Welcome

Welcome to the academic blog of Dr. Patrick Alexander. Click on the pages to find out about my current research (Imagining the Future), dispatches for Oxford Brookes University School of Education (Brookes in the Bronx), and general commentary on the familiar and strange of living as an itinerant anthropologist in the United States (thanks to the US-UK Fulbright Commission).

Wednesday 19 November 2014

Brookes in the Bronx: Ethnography in the City

Ethnography

This week I’m going to be focusing on the art, science and mystery of ethnography as it applies to my ongoing research in the Bronx. This is dedicated particularly to students on the MA in Childhood Studies at Oxford Brookes University who are exploring the theme of ethnography this week.

I’d like to begin with an obvious question: What is ethnography? We’ll explore some definitions, a brief historical account of ethnography, the state of the art and possible future directions for ethnography. We’ll then move on to explore an example of school ethnography from my current research. This will set us up for an engaged and critical discussion during around the positives and pitfalls of ethnography as a method for social analysis within specific examples.
Ethnography 
 The term ethnography is derived from the Greek ἔθνος or ethnos "folk, people, nation" and γράφω, grapho, "I write". In short, ethnography is an account of culture and society. The OED says that ethnography is ‘the scientific description of peoples and cultures with their customs, habits, and mutual differences’ - I’m not always sure about the ‘scientific’ part (we’ll get to that later), but otherwise this a good working definition. I’d like to complicate this by suggesting that ethnography can also be considered as: 1) A practice; 2) A product; 3) A way of being (seeing the familiar as strange, and the strange as familiar). Let’s explore each of these in a bit more detail through a series of statements and associated questions/caveats.

When thinking about Ethnography as a Practice, we are asking: How do you do ethnography? In short, the practice of ethnography involves: sustained engagement in a research field (but where? For how long?); and participant observation - a combination of reflective observation and engaged interaction (but are these mutually exclusive?). Ethnographers are interested to find out what people say, what do people do, the inconsistencies between actions and utterances, and how people make things meaningful. Ideally this means gaining an emic analytical perspective, walking in people’s shoes or seeing culture and society from within (but is this really possible?). It involves ‘data’ gathering, primarily in terms of fieldnotes or observation notes, interview data, and other media. It often involves a ‘magpie’ approach to research, picking up whatever one can about a particular community and then sifting through to find those artefacts that will be most valuable for your research. Some would say that this basically equates to just hanging around and talking to people…so surely this is the easy option for social researchers? Well…maybe not. For many ethnographers it is the unpredictable, surprising, personal, uncertain and occasionally chaotic nature of ethnography that makes the method as fraught as it is exciting and rewarding. 

Ultimately, the practice of ethnography should lead to a representation of the ethnographic data, which is ethnography as product. This can come in many forms (film, blog, documentary, verbatim theatre, etc.), but most often the product of ethnography is a text that adheres to certain generic qualities familiar to the tradition of writing ethnography, and often referred to as a monograph. So, how do you write ethnography? Ethnography is a dynamic genre of writing: it is prone to change, reflecting the social and historical context of the writer, and theoretical and ontological shifts in the social sciences. It is an accurate representation of the field experience (but does accurate mean the same as 'truthful'? We’ll get on to this); and it involves the critical, reflexive analysis and representation of data in a way that tells a story, often in relation to theory. 

As with the practice of ethnography, the way that a person chooses to produce ethnography raises important ontological and epistemological questions related to how  one interprets ethnography, and ultimately about how one perceives the knowable world. These are the big questions of ethnography: built into the nature of ethnographic work are issues of perception and the representation of perception. The ‘scientific’ nature of ethnography, for example, is therefore up for grabs depending on what you think you are recording through ethnography; and similarly, some will challenge the methodological value of ethnography if all it entails is an idiosyncratic account of a moment in social time (a story, in other words) that has no bearing on objective 'truth' and few claims to generalisation, representativeness or even validity. On the other hand, we can also argue that the power of ethnography is to critically address the kinds of 'truth' claims or assertions to generalisability that are made through other social science methods. Once again, if ethnography is about hanging out, it's also about hanging out and thinking hard.
 
Ethnography as a way of being
This leads us on to the notion of ethnography as a way of being. Through the practice and production of ethnography (which also involves reading and engaging with ethnographic literature), individuals are able to develop new, critical, ethnographic ways of seeing the world. By this I mean that you may begin to see in a more complex, profound way the subtle social and cultural practices that make up what you take for granted about your own existence, while at the same time developing a better understanding of the seemingly strange cultural practices of other people. This can be an unsettling process because it can involve challenging some of your most fundamental beliefs and practices. But it can also be deeply rewarding because it opens up the world through the nurturing of a critical tolerance for all social and cultural practices. Therein lies the challenge, magic and mystery of developing ethnographic sensibilities.

A (very) brief history of ethnography
There isn't really space here to go into too much detail about the historical development of ethnography as a practice within the social sciences, but click here http://www.sunypress.edu/pdf/60804.pdf for a quick but critical romp through the method's history. In brief, ethnography has developed from accounts of voyagers, conquerors and missionaries, through the work of late 19th century ‘armchair’ anthropologists (who did no real ethnography to speak of, really), to early 20th century anthropologists championing the method (notably Malinowski, Boas, Mead, Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard) who provided accounts of exotic, ‘isolated’ islands, Aboriginal Australians, African ‘tribes’ (note colonial context), and so on. In the Chicago School of Sociology ethnography was being adapted at the same time for urban Western contexts, and in the early 60s in the UK Max Gluckman and the Manchester School began developing ethnography ‘at home’ – especially in educational settings. This led to the emergence of a ‘new’ sociology of education, with figures like Hargrieves, Lacy, Paul Willis, Ball and others adopting interpretivist/symbolic and interactionist accounts of childhood and schooling. A reflexive turn came in anthropology in the late 80s and early 90s with Clifford & Marcus’ Writing Culture, which repositioned ethnography as subjective and literary, as an intepretive process involving the writer. This reflexive turn troubled the 'truth' claims made by earlier ethnographers, but was also critiqued for encouraging a kind of post-modernist navel-gazing that detracted from the substance of research. Gladly, many ethnographers have since found a happy medium where their research can be informative and evocative while also being critical and reflexive. 

Ethnