss further in Chapter 2), school represents an intense site of action and investment. While the focus of this book is what happens at school that is not formal education, formal education also shapes understandings of individuality and its invisibility in numerous ways (Jung 2007; Winkler-Reid 2017). The focus of this book is one year group in particular, Year Eleven, ­fifteen to sixteen-year-olds preparing to take their GCSE national exams at the end of the year. The students in this book joined the school aged eleven and progressed reliably through each school year together.2 As many students would leave to continue their studies at other schools or colleges, Year Eleven students were approaching the end of their time together as a group in its existing form. Over these years together the young people had created and maintained relationships, friendship groups and a hierarchical social order through the sheer force of their actions. They engaged in manifold acts of judgement and evaluation, love and care, punishment and recrimination, and they actively and tenaciously shaped themselves and each other according to particular ideas of what it means to be an acceptable person. It is these relationships and actions that are the focus of this book. While the students disagreed upon many things, the importance of having friends in school was not one of them. Friendship could provide love, belonging and security, but was also a public requirement. Friendship in school was both contingent on being assessed as an acceptable person and a necessary pre-requisite for being viewed as acceptable. Being ­friendless

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was not only a lonely and isolating experience, but also an unequivocal sign of social failure. Likewise, a person with only one friend might be suspect, positioned perilously close to the boundaries of acceptability. While the quality of friendships was also judged by students (for example, having lots of friends but no close friends might lead to judgements of ‘superficiality’), friendships offered clear evidence of acceptability. Thus, as we will see throughout this book, there was a lot at stake in friendships. To reject others shaping of you as an appropriate person was to risk sacrificing the pleasures, rewards and securities of friendship. The making and maintaining of friendships required continual effort of action and exchange, and a commitment to share time and space. The mundane routine of the school day and institutional organization of students in year groups, form groups and class groups were the institutional skeleton upon which the intensity of these interactions and relationships were created in, around and sometimes against. In Collingson School, students were divided into different form groups (where they met for registration at the beginning and end of the day) and different class groups, according to the subjects they were studying and academic ‘ability’. Students moved from classroom to classroom, making their way through the narrow corridors and stairways at the same time. As the bell rang at the end of each lesson, empty corridors suddenly become full of students, as if a cork had been popped, and the next five minutes were an intense proximity of bodies jostling and jostled, pushing and pushed, squashing and squashed, an experience similar to travelling on a rush hour train. From the moment they met their friends, in all possible moments between the school bells and up to and often over the point at which a teacher claimed the space for formal learning, students talked, joked and laughed. They put a huge amount of time and energy into creating and maintaining their relationships with each other and the results of these efforts were impressive. Through their actions – the constant talk, the joking and laughing, the hugging and holding hands, the football and play fighting – they created friendships, friendship groups and a hierarchical social order. The year group was understood by the students as a hierarchy, where those at the top were ‘seen and known’, while those at the bottom were ­‘seeing’ and ‘knowing’. These processes contributed to the tacit orchestration by which some high-status students were allowed to exert their will over others, while low-status students were expected to maintain invisibility and a compression, rather than extension, of their selves. Moreover, through these actions and interactions, as I will explore through the course of this book, students not only created different kinds of relationships with each other, they also judged, evaluated, reflected and ultimately shaped each other and themselves into particular kinds of people.

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There was a lot at stake for students in the ‘practice’ of living; to act or to not act both involved risks, and the consequences of misjudging these were exclusion, isolation, insult, punishment or no longer being considered an acceptable person. Readers may be dismayed by the stories of the pain students inflict on each other, the often rigid ways they defined what it meant to be an acceptable and appropriate person, the riven nature of social differences, and the histories of inequality and oppression upon which these drew. While this was certainly an important and painful part of the school experience, as I also hope to show in this book, love, understanding, care, and forgiveness were also important and ever-present. School was a lively and fun place, full of friendship and laughter. There was something joyous about being with your friends every day, a pleasure many adults have long left behind. It is these aspects of school life, all the interactions and relationships that go on within, around and between the adult structured demands of school and formal learning, that form the fabric from which this book is constituted.

Structure of the Book In the next chapter, I offer a wider and longer perspective on the ideas, concepts and experiences that emerge ethnographically in the remainder of the book. Firstly, I trace the long history through which ideas of the individual have developed, fundamentally shaped by intersecting regimes of colonialism, racism, patriarchy and capitalism amongst other inequalities. Secondly, I identify the ongoing presence of individuality as an important, yet often invisible ordering logic in Western sense-making practices. Finally, I situate the arguments within literature on youth and life-course, schooling and systems of inequality, and the anthropology of morality and ethics. In Chapter 2, I situate the students and their school within a particular time and place, starting with an exploration of the history and present of the global city of London before introducing the neighbourhood and school. In this chapter I also discuss my fieldwork process and finding my place in Year Eleven. Finally, I consider both change and continuity in the lives of young people in London since I conducted the ethnography in 2007–2008. The history of Year Eleven is explored in Chapter 3. Students’ narration of their shared history enabled them to constitute themselves as a ‘good’ group which has grown together, despite past wounds. This history highlights both the pain students inflicted on each other – the brutality and force by which they seek to shape each other into particular kinds of ­persons – but also, the love, care and forgiveness they extended to each

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other. Finally, this chapter introduces the four friendship groups at the heart of this monograph and examines how these groups enabled students to define themselves as particular kinds of people in relation to those around them, structured by hierarchical relations which both connected and differentiated them. Chapter 4 focuses on girls’ friendships, developing the argument that friendships are implicated in the production of individuality. While boys were legitimated in ‘acting big’ and exerting their will across the year group, this chapter focuses on girls’ friendships as offering them an intimate and legitimate means to exert their will and shape each other into acceptable selves. This chapter details the ways these friendships entailed both the maintenance of a separate, authentic and forensically responsible self, and recognition of interconnectedness with friends: for example, how a friend’s ‘bad reputation’ can taint those around them. Chapter 5 focuses on the ways students constituted themselves as both similar and different to one another in racialized and ethnicized ways. In the context of London as a global city, mirrored in the many ‘roots and routes’ of students in the school, ‘where are you from?’ was a key question students asked each other. This spatial history shared with parents and grandparents was joined with simplified categorizations of ‘black, white, Asian, mixed race’, and understood as a fundamental, unchanging aspect of what kind of person you are. At the same time ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’ were understood as mutable descriptors that could be shared with friends. Thus, the understanding of persons as both forensically distinct, and mimetically connected to each other, is exemplified in these student understandings. Chapter 6 describes the way a powerful sexual ethic constituted by students entailed evaluations of sexual practices and scrutiny of the qualities of persons involved. In these interactions students were constituted as different kinds of people who were legitimated in acting in particular and highly gendered ways: for boys, this pivoted round a pursuant and active expression of sexual desire, while for girls, sexual desire needed to be carefully guarded and safely contained within a committed relationship. These sexual ethics ascribed boys and girls with different kinds of responsibility and manifested gendered relations of connection and disconnection. Sexual practices evaluated as ‘wrong’ not only put the reputation of individuals at risk, but also jeopardized the reputation of the friendship group and year group. This chapter in turn explores the policing and work that went into maintaining the year group as ‘good’ and ‘worthwhile’, against such risks. In Chapter 7, I consider the ethics of individuality which were observable in school. As I argue, this ideological valorization of the individual person emerged in different ways, including through the virtue of authenticity.

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Made visible in evaluations between friends and peers, we see the ways in which relationships worked to constitute individual persons of a particular kind. Finally, to conclude, I move beyond everyday life in high school, arguing for the importance of displacing the generic, abstract and rarefied ‘straw individual’ in anthropology with full-blooded accounts of how individual personhoods are constituted in everyday life, intertwined with ethics and through relations with others. I also demonstrate the importance of displacing individuality thinking and interrogating individuality when working with young people by focussing on the project I co-founded, GirlKind North East, which was developed from the ethnographic research presented in this book.

Notes 1. All names of people and places are pseudonyms. 2. It would be very unusual for a student to repeat a year; most students progress through school regardless of their academic achievements or failures.

References Amit-Talai, Vered. 1995. ‘The Waltz of Sociability: Intimacy, Dislocation, and Friendship in a Quebec High School1’, in Vered Amit-Talai and Helena Wulff (eds), Youth Cultures: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 144–65. Bialecki, Jon and Girish Daswani. 2015. ‘What Is an Individual?: The View from Christianity’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5(1): 271–94. https://doi.org/10.14318/ hau5.1.013. Boddy, Janice. 1998. ‘Afterword: Embodying Ethnography’, in Andrew Strathern and Michael Lambek (eds), Bodies and Persons: Comparative Perspectives from Africa and Melanesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 252–73. Bulman, Robert C. 2015. Hollywood Goes to High School. Duffield: Worth Publishers. Busby, Cecilia. 1997. ‘Permeable and Partible Persons: A Comparative Analysis of Gender and Body in South India and Melanesia’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 3(2): 261–78. https://doi.org/10.2307/3035019. Carsten, Janet. 2004. After Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Course, Magnus. 2010. ‘Making Friends, Making Oneself: Friendship and the Mapuche ­Person’, in Amit Desai and Evan Killick (eds), The Ways of Friendship: Anthropological Perspectives. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 154–73. Degnen, Cathrine. 2012. Ageing Selves and Everyday Life in the North of England: Years in the Making. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. ———. 2018. Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Personhood and the Life Course. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Englund, Harri and James Leach. 2000. ‘Ethnography and the Meta-Narratives of Modernity’, Current Anthropology 41(2): 225–48. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London and New York: Verso. Gottlieb, Alma. 2004. The Afterlife Is Where We Come From. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hartman, Saidiya V. 1997. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in ­Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jung, Hyang Jin. 2007. Learning to Be an Individual: Emotion and Person in an American Junior High School. New York: Peter Lang. Kusserow, Adrie Suzanne. 1999. ‘Crossing the Great Divide: Anthropological Theories of the Western Self ’, Journal of Anthropological Research 55(4): 541–62. ———.1999. ‘De-Homogenizing American Individualism: Socializing Hard and Soft Individualism in Manhattan and Queens’. Ethos 27 (2): 210–34. https://doi. org/10.1525/eth.1999.27.2.210. ———. 2004. American Individualisms: Child Rearing and Social Class in Three Neighborhoods. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Laidlaw, James. 2013. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lamb, Sarah. 1997. ‘The Making and Unmaking of Persons: Notes on Aging and Gender in North India’, Ethos 25(3): 279–302. https://doi.org/10.1525/eth.1997.25.3.279. Lambek, Michael. 2013. ‘The Continuous and Discontinuous Person: Two Dimensions of Ethical Life’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19(4): 837–58. https:// doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12073. ———. 2015. ‘What’s Love Got to Do with It?’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5(1): 395–404. https://doi.org/10.14318/hau5.1.018. LiPuma, Edward. 1998. ‘Modernity and Forms of Personhood in Melanesia’, in Andrew Strathern and Michael Lambek (eds), Bodies and Persons: Comparative Perspectives from Africa and Melanesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 53–79. Londoño Sulkin, Carlos David. 2012. People of Substance: An Ethnography of Morality in the Colombian Amazon. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ortner, Sherry B. 2002. ‘“Burned Like a Tattoo”: High School Social Categories and “­American Culture”’, Ethnography 3(2): 115–48. https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381 02003002001. Ouroussoff, Alexandra. 1993. ‘Illusions of Rationality: False Premisses of the Liberal Tradition’, Man 28(2): 281–98. https://doi.org/10.2307/2803414. Schram, Ryan. 2015. ‘A Society Divided: Death, Personhood, and Christianity in Auhelawa, Papua New Guinea’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5(1): 317–37. https://doi.org/10.14318/hau5.1.015. Smith, Karl. 2012. ‘From Dividual and Individual Selves to Porous Subjects’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology 23(1): 50–64. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1757-6547.​ 2012.00167.x. Sökefeld, Martin. 1999. ‘Debating Self, Identity, and Culture in Anthropology’, Current Anthropology 40(4): 417–48. https://doi.org/10.1086/200042. Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. The Gender of the Gift. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520910713.

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———. 1992. After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press. Sykes, Karen. 2007. ‘Interrogating Individuals: The Theory of Possessive Individualism in the Western Pacific’, Anthropological Forum 17(3): 213–24. https://doi. org/10.1080/​00664670701637669. Toren, Christina. 1999. Mind, Materiality and History: Explorations in Fijian Ethnography. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2012. ‘Imagining the World That Warrants Our Imagination: The Revelation of Ontogeny’, The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 30(1): 64–79. https://doi. org/10.3167/ca.2012.300107. Walker, Harry. 2012. Under a Watchful Eye: Self, Power, and Intimacy in Amazonia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Winkler-Reid, Sarah. 2017. ‘“Doing Your Best” in a London Secondary School: Valuing, Caring and Thinking through Neoliberalism’, The Sociological Review Monographs 65(1): 137–53. https://doi.org/10.1177/0081176917693553. Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument’, CR: The New Centennial Review 3(3): 257–337. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.

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Histories, Life-Course and Ethics Throughout the rest of this monograph, I focus on the everyday school

lives of Year Eleven students. In this chapter and the next one, I trace some of the interconnected ideological and material histories which form the elements through which these ‘historically specific’ young people growing up in this particular time and place come to understand themselves and each other and make sense anew of the histories they embody (Toren 1999; Pina-Cabral 2014). Thus, while the small-scale focus of the rest of the book enables us to understand in depth the specific micro-histories (Toren 1999) of individuals, friendships and the year group, the aim is not to offer a vision of free-floating separateness but rather an insight into this little cluster of interconnected relationships, meanings and persons, that form a miniscule part of a manifold of interconnected processes that ultimately span the globe (Wolf 2010). With this aim I chart several interconnected histories of the ‘Western individual’, highlight a pervasive ‘individuality thinking’ and examine the related ‘genealogical model’ (Ingold 2017) that often structures understandings of growing up and the life-course. Furthermore, I discuss a number of overlapping fields of literature which this monograph is both building on and critically engaging with: the anthropology of personhood, psychology of personhood, the sociology and anthropology of childhood, youth and education, and the anthropology of morality and ethics.

Histories of the Western Individual Histories of the Western individual person have traced the emergence of specific ideas about individuality, and as such have demonstrated the ways

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in which dimensions of persons that appear as timeless and universal can be located as emerging within particular places and times. In 1938 Marcel Mauss famously argued that notions of the individual self are not innate or self-evident, but rather products of history (1985). Mauss’ account has been joined by several other histories, likewise drawing primarily on theology, philosophy and law, which together tell interconnected stories about the emergence of a constellation of ideas about individuality. It should be clearly stated that what follows is a consideration of the way Western persons and selves have been accounted for, rather than an argument about a straightforward conflation between the subjects invoked and actual selves. However, used carefully, these histories can offer useful insights. As Joel Robbins writes, texts may be treated like ethnographic informants, enabling us to attend to what is taken as given in them, and to consider what kind of constellation of ideas would need to be in place for these ideas to make sense (Robbins 2007b, discussing MacPherson). Furthermore, they enable us to begin to trace the interconnection of ideas and the way concepts are bedded down and come to ‘hold people in their embrace’ (Strathern 2014). Histories of the individual often begin in ancient Greece and Rome, where the individual person became a legal entity – a citizen with rights and responsibilities (Mauss 1985). In the work of classical Greco-Latin thinkers the individual person also gained moral value, ‘a sense of being conscious, independent, autonomous, free and responsible’ (Mauss 1985, 18). For example, as Charles Taylor (1992) highlights, in the work of Plato, the dominance of action and glory diminished in favour of reason and reflection. Rather than imagining gods as fused with persons, Plato conceptualized the mind as a unitary space, and the person as having responsibility over their own lives. Here, Taylor argues, ‘inwardness’ as an important quality of persons began to emerge. Themes of unity and moral value were further elaborated and embedded as part of the development of Christianity, and particularly theological debates that ‘obsessed’ over the nature of the soul, with an influential argument made for it as ‘a rational substance, indivisible and individual’ (Cassiodorus, Roman statesman, monk and writer, in Mauss, 1985: 20). Forms of radical reflexivity were identified by Taylor in the theology of Augustine, who advocated the need to look within ourselves and understand the world through our experiential relationship to it (1992). This theme intensified during the reformation with the emphasis on the fundamental importance of a direct relationship to God, and the soul cast in relation to personal character (Williams 1961). As Sylvia Wynter argues, the transformation of the individual, from one primarily understood as a religious subject to one understood as a

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secular subject, represented an epochal shift. The redescription of ‘human’ and processes of secularization, starting from the Renaissance, were made possible through the invented construct of race. Rather than grounding their ­‘prescriptive/descriptive statements of what it is to be human’ in ­relation to distinctions between natural and supernatural beings, they regrounded it in ‘a newly projected human/subhuman distinction instead’ (Wynter 2003, 264). On one side of this distinction, notions of the responsible individual were elaborated in seventeenth-century political debates. As C.B. Macpherson argues, the writings of Hobbes, Locke, Harrington and the Levellers all shared a starting premise, the acceptance of a particular kind of individualism. Macpherson termed this possessive individualism, a ‘conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities; owing nothing to society for them’ (2010, 3). As Macpherson argues, at the time of these political debates, notions of possessive individualism were already so well-lodged as a structuring logic that they could be taken as read by those engaged in these debates, despite their ostensibly opposed positions. Ownership and proprietorial relations were coupled with freedom and ‘read back into the nature of the individual’ (Macpherson 2010, 3).1 On the other side of the distinction, ‘the masses’ within national borders, and indigenous and enslaved people in colonial and imperial territories, were situated outside this possessive individualism and through which the individual could be defined against (Hartman 1997; Skeggs 2004; Johnson 2014). As Beverley Skeggs writes, ‘The he consolidated through law and other means of institutionalization (such as welfare and education) enabled the experiences of a powerful minority to determine what constituted a person’ (Skeggs 2004, 76). Exploring the process from the other side, Johnson argues, in the context of colonialism and imperialism, that the explicit contrast to spirit possession, the ‘occupied body and spoken-through person’ (Johnson 2014, 396), helped to create the rational individual and citizen subject. This forensic person could be held responsible for their actions, own private property and enter contracts,2 as distinct from ‘the unchecked excess, passion and frenzy’ of the possessed, ‘unduly susceptible to imitation’ (2014, 839) and lacking will. In the turn towards romanticism in the eighteenth century, away from  the materialist and utilitarian focus of the Enlightenment, Taylor identifies sources of a new and even more elaborated form of individuality. As he argues, expressive individualism constituted originality and authenticity as a vocation. This form of individualism focused on the notion of a truth that could be discovered within, and advocated for being responsive to an ‘inner voice’ that would enable the authentic individual

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to walk an original path. As Taylor argues, ‘Expressive individuation has become one of the cornerstones of modern culture. So much so that we barely notice it, and we find it hard to accept that it is such a recent idea in human history and would have been incomprehensible in earlier times’ (1992, 376). As scholars have argued, ‘the privilege accorded the individual’s agency, inwardness, and freedom’ is one of the key features of modernity (Keane 2002, 68) and the liberal epistemologies that have been fundamental to its constitution (Ouroussoff 1993; Ansell 2019; Fedirko, Samanani and Williamson 2021). Thus, as scholars have traced, a number of key features of the modern world, including democracy, citizenship and human rights, take as their starting place the autonomous individual as ‘the elementary social unit’ (Ansell 2019). As part of this, the rise of mass schooling has been closely intertwined with citizenship projects (Levinson 2011; Wells 2009; Alexander 2020). In the United Kingdom, the 1870 Elementary Education Act, which made school attendance compulsory for five to eleven years-olds, marked the beginning of compulsory schooling and the growing importance of the state’s role in education (Alexander 2020). As Karen Wells argues, schools became an important moral technology aiming to shape children such that ‘governments invest significant resources in education partly to produce the kind of person that values one side of the binary rational/emotional, individual/social, autonomous/interdependent more than the other’ (Wells 2009, 113). At the same time as its active moral shaping, schooling has become an unquestioned social good for children, so much so that it is included in the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) (Alexander 2020).3 In the 1990s, theorists such as Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck posited influential meta-narratives of changes in contemporary regimes of the self of ‘high modernity’. They argued that contemporary Euro-American society has seen a significant shift in the relationship between ‘the individual’ and ‘society’ and that these changes were fundamental to the construction of both. For example, Beck (1992) argued that in high modernity actors tend to become more individualized, as social change forces them to become increasingly free from structure (for example, class, family or gender structures). For modernization to successfully advance, these processes of unshackling were essential; individuals must release themselves and then actively shape the modernization process. We can see in these arguments the familiar form of the atomized individual, formed separately from others, as delineated in the history above. As Walkerdine et al, critiqued: ‘For Beck then, self-invention is a way to move beyond a stultifying traditionalism, and in this respect it shares much with bourgeois individualism. It is only by recognising themselves as individuals that people can

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become the autonomous subjects through which progressive social change can be accomplished’ (2001, 24). More recently still, the regularity with which the neoliberal subject is evoked in scholarship, as autonomous, self-regulating, responsible and entrepreneurial, speaks to the ease by which the uninterrogated individual continues to be central to social understandings in the twenty-first century. This neoliberal subject has been evoked with surprising uniformity. In research on neoliberalism in both ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ places, the autonomous individual re-emerges as the ideal form (in the anthropological literature as well as other disciplines), often with little interrogation of how this relates to actual selves (Kipnis 2011; Winkler-Reid 2017). As D.W. Murray argued, while it is easy to read into accounts of the ‘Western self ’ a story of ‘unbroken continuity’ and ‘unchallenged dominance’, alternative conceptualizations of the discontinuous self can be traced as co-existing with the more familiar story of the transcendental one, as far back as the histories begin (Murray 1993, 8; Kusserow 1999). At the same time, as we have seen, conceptions of individuality as unique, separate and continuous can be traced over hundreds of years and play an important part in both the imaginative and material development and justification of the intertwined colonialism, capitalism and racism in these processes. Highlighted throughout this history is the way in which, as Saidiya Hartman argues, ‘[a]bstract individuality presumes particular forms of embodiment and excludes and marginalizes others’ (1997, 122). Furthermore, Sylvia Wynter draws attention to the way in which this ‘overrepresentation’ of a particular kind of personhood ‘as if it were that of human itself ’ (2003, 262) has profound consequences for ‘the legitimacy by which the minority of the global population own and consume the majority of the world’s resources’ (2003, 260). As discussed in the introduction, these generic and abstract conceptualizations of the individual (tacitly white and masculine in this abstraction) have been reproduced in the anthropological literature, where they have been used as a foil against which detailed ethnographic accounts of non-Western, relational/socio-centric persons can be contrasted (Ouroussoff 1993; Spiro 1993; Kusserow 1999). These assumptions are reproduced by accepting individuality as evidenced through ideas, texts, jurisprudence or anecdote, rather than exploring through ethnographic research how ideas of individuality shape personhood in specific ways. As Alexandra Ouroussoff argues, this ‘refusal to locate western reality in the day-to-day experience of westerners’ (1993, 284) is evidence of the shaping force of liberal philosophy on anthropological ideas, despite what disciplinary myths suggest. As I will argue, by exploring the production of individuality in everyday life, we can consider young people’s processes of meaning making;

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how they draw on long histories of what it means to be an individual person and make sense of these of these ideas anew.

‘Individuality Thinking’ Individuality represents such an important ordering logic that it can be identified not only in relation to the description and prescription of persons, but also across a range of domains, structuring of sense-making practices and modes of conceptualization that can be identified in much academic analysis. Because of this, ‘individuality thinking’ is often invisible and can require repeated effort to make it visible. In her hugely influential work The Gender of the Gift (1988), Marilyn Strathern illuminated the important implications that imaginations of persons and their relations have for the way academic analysis proceeds.4 The Western ‘individual person’ is understood to be connected to others by the unifying force of society and at the same time is understood as distinct from these societal relations. In contrast, setting up the Melanesian ‘dividual person’ as the conscious ‘mirror-imagery’ (1988, 17) of this individual, Strathern argues this person cannot be understood apart from the relations that constitute them. As Strathern shows, these different ways of conceptualizing persons have important implication for the academic analysis that follows. For example, for the situated and plural Melanesian person, gender is not unitary and fixed, but rather persons embody their relationships that are both male and female. This insight, she argues, then poses important challenges for a feminism that is premised on an individual understanding of gender. This way of imagining individuals in relation to society can be identified across analytical approaches in the social sciences. As Ashley Lebner writes, in discussion of Strathern’s ideas, ‘“society” is not only a term but a way of thinking that pervades our analytical approaches and clouds our ethnography with a Euro-American mathematic or idea of scale’ (2017, 9). This ‘society thinking’ (Lebner 2017) can be joined from the other side by ‘individuality thinking’. Starting from the self-evident individual unit at the centre of analysis, this unit is then made sense of by connecting it to multiple domains by relations that are external to it and do not affect its essential attributes, at the same time as it is subsumed and hierarchized (Strathern 1988; Green 2017; Lebner 2017).5 For example, Richard Handler (1988, in Harrison 2006) highlighted the ways that nationalism can be understood as possessive individualism writ large. Nations, like individuals, are understood as bounded, unique and autonomous. Furthermore, nations are defined according to a culture

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which they possess, a culture which is forensic – self-same and continuous through time, one that can be passed down through the generations like an heirloom (Baumann 1996). As such, Simon Harrison has argued that the mimetic dimensions (or mimetic foundations) of nationalism and ethnic identity – the way that these borrow, share and shape each other – are suppressed, ignored or obscured in favour of this atomistic perspective. Thus, individuality is so tied into common modes of analysis that it is often invisible. Processes of analysis and abstraction can work to make the notion of the individual appear self-evident and this can subsequently mean that ideas of the individual person are not submitted to the same kind of critical attention extended to other forms of personhood. This is one reason why rather than automatically encompass the actions and understandings of young people within familiar abstract categories, I aim to allow space for the young people’s conceptual understandings to lead. By attending carefully to ‘how actors theorise themselves in the process of doing sociality’ (Schram 2015, 317), I explore the ways individuality can be invisible, structuring, challenged or exceeded. This approach builds on scholarship which seeks to consider the implications of who is considered worthy to listen to and who is granted determination of their own conceptual understandings, and takes people’s own conceptual understandings as the starting point for analysis. As Viveiros de Castros has argued, there is an ‘epistemological asymmetry’ in analytical practices which subsume people’s own conceptual understanding into fixed and pre-existing frames (derived from the analysts taken-for-granted ideas about the world), and the result is that this silences and hence dominates those being studied (Viveiros de Castro 2004). In British Social anthropology, this mode of analysis is often associated with encounters with ‘radical alterity’, especially with regard to Amazonia and Melanesia. Other strands of anthropological theory also foreground people’s own conceptual understandings. Black feminist anthropologists have demonstrated the important ‘theoretical travels’ enabled by taking seriously the lives and conceptual understandings of Black women (Mullings 2000; Harrison 2008; Bolles 2013).6 Aimee Meredith Cox’s ethnography of young Black women in a Detroit homeless shelter proceeds by ‘paying close and generous attention to the quotidian spaces of meaning making that Black girls enliven and invent’ (2015, 25). By attending to their ‘theories and methods’ (2015, 26), Cox elucidates the way the girls transform the spaces that limit and punish them, and in so doing reveal the possibilities for imagining society otherwise. Thus, in this monograph I seek to keep central the conceptual understandings of young people themselves, while recognizing these are not free-floating systems of meaning, and, furthermore, recognizing the part these can play in reproducing the hierarchical relations in which they are

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embedded. Young people’s conceptual understandings and actions are drawn from, and are part of, wide and deep histories and relations of power and inequality through which some kinds of persons will be more valued than others. Persons were central to the way the young people in my research understood the world; this was not in terms of abstract individuals, but rather as different kinds of persons. As I discussed in the introduction, some kinds of sameness and difference were understood by students as particularly important to who you were as a person, and were the focus of ongoing ­discussion, evaluation and judgement: boys and girls were interpreted as different kinds of persons, legitimized in doing different kinds of things, acting in different ways and judged according to different kinds of criteria, especially in relation to sex, as I will discuss in Chapter 6. Some persons were [black, white, Asian, mixed race], some were from [location in the world] and some were both. These were considered by students as important ways by which people were similar or different, as I will explore in Chapter 5.7 In the analysis I seek to attend closely to these conceptual understandings whilst recognizing their closeness to, and at times transformation into, more encompassing conceptualizations of gender, race and ethnicity. My intention is not to imply that young people’s conceptual understandings are fixed and unchanging, but rather to recognize the way in which understanding can actually or potentially shift as well as co-exist (for example, from boys and girls to gender, black, white, Asian to race) and in so doing subtly shift the social world the young people were inhabiting. Likewise, these two clusters of distinction described above were key to how the young people were understanding and describing themselves and others as particular kinds of persons at this point in time and place. However, this is not to say that additional or different criteria would not become important to them as they grew up and left school or that young people at school today might not be working with different criteria. Foregrounding the conceptual understandings young people drew on to understand themselves and each other as particular kinds of persons means that other kinds of description appear more obliquely. While anthropologists of Britain have identified class as an important ethnographic category, as well as an analytic category (Edwards, Evans and Smith 2012), class did not emerge among students as a key way of describing persons or understanding sameness and difference. However, if we understand class to concern relational and structural conditions of inequality (Kalb 2015; Tyler 2015),8 then, as I will explore, there were times in school where students explicitly focused on their differential access to material resources, particularly in relation to their imagined futures. Furthermore, these were

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examined more obliquely through other clusters of meaning, such as ghetto, discussed in Chapter 5, or through differences articulated through ‘cultural struggles’, for example taste (Tyler 2015). To be clear, my argument is not that material and symbolic inequalities did not shape young people’s lives in fundamentally important ways. Furthermore, as we have seen, the history of individuality is intimately tied up with capitalism and property relations.9 However, the way this emerged in relation to particular descriptions and understandings of persons in school, and in relations between peers, was oblique, particularly in comparison to the understandings of the differences between ‘boys’ and ‘girls’, ‘where you are from’ and ‘black, white, Asian and mixed race’ which, as I will discuss in later chapters, were granted a forensic presence in young people’s understandings and evaluations of persons. As well as paying attention to young people’s conceptual understandings, I will draw on my own concepts that help to further elucidate the ways young people are coming to understand themselves as particular kinds of individual persons and the pervasive ethical dimensions of this. As I discussed in the introduction, scholars have utilized ethnography in order to challenge dichotomous renderings of Western ‘individual’ persons and non-Western ‘joined up persons’ (Carsten 2004, 83–84), from both sides of the divide. As such, it is now commonly argued that rather than understanding individual-dividual (and related contrastive pairs) as distinctly different kinds of persons, to be ‘found’ in non-Western or Western locations, these distinctions can be better understood as dimensions of all persons, part of the personal experience of the self, as well as differently foregrounded in cultural ideologies, values and models (LiPuma 1998; Lambek 2013, 2015; Schram 2015; Degnen 2018). However, as I have argued so far in this chapter, individuality is such a structuring logic that it requires frequent effort to not take it for granted as self-evident. Therefore, when the individual-dividual divide remains structuring of the debate, even at increasingly small scales, we are at risk of being taken down familiar grooves of analysis and may fail to explore other aspects of personhood that exceed this ‘two-axis combinatory affair’, that tend to ‘summon each other up as fully formed entities’ (Bialecki and Daswani 2015, 273). Thus, in seeking to interrogate individuality as an ethnographic concept, I choose not to employ ‘individual’ as an analytic concept, but rather utilize ‘forensic’ and ‘mimetic’ to conceptualize dynamic strands that come to constitute personhood. As introduced in the previous chapter, Michael Lambek elaborates the distinction between forensic (self-same, unfolding over time and continuous) and mimetic (imitative, iterative and discontinuous) as c­ ontrastive

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yet mutually constitutive aspects of personhood (Lambek 2013). While Lambek focuses on the ‘the public side of personhood’ and frames his argument in broad cross-cultural and historical terms, I use his distinction to explore the specifics of a particular kind of selfhood emerging between young people in London. As I will argue throughout this book, forensic and mimetic dimensions help to identify the productive tensions central to the emergence of individual personhood in school. Forensic notions recognize the importance of continuity of the self over time, and the ways people are held accountable for their past actions and future commitments. Mimetic notions recognize the importance of continuity with other people, the self as imitative, iterative and discontinuous, and the ways new commitments can be made, criteria can be shifted and ‘what a person says and does draw[s] from what other people have said or done, or serve[s] in turn as examples or foils for others’ (Lambek 2013, 848). Thus, as I will explore in more depth later in this chapter, as Lambek argues, ethics are intrinsic to both continuous and discontinuous dimensions of personhood and thus these dimensions draw out the intrinsically ethical dimensions of human becoming.10

Life-Course, Youth and Human Becoming We join the students in Collingson School at a particular point in their lives. As Cathrine Degnen argues, different phases of the life-course can bring different questions regarding personhood into focus and ‘speak implicitly to the ways in which personhood is intrinsically connected to – and changes with – the various phases of the life course’ (2018, 3). Furthermore, ‘Western personhood – like the life course – is predicated on a naturalised notion of linear “development” through life’s phases’ (2018, 19).11 This linear development is also extended to kinship models, where the child is understood as connected to their parent through a ‘line of transmission’ (Ingold 2017). Kinship is imagined as the downward flow of time, identity and obligation, creating autonomous beings separate from their parents who are the outcome of acts rather than relations (Strathern 1992). Tim Ingold terms this a ‘genealogical model’, ‘the defining assumption of which is that individuals are specified in their essential constitution, independently and in advance of their life in the world, through the bestowal of attributes from ancestors’ (2017, 7). As Patrick Alexander further argues, the ‘genealogical model’ influentially structures how childhood is understood, and the lives of children and young people are structured (2020). The need to ‘socialize’ or ‘enculturate’ children rests on similar ideas of the downward transmission of information from one generation to the next, and the assumed starting point

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of babies as ‘bio-bundles’ (Gottlieb 2004) that need to be made social by society (Strathern 1992; Toren 1999, 2012). These genealogical idioms also shaped the way young people were studied in anthropology, prior to the 1990s. Anthropology’s engagement with ‘youth’ was primarily as ‘not-yet finished human beings’, situated in a liminal position between childhood and adulthood. Young people were studied as being led into full cultural membership by adults, rather than actors in their own right (Amit-Talai and Wulff 1995; Bucholtz 2002). Since then, research in anthropology, sociology and human geography among other disciplines has centralized children and young people’s active engagement in their social worlds, exploring historically and geographically specific constructions of childhood and youth, and the way broader political and economic contexts impact on children’s everyday lives (Montgomery 2008; Froerer 2009; Lancy 2014; Sobo 2015; Aitken 2018; Levison, Maynes and Vavrus 2021). In relation to work on ‘child development’, the work of American pragmatists John Dewey and George Mead (Martin, Sokol and Elfers 2008), and psychologists Lev Vygotsky (Stetsenko 2012) and Jean Piaget (Toren 1999; Martin, Sokol and Elfers 2008) have been variously built on to delineate the fundamentally relational way infants and children develop through dynamic, expanding arenas of coordinated activity, interaction and turn taking, and through which children come to understand different positions and perspectives, and differentiate themselves from others (Martin, Sokol and Elfers 2008; Martin 2012). As these scholars demonstrate, as children become older and move into youth, coordination with others becomes increasingly complex, and includes the giving and receiving of reasons, shared imagination, concern for self and others, and self-­determination, all emerging through interactions and conversational practices (Martin 2012). As Anna Stetsenko further elaborates, ethical dimensions are intrinsic to this human becoming, ‘because they are integral to actions through which we become who we are while changing something in and about the world – always acting together with other people, for other people, and affecting other people while being reciprocally affected by them’ (Stetsenko 2012, 151). In similar ways to the anthropological debates outlined earlier in this chapter, this fundamentally intersubjective starting point has enabled psychologists of personhood to make visible and challenge the self-evidence of the pre-constituted individual in their discipline.12 In contrast, these psychologists have utilized the concept of personhood to enable them to go beyond a preoccupation with ‘the inner psychological functioning of private selves’ towards a more encompassing exploration that enables ­consideration of ‘moral agency, biographical detail, or social ­relations’

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(Martin and Bickhard 2012, 86). Utilizing a range of approaches and methods (including for example neurophysiology, phylogenesis and ontogenesis), the psychology of personhood offers a useful complement to the anthropological study of personhood. The importance of development and evolution are here delineated, not as ideological justifications for individualism, but rather for the fundamentally intersubjective, simultaneously biophysical and sociocultural ways in which persons have evolved in coordinated activity and relationships with each other (Martin 2012).

School as a Site of Action and Ethics For many children and young people across the world, school represents an important site of everyday life and action, and often entails the implicit and explicit instantiation of particular kinds of subjects, citizens and hierarchies of belonging (Sancho 2015; Wise and Noble 2016; Tanu 2017; Blum 2019; Alexander 2020). As Patrick Alexander charts in the UK context, while discourses of education have changed significantly since the rise of mass schooling in the nineteenth century, the ‘stratified, aged-based’ structure of schooling remains remarkably similar (2020, 71). In the UK children usually start school aged four or five and must stay in some form of education until they are eighteen, they are normally required to attend school for seven or eight hours a day, five days a week. This institutional management of young people segregates them into  narrow  age-specific groups and ‘compresses and hence intensifies peer interaction’ (Amit-Talai 1995, 241). As such, as Alexander argues, schooling further replicates genealogical understandings, as children and young people are arranged in narrow age-specific groupings, and move progressively and linearly up through school years, towards becoming citizens and adults (2020). As such an important site of action for children and young people, school has been the focal point of numerous ethnographic studies over the decades. There are traditions of ethnographies of education world-wide with different research and disciplinary emphasis (Anderson-Levitt 2011). In the UK, there has been a strong tradition of ethnographic research from the sociology of education and education studies since the 1970s. The anthropology of education emerged more recently in the UK in the 1990s (Delamont 2013; Alexander 2020) and anthropological accounts of British schooling remain rare (see for example Evans 2006; Alexander 2020). Within this body of ethnographic research on schooling, a key strand explores the constitution of gender, sexuality, class and race among peers in school. Published in 1977, Paul Willis’s hugely influential ethnographic account of class and schooling focused on the informal realm as the site in

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which the anti-school ‘lads’ developed, projected and validated values and ways of gaining status in distinction to formal schooling and official values (Willis 1977). While Willis designated the informal realm as the domain of the anti-school lads, drawing from her ethnography of a Quebec high school, Vered Amit-Talai suggested that ‘The formal/informal tension can more fruitfully be viewed as a more general contradiction embedded in a particular institutional treatment of adolescents’ (1995, 241). Exploring how friendship groups may be differently positioned within this realm, scholarship delineated how these groups were a key arena where different kinds of femininities (Hey 1997) and masculinities (Mac an Ghaill 1994) were made sense of, practised, resisted and lived out, both in public sites and the more private ‘interpersonal recesses of schooling’ (Hey 1997, 30). A pervasive ‘heterosexual matrix’ (Butler 1990) has been identified in this literature, through which acceptable forms of masculinity or femininity are produced (and policed) through expectations of compulsory heterosexuality (Hey 1997; Renold 2000; Youdell 2005; Charles 2010; Payne 2010). As such, these discourses are identified as powerful categories for the policing and regulation of not only appropriate sexual identities but also appropriate gender identities within education contexts, often through discourses of ‘feminine sexual morality (and immorality)’ (Youdell 2005, 259). An important feature of this ‘heterosexual matrix’ is a persistent sexual double standard, through which ‘an active, desiring sexuality is positively regarded in men, but denigrated and regulated by negative labelling in women’ (Jackson and Cram 2003, 113; Thomas 1959; Cowie and Lees 1981; Lees 1986). As Carissa M. Froyum further identifies, race and class, as well as gender, play an important and complex part in shaping these ‘gendered subtexts of sexuality’ (2010, 69). Ethnographic research has also explored schools as important sites of racialization and white supremacy (Gillborn 2015; Blaisdell 2016). While this is often unmarked in education policy and euphemistically addressed by teachers and senior managers in the school context claiming they are ‘colour-blind’ or ‘post-racial’ (Joseph-Salisbury and Connelly 2018; Warmington et al. 2018), ethnographic studies of friendships and peer relations in school have demonstrated how young people often refuse this silencing. Informal realms are highlighted as important sites where racial and ethnic differences can be explored, interrogated and made sense of (­Pollock 2004; Kulz 2014). As meeting points, schools are often sites where specific relations of conviviality and cosmopolitanism co-exist with the reproduction of racisms, social hierarchies and inequalities (Hollingworth and Mansaray 2012). Scholarship on identity processes for young people in school has often ‘focused on them in isolation, honoring the assumption that race, class,

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and gender are autonomous social categories’ (Nelson, Stahl and Wallace 2015, 172; Bhopal 2020). A strand of ethnographic research has offered a more thoroughly intersectional approach to the study of these identity processes in school (Dewan 2012; Kulz 2014; Nelson, Stahl and Wallace 2015; Kustatscher 2017). Building on wider scholarship on intersectionality, this research explores ‘lived identities as interlaced and systems of oppression as enmeshed and mutually reinforcing’ (May 2015, 3) and the ways ‘subjectivity is constituted by mutually reinforcing vectors of race, gender, class, and sexuality’ (Nash 2008, 2).13 Theoretically, much of the work which explores identity and British schooling has drawn from post-structuralism or practice theory, allowing for a focus on power and the way subject positions are produced, as well as the intimacy of subjectivities and desire. Young people’s peer ethics are present in these ethnographies but have less frequently been foregrounded in the analysis. However, as I will argue in the following section, a focus on ethics can help us to further recognize what is at stake, by offering an ‘experience near’ conceptualization of what matters to young people.14

Foregrounding Young People’s Peer Ethics Anthropological approaches to morality and ethics offer ways to explore the ‘problem of action’ (Mattingly 2012) which ‘foregrounds the human predicament of trying to live a life that one is somehow responsible for but is in many respects mercurial and unknowable’ (Mattingly 2013, 308). Thus, in the last few decades, an ‘ethical turn’ in anthropology has focused explicit attention on the moral and ethical dimensions of human experience, and there has been lively debate about how best to conceptualize it.15 In this newly distinguished arena of inquiry, scholars have sought to go beyond mechanistic understandings of human experience and reproduction, in order to account more satisfactorily for capacities for reflection, evaluation and freedom in social life (Lambek 2010b; Laidlaw 2013; Mattingly 2013; Mattingly and Throop 2018). While some have sought to make a distinction between ordinary action, with its attendant norm-governed morality, and distinct moments of ethical deliberation (e.g. Laidlaw 2002; Robbins 2007a; Zigon 2007), others have foregrounded the ordinary as a key site of ongoing and pervasive moral work (Lambek 2010a; Mattingly 2013; Stafford 2013). While the ethical is understood as ubiquitous in activity, practice and judgement, it ‘does not simply go without saying’ (Lambek 2010a, 28) and can thus be studied by paying attention to the practices and actions of everyday life.

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As Hannah Appel (2019) argues, while this scholarship recognizes the existence of structures of power and domination, there is a tendency to conceptualize power, structure, interest, inequality, etc. as ‘larger forces’ that are above and outside the ethical selves and experiences being ­delineated. This reproduces a distinction between a focus on intimate moral lives, examined through ethnography, and broader economic, political and historical conditions. Instead, she argues, these forces ‘take shape in and through people’s ethical actions, not above or outside them’ (2019,  179), and so can equally be studied ethnographically (see also ­Samanani 2022). Bringing anthropological debates on morality and ethics into dialogue with the anthropology of childhood and youth, Anne-Meike Fechter has highlighted the ways morality was implicit in early work by anthropologists, for example in the focus on child-rearing. As she writes, ‘Generally, questions about what is considered a good child, and the best way to raise such a child, underlie many of these works’ (2014, 149). As Fechter further argues, the conceptual resources of the anthropology of morality and ethics can train our attention to the ways in which the ethical becomes manifest in the banal and unspectacular sites of growing up and micro-contestations between peers, thus complementing the more recent centralization of children and young people themselves and the recognition that socialization, including moral learning, is an active process of meaning-making and creating anew (2014, 148; Stafford 2013). As I will draw on particularly in this monograph, Michael Lambek’s conception of ‘ordinary ethics’ offers useful tools for understanding the mundane and efficacious ways ethics emerges in young people’s interactions and relations within school. Elaborating an ‘ethics of action’, Lambek focuses on the ethical as an intrinsic dimension of speech and action. In this understanding ‘ethics entails judgement (evaluation) with respect to situations, actions, and, cumulatively, actors, persons or character’ (2010b, 42), according to a range of criteria. In everyday practice, he argues, we are constantly exercising judgement in relation to ourselves, others, situations and actions. We use criteria to make these judgements: for example, how to conduct ourselves, whether to commit a certain act, for what reason and in what way. Criteria are also the grounds for deciding what constitutes a kind of act, for deciding if acts have been committed correctly or legitimately, and for evaluating our own and others’ actions. At the same time, while criteria shape the way we act, they do not determine it. Criteria are often implicit, part of the judgement itself, but they can also be consciously considered and debated. Some criteria are continuous or enduring, but, at other times, new criteria are brought into effect or applied to different people or contexts.

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Lambek argues that performative acts can recalibrate criteria and ‘shift the ethical context’ (2010b, 56). Mundane acts, such as promising, are performative, because they commit the speaker to a particular course of action and change the criteria by which they will subsequently be judged. Thus promising, forgiving or taking responsibility are illuminated as efficacious acts through which everyday life is made possible. Performative acts can have enduring effects, and so there is a whole ethics to history and social change. As we will see, recalibration of ethical criteria happens within school as pupils grow up. In a later article focusing specifically on personhood (2013), Lambek highlights how these ethical processes are intrinsic to how humans are made into persons. As Lambek argues, ‘persons are human beings under a set of descriptions, criteria, and commitments put into place by means of successive performative acts’ (2013, 845).16 It is here that Lambek proposes the forensic and mimetic as fruitful distinctions through which to understand personhood and its ethical dimensions. The forensic emphasizes continuity and being held accountable for past actions and future commitments, while the mimetic emphasizes discontinuity and the performative possibilities of initiating new criteria, committing to new courses of action, and drawing from others in these processes. Without wishing to reify life-stage and youth, as I observed in school, ethical interactions between peers were hugely important for things being ‘worked out’ and made explicit. Young people in school were actively constituting a primarily adult-free space, and here they could shape and examine social definitions, define and police moral actions, and tenaciously shape each other into appropriate people. They were trying to do what they considered to be good and right, judging the speech and action of others according to ethical criteria, and willing to act upon these judgements, for example by punishing those who were judged as having ‘done wrong’. Ethical discussion, judgement and commentary were pervasive in school and, as we will see, broader forces of inequality and power ‘take shape in and through’ the young people’s ethical actions, ‘not above or outside them’ (Appel 2019, 179). Furthermore, these ethics were an important part of the relational production of individual personhood observable in the context of school. As we will see throughout this book, the fact that so many actions, practices and facets of the self may be judged in ethical terms – as good and bad, right and wrong – is part of what gives these judgements such force, helping us to recognize the imperatives by which young people are making themselves and each other into appropriate and acceptable people. Furthermore, the young people positioned between childhood and adulthood, were encountering, experiencing and seeking to understand novel things, including the growing centrality of sexuality and the

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­ etermination of what would constitute a ‘good life’ in the future. As Hand nah Arendt (2019 [1958]) wrote, to act is to bring something new into the world, but the consequences of this action can only be known after we have acted. We have no choice but to shoulder the burdens of the consequentiality, irreversibility and unpredictability of action. Arguably for young people, this unpredictability is particularly intense. In growing up, students were collectively practising new kinds of action and basing their judgements on new kinds of criteria, those associated increasingly with adulthood rather than childhood. In Chapters 3 to 7, I focus on the actions and interactions of Year Eleven students as they shape themselves and each other into particular kinds of people; prior to this, in the next chapter I situate my research within the specific place and time in which it was conducted.

Notes   1. It should be noted this continuous, forensic person was not the only one who was imagined during this period. The enlightenment writer, David Hume, argued for a radical empiricism, and that ‘the idea of a continuous self was fantastic. There was nothing beneath the ideas to connect them’ (Murray 1993, 12). This vision of a contingent self was then explicitly argued against by Kant positing the transcendental subject (Taylor 1992; Murray 1993).   2. As Johnson writes: ‘Contracts … require at least these three virtues: authenticity, the assurance that contracts in fact express the actual wills of contracting partners; identity, the assurance that contracts made today will still abide in the future; and the authority, an agreement as to the common power compelling and ensuring the contract’s fulfilment’ (2014, 405).  3. As with human rights discourses more generally, these rights are grounded in ­notions of individual autonomy (McLaughlin 2020).  4. Strathern’s Gender of the Gift has been described as a ‘thought-experiment’ suspending the structuring logic of the individual-society in order to create space to examine other images of persons and connections (Gell 1999; Schram 2015).   5. This is helpfully visualized ‘by imagining an individual located at the intersection between several overlapping circles or spheres of a three-dimensional Venn diagram’ (Green 2017, 199).   6. In sociology, related theoretical pathways have been illuminated, for example Patricia Hill Collin’s work on Black feminist standpoint theory (e.g. 2002).   7. Throughout I use students’ own identifications, e.g. ‘white’, ‘black’, ‘black, Nigeria’, ‘white, Italy’, ‘Asian, Pakistan’, ‘Iran’, ‘black, mixed, Kenya’. From ‘England/Britain/ UK’ were rarely used, as this was generally taken-for-granted as shared. Students sometimes said they were ‘not from anywhere’ if they did not identify as being ‘from’ another global location.   8. As Don Kalb writes, class ‘does not refer to this group or that, to this position or that, to this factor or that. Rather, it encapsulates a political and intellectual effort to point to the problematic of shifting, interconnected, and antagonistic

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social inequalities, a problematic that continuously calls for vernacular as well as ­scientific discovery, identification, contestation and critique’ (2015, 14). Furthermore, it enables a ‘recognition of the unequal distribution of resources (economic and symbolic) and the accompanying processes “of exploitation, dispossession, and immiseration that produces the very rich as the privileged class that lives off the rest of us”’ (Dean 2012, 74, in Tyler 2015).   9. As Elana D. Buch argues, ‘theories of personhood and subjectivity must account not only for change across the life course, but also for how social, material, and bodily resources intersect with these complex processes. Theories of personhood must thus consider which kinds of persons are able to successfully pursue valued social roles at different stages of the life course and how the possibilities for personhood vary depending on the kinds of resources people have access to’ (Buch 2015, 54). 10. As Lambek notes, similar analytical strands have been utilized in related disciplines. For example, the work of George Herbert Mead has been utilized in sociological arenas, as a way to capture people’s experiences of a unified self, without necessitating recourse to an essential core self (S. Jackson 2010; Lawler 2015). The American pragmatists who were explicitly concerned with practical engagement in the world conceptualized the fundamentally social nature of selfhood, in contrast to ‘the Enlightenment conception of a transcendent self standing outside the social’ (Holstein and Gubrium, in S. Jackson 2010, 124). George Herbert Mead (1934) theorized the self as a process, with two dynamic aspects, the ‘me’ who engages in the world and relations, and the reflexive ‘I’, both of which are embedded in social relations and activity. The relationship between these two aspects is understood not as a spatial one, ‘but a temporal and reflexive self-relationship of an agent who chases her own shadow’ (Crossly 2001, 147, in S. Jackson 2010, 128). As Stevi Jackson argues, Mead’s conceptualization offers a corrective to the overemphasis on the ‘decentred, fluid or fractured’ (S. Jackson 2010, 126) post-structuralist, postmodern or psychoanalytic subjectivity, while not necessitating a notion of a ‘core self ’. However, as she further writes, Mead’s ideas have often been misrepresented, as a social ‘me’ and a ‘I’ as individual, pre-social and real part of the self, thus fitting it into conventional understandings of the person as containing a true, essential and unchanging part (S. Jackson 2010; Lawler 2015). 11. Notions of the life-course have been used by scholars to move beyond the life cycle premised on a sequence of orderly life stages that people universally go through as they age (Johnson-Hanks 2002; Hunt 2016; Degnen 2018). Whereas previous work in anthropology and beyond has conceptualized the life cycle as a straightforward process, with a focus on rites of passage, ethnographic research on the life-course has highlighted that movement through life is often complex, contingent and multi-faceted (Johnson-Hanks 2002). Life stages do not have inherent meaning but are socially and politically constructed and change over time, and for many people expected routes are no longer as predictable or achievable as they may have once been (Hunt 2016; Durham and Solway 2017). 12. As Jack Martin writes, ‘The trinity of individualism, internalism, and reductionism that has ruled psychological science has privileged the individual (or more properly, interior parts of the individual) ontologically, epistemologically, and methodologically’ (Martin 2012, 132). Thus, while psychology takes people as its subject matter, it usually does so through a focus on behaviour, cognition, biology and/or

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emotion, and as such inquiries into ‘supposed parts of persons (reflexes, behaviors, thoughts, and neurophysiological processes) rather than persons themselves’ (Martin and Bickhard 2012, 86). 13. Stemming from Black and woman of colour feminist thinking and activism, intersectionality has become one of the key feminist analytical frameworks across disciplines of the last few decades (Nash 2008; May 2015). As May writes, [I]ntersectionality is interdisciplinary in orientation and draws on multiple sites of knowing, from the micropolitical scale of lived experience and personal reflection to the macropolitical scale of structural, political, philosophical, and representational inequities’ (2015, 9–10). 14. As Mattingly writes, post-structuralism is essentially a third-person explanatory framework; as such it still basically focuses on the outside. Post-structuralism ‘tells us a lot about school, so to speak, but much less about the vagaries – indeed the tragedies – of human action and experience’ (Mattingly 2012, 179). 15. Prior to this, as James Laidlaw has argued, morality in anthropology was ‘everywhere and nowhere’, pervasive in anthropological studies of kinship relations, religion, ritual, etc. but without a ‘sustained field of enquiry and debate’ (Laidlaw 2002, 312). 16. A complementary perspective on the ubiquity of ethics is delineated by psychologists of personhood, as part of their critique of the mainstream of the discipline. Stetsenko writes, ‘Within the unity of my “once-occurring answerable life” composed of an uninterrupted flow of responsive and responsible deeds that cannot be undone and that leave traces in the world, the ethical (“the ought”) is turned into a central, ubiquitous dimension that underpins and penetrates all other aspects of Being and Becoming, and thus represents a form-creating quality and an anchoring constituent of the whole edifice of human life’ (2012, 152).

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Durham, Deborah and Jacqueline Solway. 2017. Elusive Adulthoods: The Anthropology of New Maturities. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Edwards, Jeanette, Gillian Evans and Katherine Smith. 2012. ‘Introduction: The Middle Class-Ification of Britain’, Focaal (62): 3–16. https://doi.org/10.3167/ fcl.2012.620101. Evans, Gillian. 2006. Educational Failure and Working Class White Children in Britain. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Fechter, Anne-Meike. 2014. ‘“The Good Child”: Anthropological Perspectives on Morality and Childhood’, Journal of Moral Education 43(2): 143–55. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/03057240.2014.909350. Fedirko, Taras, Farhan Samanani and Hugh F. Williamson. 2021. ‘Grammars of Liberalism’, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 29(2): 373–86. https://doi. org/10.1111/​1469-8676.13061. Froerer, Peggy. 2009. ‘Ethnographies of Childhood and Childrearing’, Reviews in Anthropology 38(1): 3–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/00938150802672923. Froyum, Carissa M. 2010. ‘Making “Good Girls”: Sexual Agency in the Sexuality Education of Low-Income Black Girls’, Culture, Health & Sexuality 12(1): 59–72. https:// doi.org/10.1080/13691050903272583. Gell, Alfred. 1999. ‘Strathernograms, or the Semiotics of Mixed Metaphors’, in Eric Hirsch (ed.), The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams. London: Athlone, pp. 29–75. Gillborn, David. 2015. ‘Intersectionality, Critical Race Theory, and the Primacy of Racism: Race, Class, Gender, and Disability in Education’, Qualitative Inquiry 21(3): 277–87. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800414557827. Gottlieb, Alma. 2004. The Afterlife Is Where We Come From. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Green, Sarah. 2017. ‘Thinking through Proliferations of Geometries, Fractions and Parts’, in Ashley Lebner (ed.), Redescribing Relations: Strathernian Conversations on Ethnography, Knowledge and Politics. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 197–207. Harrison, Faye Venetia. 2008. Outsider Within: Reworking Anthropology in the Global Age. ­Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Harrison, Simon. 2006. Fracturing Resemblances: Identity and Mimetic Conflict in Melanesia and the West. New York: Berghahn Books. Hartman, Saidiya V. 1997. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in ­Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hey, V. 1997. The Company She Keeps: An Ethnography of Girls’ Friendships. Buckingham, UK, and Philadelphia: Open University Press. Hollingworth, Sumi and Ayo Mansaray. 2012. ‘Conviviality under the Cosmopolitan Canopy? Social Mixing and Friendships in an Urban Secondary School’, Sociological Research Online 17(3): 195–206. https://doi.org/10.5153/sro.2561. Hunt, Stephen J. 2016. The Life Course: A Sociological Introduction. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Ingold, Tim. 2017. Anthropology and/as Education. London: Routledge. https://doi. org/10.4324/9781315227191. Jackson, Stevi. 2010. ‘Self, Time and Narrative: Re-Thinking the Contribution of G. H. Mead’, Life Writing 7(2): 123–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/14484520903445255.

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Jackson, Susan M. and Fiona Cram. 2003. ‘Disrupting the Sexual Double Standard: Young Women’s Talk about Heterosexuality’, British Journal of Social Psychology 42(1): 113–27. https://doi.org/10.1348/014466603763276153. Johnson, Paul Christopher. 2014. ‘Towards an Atlantic Genealogy of “Spirit Possession”’, in Spirited Things: The Work of ‘Possession’ in Afro-Atlantic Religions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 23–46. Johnson-Hanks, Jennifer. 2002. ‘On the Limits of Life Stages in Ethnography: Toward a Theory of Vital Conjunctures’, American Anthropologist 104(3): 865–80. https:// doi.org/10.1525/aa.2002.104.3.865. Joseph-Salisbury, Remi and Laura Connelly. 2018. ‘“If Your Hair Is Relaxed, White People Are Relaxed. If Your Hair Is Nappy, They’re Not Happy”: Black Hair as a Site of “Post-Racial” Social Control in English Schools’, Social Sciences 7(11): 219. https:// doi.org/10.3390/socsci7110219. Kalb, Don. 2015. ‘Anthropologies of Class: Power, Practice and Inequality’, in James G. ­Carrier and Don Kalb (eds), Introduction: Class and the New Anthropological Holism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–27. Keane, Webb. 2002. ‘Sincerity, “Modernity”, and the Protestants’, Cultural Anthropology 17(1): 65–92. Kipnis, Andrew B. 2011. ‘Subjectification and Education for Quality in China’, Economy and Society 40(2): 289–306. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2011.548950. Kulz, Christy. 2014. ‘“Structure Liberates?”: Mixing for Mobility and the Cultural Transformation of “Urban Children” in a London Academy’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 37(4): 685–701. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2013.808760. Kusserow, Adrie Suzanne. 1999. ‘Crossing the Great Divide: Anthropological Theories of the Western Self ’, Journal of Anthropological Research 55(4): 541–62. Kustatscher, Marlies. 2017. ‘The Emotional Geographies of Belonging: Children’s Intersectional Identities in Primary School’, Children’s Geographies 15(1): 65–79. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2016.1252829. Laidlaw, James. 2002. ‘For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8(2): 311–32. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.00110. ———. 2013. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lambek, Michael (ed.). 2010a. Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action. New York: Fordham University Press. ———. 2010b. ‘Toward an Ethics of the Act’, in Michael Lambek (ed.), Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action. New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 39–63. ———. 2013. ‘The Continuous and Discontinuous Person: Two Dimensions of Ethical Life’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19(4): 837–58. https://doi. org/10.1111/​1467-9655.12073. ———. 2015. ‘What’s Love Got to Do with It?’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5(1): 395–404. https://doi.org/10.14318/hau5.1.018. Lancy, David F. 2014. The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lawler, Stephanie. 2015. Identity: Sociological Perspectives (2nd Edition). Oxford: Polity Press.

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Following from the previous chapter, in this chapter I take an increas-

ingly narrow focus, introducing first the history and present of London as a global city, before providing an introduction of the neighbourhood and school. Here I also discuss my fieldwork process: gaining access to Collingson School, finding my place among Year Elevens, and reflecting on some of the ethical issues raised by studying young people’s lives in school. Finally, I discuss the changes that have taken place since this ethnography – a snapshot of a particular time and place – was undertaken in 2007–2008. I do this as I do not wish to imply in the subsequent discussions that young people’s experiences and understandings are unfixed and unchanging. Thus, I highlight a number of important changes that have happened since I undertook the fieldwork which are likely to have shaped young people’s lived experiences in a number of ways. At the same time, I argue that we can continue to identify continuity in the recognizable aspects of friendships, peer relations and hierarchies that are so important for becoming a particular kind of person.

London From its very beginnings London was shaped by the international flows of people and things that have converged on this great metropolis. It is where the cultures of the world have accumulated, sedimented and combined in one place. Once an imperial centre, London is now a key junction or crossroads within the circuits of global neoliberal capitalism. (Back and Sinha 2016, 517)

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In her influential work, Saskia Sassen identified London as a ‘global city’, alongside New York, Tokyo, Frankfurt and Paris (2001). As Sassen argued, these cities represent concentrated points of control in the global economy and are also characterized by a disconnection between the city and the region and nation in which they are located. As demonstrated, these transformations had huge material and spatial effects, including high-income gentrification coupled with sharp increases in spatially concentrated poverty, and polarization of employment and wages. This status as a global city is a transformation deeply shaped and underpinned by London’s history as an imperial heartland (Eade 2000; Danewid 2020). As Jane Jacobs argues (2002), the spatial imaginary of imperialism, based on the forceful flow of power between the ‘core’ and ‘periphery’, was another manifestation and building block of colonialism that constructed and legitimized violence and inequality – which also includes the distinction between individuals and others as described in the previous chapter. As scholars have traced, racializing processes were intimately intwined with the movement of people into this imperial centre, fuelled by a ‘voracious appetite for labour and resources outside the nation’. This appetite was coupled with, and sustained by, ‘the enduring sentiment of nativism’ (Hall 2017, 1563) through which European-descended racialized groups were transformed into a new constituency of white citizens, with British nationality defined to exclude the racialized other (Eade 2000; Virdee 2019). More recently, flows of migration from an increasingly diverse range of places are intertwined with active and punitive ­border-making and new racist hierarchies (Back and Sinha 2016; Hall 2017; de Noronha 2019). These histories, legacies and contemporary processes are both sedimented and continually reshaping of the life of London, in terms of broader patterns of polarization and inequality (Eade 2000; Danewid 2020), as well as the intimate ways people live alongside each other and make meaning from the materials of the city. A rich body of ethnographic work has explored the everyday experience of living in this ‘dynamic cityscape’ (Back and Sinha 2016). Influential studies from the 1990s captured young people’s everyday lives in London neighbourhoods, the simultaneously local and trans-local nature of identity formation, racisms and ‘new ethnicities’ (Alexander 1996; Back 1996; Baumann 1996). Building from this scholarship, research has focused on a range of mundane sites of urban life, including high streets, housing estates, community centres and bowling alleys, across London (Wessendorf 2013; Valluvan 2016; James 2017; Samanani 2017; Jackson 2019). As part of this, scholars have explored the ‘conviviality’ of London life,1 understood as a set of tools, habits, routines, rhythms and practices ‘through which people from disparate biographies

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can live together in a city riven by social divisions and damage’ (Back and Sinha 2016, 521). Thus, ethnographies of London demonstrate a fabric of daily life which has been given shape by long histories of colonialism, capitalism, migration and movement, as well as contemporary policies, techniques of regulation and sources of funding (James 2015). It is a fabric that is always in the process of being made and made sense of anew. Recognition of this has enabled scholars to conceptualize the local urban experience, not as separate and bounded, but as the locus of connections, relations, biographies and loyalties that exceed urban and national boundaries and span the globe (James 2015). As part of this fabric of everyday urban life, schools have been studied as important sites of urban meeting, interwoven with both conviviality and racism, and, as I will discuss in more detail below, significantly shaped by education policy and parental choice which reproduce exclusion and privilege (Hollingworth and Archer 2010; Hollingworth and Mansaray 2012; Wise and Noble 2016).

Collingson: School and Neighbourhood Collingson School, situated in the neighbourhood of Collingson, located somewhere between the outer suburbs and inner city, was one such urban meeting place. Students travelled in from the surrounding areas from a number of different neighbourhoods. As is typical of the spatial organization of London, within the catchment area of Collingson School, those living in the area could be characterized by a wide-variety of cross-cutting and intersecting differences, including housing, income, employment, ethnicity, race, religion, language and place of birth. At the time of my research, Collingson was a mixed-gender comprehensive, considered large with around 1300 students and heavily over-­ subscribed – meaning there were not enough places for students wishing to attend. The school was considered academically improving, positioned in the middle of the league table for the borough, a table which included fee-paying and selective schools. As it was oversubscribed, intake was based on an entry exam which allocated students to three bands: 25 per cent of the Year Seven intake were admitted from the top band, 50 per cent from the middle band and 25 per cent from the bottom band. As one teacher said, ‘There’s lots of selective schools in the area that cream off the brightest students, so they try to balance it to avoid becoming a “sink school”.’ About 20 per cent of students were in receipt of free school meals – a statistic described as a ‘rough proxy for poverty’ by Gillborn and Youdell (2000, 10). As I will explore in more detail in Chapter 6, students u ­ nderstood

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themselves in relation to a diverse array of global ‘roots and routes’ (Gilroy 1993), and in these racialized and ethnized classifications and identifications of sameness and difference, some people were [black, white, Asian, mixed race], some were from [a location in the world] and some were both. Over half of students in the school spoke another or different language at home than English. There were notably fewer white students attending the school than lived in the surrounding catchment area. Since 1988, parents in England have had a choice in the school their children attend (Benson, Bridge and Wilson 2015). Scholars have demonstrated how the possibility of choice helps to reinscribe classed and racialized privilege and have highlighted that these dynamics are particularly pronounced in London due to the spatial proximity of different kinds of housing (and different kinds of people who can afford this housing); its racial, ethnic and national diversity; the broad spectrum of school attainment statistics (from well below the national average, to well above it); and the wider range of selective schools than other parts of the country (Hollingworth and Archer 2010). As these studies show, white middle-class parents often send their children to high achieving selective schools or fee-paying schools where the student population is likely to be more white and middle class; London has a significantly higher proportion of children attending fee-paying schools than the national average (Butler et al. 2007). For example, Benson et al. (2015) highlight the parental focus on good attainment rates and the ‘right’ social mix, a euphemistic way to speak about desirable schools containing a significant proportion of white, middle-class children like their own.2 When I conducted my fieldwork, New Labour had been in power for eight years. A key focus of the government was social mobility, to overcome increasing inequalities, and education was centralized as the key means by which this could be achieved, with an emphasis on equality of opportunity (Bradford and Hey 2007; Kulz 2014; Warmington et al. 2018). As Christy Kulz argues, this focus on ‘aspiration-building’ represented the ‘imposition of class values, attitudes and behaviours as universal norms implicitly rest on culturalist racisms and class-based pathologies that ignore how hierarchical societies require losers (Gewirtz 2001)’ (2014, 687). This emphasis on ‘aspiration-building’ built on a longer-term pressure on schools, since the 1980s, to be ever-improving, and particularly the ‘A – C economy’3 of league tables, that powered a number of changes in daily life in school, including a return to pre-1970s streaming according to academic ‘ability’ (Gillborn and Youdell 2000). A few years prior to my research, Collingson School had been placed on  ‘special measures’, a designation of ‘failed standards’ by Ofsted, the national inspectorate body. Shortly after this, a new head teacher was

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a­ ppointed and subsequently the school was judged to be ‘rapidly improving’. The school  was performing increasingly well – in terms of league tables – with the percentage of students achieving the key benchmark standard (5 GCSE qualifications, grades A*–C), rising year on year. Collingson School was thus considered a success story, combining league table success with ‘equality of opportunity’ (Bradford and Hey 2007; Kulz 2014). Year Elevens were a particular focus of the ‘A – C economy’, as their success in their GCSES, national exams taken at the end of Year Eleven, was a key way the school would be judged. Results had important consequences, for example in relation to the school’s position in the league table. A number of strategies were put in place to help the students achieve at least five A* – C GCSEs, including a ‘traffic light’ register for each Year Eleven form group, which marked students as safely able to achieve this, at risk of achieving this, or not expected to achieve this. This ‘educational triage’ (Gillborn and Youdell 2000) entailed interventions particularly targeted at those labelled ‘amber’, so-called ‘key marginals’, because their results would have the most impact on the school’s league table results. As I have written about previously (Winkler-Reid 2017), the organization and ideologies of this kind of schooling produced students as individuals in particular ways. The focus on student attainment and performance indicators highlighted the way students were considered as commensurate individual units – quantified, calculated and made equivalent – enabling hierarchical comparison at a local, as well as regional and national level. While these aspects of school life encouraged a focus on comparison and hierarchy, at other points students were encouraged to ‘just do their best’ and ‘not compare themselves to others’, foregrounding the incommensurate dimensions of selves. This monograph focuses on young people’s peer relations, and the times and spaces of school outside of its formal institutional demands. As I will show, students pushed up against the institutional structure and utilized the gaps and spaces in the school day to develop their relationships and social hierarchy, which existed in an uneasy relationship with other adult-imposed hierarchies. Teachers do not feature much in this account, nor do parents, or other adults. In the following sections, I discuss further the methodological and analytical processes and decisions that led to this focus.

Focus, Access and Finding a Place among Year Eleven A focus on the peer relations and hierarchies of Year Eleven was not my plan from the outset but emerged through the fieldwork process. As I chart

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in the following sections, this was both in relation to external restrictions placed on my research and through coming to understand the organizational logic of Collingson School. Gaining access to a school was difficult. At first, I wrote to schools in a commutable distance from where I was living in London and followed up with phone calls. When I had little success with this strategy, I started to take my letter into schools in person, and again followed these visits up with phone calls. In trying to gain access, I learnt that access to school may be guarded by a number of different gatekeepers, and although some gatekeepers may possess objectively less power in terms of the hierarchy of the institution, they can be equally effective in blocking requests for entry. For example, after an initially promising inquiry, where the receptionist told me when I dropped a letter in that research had been permitted in the school before, I followed up and was put through to the head teacher’s ‘PA’ (personal assistant). The PA told me ‘no, we don’t let people do research here.’ I told her what the receptionist had told me, but she replied brusquely ‘well that person doesn’t know what she is talking about.’ Despite the divergent information I had received, I had no further recourse; the PA was the gatekeeper to the gatekeeper, and I had no way to contact them outside her approval. I made a follow-up call to one school and was put through to a temp filling in for the head teacher’s PA. Unsure what the normal protocol was, she booked me an appointment in the head’s diary for the following week. The meeting with the head was positive and he said he was happy to grant me access. The head referred me to the head of sixth form (the last two years of secondary education – Years Twelve and Thirteen), who would be the person I would be reporting to, and I arranged a meeting to finalize access. However, during this meeting it became clear that she was not happy about me conducting research there and told me the head had been ‘unfair’, to her and me, by giving by an open invitation to research. Sometime later, I learnt that the head teacher had only been in post for a short time and was unpopular with teachers, pupils and parents, due to significant structural changes he had made. While the teachers could not control the larger decisions he was making, I perhaps represented something they could make a stand against. I had thought that because I had been granted access from the top-level gatekeeper my access was secured, but institutional dynamics are complex and multiple gatekeepers can be effective in restricting access. Finally, at the point when I was despairing of ever gaining access to a school, a friend who was working as a teacher at Collingson offered to talk to the head teacher and other relevant staff members for me, to introduce my research and set up a meeting. Her help was instrumental in facilitating my access into the school; she was a trusted colleague, well-established in the school and willing to vouch for me, so I was no longer an unknown

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quantity. Further, as an insider, she could direct me towards the teachers who would be most open to my research. My meeting with Mr Foster, the head of Year Ten (who was the head of Year Eleven when I was following them), was a sharp contrast to my experience at the previous school. Mr Foster was enthusiastic about my project and supportive of my access to the school. The only limit he placed on my research was that it did not extend beyond the school. He explained that within school, the teachers had responsibility for both me and the students, but away from school they could not supervise but might still be held responsible because they had given me initial permission to research Collingson pupils. The contrast between trying to gain access to schools and my experience once I had access was striking. Whereas I found it difficult to find a way into school (or even to know who best to contact) and encountered multiple gatekeepers, once I had access (and an identity card) I had the freedom and flexibility to direct my research as I wished within school. This contrast was instructive, highlighting the space of school as constituted by rigid external boundaries and requiring ratified participation. Once I was a ratified adult participant, however, school represented a series of interconnected spaces with movement between them being fairly easy and straightforward. I started my fieldwork by observing many different classes across different year groups; this was valuable in providing me with a broad understanding of school life and enabling me to observe the notable differences between year groups. However, I found it hard to find opportunities to talk to students, who were used to having strange adults observing their lessons (usually trainee teachers). When I did have a conversation with a student, once the lesson ended, the squash and tussle of students moving from one lesson to the next made it hard to continue or follow up. One day, I observed two classes in a row from the same year group and found myself easily involved in the conversations as we moved from one classroom to the next and waited outside for the following lesson to begin. I realized that to understand school I needed to mirror the way it was organized: to immerse myself in one year group and to follow a timetable in the way students did. Mr Foster, supportive of the revised direction of my research, gave me a timetable to follow, and it was this that enabled my access into the year group. Sitting in lessons, I soon got to know individual students and could ask if it was okay to join them in their adult-free spaces. By spending time in different friendship group territories, I also got to know other students who I was not in lessons with. In this way, I gradually developed a web of connections in the year group, getting to know different friendship groups

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in the process. This was very similar to the way students themselves made friends with each other. The downside of this approach was that in building relations through intergroup networks, I did not spend time with the more marginalized friendship groups in the year. When I came to write up the fieldwork, I realized some of these friendship groups (particularly the ‘Blonde Barbies’ and the ‘Indian group’) were important to the way other friendship groups were able to position themselves as acceptable and belonging to the year group, despite their differences, and yet I did not have their perspectives. The difference between ‘young person’ and ‘adult’ was generally clear cut in school, and the separation of space this entailed was respected. Teachers rarely engaged with students in their adult-free spaces, beyond saying hello as they passed, unless there was a significant disruption (for example a fight). Despite this, my presence in these adult-free spaces was rarely cause of much note; as I was a young looking twenty-five/-six year-old, passing teachers often assumed I was a sixth form student (sixth formers did not wear uniforms), and students welcomed me in. At first, however, I still found fitting in as neither a teacher nor student difficult. My adult skin felt perilously thin, my shy fifteen-year-old self a constant, critical companion. Although I knew intellectually that I could never fit in at Collingson in the same way as I had in my own school, I still could not shake the feeling that I was a social failure, spending time on my own without the security of a group of friends who waited for me after class or accompanied me through every part of the school day. With time, I did come to fit in in my own way; as my relationships with students grew, I felt more ‘myself’. I could join in with running jokes or add to discussions about events at school. Girls would ask me to wait with them at the end of class or walked with me to the next lesson. I was reminded of the joys of school, always having someone to chat to or laugh with, the guaranteed company every day. It was in this way that I became familiar with the social organization of the year, not only the friendship groups and their connections in their present form, but also the histories of who used to be friends with who and significant events in friendship groups and year groups pasts. My position between and among different friendship groups enabled me to hear the different versions of stories and interpretations of events. For example, I heard several retellings of episodes of bullying, but as I heard these stories over time – and from different sources – no claim of bullying was accepted by everyone but was interpreted in different ways and as true or untrue ­depending on the speaker and their position in relation to the events. By the end of my time with Year Elevens I had become a knowledgeable member of the community and was gratified when someone would say to me ‘did you know that so and so and so and so used to go out’ and I could

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a­ nswer yes, or someone reported a recent piece of ‘hot’ gossip to me which I had already heard. On reflection, my emotional trajectory was similar to that of any new student and offered me an insight into the miserable isolation of being ‘the odd one out’ and the pleasures and rewards of fitting in. Likewise, while my body-self and interactions (words, facial expressions, disclosures and jokes) felt woefully insufficient for conducting research, these were also the only resources students had at their disposal and with which they created so much. In Chapter 4, which focuses on girls’ friendships, I further explore my own relationship with this fieldwork, by submitting my own experiences of friendship at school to the same analytical lens that I focus on students in Collingson School.

School and Informal Realm as the Unit of Analysis The conditions of my access, limiting me to school, defined the boundaries of my research and I was so grateful for access that I did not question or challenge it. The school as field-site can be thus understood as an ‘arbitrary location’, whose boundaries were delimited by concerns unrelated to the aims of the research (Candea 2007). At the same time, this delimitation has enabled research insights. Students at Collingson School lived within a large radius of the school and often had no community ties to each other apart from the school. Collingson was thus a specific meeting place, and focusing just on school enabled me to take this social space as the primary location of analysis. Even if restricted to school grounds, there were many sites I could have focused on or threads I could have followed. Although I entered school with a particular idea of what I wanted to research (disordered eating and body image among girls), once I gained entry into school, I was led by the students’ conversations and preoccupations. This led me to a focus on friendships, peer relations and the status and hierarchy of the informal realm. While keeping the research within the boundaries of school was imposed by the conditions of my access, the focus on the informal realm as the locus of my analysis reflects its importance in the school life of the students. This is not a claim that other parts of their lives or social worlds that happen outside this are unimportant. While peer-centred processes are the focus of this book, they are of course part of the broader fabric of young people’s lives, formal demands of schooling, family and home life, and communities, that may be in alignment or tension with ways of becoming a particular kind of individual. However, the informal realm at school was meaningful in its own right.

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The informal realm thus represents a particular scale, a focus on which truncates some aspects of exploration (for example home life and its impact on student experience) and centralizes others (peer relations, actions, interactions and evaluations). Within this scale, some events, experiences and relationships became material through which understandings and relations were produced, and some did not. For example, three students I got to know well were dealing with recent close family bereavement or serious family illness. These did not however become explicit in the informal realm in the same way as other ‘private’ experiences which occurred outside school, such as sexual acts (as discussed in ­Chapter 6). It seems that certain personal experiences, particularly concerning family, remained submerged in the workings of the realm. Furthermore, throughout these tragic family events, the students continued to invest and engage in the informal realm – despite what they were dealing with at home, they did not withdraw from the preoccupations of this realm. More generally, parents were rarely mentioned, and when I asked questions about them at the start of my fieldwork, I got short, perfunctory answers in contrast to the elaboration I received in answers about the informal realm. As I will describe in this book, when I began my research, Year Eleven had been together for four years and after this final year together would soon go their separate ways, with many students leaving to go to different schools or colleges, two years after which they would leave these institutions completely. While Collingson School still exists, this monograph is an account of somewhere or something (this particular Year Eleven informal realm) that no longer does. The last day of school was also the last time I saw almost all the students. It was my own lack of confidence and uncertainty about my post-PhD future that meant I did not follow up over the intervening years. As I will explore in this book, within the expectations of friendship at school, to stop the actions of friendship is to stop being friends. These kinds of endings were expected for young people and, unlike many sites of adult life where you can return to a place and expect to find the same people there, this was not the same for students at school. However, this means the research captures a snapshot of a particular time and place rather than extending beyond into the young people’s futures.

Ethical Reflections Researchers have argued against the presumption that children and young people are inherently vulnerable in research processes and emphasized ­instead that, as capable actors and experts in their own lives, they should

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be treated as active participants in social research (James 2007; Meloni, Vanthuyne and Rousseau 2015; McLaughlin 2020). While these arguments have often centred around the importance of recognizing children and young people’s agency and voice, scholars have also highlighted that this can result in debates that focus on the individual child within whom agency is located and thus risk ‘endorsing the myth of the autonomous and independent person’ (Prout 2004, 66, in McLaughlin 2020, 209). For example, institutional ethics processes often position the ability to consent as a property of the individual child. This has been highlighted in critiques of formal ethics processes more generally, whose starting premise is the autonomous individual (Dove et al. 2017) and thus constitute key locations where ­‘individuality-thinking’ is reproduced. Avoiding a focus on the autonomous individual in ethical considerations, scholars have instead advocated for relational approaches to ethics that de-centre individual autonomy and recognize relationships and contexts of interdependence which shape voices and enable action and participation in research (Meloni, Vanthuyne and Rousseau 2015; McLaughlin 2020). As Meloni et al. argue (2015), this relational approach also means not establishing ‘child’ and ‘adult’ as two opposed, taken-for-granted categories within which power is understood as fixed, but rather recognizing power ‘in the mutual representations of the subjects, the intricacies of the research process, and the negotiation of roles and identities’ (2015, 119). Age is not the only aspect of identity that shapes how young people will perceive the researcher, and furthermore, the activities of fieldwork, for example hanging out in different, usually ‘adult-free’ spaces, often means the researcher is perceived as a ‘different kind of adult’ (Kehily 2004; Meloni, Vanthuyne and Rousseau 2015; Herron 2019). At the same time, a more complex understanding of power in research relationships does not negate the importance of recognizing the power researchers have. As Kimberley Huisman (2008) reflects in her own fieldwork experiences, the institutional division between her as researcher and her participants, and the acknowledgement that she was benefitting more from these relationships than they were, was often in the background during the fieldwork process. However, it abruptly returned to focus as she finished her fieldwork, returned to university, and became immersed in the intense process of writing up that followed. Importantly, Huisman highlights the different planes researchers and participants are operating on, including once the fieldwork is over and the researcher then analyses and writes up their research while participants continue with their lives. As Melinda Herron (2019) also highlights, fieldwork in schools entails particular ethical challenges of navigating relational dynamics with young people within the expectations of the school ­institution and different adult actors involved.

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During my fieldwork, students had different reactions to me – some ignored me and treated me with indifference while others actively included me in conversations, explaining things for my benefit. At times students used me in place of friends to wait for them when they had to stay to talk to a teacher (so they didn’t have to walk alone) or to sit next to in class. I could also be a source of information; I was often asked questions about my own school experiences or about what university involved. Gender also shaped these interactions: my entry into all friendship groups was initially through girls, and my relationships with students tended to reflect gendered relationship conventions. For example, I often talked to girls one-to-one or in small groups, but my conversations with boys tended to be in the context of larger groups, or in interactions in class (as I discuss in the following chapter, ‘class friendships’ were less gendered divided then friendship groups). As Peter Hart (2016) argues in relation to youth work, the literature on ‘professional boundaries’ starts from the assumption that boundaries are maintained by practitioners. This focus fails to recognize how young people are also active in negotiating and maintaining boundaries, for example through their use of space, their willingness to interact with youth workers, or what information they were willing to share. For those students who did not show any interest in interacting with me, I did not push it, respecting what I interpreted as their desire to not interact with me as a researcher. However, on reflection I can see that this also could have resulted in shyer or less visible students not being as present in my research. Taking the informal realm of Year Eleven as my primary locus of analysis, I have aimed to focus on the aspects of experience and understanding that were salient to this realm. In my ongoing ethical reflections on the tensions relating to this research process, the representational power of choosing what to write, and recording scenes, words and interactions that would otherwise only be part of memory, has for me been one of the thorniest. The stories and accounts I have included were in circulation among peers in this realm, part of what was being ‘worked out’ between them. I have excluded details from my account that were told to me as private and were not part of the interactions of the realm, as these were not part of what was being worked out by peers. Throughout, I attend to the different perspectives and interpretations of those involved, with the hope of capturing the polyvocal nature of the informal realm. However, some things were known by some people and not by others. When writing about this informal realm, I am conscious that while I have taken steps to ensure the school is not identifiable from the outside, and have used pseudonyms throughout, these peer relationships could still possibly be identifiable by those involved. As Jerolmack and Murphy (2019) write, even with extensive masking, in ‘small towns, neighborhoods, or organizations where hiding

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subjects’ identities from each other (i.e. ensuring “internal confidentiality”; see Kaiser 2009) can be especially challenging’, subjects can often deduce the identity of others (2019, 805). Unlike villages, or neighbourhoods, the Year Eleven informal realm which is the focus of this book no longer exists. The students would now be thirty and this snapshot of their school lives at fifteen and sixteen is captured like an insect in amber, where otherwise it would have dispersed into individual and collective memories, or been forgotten.

Change This snapshot of a particular time and place draws from fieldwork conducted in 2007–2008; as such it can be read as an ‘ethnography of the recent past’ (Alexander 2020). In the following section, I highlight some key events and social, technical, political and economic transformations that are relevant to the shaping of both young lives in London and the institution of school over the intervening years. I do this to recognize the importance of both change and continuity in the account that follows. Young people’s experiences are historically constituted, and the significant changes that have occurred in the intervening years would likely have shaped what was present among peers in school and represented in the ethnographic research (for example, the omnipresence of mobile phones and social media or a wider visibility and recognition of diverse gender and sexual identities). At the same time, this account of the recent past also enables us to see the continuities of peer relations and being and becoming a particular kind of person. As I argue, this continuity is observable in school ethnographies since the 1970s and in my own recent work with young people. The global financial crisis was occurring at the time of the fieldwork and while not present in my notes, the repercussions of this are among the things that have significantly shaped young lives in the intervening years. Ending thirteen years of New Labour governance, the Conservative-­Liberal Democrat coalition government came to power in 2010, followed by successive Conservative governments. In this period social and economic inequality in the UK has been intensified by severe cuts to public expenditure, including in the areas of welfare, social care and local government, instigated in the name of austerity by these governments, and representing a pronounced challenge to the ‘post-war logic of welfare consensus’ in Britain and across the global North (Koch and James 2022). For young people, the end of the Education Maintenance Allowance4 in 2011, the decimation of youth services, and the introduction of higher education fees in 2012 were all justified as part of this austerity logic (James 2015).

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In 2011, in areas across London, as well as the rest of England, there were four days of unrest,5 quickly codified as racialized ‘youth riots’ (­Elster 2020). In the aftermath, then Prime Minister David Cameron declared, ‘These riots were not about poverty… No, this was about behaviour, people showing indifference to right and wrong, people with a twisted moral code, people with a complete absence of self-restraint’ (Harker 2015). This discourse was not only political. In academic responses to these events, despite the range of disciplines and analytic orientations involved, young people were often framed as ‘pathological consumers’ (e.g. Aiello and Pariante 2013; Treadwell et al. 2013). The riots thus represented an important point through which a ‘deficient’ young morality was (implicitly) contrasted with a mainstream, normative morality (Elster 2020). Scholars have also charted ‘racism’s shifting modes’ (Back, Sinha and Bryan 2012, 143) over this period, the ‘reordering of the terms of inclusion’, its enduring colonial legacies (Back, Sinha and Bryan 2012, 150), as well as the particular form these take in London. In 2012, a set of policies was introduced by the then home Secretary Theresa May, which enabled the government to ‘deport first and hear appeals later’. This tightened regulations and increased webs of immigration controls with the explicit aim of creating, as Theresa May said at the time ‘a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants’ (Travis 2013), as well as making the questioning of migrant status visible in public spaces, particularly in London (Hall 2017).6 Scholars have also examined how the ‘leave campaign’ for the UK referendum on leaving the European Union in 2016 and discourses since mobilized ‘long-standing racialized structures of feeling about immigration and national belonging’ (Virdee and McGeever 2018, 1804; Bhambra 2017; Meghji 2022). These dynamics shape life in school. For example, consider the government requirement since 2015 for schools to teach ‘British Values’ and identify ‘children at risk of radicalization’ through the ‘Prevent Duty’ (­Byrne et al. 2020; Blell, Liu and Verma 2022). Following the 2016 immigration act, the Department for Education agreed to pass on the details of school students from the annual school census to trace families without a legal right to remain (Candappa 2019, 427).7 As Yuval-Davis et al. argue, bordering practices such as these have increasingly become part of everyday life in Britain and ‘the intensification and growing hegemony of this everyday/­ everywhere bordering technology threatens to destabilise the conviviality of multi-ethnic metropolitan London, the rest of the UK and other European societies’ (2018, 239). A diversity of sexual and gender identities has become increasingly visible in this period, and recent research in schools highlights the importance of this for many young people. As McGlashan and Fitzpatrick write:

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The nature of sex/ualities, genders and schooling has changed considerably over the last 20 years, with global political, social and cultural shifts bringing the lives of queer youth to the fore. Trans youth are now more visible and various kinds of support groups in schools (such as diversity support groups, queer groups and gay – straight alliances) have emerged. (2018, 239) Bragg et al. (2018) have explored growing gendered diversity among young people, including expanded gender vocabulary, diverse gender explorations and identifications, and peer support for rejection of binaries. Thus, while gender was articulated by the students in my study in binary terms, and they actively policed each other in terms of compulsory heterosexuality, it seems likely that other notions of gender and sexuality would have been observable if I had done similar ethnographic research today. Technological development has intensified, along with the presence of social media in everyday life. When I conducted my research, most students had mobile phones, which included access to the internet, and Bebo, Myspace and to a lesser degree Facebook were part of life. Students also often communicated with each other online through MSN instant messenger. Since then, young people have had increasing access to smart phone technology, 4G or 5G networks, and platforms such as YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok have risen to prominence. Digital technologies have enabled image-based practices of sexual harassment and abuse, for example ‘pressurised sexting’ (boys asking girls for nudes) and the often-non-consensual sharing of digital sexual images, that were not present in my fieldwork. As Ringrose et al. (2022) explore, these are shaped by cis-heteronormative homosocial masculinity practices, through which boys can gain masculine value among peers for these kinds of exchanges, while girls are punished. These dynamics represent a particular instantiation of the sexual double standards (Naezer and van Oosterhout, 2021) explored in Chapter 6 in newer, arguably more intensified ways. At the same time, while the negative aspects of social media have been well documented, scholars have cautioned against its simplistic scapegoating that obscures the diverse and divergent experiences of young people engaging in social media and the political, economic and ecological forces that may be causing increased anxiety among young people (Pangrazio 2018). Debates around social media frequently converge on the recognizable themes of crisis, anxiety and pathological consumption through which young people are often represented. For example, as Crystal Kim and Jessica Ringrose note, social media is understood by schools as a distraction from learning, a risk

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and a potentially dangerous influence (2018). However, they argue that the positioning of young people in terms of pathological consumption can obscure the ways they might be actively, creatively and critically using these technologies. For example, social media has opened spheres for feminist political participation and represents a challenge to the ‘engrained constructions of youth,  particularly girls, as lacking in political agency’ (Kim and Ringrose 2018, 46–47; Retallack, Ringrose and Lawrence 2016). Young people face intensifying ecological uncertainty, and their activism has also been important and visible in relation to the urgent need for a meaningful global response to the climate crisis. In 2019 the School Strikes 4 Climate movement (SS4C) saw students around the world protest by missing school to participate in demonstrations (Nissen, Wong and Carlton 2021; Sharma 2021). Most recently young people have experienced great biographical disruptions due to the Covid-19 pandemic, including school closures (over a total of six months in 2020–2021 in the UK), severe restrictions on their ability to socialize in person with their friends, and for some the experience of the severe illness or death of family or friends (Holt and Murray 2021). Furthermore, Covid-19 has intensified existing inequalities and vulnerabilities, including household violence, overcrowding and poverty (Plan International 2020). Already under pressure from austerity and league table demands, schools have increasing numbers of students in need of additional support, with long waiting lists for support services (Cowie and Myers 2021). Young people who were fifteen to sixteen-years old – the age of students in this monograph at the start of the pandemic – missed out on many rites of passage, including the celebration of their last day at school described in this book. In terms of education policy, one important change in 2015 was the rise from sixteen to eighteen of compulsory education or training. Intensified dynamics of privatization have also characterized the intervening years through academization (Kulz 2017). While academization since New Labour has changed funding models and opened the door for the increased privatization of education,8 at the level of pedagogy, there has been a return to traditional modes of instruction and curriculum, including a constriction of subject choices and a reemphasis on summative examinations as assessment (Gewirtz et al. 2021). As Patrick Alexander writes: In light of the voracious uncertainty that characterises the present since 2008, it is interesting to note how little has changed in terms of how schooling frames life after school. Indeed, in terms of curriculum and qualifications, if anything schools now represent an even more modernist interpretation of how knowledge gained in school relates to life in the wider world. (2020, 103)

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Continuity One theme that runs implicitly through the above account is the way young people and their lives are often described in negative and anxious terms. As Aimee Meredith Cox writes, ‘[i]t is fair to say that research on adolescence has largely been written from the perspective of fear’ (Cox 2015, 12). As the ‘future in the making’ (Cole and Durham 2008), young people are repeatedly cause for intense concern in public debates.9 A cross-­disciplinary critical discourse on this ‘crisis narrative’ has noted the rhetorical nature of the debates, the historical precedent of public anxiety concerning the moral education of the young and the corrupting influence of ‘modern times’, and the classed, gendered and racialized shape of these concerns (Egan and Hawkes 2008; Smith and Attwood 2011; Kehily 2012; Renold et al. 2016; Tsaliki and Chronaki 2020). Questions of morality are often key to these debates. Such crisis narratives contrast, more or less explicitly, the current state of affairs with a past viewed in terms of a shared system of socially enforced normative morality that has now been eroded. Underlying the anxious debates about youth and morality, the fear or belief that young people are internalizing damaging ‘messages’ (in relation to sex, body shape, violence or consumerism, etc.), in place of the normative  morality  that is presumed to have existed before, can be identified. The result is a repeated vision of children and young people as damaged by forces, trends, messages and images originating outside their everyday worlds, with their experience, sense of self and morality being fundamentally structured by these forces (Bray and Colebrook 1998; Coleman 2009). Much of this discourse takes as its starting place broad trends or observable cultural products (such as media images or consumer products) and assumes the effect they are having on young people. From this perspective, young people are represented as ‘pathological consumers’, while much less attention is paid to the achievements of their everyday lives. As I will demonstrate in this monograph, in contrast to fears of moral crisis, young people have clear ideas about right and wrong, good and bad, and are willing to act on these ethical judgements in interactions with  their  peers. The ethical dimensions pervasive in  students’ speech, action and sociality provide  a more nuanced perspective on moral change. This is not an argument that these ethics are drawn from nowhere, but a call for attention to the more complex ways young people draw from materials and histories in their ethics. As I will explore, these ethics are fundamentally intersubjective and occur as an important part of friendships and peer relationships. As such this represents another important continuity. One of the striking things about ethnographic work conducted in schooling since the 1970s, is the

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many recognizable facets of friendships, peer relations and the informal realm that can be identified across these fifty years (for example Willis 1977; Wulff 1988; Mac an Ghaill 1994; Hey 1997; Amit-Talai 1995). These ethnographies highlight the importance of friendships and peer relations for becoming a particular kind of gendered, racialized and classed person, the powerful policing that goes on between peers, as well as the pleasure, joy and support that come from these relationships. Through my own recent project Girl-Kind North East (co-founded with Sarah Ralph-Lane in 2017), which I discuss in more detail in the conclusion, we have worked with over 300 girls and have heard repeatedly from them about the persistence of gendered double standards, the continuing power of the slag discourse, tenacious policing by peers, and evidence of status as about being seen and known. At the same time, we have noticed that many girls have a language with which to express the injustice they observe, for example discussions of the patriarchy, toxic masculinity, heteronormativity and racism, conceptual understandings that I observed much less when I was doing my fieldwork. In this chapter I have situated the school and the students in the history of London and the neighbourhood of Collingson, before discussing my own entry into the school and Year Eleven. Throughout, I have sought to emphasize the specificity of time and place and the particular scale of my research focus. I write in the past tense throughout this book to be consistent with the recognition that this ethnography captures just one point in time and the young people at one particular point in their lives. This specificity and particularity runs through the ethnography, which I offer as a snapshot rather than a claim for the fixed and unchanging nature of the concepts young people use to understand their social worlds. I seek to recognize the possibilities of conceptual transformations within individual biographies: for example, in this book we will see how young people look back on their younger selves in terms of how their understandings and actions have transformed. In the preceding section, I have also suggested that since conducting the ethnographic research for this book, there may have been wider transformations in the language and concepts available to young people to understand inequality, oppression, non-normative identities and justice. Tracing concepts in use is to recognize and trace the historical nature of meaning, ideas and concepts as part of the transforming ways meaning is made by ‘historically specific persons’ (Pina-Cabral 2014; Toren 1999). In this task, I attend to young people’s micro-histories, histories of individuals, friendships and the Year Group, and the way these connect to broader collective histories. In the next chapter I explore these micro-histories in more detail, through a focus on how Year Eleven understood their year group history and in the process constituted themselves as a good group, in relation to their former selves.

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Notes 1. Conviviality in this understanding does not only refer to ‘happy’ or ‘fun’ forms of togetherness, but a more ambivalent experience of shared life, importantly emphasizing that ‘recognising conviviality should not signify the absence of racism’ (Gilroy 2006, 40). 2. Relatedly, Reay et al.’s study focused on parents choosing inner-city comprehensive schooling that ‘most white middle-class people avoid’. Parents ‘position themselves as “other” to what they perceive to be normative white middle-class attitudes and behaviour, often denouncing and always putting moral distance between themselves and the white middle-class majority. Yet, they and their children inevitably constitute “the privileged other” in the disadvantaged, multi-ethnic spaces that they opt for, at perpetual risk of becoming enmeshed in a colonialist sense of entitlement (Razack, 2002)’ (2007, 1043). 3. GCSEs are now marked from 9 – 1 rather than A* – G. 4. The EMA was paid to eligible students aged sixteen to nineteen to support their continuation in secondary education. 5. A significant event prior to the unrest was the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan in Tottenham, North London and the failure of high-ranking police officers to respond to the questions of peaceful protestors (Elster 2020). 6. As Suzanne Hall writes, ‘In the U.K. the malicious government experiment brandished by the threat, “In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest”, was pasted over vehicles driven around the London Boroughs of Barking and Dagenham, Redbridge, Barnet, Brent, Ealing and Hounslow in 2013’ (2017, 1598). 7. Following a legal challenge in 2018, the DfE no longer required schools to ask for nationality and country of birth, but the data sharing agreement remained in place (Candappa 2019). 8. Academies are funded directly by the Department of Education and are not under local authority control; they are self-governing charitable trusts that may receive support from personal or corporate sponsors. Labour had opened 203 academies by the time they left office in May 2010; as of January 2018, there were 6,996 academies, representing 72 per cent of secondary schools (National Audit Office 2018), with the coalition and subsequent Conservative government forcibly converting so-called ‘failing’ schools into academies. Michael Gove, Education minister between 2010 and 2014, was a key instigator of this academization, and as Kulz argues, his ‘grand claims to freedom, innovation and social mobility conceal academies’ alternative purpose as a privatization tool’ (2014: 688). 9. For example, in relation to concerns over ‘sexualization’ – an increasing permissiveness and openness towards sex, and preoccupation with it (Jackson and Scott 2004; Smith and Attwood 2011; Ringrose and Renold 2012; Egan 2013); the expansion of consumerism and advertising with children and young people targeted as valuable markets (Egan and Hawkes 2008); the risks of digital technologies and social media (Harvey, Ringrose and Gill 2013; Pangrazio 2018); the negative body image of girls (Coleman 2009); knife crime and gangs (Williams and Squires 2021); the 2011 ­English riots (Flint and Powell 2012; Elster 2020).

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———. 2006. ‘Multiculture in Times of War: An Inaugural Lecture given at the London School of Economics’, Critical Quarterly 48(4): 27–45. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1467-8705.​2006.00731.x. Hall, Suzanne M. 2017. ‘Mooring “Super-Diversity” to a Brutal Migration Milieu’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 40(9): 1562–73. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.13 00296. Harker, Joseph. 2015. ‘Oliver Letwin’s Memo on Race Is Not Ancient History: It’s Current Tory Policy’, The Guardian, 30 December 2015, sec. Opinion. Accessed 8 December 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/30/oli​ ver-letwin-memo-race-1985-ri​ots-david-cameron-2011-race-equality. Hart, Peter. 2016. ‘Young People Negotiating and Maintaining Boundaries in Youth Work Relationships: Findings from an Ethnographic Study of Youth Clubs’, ­Journal  of Youth Studies 19(7): 869–84. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2015.1 112881. Harvey, Laura, Jessica Ringrose and Rosalind Gill. 2013. ‘Swagger, Ratings and Masculinity: Theorising the Circulation of Social and Cultural Value in Teenage Boys’ Digital Peer Networks’, Sociological Research Online 18(4): 9. Herron, Melinda. 2019. ‘Ethnographic Methods, Young People, and a High School: A Recipe for Ethical Precarity’, Anthropology & Education Quarterly 50(1): 84–96. https://doi.org/10.1111/aeq.12278. Hey, Valerie. 1997. The Company She Keeps: An Ethnography of Girls’ Friendships. Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press. Hollingworth, Sumi and Louise Archer. 2010. ‘Urban Schools as Urban Places: School Reputation, Children’s Identities and Engagement with Education in London’, Urban Studies 47(3): 584–603. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098009349774. Hollingworth, Sumi and Ayo Mansaray. 2012. ‘Conviviality under the Cosmopolitan Canopy? Social Mixing and Friendships in an Urban Secondary School’, Sociological Research Online 17(3): 195–206. https://doi.org/10.5153/sro.2561. Holt, Louise and Lesley Murray. 2021. ‘Children and Covid 19 in the UK’, Children’s Geographies 20(4): 487–94. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2021.1921699. Huisman, Kimberly. 2008. ‘“Does This Mean You’re Not Going to Come Visit Me Anymore?”: An Inquiry into an Ethics of Reciprocity and Positionality in Feminist Ethnographic Research’, Sociological Inquiry 78(3): 372–96. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1475-682X.2008.00244.x. Jackson, Emma. 2019. ‘Valuing the Bowling Alley: Contestations over the Preservation of Spaces of Everyday Urban Multiculture in London’, The Sociological Review 67(1): 79–94. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038026118772784. Jackson, Stevi and Sue Scott. 2004. ‘Sexual Antinomies in Late Modernity’, Sexualities 7(2): 233–48. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460704042166. Jacobs, Jane M. 2002. Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203430903. James, Allison. 2007. ‘Giving Voice to Children’s Voices: Practices and Problems, Pitfalls and Potentials’, American Anthropologist 109(2): 261–72. https://doi.org/10.1525/ aa.2007.109.2.261. James, Malcolm. 2015. Urban Multiculture: Youth, Politics and Cultural Transformation in a Global City. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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———. 2017. ‘Negative Politics: The Conformity, Struggles and Radical Possibilities of Youth Culture in Outer East London’, European Journal of Cultural Studies 20(2): 107–24. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549416638522. Jerolmack, Colin and Alexandra K. Murphy. 2019. ‘The Ethical Dilemmas and Social Scientific Trade-Offs of Masking in Ethnography’, Sociological Methods & Research 48(4): 801–27. https://doi.org/10.1177/0049124117701483. Kehily, Mary Jane. 2004. ‘II. Girls on Girls: Tensions and Anxieties in Research with Girls’, Feminism & Psychology 14(3): 366–70. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959353504044636. ———. 2012. ‘Contextualising the Sexualisation of Girls Debate: Innocence, Experience and Young Female Sexuality’, Gender and Education 24(3): 255–68. https://doi.org /10.1080/09540253.2012.670391. Kim, Crystal and Jessica Ringrose. 2018. ‘“Stumbling Upon Feminism”: Teenage Girls’ Forays into Digital and School-Based Feminisms’, Girlhood Studies 11(2): 46–62. https://doi.org/10.3167/ghs.2018.110205. Koch, Insa and Deborah James. 2022. ‘The State of the Welfare State: Advice, Governance and Care in Settings of Austerity’, Ethnos 87(1): 1–21. https://doi.org/10.108 0/00141844.2019.1688371. Kulz, Christy. 2014. ‘“Structure Liberates?”: Mixing for Mobility and the Cultural Transformation of “Urban Children” in a London Academy’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 37(4): 685–701. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2013.808760. ———. 2017. Factories for Learning: Making Race, Class and Inequality in the Neoliberal Academy. Factories for Learning. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mac an Ghaill, Máirtín. 1994. The Making of Men: Masculinities, Sexualities and Schooling. Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press. McGlashan, Hayley and Katie Fitzpatrick. 2018. ‘“I Use Any Pronouns, and I’m Questioning Everything Else”: Transgender Youth and the Issue of Gender Pronouns’, Sex Education 18(3): 239–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681811.2017.1419949. McLaughlin, Janice. 2020. ‘Relational Autonomy as a Way to Recognise and Enhance Children’s Capacity and Agency to Be Participatory Research Actors’, Ethics and Social Welfare 14(2): 204–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/17496535.2020.1714689. Meghji, Ali. 2022. ‘Towards a Theoretical Synergy: Critical Race Theory and Decolonial Thought in Trumpamerica and Brexit Britain’, Current Sociology 70(5): 647–64. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392120969764. Meloni, Francesca, Karine Vanthuyne and Cécile Rousseau. 2015. ‘Towards a Relational Ethics: Rethinking Ethics, Agency and Dependency in Research with Children and Youth’, Anthropological Theory 15(1): 106–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499​ 614565945. Naezer, Marijke, and Lotte van Oosterhout. 2021. ‘Only Sluts Love Sexting: Youth, Sexual Norms and Non-Consensual Sharing of Digital Sexual Images’. Journal of Gender Studies 30(1): 79–90. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2020.1799767. Nissen, Sylvia, Jennifer H.K. Wong and Sally Carlton. 2021. ‘Children and Young People’s Climate Crisis Activism – a Perspective on Long-Term Effects’, Children’s Geographies 19(3): 317–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2020.1812535. Noronha, Luke de. 2019. ‘Deportation, Racism and Multi-Status Britain: Immigration Control and the Production of Race in the Present’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 42(14): ­2413–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2019.1585559.

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So much has happened now that even if you don’t really like someone, you just appreciate that you’ve got loads of history with them. —Grace

The Last Day of School

As spring bloomed and Year Eleven lessons became increasingly

crammed with revision for their impending GCSE exams, ‘The Last Day of School’ approached with much excited anticipation from the students. Students would be celebrating the end of lessons, school uniform, compulsory education, and the year group in its existing form, although soon they would be returning to school for revision lessons and their exams. As I entered the form room, where the register was normally taken, the normal conventions of the classroom were flipped. Students wore their uniforms in usually banned ways, with trainers, baseball caps and untucked shirts, high heels, suspenders and red lipstick. While the rest of the school sat down to their first lesson, Year Eleven roamed freely between several interconnected classrooms, signing each other’s shirts and leaving messages in each other’s ‘leaver’s’ books. Regardless of their friendship group or status, they asked any student or teacher who crossed their path to sign. Gradually everyone’s white shirts bloomed with brightly coloured messages, pictures and signatures. James, one of the self-named ‘Misfits’, a friendship group described to me by one of their members as ‘all having been dumped in the same kind of bin’, bounded up to me. While he had often expressed his disdain for the ‘fake’ people in the year group, today he told me what a

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good day he was having: ‘It’s been brilliant, I’ve talked to all these people I don’t normally speak to, and I’ve got loads of mobile numbers. I’m really glad I had this time with all these people I’ve been with, even though I might not have talked to a lot of them.’ After lunch, students made their way into the main hall for their final assembly. It lasted for over three hours, ending long after the normal school day. Teachers and students contributed, reading specially written poems, singing or performing dances. Mr Forster, head of Year Eleven, gave a heart-felt speech: ‘We’ve laughed, we’ve cried, there’s been battles over uniforms, make-up, lateness, and trainers but there’s always been so much fun and laughs, so many brilliant memories. There is so much talent in this year, this year group is truly special, and you’ve all got such amazing spirits…’ As he finished – telling them he always regretted not telling his last year group how he felt about them, so he just wanted to let them know he thought they were amazing – his voice cracked, and as he returned to his chair, other teachers reached over patting his shoulder to comfort him. The final speaker of the assembly was Dominic, tall and thin with hair that fell over his eyes. Another member of the Misfits, Dominic had received a particularly hard time from the higher status boys because he refused to accept the conventions of status that expected him to make himself invisible. In the safe space of his friendship group territory, I had heard him speak candidly about the insults and aggression he had received from peers within the year group. He addressed the audience: I don’t know how many of you remember me in Year Seven? Probably only about one person. But after primary school I had no self-­ confidence, I couldn’t meet anyone’s eye, I flinched if anyone came near me. Since then, my confidence has grown, now I’ve got friends and I’m able to stand up in front of you and say this, which I would never have been able to do before, and a lot of you are to thank for that. Some of you are my friends, some of you are people I just nod to when we pass in the corridor and lots of you I probably just pass, but we all get along and while I’m not the most popular person in the year, as far as I can tell that’s Chimmi [one of the high-status boys] (the audience laughs), I’m a lot better than I used to be, and that happened here, so I wanted to say thank you. After my observations throughout the year, I worried this speech would be met with laughter or jeers. There was a split-second pause and I held my breath. Then the students exploded into loud clapping, cheering and whooping. Some students (including many of the high-status boys) give

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him a standing ovation. As the assembly ended, Take That’s Never Forget, their ‘year song’, started to play, and the students and teachers, many crying or with tears in their eyes, turned to hug those close to them and started to make their way out of the hall, arm in arm into the bright spring sunshine.

The History of Year Eleven Both institutionally and interpersonally, the primary organizing principle in Collingson School was the year group.1 Year groups are formed in Year Seven, when students from different primary schools come together for the first time and stay together until Year Eleven, when some students move to study in different schools and colleges for their final two years of school. All lessons and assemblies, and a number of other activities, are held in these groups. The organizational force of the year group is reflected in peer relationships; friendship groups almost always consisted of members from the same year group, and the hierarchical arrangement of friendship groups and individuals was year-wide. Year Elevens, the focus of this book, had thus been together as a group for five years. The ‘last day of school’, described above, was a culmination and celebration of their time together as a group in its existing form. As I will explore in this chapter, their history has been constituted by a manifold of actions, interactions and peer relationships of different kinds. While these efforts often manifested distinction, difference and hierarchy, they also resulted in processes of unification through which the students could come to view themselves as a worthwhile group who had grown together as they had grown up. In the second half of this chapter, I focus on how different kinds of friendships are understood by students, and friendship groups, as an important way through which students situated themselves as similar or different to each other. I also introduce four of the main friendship groups that are at the heart of this ethnography. As I argue, through a focus on these groups we can see how, in often subtle and complex ways, broader classed, racialized and gendered histories were brought into being as students defined and situated themselves and others as ‘particular kinds of people’.

Shared History In Year Seven it’s all different cultures… because you’re growing up, and you’re finding out who you are and what your values are, so you’re all clashing… but eventually everyone meshes together. —Megan, seventeen, Year Thirteen

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The recounting of their shared history was a common practice among Year Eleven. Through the frequent retelling of collaboratively told stories – the scary and hated year head who stalked the halls with clanging keys, or a miserable school trip where it rained all day – students manifested this shared history. The laughter these stories entailed, joking about their former selves as well as the events that at the time seemed so important to them, also exemplified the ‘convivial sociality’ (Rosengren 2010) so present in daily life at school. As I will explore in this section, shared history was part of the very material from which this convivial sociality was produced and spoke of the intensity of students’ ‘mutualities of being’ (Sahlins 2011) over the last five years, as well as the effects of their shared efforts to shape each other as particular kinds of people. At the start of the school year, the Year Elevens watched with detached amusement as the Year Sevens, eleven-year-olds newly arrived in the school, attempted to navigate their way around, their small frames loaded with large rucksacks, creating snail-like silhouettes. Sharing corridors with rambunctious older students for the first time, the new students scurried and huddled, while the Year Elevens, relaxed in their established space, laughed about the size of their bags and how little they were, reminiscing about when they were that young. For Michael, the start of Year Seven represented a sharp break from what had gone before in primary school. Joining the much bigger secondary school, with students coming from a range of different schools, he experienced a sharp change of friendships and status: ‘Everything changed from primary to secondary, and everything that happened previously disappeared. I know it’s hard to believe but at primary school I was at the top, then I got here, and I was like “hey where have you gone?”.’ As the students told it, small friendship groups formed rapidly based on the proximity of a shared form group; the relationship between the groups was described in terms of caution and reticence. At the same time, students were beginning their classification of each other in terms of youth styles. ‘I remember Year Seven and this guy came up to me and said, “what are you?” And I was like “I don’t know what I am”,’ said Bart. ‘Yeah,’ said Natasha, ‘People were asking “are you a townie or are you a grungie?”.’ In these uncertain times, it seemed that even cursory contact might turn you into their type. ‘I was just talking to Leah, and someone came up to me and said, “are you a grungy now?”’ recounted Tanya, agreeing with Bart and Natasha’s retelling of Year Seven. In Year Eight, these relations turned to open acrimony and discord. ‘In Year Seven we were naive; we didn’t really know what was going on,’ reflected Lisa and Keely. ‘When you get to Year Eight you realise that nothing is that bad in school and then everything just exploded… Year Eight was

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the bitchiest year, everyone was sort of like bitching, proper, proper bitching. Boy fights, bitch fights, everything.’ By student accounts, Year Eight and Year Nine was a kind of ‘wild west’, a period of relative ‘lawlessness’; social relations were frequently uncertain, mercurial and discordant, and friendships were made and broken with alarming speed. A week-long school trip at the end of Year Nine was viewed by Year Elevens as a catalyst for a major re-organization of friendships and groups and the beginning of an increasing stability and positive connections between different friendship groups. Perhaps there was also an element of adult intervention on the trip, as form groups – the previous basis for friendship groups – were mixed up and, away from their established groups, students felt they had an opportunity to make more ‘like-minded’ friends. Away from the formations of space and time that had formed in school (including who you spent time with and where you spent time together), the trip acted as a liminal space where new relationships could be rapidly formed. At each point in their history, students spoke of the worry involved, the uncertainty of friendships that might be broken with little notice and the pain of finding yourself excluded by those who were once your friends. Georgia and Grace talked with me about a particularly difficult period for them. ‘Year Nine was a hard year, there were massive fights,’ said Georgia. Grace continued, ‘That’s when everyone was breaking up, in Year Ten was the time when we dealt with the fact that we’d separated but in Year Nine it was just like “you’re leaving me out”.’ ‘Why were you separating?’ I asked. ‘Because people change,’ answered Georgia. ‘Yeah, people change,’ affirmed Grace, ‘It’s just that time when everyone is growing up and changing and they realise they don’t want to hang around with those people.’ Back at the school the reconfigured informal realm settled into the friendship groups and hierarchy recognizable in Year Eleven. Students contrasted their early friendships, based on physical proximity – who you sat next to or who you shared a form group with – with their current friendships which were with like-minded people with whom they had things in common and could be themselves. These commonalities included what people wore and what music they listened to, and increasingly shared values and conceptions of the good life. Explaining this to me, Jenny offered an example: ‘like some people only care about drinking, they don’t think GCSEs are important, they’re not the sort of people we’d be friends with now.’ While students discussed similarity in terms of shared ‘priorities’, ‘tastes’, ‘values’, ‘sense of humour’ and ‘opinions on other people’, it was less usual for students to describe similarities with friends explicitly in terms of broader commonalities such as class or race. As I will discuss in more depth in this and later chapters, this emphasis on the personal aspects of

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similarity in tastes, styles and orientation can been seen as ‘metonymic place holders’ (Chun 2011) for entangled sets of classed, racialized and gendered associations. At the same time, these associations were not necessarily straightforwardly and permanently attached to persons. As a space apart from family, school allowed students a flexibility of presentation and action, ways of being which matched peers rather than parents. While friendship and friendship groups were a key way through which students recognized and interrogated difference and identified themselves and others in these terms, they also laid claim to sharedness with their peers that cut across straightforward categorizations. Conceiving of friendship historically, we can recognize them as informed by the collective histories that students embodied, and also contributing to each student’s unique history through which they become a particular person, in a particular time and space (Toren 1999). Thus, from their account of their shared history, we can see the emergence of an ongoing tension between an understanding of persons and experiences of self, as on the one hand shaped by others, malleable and susceptible to the influence of others, and on the other as self-same and continuous, such that in early years, unanchored from all they had known before, some students, like Michael, found themselves unexpectedly ‘new’ again (as he said, ‘where have I gone’) and others, such as Tanya, experienced mimetic risk – even a cursory conversation could turn you into a completely different ‘kind of person’. While as Georgia and Grace described, the pain of friendships breaking in Year Nine was about both finding ‘like-minded selves’, connecting to the internal and authentic ‘you’ and the recognition that ‘people change’. At the same time as the catalytic Year Nine trip enabled new friendships based on similarity to form, it also increased the interconnections between groups. While friendship groups continued to define themselves in contrast to each other, this difference was no longer a barrier to closeness and students across groups began to interact more and more. As I will discuss in more detail later in this chapter, while friendship groups continued to demand an investment of time and commitment to territory, other actions of friendship, like spending time together in class, enabled other kinds of relationships to grow. The growing interconnections between groups highlights the cumulative effects of students’ actions. When they entered school, the year group was created through external institutional forces – a group ‘in itself ’ – but during their time together, actions and interactions enabled the students to produce themselves internally as a worthwhile group – a group ‘for itself ’. The cumulative effects of these actions not only enabled students to manifest their shared history, but also to situate themselves positively in relation

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both to other year groups and to their former selves. ‘We’ve got a really nice year, we’re particularly nice,’ said Sejal, ‘Year Ten have got a reputation, a group of boys got excluded2 last year, that gave the year a reputation, and the rest of the year are just rude. Year Twelve, they’re just not very friendly. Our year just accepts everyone.’ ‘It used to be that there was this bitching and you had to have sides,’ explained Samantha, ‘But it’s not like that anymore, we have our separate groups, but everyone talks to each other… the grungies talk to the chavs, the chavs talk to the slags, and well, the emos don’t even talk to each other!’ Through the actions and interactions of daily life at school – the transformation of negative talk (bitching) replaced by positive talk, ‘sides’ replaced by acceptance – the girls could provide evidence of Year Eleven as a worthwhile group. The temporal dimensions of this unity were also recognized by students, as they described how they had ‘grown together as they have grown up’. As Keely and Lisa explained it, the tumult of Years Eight and Nine was ‘just a phase, in a way we needed to get it out our system and now it’s not going on’. Things stopped being ‘bitchy’ because ‘we grew up’ and growing up meant ‘not being bitchy’. As we will see in the next chapter, the rhetoric of no longer being bitchy was only part of the story – and girls particularly continued to assign bitchiness, as a negative judgement, to each other. However, Lisa and Keely’s claims represented the pride in this unity. The constitutive nature of ‘growing up’ and ‘growing together’ further emphasized their contrast to the other year groups and to their past selves who were characterized as less united, and therefore less grown up. But this mutual constitution also suggests what is at stake, as a failure of unity could be a viewed as a failure to grow up. As such, as we will see in later chapters, students invested effort in maintaining this rhetoric, even when claims to unity seemed less convincing. ‘The Last Day of School’, described at the start of this chapter, represents the pinnacle of this unity. That James could express gratitude at having spent time with these people, despite often expressing how he had suffered through their actions, tells us something about forgiveness. As Hannah Arendt famously argued (2013 [1958]), forgiveness offers a corrective for the inevitable damages resulting from action, including the pain we cause each other. Forgiveness can mitigate the irreversibility of action by making a break with the past actions and forgiving the actor for these actions. Likewise, in his speech to the year group, Dominic chose to thank the group for the person he had become. In recognizing this he made a break with their past negative actions towards him and focused on the positive effects of their actions. In their acknowledgement of this speech, the standing ovation and claps, the tears and hugs, this break from past wrongs manifested the growing together ideal and generated the experience of

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unity to which students appealed. Despite the irreversibility of actions, in this moment, forgiveness triumphed over rancour, equality over hierarchy, and unity over differentiation. As Nihal said, looking back at his whole time at school, ‘our last assembly together, it was the best time in my opinion, all of us together and celebrating everyone together.’

Friends and Friendship Groups in Year Eleven Friendships in Year Eleven were the grounds for processes of both unification and differentiation. As Sejal and Samantha explained in the section above, ‘we have our separate groups, but everyone talks to each other.’ ‘Liking’, a personal and positive evaluation and appreciation of the person, was the starting point for all friendships. Friendship entailed some degree of shared space and time, and the exchange of talk, but while relations between all friends needed to be maintained by action, different kinds of friendships entailed different kinds and frequencies of action. As I explore in more depth in the next chapter, ‘close’ friendships were understood according to the notions of sameness, proximity and depth, and entailed a commitment of time and interaction. Friendships of closeness-sameness coalesced into groups, where, ideally, all members of the group should consider each other at least ‘good friends.’3 Friendship groups required commitment to space – a group territory, a designated place in the school where the group spent lunch and break-times – and time – the majority of spare time should be spent there. Through this intensity of shared action and exchange and the creation of particular formations of time and space, groups could define themselves in contrast to other groups, with distinctive contours of difference. Friendship groups were also key to how status was constituted within the year group. One lunchtime, early in my fieldwork, I was standing with the Misfits in their tucked away territory, when the conversation turned, as it often did, to status within the year. ‘We’re pretty low down in the hierarchy,’ Leah told me. ‘But we’re not the lowest,’ said James. ‘You’re right, I can go through the popularity from bottom to top, at the bottom are Elaine, Rose, and Fatima. Rose is alright, she’s a nice girl but….’ ‘They’re  strange, odd, not quite there.’ ‘Then there’s Talia and Deepa, they’re the people who haven’t really managed to make any other friends, so they hang around with each other. Then there’s us. Then there’s Marina’s group, you know like Francesca and Beth, they’re close to being popular but not quite and then there are the popular group like Ruby and Natasha and that lot – the It girls, and the boys Chimmi, Davros Jacob, there’s loads of them.’

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As Leah and James highlighted, the status hierarchy was recognized by students, regardless of their position within it. Students in different friendship groups agreed that in the specific formation of the Year Eleven hierarchy, Elaine was clearly at the bottom, and students such as Davros, Chimmi and Jacob, as members of the ‘Man-dem’, and Ruby and Natasha, members of the ‘It Girls’, were at the top. James and Leah assessed their position, as members of the Misfits with clear-eyed objectivity, as ‘low, but not the lowest’. However, although students all recognized hierarchy, when I asked about ‘popularity’, they were often quick to correct me. They felt ‘popularity’ implied most liked, and instead preferred to discuss ‘status’. While ‘liking’, regardless of similarity or commonalities, was what was needed in friendship, status did not necessarily rest on how many friends a person had, but on a particular kind of recognition. As Megan clarified for me, ‘It’s not popular as in everyone likes them but the loudest, the most powerful group, not popular, louder, louder and more well-known.’ As students described it, status could be considered analogous with fame, like being a celebrity. As Nancy Munn argued, fame is a form of virtual influence, extending the actors’ influence over the minds and actions of others, but also dependent on the recognition and evaluation of others. Furthermore, fame produces a potentiality for kinds and effects of action (Munn 1992). Thus, different status entailed different legitimacies of action, and high-status students were legitimated in exerting their will over others in a way that was considered unacceptable for those of lower status. Furthermore, status visibility was one-way – those that were seen or known were not expected to reciprocally see or know, and being high status legitimized kinds of action that were not legitimate for low-status students. Explaining how status worked to me, Leah illustrated her answer with a hypothetical example of the influence different people were able to have over others. Contrasting Elaine (one of the lowest status girls in the year) with Ruby (one of the highest status girls in the year), Leah asked me rhetorically: What would happen if Elaine asked someone if she could borrow a ­pencil? Even if they had a pencil case full, they’d probably say no. Now what would happen if Ruby asked? They’d give it to her, even if they had no other pencils, they were walking in the other direction, and were late for their lesson. In the following section, I describe the ‘low-status’ Misfits and ‘high-status’ It Girls and Man-dem in more detail, as well as discussing the middle-status ‘Green Corridor Girls’. Altogether, students in these four groups made up about a quarter of the year, I focus on these groups

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because they were key in student’s imaginings and descriptions of the year group hierarchy and included a number of members I got to know well – while I introduce these students here, we meet them throughout this book. Like other year groups in the school, most of the friendship groups were constituted by either boys or girls, and each had their own territory in the school where they spent lunch and break-times. As we will see, the social relations of the Year Eleven informal realm were exemplified in these spaces, which transformed the material environment of the school in particular ways and came to reflect the hierarchical social order.4

The It Girls They called us plastics, all of us. But we’re not plastics, we don’t have bleached blonde hair. —Samiya Then you get the It girls, they’re the attractive ones…

—Lexy

As you entered the school, past the original 1920s building, and towards the complex of concrete walkways, playgrounds and buildings, the It girls were among the first Year Elevens you saw. Sat in and around a bench on a raised platform that skirted one of the main buildings, the It Girls often looked like a tableau. This highly visible position reflected their status within the year, as the ‘most popular’ girl group. Typical of girls’ groupings, the girls usually sat stationary and close together, and would often be visited by other students, particularly high-status boys. The It Girls variously identified as ‘black, white and mixed’, and ‘from’ Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria and Columbia, as well as ‘not from anywhere’. Grace was tall and elegant; a leader in learning, symbolized by a gold band which edged her blazer, she engaged with her friends in a calm and thoughtful way. Her best friend Kadia was sweet-natured and funny, her lack of confidence in her own abilities inspiring both a protective affection and frustration in her friends. Fun and forthright Samiya, who we met in the introduction, was also closest to Kadia. Charming Natasha was best friends with confident Ruby, and Georgia – as the newest member of the group – was the least secure in her position. Finally, best friends Maria and Cheryl completed the group. As the other students characterized, the It Girls were the ‘good looking ones’; these looks entailed a certain kind of performance and polish,

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through which they were visible in a way others were not. The girls came to school every day made up and with hair styled, their clothes an artful transformation of the basic uniform requirements into current fashion: ‘skinny’ jeans instead of shapeless school trousers, ballet-style pumps instead of clunky shoes, and fashionable jackets instead of the standard school blazer. The production of this high status was not mutually exclusive with engagement in formal schooling. Grace, Kadia, Ruby and Georgia were all in the highest sets in school and considered by teachers among the ‘highest achievers’ in the year. Popular from Year Seven, the girls’ appearance and visibility brought with it increased scrutiny. In younger years, they were labelled ‘Plastics’, borrowed from the 2004 film Mean Girls, about the power and politics of girls’ peer group relations in an American high school. In the film, ‘the plastics’ were the highest status group, so called because they had Barbie-like good looks, but were vacuous, fake and shallow (and mean – getting their come-uppance at the end of the film). For the It girls then, the label ‘plastic’ simultaneously recognized their good looks while devaluing this, and them, as inauthentic. It was these looks that were understood by other students to give them (the right kind of ) visibility, and hence status. As Lexy told me, ‘Natasha and that lot have been popular since Year Seven, because of their looks basically. Those guys have got their looks and stuff so that instantly gives them status… although it depends what kind of status you want.’ As we will see, while the high-status boys were legitimized in exerting their influence over others, ‘acting big’, for girls this would be viewed as unacceptable. Thus, while both the It Girls and the Man-dem were unanimously identified as the highest status groups in the year, their way of interacting with others and the kinds of relations they had with other students of lower status were very different. In class, the girls chatted with others, joining in with jokes and greeting their class friends happily as they strode through the corridors arm in arm. I also greatly appreciated the warmth and welcome by which they invited me into their territory, and the open way they filled me in on their history, experiences and the gossip in the year. The visibility of these looks was interlinked with their desirability among boys in the year. As Dominic put it, ‘the good-looking girls get all the ­attention  – everyone wants to do them or go out with them.’ While ­boyfriend  – girlfriend relationships between students of notably different status were rare, boys of all status expressed their interest in the It Girls. Looking on from a distance, Leah offered a different perspective, ‘The reason those girls are popular is that they’ve been deemed attractive by the popular boys.’ ‘So, they’re the most attractive girls in the year?’ I asked. ‘Not necessarily, they’re just the ones who are seen as most attractive by those boys, and

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that’s what matters.’ As I will discuss in Chapter 6, it was also this position as the most desirable and visible girls in the year that placed a particular kind of ethical status upon them. As representatives of the year group, they were seen as having the particular power and danger to undermine the virtue of the year group and were thus policed by the high-status boys. While the coercive dimensions of being considered ‘desirable’ will be explored in Chapter 6, the desire of others also entailed rewards, pleasures and validation.5 For girls like the It Girls, who were willing and able to ‘get it right’, engaging with boys with the right level of playful flirting in order to appear interested but not desperate, desirability offered a gender-­ acceptable way for them to exert their will and extend their intersubjective influence. Not all the It Girls engaged in these kinds of practices equally; while the group as a whole were viewed as the best looking, as individuals, Natasha, Ruby and Cheryl appeared most practised at the subtle persuasion of their effects. I observed boys almost break into a run in an attempt to cross their path. With just a small smile or a flutter of their eyelashes, they drew boys willing to go out of their way to assist them. In Science class, Ruby sat at desks surrounded by boys of different friendship groups, who jostled for her attention as she held court. When the class were asked to set up for practical experiments, she often sat chatting to friends on nearby tables, while her partner for the lesson, one of the boys, gathered and set up their equipment. As with so many things in school, extensions of influence did not go unnoticed, even within the friendship group. Watching from their bench as Natasha chatted attentively to a boy nearby, Grace commented, ‘she doesn’t fancy him, she just likes the attention.’

Becoming an It Girl As with every friendship group, the It Girls had a history that was important to them in the retelling, and members had joined and left throughout this time. Grace, Samiya, Natasha and Kadia had been friends since primary school, and Ruby, Cheryl and Maria had joined them in Year Seven. I discuss the history of the It Girls further in Chapter 5, but for now I focus on the newest member of the group, Georgia, who throughout Year Eleven became part of the It Girls. Georgia was one of the first students to speak to me when I joined Year Eleven, asking me questions about myself and telling me about her busy weekend, which involved martial arts training, and a house party with friends who go a different school. Georgia was planning to leave Collingson for a different sixth form and said she would be glad to leave because

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‘the people here are limiting, and no one shares my interests.’6 Although Georgia did not feel that she fit in at Collingson, as she went through the years at the school, she also sought and (somewhat) succeeded to be successful in the Year Group hierarchy where different ways of being were valued. Georgia had changed friendship groups a number of times until she started to become friends with Ruby and Natasha in Year Ten and her ascent into the It Girls speaks of the kinds of transformations that were possible in school. As we will see later in this chapter, this is in contrast to members of the Misfits, who, while expressing similar sentiments to Georgia, were not interested in transforming themselves to achieve this kind of success. Rhiannon, who described herself as part of the middle-status ‘crazy funny group’ with Lexy and Ling Ling, told me how Georgia had changed from Year Eight. ‘You know Georgia? Well, [in Year Eight] everyone in her class hated her, and they made her come into our class, but we all hated her as well.’ I asked why people felt like this about her. Rhiannon answered, ‘She just thought herself better than everyone, so then me and some of our friends didn’t want her talking to us so we were just really rude to her, so she said we were bullying her and then there was this massive thing, like Mean Girls.’ For girls, ‘thinking yourself better than everyone’, along with ‘acting big’, was frequently evaluated as illegitimate in gendered terms. However, Rhiannon concluded by telling me, ‘Georgia has changed a lot, she’s really different. She was really annoying. No one really liked her before.’ As Rhiannon observed, to enable her to make new friendships, and subsequently to become somewhat welcome into the space-time of the It Girls, Georgia had managed to change her ways of being so as to be judged as acceptable in a way she had not before. During the time I was at school, Georgia, Ruby and Natasha visibly engaged in the actions of best friendship: picking each other up from lessons, linking arms as they walked through the school, spending as much time as possible together. Her inclusion with these girls was a testament to this transformed position. At the same time, Georgia’s relationship with the other It Girls was not ‘particularly close’. If Ruby or Natasha were not by the benches, she stood awkwardly to the side of the other girls, seemingly unsure if she should be there or not (and Samiya in particular often treated her with a breezy disregard). The threads that connected her to the group rested on her friendship with Ruby and Natasha, rather than the multiple friendships of the more secure members of the group. Meanwhile, because of her ascent into the It Girls, and as someone who had transformed her status in the year quite dramatically, she was of particular interest to other students such as Rhiannon, Lexy and Leah, who had been friends with her in the past. Discussing her one day in class, Lexy

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told Leah, ‘I don’t really like her, but it’s hard to explain our relationship, it’s like an intolerant toleration, there’s something about her that I don’t like, but at the same time we’ve had some good times… it’s like she changes depending on the people she’s with as well, sometimes she’ll be friendly, and sometimes she won’t.’ ‘Yeah,’ said Leah, ‘Like she’s entertaining but dangerous.’ Georgia’s story highlights the capacity for transformation in school, but her particular kind of visibility, as previously low-status, and the avidity by which she was observed also highlights the way the students’ shared history continued to inform how a person was judged. Georgia understood herself as a ‘particular kind of person’, her way of being seemingly much more shaped by home and life outside school than inside. However, in addition to these forensic ways of understanding herself she had significantly transformed herself in school and in doing so gained a very different position in the year group hierarchy. Ruby and Natasha’s acceptance of her through their best friend actions highlights the way her past did not determine how they saw or related to her now; but while these mimetic effects of transformation were seemingly foregrounded by her new friends, her former friends and classmates continued to judge her using criteria tied to her past actions and self. In this way, Lexy’s opinion that she ‘changes depending on who she’s with’ was agreed with by Leah who evaluated her as ‘dangerous’ for this reason. More generally, Georgia’s story highlights the delicate line between the continuous aspects of the self and the transforming aspects, through which a person might be evaluated as ‘inauthentic’ (too changeable) against an ideal of the authentic, self-same individual. I will discuss this further in the next chapter. It also highlights the tension for students who, growing up under each other’s watchful eyes, might continue to be judged according to past actions recorded in their shared history, even as growing up was recognized as necessitating the need to change.

The Man-dem To get status as a boy, you have to act masculine, you know like being sporty, dating various females, trying to get laid. —Jerome (eighteen, Year Thirteen) The Man-dem were the highest status group of boys in Year Eleven. Their territory was the tarmac football pitch at the centre of the school ground. As a designated pitch it was a sought-after location, enabling games not to be interrupted by other students cutting through, as was the case with the school field, where younger boys played. As was typically the case for

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boys, the group was large – consisting of about twenty members – and constantly in motion. Sporting skill, particularly in football, was central to their status within the year, with some members particularly visible as ‘sports stars’. Other routes to visibility included being known as the ‘buff ’ or ‘fit’ (good looking) heart throbs, or as ‘bad boys’ with links to well-known ‘gangs’ outside school and rumours of criminal activity. Collectively, the group were viewed as the most ‘masculine’ group, the ‘man men’. Like the It Girls, the group members identified as variously ‘black, white, Asian and mixed’ and ‘from’ a range of places including Ghana, Nigeria, Greece, Italy, Peru, China, India and Pakistan. As I will discuss further in Chapter 6, while having diverse identifications, they shared a style which was indexed by students as ‘black’, highlighting the mimetic ways through which friends could understand themselves as similar to each other.7 Not all the boys were equally known, and Davros, Jacob and Chimmi were considered the highest status – the most visible in the group. While the It Girls and Man-dem were equally ‘seen and known’, their visibility was produced differently and speaks of gendered conventions within the school. While the It Girls were famous because of their looks, and these legitimated particular kinds of action (for example the persuasive influence over boys), it was still not acceptable for them to ‘act big’. In contrast, the high-status boys were legitimated in exerting their influence more broadly and expansively over others and this did not risk damaging their reputations. The Man-dem occupied a whole range of positions within the academic spectrum. Some were ‘high achievers’, in all top sets and Leaders in Learning, while at the other end of the spectrum, some were labelled as ‘low achievers’, in bottom sets and actively oppositional in class.8 However, achievement in school was not mutually exclusive with visibility and opposition in class. Davros and Jacob were two of the highest status boys in the year and in all top sets, predicted As at GCSE, but both produced visibility in class by entering into battles of wills with the teachers. Small and spry, Jacob was well-known as an athletics and football ‘star’, an academic high achiever and a big personality, often joking, doing impressions or clowning around. His best friend Chimmi, also a sporting star and academic high achiever, was a calm contrast to his high-energy friend, and a thoughtful and reassuring contributor to ‘class friend’ conversations in the classroom. Davros was a commanding presence in the classroom, sometimes warm and welcoming, and at other times willing to stand his ground and enter into a battle of wills with the teacher or another student. Both Davros and Jacob were often visible in the classroom. In some lessons and with some teachers, they were encouraging leaders, telling other students to be quiet and listen to the teacher, or taking the lead in class

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discussions. At other times, they would take an oppositional stance, ignoring teachers’ commands, or enacting them slowly, without breaking eye contact with the teacher. As one teacher said, strong characters like these had a lot of power in the classroom, and could affect whether the lesson ran smoothly, or whether it descended into chaos. These actions were evaluated as legitimate by students because of the already high status of the boys. However, in their private spaces, some students were critical of these actions, which they judged as ‘abuses of power’ and ‘intimidation’. As Leah said one day after a classroom show-down between Jacob and a teacher, ‘I don’t like Jacob, I don’t think he’s a very nice person. But he has the attention on him, and the power, he can control the way things go.’ ‘Yeah,’ Richard agreed, ‘he can misuse his power, like if you say something he’ll just look at you and then look away.’ For Leah, there was considerable fascination in observing Jacob and Davros and the dynamics between them; as she observed, their attempts ‘to control the way things go’ were not only directed at less popular students but at each other. Jacob and Davros, she observed, were ‘always trying to out-do each other because they’re both power hungry’. In her opinion, it was Davros who emerged as the winner in this contest because ‘he is the most rude, the most outrageous.’9 This kind of ‘competitive equality’ (Evans 2006)10 was characteristic of friendships among the Man-dem, as another member explained to me. Sitting on the grass one lunchtime, Samiya, Kemal and myself made an unusual grouping. For my benefit, Samiya started to ask Kemal about his friendships: ‘The boys talk about their penis size, don’t they?’ ‘Yeah,’ confirmed Kemal. ‘So, what else do boys talk about?’ ‘Between us lot yeah? It’s who’s got the most money, who looks the sharpest, who’s got the most girls, who’s got the least girls… it’s about competition.’ As I will discuss in the next chapter, for girls, bitching (talking badly about someone behind their back) represents an act of distinction against a friend who may be defined in terms of the closest sameness. Here, the boys agreed on what was important – ‘girls, money, looking sharp’ – and differentiated themselves through more open acts of competition. In both these cases, action had the double-sided ability to both connect and separate. As Kemal went on to explain, ‘We all take it as a joke, but obviously sometimes we’re being serious.’ There was a line that enabled this to be taken as banter, but the irreversibility of action meant this could be an unpredictable line. ‘What happens when it gets serious?’ I asked. ‘Between boys? Fights. But we hardly ever get to the point where we start punching each other.’ As I will explore more in the next chapter, there was a common rhetoric among students that girls dealt with their differences through bitching, whereas boys dealt with them through violence. However, as Kemal’s last statement highlights, these threats of violence were rarely acted upon.

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The Misfits Then you get the people by the back wall, you can’t really describe them … well they keep to themselves a lot… the back wall is generally associated with grunge. —Lexy As described by James and Leah, two members of the Misfits, their group was ‘low, but not the lowest’. Their territory was the ‘back wall’ on the edge of the school ground. Hidden away, the Misfits could not be seen unless sought out. In fact, Leah told me she consciously chose this location because it was ‘so out of the way’. About twenty-five students were part of the Misfits, which included the only other girls in the group Samantha, Sejal and Nadia. At break and lunchtimes, the territory filled with a mass of students, standing in groups chatting or swirling around, play fighting and wrestling. The majority of the group were white, some ‘not from anywhere’ and some ‘from’ Russia and Italy. There were also members who were ‘Asian’ and ‘from’ China, India, Indonesia and Pakistan. As with the other friendship groups discussed in this chapter, while a number of the group were in high sets, there was not a uniform orientation to school. Along with high achievers, deeply invested in formal schooling, there were ‘coasters’ who did what was needed to get by (and no more), and those who were not even doing this. While the group were often described by the other students as ‘the grungies’, only a few students had long hair, baggy and scruffy clothes, and the name of rock or heavy metal bands sewn on as patches on bags and coats or tippexed onto rucksacks. Others, in neat uniforms and with shortly cut hair, were described as ‘geeks’. This divergence of styles matched their self-identification as ‘the misfits’, the place for people who do not fit in to the mainstream, who are outside of and uninterested in the style and music tastes associated with high-status groups in the year. The Misfits cast their space as free from judgement, a refuge for those who did not fit in anywhere else. Discussing the history of the group, Leah told me that the group had grown larger over the years as those who ‘were on their own before’ gravitated there, as ‘it was an easy place to go’: ‘Like Dominic, he was on his own before but now he’s found a place here.’

Not Fitting in Looking back on her time at Collingson after having left, Leah described her experience of ‘not fitting in’; ‘They [her peers at Collingson School,

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i­ncluding the people within her friendship group] didn’t understand me and I didn’t understand them. I understood them in an anthropological way, or if I had to be a psychologist, I could explain their behaviour… I had different interests and values to them as people.’ Leah often felt she observed her peers from an ‘academic distance’, and as one of my key interlocutors in school, she constantly impressed me with her incisive analysis of relations in school. But in contrast to many (although by no means all) other students, she did not experience the feelings of closeness and sameness, the affection, security and recognition of friendship in school. At the same time, she recognized the pragmatics of having a group of friends at school. Despite ‘not even particularly liking quite a few of them’, Leah continued to spend time with the Misfits because ‘I have no choice, I’ve got nowhere else to hang out.’ Having a group of friends, even ones you do not like, she explained, was like a ‘safety net’. Leah, like Georgia, often defined herself in relation to her friends outside school, and their differing experience of attending fee-paying schools. The first day I meet Leah, during a conversation about my research, she suggested that I contrast Collingson with one of these schools: In private [fee paying] school, everyone works hard and wants to do well, so everyone is competing against each other. It can be a really bitchy environment, I mean I’ve seen people cry because they get an A, an A is seen as a failure, you have to get A*. To get a B, you might as well get a U, it’s a complete failure. But here if you work hard, you’re seen as arrogant, it’s not cool to work hard in lessons here. Looking back at her time in Collingson, Leah described living in a ‘different world’ to most of her fellow students: Mostly I don’t regret that I’ve had this experience  [attending Collingson School], because I think it’s been a fantastic experience for understanding the world… I wouldn’t have seen it because I live in a different world to them [her fellow Collingson students] and when I entered the school gates that was a different world. But I do think that my confidence and social life up until now has suffered. As I discussed in Chapter 1, class was not assigned by students as a forensic presence connected to persons, in the way that being a boy or girl, black, white, Asian or mixed, and/or from somewhere was. As such its presence in school came in and out of focus in a different way to the ongoing discussion and interrogation of these differences. However, f­ riendship groups

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were often the place where the interrogation of the ‘unequal d ­ istribution of resources’ (Tyler 2015) could come into view. As the year progressed, a regular topic of discussion among students was the decision to stay at Collingson for sixth form or to make the move to a different school or college. For some students, such as Georgia and Leah, a fee-paying school was one of the possibilities available to them; for other students without this possibility, options included moving to the selective state sixth form college Clare House, considered one of the ‘top’ colleges in the country, or to sixth forms in other schools such as the nearby ‘high achieving’ Sefton Park. In the Misfits territory, Sejal reported from a recent open evening she had attended at Clare House, ‘You need As to get in, even though they say you need Bs, because there are so many people applying you have to really get As to get in.’ ‘Apparently,’ chimed in Lionel, ‘Sefton Park is a better sixth form than Clare House.’ ‘Yeah,’ said Sejal, ‘but it’s in a really rich area, and full of rich people. It’s really hard to get into anyway, but rich people are cleverer so…’ ‘Rich people aren’t necessarily clever, some of them can be quite stupid,’ interjected Dominic. ‘Yeah,’ agreed Sejal, clarifying her position, ‘but if you’re rich your parents can pay for private tutors, and stuff, so they can make sure you get into a good school.’ Sejal, Dominic and Lionel were all predicted top grades in their GCSEs, but as this conversation highlighted, they were also aware that doing well and good grades were only part of the resources at play.

Imagining the Good Life, Imagining Violence When I asked some of the Misfits what it was like to be a teenage boy, Tom replied, ‘we’re the wrong people to ask really… we’re not exactly the norm.’ Describing what led to popularity for boys, Richard described: ‘If you’re good at sport, or funny and clever then you’re popular. If you’re just smart, then people think you’re boring. Loads of the boys who are popular are sports stars, like Chimmi and Abdul [members of the Man-dem].’ I asked him why this made them popular. ‘Maybe because people idolize them, because they see what they can do.’ ‘They’re like sports personalities,’ interjected Dominic. ‘Maybe because it’s not that people actually like them but like what they can do, because people see what they can do.’ In the gendered legitimacy of particular kinds of actions and intersubjective influence, while, as I will discuss in more detail in the next chapter, girls tended to exert influence over each other in more intimate (but no less potent) ways, the high-status boys were legitimated in exerting influence in more overt and expansive ways. For the Misfit boys, they expressed their experiences as that of being dismissed,

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ignored or laughed at by high-status boys in class. While in lessons, conventions of visibility and status enabled the expansion of some selves and the compression of others, in the safety of their friendship group territories more kinds of action were possible. While the boys spoke of feeling silenced or threatened in class, their territory offered a safe space in which to express themselves and engage in collaborative acts of imagined violence. Discussing the recent report from the national school inspectorate body, Tom repeated a rumour to some of the group that the ‘psychos’ were asked not to come in on that day, so they did not affect the school’s report. Lionel announced he had come up with a better solution, ‘a cull’. On another occasion, discussing their position in the year, James explained, ‘We’re the sort of people that if we put our hands up and say something then everyone groans or complains.’ Ibrahim continued, ‘So we formed our own little tribe and when we overpopulate them in their classroom then we tend to do the same thing to them, instead of a sigh or a groan we end up shooting them.’ From the safety of their own territory, the Misfit boys engaged in their own definition which denied the value of the status accrued. This imagined violence also exemplifies the significance of recourses to violence for boys (imagined or threatened), in ways not legitimated for girls. One lunchtime, Leah started to do an impression of the Man-dem, imitating a macho swagger and their way of speaking. This led to a tirade of insults from Tom, Michael and James as they labelled the Man-dem ‘idiots’, ‘dickheads’, ‘wankers’ and ‘wastes of space’. Changing the tone, Tom asked thoughtfully, ‘You know what I was wondering the other day? What happens to people like that after school? You can’t really imagine them after the age of twenty-two.’ ‘They end up in prison, or they stay at home on benefits,’ replied Leah. Michael turned to me: ‘We’re the smart ones and the rest are stupid, that’s why we hang out round here… We would spend every waking minute mocking the rest of our year because we believe them to be no-brainers with no hope in life. Basing all our corny jokes on crude stereotypes that unfortunately turn out to be true.’ ‘Yeah,’ agreed James, ‘when you get to know people like that… their intelligence is lacking and they’re not that charismatic, they’ve only got status because they’re sporty.’ These two examples highlight the ambivalence through which the Misfits observed and judged the Man-dem according to differing sets of criteria. In the first example, Dominic and Richard highlighted the criteria of visibility recognized by all students in the year, and particularly the gendered criteria through which boys gained status through ‘what they could do’, including being funny, clever and good at sports (whereas girls gained status through what they looked like). In the second conversation,

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despite the clear evidence to the contrary, such as the academic success and leadership roles that members of the Man-dem held in the school, in this scathing assessment, the group was generalized and denigrated according to the ideological associations of classed and racialized masculinity shaped by white supremacy – criminal activity, reliance on benefits and lack of intelligence (Archer and Yamashita 2003; Joseph-Salisbury 2019). While Leah and the Misfit boys were clear about their relative status within the year and shared with their peers in the year group, they did not find themselves wanting, but instead understood themselves as ethical selves in an unethical world – where status was based on ‘intimidation’ and the ‘abuse of power’. As part of this they could draw on broader ideologies of dominance to enable them to imagine a future in which status will be reversed and they were the successful ones, even if they were not currently.

The Green Corridor Girls So far, I have described the visibility of the high-status It Girls and Mandem, and the relative invisibility of the Misfits. In line with the conventions of the informal realm, the high-status students were ‘seen and known’ by the low-status students, while the low-status students were much less visible to the high-status students. As such I often heard the Misfits discuss the It Girls and Man-dem but rarely heard the It Girls and Man-dem discuss the Misfits. The Green Corridor Girls had a connecting position in the year; their friendships with members of different groups in the year, including the It Girls, Man-dem and Misfits, meant they held an interesting position in the year group hierarchy, suspended between the intense scrutiny of high visibility, and the restrictions on action for those expected to be invisible. The group consisted of a core of five girls, who all identified as white and ‘not from anywhere’ – Caroline, Lisa, Keely, Jess and Debbie – with a number of peripheral members who spent varying amounts of time in the girls’ territory. The core group varied academically: Caroline, Jess and Debbie were among the highest achievers in the year, in top sets for everything, while Lisa and Keely were in middle and lower sets, although they were all invested in the formal aspects of schooling. Their territory was ‘the green corridor’, a large hallway on the ground floor of one of the main school buildings. Although this territory was less immediately visible than that of the It Girls, it was a busy thoroughfare; it was on the route to the Mandem’s football pitch, the girls’ toilets and many of the classrooms, and they often had ‘visitors’ – people stopping by.

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Best friends, authoritative Caroline and chatty Lisa socialized with the It Girls and Man-dem outside of school and went to the same parties. Sweet-natured Keely did not go to the parties and spent time instead with low-status girls Talia and Deepa. As Lisa explained to me, ‘she just doesn’t like what goes on there, like the drinking…’ ‘And the humping,’ Keely added, ‘We don’t mind, we’re still close friends.’ Jess and Debbie were both sporty and spent time with other people on their respective sports teams. As Lisa described her group to me, she said, ‘I don’t think we have a proper stereotype because there is a bit of everything in our group… We’re all interested in different things but we all just get along.’ In their grouping, the Green Corridor Girls encompassed different ideas of what a good life is, now and in the future: the visibility and teenage fun of parties and drinking, the authenticity of true friendships regardless of status, and the commitment to studies and focus on future success. In her description of Caroline’s embodiment of these different ideas of what it means to be a successful and ethical person, Leah was clear: Caroline was a popular girl but not for the same reason [as the Man-dem]. I think because she was so strong and appeared so confident and people respond well to really confident people, because no one would mess with her. She asserts herself and she’s strong, people think she’s like a rock. She will stand up for herself and if she’s angry you’ll know about it, and at the same time she can be very kind. And at the same time as being very clever she fits into being a party girl, so she’s sort of got it all. She had a core group but apart from that she could go anywhere in the school, she could be part of any group. So really, she didn’t have a personality, she was everything. Interestingly, in Leah’s description, Caroline could ‘go anywhere’ and hang out with any group in the year, but her qualities were also those that were typically considered by the students as masculine – asserting yourself and dealing with things ‘face-to-face’ (in contrast to bitching, which happens ‘behind the back’) – as well as feminine ‘kindness’. As we will see in this book, while historically constituted ideas about what are appropriate forms of action shaped judgement and criteria, the character and standing of individual students meant that some have more freedom than others to act in unconventional ways and still be considered acceptable. In Leah’s interpretation, Caroline’s status was as a result of her ability to embody different ideas about what it means to be a successful and ethical person, ideas that were often viewed as being in tension in evaluation practices between groups.

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The Green Corridor Girls, with their central territory and friendships across the year group, were also conduits of knowledge, acting as a sort of switchboard for the speedy spread of information within the year. As Lisa described, ‘sometimes we’ll run up to each other in the hall and we’ll be like “I’ve got to tell you something!” Then it spreads rounds the whole school, but it’s not our fault!’ I saw this in action one lunchtime, as we sat in a circle, legs crossed, on one side of the Green Corridor, chatting idly about the previous night’s TV. Suddenly, our conversation halted as everyone turned to look at the cause of a flurry of activity. Candice, part of a small group of ‘Opt-out rebels’, who often skipped classes and were fairly disengaged in the year group hierarchy, came storming past. She muttered, ‘I can’t believe they’ve done that!’ loudly before disappearing into the girls’ toilets. Gemma jumped up from our circle and followed her in there. Ten minutes later Gemma emerged triumphantly from the toilet, and again we all stopped talking, looking at her expectantly. ‘Right, I’ve got the gossip,’ she said, making herself comfortable. ‘You know at Indigo’s party they all took E tablets?’ ‘I didn’t know that,’ said Keely, looking puzzled, while the rest of the group nodded their heads. Gemma continued: ‘Well, the teachers found out. One of the Year Tens grassed them up. And now they’re following those people around, up Collingson high street and stuff, because they all smoke Cannabis as well, so they’re following them around with walkie-talkies and stuff and they just found this out, so they’re pissed off.’ This was the first telling of a story that unsurprisingly became hot gossip within the year group. After lunch the group went to their respective lessons, and sitting with their class friends, from different peer groups, the story was recounted and dissected, enthralling friends in the slow afternoon lessons. The following day, as I spent break-time with the Misfits, this story was again recounted, this time embedded in judgement which assessed the opt-out rebels as irresponsible and wild.

Friendship and Difference While friendship groups were centrally structuring of the year group and its hierarchy, other kinds of friendship, understood in terms of difference and closeness, were also valued by students. These friendships were not premised on similarity and did not carry with them the same expectations of shared time and space, or the same mimetic connection between friends (and the associated risk of a friend’s actions tainting their friends’ reputations). Small actions of friendliness, like enthusiastic greetings or hugs as they passed in the hall or waited for lessons, enabled students to live up to the expectations of time and space that their close friendships and groups

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demanded of them, while at the same time making and maintaining other friendships and connecting students in emanating networks of friendly relations. Furthermore, while friendship groups generally consisted of either boys or girls, class friendships and cross-group links enabled friendships between girls and boys. ‘Class friends’ was an important kind of friendship which developed outside friendship groups. As suggested by the name, class friends predominantly spent time together within lessons and then went to their separate friendship group territories at lunch and break. Classrooms represented spaces apart from the territorially marked areas of the school grounds, and were a common place where friendships which were understood in terms of difference rather than sameness developed. As students did not choose who they would be in class with (and often who they sat next to), they might not be in some or most lessons with friends from their group; however, the importance of always being with some kind of friend remained. For these reasons, having good class friends was not viewed as a threat to the friendship group. These friendships were described by students in terms of closeness yet difference, and class friends often made for incongruous pairings. For example, both Leah and Samiya were students I got to know well, and their voices and perspectives can be heard throughout this book. Leah was a sceptical and analytical member of the low-status Misfits; she was clear about ‘not fitting in’ and approached her year mates with an academic distance. Samiya was a chatty and outgoing member of the high-status It Girls; she was at the heart of the status hierarchy, approaching the dynamics with a high-spirited mix of being fed up with the ‘pettiness’ of the situation, and laser-sharp bitching about the ‘bad lip-liner’ or ‘minxy behaviour’ of peers who crossed her path. Leah and Samiya became friends on a school trip in Year Nine, and their shared time in Drama class allowed them to continue this friendship apart from the territory and status that divided them. They both got a lot of enjoyment out of their friendship, including insight on the dynamics of the year group from very different perspectives.

Unification, Differentiation and Different Kinds of People SWR: So how would you describe Collingson? Natasha: Really comfortable, you feel like when you’re coming to   school like you’re at home. I like Collingson, I love it. When Natasha returned from an induction day at Clare College, she said she was unsure about what to do: whether to stay at Collingson or move

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to the college. She told her friends and me ‘I might leave, because I got into Clare House… but I didn’t like the people, they were upbeat and nice, but I really don’t feel they were my kind of people.’ In this chapter, I have ­explored Year Eleven as both unified and differentiated. In the first part of the chapter, the ‘Last Day of School’ captured the pinnacle of this unification, ‘all of us together and celebrating everyone together’. Through their shared history and commitment to a shared ethic of growing up, growing together, Year Elevens could understand themselves as a ‘good group’ and a ‘loving collectivity’. At the same time, these actions and experiences of unification co-­ existed with actions and experiences of differentiation. A status hierarchy was recognized by students, regardless of their position in it. Those with high status were the most ‘seen’ and ‘known’ and, as we saw with the It Girls and the Man-Dem, status legitimated particular kinds of action. However, as other students were quick to clarify, ‘most known’ did not necessarily mean ‘most liked’, highlighting ways of seeing status that did not mean that those with less status were of less value. As we saw with the Misfits, while they recognized the actions of high-status students as producing visibility, they often judged these actions critically, or as pointless and unimportant. Involved in their own kinds of action and judgement, they were not interested in being judged according to the same criteria as high-status students. Throughout this book we will see the ways students defined and enacted ethical selves and the different criteria by which they wished to be judged and judged each other as part of this. While high-status students were not usually viewed by their peers as ethical exemplars to be emulated, their status legitimized their exertion of intersubjective influence. This influence could then be used to enforce ‘the right way’ of doing things, leading others to punish or exclude those who did not conform. As we will see in later chapters, this influence could be exerted with the intent of maintaining the year group as an ethical collective. Friendship groups and the relationships between them were an important way through which difference and sameness was parsed in school. Students’ considerations of what it meant to be a ‘particular kind of person’ drew on deeply racialized, classed and gendered histories, but often, in somewhat oblique ways, foregrounding local hierarchies of value and status and legitimacies of action and influence.11 Tracing this, I have tried to capture the way different sets of criteria could be brought into action by students, enabling them to foreground or background particular kinds of meaning. Criteria might focus on the actions within school that created status and visibility, but also called on ideologically and historically informed meanings and ethics. Both constituted the material from which students defined themselves, their friends and others. Relatedly, as we have also seen, friendship groups

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enabled students to collectively define and claim to embody particular virtues, claims that were not dependent on (and sometimes directly opposed to) status in the informal realm. As such, we can recognize simplifying and clarifying processes at work in students’ relations, that e­ nable groups to become ‘exemplars’ of particular ways of life. I have also examined the way constellations of differences were made sense of from the perspective of particular groups and individuals, and the way particular kinds of classification, categorization and interpretation enabled students to position themselves in the social world of school and their imagined futures. For example, while Natasha experienced school ‘like home’ with ‘her kind of people’, Leah experienced school as a ‘different world’ with people she did not identify with. Even within the same students there was complexity; for example, James appeared twice in this chapter, at one point expressing how glad he was to have this time with his fellow students on the last day of school, while at another point engaging in an imaginary ‘cull’ of people in the year. As I will go onto explore further in the next chapter, with a particular focus on girls’ friendships, friends and friendship groups were an important way through which people could be understood as particular kinds of persons. Friends were seen and judged as ‘like-minded selves’, drawing on notions of authenticity, self-sameness and continuity. In the following chapters, I will develop these themes further to explore how the shape of individuality can become visible in school.

Notes   1. Describing a very similar form of year group dominance in Lakefield School, Alexander notes ‘the year group is a defining category of identity from the very first day of Year Seven because it serves as one of the primary collective nouns by which students are institutionally recognized, and by which they are able to locate themselves within the formal hierarchy of the school’. This taken-for-granted form of institutional organization, he argues, is part of a broader taxonomic ordering of childhood as ‘a period of accumulative development, rather than as a time of intrinsic value on its own’ (2020, 85).   2. Suspended from school for ‘bad behaviour’.   3. The reality was often more complicated than this – some members of the same group might not consider themselves good friends or might not even like each other. Someone could be a member of a group, by virtue of their close friendship with only one other member (as long as that member was good friends with other members). Friendships were thus the strands that connected members together, but while some members were securely ensconced by a number of tight friendship strands, others dangled perilously, with only one or two strands connecting them to the group.

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  4. Danau Tanu charts similar spatialized dynamics in her ethnography of an i­ nternational school in Indonesia, where use of different hang out spaces in the school reflected and reproduced racialized and gendered hierarchies of status (2017).   5. As Valerie Hey writes, ‘Taking up positions within heterosexuality confers differing (if troubling) forms of social power associated with girls’ differing claims upon its prestige’ (1997, 13).   6. Georgia’s way of describing herself to me highlighted the oblique ways that classed distinctions were made visible by some students. In Kulz’s ethnography, a participant Poppy describes herself similarly, but in explicitly classed terms. Despite having been born and brought up in the area, Poppy describes herself and her friends as ‘“not typical Redwood kids”, because they were conscious of being “very ­middle-class”’ (2014, 692). Reay et al. (2007) highlight similar observations from the perspective of parents, who send their children to comprehensive schools, committing to multi-ethnic spaces while still seeking to defend and reproduce their (child’s) white middle-class privilege.   7. Similarly, in research with young men in another London school, Archer and Yamashita describe that ‘[t]hese masculinities were racialized, but not in simple or homogeneous ways’ (2003, 120). They describe the ‘cultural entanglements’ observable among peers – ‘commonplace forms of creolization, hybridity, syncretism, [that] represent a profound challenge to the idea that national and social forms are logically coherent, unitary or tidy’ (Hesse 2000, 2, emphasis in original, cited in Archer and Yamashita 2003, 120).   8. This is in contrast to other ethnographic research where to act masculine is mutually exclusive with doing well at school, e.g. Mac An Ghaill (1994) and Evans (2006).   9. Leah’s insights reflect Evans’ analysis of the disruptive boys’ peer group within Tenterground School. ‘When the climate is one of ruthless domination, it is often the brightest amongst the tough boys who quickly becomes peer leader. It is not simply a matter of brute force; it is also to do with the combined skills of daring and personal charisma’ (2006, 86). 10. Although there are similarities between the ‘competitive equality’ of the disruptive boys and the Man-dem, for the Man-dem this did not inevitably destroy the ‘boy’s chances of doing well at school’ (2006, 116). As I have described, while some of the Man-dem did disrupt lessons, their dominance in class was not necessarily at odds with academic success; their ‘intersubjective influence’ enabled them to decide whether to conform or resist and to direct other students accordingly. 11. These local hierarchies have their own histories, as evidenced by foundational ethnographies of young people’s lives in London conducted in the 1980s and 1990s.

References Alexander, Claire E. 1996. The Art of Being Black: The Creation of Black British Youth Identities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Alexander, Patrick. 2020. Schooling and Social Identity: Learning to Act Your Age in Contemporary Britain. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi. org/10.1057/978-1-137-38831-5.

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Archer, Louise and Hiromi Yamashita. 2003. ‘Theorising Inner-City Masculinities: “Race”, Class, Gender and Education’, Gender and Education 15(2): 115–32. https:// doi.org/10.1080/09540250303856. Arendt, Hannah. 2013. The Human Condition: Second Edition. Chicago: University of ­Chicago Press. Back, Les. 1996. New Ethnicities and Urban Culture: Racisms and Multiculture in Young Lives. London: UCL Press. Baumann, Gerd. 1996. Contesting Culture: Discourses of Identity in Multi-Ethnic London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chun, Elaine. 2011. ‘Reading Race Beyond Black and White’. Discourse & Society 22(4): 403–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926510395833. Evans, Gillian. 2006. Educational Failure and Working-Class White Children in Britain. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hey, Valerie. 1997. The Company She Keeps: An Ethnography of Girls’ Friendships. Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press. Joseph-Salisbury, Remi. 2019. ‘Wrangling with the Black Monster: Young Black MixedRace Men and Masculinities’, The British Journal of Sociology 70(5): 1754–73. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12670. Kulz, Christy. 2014. ‘“Structure Liberates?”: Mixing for Mobility and the Cultural Transformation of “Urban Children” in a London Academy’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 37(4): 685–701. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2013.808760. Mac an Ghaill, Máirtín. 1994. The Making of Men: Masculinities, Sexualities and Schooling. Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press. Munn, Nancy D. 1992. The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) Society. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Reay, Diane. 2007. ‘“Unruly Places”: Inner-City Comprehensives, Middle-Class Imaginaries and Working-Class Children’, Urban Studies 44(7): 1191–1201. https://doi. org/10.​1080/00420980701302965. Rosengren, Dan. 2010. ‘Seriously Laughing: On Paradoxes of Absurdity among Matsigenka People’. Ethnos 75 (1): 102–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141840903402468. Sahlins, Marshall. 2011. ‘What Kinship Is (Part One)’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17 (1): 2–19. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2010.01666.x. Tanu, Danau. 2017. Growing Up in Transit: The Politics of Belonging at an International School. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Toren, Christina. 1999. Mind, Materiality and History: Explorations in Fijian Ethnography. London and New York: Routledge. Tyler, Imogen. 2015. ‘Classificatory Struggles: Class, Culture and Inequality in Neoliberal Times’, The Sociological Review 63(2): 493–511. https://doi.org/10.1111/​ 1467-954X.​12296. Wulff, Helena. 1995. ‘Inter-Racial Friendship: Consuming Youth Styles, Ethnicity and Teenage Femininity in South London’, in Vered Amit-Talai and Helena Wulff (eds), Youth Cultures: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. London: Routledge, pp, 63–80.

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Girls’ Friendships, Making, Breaking and Intimate Power It was a warm, sunny day in September near the start of the school year

and most of the Green Corridor Girls were sitting on the field. When the weather was like this, most groups moved from their normal territory to sit on the playing field. With the groups mixed up, the field provided a particularly good vantage point for observing and commenting on others. Keely pointed to their friend, Katy, talking and laughing with Jack, a little way off: ‘She’s off talking to Jack again, are they like getting it on or what? She told me that she had “feelings” for Nate the other day. She won’t tell me anything anymore because I have a big mouth.’ Caroline looked at me and gestured to Lisa, ‘We always tell each other everything.’ ‘Yeah,’ said Lisa, ‘Sometimes we’ll run up to each other in the hall and be like “I’ve got to tell you something!”, then it spreads round the whole school, but it’s not our fault.’ ‘We’re like one person anyway.’ Keely is still looking at Katy: ‘Katy is being so “gay”,1 she walked straight past and didn’t even say hi.’ As discussed in the previous chapter, friendships in school were often understood in terms of similarity, closeness and depth. Close friendships were usually based on notions of sameness, creating and manifesting an understanding of ‘like-minded’ selves who have found each through what they share. These like-minded selves intensively shared time and space, revealing their depths without fear of judgement. Making and maintaining friendships foregrounded the acceptance of pre-existing selves, each with their own history. At the same time, friends were mimetically connected, ‘like we’re one person’, with intertwined reputations and a responsibility to the other. For girls, best friendship was described in terms of closest sameness, and was often among the first things they told me about themselves. Thus, Caroline and Lisa described themselves as ‘like one person’, who ‘tell each

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other everything’. Girls’ friendships were relationships of love, belonging and commitment. At the same time, to have friends in school was centrally important to being considered an acceptable person, so friendships were both personal, private relationships and public representations of acceptability. Furthermore, while gendered conventions of action and visibility made it acceptable for (high-status) boys to exert their will and extend their intersubjective influence widely across the year, this was not considered acceptable for girls. As we will see in this chapter, friendships enabled girls to exert their will in intimate, yet no less potent ways. In the final part of this chapter, I analyse my own experiences of friendship in school, describing how exertions of will, exclusion and friendship break-ups hold a formative position in my own personal history. In this chapter we also begin a closer examination of the analytical strands through which individual personhood emerges in the course of everyday life at school. Scholars have long noted that friendship implies a particular notion of personhood. The Western ideal of friendship as a personal, private and voluntary relationship between autonomous individuals getting to know each other’s ‘depths’ entails an independent individual existing prior to social relations, the locus of autonomous intentionality and possessor of a hidden inner self that may or may not be revealed (Paine 1969; Allan 1989; Carrier et al. 1999; Spencer and Pahl 2006). But the anthropological literature on friendship also challenges this particular conceptualization and draws attention to the diverse ways in which friendships are constituted in practice and defined by friends themselves (Bell and Coleman 1999; Santos-Granero 2007; Desai and Killick 2010; Evans 2010; Froerer et al. 2010; Torresan 2011). This enables scholars to consider the relationship between different modes of friendship and different modes of personhood (e.g. Santos-Granero 2007; Course 2010). As I will explore in this chapter, by paying attention to the complexities of the girls’ friendships we can see the importance of both the separated and connected dimensions of selves (Lambek 2013). Implicated in one another, they enable girls to become particular kinds of persons in relation to those around them. As we will see, making friends is understood as like-minded selves becoming closer to other like-minded selves and foregrounds forensic dimensions – the continuous and self-same aspects of the person. At the same time, to become close friends entails a shift in criteria by which the person would subsequently be judged, not as a completely separate person, but as someone whose ‘bad’ actions could potentially tarnish the reputation of their close friends. Bitching and the exclusion of friends also foregrounds mimetic dimensions – the tenacious shaping of other selves. The manifold actions of friendship discussed in this chapter highlight the way these can change the criteria by which actions and persons are sub-

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sequently judged, shifting the focus back and forth between separate and connected selves.

Girls’ Friendships Although there were some mixed friendship groups, most groups were made up of all girls or all boys. There was a visual form to these groups. Walking around school at lunchtime, the multitude of students took shape in particular ways. Small, tight coteries of girls sat talking intensely on the floor of hallways, or squeezed onto a bench, while circulating shoals of boys, linked loosely in banter, play fighting or football, expanded to fill the remaining space. The school field, playground and hallways were full of students, but understood from the perspective of the students, friendships not only occurred within time and space but created specific formations of time and space (Munn 1992), with gendered patterns. These visual differences reflected the differing way boys and girls tended to constitute their friendships. Girls’ talk often focused on the personal details of their and other people’s lives and as I will discuss in this chapter, the disclosure of information not publicly known was an important action of friendship indicating an increasing closeness. For boys, whose conversations did not necessarily centre on personal details, different kinds of shaping of selves occurred – as we will see in Chapter 6 – through the rough and tumble of play fighting and the exchange of sex talk. As discussed in the previous chapter, there were also gendered differences in status, visibility and the legitimacy of action. ‘Acting big’, and the extension of influence across the year, was considered a legitimate action for boys, in a way that it was not for girls, even if they were evaluated as high status. For girls, status was often connected to the way they looked; their legitimate influence beyond their close friendships was dependent on being desired. As Richard put it, the boys were popular because ‘people can see what they can do’, whereas ‘the girls have their looks’. However, as I will explore in this chapter, friendship offered an important means through which girls could legitimately exert their will.

Closeness, Disclosure and Depth As described previously, friendships were often described and judged according to criteria of closeness, sameness and depth. For girls, the closer the friendship, the more time should be spent together, the more secrets divulged, and hence the more they knew ‘the real you’. Friends should

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a­ cknowledge and accept you for ‘who you are’ – the real internal you. With friends, you could ‘be yourself ’ without fear of judgement. Year Thirteen best friends Eleanor, Megan and Jane explained the importance of their friendships. Eleanor said, ‘I’m really, really shy, it doesn’t really show when I’m in front of my best friends and stuff because they’re the only people with who I feel completely comfortable.’ I asked why they feel comfortable with each other. Megan answered, ‘Because they know you,’ Jane adding, ‘Because I know they like me.’ The revelation of depth was an important part of close friendships, and foregrounded the self-same dimensions of selves, the ‘real you’. These ideals of friendship closely matched ideologies of the individual, with friendship as a proximity between like-minded selves, who reveal their true authentic depths to each other. Close friendship thus brought with it the pleasure of being known and understood, but also entailed expectations of behaviour and responsibility. At the same time, for many friends, this sharing of space and time represented a choreography of effort to create this intimate space and time of friendship, carved out against the institutional organization of the school. The day I first met Samantha and Sejal, they declared ‘we are best friends’. Their time in school was choreographed to manifest and express closeness, sameness and constant exchange. Working against the confines of the lesson timetable that routinely separated them, Samantha and Sejal met before and after school, and the first thing they did when the bell rang was to seek each other out among the students milling through the corridors. They hugged and kissed, even if they had been apart for just one lesson, they linked arms, held hands as they chatted with other friends or stood a little way off from the rest of the group, heads close together, ­whispering – visibly sharing their secrets. When Sejal told of a fight with her parents, Samantha listened to her vent, and when Samantha was let down by a boy, Sejal comforted her as she cried, and reassured her that he was the one making the mistake. One word, an elliptical reference to a private joke, could send them into fits of laughter. They made plans for sleepovers or parties on Friday, and, on Monday, happily recounted their activities back to each other. Closeness between friends was often described in degrees – good friend, close friend, really close friend, best friend – bringing with them increasing expectations of shared time, space and exchange. As suggested by the lengths Sejal and Samantha went to, shared time and space was a vital expression of the closeness of a friendship. Best friends spent all available time together within school, and as much as possible outside school. The closer the friend, the closer the area of proximity; friends sat on each other’s laps, played with each other’s hair or sat quietly, hand in hand, with one head resting on the other’s shoulders. This was a physical affection not

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available to boys who, as I will discuss in Chapter 6, would be called gay if they engaged in similar actions. Best friends took great care of each other, almost always knowing where the other was, chasing after them to offer words of comfort or a hug if the other had been upset. Central to the actions of friendship was the constant exchange of talk, chatting throughout the school day, and then extending this by instant messenger or phone once they were at home. Friends talked together about what they had watched on television, what they were going to wear to a party, how a person had made them feel, what they had heard other people say and what they thought was going on with their own or other people’s group of friends. It was through this talk that proximity and closeness were created and manifested, and depths were revealed. While boys’ friendships could acceptably involve a lot less talk (with interaction constituted by football, play fighting, etc.), for girls, talk was the currency of friendship. Like space and time, the closer the friendship, the more talk was expected, and the more effort was made to create opportunities for talking. Shared expectations of talk created and evidenced the closeness of a friendship. Disclosure (Amit-Talai 1995) can be understood as the particular revelation of depths – what would not normally be known was offered to friends – and, in its reciprocity, created selves who knew each other intimately, beyond the surface. While the content of what was disclosed was a matter to be kept between the friends, the act of disclosure had performative qualities. In removing themselves from the rest of the group, turning their backs or whispering in each other’s ears, girls could show to others that they were the kind of friends who told each other things they did not tell others. Best friends were those who ideally ‘told each other everything’.

‘We Stopped Talking’: Breaking Friendships There was genuine love, belonging and pleasure in girls’ friendships, and comfort and recognition to be found in these intimate relations. But this was not all there was. Practices of breaking friendships, bitching and exclusion were also a common part of girls’ friendships, and, in these practices, we can see the tenacity and effort that went into shaping other selves into acceptable forms. The actions that created and maintained friendships, forming a proximity and an intimacy that carried expectations and comforts, could also be withheld in order to break a friendship. Spending less time together, no longer sharing the same space, speaking less or no longer disclosing, were all observed as signs of this rupture. To end the actions of friendship was to end the friendship. When girls said, ‘we don’t talk ­anymore’, this indicated a friendship had ended.

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In Year Eleven, Lillian told me the story of her brief friendship with Lara when they were both in Year Eight. Before they had become friends, Lillian was feeling lonely, clinging to the periphery of another group of friends but not at ease. She ‘didn’t really get them’ and they ‘didn’t really get her’. Working with Lara on a project, Lillian experienced for the first time in school that ‘click’ of recognition: ‘Everything she said was just like “yes!” You know? We totally got each other.’ The girls started spending as much time as possible together. ‘I’d get off the bus early and she’d wait for me so we could walk to school together. We’d always be on the phone or instant messenger or having sleepovers at each other’s houses.’ All actions of friendship helped to fuse them together in what Lillian experienced as a rapture of connection: ‘It’s difficult to explain but she was like a drug, she was the most amazing person to be with, she made me feel amazing about everything, it sounds strange, but I just had to be with her.’ But near the end of the school year, Lara started to reduce these actions of friendship. Lillian recounted: Then one time, I said something, it must have been wrong, but I didn’t know it, she became venomous, she wouldn’t tell me things and one time I came into class and she was sitting with Katia, and there was no space for me, she was like ‘oh sorry’… Then one day I came into school and she wouldn’t talk to me, I didn’t know what I’d done wrong and she wouldn’t tell me, I couldn’t understand, she just cut me off ‘bam’. I was properly depressed, I used to dread coming into school and every single day I used to cry after school. The following year Lillian found out that accusations had been levelled against her by Lara and used as justification for her ending the friendship with Lillian: ‘Afterwards I found out she’d been bitching about me with Katia, saying I copied her all the time and was really annoying.’ In hindsight, Lillian gave a fresh interpretation of Lara’s (lack of ) actions, ‘I think she wanted to be friends with more popular people, because she dropped Katia pretty quickly and after that became friends with Lola and that lot, it was like a ladder going up.’ But at the time, the suddenness of Lara’s change, and Lillian’s lack of understanding of why this was the case, was devastating. This intensity of making, being and breaking friends was not an unusual experience for girls. As discussed in the previous chapter, in younger years friendships were made and broken frequently, while as students got older, the speed at which these transformations happened slowed down. Friendships tended to be more stable in Year Eleven, and the mercurial nature of the withdrawal of talk and other friendship actions less extreme. But these stories of exclusion, break-ups or being ‘dumped’ by friends highlight

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the pain of living among the unpredictable actions of others and formed an important part of the histories connecting students to each other, sometimes in the silence that followed the end of a friendship. Girls sometimes asked me, ‘did you know that they used to be friends’? As I got to know the students later in my fieldwork I could often answer yes to this question. But this was not from the quality of interactions that could be observed in everyday life, but rather the histories of relationships that they or others revealed. If close friendships entailed a mimetic connection, an ex-friend was held as forensically responsible for her actions. The point where a friend stopped being a friend was performative, thus changing the criteria by which both parties were judged. As we stood talking one lunchtime around the tree, Lexy, visiting from her usual territory, was asking Sejal about her best friend, Samantha. ‘And why aren’t her and Nadege friends anymore?’ Lexy asked. ‘Nadege likes to mess with people,’ responded Sejal, ‘Samantha just got sick of it.’ Lexy nodded in recognition. Sejal continued, ‘Now Nadege has stopped talking to me as well, it’s so immature, she won’t even ask me to pass her things in class, she gets other people to ask me, it’s just like “grow up”, that you can’t even ask me.’ A couple of weeks later, Sejal told me that the previous year, Nadia also stopped talking to Nadege because she was talking about her behind her back. ‘Could you tell we used to be friends?’ she asked me. ‘No,’ I answered, ‘I would never have guessed.’ ‘Yeah,’ pondered Sejal, ‘there’s a lot of this going on, people once being really close and then falling out.’

‘I Didn’t Talk to Her for a Year’: Sanctioning Friends Talk was not all or nothing, but a subtlety by which degrees of upset, affront or annoyance could be expressed to friends without ‘being said’. On Monday break time, as the Misfits milled around, Nadia, close friends with Samantha and Sejal, stood chatting intently with someone else as Sejal and Samantha talked about the weekend. This on its own was not enough for the girls to be sure Nadia was being ‘off with them’, but then, when Sejal asked her a question, Nadia answered with one word, avoiding eye contact. At the end of the break, she walked off to class with Leah, when normally she would have waited for Sejal. At lunchtime, Samantha and Sejal reflected on what they might have done to upset her. ‘Do you think it’s ‘cause we were drinking on Saturday night, and she doesn’t approve?’ suggested Sejal. ‘Yeah, that could be it, she can be a bit weird about that kind of thing,’ Samantha concurred. Regardless, the girls did not find out for sure, and after a couple of days of ‘hardly speaking’ to them, Nadia resumed her actions of friendship.

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Longer periods of ‘not speaking’ marked bigger misdemeanours. As I have previously discussed, friendship groups contained relationships of different degrees of closeness. Detailing these dynamics amongst her friendship group, the It Girls, Kadia told me that Grace and Samiya ‘get on alright but aren’t that close’. Here she shared with me an episode in their history, following which Grace and Samiya did not talk ‘for like a year’: Me and Samiya went on Grace’s instant messenger, and we were talking to random people, pretending to be her. It was just a joke but when Grace found out she was really annoyed. She forgave me but for some reason she didn’t forgive Samiya. Grace was hanging around with Tanya and Monique at the time, and she used to get Monique to come up to us and say really horrible things about Samiya. I was really in the middle, so if I spent too much time with Samiya at lunchtime, then Grace would get upset. Then after about a year, Grace said she wouldn’t mind being friends with Samiya again, but she didn’t want to be the one to make the first move. So, I told Samiya, and Samiya sent Grace a text. They’re alright now, but they don’t talk on the phone or anything. Non-disclosure was another means to end or create distance in a friendship. A friend withholding information which they shared with others was viewed by girls as a clear indicator that something was wrong in the relationship. As recounted by Lillian, one of the reasons she knew there was something wrong between her and Lara was because ‘she stopped telling me things’. Shortly afterwards, Lara stopped talking to her completely and their friendship ended. Actions of friendship thus created particular relations of space and time either of intimacy, proximity and constant exchange, or of distance, disconnection and absence of exchange. When Grace and Samiya ‘fell out’ and ‘weren’t speaking’, Kadia had to balance her commitments between the two, splitting the amount of time and the space she was able to share with both. These examples also highlight the constant attentiveness demanded of girls as they navigated their relationships. Friends might be angry with you and you would not know, they might forgive you but were still not your friend. The space and time of specific friendships, and the entanglements that enabled friendship groups to take shape involved careful attention to, and interpretation of, the actions of those around you. It was tiring work, as Sejal said: I hate the way that everything between girls is implied. You spend all your time trying to read between the lines, you don’t know if

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someone is annoyed or angry with you, and even if they were, they wouldn’t say. You’re always worried you’ve done something wrong, and you go over what you’ve said or done just in case. It can be really tiring. These withdrawals of the actions of friendship were not only personal, private expressions of upset or disapproval. They also enabled collective definitions and enactments of the acceptable and appropriate way to be a good friend, and a good girl, justified in terms of ethical judgements drawn from criteria of ‘how friends should act’, and ‘how girls should act’. Carrie stopped talking to her close friend Tina when Tina got together with a boy that Carrie had recently split up with and was especially upset because Tina was ‘always doing things like this’. Again, this was not communicated directly to Tina but via mutual friends. After a few months Carrie decided to start talking to Tina again because ‘He’s only a guy and it isn’t worth losing a friend over.’ Tina was judged as a ‘bad friend’ for putting a boy before the friendship according to ethical criteria of how friends should act. Similarly, Nadege was viewed as not ‘nice enough’. Both girls upset their friends and were sanctioned by them through the withdrawal of talk. Furthermore, even if a girl’s actions did not directly impact on their friends, she may still be punished. For example, as I will discuss in Chapter 6, if a friend was judged as behaving like ‘a slag’ (acting, or appearing to act, sexually ‘promiscuous’), she would often be sanctioned by friends, not because it affected the friendship, but because it may have led to a ‘bad reputation’ for both the girl herself, and her friendship group.

Exclusion The ability to end friendships, and thus hold an ex-friend as forensically responsible for her actions, rather than as connected with intertwined reputations, was a means by which girls could protect their own reputations. Exclusion could work to force girls out of particular spaces and times (Samiya could not spend time with Kadia and Grace), out of the friendship group (like Nadege), or out of friendship networks altogether. For example, as discussed in the last chapter, Georgia’s tentative place in the It Girls was gained following her outright rejection from all friendship groups in Year Nine. Depending on their relationships within the friendship group, girls were vulnerable to total exclusion. To be close to all the other girls in your group was to be woven into relations in such a way that the intersubjective influence of one or two others could not affect your inclusion in the group.

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On the other hand, a girl whose relations of closeness were only with one other member of the group was more vulnerable to being cast out at the will of another. While there were gendered conventions that placed limitations on girls’ ‘acting big’ and exerting their will widely in the year group, here we can see the more intimate ways that through exclusion – and inclusion – girls could exert their will and extend their intersubjective influence. Through these (non) actions of (not) friendship, some girls were able to shape the formations of space, time and exchange around them – controlling who could talk to whom, spend time with whom and where (Evans 2006). However, as we have also seen, attempts to exert will were not always successful and could backfire. Nadege talking badly about others in her group did not end up with them being excluded, but with her excluded. For girls, the actions of friendship were not only used to make or break personal and private relationships, but also as a collective, efficacious way to manifest, define and act upon the ethical conventions of action in school and shape other selves according to these. Most girls accepted the practice of exclusion as legitimate, even if they questioned the legitimacy of some acts of exclusion, or the truth of justifications given (‘I think they’re being out of order’). There was a lot at stake for girls in the endeavour to form  their selves in these acceptable ways. Georgia’s experience and visibility, described in the previous chapter, as an exemplar of the consequences of ‘thinking yourself better than others’, highlighted the possibilities of expulsion from formations of friendship altogether, as well as the recognition, companionship, love, security and social validation that these entailed. Most, but not all girls, were willing to accept these actions of friendship that could constitute both positive and painful experiences and affects. While other girls often recognized the double-edged and problematic nature of their relationships, even while they were deeply invested in them, Leah could not always bring herself to undertake this hard work: ‘I find friendships with girls really difficult, they’re really pathetic, like they hold onto every little thing, every little thing becomes an issue because they won’t let go of anything.’ However, despite her critique and her desire not to be drawn into these practices which she found ‘duplicitous’, Leah still became part of these relations as she sought friendships with girls as well as boys. Despite maintaining that her relationships were characterized by an ‘academic distance’, at other times she discussed painful experiences of friendship gone awry that further convinced her that the risks of increasing closeness were not worth taking.

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Bitching I think with girls they’re just analytical about how other girls act and they’re just judgemental… It’s because of bitchiness, girls know that they’re going to be analysed about everything they do. I think with girls it’s mainly like, ‘Did you see her wearing that?’, ‘She’s talking to that person, and I don’t like it’, ‘She’s talking to that boy, what does she think she’s doing?’ —Caroline While exclusion was often preceded and accompanied by bitching (which justified the exclusion), these practices did not necessarily go hand in hand. If practices of inclusion and exclusion can be understood in terms of distance (drawing closer, pushing away), bitching can be understood in terms of hierarchical difference (‘she’s like that, and by implication I’m not’). Bitching did not necessarily entail distancing and was recognized by girls as a normal and expected part of all friendships, even those defined in terms of the closest sameness. As Ruby explained, ‘It sounds funny, but they are your friends, it would never go to they dislike you, it’s just that you annoy them a little bit.’ ‘Yeah, because there’s a difference between not liking someone and bitching about them,’ added Samiya. So, while friendship was idealized by girls in terms of ‘depth’, bitching highlighted the dangers of being known. On the one hand, self-exposure was necessary for the creation of intimacy and expression of depth. On the other hand, bitching was a continuous reminder of vulnerability because of revelation. As Lexy noted, ‘I think everyone bitches about their close friends, because they know the most about them, so they know what to bitch about, they know more.’ Unsurprisingly, these commentaries on speech, action and character would often be disputed by those implicated in them. Bitching thus enabled a positive distinction for those engaged in it, defining selves (even those understood in terms of the closest sameness) as different to, and separate from, each other. Both girls and boys described bitching as a ‘natural quality’ of girls. The popular rhetoric was that girls dealt with tensions and disagreements by bitching, while boys ‘had it out’ physically. Girls and boys worked together to maintain this rhetoric, despite the contrary evidence that boys did bitch, and fighting was rare for both boys and girls. Furthermore, like many other rhetorical discourses in school, at times students reflected on the discrepancies between such claims and reality. As Samiya said to Kadia, Amir and me, ‘Boys are bigger bitches than girls, they’re bitchy to each other too.’ However, the idea that bitching was a ‘natural’ quality of girls maintained it as an acceptable way for girls to express ‘what they

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really thought’ without risking accusations of ‘acting big’ or ‘acting hard’. The partially concealed nature of bitching (that it happened behind the bitched-about’s back) also enabled claims to the ‘closest sameness’ to continue to be made. For girls, the recognition of bitching as an inevitable part of their friendships also acted as a continual reminder of the surveillance they were placing each other under. Bitching not only enabled the criticism of people and their actions, but also the articulation of the criteria of communication, exchange and the way girls should treat each other as friends. In the evaluations of acceptable speech that were a pervasive part of school life, even bitching itself was something that could be bitched about. Meanwhile, as a form of communication that happened behind the back of the target, it encouraged second-guessing, doubt and the impetus to subject yourself to the judgement you imagined others might be subjecting you to. At the same time, bitching itself was an action of disclosure. Sharing what you ‘really think’ about a person revealed your inner thoughts and was one way by which like-minded selves could be recognized. As such, bitching was one of the actions through which new friendships could be made, or friendships could be maintained or become closer. In these actions, the forensic dimensions of the self were again emphasized, in both the action of distinction from the bitched-about (‘what I’m like as opposed to what she’s like’), and in the action of recognition from the bitched-to (‘sharing what I really think with a fellow mind’). At the same time, bitching acted to shape the behaviour of others. Tanya, Natasha and I were sitting together on the top end of the field, the slight rise giving us a good view of the field, full of students sitting in groups or playing around in the bright spring sunshine. The girls were talking about the changes in their friendships over the years as they made daisy chains. ‘There were some people that made other people bitch, because they were such bitches,’ said Tanya. ‘Like Samiya,’ offered Natasha. ‘Yeah, when you’re around her, you bitch a lot.’ ‘She influences you a lot.’ ‘It’s not even in our nature,’ said Tanya as she threaded one stalk through another. ‘She’ll say something, and you’ll be like “yeah, yeah, yeah, I didn’t even realize”,’ agreed Natasha. ‘We’re not bitchy people but when we were with Samiya then you might end up saying something and you’ll be like “oh my god did I just say that”, because you wouldn’t say that normally. But because she influences you.’ Tanya stopped abruptly and looked at Natasha, her eyes wide, ‘We’re bitching right now!’ Natasha did not look up from her daisy chain, ‘Yeah I know, but we’re not saying it like that.’ Like other actions (or non-actions) of friendship, bitching was a performative, iterative act that could change the criteria by which girls (both

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speaker and target) were subsequently judged. In the flow of their conversation and the ease of like-minded selves sharing opinions, Natasha and Tanya’s criticisms of Samiya were well-worn (they had all been friends since Year Seven). In this case, the cumulative judgements of Tanya and Natasha had cast Samiya as the ‘bitchy person’, and therefore the things she said were judged as bitchy. Thus, it was not only Samiya’s actions that were being evaluated, but her character, and, co-ordinately, for Tanya and Natasha, for whom bitching was ‘not in their nature’, even the recognition that ‘they are bitching right now’ was not judged by them according to the same criteria. As Tanya and Natasha were not bitchy people, they did not have to evaluate their words in these terms, ‘we’re not saying it like that’. Bitching may have more or less expansive or intimate impact, more cumulative or immediate effects. Bitching could be the normal expression of friends who ‘annoy them a bit’ (such as Tanya, Natasha and Samiya), or it could, particularly if concerning a more major infraction, have effects beyond the immediate people involved and impact the criteria of how that person was judged. Like inclusion and exclusion, bitching was also one of the actions of friendship that enabled girls to exert intersubjective influence. As Michael observed, bitching enabled hierarchies to be created covertly within groups and between friends. Bitching enabled relations of domination by intimacy. As Michael observed: Girls being friends with girls is a really nasty kind of relationship. Most of what you hear is girls bitching about other girls. A guy will try to be really macho but actually there is the same kind of thing for girls to do with status and how you outwardly appear … There is a hierarchy, but it exists behind the groups, the groups are kind of like a front. Like a girl will be in a group of supposedly ‘best friends’ and will then go and bitch to some other girls about their ‘best friends’. While bitching might be about the shared judgement of like-minded friends, it could also work to persuade others to view the bitched-about in a particular and more negative way. Samiya recounted her conscious manipulation of accusations of bitching to turn others against Maria and Cheryl when they were in an argument in Year Nine: Basically, I didn’t like them anymore because they were really bitchy, but so was I. I pretended they were the biggest bitches, and everyone turned against them. We made up rumours, like ‘they’re really bitchy, they bitch about everyone’. But that’s the thing, we were all very bitchy then, very bad. I just used to, I used to heat it up a bit.

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Like other forms of action and interaction in school, the ability to exert influence successfully required a certain competence in handling the nuanced criteria by which girls judged friends and their communications. Samiya’s strategy was certainly a risky one, which could have easily backfired, with people turning against her rather than Maria and Cheryl. This is what happened to Nadege. Her bitching was judged as malevolent ­manipulation – ‘messing with people’ – and resulted in the end of her friendships with Nadia and Samantha.

Friends and Boyfriends While relationships in earlier years were usually short-lived and involved minimal interaction (‘beforehand it was like “oh I’ve got a boyfriend”, “oh I’ve got a girlfriend” and then it lasts a week’ – Lisa), in Year Eleven, the demands of having a boyfriend were often in tension with the expectations of close friendship with girls and the shared space and time it entailed. Girls were aware of these tensions, and often gave this as the reason they were ‘proudly single’. While the demands and expectations of heterosexuality were central to sociality in school (and will be examined in Chapter  6), these could be met through interactions with friends, as well as with boys. For example, girls often talked between themselves about who they fancied or who they thought was good looking. So, while friendship in school was practically compulsory, romantic relationships appeared decidedly more optional. The trouble having a boyfriend could bring to friendships, and therefore a good reason for staying single, was exemplified for some of the girls I spoke to by a story that unfolded over the course of Year Eleven. At the start of the school year, Marina, Francesca and Beth were a small group of three best friends. Over the course of the year this changed when Francesca started spending more time with the It Girls, Marina with Rhiannon and Ling Ling, and Beth with her boyfriend and his group of friends. As the year progressed, the details of this distancing between the girls gradually emerged. The first time I heard about this was in November. Marina, Leah, Samiya and I were chatting together in drama class. Marina, Leah and Samiya all considered each other good albeit unlikely class friends (especially in the case of Leah and Samiya), and so the chats were wide-ranging, enabling the girls to gather perspectives from different positions in the year group. ­Marina told us about a ‘drama’ that she had been involved in over the last few weeks. ‘There’s this girl called Catherine, she’s really tall and thin, do you know her? She’s the only real blonde in the group,’ said Marina. Samiya was doubtful, ‘None of them are real blondes.’ Marina continued, ­‘Anyway,

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she’s been making stuff up about me and telling people. So, she’s been ­telling people that I go with loads of different boys and stuff, when that’s actually what they do. She told Ollie and because of that he didn’t want her to hang around with me otherwise he’d dump her, so we had to pretend we weren’t friends.’ ‘But she’s your friend,’ said Leah angrily, ‘what’s it got to do with him anyway?’ ‘On Saturday night,’ continued Marina, ‘we called her up because we knew that she was at this party, so I could ask her why she was saying this stuff about me, but she didn’t want to talk to me. Then the next day she was on MSN [instant messenger] saying, “why did you call? I was trying to sleep”, and then saying, “you’ve got no friends, no one likes you, you’re just jealous of me because I’ve got a life and you don’t have a life” and I was like “I wouldn’t want your life, all you do is get drunk every night”.’ ‘Do they really get drunk every night?’ asked Leah in amazement. ‘Yeah,’ Marina answered decisively. ‘So, I was like “we need to sort this out”, so we arranged to meet at break yesterday on the field, and I waited for ten minutes and she didn’t come, so I went to find her, and she was hiding in the green corridor with her group and loads of boys. So, I asked her “what’s your problem?” and then Paige just stepped in front of her, and was saying “leave her alone”, and Catherine was just standing behind her not saying anything.’ ‘Did it upset you?’ I asked. ‘Yeah, it upsets me especially when it affects my friendships, and people are thinking things about you that aren’t true.’ ‘Why do you think they did that?’ I asked, ‘Did you used to be friends?’ ‘No, we were never friends, the only thing that I can think of is that’s she’s jealous ‘cos Beth is going out with Ollie and they used to go out with each other, and Ollie dumped her, and he hates her because of something she did, and now she’s trying to split them up.’ ‘They just think they’re big, you know. Like they’re not scared of anyone,’ Samiya said. ‘Yeah,’ Marina continued, ‘but I’m still going to stand up for myself, because everyone is scared of them, so they let them get away with everything, but I’m not going to let this go. No one likes them, they’re only friends with each other. But no one stands up to them, and everyone pretends to like Paige because she has these parties every weekend.’ ‘Does it bother you that Beth spends so much time with Ollie?’ asked Samiya. Marina answered, ‘It doesn’t really bother me, it’s just that she spends time with him and his friends, but he doesn’t spend time with her and us. But it’s their relationship so…’ As I will go on to discuss, Marina and Beth’s friendship suffered because of the rumours and Ollie’s judgement of them. But I recount this conversation in detail because it also highlights several dimensions of friendship in school. As class friends, Marina, Leah and Samiya were differently situated within the year group and involved in different sets of friendship dynamics. The classroom could be a place where support was provided, away from the intensity of these dynamics. Leah and Samiya listened intently to Marina

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and gave her a sympathetic ear for her side of the story. In their friendship across recognized differences, Marina, Samiya and Leah could position themselves as different but acceptable, in contrast to the Barbies, who were positioned as different but unacceptable. In this judged unacceptability, claims and ­counterclaims of lack of friendship were key. Marina used claims that ‘no one likes them’ and ‘they’re only friends with each other’ as an insult and critique. Here unacceptability was evidenced by a position in the year where, apart from your own friendship group, no one else likes you. Thus, this story also highlights the interactions between peers that connects different members of the year group in positive relations, as part of ‘growing together’. In the spring, I heard this story again but from a different perspective. Rhiannon, Georgia, Lexy and I were talking in the art room at lunchtime, when I asked about whether they thought there was a pressure on girls to have a boyfriend. The girls agreed that while it was kind of expected of teenagers, some people cared about it while others did not. Rhiannon said that she was happy to be on her own because of the hassle that having a boyfriend brings: ‘You know sometimes you’ve got male friends, and you’ve got a boyfriend and…’ ‘They don’t like that,’ Georgia cut in, ‘or when your boyfriend doesn’t like your friends and they want you to change your friends.’ ‘Has that happened to you?’ I asked. ‘Yeah, I dumped the boyfriend, but some people do the opposite.’ Here Georgia retold the story of Beth, Marina and Ollie. ‘It took them ages to get together and everything was fine except she did abandon her friends a bit, although girls generally do that when they have a boyfriend. And then he didn’t like her friends and rumours started flying and then basically she chose him over her friends. So, it ended up her giving up her friends and then she was really restricted by him and bound to him and now she doesn’t really have anyone, and that’s bad.’ Here then, the first-hand experience of Marina and Beth’s friendship became a cautionary tale. While in November Beth and Marina were pretending not to be friends, the pressure to keep their friendship a secret, and therefore not be able to visibly fulfil expectations of shared time and space with each other, took its toll and pretend distance became real distance. For Rhiannon and Georgia looking on, it could be used as an exemplar of the dangers of having a boyfriend, and evidence for why, as Rhiannon put it, ‘I’m quite happy by myself, because I can just do what I want really.’ Unsurprisingly, too much time spent with boyfriends, the ‘desertion’ of friends or acting differently when the boyfriend was around were all common causes for bitching. In these ways, as has emerged throughout the chapter, gendered criteria of being a good friend were used as the basis of judgement.

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My Own Experiences of Friendship, Exclusion and Exertion of Will in School Although during my fieldwork, I was a witness rather than a participant in the friendship dynamics described, I am not separate from these processes which form an important part of my history. In the following section, I submit my own experiences to analysis. During my time as a student, I too was deeply invested in the informal realm, and engaged in my fair share of bitching, exclusion and boundary policing practices, as well as the more positive practices of this realm. On my first day at secondary school, I remember observing my new year mates: judging them on their appearance and how popular they appeared, and pinpointing those I assessed as ‘cool enough’. When I felt that the initial group of friends I made did not meet these criteria, I set my sights on another (more visible) group. I started chatting with them in class and hanging around on the outskirts of their group at lunchtime until I was legitimized as a member of the group with invitations – first to spend time with them in school and then beyond school at their houses. Once this had happened, I ‘stopped talking’ to my former friends, cutting off the expected interactions of friendship. My new group and I desired teenage fun but at our age (eleven and twelve) these initial attempts were often futile (too much parental control, nowhere to go), although we did manage to try smoking, drinking and shoplifting. We also gave ‘attitude’ to teachers (resisting or ignoring their direction or talking back). In this friendship group, bitching was a key interaction and as I became secure in my position within the group, I too started bitching. Among our group Olivia became a target, as we assessed her behaviour as inappropriate (she was ‘too bitchy’, she was not ‘nice’, but in hindsight, I think we were intimidated because she was powerful). I was instrumental in enacting her exclusion from the group; we reduced our actions of friendship (such as talk, disclosure and invitations) and she left the group. However, I was unaware that Olivia was making a play to regain her status within the group and was using the same strategies that had resulted in her exclusion to facilitate my exclusion. Behind my back she had been busy positioning my behaviour as unacceptable and recruiting allies to secure her position. I became aware of this shift, dramatically. One day I came into school and no one in my class was talking to me. They had withdrawn this key interaction and I was excluded. I had a horrible, lonely and confusing day before taking the rest of the week off ‘sick’. Eventually my mother persuaded me to return. It was February, snowy, and school was treacherous with boys throwing snowballs. My classmates were talking to me to some degree, but the flow of friendly exchange was not as it had been before.

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At lunchtime, as I trudged across the playground, two girls from my friendship group called to me from the window of an empty classroom and asked me to come up and talk to them. My spirits rose as an invitation was a friendly action and could be a positive sign that my exclusion from the group had come to an end. But when I entered the classroom, my heart sank as I saw Olivia sitting with them. Without ceremony, they told me that we were no longer friends, and they did not want me to speak to them ever again. With snowballs flying past my head, I walked out of that school and never returned. My tumultuous friendship experience was not the only factor in my refusal to return to school. I felt trapped in a cycle of bad behaviour in class, I was often in detention and close to completely disengaging with my studies. In hindsight, I was also unhappy at home as my mother and stepfather were divorcing. But at the time I did not recognize this. All my energy and emotional investment felt entirely tied to my problems with friends – it was my primary concern. Now I can consider that perhaps I transformed my (unidentified) unhappiness at home – over which I had little control – into my actions and investment in the informal realm in which I could attempt to wield some power and exert my intersubjective influence. My mother, concerned about my rebellious behaviour and my emotional distress, supported my refusal to return to school and helped me to find a new one. After six weeks (which felt like forever), I was offered an assisted place2 at a fee-paying girls’ school and started in the last term of Year Eight. The girls in my new school were in the midst of a similarly turbulent period, and bitching and exclusionary practices were rampant in my new year group – as we have seen in the previous chapter, Year Eight and Nine are often the most unsettled and discordant time for peer relationships. Fitting in and the processes of friendship always include an element of risk but I did not put myself on the line in the pursuit of power in the same way again. I gradually became part of a friendship group with a solid position in the year; we did not attempt to dominate but had connections to different status groups. Like the students at Collingson, we were also invested in the ‘growing together’ experience, and some of the most valued friendships I developed during this time were with those I had initially had the most antagonistic relations with. However, my teenage years continued to be characterized by friendship break-ups and friendship group splits. I used to look back on these ruptures with regret and self-criticism. How could I have been so invested in these friendships which then ended so abruptly? Returning to school highlighted that these processes are common; the flow of friendship actions must be constantly maintained and to stop acting is to stop being friends.

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It helped me to see how important friendships are to the process of growing up and becoming a particular kind of person. For me, friendship breakups and exclusion were also a catalyst for leaving school, and I see this as a significant turning point in my life. I went from disengagement with school and education to a new school where you could only be cool if you tried hard in lessons (although this was not the only criteria). In my fee-paying school, academic success was the expectation and my renewed investment in learning and identity as a committed student set me on an academic path which led to a Masters, PhD and academia.

Friendship and Mimetic and Forensic Demands As we have seen in this chapter, a focus on the range of friendship practices highlights both the mimetic and forensic dimensions of girls’ personhood, and the ways in which these dimensions are implicated in each other. Notions of self and person were simultaneously posited as prior and emerged through the process of friend-making. I have also examined the ways in which friendships act as a medium of intersubjective influence, enabling some girls to exert their will in particular ways, and create particular relations of space, time and exchange. Making friends, breaking friends and bitching were also examples of performative acts instantiating or changing criteria by which girls subsequently judged and were judged. As we have seen, the criteria were gendered – what it meant to be a good friend, and a good person, was specific for girls. The judged wrongness of actions was often used to justify exclusion but could simultaneously be a way to exert will. Girls idealized their friendships through depth and similarity, and through a correct order of things: separate selves who could be friends should come first, friendships formed by these separate selves came second. But as is the case throughout this book, we have also seen the forceful shaping of others. In the case of girls’ friendships, practices of bitching and exclusion were particularly key. Recognized as a ‘normal’ part of girls’ friendships, we have seen how bitching was often practised through the intimacy and proximity of friendship, and as such, despite the ideal that friends know you and accept you for ‘your true inner self ’, bitching was an intimate exchange through which girls shaped each other. At the same time, bitching was a practice of differentiation. Even in relations of ‘closest sameness’, bitching allowed an emphasis on ‘what she’s like’, and, by implication, ‘what I’m not like’ that rested on ideas of the continuous self. As such, we can see the way separate and connected dimensions of personhood were implicated within one another in the practices of girls’

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friendships. Friendship entailed the mimetic effects of potentially being tarnished by another’s actions while to break a friendship was to stop being connected, and to make each party responsible for her own actions. This can also be seen in the histories of friendships, sometimes invisible because the friendship no longer existed – although the history was still remembered. Through their friendship histories, girls attested to their mimetic connection to each other, as well as their forensic disconnection from each other – sometimes temporarily, in acts of bitching, or permanently, in the ending of friendships.

Notes 1. ‘Gay’ was frequently used as an insult in school; for further discussion on this, see Chapter 6. 2. A scheme of the Conservative government; the state paid an individual’s fees and gave them a uniform and school lunch allowance to enable individuals who would not normally be able to pay for private education to attend. It was abolished by the Labour government in 1997.

References Allan, Graham. 1989. Friendship: Developing a Sociological Perspective. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Amit-Talai, Vered. 1995. ‘The Waltz of Sociability: Intimacy, Dislocation, and Friendship in a Quebec High School’, in Vered Amit-Talai and Helena Wulff (eds), Youth Cultures: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 144–65. Bell, Sandra and Simon Coleman. 1999. ‘The Anthropology of Friendship: Enduring Themes and Future Possibilities’, in Sandra Bell and Simon Coleman (eds), The Anthropology of Friendship. London: Berg, pp. 1–19. Carrier, James G. 1999. ‘People Who Can Be Friends: Selves and Social Relationships’, in Sandra Bell and Simon Coleman (eds), The Anthropology of Friendship. London: Berg, pp. 21–38. Course, Magnus. 2010. ‘Making Friends, Making Oneself: Friendship and the Mapuche ­Person’, in Amit Desai and Evan Killick (eds), The Ways of Friendship: Anthropological Perspectives. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 154–73. Desai, Amit and Evan Killick. 2010. The Ways of Friendship: Anthropological Perspectives. ­Oxford: Berghahn Books. Evans, Gillian. 2006. Educational Failure and Working-Class White Children in Britain. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2010. ‘The Value of Friendship: Subject/Object Transformations in the Economy of Becoming a Person (Bermondsey, Southeast London)’, in Amit Desai and Evan Killick (eds), The Ways of Friendship: Anthropological Perspectives. New York and Oxford: ­Berghahn Books, pp. 174–96.

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Froerer, Peggy. 2010. ‘Close Friends: The Importance of Proximity in Children’s Peer Relations in Chhattisgarh, Central India’, in Amit Desai and Evan Killick (eds), The Ways of Friendship: Anthropological Perspectives. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 133–53. Lambek, Michael. 2013. ‘The Continuous and Discontinuous Person: Two Dimensions of Ethical Life’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19(4): 837–58. https:// doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12073. Paine, Robert. 1969. ‘In Search of Friendship: An Exploratory Analysis in “Middle-Class” Culture’, Man 4(4): 505–24. Santos-Granero, Fernando. 2007. ‘Of Fear and Friendship: Amazonian Sociality beyond Kinship and Affinity’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13(1): 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2007.00410.x. Spencer, Liz and Raymond Edward Pahl. 2006. Rethinking Friendship: Hidden Solidarities Today. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Torresan, Angela. 2011. ‘Strange Bedfellows: Brazilian Immigrants Negotiating Friendship in Lisbon’, Ethnos 76(2): 233–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2010.544 854.

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Place, Colour, Authenticity and Style The science lab was in the original school building; the high wooden

tables were etched with the names of past students and the air hung a little more heavily than elsewhere, slightly sulphuric from thousands of past experiments. Perched on their high stalls, Chimmi and Georgia were watching the flame of their Bunsen burner as their beaker slowly boiled; Chimmi was sitting straight and still with shirt untucked and Georgia, small beside him, was twisting her hair as usual. ‘I mean, I’m not actually black,’ said Chimmi, extending his arm forward on the desk, his white shirt rolled up to the sleeves. ‘Yeah,’ said Georgia, ‘but no one is really black, are they?’ ‘Some people are, some people are pretty close.’ Swinging his knees around from the neighbouring desk, Ishwar joined in the conversation: ‘who’s the blackest person in the year? Is it Lamar?’ ‘Yeah,’ nodded Chimmi, ‘it could be.’ I heard conversations like these often in school. Students showed a willingness to question each other and interrogate racialized differences between people directly, in contrast to a ‘colour-muteness’ which often prevails in public debates among adults and in educational policy (Pollock 2004; Chun 2011; Harris and Herron 2017; Holmes 2017; Joseph-Salisbury and Connelly 2018). As in Britain more widely, specific combinations of skin colour and physical features, nationality, religion, language and history led to some students being categorized or identifying as [black, white, Asian or mixed race], some as from [location in the world], some students as neither and some as both. These aspects of persons were understood by students as an important way that they were similar to, or different from one another. Thus, Chimmi described himself as ‘from Ghana’ and ‘black’, Ishwar ‘from Pakistan’ and ‘Asian’, and Georgia described herself as ‘white’.

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As I will explore in this chapter, these descriptions were considered by students to be a fixed and unchanging part of the continuous self, a continuity that extended to parents, grandparents and ancestors. At the same time, through the manifold of talk and action that happened between peers, these notions of difference were brought into everyday life as an important way to describe, evaluate and understand people, and as a subject of discussion and reflection. Furthermore, friendship groups and ways of acting were often racially coded as ‘black’ or ‘white’, even when they contained members who identified or were classified in a diversity of ways. In this way ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’ were understood as mutable descriptors that could be shared with friends. ‘Ghetto’ emerged in school as a particular repertoire of style, speech and action that drew on a complex tangle of racialized, classed and gendered meanings. In the history of the It Girls friendship group, we will see how ‘acting ghetto’ was worked out as part of the criteria for evaluation between friends. Finally, I will explore how the rhetoric of ‘growing up and growing together’, introduced in C ­ hapter 3, enabled students to recognize racialized and ethnized differences between them, while valuing closeness. However, the growing together discourse co-existed with other ways of interpreting these differences in terms of ­incommensurability and fixed and insurmountable separation.

Classifying Difference It was another science lesson, and this time I was sitting with Daisy and Aabida, incongruous class friends. Daisy was one of the ‘Opt-out rebels’ and often told off in class, while Aabida, part of a small group of hijab-wearing girls, was a conscientious student who was aiming to become a doctor. ‘Where do you think Daisy is from?’ Aabida asked me. ‘No one ever guesses right!’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Well, where do you think Aabida is from?’ Daisy asked. ‘I don’t know, where are you both from?’ ‘Well, I’m English,’ said Daisy, ‘but my dad is Japanese, and my mum is English.’ ‘And where do people think you’re from?’ ‘Loads of people think I’m Chinese, they think I’m from Asia somewhere, but they always say Chinese, why Chinese? No one ever thinks I’m Japanese. Someone even thought I was Jewish,’ she said, ‘I’m like “Jewish?!”’ ‘Where are you from?’ I asked Aabida. ‘I’m from Somalia. Are you English?’ she asked me. ‘Well, my mum is Jewish, and my dad is English,’ I said as Daisy laughed with embarrassment, ‘But no one thinks I look Jewish.’ ‘Yeah, I thought you looked English,’ agreed Aabida. ‘But you do look like Leah,’ added Daisy, ‘and Leah looks Jewish.’ This was one of several similar guessing games I was engaged in by students. This kind of game turned on both the interest in ‘where people are

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from’ and the difficulty of guessing right. Talk between peers often demonstrated their willingness to tussle with tricky categorizations, ask questions, or challenge each other in these terms. Students who did not ‘look white’1 were often asked ‘where are you from?’ Although other differences were also understood in terms of place – schools, neighbourhoods, estates or boroughs of London – ‘where are you from?’ was primarily understood as a question about origin outside Britain (in contrast to ‘where do you live?’ or ‘what school do you go to?’). This question was understood as such even by students whose families had been living in Britain for a generation or more. In answer to this question, students in Year Eleven would describe themselves as ‘from’ a wide array of places including China, Japan, Cyprus, Malaysia, Poland, Russia, Portugal, Italy, Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Columbia, Kenya, Somalia, Nigeria, Jamaica and the Dominican Republic. As Peter Wade suggests, in contrast to other forms of cultural differentiation, ethnicity tends to use the language of place: ‘People thus use location, or rather people’s putative origin in certain places, to talk about difference and sameness. “Where are you from?” is thus the ethnic question par excellence’ (1997, 18). Furthermore, as Dhooleka Sarhadi Raj writes, behind the perpetually asked ‘where are you from question?’ is the unstated assumption that ‘one is a sojourner; one is not from here or can only claim to be here temporarily’ (2003, 2). As I further argue, the ‘where are you from?’ question is premised on a particular understanding of individual persons and their relationship to others. The geographic history of ethnicity connects children, parents, grandparents and ancestors together through a straightforward downward flow of life, and assumes the enduring consequences of these generational relations (Strathern 1992; Ingold 2017). Students were thus positioning themselves and being positioned in terms of ‘connections that stretched back through time, grasped as a spatial image’ (Taussig 1987, 253). At the same time, the majority of peers were understood to fit into the racial categories of ‘white, black, Asian and mixed race’. Similarly to Mika Pollock’s ethnography of a Californian high school, ‘[a]lthough identities … were infinitely complex, racial identification was an accepted process of social simplification’ (2004, 35). These categories were frequently used as a shorthand in describing a person – ‘Oh, I think I know who you’re talking about, she’s black, right?’ Some students who described themselves as ‘mixed, black and white’ would also describe themselves ‘black’ at other times.2 Occasionally, students referred to these categories in terms of an overarching notion of ‘race’, but much more frequently this was described in terms of ‘colour’ or ‘black, white, Asian, mixed race’. Not all students were straightforwardly positioned within these simplified categories; ­students

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such as those ‘from’ the Middle East or South America did not fit into this system and so were only classified as ‘from somewhere’. Scholarship on race across a range of disciplines has challenged essentialized understandings of race as ‘a system for classifying human beings that is grounded in the belief that they embody inherited and fixed biological characteristics that identify them as members of racial groups’ (Morning 2011, 21). They have instead demonstrated the ways in which different racial classification systems emerge historically and are used as instruments of power and oppression (Morning 2011). At the same time contemporary research has demonstrated the enduring presence of essentialized understandings of race in both everyday life and academia (Morning 2011; Song 2018). As I will trace in this chapter, a part of this resilience can be connected to the way racial classifications and identifications of persons are intertwined with, and constituted through, notions of the forensic individuality as self-same, continuous, bounded and who you ‘really are’. This forensic understanding also extends to groups, understood in the same way. These different modes of classification and description were neither separate from each other nor synonymous with each other. The simplified racializing categorization of ‘black, white, Asian and mixed race’ contained reference to skin colour (black and white), place and origin (Asian), and explicit reference to race (mixed race). Perceptions of ‘non-whiteness’ were key to the salience of the ‘where I’m/you’re from’ discourse, particularly when the person could not easily be described according to simplified racialized categorization. As scholars have argued, along with place, language and religion are variably mobilized in terms of ‘ethnicity’ and in Britain at least, these become particularly salient markers of difference when they are attached to people not considered white (Alleyne 2002; Raj 2003; Song 2018).3 For example, students ‘from’ Italy and Russia would at times highlight ‘where they were from’ but were primarily classified as white. In contrast, non-white students were acutely aware of the always-already nature of their appearance which marked them as ‘from somewhere’ before they had even spoken. Students spoke about the constant reminder of their classification in these terms and of their different experiences in relation to simplified racial categorization and the complexity of ‘where you are from’. As Jerome (Year ­Thirteen) told me, it was his blackness that was the primary way he was classified by others. Speaking about his experience of racism, he said: There was this one time, and I still laugh at it now. It’s raining and you have a hood, what do you do if it’s raining, and you have a hood? Put your hood on. Because of what’s happening in the media with

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hoodies and black guys, people look at you and go ‘oh my god, he’s going to stab me’ when really, truly, I just don’t want to get my head wet. Then you have the stereotypes, then in a jokey way I’m like the big black guy, at school there’s people who are like ‘oh yeah, you’re the big black guy, you’re Jerome’. That’s all I’m known as, not good looking, not smart, no, just ‘you’re black’. Just at this moment a friend of his walked past; beckoning him over, Jerome asked, ‘Hey man, how would you describe me?’ ‘Tall and black,’ replied the friend before walking on. ‘See,’ said Jerome, turning back to me, ‘not good looking, not smart, just you’re black.’ Samiya told me that she was often asked ‘where she was from’: her dad was ‘white’ and mum ‘from a coastal region of Kenya, where loads of people are mixed, mixed Chinese and African. My mum’s really mixed, she’s got Indian, Arabic, African in her’. ‘No one ever knows where I’m from, everyone thinks I’m from different places, some people say that I’m Iranian, others that I’m Latin or from Brazil, others say I’m from India.’ I asked her if she minded that no one knew where she was from. ‘Most of the time I don’t mind, I think it’s kind of mysterious. The only thing I don’t like is when people think I’m from not very good places, like I don’t like it when people think I look Indian.’ For Samiya, the persistent question ‘where are you from?’ was a fact of life; the salience of her non-whiteness to the people she met was not in doubt, it was just that the correct answer to this question was not ‘obvious’ to them. While she enjoyed the ‘mystery’ of eluding classification, she also spoke of wanting people to know who she ‘really is’. ‘The other thing is that no one knows that I’m African, because I don’t look black at all so I used to have to wear the African colours on a chain so people would know.’ As Samiya’s words indicate, ‘where you’re from’ was closely tied into notions of the authentic, forensic self, ‘who you really are’. At the same time, it was through numerous performative acts, the asking and answering of the question ‘where are you from?’ or claiming of particular geographic histories through words, actions or material symbols (like wearing the African colours on a necklace), that this forensic self was made visible. The salience of religion in classification, categorization and identification emerged within and across these understandings of difference in a range of ways for students. For Aabida, her hijab was a visible sign of her religion which she was clear would shape how she was viewed. As a committed and ambitious student, she was planning to move for sixth form to an academically high-achieving school. When she got an interview for Saint Jude’s School, she was pleased because it was ‘second best’ in the Borough; however, she was also concerned, because ‘once they see my head-

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scarf they’ll say no because it’s a catholic school.’ For other students, their religion was something that could be known or not known about them. For example, in one geography lesson there was an empty seat at our normally full table. ‘Why is Kadia not here?’ asked Nick. ‘Because its Eid,’ answered Natasha. ‘I didn’t know Kadia was a Muslim,’ replied Nick. ‘I do,’ said Natasha, ‘because I’ve known her for like ten years.’ ‘I’ve known her for ten years too,’ responded Nick, ‘and I still didn’t know she was a Muslim.’ While in this conversation Kadia’s religion was positioned as privileged knowledge – as Kadia’s good friend, who knew her well, it made sense to Natasha that she had this knowledge when Nick did not – for other students their religion was more widely known. Leah described being Jewish in forensic terms, ‘it’s part of who I am and my roots’, and as my conversation with Daisy and Aabida at the start of this section suggests, Leah’s Jewish identity was well-known among her peers, connected by Daisy to the ‘way she looks’. During one conversation with Michael and Leah about religion, Michael asked if I was Jewish; when I said yes, he turned to Leah and asked, ‘did you know that? Was your Jewdar working well?’ Turning back to me, he explained, ‘Leah always claims to have a very accurate Jewdar.’ I said that I had told Leah I was Jewish; ‘yeah, but I did think it anyway,’ Leah concluded. For Leah, being Jewish was something that could be known, sensed or become part of the guessing game but had a forensic, internal quality. Other students connected religion to the mimetic rather than forensic aspects of their self. For example, during another science lesson, Annika was telling Aabida and Daisy, ‘I change my religion every few weeks, at the moment I’m Jain, before that I was an atheist, before that Hindu and before that I was Jain again.’ ‘Why don’t you become Jewish?’ suggested Daisy playfully, ‘Jewish?’ questioned Annika. As she said this, they noticed Leah behind them; Daisy and Aabida laughed nervously while Annika quickly explained the context of their conversation. ‘It takes three years to convert to Judaism,’ Leah informed them matter-of-factly, ‘and even then, you might not be accepted.’ Specificities of difference were brought into the classroom in ambivalent ways, as part of students’ manifold interactions with each other. Waiting for the teacher to arrive, the students were sitting in the drama studio, in a large circle, when Karl, white, confidently stated ‘Chimmi is the only real Ghanaian here.’ ‘But I’m a real Nigerian,’ Joseph snapped back proudly. ‘You’re not a real Nigerian,’ countered Chimmi, ‘you haven’t been there, you’re not a citizen.’ ‘I’ve got a Nigerian passport,’ replied Joseph more defensively this time. Then quickly, as if noticing this, he recovered himself. Getting up, he walked towards Chimmi, his gait changing from that of a slender, agile fifteen-year-old to a portly, elderly man. Voice booming, in a convincing Nigerian accent, he asked, ‘Who says I’m not a real Nigerian?’

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The class broke out in laughter. It was ‘Uncle Joseph’, a character who had recently been making his appearance when Joseph clowned around in class. ‘Not me, Uncle,’ says Chimmi, head bowed, and smile suppressed, jokingly chastened. As I have discussed, ‘where I’m from/where are you from?’ was premised on a broadly defined spatialized history, and responses to this question were usually accepted. In other words, very few criteria needed to be met for this claim to be accepted, beyond the claim itself. However, in their disagreement, the boys went beyond this, to draw upon a range of criteria for assessing whether someone is ‘a real…’, citing citizenship, passports and physical presence in a place.4 These claims and counter claims recognized a complexity beyond ‘where you’re from’ where some people could be more ‘really from’ than others. But this debate was also taking place as part of the competitive friendship that existed between Chimmi, Joseph and Karl, all among the highest status in the year. When Uncle Joseph arrived, it becomes a clowning opportunity for Joseph, and a chance to create the kind of visibility for which he had become famous in the year group (Chimmi and Karl did not clown like Joseph did). The humour of Uncle Joseph was drawn from the specificity of ‘where he is from’, but even those who do not share the reference of the authoritarian Uncle still shared the fun.

Music, Style and Talk So far, I have discussed how ‘where you are from’ and ‘race’ were understood by students in forensic terms, as more or less unchanging aspects of a person. Hence, these were important aspects of true and authentic selves, and were not considered to change through the course of school or in relation to peers. At the same time, other practices entailed the indexical assignment of ‘black’ or ‘white’ to music, style, ways of talking and action (Chun 2011).5 For example, R’n’B was classified by peers as ‘black music’, and rock as ‘white music’.6 Engagement in these practices did not straightforwardly correlate with ‘where you were from’ or whether you were ‘black, white, Asian or mixed race’. Instead they were things considered important to be shared by friendship groups, intertwined with the year group hierarchy, and also viewed as subject to change. For example, members of the Man-dem (introduced in Chapter 3) identified themselves as from a wide range of places, and as black, white, Asian and mixed race. These forensic notions of the self were important to the boys and became particularly salient at times. For example, Davros often proclaimed he was a ‘proud Greek’ and as we saw in the last section, as Chimmi and Joseph argued about what it meant to be a ‘real’ Ghanaian

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or Nigerian, both made claims to this authenticity. At the same time, the group shared a way of dressing and talking. On non-uniform days, the boys wore oversized baseball caps, baggy jeans, Nike trainers and diamond earrings. Some of them had sharp patterns shaved into their hair. They also shared a way of speaking; standard English words were invested with altered meanings, along with specific pronunciation and inflections (Back 1996, 130).7 While this style was indexed by peers as ‘black’, for example through reference to ‘ghetto’, ‘gangster’, ‘street’ or ‘Hip Hop’, it was not only black friends who were legitimated in talking or dressing this way. Rather, it was shared between all members of the group,8 reflecting a particular style as well as position in the hierarchy. Like the Man-dem, the It Girls often used a number of features of this style, some of the Green Corridor Girls used some of these features, and the Misfits rarely used any of them.9 Ways of speaking foregrounded the mimetic ways through which friends could make themselves similar to each other, and in the process different to their parents.

‘I Don’t Act Ghetto, It’s Dumb’ It was a hot spring day, and unusually Samiya and I were sitting with two students from a different year, Mariam (Iran) and Angelo (black, Nigeria) from Year Ten. Across the field another group of Year Ten girls, two white and three black, were in our eyeline. Even in uniform their look was distinctive; their hair was pulled back tightly in high ponytails with perfect curls slicked closely to their foreheads. Their large gold earrings, shaped like hollow-centred hearts, were glinting in the sunshine. Indicating the girls, Samiya commented to Mariam, ‘your year is really ghetto-fabulous.’ ‘My year is fucking shit,’ replied Mariam. I asked Samiya what she meant; ‘well like in their year they’re ghetto in the way they dress, they’ll clip their hair, gel it, they’ll slick it and then act like they’re really minxy, but they’re not, they’re nothing special, they’re ugly as well. They act rowdy you know? Talking back, they’re always giving attitude.’ Mariam continued, ‘they act ghetto, but they’ll live in Chimes Hill [a well-off neighbourhood close to Collingson] or somewhere like that… They’re wannabe ghetto, because they have houses and everything, they have good cars.’ ‘So why do you think people act ghetto?’ I asked. ‘I dunno,’ pondered Angelo, ‘because they probably think it’s cool, innit. I don’t act ghetto, I don’t act bad… Because it’s really dumb, because after a couple of years of doing that then you’re not going to get anything out of it… you’re going to spend your whole school time being bad, getting expelled and then you come out into the real world and you ain’t got nothing. You can’t keep

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on being bad for the rest of your life, otherwise you’ll end up in prison or something.’ The term ghetto circulated in school as a way to describe people, and a particular way of dressing, acting and talking, and acted as a ‘metonymic place holder’ (Chun 2011) for a tacit and slippery ideological tangle of associations.10 Ghetto carried with it notions of blackness, but also interconnected meanings relating to poverty and lack of material resources, hardness and toughness, criminality, masculinity, local hierarchies and a particular orientation both locally and within the city of London at large.11 Notions of authenticity were highlighted in evaluations of ghetto and ghetto students, as can be seen in the conversation between Samiya and Mariam. But while ghetto was closely associated with blackness, when Samiya and Mariam criticized the ghetto girls, they did not do so based on the inauthenticity of ‘acting black’ for the white ghetto girls, but rather they used the same criteria to judge all of them negatively as inauthentic, based on the perceived mismatch between their ghetto style and material privileges. As Mariam pointed out, these girls lived in Chimes Hill, they have ‘houses, good cars’; they are not, Mariam suggested, poor. As this example illustrates, acting ghetto was controversial among students and none of the students I spoke to in Year Eleven identified their present selves as ghetto. However, drawing on particular criteria of visibility and status, a number of students could recognize its appeal. The actions associated with ghetto – (rumoured) criminal activity, acting up in class, talking back to teachers, and the (supposed) willingness to use physical force – were all actions that produced visibility and increased status more generally. As Shola (black, Nigeria) said, ‘people act ghetto because they wanna be cool, wanna be known.’ At the same time, using a different set of criteria, centred on achieving formal success and ideas of the good life, ghetto was problematic, viewed as conflicting with doing well in school and getting a job in the future. As Angelo saw it, what might get you status within school would end up getting you into trouble ‘in the real world’. Reflecting on her time in school, Shola (Year Thirteen) described how her orientation to ghetto and doing well at school changed as she got older. Her initial criteria for assessing a good or bad school were based on criteria of coolness, reputation, ghetto and the number of black students there. Choosing Collingson meant forsaking the visibility of nearby Harlsbrook Academy, and its extension of fame beyond the school to the surrounding area. ‘I nearly went to Harlsbrook, and things would have been very different for me… at first I regretted it [making the choice not to go to Harlsbrook], but now I’m really glad I didn’t go there.’ ‘Why did you regret it at first,’ I asked?

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Harlsbrook’s reputation was bad [cool], ghetto, and all the cool kids went there. It had a reputation, like all the kids wanted to go there … Because there were more black people there, they seemed to have a good time, they were always in the limelight, well not the limelight but everyone knew that school, everyone knew that school … Like we [Collingson School] have a reputation as having bare, I mean a lot12 of white people and Asian people, which makes it not a good school, people say ‘oh there’s not a lot of black people, I don’t want to go there’. However, the criteria by which Shola judged what constituted a good or bad school changed as her priorities changed, and she began to focus on doing well at school, on getting into university and on her future career plans. ‘I’m glad I didn’t go there now. Because of the way that they turned out; pregnant at school, only some of them did A Levels.’ While ghetto was understood as a route to visibility, students also felt it mitigated against achieving this good life, for example by limiting the possibility of doing well in school. Instead, visibility through coolness could be balanced with other virtues, such as working hard in school ‘you can be a cool person and have good results,’ ­confirmed Shola. As with friendship groups, schools were a way through which difference was ordered and interrogated, and through which students could define themselves as similar to, or different than their peers. Jerome, who attended Harlsbrook Academy before moving to Collingson for sixth form, spoke about his experience: ‘There’s this saying in Harlsbrook, that it’s the best place to learn everything except an education. And it’s true, when I went into Year Seven it was a big culture shock, you come to this place where there’s drugs, sex, violence and everything else…’ At the same time, he emphasized, ‘we all felt like a family’; he contrasted this with Collingson where ‘it’s little groups, and everyone is bitching about each other.’ At Harlsbrook, ‘it’s like a big consciousness. It’s not just a group of people, literally if you’re from Harlsbrook than you’re automatically put in a category, therefore you have to look after each other.’ While Jerome decided to move to Collingson because he was ‘he was getting too comfortable’ and ‘looking for a challenge’, he said that he didn’t feel the same sense of belonging as he had done at Harlsbrook. Thus, he recounted a similar experience to the one explored in this book, for the Year Eleven students of Collingson School: ‘whenever I see someone from Harlsbrook who I haven’t seen for a while, we reminisce about the good times, “oh do you remember when that happened”. You’ve been together five years.’ At the same time, being from Harlsbrook was part of the racism Jerome e­ xperienced. As he described:

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I sort of think I have to work ten times harder than kids of other races because I sort of feel… So it’s like ‘you’re black, you’re from Harlsbrook, you’re born to fail… people pretty much look down on you and think you’re just another face that causes problems for society, ‘why aren’t you a drug dealer? Why don’t you have a baby at 16?’ I’m the sort of character that’s ‘well if you think I’m going to fail than I’m going to work my hardest not to fail so I can stick my fingers up at you’. In school, ghetto was not the only way to act black, and being black was not a prerequisite for being ghetto. At the same time, as Shola experienced, ‘when you’re black, people expect you to act in a certain way… [They expect you] to act ghetto.’ For Shola, ‘being black’, understood in forensic terms, entailed confronting particular expectations of mimetic action, being aware of the kinds of criteria by which she would be judged. As she explained, people expected her to act ghetto, and when she did not, she could be accused of ‘acting white’.13 ‘People say I act white, and I’m like why? Because of my facial expressions, and stuff like that, you get that you really do.’ ‘Are they saying your facial expressions are too white?’ I asked. ‘Yeah, or too English, or too “oh my gosh” [in prim voice]. I don’t know, and they think I should act more black and stuff like that.’ In Collingson non-black students were rarely judged as inauthentic for mimetic expressions of ‘blackness’ (as a contrast, see Chun 2011), and as discussed earlier, speaking in a shared Multi-ethnic London vernacular, often coded by students as black, was a marker of belonging. However, more frequently, black students were judged as inauthentic for ‘acting white’ and for a perceived incongruity between forensic and mimetic dimensions of the self. Terms such as Oreo, Coconut or Bounty were insults directed to such students judged as ‘black on the outside and white on the inside’.14 As we have seen so far, ‘where I’m from’ and ‘black, white, Asian and mixed race’ were understood as fixed by students in terms of unchanging, continuous and embodied aspects of a person, passed down by parents. These aspects of the self were always-already subject to the imposition of expectations, judgements and questioning, racializing practices by which non-white students were continually asked to account for themselves in ways white students were not. At the same time repertoires of style, action and talk understood in terms of ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’ focused on what was shared with peers rather than parents. These were also subject to evaluations of authenticity, which could be mobilized in different ways. The ghetto girls were judged as inauthentic through the mismatch between their ghetto style and material privilege, while Shola was accused

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of ‘acting white’ for not acting ghetto enough. We can see this further in the ­following section, which focuses on the friendships between the It Girls and the way in which they recount their friendship group history. As part of the conscientious tenacity by which friends shaped each other into acceptable persons, black friends monitored each other according to judgements of ‘too much’ but also ‘not enough’.

The History of the It Girls Nihal (Asian, Kenya) was sitting with Samiya (black mixed, Kenya), ­Kadia (black mixed, Kenya), Natasha (Malaysia), Grace (black, Nigeria) and Ruby (white) on their bench. They watched students go by silently for a few moments, spotting a couple of girls from another year who had just entered our eye line. Nihal pointed and asked Samiya, ‘You see those girls there? Are they Ghanaian?’ ‘Yeah,’ replied Samiya, ‘they’re fresh from Ghana.’ ‘I don’t like her red lipstick,’ commented Natasha, ‘it looks cheap.’ A little later the sports teacher (white) walked past the bench. ‘Hi, Sir,’ called Kadia and Grace in a playful, sing-song way. After he had walked past, Kadia commented, ‘Mr Neal is so buff [fit, good looking].’ Grace nodded in agreement, ‘And did you know his girlfriend is black? He’s going out with a beautiful black woman!’ ‘Wow,’ said K ­ adia, in dreamy awe. As I described in Chapter 3, in Year Eleven the It Girls were a stable friendship group: in addition to Samiya, Kadia, Natasha, Grace and Ruby featured in the vignette above, Maria and Cheryl (Columbia) and Georgia (white) were also part of the group. As with other friendship groups, beyond the initial impression of unity was a more complex interrelationship of friendships of varying degrees of closeness and a history of making, breaking and bitching among friends. The recounting of this shared history was also a way for them to situate themselves as ‘grown up’ in relation to their former selves, a narrative of growing up that included negotiation for the It Girls over the acceptability of ‘acting ghetto’. While they had been friends in Year Seven and Eight, the group had splintered in Year Nine. Ruby explained, ‘I wasn’t really friends with Kadia and Natasha because we thought they were ghetto. Me, Samiya, Cheryl and Maria were friends although everyone called us “the plastics”.’ I asked why they were seen as ghetto. Kadia replied, ‘slicking our hair, “I’m gonna bang you up because I’m looking at you”.’ Ruby continued, ‘and Grace, you were never really ghetto, were you? You were in the middle.’ Kadia

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replied quickly, ‘she was! Remember what she was like in Year Ten, she was so black, whoops, I mean she was hanging around with ­Monique and Tanya [both black].’ Towards the end of Year Ten, the group reunited. Kadia said that she, Natasha and Tanya15 just ‘calmed down’, acting ghetto ‘was just a phase really, and we grew out of it.’ As with the ghetto girls in the previous section, ‘being black’ was not a prerequisite for being ghetto. In the original split, Kadia (black mixed, Kenya), Natasha (Malaysia) and arguably Grace (black, Nigeria) were the ghetto ones, and Samiya (black mixed, Kenya), Ruby (white), Cheryl and Maria (Columbia) were the plastics. As I discussed in the last chapter, exclusion or the breaking of friendships were often justified in terms of ethical judgements based on criteria of how girls should act and how friends should act. For the It Girls, in the version of the history they recounted, their divisions were over whether ghetto was an acceptable way to be or not. Ghetto, with its associations of toughness, acting big, overt dominance, criminal activity, acting up in class and talking back to teachers, contradicted the criteria for being a good girl (and could bolster being a good boy).16 From this perspective, different relationships to ghetto in this group of friends not only challenged shared ideas about what was a good life (important to friendship groups) but also limited their ability to judge their friends as ‘good girls’ and thus ‘good friends’. In the end, it was Kadia and Natasha who rejected ghetto, ‘growing out of it’ and allowing the group to reunite with shared criteria of appropriate action. While the girls were now able to share criteria for appropriate action, expectations understood as stemming from their blackness were still carefully monitored between friends. For example, one lunchtime on the bench Kadia told the group about her misadventures with hair relaxants the night before, tipping her hair forward to show partially relaxed roots; she described how she had washed it out before it had time to work properly because it hurt too much. Grace reprimanded her, ‘you must be pretend white or something, of course it hurts, you just have to keep it on.’ At other times, friends who were ‘from’ the same place, such as Maria and Cheryl, and Kadia and Samiya, mobilized these shared forensic origins in actions of recognition or shared experience. Focusing on the It Girls and their history, we can see how ‘being black’ and being ‘from the same place’ was drawn on and became salient between friends. While these aspects of their selves, that may or may not be shared, could at times be very important, there were also many other things the girls saw themselves as sharing, that crosscut these axes of sameness and difference. Likewise, at times the girls’ judgements drew on ethical criteria explicitly informed by these similarities and differences (‘That’s not the way

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a black girl should act’, ‘We don’t do that kind of thing as Columbians’), while at other times this was not the case.

The Growing Together Rhetoric and Incommensurable Difference The It Girls primarily defined their relationships in terms of sameness and closeness, even as their differences were explored and managed within these relationships. In contrast, as I described in Chapter 3, ‘growing up, growing together’ represented an important discourse through which Year Elevens conceived of themselves as a united group, in relation to their past selves. Furthermore, because ‘growing together’ conceptualized relationships between friendship groups and peers in terms of difference yet increasing closeness, it was one way through which students could evidence a convivial sociality, that recognized, rather than denied, racialized and ethnized differences. The casual conversations about skin colour, the ‘where am I from?’ guessing games or laughter at the impression of Uncle Joseph, were all examinations of difference and friendly interactions that contributed towards the feeling of ‘growing together’. As for many young people growing up in multi-racial, ethnic and religious London, the convivial navigation of these differences was a mundane feature of their everyday lives (Valluvan 2016). However, the conviviality of difference co-existed with other ways of interpreting difference as racialized incommensurability (Kirtsoglou and Tsimouris 2018). For example, I heard both Islamophobic and Antisemitic sentiments explicitly expressed in school, described by students as ‘racism against Muslims’ or ‘racism against Jews’, reflecting academic arguments about the racialization of these religions (Meer 2013; Kirtsoglou and Tsimouris 2018). Reasons for these feelings of prejudice were often located outside school, for example, that Jews are ‘really rich’ or ‘greedy’ or that Islam leads to ‘people blowing stuff up’, even though peers belonging to these religions who they knew in school were ‘not like that’. Notions of reified and essentialized difference also emerged through the rhetoric of the ‘growing together’ discourse. I was told by a number of students from across the peer groups that in Year Eleven ‘everyone gets along’; however, they then often qualified this with ‘except the Indian group’ as they were the only groups who ‘only hung out with themselves’ and ‘cho[o]se to segregate themselves’. In these students’ understanding, the Indian group’s position was not due to the year group excluding them, but to the Indian group not joining in. In this way the ‘growing together’ discourse and student claims to harmony were not undermined, even when some students in the year were not included.

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While ‘growing together’ offered the premise that differences did not necessarily preclude closeness, the Indian group’s differences were understood as the reason for their distance. Students justified this by saying that their ‘culture is really different’, ‘that for them it’s about families’ or that ‘they’ve kept proper strong Indian values’. These explanations mirror broader discursive shifts over the last four decades, in which, as Paul Silverstein summarizes, ‘[R]acist paradigms according a purely biological foundation to racial categories have increasingly given way to a wider presupposition of cultural difference as the fundamental and immutable basis of identity and belonging (Banton 1996, Barker 1981, Cole 1997, Gilroy 1987, Grillo 2003, Wieviorka 1995)’ (2005, 366).17 Thus, within the social space of the informal realm, difference was conceptualized in alternative ways. Difference could be transformed through interaction and relationships into the grounds for closeness. But essentialist and reifying notions of ‘strong culture’ could also be mobilized to explain those who were not growing together. Difference in this case becomes fixed and insurmountable, the inevitable grounds for distance.

Conclusion In this chapter I have explored some of the ways through which racialized and ethnized dimensions of difference were manifested, contested and reflected upon in the course of young people’s everyday lives among peers. I have sought to show the way ‘where you are from’ and classifications of ‘black, white, Asian and mixed race’ were constituted in and through forensic notions of the person, as well as how they emerged mimetically. I argue that these are not separate processes, but mutually constitutive aspects of how particular kinds of persons are produced and produce themselves. Peer relationships and time and space shared together foregrounded the mimetic ways in which groups of friends, described according to different forensic terms, shared racialized repertoires of youth style and practice. These shared repertoires enabled friends ‘from’ many places across the world to evaluate themselves and others according to the same sets of criteria. Ghetto was a particular repertoire which was invested with a complexity of metonymic associations and which brought with it evaluations based on particular kinds of (in)authenticity. In turn, these mimetic practices become part of embodied histories and forensic selves. For example, as some of the It Girls left school at the end of Year Eleven and went their separate ways, the particular self-understanding they had instantiated, negotiated, monitored and evaluated between themselves as friends (and criteria of friendship) would become part of their histories. Finally, through

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the notion of ‘growing together’, students highlighted the importance of the familiarity and recognition built up over their time together in school. However, ‘growing together’ was not a straightforward story of unification but contained within it the possibility for essentialized and incommensurable difference. Understanding mimetic and forensic aspects as different dimensions of the same set of processes, we can also see the racializing descriptions through which particular kinds of persons were made to appear and the manifold and mundane performative acts through which students rendered each other as particular kinds of persons according to these descriptions. As we have seen, non-white students were asked to account for themselves in a way that white students were not. In their recognition of the ‘always-­already’ nature of the evaluation and judgement of others, they were acutely aware of the acts that were ‘committed towards, over, with respect to’ them (Lambek 2013, 845), that identified them as ‘not from here’ before they could act themselves. As we have seen in this chapter, some students were asking others to see or classify them according to the way they identified, however this was in a context which always defined them from the outset as ‘not white’ and ‘not from here’. Samiya’s telling people where she was ‘really’ from, had a certain illocutionary force but this needed to be brought into being each time she met new people. As I have further argued, the ‘where are you from’ question is also premised on a particular understanding of personhood. ‘Where you are from’ is understood as unchanging and carried in the individual; this forensic quality is passed down automatically through parents, grandparents and ancestors and requires an assumption of the enduring consequences of generational relations embodied in separable individuals (Strathern 1992; Ingold 2017). At the same time, classification and identification as ‘black, white, Asian or mixed race’ foregrounded a particular kind of embodied visual evidence in understandings of the person, where the body-person was permanently identified and considered temporally continuous (Brah 1996; Lambek 2013).

Notes   1. As Avtar Brah wrote, ‘looks’ matter because ‘of the history of the racialisation of “looks”, they mattered because discourses about the body were crucial to the constitution of racisms. And racialized power operated in and through bodies’ (1996, 3). While these are histories of differential racisms and racializations, they also coalesced and continue to coalesce around a ‘white/non-white dichotomy’ (1996, 13).   2. Similar to Jennifer Patrice Sims and Remi Joseph-Salisbury who, drawing from their studies of black mixed-race men in the UK and US, write, ‘Black Mixed-Race men articulated fluid and multiplicitous identities. In particular, their descriptions

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of their identities often rejected dominant constructions of racial categories as mutually exclusive. Instead, many expressed identifications with both blackness and mixedness, sometimes interchangeably and often simultaneously’ (2019, 56). Brian Alleyne traces the top-down processes through which ethnicity became a ‘privileged marker of difference for all non-white persons in Britain’ (2002, 612), arguing as such that self-evident notions of ‘ethnic communities’ are techniques of power that cannot be separated from the racialized dimensions that are part of these ­categorization practices. In her ethnography of children in a Scottish primary school, Marlies Kustatscher (2017) records similar discussions among her young participants which she terms a ‘politics of intersectional belonging’. As Elaine Chun writes, the ‘the explicit labeling of people or practices with race terms, such as black, white, ghetto, or prep … is a form of racialization, this practice entails the assignment of racial meanings to cultural signs that might have been read in other ways. By naming the world with race terms, speakers designate the axis of race as central to its logic’ (2011, 403–404). Paul Gilroy used the term ‘the black Atlantic’ to describe the connective cultures of blackness and the way these cultural forms are taken up and transformed in specific localities, such as London. ‘Rather than associating blackness with nationality, it is now viewed as post, trans and inter-national, more a matter of culture and style than citizenship, rights or fixed, contractual obligations’ (1993, 3). Scholars have termed this a Local Multiethnic Vernacular (LMEV), as Sam Holmes defines in relation to his South London research: ‘The bedrock of LMEV is traditional London working class speech, with significant influences from Jamaican working class speech. It is open to individuals of all ethnic backgrounds and incorporates linguistic features from other ethnically marked speech which is influential in the locality’ (2017, 174). It was shared between friends; the boys would talk in more standard English with teachers. Drawing from her ethnography of a San Francisco Bay Area school, Mary Bucholtz focuses particularly on these linguistic processes, as important symbolic resources through which students located themselves in relation to peers (2010). In Christy Kulz’s ethnography of a London high school, students often described group divisions as corresponding to speaking styles, for example in relation to the use of slang (2014). As Chun writes, these ideological associations have their own history, for example the intertwining of whiteness and class privilege and a historical whitening of people, e.g. Jews, who have become middle class (2011). A similar cluster of meanings has been identified in the American context (e.g. Goodwin and Alim 2010; Chun 2011; Waldron 2011, see also Back (2005, 28–39) in relation to ghetto and local space in London, Kulz (2014) in relation to ghetto in school. As I discussed in the introduction, while class was rarely used as a category by itself, modes of classed thinking in terms of the division of people in terms of material resources were threaded through other more salient categories. As Chun notes, discussing the use of ghetto in her ethnography of a high school in Texas, the explicit labelling of people or practices with race terms, often achieves more than racial classification. Racial labels such as ghetto, ‘simultane-

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ously bear meanings along axes such as class, gender, or sexuality’ (2011, 412), as well as locating individuals and groups within ‘hierarchies of social space’ (2011, 417). ‘Bare’ means a lot in LMEV; here Shola is correcting herself to standard English for my benefit. As Chun highlights, ‘the sociocultural significance of Standard English has become so entrenched with meanings of whiteness that non-white speakers who are seen as using Standard English are sometimes labeled as “talking white”’ (2011, 413). These terms are recurrent in ethnographies of young people and race ethnicity (e.g. Back 1996; Chun 2011). Similarly, Gilroy writes, ‘what is the fatal currency of what we call “coconut”, “choc-ice”, or “Oreo-cookie” ontologies with their strict and pernicious divisions between “inside” and “outside”’ (1998, 841). Tanya remained a peripheral member of the It Girls but, unusually among the students, preferred not to commit to one friendship group. As described by the students, ghetto was closely connected with conceptions of masculinity as ‘being about hardness, aggressiveness, confrontation, and hierarchical power relationships and that it is racialized (Connell, 2000)’ (Phoenix 2004, 233). As Farzana Shain reviews, this ‘new racism’ ‘has become the more dominant, acceptable and therefore embedded form of racism in the UK. This “new racism” frees individuals from accusations of racism because they do not need to subscribe to a belief in race-based superiority/inferiority… The theory therefore reverses the charges so that a racist is someone who does not adopt the culture and lifestyle of the “host” nation (Barker 1981)’ (2020, 272).

References Alleyne, Brian. 2002. ‘An Idea of Community and Its Discontents: Towards a More Reflexive Sense of Belonging in Multicultural Britain’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 25(4): 607–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870220136655. Back, Les. 1996. New Ethnicities and Urban Culture: Racisms and Multiculture in Young Lives. London: UCL Press. ———. 2005. ‘“Home from Home”: Youth, Belonging and Place’, in Caroline Knowles and Claire Alexander (eds), Making Race Matter: Bodies, Space and Identity. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 19–41. Brah, Avtar. 1996. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London: Routledge. Bucholtz, Mary. 2010. White Kids: Language, Race, and Styles of Youth Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chun, Elaine. 2011. ‘Reading Race Beyond Black and White’, Discourse & Society 22(4): 403–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926510395833. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London and New York: Verso. ———. 1998. ‘Race Ends Here’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 21(5): 838–47. https://doi. org/10.​1080/014198798329676. Goodwin, Marjorie Harness and H. Samy Alim. 2010. ‘“Whatever (Neck Roll, Eye Roll, Teeth Suck)”: The Situated Coproduction of Social Categories and Identities

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through ­Stancetaking and Transmodal Stylization’, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 20(1): ­179–94. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1395.2010.01056.x. Harris, Anita and Melinda Herron. 2017. ‘Young People and Intercultural Sociality after Cronulla’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 38(3): 284–300. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 07256868.2017.1314258. Holmes, Sam. 2017. ‘Lusondoners: An Account of Lusophone-Inflected Superdiversity in a South London School’. PhD Thesis. Kings College London. Ingold, Tim. 2017. Anthropology and/as Education. London: Routledge. https://doi. org/10.​4324/9781315227191. Joseph-Salisbury, Remi and Laura Connelly. 2018. ‘“If Your Hair Is Relaxed, White People Are Relaxed. If Your Hair Is Nappy, They’re Not Happy”: Black Hair as a Site of “Post-Racial” Social Control in English Schools’, Social Sciences 7(11): 219. https:// doi.org/10.3390/socsci7110219. Kirtsoglou, Elisabeth and Giorgos Tsimouris. 2018. ‘Migration, Crisis, Liberalism: The Cultural and Racial Politics of Islamophobia and “Radical Alterity” in Modern Greece’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 41(10): 1874–92. https://doi.org/10.1080/0141 9870.2018.1400681. Kulz, Christy. 2014. ‘“Structure Liberates?”: Mixing for Mobility and the Cultural Transformation of “Urban Children” in a London Academy’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 37(4): 685–701. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2013.808760. Kustatscher, Marlies. 2017. ‘The Emotional Geographies of Belonging: Children’s Intersectional Identities in Primary School’, Children’s Geographies 15(1): 65–79. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2016.1252829. Lambek, Michael. 2013. ‘The Continuous and Discontinuous Person: Two Dimensions of Ethical Life’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19(4): 837–58. https:// doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12073. Meer, Nasar. 2013. ‘Racialization and Religion: Race, Culture and Difference in the Study of Antisemitism and Islamophobia’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 36(3): 385–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2013.734392. Morning, Ann. 2011. The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Phoenix, Ann. 2004. ‘Neoliberalism and Masculinity Racialization and the Contradictions of Schooling for 11-to 14-Year-Olds’, Youth & Society 36(2): 227–46. https:// doi.org/10.​1177/0044118X04268377. Pollock, Mica. 2004. ‘Race Bending: “Mixed” Youth Practicing Strategic Racialization in California’, Anthropology & Education Quarterly 35(1): 30–52. https://doi. org/10.1525/aeq.2004.35.1.30. Raj, Dhooleka Sarhadi. 2003. Where Are You From?: Middle-Class Migrants in the Modern World. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Shain, Farzana. 2020. ‘Race Matters: Confronting the Legacy of Empire and Colonialism’, British Journal of Sociology of Education 41(2): 272–80. https://doi.org/10.108 0/01425692.2020.1717104. Silverstein, Paul A. 2005. ‘Immigrant Racialization and the New Savage Slot: Race, Migration, and Immigration in the New Europe’, Annual Review of Anthropology 34(1): 363–84. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.34.081804.120338. Sims, Jennifer Patrice and Remi Joseph-Salisbury. 2019. ‘“We Were All Just the Black Kids”: Black Mixed-Race Men and the Importance of Adolescent Peer

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Groups for Identity Development’, Social Currents 6(1): 51–66. https://doi. org/10.1177/2329496518797840. Song, Miri. 2018. ‘Why We Still Need to Talk about Race’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 41(6): 1131–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2018.1410200. Strathern, Marilyn. 1992. After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taussig, Michael. 1987. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Valluvan, Sivamohan. 2016. ‘Conviviality and Multiculture: A Post-Integration Sociology of Multi-Ethnic Interaction’, Young 24(3): 204–21. Wade, Peter. 1997. Race and Ethnicity in Latin America. Sterling, VA: Pluto Press. Waldron, Linda M. 2011. ‘“Girls Are Worse”: Drama Queens, Ghetto Girls, Tomboys, and the Meaning of Girl Fights’, Youth & Society 43(4): 1298–1334. https://doi. org/10.1177/​0044118X10382031.

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Sex Talk, Judgement, Sanction and Threat Sex talk was a common feature of everyday life at school, and a source of

fascination and laughter. At the same time, sex actions and evaluations of appropriate sexuality were some of the most actively and forcefully policed by peers. These judgements were premised on gendered criteria; for boys a pursuant and active expression of heterosexual sexual desire could rarely be ‘too much’, and so negative judgements often centred around evaluations of ‘not enough’. In this context, ‘not enough’ was considered evidence of ‘being gay’. Girls had a finer line to walk; while sometimes similar evaluations of ‘not enough’ led them to be called ‘lesbians’, much more often, evaluations of ‘too much’ led to being named as a slut, slag or sket, by both boys and girls. As we will see, these sexual ethics were an important way through which someone could be evaluated as an acceptable or unacceptable person. In the way these judgements occurred and were given force, we can again see the repeated, mutually constitutive tension between persons as separate, self-continuous, and held as forensically responsible for their actions, and as mimetically shaped by the actions of, and relations with, others. It was in relation to sex that students were particularly vulnerable to mimetic threat, and the ability of just one wrong action to change the criteria through which someone would be judged highlights the important ways actions were understood to create acceptable persons.

Sex in School It was lunchtime and many students were sprawled across the field, taking advantage of the autumnal sun before winter would see them banned from

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the increasingly muddy field and dispersed into the corners and corridors of the school grounds and buildings. The Green Corridor Girls sat, some eyes closed with faces upturned to the sun, chatting idly about the dramatic events on Hollyoaks, a TV soap, the evening before. Suddenly, Candice and John, two of their friends from the Opt-out rebels, swept in and the girls shuffled around to include them in their circle. Candice was clutching some cards and her smile was mischievous: ‘Look what we’ve got!’ She started passing the cards around; they each had a different illustrated Karma Sutra position on them with instructions on how to achieve them. The girls found these hilarious, reading out choice phrases and holding up the drawings to show the rest of the group. Keely, brow furrowed, was a lone voice of puzzled innocence amongst all the seemingly knowing hilarity. ‘What’s penetration?’ ‘Oh god, why would you want to do that?’ Her final question tipped the group into hysterical laughter: ‘Why would you want to delay an organism?’ (sic). ‘Typical Keely,’ said Lisa, draping her arm affectionately around her friend’s shoulder. This example highlights the casual way that sex knowledge circulated in school, and the many ways that it emerged during everyday life. Sex was frequently talked about – the recounting of sexual acts and interactions outside of school, the more abstract discussions about sex, or jokes about sex. Sex also entered school through other kinds of media, the Karma Sutra cards discussed above, or a long autobiographical saga of the (supposed) sexual exploits of a seventeen-year-old girl, written completely in text speak, that was passed from phone to phone around the school. As we will see throughout this chapter, sex talk was also often a medium for students to bring other kinds of meanings and effects into school, and an important way through which students could demonstrate themselves as appropriately gendered persons. There was an asymmetry in the way sex talk and joking was used by boys and girls. As we will see from the following examples, sex talk was experienced by some girls as a form of domination. For example, Keely told me about an embarrassing experience she had had in a recent lesson; Billy, messing around with friends near her desk, had leaned over and asked seriously, ‘Keely, can I ask you something… do you give head?’ Analysing it further, she said, ‘I think he did it to make himself feel better because he’d just got slapped by a different boy. So, I just think he wanted the attention drawn off of him, but it was such an unnecessary comment to make, and I was just like “you’re just a stupid little…”.’ Lisa, listening to Keely, added for my benefit, ‘like that might not offend some people, but for Keely that’s offensive.’ Addressing Keely, Lisa continued, ‘it’s weird though because you don’t like it when someone says that to you, but my friend said that I liked anal and drew a picture and everything, but we’re really good friends so

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I just took it as a joke and laughed at it.’ Keely concluded, ‘It’s when you don’t know them.’ This also highlights the double-edged nature of play and joking, which could be received, like Keely did, as experience of intended domination and offence, or, as Lisa did, as ‘just a joke’ between friends. Laughter was not always about sharing a joke, it could also be about nervousness, uncertainty or not wanting to rock the boat, but Lisa was clear that she was experiencing it in a different way to Keely. While girls had different responses to sex talk and joking in school, laughter or most commonly a resigned roll of the eyes, or sigh of ‘not this again’, it was more commonly boys that initiated this kind of talk and joking. As I described in Chapter 3, the Misfits self-identified as geeky or grungy and were not engaged in sport or the high visibility relationships that granted status to boys, such as members of the Man-dem. However, a number of the Misfits did engage in frequent sex talk, joking and play. This was part of the frequent movement that characterized the boys’ actions together; swirling around the smaller groups of stationary Misfits standing and talking, the boys often chased each other, flung themselves and others to the ground to wrestle and as part of these games, many things could become a fake penis, held close to the flies, and flung at friends, or sex acts, requiring no props, could be mimed on each other. I also often heard transgressive sex jokes made by the Misfits, for example concerning bestiality, paedophilia or necrophilia. In his ethnography of boys of a similar age in school, Mac an Ghaill also observed the ways in which ‘sex and sexuality were compulsively and competitively discussed and played out’ (1994, 90) and connected this to the ‘categorical imperative to act like a heterosexual man’ within school (1994, 91). Whereas these mainly focused around ‘performance stories’ (1994, 92), we can see the way that joking, which did not require claims (which might be evaluated as unconvincing and thus illegitimate) of heterosexual success, was also an important source of action for some boys. Sex talk, joking and play enabled boys to demonstrate a sexuality that was potent, active and ‘never off their minds’, key to creating the parameters of acceptable masculine personhood and ‘acting like a man’. Through the frequent repetition of these actions, we can see that acceptable masculine personhood was not secure, but needed to be continually demonstrated. To stop transacting in these ways was to risk falling outside the bounds of acceptable masculinity, and, as I will explore later in this chapter, this was primarily framed by students in terms of being or acting gay. Boys’ almost compulsive repetition of these sexual discourses highlights the high stakes involved in appearing as acceptably masculine. Thus, while gender was granted a forensic reality in school, acceptable gender required continuous action, the mimetic nature of the i­nteractions

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­ighlighting interplay between the continuous and discontinuous in h ­becoming a particular kind of gendered person.

Girlfriends, Boyfriends and ‘Good Sex’ For girls, the creation of an acceptable heterosexuality through talk was more often through relationship talk or the discussion of love interests, rather than sex talk. As I discussed in Chapter 4, talk between friends could manifest heterosexuality at the same time as maintaining and strengthening friendships. Furthermore, there were quite different orientations to this; while some friends talked in detail about boys they fancied (who may or may not know), others were more interested in the general workings of social life and romance in school. As we saw, boyfriends, unlike friends were not essential for girls, and many girls expressed that they were ‘proudly single’, often because of the risks having a boyfriend entailed, not least the difficulties of balancing the demands of time a boyfriend and friendship required. The boyfriend-girlfriend relationship was however an accepted and established kind of relationship in school; the illocutionary utterance of asking someone to be your boyfriend or girlfriend changed the criteria by which both parties would subsequently be judged, both by each other (the demands, expectations and commitment to promises) but also by those around them. Importantly, the instantiation of a committed relationship changed the criteria by which sex between the pair could be judged as ‘good sex’. When Gemma got serious with her boyfriend from the year above, she would report back to her friends, the Green Corridor Girls, about the progress of their sexual activities. As the date of their first ‘sleepover’ approached, she openly discussed her plans and concerns with her friends, discussing what colour underwear she should buy (‘white is too virginal but red is too slutty’) and expressing her worries about him seeing her in the morning without make-up and straightened hair (she was considering setting her alarm so she could perfect her appearance before returning to bed). Francesca reassured her, ‘for some reason boys like you when you look like that, even though you feel really bleurgh.’ Gemma promised to give the girls a ‘blow-by-blow account’ when they returned to school on Monday. As we have seen earlier in this chapter, in the same friendship group, Keely’s innocence could be affectionately understood by her friends, and here Gemma could speak openly about her experiences, with Francesca giving advice from a position of experience. There was no sense that there

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was effort either way to convince their friends into the right way to be, rather an acceptance of the different orientations to sex between friends, as long as it stayed within the bounds of acceptable sex contained within a committed relationship. At times, students also drew on intersecting ethnized, racialized and gendered criteria in these evaluations of acceptable sex. Reflecting on the differences between her and her white ‘class friends’, Shola who was black and ‘from’ Nigeria explained to me: You know there are certain things in my family that I’m not allowed to do. I don’t want to be too specific about it but no sex before marriage. I know people do it but with me and my friends we know that our families don’t really like that thing, it’s a real cultural thing, like where you come from. It’s really different for different backgrounds, it’s like not trying to be rude but for the white background they don’t really care. Criteria for evaluation could be both differing and shared in these interactions. For example, as Shola’s white friend Megan recounted; ­ when she told Shola she had had sex with her boyfriend, Shola’s first response  was to say ‘oh, are you going to get married?’ before she said, ‘I suppose  it’s ok because you’ve been together for such a long time’, thus drawing on  ­criteria of acceptable sex if contained within a committed ­relationship.’1

Being a Slag As we have seen so far, sex was not always negatively judged; however negative evaluations relating to sex (or lack of sex) were an ever-present risk in school that could have important consequences for being judged as unacceptable. A theme throughout this book has been the effort students put into making and unmaking each other as acceptable and appropriate persons, and as we will see, evaluations relating to sex had great shaping power. How this occurred was different for boys and girls; girls were mimetically at risk from the actions of sex, while the same actions could bolster a boy’s reputation and their forensic claims to manhood.2 While sex in relationships was not judged negatively, other kinds of sex, for example one-night stands or sex outside of relationships, were judged according to a range of interconnected criteria: who it was with, when it happened, if it was unusual or something the person did often. For example, Michael suggested that ‘it depends why it happens, if you’re

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being really cheap about it, like if you have a drunken one-night stand, then that can get you branded as a slut.’ Further, he continued, it also depends on frequency, ‘You can’t say that a slut is a girl who’s slept with a lot of men, because it depends on the time period and the situation. If you’ve been mainly completely pissed at parties and you’ve slept with a different guy every night for three weeks then that is a slut … but if it was over the course of two years…’ Furthermore, judgements of ‘slagginess’ were not only attached to evaluations of sex acts, but they could also come to stand for more general transgressions drawing on criteria of appropriate gendered behaviour. Michael started with a definition of a being a slut in terms of actions but then elaborated that it was also about what a girl wore. ‘What I’m saying is that a girl being slutty is not the way she looks but the way she acts, there are sort of general things slutty girls wear but a slutty girl is mainly determined by her actions… it’s a combination of two things; they wear unbelievably revealing things, like to church.’ James continued, ‘And you say like “hello” to them and they have their legs open.’ These actions and evaluations brought the mimetic dimensions of becoming persons to the fore. ‘Sluttiness’ constituted transgressions of action and appearance which easily transformed into evaluations of a girl as ‘a slut’. Being named a slut was a significant performative action which could change the way people acted towards her. For example, as discussed in Chapter 4, friends were understood to be mimetically connected and therefore were at risk from their friends’ actions. There was a particular mimetic danger in being named a slag, and friends could use the withdrawal of talk, among other actions, both to make clear the transgressions of the slag and potentially to isolate them. Being a slag was also a form of visibility. As discussed in Chapter 3, there was legitimate and illegitimate ways of becoming visible, connected to both status and gender. Caroline described, ‘If a girl is a slag than guys will start to hang around her a lot more.’ ‘The boys will have a field day,’ confirmed James. ‘They’re just out for what they can get I suppose,’ said Caroline, ‘but then afterwards they’ll call them a slut.’ In a discussion of this topic with Amit and Samiya, they highlighted a similar dynamic. ‘Like with Serena, people call her a sket. But then she makes it worse for herself because of her actions,’ explained Amit. ‘The thing about Serena is that she can’t say no, so then people come up to her and then she gets an even worse reputation,’ elaborated Samiya. This reputation was seen to be difficult to change; as Michael put it, ‘you know how you get an FDA stamp of approval on chicken and stuff, it’s like that.’ However, Caroline also recognized the desire for attention and v­ isibility, even if it was the ‘wrong kind’ of visibility:

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Some people become more popular with it. Like if a younger girl is a slag then older guys will start to hang around her a lot more. But no one is going to view anyone nicely because of it, they’re always going to view people negatively… I think most girls who do that are insecure anyway, that’s what they want, they want the attention, and they think that they’re getting it, they don’t realize they’ll be viewed negatively. As Caroline highlighted, when a girl became visible because of a ‘bad reputation’, boys are drawn to them. This makes sense within the gendered double standard; whereas for girls (rumoured) sex acts outside of relationships would often lead to negative evaluations, for boys almost all sex was good sex (regardless of who it was with or whether it was outside a relationship). In this way, we can see that while a slag posed a mimetic threat to other girls, she represented a mimetic opportunity for boys: the opportunity to have sex with her and, through this interaction, prove themselves as an appropriate sexual person and reaffirm their forensic masculinity. However, there was also an ambivalence to this opportunity. Michael contemplated that ‘boys should actually love the idea of sluts,’ but ‘when we truly like girls we don’t like to imagine them as a slut.’ Dominic agreed, ‘that’s the thing, no guy genuinely wants to go out with a slut properly.’ ‘Yeah,’ confirmed Richard, ‘they’d get the mick taken out of them a lot for it.’ While entering into a relationship with a girl labelled a slut could damage a boys’ reputation, as Caroline highlighted earlier, a way to guard against this was to pursue a girl for the aim of sex, while continuing to articulate her as a slag and rejecting her as a girlfriend (who could then be judged as participating in acceptable sex). In this way, the mimetic threat the slut presented to the boy was guarded against by the forensic act of making her responsible for these actions. For girls, the figure of the slut could represent an unacceptable other against which they could define themselves as acceptable in contrast.3 For example, the Blonde Barbies, and particularly their most visible member, Paige, were often discussed by other students. As we saw in Chapter 4, in the conversation between class friends Leah, Marina and Samiya, Paige was often evoked as epitomizing bad behaviour, not only ‘giving blow jobs at parties’ (according to Samiya) or at least ‘to the buff [good looking] ones’ (according to Marina), but also ‘acting big… like she’s not scared of anyone.’ The mimetic dimensions of becoming persons were again brought to the fore, as Paige and the Blonde Barbies were made a foil against which the others could define themselves by contrast as good and appropriate. Furthermore, this contrast also enabled students to define their notions of the good life. After describing the Barbies to me as girls who ‘go and get drunk

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at parties, whore themselves out,’ Lexy defined herself and her friends in contrast: ‘We don’t go around doing that, we’re here to learn.’ ‘Exactly,’ said her friend Rhiannon, ‘we’re here to learn, we’re not in school to give guys blow jobs.’ ‘We’re not here to whore ourselves out to as many people as we can in a week. We’re in school to learn, that’s why we’re in school, to get good GCSEs,’ reiterated Lexy. Being labelled as a slut was thus a powerful insult that could come from ethical evaluations of inappropriate sex acts and more generally from judgements of inappropriate action and appearance. It was therefore a forceful and flexible way through which students policed and shaped each other according to a range of interconnected gendered criteria of appropriate speech, action and appearance. As we will see, these evaluations also often became collective projects of policing and sanction. Kadia told me that something that happened between her and a boy outside of school had become known in school, circulated through rumour. After the actions came to light, all members of the Man-dem gave her a hard time and then stopped speaking to her. Samiya explained to me that what Kadia went through was not unusual; most of their group had been ‘terrorized’ by the Man-dem at some point, usually, although not always, because of perceived ‘skettish’ behaviour. As Samiya explained, once one of the highest status boys like Davros or Jacob (Chimmi did not seem to instigate this kind of thing) had decided to punish perceived bad behaviour, the other boys were expected to fall into line. ‘If one of them breaks out, they might get rushed [beaten up],’ explained Samiya, sympathetic to the pressure they were also under. Returning to her own experience of being ‘terrorized’, Kadia told me that compared to all the ‘hassle’ she had received from them, ‘when they stopped talking to me and left me alone, it was actually a relief. But it was a really hard time, the thing was, what I did wasn’t bad, it was just something between two people.’ Thus, as Kadia’s reflection highlights, students did not always accept the criteria by which they were judged. I had previously heard a version of this story when Caroline was visiting the Misfits territory. As discussed in Chapter 3, as a well-connected and well-liked member of the year group, Caroline was somewhat of a gossip conduit and she was often a source of knowledge of other groups for the Misfits. After she told the story, Michael expressed surprise, ‘I would never have thought that!’ After the bell rang to signify the end of lunch, I stamped across the muddy, icy field with Sejal to our next lesson. She was not part of the conversation, and I had not noticed her listening, but once we were out of the earshot of the others, she turned to me and said in a confidential tone, ‘I’ll be looking at people differently now, some people look so innocent.’ As this story unfolded, students involved or observing drew on a shared but contested criteria to make judgements about the right and wrong of the

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situation: The Man-dem evaluated it as an offence which needed punishment, Kadia and her friends as nothing wrong, just something that happened between two people. And Sejal, Michael and Caroline evaluated it as something that, as Caroline said, ‘will make a lot of people see her negatively’. These criteria were only applied to Kadia; the boy involved was not subjected to the same judgement. Furthermore, this story highlights the ways in which members of the It Girls were policed by the Man-dem. As I discussed in Chapter 3, the It Girls and the Man-dem were status equivalents in the year group; many considered each other friends, they often socialized together and had in the past dated. It was the conventions of visibility and status that made the girls vulnerable to the boys’ attentions; as Lambek notes, ‘the ethical is to be distinguished not only from what is specifically unethical but also, and perhaps more fundamentally, from simple indifference’ (Lambek 2010,  54). Thus, as I have illustrated throughout this book, peers did not ‘see’ each other equally, and it was the visibility of the It Girls to the Man-dem, because of their status equivalence, that meant their actions were scrutinized as such. After Kadia and Samiya told me their stories, I asked indignantly, ‘why do the boys care so much when it has nothing to do with them?’ Samiya answered philosophically, ‘We’re like their girls, I think they feel we kind of represent them so if we do things that make them look bad then they don’t like it.’ The mimetic threats of the slag were understood by students to have potentially far-reaching effects. It was not only individuals and friendship groups at risk of being named ‘slaggy’, but also the entire year group or school. In this way, taking action against someone was not only about individual punishment but also about protecting the reputation of the year group and school – a matter of collective concern. As I have explored in previous chapters, importance was placed on the year group as a ‘good group’, an ethical collectivity. This was often articulated in terms of having ‘grown up and grown together’ – the cumulative effects of positive actions and interactions. However, the group could equally be undermined by negative actions and interactions. Members of the Man-dem had taken on this guardianship of the ethical collective, and in particular policed the actions of the It Girls. As they were the highest status and most visible girls, there was more at stake if their reputation was judged ‘bad’ – the whole year group could by extension become judged as ‘slutty’, undermining their claims to being an ethical collective. As always, these interactions and relationships were being closely observed by those not involved. From this observer’s perspective, Lexy described the policing by high-status boys as one of the downsides of being well known:

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Well yeah, because obviously, they get harassed by boys a lot which is never a good thing, I don’t know how they feel about that… The guys we talk to, it’s not that kind of relationship, it’s like we’re all just normal people. It’s because they all [the Man-dem and the It girls] fancy each other, because basically they’re the sexually charged people of the Year. Similarly, Leah interpreted these actions in terms of domination, ‘It’s strange, it’s an alien world. The girls were being walked all over… I think it was about [the boys] asserting themselves. And I don’t think that they cared about those girls at all, it was all “I’m the boss, I’m the boss, shut up I’m the boss”.’ However, the It Girls themselves drew on different criteria to challenge the assumptions of this hierarchy. As Samiya said, ‘The thing is, the boys say we depend on them, but really, they depend on us, for friendship. And they don’t really have a life outside – they want us to bring girls to their parties.’

Being ‘Gay’ Like the slag discourse for girls, the gay discourse was a policing mechanism of great force and efficacy for boys. Sometimes I heard homophobia explicitly expressed in school, by boys particularly, with great virulence and disgust, with being gay described as ‘repulsive’, ‘disgusting’, ‘unnatural’ or ‘wrong’. Often, it was used as a signifier of ‘failed’ masculinity, and more generally it was used as a commonly used word of failure, disparagement or criticism. As Michael explained to me, ‘people will use gay for anything, people don’t just use gay as in “you’re homosexual”, they use it as an insult… people associate gay with something crap, so it’s a general way of telling someone that you think they’re bollocks.’ Whereas the naming of slags and judgements of ‘slagginess’ often entailed detailed descriptions of supposed actions (as for example Paige above), I did not hear the same for judgements on ‘gayness’. Rather, while girls were judged as slags according to criteria of ‘too much’, boys were judged as gay according to criteria of ‘not enough’ or the wrong kind of action. Grounded in criteria in which male interest in, and pursuit of, heterosexual sex was rightly potent, active and ‘always on the mind’, to not act was suspicious. Furthermore, boys who did not engage in kinds of action marked as masculine, whether that be sport, play-fighting, sex talk, banter, joking and physicality, were also at risk of being judged ‘gay’ and placed outside of the bounds of appropriate male personhood which was ­necessarily heterosexual.

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Both girls and boys articulated ideological connections between gayness and femininity (Youdell 2005) and used this to reinforce the gendered distinctions of what was considered appropriate behaviour. In the ­classroom or playground, girls were often quick to make a joke at the expense of boys judged as acting ‘girly’: poring over women’s magazines (brought in by a girl), expressing concern about their appearance, putting on lip balm or complementing a girl on an outfit. During class, Leah, Georgia and Lexy (‘frenemies’ who often positioned themselves as different to each other) came together in a shared evocation of this criteria. ‘I like people who are masculine, I think if you’re a boy you’re a boy, I don’t like all that rubbish… Any boy that doesn’t want to be macho, ok this is going to sound bad, is probably gay,’ said Leah. ‘Some of them are a bit effeminate and they start talking to you about really girly things and it’s like urggh,’ agreed Lexy. As with the slag discourse, ‘gayness’ represented a mimetic threat for boys. As I described in Chapter 4, girls’ friendships were characterized by a physical affection and closeness, hugging, kissing and holding hands. These were interactions that for boys as friends were out of bounds. Thus, while accusations of being gay were judged according to the criteria of insufficient heterosexual and masculine actions, they were also judged according to criteria of the wrong kind of action. This was particularly the case in relation to affection or compliments towards male friends, actions and interactions that were considered acceptable for girls. As Shola explained, ‘If you’re a guy and you interact the same way as girls do – say a boy gives another boy a hug or kisses or something, they might say “okay, are you gay or something?”.’ For these reasons, when asked, both boys and girls felt that despite the threat of being named a slag, boys’ actions were more restricted than those of girls. A number of times I heard different girls comment that despite the difficulties of being a girl, including the threat of being named a slag, they still felt they had the preferable position over boys.4 Richard and Dominic, members of the Misfits, expressed a similar sentiment about the restrictions placed on boys. Richard articulated, ‘there’s more pressure on boys than girls, like for girls it’s just about how you are, but for boys it’s about how you are and what you do. If you do this or you do that then you’re gay.’ Dominic added, ‘like girls can say they think another girl is attractive, but if a guy did that, they’d be called gay straightaway.’ As these boys highlighted, there were constant risks within their male friendships; doing ‘the wrong thing’, including complimenting a friend, could easily lead to being called gay. Furthermore, the same actions were not equally risky for all boys. For the boys of the Misfits, their low status and lack of recognition of ‘masculine qualities and actions’, such as sport or success with girls, left them particularly vulnerable. Dominic said with resignation, ‘whatever I do someone

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calls me gay because I have long hair and that automatically means that I’m gay.’ However, for the Man-dem, many of whom had established their sexual reputations through well-known relationships or encounters with girls (true or not), there was less risk of particular actions or styles leading to them being named gay. For example, both Karl and Nathan also had hair of a similar length to Dominic’s, and while the girls sometimes laughed at this and called them ‘girly’, it did not result in them being named as gay and excluded from appropriate masculinity. Although used much less frequently than slag, the ‘lesbian’ discourse, like ‘gay’ for boys, was applied to girls who did not do enough in relation to (appropriate) heterosexual action, or furthermore were not ‘desired’ enough by boys. Like gay, this was not only in relation to the correct expressions of heterosexual desire (different for boys and girls), sufficiently feminine action, dress, hair, etc., but also more general social failure of the low-status students. I did hear about occasions of girls, but never boys, kissing each other, but this was spoken about in relation to being drunk at parties and was not presented as risky for being seen as a lesbian. On the other hand, in line with the mimetic risks of friendships, being friends with someone ­considered a lesbian attracted suspicion. As Jane (Year Thirteen) encountered in a younger year: There was the lesbian thing, the two girls I was best friends with, one of them was rumoured to be a lesbian… When I started hanging around with her, people would come up to me and warn me and say ‘do you know she’s a lesbian?’ and I was like ‘I really couldn’t care less’, and they were like ‘are you a lesbian?’ and I was like ‘no’. Furthermore, this mimetic threat also concerned being in all-girl environments and not interacting enough with boys. Just before assembly started and the students were called to silence, Lisa and Linda were chatting about their choices for sixth form. Linda revealed her desired school: ‘it’s a private girls’ school.’ Lisa leaned in and whispered, ‘you’ll become a lesbian.’ Linda shot back quickly, ‘I don’t care what I become, as long as I can go to that school. It’s one of the best schools in the country.’

Sex and Former Selves As we have seen so far, being named as a slag for girls (and to a much lesser extent lesbian) and gay for boys was a powerful marker of gendered transgression. Both were drawn from gendered criteria which meant the same action could result in a girl being judged as a ‘slag’ while the boy

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gained prestige from the (supposed) proof he had sex with a girl. While these originated in judgements of speech, action and appearance, they also became attached to the person who then became a mimetic threat to others. I have also tried to show how judgements according to criteria were often contested, and students offered different perspectives on the dynamics they observed or experienced. As with many kinds of interaction explored in this book, at the same time as they were engaging in practices of judgement, and potentially sanction, they were also reflecting on them. As Webb Keane writes, ethics are ‘not all of one order’. ‘Sometimes we are in the midst of action; sometimes we stand apart from it’ (Keane 2010, 69). For example, students, especially girls, often highlighted the double standards they observed and were part of; as Georgia said, ‘what really annoys me is that a boy sleeps around and he’s like cool and a girl is [a] slag.’ Judgements on sexual ethics were also made in relation to other criteria, for example criteria of truthfulness, authenticity and the importance of ‘being true to yourself ’ that, as I have discussed, were important in school. Jerome told me the story of a girl in his year who was accused of being a slag and who, when confronted with this accusation, said yes and she didn’t care what anyone thought of her. Her indifference, recounted Jerome, meant that she was ‘automatically respected, she wasn’t respected for what she did, she was respected for what she said when they caught her because she still carried on with who she was. Whereas if there’s a girl and she did something and everyone knows it, and she denies it, then that’s worse.’ In the next chapter, I will focus in more detail on the ethics of individuality, through which notions of authenticity are central. In this example, we can see that despite (or because of ) the mimetic threat that slaggy actions entailed, actions that foregrounded the self-same and continuous dimensions of the self, and accepted the forensic responsibility that this entailed, regardless of the opinions of others, could to some degree emolliate the judgement of slag, and garner respect. Year Thirteens looking back on their younger years often highlighted the rigidity of their and their peers’ perspectives then, in relation to now. As they described, and as I observed when spending time with them, the virulence of ‘slag’ and ‘gay’ diminished, and students evoked these as criticisms of persons much less often. Students allowed each other more flexibility in the kinds of sexuality they could express, and the ethics of sexuality became less of a collective project of evaluation and sanction. As Jane said: ‘I think it’s because they’re too young, before they have any experience of sex, they use it [the slag discourse] as something. But when you get older, they think “oh yeah, this is quite fun”. Everyone was prudes before, but they were only prudish because they didn’t have any experience of it.’

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As Jane’s comments suggested, there was a recalibration of criteria that occurred between peers as they got older, precipitated by many performative acts that included sex itself. As I have suggested elsewhere in this book, while all action is risky because it is irreversible and consequential, the perils are particularly intense for young people less ‘practised’ in the art of living. This may be considered particularly the case in relation to sex, which is usually encountered for the first time on the road to adulthood. But we can also consider how the acts of reflection discussed above had performative qualities, leading to a recalibration of criteria, following which the ‘slag’ and ‘gay’ criteria were less likely to be applied, were applied less forcefully and/or were less likely to lead to peer sanction. Similar sentiments were expressed by some members of the Misfits. James said, ‘It’s just a new thing, so it’s got that novelty factor, and everyone is kind of obsessed. When everyone gets used to it, it doesn’t lose any value but it’s…’. Richard continued, ‘Because as soon as something is new people have a really strong opinion on it. But as soon as they get used to it, it will become less important, it will be a bad thing but not as bad as it was.’ ‘It’s like when kids got a new toy and they go over the top with it and end up breaking it, it’s sort of like that.’ ‘It’s all to do with normalcy…’ added Dominic. ‘Yeah,’ Richard agreed. ‘At secondary school if you do something out of the ordinary than you’re gay or if you’re a woman then you’re a slut, it’s like you have to be normal, you can’t be out of the ordinary, but outside school, after school, I think people will kind of accept it more.’

Sex, Ethics and Personhood In this chapter I have focused on the multiplicity of actions through which students evinced sexual ethics within school and in the context of the commonplace circulation of sex knowledge and sex talk. Interactions of sex extended far beyond the physical act (and often did not originate there in the first place) and were constantly transformed into talk, humour, rumour, bitching, play and ‘reputation’, each with their attendant conventions. Sexual differentiations were produced by students through a forceful and efficacious sexual ethics, where boundaries of acceptability were often made visible when peers were perceived to have transgressed, which then came to structure their experience and notions of acceptable personhood. For boys, to be appropriately sexual persons, they had to demonstrate a powerful, pursuant heterosexuality which was ‘never off their minds’. For girls, to be appropriately sexual was to walk a finer line, demonstrating heterosexual interest, entering into committed relationships, and possibly engaging in ‘good sex’ within these relationships.

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Here we have seen criteria clearly shaped by ‘the prevailing politics of normative gender difference (girls and boys as opposite sexes)’ (Hey 1997, 129) and the heterosexual matrix (Butler 1990) through which acceptable gender becomes visible through heterosexuality, and heterosexuality becomes visible through gender. At the same time, as Aimee Meredith Cox writes, ‘[s]exuality is undoubtedly read differently on different bodies, and thus the implication of its expression depends on the positionality of the individual’ (2015,  159). Racialized and ethnized criteria intersected with gendered criteria as ­students made particular judgements on sex relating to ‘where you/I am from’. Furthermore, in the power of these discourses in school we see the importance of acceptable sex for becoming the right kind of person, and the risk that evaluations of unacceptable sex, action and appearance presented to this personhood. While gender was granted a forensic quality by students in school, understood as an unchanging, natural and self-same dimension of a person (who could not be imagined as non-­gendered), being seen as the ‘right’ kind of boy or girl took continual effort and ­vigilance. As we have seen, mimetic threats to gender and sexuality are rife in school; action, non-action or spending time with the ‘wrong person’ could easily change how you would be viewed, and what you could ­‘become’.

Notes 1. Exploring the ways in which ‘racialized immigrants claim through gender the power denied them by racism’ (2001, 416), Yen Le Espiritu argues that female morality, including sexual restraint, can be an important site where ‘economically and politically dominated groups can construct the dominant group as other and themselves as superior’ (2001, 421). 2. Valerie Hey’s ethnography, conducted almost twenty years earlier, found something very similar, attesting to the consistency with which discourses are brought into being anew by successive generations: ‘Girls’ practices … had as their major aim the making of feminine identity or reputation through the axis of conformity to classed sexual codes. Examples like “being improved” abound, being transformed into a “slag” or otherwise surveyed – tactics which were made available by girls’ unique capacity to “get beneath each other’s’ skin” by establishing powerful judgements on the surface of each other’s’ bodies’ (1997, 130). 3. As Hey writes, ‘In this economy, the incentive of “othering” was enormous – how else could you claim to be normal, acceptably attractive and OK? It is all those other girls who are made to carry the bad bits of femininity’ (1997, 75). 4. As with the work of Hey, Máirtín Mac an Ghaill’s ethnography (1994), attests to the continuity of these forms of policing. As he writes, ‘Gender discipline is not imposed only on women: normalizing programmes for men are also steeped in assumptions

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about masculinity… young men constructed as being less than “masculine” are also likely to come under suspicion and surveillance’ (Carlen et al. 1992: 102)’ (1994, 93).

References Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Cox, Aimee Meredith. 2015. Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hey, Valerie. 1997. The Company She Keeps: An Ethnography of Girls’ Friendships. Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press. Keane, W. 2010. ‘Minds, Surfaces, and Reasons in the Anthropology of Ethics’, in Michael Lambek (ed.), Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action. New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 64–83. Lambek, Michael. 2010. ‘Toward an Ethics of the Act’, in Michael Lambek (ed.), Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action. New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 39–63. Le Espiritu, Yen. 2001. ‘“We Don’t Sleep around like White Girls Do”: Family, Culture, and Gender in Filipina American Lives’, Signs 26(2): 415–40. Mac an Ghaill, Máirtín. 1994. The Making of Men: Masculinities, Sexualities and Schooling. Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press. Youdell, Deborah. 2005. ‘Sex–Gender–Sexuality: How Sex, Gender and Sexuality Constellations Are Constituted in Secondary Schools’, Gender and Education 17(3): 249–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540250500145148.

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Becoming an Individual among Others Throughout this book, I have focused on young people in the process of

growing up and have sought to tease out how their personhood develops through mutually constitutive forensic and mimetic processes. Students were self-same, continuous and disconnected from others, held forensically responsible for their actions. And they were also malleable, discontinuous and connected to others. They were shaped by the actions and associations of others, both positively (for example, through friendship) and negatively (for example, the mimetic threat that the ‘slag’ and ‘gay’ naming represented). We have also seen ongoing tensions in friendship and other peer relationships between the desire for mimetic connection and forensic distinction. These forensic and mimetic dimensions come in and out of focus and transform into each other through ethical practices of evaluation and judgement. As we have seen in the preceding chapters, these strands of personhood are embedded within, and shaped by, intersecting dimensions of sameness and difference and their associated ethical criteria. In this chapter, I explore the way in which a particular ethic of individuality, a foregrounding of an ideological valorization of ‘the maximally socially distinct and temporally continuous individual’ (LiPuma 1998; Lambek 2013, 842), emerged in different ways between peers in school.

The Virtue of Authenticity A theme throughout this book has been the central importance of appearing in the right way in order to be judged an acceptable person. At the same time, we have a seen how authenticity – being ‘true to yourself ’ regardless

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of the judgement of others – was also highly valued. As I have highlighted, despite drawing meaning from notions of a continuous essential self, authenticity was itself a criterion against which students could be judged. These appraisals evidenced success in terms of ‘being yourself ’ and failure in terms of ‘fake’, ‘try-hard’ or ‘attention-seeking’; thus, here we see that the virtue of authenticity emerged in the intersubjective judgement of others, while at the same time accusations of ‘fake-ness’ were used to label ‘bad’ mimetic shaping. While visibility and status – ‘being seen and known’ – were recognized by students as legitimizing the wider extension of influence over others and an expansion of self, many students argued they did not desire this. The expanded self of the high-status students was defined in contrast to the virtues of being genuine and authentic. ‘Being seen’ was cast in terms of the superficiality of surface, while being authentic was cast in terms of the profundity of depth. Thus, as we have seen in previous chapters, while the Misfits were clear about a year group hierarchy that placed them near the bottom of the pecking order, they were also critical of those higher status students, and made it clear high status was not something they desired. For example, in a conversation with me, Leah described the Man-dem in these terms, ‘they just want to be in a big gang, have lots of friends, they need constant validation.’ In her analysis, they were unconvincing in their masculinity because their actions did not come from a genuine place: Because they have no self-esteem. Because they’re trying to find themselves. Because they’re trying to fit into stereotypes. Because when people don’t know what they should be they always stereotype themselves and then they become caricature of each other, and they were all caricatures of each other… I don’t like people who are fake, and they are fake about it. As I described in the introduction, in contrast to the supposedly disingenuous high-status pupils, the Misfits positioned themselves as having ‘genuine friends’ (James) and allowing each other to be ‘a group of individuals’ ­(Michael). While they recognized that being low status placed them in a vulnerable position, they also argued that the visibility of high status entailed its own vulnerability and peril. To have a reputation was to have something to lose, and so to restrict your possibilities for action. ‘Here’s the truth though,’ Michael declared to me one lunchtime, ‘most guys don’t actually care that much how a girl looks, truthfully. It doesn’t come down to how they look, it comes down to who they are, and that is the god’s honest truth.’ Caroline, visiting the Misfits territory from the Green Corridor, interjected, ‘it might be true for you but not for other boys, say like

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for Nathan [one of the Man-dem] it’s obviously not.’ Michael nodded in agreement, ‘I think part of that is that if he says that he likes different kinds of people then guys at the school wouldn’t accept it, they would lose status and it’s all about status. If a guy says he likes a girl who isn’t considered to be unbelievably attractive, then he will lose status.’ ‘Yeah,’ concludes Caroline, ‘it will affect their reputation.’ As discussed in the previous chapter, reputation – the mobile, circulating part of the self – was vulnerable to damage by the opinions of others; boys and girls with reputations to maintain, in different ways, had to guard against this mimetic threat. In this case, being associated with the wrong kind of girl (one who was not ‘unbelievably attractive’), and not acting in accordance with the judgements of the whole group, would damage a reputation, and therefore this would be avoided, regardless of the genuine feelings the boy had for the girl. By contrast, the Misfits presented themselves here as the ones with the freedom to act independently of their friends and follow their true desire, regardless of how it would be seen. As I have sought to show throughout this book, the judgement of peers would not necessarily be accepted by the people against who the judgement was directed. Higher status pupils did not view themselves as ‘less authentic’. However, regardless of the impact of these judgements, through these collaborative acts, the Misfits could draw on their comparison with other groups, particularly the Man-dem, to make judgements of authenticity and define themselves positively in the process. By drawing upon criteria of authenticity, the Misfits were able to define themselves virtuously as ‘real friends’, while other groups were judged as ‘fake friends’, dependent on maintaining the right kind of image. Being genuine was durable because it stemmed from the ‘inner self ’ while being visible was fragile because it depended on the maintenance of surface and the evaluations of others. As we have seen from the Misfits, this also enabled an understanding of a different kind of will. Whereas high-status students were legitimized in extending their intersubjective influence widely over others, authenticity was seen to grant a forensic freedom to follow your true desires, regardless of the opinion of others.

Friendship, Bitching and the Ethics of Individuality Accusations of fakeness were not reserved for high-status students but were a common source of critique and bitching between peers and between friends. It was in these terms that Leah interpreted Sophia, and the reason she had so few friends. Leah knew Sophia from outside school as their parents knew each other: ‘she’s really different, inside school she talks quite

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chavvy, outside school she talks quite posh.’ As such Leah concluded she did not have many friends ‘because she’s not being herself, everyone can just tell she’s not being herself, they don’t know who she is, they can just tell she’s not being herself.’ The evaluation of this fakeness was not straightforward; Leah recognized that Ruby also spoke differently outside and inside school, and yet was one of the most popular girls in the year group, with lots of friends. As discussed in the previous chapters, talking and dressing like peers, as opposed to parents, was quite common and was not necessarily judged negatively. The point, however, is how judgements of inauthenticity could be mobilized; it was considered possible by students to assess whether someone was being themselves or acting fake. The presence of a ‘true, unchanging, inner self ’ was both central to being considered an acceptable person, and at the same time was something that could be legitimately evaluated and critiqued by peers. Evaluations of the forensic self therefore justified the mimetic shaping of others. As with other forms of mimetic shaping, this was also something that could be done by the person themselves, transforming their own actions: ‘She used to be really fake, she’s much more genuine now’ or ‘she used to be a copycat’. A common subject of bitching was imitation. This might be in terms of copied clothes, hairstyle, favourite band, opinions, or ways of speaking. Like other aspects of friendship, accusations of copying often represented the tipping of a delicate balance. As I have discussed, friendship was idealized by girls as a good match between pre-existing true selves, and friends were expected to have lots in common. Similarities were seen as spontaneous, equal and the expression of your ‘true’ inner self. However, copying accusations arose when these similarities were judged as inauthentic, superficial and not about ‘who you really are’. Persistent copying was accepted as legitimate grounds for breaking friendships and subsequent exclusion. After being dumped by Lara, Lillian discovered she had been accused of copying. Lillian described copying as a key factor in the breakdown of another friendship made after Lara had dumped her. Lillian introduced her new friend, Maya, to her group, and according to Lillian, this previously shy girl had copied her way of interacting with its members. At first Lillian said she felt flattered by having her own ‘clone’, but then she began to feel that Maya was acting ‘more like me than I was’ and taking over her role in the group. As I argued in Chapter 4, particular modes of friendship entailed particular conceptions of persons who could be friends. When friendship was idealized in terms of a connection between true selves, then there was a lot at stake in these evaluations of authenticity. You could not be a genuine friend without being a genuine you. Copying and ‘acting fake’ (not being

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yourself ) were both an affront to the ethics of friendship and to the ­ethics of individualism, drawn from interlinked criteria of friendship, forensic individuality and the correct order of (individual) selves first, and friendships second. As with other instantiations of this ethics of individualism, it gained its force through its mimetic effects, the capacity of these judgements to shape self and others into appropriate selves.

Surface and Depth and Looking Good for Yourself Throughout this book we have seen that both evaluations of authenticity – understood in terms of hidden depth – and evaluations of looking good – understood in terms of appearance – were interwoven into everyday life at school. As I have written about elsewhere (Winkler-Reid 2017), girls in particular were subject to these evaluations, shaped by dominant body and beauty ideals. In these evaluations, girls were judged on their surface appearance more frequently than boys. Thus, there was a recurrent tension in evaluation practices between surface (being judged on the way you appear) and depth (looking beyond this to see the ‘real’ person). Students expressed their understanding that ‘being seen’ and ‘being known’ were not necessarily the same thing – a ‘true inner self ’ may be both expressed or concealed by surface. As Kate (Year Thirteen) described, ‘when I was younger, I was a chav, but I didn’t really feel like it inside. I wasn’t a real chav, I had my hair scraped back and stuff, but I didn’t really have the attitude.’ Acknowledging this, students argued that being a good friend involved looking beyond appearances and getting to know ‘the real person’. Pointing over to where Maria stood, chatting to some of the Man-dem, Ruby said, ‘For example I’m looking at Maria now and she’s wearing loads of make-up or whatever, so they think “she’s like this, she’s like that” but to judge someone like that is really weird.’ Both authenticity and looking good were important criteria for the shaping of appropriate persons, and yet they pulled in different directions. It was within this tension that we might consider the discourse of ‘looking good for yourself ’ that emerged in a similar way to ‘growing together’, as girls reflected on their histories defining themselves as different to their former selves. ‘People used to care a lot more but now I think, no one really minds,’ said Lisa in answer to my question about whether people cared a lot about looks. ‘Like you want to look nice, but it depends as well whether it’s what you want to look like or what you want other people to look like. Like the girls tried to dress themselves up for the boys, because they were trying to get a boyfriend, weren’t they? It used to be like that, so the boys would notice them… But no one really cares anymore, because you know

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the person not the look. Yeah of course they matter to a certain extent, but not really, do they?’ She looked at Keely for confirmation. ‘No, as long as you look presentable,’ agreed Keely. To ‘know the person and not the look’ highlights the potential disconnect between appearance and true self. The way you appear is important, but it is not necessarily the real you. The look focuses on surface, visibility and appearance; the person is someone whose inner depths are known. Like authenticity, ‘looking good for yourself ’ was not exempt from the realm of intersubjective evaluation, rather the criteria by which appearance was judged was shifted. Here judgement rested not only on looks, but on the perceived desire behind these looks. Discussing with me the things they felt had changed most as they grew up, Georgia and Grace used these evaluations to distinguish between those who had grown up and those that remained ‘immature’. ‘Now no one really cares,’ said Georgia, ‘but then you still see some people who make a real effort.’ ‘Still now though, that’s what I’m talking about,’ said Grace. ‘The immature people are the people who are still making an effort now.’ ‘I think most people have realized that you’ve got to be here five days a week, you can’t always make an effort, and when you’re with those people it’s like “what’s the point?”’ Like bitching, this general act of criticism worked to make visible a subtle recalibration of evaluation and judgement around the notion of effort. In these evaluations, Grace and Georgia positioned themselves, by implication, as suitably mature – able to make the right amount of effort. Whereas making an effort for others (and particularly boys) was cast as being fake and immature, looking good for yourself aligned the outer and inner you. It strengthened claims to being genuine – motivated by expressions of the true self rather than superficial surface. Furthermore, in these recalibrations, as with those around the slag discourse discussed in the previous chapter, a further marker of grown-upness was the capacity to evaluate yourself. Rather than needing other people to shape you, you showed you could shape yourself – you did not need to be told. In these ways, the markers of grown-upness were also students investing themselves with more forensic responsibility.

Closeness and Difference, Surface and Depth, Sameness and Difference Individuality also gave shape to the way students understood themselves in relation to others. As we have seen throughout this book, relationships were frequently understood along two key axes: closeness – distance and sameness – difference. Best friendships, and other friendships within

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friendship groups, were described in terms of closeness and sameness. As we have seen, girls particularly defined their friendships in terms of degrees of closeness (she’s a friend, she’s a close friend, she’s a really close friend, she’s my best friend), with the understanding that even within one group of friends, different people would be closer to each than others. Best friendship was the designation for the closest degree of friendship, becoming each other’s ‘other half ’. Other kinds of friendships were understood in terms of closeness and difference; thus, a number of times in this book we have joined class friends in their observations and evaluations of the peer relations around them. As I have argued, these friendships were valued even though, and often because, they were between people who understood themselves as very different. Finally, we have seen the efficacy of the creation of distance, the ending of friendships and their corresponding demands for commitment of closeness, and the active processes of exclusion. The point at which a friend becomes no longer a friend, and therefore not ‘part of you’, was also when reputations became untwined from each other, the creation of distance emphasizing the ex-friend as a forensic person held responsible for their actions apart from you. Spatial metaphors for understanding the relationship between persons are illuminating for the kind of person understood in these relations. In her discussion on English kinship and individuality, Marilyn Strathern (drawing on the work of Macfarlane 1978) highlights the importance of distance (both physical and analogous) to individualism: ‘An invitation to imagine the individual person set against the givens of his or her social situation, and against pre-existing relationships’ (1992, 13–14). While imagining horizontal difference from others, individuality often imagines a vertical relationship of the self; thus, like the young people in this book, Adrie Kusserow noted the ‘vertical metaphors’ of middle-class parents, an ‘axis that ranged from superficial (top) to natural/real/true (bottom)’ (2004, 88). Thus, young people were conceiving of their relationships in terms of closeness and distance and evaluating themselves and each other in terms of surface and depth, and both these spatial metaphors worked to reproduce an invisible ‘individuality thinking’ that shaped how young people ­understood themselves.

Evaluating Individuality In this chapter I have centralized the way a particular ethic of ­individuality  –  a  valorization of the independent, authentic and consistent p ­ erson  – emerges in everyday life at school and explored how this ethic of individuality was drawn on by students as criteria for evaluation.

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­ uthenticity and fakeness were evaluated interpersonally, and through A these ­intersubjective interactions individualism was brought into being, given shape and attached to moral valuations (it is important to be genuine and not to be fake). For example, by evaluating their high-status peers as fake, the Misfits were ‘making sense anew’ of a particular notion of the individual as involving a true, unchanging, inner self that may or may not be accurately expressed to others. In the process they were coming to understand themselves as valued genuine people. Through their evaluative interactions, students were also grappling with the tensions inherent in this individualism, for example the way surface could both express and obscure the ‘true inner self ’, and the way authenticity was positioned as both someone being true to their selves regardless of the evaluation of others and subject to evaluation by peers. Thus, in these ways we can see that although the ideology of individuality valorizes the person as independent and existing separately from their relationships, in practice it is manifested and made sense anew by young people within their relationships. Evaluations of individuality are used to justify the mimetic shaping of peers.

References Kusserow, Adrie. 2004. American Individualisms: Child Rearing and Social Class in Three ­Neighborhoods. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lambek, Michael. 2013. ‘The Continuous and Discontinuous Person: Two Dimensions of Ethical Life’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19(4): 837–58. https:// doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12073. LiPuma, Edward. 1998. ‘Modernity and Forms of Personhood in Melanesia’, in Andrew Strathern and Michael Lambek (eds), Bodies and Persons: Comparative Perspectives from Africa and Melanesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 53–79. Strathern, Marilyn. 1992. After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Winkler-Reid, Sarah. 2017. ‘“Looking Good” and “Good Looking” in School: Beauty Ideals, Appearance, and Enskilled Vision among Girls in a London Secondary School’, Anthropology & Education Quarterly 48(3): 284–300. https://doi.org/10.1111/ aeq.12200.

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Conclusion

Being good friends is a really hard thing. It’s like I’m me and I know who I am, then when your friends with someone you’re like ‘Don’t be you, be me.’ But then it’s like ‘No, don’t copy me, be you.’ —Leah

In the preceding chapters, I have explored how young people’s individ-

ual personhoods are constituted in everyday life, intertwined with ethics, and through relations with others. Situating these processes within school and the friendships, peer relations, hierarchies and shared history within it, I have highlighted the ways the students sought to shape each other into acceptable individual persons. Throughout this account, I have drawn attention to the productive tension and mutual constitution between the forensic dimensions of selves – being self-same, continuous over time and held responsible for your actions – and the mimetic dimensions – being discontinuous and imitative, and connected to and shaped by others. Through attention to growing up and this part of the life-course, we have seen how these processes of becoming a particular kind of person were being explicitly worked out and debated by young people often through ethical processes of judgement according to a range of transforming criteria. Furthermore, examining the emergence of individuality ethnographically, I have explored the shape of ideologies of the individual and the way ‘individuality thinking’ forms part of young people’s own self-making practices. As we have seen, young people drew on an ethics of individuality, a valorization of the independent, authentic and consistent person, in their evaluations of each other. While this ethics of

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individuality shares characteristics with the ‘paradigmatic conceptualization’ of the Western self (Sökefeld 1999), drawn from ideas, texts and anecdote, paying attention to how this emerges in everyday life enables us to go beyond the abstract individual. As I have argued, young people’s understandings and evaluations of personhood are shaped through the specificities of social difference and inequality. Particularly salient in this context was the differences between being a boy and a girl, and being ‘black, white, Asian or mixed-race’ and ‘from somewhere’ or ‘not from somewhere’. I have explored these differences through close attention to the words, perspectives and concepts of students. I have done this with the aim of not automatically subsuming their understandings within pre-existing categories, but rather to take seriously how these understandings can contribute to debates and help us to move beyond the abstract, to the specificities of being an individual, in a particular place and time, and in relation to others. At the same time, I have sought to do this without setting young people’s selves, understandings and ­micro-histories adrift from the broader forces and historical and ideological structures through which some persons will be more valued than others. Young people were making meaning from historical materials, and we have seen them work with deeply embedded notions of persons that can be traced back and connected to global structuring forces. But things are also in the process of being created anew. I hope I have shown how young people are both tenacious shapers and critical and caring persons in process. As I have argued, attending to the way specific and relational individual personhood emerges in everyday life is important because it enables us to challenge the structuring myth of the autonomous Western individual. While anthropological debates on personhood have challenged a binary between ‘individuals’ and ‘dividuals’ and recognize that persons everywhere can contain both, the ready acceptance of the ideal individual emerges in other arenas. For example, as part of the huge proliferation of research on neoliberalism, its ideal subject, which is autonomous, responsible, and self-disciplining, is evoked with regularity. This conflation of ideal subjects with actual selves then accepts, rather than interrogates, the ideologies used to justify neoliberalism (Kipnis 2011; Winkler-Reid 2017b). As I have also suggested, this ready acceptance of the autonomous individual can be connected to a pervasive individuality thinking in Western sense-making practices. Individuality is so much a part of a ‘deeply rooted metaphysics’ (Strathern 1988) that the way it structures analysis can often be invisible.

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Challenging Individuality-Thinking in Practice: Girl-Kind North East ‘Individuality thinking’ and its associated sense-making practices are not only deeply structuring of our understanding, but relatedly, have significant consequences for practice. For example, individuality thinking fundamentally shapes theories of learning. In her influential scholarship, Jean Lave (1996) identified a mainstream of theories of learning which conceive of it as only a mental, individual process. Learning is understood as the individual internalization of external knowledge and as such is underpinned by the uninterrogated pre-existing individual learner, separate and separable from others (Lave 1996; Ingold 2000; Martin 2014). This further relates to the genealogical model, and the notion of discrete information being transmitted from generation to generation, as in schooling (Ingold 2017; Alexander 2020). The uninterrogated dominance of this understanding of learning and the assumptions of the person it rests on has important consequences for the way ‘interventions’ for young people are designed.1 Thus, in an earlier article (2017a) I focused specifically on bodily dissatisfaction among girls and the way in which negative ‘body image’ is primarily conceived in both the academic literature and public discourse in terms of an ‘ingestion model’ of subjective formation (Bray and Colebrook 1998) where the individual is understood to be consuming media images of thin women to adverse effect.2 Girls are understood as consuming a ‘bad diet’ of media images, and it is this internalization of external knowledge that is argued to shape their subjectivity. The starting place for this is the self-evident and separate (consuming) individual, and the prime relationship explored is between the individual and media forms. The implication of the dominance of this ‘ingestion model’ is that interventions with young people (and specifically girls) seeking to address issues of bodily dissatisfaction or negative ‘body image’ are often information-based. These approaches use conventional dyadic pedagogic approaches to seek to rectify this ‘bad diet’ and encourage the individual learner to internalize different kinds of images and information about the body. As O’Dea and Abraham (2000) demonstrate, educational interventions aiming to improve body image or reduce eating disorders that use these information-based approaches are rarely effective and may have unintended negative consequences (such as introducing young people to specific weight-loss techniques they have not encountered before). Furthermore, the starting place for these interventions is often adult-defined problems. As I have explored throughout this book, this bounded and self-­evident individual only comes to take shape through the manifold processes of

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evaluation and judgement between peers within school, and young lives are lived intensely among other people. Bodily dissatisfaction, as with the other dimensions explored in this book, takes shape among pervasive social processes, including looking and being seen, evaluation and self-­scrutiny. Students are also engaged in reflection on their practices and critical commentary. At the same time, however, there is little space in school for these relationships, interactions and feelings to be explored and valued, especially in the context of continued and increasing performance measurement and pressure on schools for students to attain a ‘good pass’ in their English and Maths GCSEs (Gewirtz et al. 2021). Seeking to create a space where girls could be supported in exploring the complexity and intensity of their peer relations, in 2017 I co-founded Girl-Kind North East (with Sarah Ralph-Lane).3 Girl-Kind did not assume in advance what problems were important to girls but rather valued them as experts in their own lives, respecting their critical capacities. Girl-Kind worked with girls aged eleven to eighteen to explore their experiences through workshops and a celebration event. The first workshop started with one open question: what are your experiences of growing up as a girl in the North East of England? Working together in groups, the girls decided what topic or theme they wanted to focus on, and how they wanted to express it to others. All this led up to the celebration event where girls presented the work they had created to family, friends and special guests with the power to influence change, for example local members of parliament. We started Girl-Kind in 2017, working with two schools and about forty girls. In 2018 this doubled and in 2019 it doubled again, when we worked with ten schools and youth groups. In the first three years, over 300 different girls participated in Girl-Kind activities. We were surprised by the demand and desire for a programme such as Girl-Kind and the lasting effects it had on some of the girls who took part. For example, one participant who took part in the first Girl-Kind in 2017 said in 2020: Usually… loads of thoughts will go through my head: … ‘I can’t do this’… ‘You are not supposed to do that!’ ‘You can’t talk.’ ‘You are not allowed to do this!’ and stuff like that. But ever since I went to GirlKind I am able to open up more, and just tell people. And even talk to older people. Starting with one question, everything else was generated from the girls: what was important to them and what they wanted to explore. The themes they chose to focus on often resonated with what has been explored in this book. For example, one group wanted to illustrate how it felt to be constantly judged. Girls in white t-shirts featuring positive words

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to ­describe themselves were braced against an audience invited to throw paint bombs at them. This symbolized the negative judgements often flung at them, but also their ability to stand strong against them. Girls talked powerfully about the gendered double standards that they daily experienced; one group focused on school uniforms and the constant reprimands they received for having their skirts too short, while boys who had tight trousers were not reprimanded: ‘they say it’s for our own good, so we don’t distract the boys,’ explained one girl, exasperated by the unfairness. Another group focused on catcalling, realizing that it was something that every girl and woman in the room had experienced; a different group produced a series of photographs of lone young women on deserted streets at night, a reclaiming of these ‘dangerous’ spaces as their own. As in Collingson School, the girls conveyed the mundane violence of being a girl, and for some the way this intersected with experiences of racism and/or homophobia and expressed a righteous anger about the struggles they continued to face. They also often had a language through which to articulate this injustice, which they utilized in this specifically created space. For example, one zine created in a workshop at the celebration event was authored by a self-named ‘raging feminist’, while the terms feminism, patriarchy, toxic masculinity, heteronormativity, sexism, racism and double standards were all used by girls to name their experiences (none of them provided by us). Looking at the data for Girl-Kind in relation to this book, and the pervasive evaluation and judgement peers subjected each other to, I was struck by how the girls who took part experienced it as a space free of judgement. As one participant reflected: I think at the celebration day I felt really like I am not going to come forward, and I will go, and I will sit quietly and let everyone else explain it [what they had created]. And then I got there, and it was like well everyone else has put their experiences and their thoughts on the line too, for me to sit here and judge. And we are all looking at each other’s stuff. So, I felt more comfortable and confident with it. Teachers who took part in the programme also reflected on this: I think it not being run by teachers … and knowing that it was a confidential space, where everything was going to stay within the room, made them feel a lot more comfortable as a result. … It’s quite empowering, isn’t it, to say ‘This is your thing’ – and even just

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asking them individually for their permission I think is probably something they don’t get very often. The Girl-Kind North East project developed from an ethos that guided everything we do. And this ethos is anthropologically informed: that we should not assume in advance what is important to people, that we should not frame people’s lives from the outset in terms of problems – people are experts of their own lives. But, differing from ethnographic research, it was also about creating a conscious, supporting space of value, distinct from the intensity of school life, where girls could explore the things they were experiencing, and feel listened to and valued. This felt a simple premise, but as we ran Girl-Kind, and heard from the girls and the adults around them we realized how much the girls valued this experience; it struck us how rare these spaces often are in young lives. We should not underestimate the benefits of trying to displace individuality thinking. By cutting against the grain of these dominant knowledge practices, we can create alternative spaces where young people’s own sense-making skills and practices are ­recognized and valued.

Notes 1. As Jack Martin writes, ‘[c]onsistent with this emphasis on psychological explanations, highly publicized research and intervention programs in educational psychology in areas such as self-esteem, self-concept, self-efficacy, and self-regulated learning have promoted inner psychological and biological causes of student conduct, experience, and learning and minimized social and cultural constituents of students’ educational experiences and outcomes’ (2014, 169). 2. As Rebecca Coleman (2009) argues, while this research is diverse and cross-disciplinary, there is a common tendency to posit a relatively straightforward, one-way and linear relationship between media images and their negative effect on girls. 3. From the perspective of media and culture studies, Ralph-Lane’s work also challenges textualist assumptions, in this case in relation to film stars, exploring the action-centred way they are used and function in social interactions in personal relationships (Ralph 2015).

References Alexander, Patrick. 2020. Schooling and Social Identity: Learning to Act Your Age in Contemporary Britain. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/​ 978-1-137-38831-5. Bray, Abigail and Claire Colebrook. 1998. ‘The Haunted Flesh: Corporeal Feminism and the Politics of (Dis)Embodiment’, Signs 24(1): 35–67.

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Coleman, Rebecca. 2009. The Becoming of Bodies: Girls, Images, Experience. ­Manchester: Manchester University Press. Gewirtz, Sharon, Meg Maguire, Eszter Neumann and Emma Towers. 2021. ‘What’s Wrong with “Deliverology”? Performance Measurement, Accountability and Quality ­Improvement in English Secondary Education’, Journal of Education Policy 36(4): 504–29. https://doi.org/10.​1080/02680939.2019.1706103. Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. ———. 2017. Anthropology and/as Education. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.43​ 24/9781315227191. Kipnis, Andrew B. 2011. ‘Subjectification and Education for Quality in China’, Economy and Society 40(2): 289–306. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2011.548950. Lave, Jean. 1996. ‘Teaching, as Learning, in Practice’, Mind, Culture, and Activity 3(3): ­149–64. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327884mca0303_2. Martin, Jack. 2014. ‘Psychologism, Individualism and the Limiting of the Social Context in Educational Psychology’, in Tim Corcoran (ed.), Psychology in Education: Critical Theory~Practice. Bold Visions in Educational Research. Rotterdam: Sense, pp. 167–80. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6209-566-3_11. O’Dea, Jennifer A. and Suzanne Abraham. 2000. ‘Improving the Body Image, Eating Attitudes, and Behaviors of Young Male and Female Adolescents: A New Educational Approach That Focuses on Self-Esteem’, International Journal of Eating Disorders 28(1): 43–57. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1098-108X(200007)28:13.0.CO;2-D. Ralph, Sarah. 2015. ‘Using Stars, Not Just “Reading” Them: The Roles and Functions of Film Stars in Mother–Daughter Relations’, Celebrity Studies 6(1): 23–38. https:// doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2015.995466. Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. The Gender of the Gift. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520910713. Sökefeld, Martin. 1999. ‘Debating Self, Identity, and Culture in Anthropology’, Current Anthropology 40(4): 417–48. https://doi.org/10.1086/200042. Winkler-Reid, Sarah. 2017a. ‘“Looking Good” and “Good Looking” in School: Beauty Ideals, Appearance, and Enskilled Vision among Girls in a London Secondary School’, Anthropology & Education Quarterly 48(3): 284–300. https://doi. org/10.1111/aeq.12200. ———. 2017b. ‘“Doing Your Best” in a London Secondary School: Valuing, Caring and Thinking through Neoliberalism’, The Sociological Review Monographs 65(1): ­137–53. https://doi.org/10.1177/0081176917693553.

Index

An ‘n’ after the page number indicates a note number to follow (example ‘134n5’ would mean note 5 on page 134). academization, 57, 60n8 acceptability of actions, 49, 88, 102, 104, 105–6, 146 boundaries of, 10, 73, 149 close friendships, 95, 96 creation of, 12, 31, 127, 136 friendship groups, 49, 110 and gender, 28, 78, 85, 138–39, 150 of individual persons, 9, 11, 152, 154, 155, 160 sex, 140, 142, 150 transformation, 79, 80 access to the school, 42, 46, 47–48, 50 ‘acting big’, 77, 79, 97, 104, 106, 142 age, 2, 33n11, 52, 57, 86, 138 age-specific groupings, 9, 27 Alexander, Patrick, 25, 27, 57, 92n1 America, 6, 26, 33n10, 77, 131n2, 132n11. See also Euro-American society anthropology conceptual understandings, 8, 22, 23 influence, 8, 84, 165 life-course, 33n11 literature, 5, 6, 16, 20, 96 of morality, 11, 16, 29, 30, 34n15 of personhood, 3–4, 5, 13, 26–27, 96, 161 reproduction of assumptions, 20 youth studies, 26 appearance authenticity, 156, 157 femininity, 146

judgement on, 111 racism, 119, 131n1 scrutiny, 77 ‘slut’ label, 141, 143 See also clothes; hair Arendt, Hannah, 32, 73 assembly, 68–69, 74, 147 attainment, student, 46, 163 ‘attitude’, 111, 123, 156 attractiveness, 76, 77, 78, 81, 146 authenticity, 2–3, 18, 77, 122–23 blackness, 124, 126 conceptualization, 2–3 evaluations of, 80, 126–27, 130, 154, 155–56, 159 forensic freedom, 152–54 forensic self, 120, 122–23 notions of, 120, 124, 148 revealing, 98 virtues of, 12, 152–54 See also fakeness author access, 42, 46, 47–48, 50 experiences, 49, 96, 111–13 intersubjective influence, 112 position, 49 autonomy, 19–20, 25, 32n3, 52, 96, 161 behaviour, ‘bad’, 92, 112, 142, 143 belonging, 55, 126, 129, 130, 132n4 to school, 125 to the year group, 49 See also fitting in

168 

z Index

binary (‘individuals’ and ‘dividuals’), 4, 19, 161 binary, gender, 8, 56 bitching, 105–8 authenticity, 154 breaking friendships, 71, 100 causes for, 110 definition of, 82 disclosure of information, 106 exclusion, 111, 113 mimetic dimensions, 96 replaced by positive talk, 73 similarities, 155 blackness authenticity, 124, 126 expectations, 128 mutable descriptors, 12, 117 racism, 119 style, 130, 132n6 bodily dissatisfaction, 162–63 boundaries, 10, 48, 50, 53, 111, 149 boyfriends, 77, 108, 110, 139, 140, 156 bullying, 49, 79 capitalism, 24, 42 changes since fieldwork, 54–57 chavs, 73, 155, 156 Chimes Hill, 123, 124 Clare House, 85, 91 class (social) individuality, 158 inequality, 6, 23, 32n8, 84, 132n11 privilege, 45, 60n2, 93n6, 132n10 speech, 132n7 status, 27 classes, within, 72, 77, 81, 111–12, 117, 122 dominance, 93n10 status, 86 See also assembly; friendships, class classification, 8, 45, 70, 117–22, 130–31, 132n11 closeness degrees of, 102, 127 and difference, 72, 89, 90, 117, 130, 157–58 between friends, 74, 97, 98, 99, 129

and vulnerability, 104 See also friendships, ‘close’ clothes, 77, 83, 139, 141, 164 Collingson neighbourhood, 11, 42, 44, 59 Collingson School, 44–46 access, 47–48 description, 2, 10, 50, 90 fitting in, 49, 78–79, 83–85, 112 friendship groups, 126 institutional organization, 69 life-course, 25 reputation, 124–25 commonalities, 71, 75, 155. See also similarity competitive equality, 82, 93n10 conceptualization (by young people) attention to, 8, 22–24 commonalities, 71 difference, 130 ghetto, 133n16 ‘growing together’, 129 of themselves, 2, 7 transformations, 59 Conservative governments, 54, 60n8, 114n2 continuity, 58–59 since the fieldwork, 11 with other people, 7, 25, 42, 54, 150n4 over time, 7, 25 of self, 20, 117 conviviality, 28, 43–44, 55, 60n1, 70, 129 Cox, Aimee Meredith, 22, 58, 150 criteria, judgement, 23, 30–32, 86, 91, 124, 145–46 changes, 96, 101, 125, 139, 157, 160 gendered, 136, 140–41, 143–44, 147–48, 150 Department for Education, 55, 60n8 depth, 95, 96, 105, 113, 157 authenticity, 3, 98, 153, 156 disclosure of information, 97, 99 ‘individuality thinking’, 158 descriptors, mutable, 12, 117 desirability, 76, 77–78, 146 difference, 2, 23–24, 44, 105, 131, 161 classifications of, 8, 45, 92, 117–22

Index 

and closeness, 72, 129–30, 157–58 ethical criteria, 128, 152 ethnicity, 28, 130, 132n3, 140 and friendship, 89–90, 110 friendship groups, 74, 84–85, 91, 125 gendered, 82, 97, 140, 150 racialized, 28, 116–17, 130, 140 between year groups, 48–49 differentiation, 74, 82, 90–91, 113, 118, 149 disclosure of information, 97, 99, 102, 106 distancing academic, 84, 90, 104–5 difference, 130, 157 disclosure of information, 102 between friends, 108, 110 reputation, 158 social class, 60n2 dividuality, 4, 5, 21, 24 dominance, 20, 93nn9–10, 107, 138, 145 power, 30, 87, 150n1 sex talk, 137 Enlightenment, 18, 32n1, 33n10 equality of opportunity, 45–46. See also competitive equality; inequality ethical collective, 91, 144 criteria, 103, 128, 152 dimensions, 7, 24, 25, 26, 58 evaluations, 143, 152 judgements, 7–8, 31, 58, 103, 128, 160 persons, 3, 7, 88 practices, 104, 152 reflection, 42, 51–54 selves, 87, 91 status, 78 ethics of friendship, 156 of individuality, 12, 148, 152, 154, 158, 160–61 peer, 3, 29–32 sexual, 12, 136, 148, 149–50 shared, 91 ubiquity of, 7, 29, 34n16

z 

169

ethnicity, 12, 22, 28, 132n3, 132n7, 133n14 definition, 32n7, 118, 119 See also multi-ethnic spaces ethnographic research for this book, 42, 54, 56, 59, 69, 160 concepts, 23, 24 ‘individuality thinking’, 21 methods, 7, 11, 17, 22, 29, 30 use of, 3, 20, 24, 29, 33n11 ethnographic research studies of education, 27 on life in London, 43–44, 93n11, 132n9, 132n11 on masculinity, 93n8, 150n4 on personhood, 5–6 on race, 28, 118, 133n14 in schools, 9, 58–59, 93n4, 93n6, 132n4, 138 of young people, 29, 133n14, 150n2 Euro-American society, 9, 19, 21 exclusion distancing, 105 ethical judgements, 128 of friends, 71, 103–4, 111–12, 113, 128, 155 history, 5 intersubjective influence, 91, 96, 103 of ‘others’, 5, 20, 43 from school, 73 social, 44 expectations and blackness, 126, 128 of friendship, 51, 89, 98–99, 105, 108, 111 friendship groups, 143 heterosexuality, 28 life-course, 33n11 romantic relationships, 110 of school, 6, 52, 113 similarities, 155 visibility, 10, 68, 75, 87 fakeness, 2, 67, 153, 154–55, 157, 159 femininity, 28, 88, 146, 147, 150n2 feminism, 21, 22, 32n6, 34n13, 57, 164

170 

z Index

fieldwork, 2, 51, 56, 74, 111 context, 45, 54 process, 11, 42, 46–47, 48–49, 52–53, 101 See also access to the school; author; ethnographic research fights (between peers), 71, 82, 105 fitting in, 1, 2, 49, 50, 112 not fitting in, 2, 49, 79, 83–85, 90 forensic dimensions, 7, 96, 106, 113, 126, 160 distinctions, 12, 31, 152 notions of the self, 25, 80, 120, 122, 130, 155 origins, 22, 119, 128 person, 18, 32n1, 158 presence, 24, 84 quality, 131, 150 responsibility, 101, 103, 148, 157 terms, 121, 122, 126, 130 friendship, actions of bitching, 106, 107 criteria, 96 ending, 99–100, 103, 111, 155 ethical conventions, 104 expectations, 51, 89 investment, 72 talk, 99–100, 101, 102 friendship, concept of, 74 friendship group(s) access to, 49, 53 of author, 111, 112 basis for, 28, 70, 71 exclusion from, 102, 103 hierarchy, 69, 71, 74–75, 79 interconnections between, 72, 91, 129 introduction, 12, 49, 69, 97 reputation, 12, 144 territory, 48, 68, 72, 76, 86, 90 friendships, breaking and authenticity, 155 ethical judgements, 128 growing up, 71 painful experiences, 72, 112 romantic relationships, 103, 109 talk, 99–101

friendships, class, 89–90, 108, 109, 117, 140, 158 friendships, ‘close’, 74, 92n3, 95, 97–98, 101, 108 friendships, genuine, 1, 2, 99, 153–54, 155. See also fakeness games, 80, 117–18, 121, 129, 138 ‘gay’ discourse, 95, 99, 136, 138, 145–47, 148–49 insults, 114n1, 145 GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) exams, 46, 67 importance of, 71 predictions, 81 results, 9, 46, 60n3, 85, 143, 163 ‘geeks’, 83, 138 gender(ed) acceptability, 78, 85, 138–39, 141, 150 binary, 8, 56 conventions, 53, 81, 96, 104 criteria, 86, 110, 136, 140, 143, 147 differences, 8, 79, 93n4, 97, 146, 150 double standards, 59, 142, 164 histories, 69, 91 identities, 28, 55, 137 relations, 12, 21, 23 Gender of the Gift, The (Strathern), 21, 32n4 ghetto, 117, 123–27, 128, 130, 132n11, 133n16 girlfriends, 77, 108, 127, 139, 142 Girl-Kind North East, 13, 59, 162–65 good life, 32, 71, 85, 88, 128, 142 government focus, 19, 45, 54, 55, 60n6, 114n2 academization, 60n8 Green Corridor Girls, 75, 87–89, 95, 123, 137, 139 ‘growing together’ acceptability, 110 appearance, 156 closeness, 129–30 difference, 117, 129, 130, 131

Index 

investment, 112 shared ethic, 91 unity, 73 growing up authenticity, 2 commonalities, 71 differences, 117 experiences of, 163 in London, 129 process of, 8, 16, 32, 113, 152, 160 shared history, 69, 80, 91, 127 sites of, 30 unity, 73 grunge, 70, 73, 138 hair, 1, 83, 98, 116, 128, 147 colour, 76 style, 68, 77, 123, 127, 139, 156 Harlsbrook Academy, 124–26 heterosexuality, 28, 56, 93n5, 108, 139, 149–50 hierarchy bitching, 105, 107 challenging, 46, 89, 145 friendship groups, 12, 69, 71, 90–91, 107 informal realm, 47, 50, 93n4, 133n11 position, 74, 80, 87, 153 reproduction of, 22 in school, 92 in society, 43, 45 year group, 10, 75, 76, 79, 89, 122 historically informed meanings, 7–9, 25, 54, 88, 91 history friendship group, 2, 49, 78, 83, 117, 127–29 interconnected, 16, 23, 101 of London, 42–44, 59 micro-histories, 16, 59, 161 own personal, 96, 111 of relationships, 101, 102, 114 shared, 69–74, 80, 91, 160 spatial, 12, 120, 122 Western individual, 5, 16–21 homophobia, 145, 164

z 

171

homosexuality, 145. See also ‘gay’ discourse human becoming, 25, 26 imitation, 18, 86, 155, 160 immigration, 55, 60n6, 150n1 independence, 52, 96, 154, 159 Indian group, the, 129–30 individualism, 5–6, 19, 27, 156, 158–59 possessive, 18, 21 individuality, conceptions of, 2–8, 13, 16–17, 20, 158–59 individuality, ethics of, 12, 148, 152, 160–61 individuality, production of, 12, 20, 31 ‘individuality thinking’, 13, 16–17, 21–25, 52, 158, 160 challenging, 162–65 individual personhood, 13, 25, 31, 96, 160, 161 inequality, 31, 45, 57, 144, 146, 161 class, 6, 23–24, 32n8 colonialism, 43 economic, 54 histories of, 11 material, 24, 85 informal realm, 50–51, 53–54, 59, 71, 76, 92 conventions, 87 difference within, 27–28, 130 investment, 51, 111, 112 insults, 68, 86, 110, 126, 143 ‘gay’ discourse, 114n1, 145 See also ‘lesbian’ discourse; ‘slag’ discourse intersectionality, 29, 34n13, 44, 140, 150 intersubjective influence of author, 112 bitching, 107 desirability, 78 dominance, 93n10 gender, 85, 96, 103–4, 113 status, 91, 154 intimidation, 82, 87, 111. See also dominance investment forensic responsibility, 157

172 

z Index

investment (cont.) in formal schooling, 83, 87 ‘growing together’, 112, 130 informal realm, 51, 111, 112 in learning, 113 in relationships, 72, 73, 104, 112 site of, 9 It Girls, 76–79 attractiveness, 76, 77, 78, 81 dynamics, 102, 108, 127, 128 history, 2, 78, 117, 127–29 members, 74–75, 81, 90, 103, 133n15, 144 mimetic practices, 123, 130 status, 75, 77, 87, 90, 91 visibility, 76, 77, 81, 87–88, 144–45 judgement, 82, 89, 109–10, 152–53, 154–55, 163 on appearance, 111, 131, 156, 157 authenticity, 92, 126–27, 155 bitching, 73, 105, 106, 107–8, 113 criteria (see criteria, judgement) ethical, 31, 58, 103, 128, 148, 152 fear of, 95, 98 free from, 83, 164 negative, 73, 136, 140–41, 164 transformations, 79, 80 knowledge academization, 57 dominance, 165 internalization, 162 privileged, 121 sex, 137, 149 of year group, 49, 89, 143 See also disclosure of information Kulz, Christy, 45, 60n8, 93n6, 132n9, 132n11 Kusserow, Adrie, 5, 6 Labour. See New Labour Lambek, Michael, 7, 24–25, 30–31, 33n10, 144 ‘Last Day of School’, 51, 57, 67–69, 73, 91, 92

legitimate action criteria, 8, 30 exclusion, 104, 111 gender, 12, 23, 79, 81, 85, 97 history, 20 intersubjective influence, 91, 154 status, 75, 77, 82, 91 style, 123 violence, 43, 86 visibility, 141, 153 ‘lesbian’ discourse, 136, 147 lessons. See classes, within life-course, 11, 16, 25, 33n11, 160 locality, 43–44, 91, 93n11, 124, 132nn6– 7, 132n11 London, 42–44 culture, 132n6, 132nn6–7 and ghetto, 124, 132n11 history, 12, 42, 44, 59 immigration, 55, 60n6 life in, 8, 11, 25, 54, 60n5, 93n11 multi-ethnic spaces, 55, 129 schools, 45, 47, 93n7, 132n9, 132n11 Mac an Ghaill, Máirtín, 138, 150n4 Man-dem, 80–82 authenticity, 153–54 competitive equality, 82, 93n10 forensic notions of self, 122 judgement on, 86–87 members, 75, 85, 88 punishment from, 143, 144 sexual desire, 147 status, 75, 77, 80, 91, 138 visibility, 81, 138 marginalization, 20, 49 masculinity acceptable, 28, 138, 147, 151n4 actions of, 56, 80, 93n8, 145–47, 153 appropriate, 88, 147 and class, 87 conceptions of, 93n8, 133n16 ‘failed’, 145 forensic, 142 friendship groups, 80–81 racialized, 87, 93n7 maturity, 2, 101, 157

Index 

Mead, George, 26, 33n10 Mean Girls, 77, 79 messaging, 56, 99, 100, 102, 109, 137 metonymic place holders, 72, 124, 130 micro-histories, 16, 59, 161 mimetic concept, 7, 24–25, 31, 121, 152–53 connection, 89, 95, 101 dimensions, 22, 96, 113–14, 126, 141, 160 effects, 80, 156 interactions, 131, 138 practices, 81, 123, 130 risks, 72, 147 shaping of others, 155, 159 threat, 136, 142, 144, 146–48, 150, 154 Misfits description, 1, 67, 75, 83, 85, 154 hierarchy, 74–75 judgement, 89, 91 members, 68, 79, 90, 101, 146, 149 safety, 84, 86 status, 74, 87, 153–54, 159 style, 123 territory, 1, 85, 143, 153 visibility, 87, 138 mobile phones, 54, 56, 68, 99, 100, 137 moral value, 3, 17, 159 multi-ethnic spaces, 55, 60n2, 93n6 music, 71, 83, 122 nationalism, 21–22 neoliberalism, 20, 42, 161 networks, 49, 90, 103 New Labour, 45, 54, 57 non-whiteness, 119, 131n1 oppression, 11, 29, 119 Opt-out rebels, 89, 117, 137 painful experiences, 2, 11, 72, 101 exclusion, 71, 104, 112 peer ethics, 3, 29–32 personhood anthropological study of, 3–4, 13, 26–27, 161

z 

173

discussions on, 3, 4–7, 20, 22, 24–25, 33n9 forensic distinctions, 31, 113, 152 individual, 13, 25, 31, 96, 160, 161 mimetic distinctions, 31, 113, 152 production of, 9 psychology of, 26–27, 34n16 understanding of, 131, 138, 145, 149, 161 Western, 6, 8, 25 persons, kinds of, 3, 4, 24, 33n9, 96, 131 conceptualization by young people, 23 production of, 130 phones, use of, 47, 56, 99, 100, 102, 137 policing (between peers) ethical collective, 145 gender, 28 power, 78, 143, 150 reputation, 12, 144 sexuality, 28, 56, 136 policy, education, 28, 44, 57, 116 popularity assessing, 111 high, 76, 77, 88, 155 increase, 68, 100 lower, 82 order of, 74–75 reasons for, 77, 85, 88, 97 and visibility, 142 possessive individualism, 18, 21 power, 29, 31, 59, 93n5, 140, 143 abuse of, 82, 87 and colonialism, 18, 43 friendship groups, 75, 77, 78, 112 government focus, 44, 54 racialized, 119, 131n1, 132n3 relations of, 23 research process, 52, 53 of self, 6 structures, 30 See also Girl-Kind North East private experiences, 51 expressions, 103 information, 53 jokes, 98 relationships, 104

174 

z Index

private (cont.) selves, 3, 26 spaces, 28, 82 private education, 84, 85, 112, 114 privatization of education, 57, 60n8 privilege(d) autonomy, 19 class, 33n8, 45, 93n6, 132n10 ethnicity, 132n3 knowledge, 121 material resources, 124, 126 neighbourhoods, 6 ‘other’, 60n2 racial, 45, 132n10 reproduction of, 44, 93n6 psychological explanations, 16, 26–27, 33n12, 34n16, 84, 165n1 punishment conceptualization by young people, 22 double standards, 56, 144 ethical collective, 91 judgements, 31, 144 withdrawal of talk, 103, 143

exclusion, 44 hierarchies, 22, 28, 93n4 ‘individuality thinking’, 52, 158 inequalities, 28 privilege, 44, 93n6 racism, 28 reputation of close friends, 96 of friendship groups, 12, 103 gendered double standards, 142 of individuals, 12, 81, 103, 140, 141–42, 147 judgement, 150n2 responsibility, 95, 158 of schools, 125, 144 vulnerability, 153, 154 of the year group, 12, 73, 144 research, ethnographic. See ethnographic research research methods. See fieldwork resources, material, 23, 24, 124, 126, 132n11 rhetoric, 5, 73, 82, 105, 117, 129

racial categorization, 118–19, 130, 132n2 racialization, 28, 43, 129, 131n1, 132n5, 150n1 racism colonialism, 55 conviviality, 44, 55, 60n1 cultural, 130, 133n17 experiences of, 120–21, 125–26 violence, 164 whiteness, 131n1 reflection, ethical, 51–54 relationality, 4, 5–6, 31, 52, 161 relationships, maintaining, 9–10, 74, 90, 99, 106, 112 mimetic connections, 95 talk, 139 See also friendship, actions of relationships, romantic, 77, 108–10, 142, 147 committed, 12, 139–40, 149 religion, 120–21, 129 reproduction of assumptions, 5, 6, 20

safety of friendship, 12, 68, 84, 86 school life, 9–11, 46, 48, 50, 106, 165 school organization student attainment, 46 timetable, 48 year groups, 9, 10, 47, 69, 92n1 schools (individual) Clare House, 85, 91 Collingson School (see Collingson School) Harlsbrook Academy, 124–26 schools, fee-paying, 44, 45, 84–85, 112, 113, 114. See also private education schools, selective, 44, 45, 85 scrutiny, 12, 77, 87, 144 security, 49, 76, 79, 92n3, 111, 138 self, inner acceptance of, 113 authenticity, 2, 154, 155, 156 expressing, 96, 159 sex, acceptable, 140, 150 sex knowledge, 137, 149 sex talk, 97, 136, 137, 138, 139, 149

Index 

sexual desire, expression of, 12, 136, 147 sexual ethics, 12, 136, 148, 149–50 sexuality, 28, 31, 54, 56, 138, 148 gendered criteria, 136, 150 See also heterosexuality shaping of others, 99, 113, 153, 156, 159 acceptability, 10, 96, 155 See also mimetic similarity, 71–72, 89, 113, 128 and commonalities, 71, 75, 155 ‘sket’ label, 136, 143 ‘slag’ discourse, 148, 157 ‘slut’ label, 141, 142, 143, 144, 149 socialization, 4, 25, 30 social media, 54, 56–57, 60n9 speech acceptable, 106 appropriate, 143 in assembly, 68, 73 ethics, 30, 31 style, 86, 123, 126, 132n7, 132n9, 133n13 sport, 80–81, 85, 86, 88, 146 status change of, 28, 70, 86, 111, 124 friendship groups, 74–79, 80, 83, 90, 91, 144 gendered differences, 97, 107 hierarchy, 90, 91, 93n4 high-status students, 2, 68, 81–82, 122, 143, 153–54 low-status students, 10, 87, 88, 146, 147 sport, 81, 85, 86 value of, 86, 154 visibility, 59, 91, 153 stereotypes, 86, 88, 120, 153 Stetsenko, Anna, 26, 34n16 Strathern, Marilyn, 21, 32n4, 158 style, 6, 81, 83, 122–23, 132n6, 147 ghetto, 124, 126, 130 grunge, 70 of speech, 86, 123, 126, 132n9 See also clothes; ‘geeks’; hair; music surveillance, 106, 150n2, 151n4 talk, 74, 82, 99, 118, 122, 123 positive, 73

z 

175

sex, 97, 136, 137–39, 149 withdrawal of, 99, 100, 101–3, 111, 141, 143 See also bitching; speech Taylor, Charles, 17, 18–19 timetable, 48, 98 transformations (conceptual), 59, 73, 130 transformations (student), 79–80, 100 unification, 21, 33n10, 69, 74, 90–91, 131 United Kingdom, 19, 27, 54–55, 60n6, 131n2, 133n17 United States. See America unity, 17, 73–74, 127, 129 university, 52, 53, 125 violence, 43, 82, 85, 86, 143, 164 imagined, 85–86 visibility (of students) expectations, 10, 87 in fieldwork, 53 and gender, 81, 86, 96, 141–42 routes to, 81, 91, 122, 124–25 scrutiny, 87, 144 status, 68, 75, 76, 77–78, 80, 153 territory, 83, 109 vulnerability, 153, 154 vulnerability depth, 105 exclusion, 103–4 in fieldwork, 51 increase in, 57 masculinity, 146 mimetic threat, 136 status, 144, 153–54 West, the, 4–5, 8, 16 Western personhood, 5, 8, 25, 96 practices, 11, 161 settings, 5–6 Western individual, the, 5, 16–21, 24, 161 whiteness, 119, 126, 131n1, 132n10, 133n13 mutable descriptor, 12, 117 style, 122, 126

176 

z Index

Willis, Paul, 27–28 Wynter, Sylvia, 17–18, 20 Year Eight, 70–71, 79, 100, 112, 127 Year Eleven author in, 42, 49 description, 2, 9, 11, 16, 32, 51 friendship groups, 74–75, 76, 80, 127 growing up, 73, 91, 129 history, 59, 69, 70, 130 informal realm, 53–54, 71 micro-histories, 59 results, 46 students, 78, 100, 108, 118, 124

See also ‘Last Day of School’ year end, 9, 46, 71 Year Nine, 71, 72, 90, 103, 107, 127 Year Seven, 44, 68–69, 78, 92n1, 125, 127 friendship groups, 70, 77 Year Ten, 71, 73, 79, 89, 123 youth groups, 56, 163 life-stage, 31 morality, 55, 58 services, 54 studies, 11, 26, 30, 57 styles, 70, 130 work, 53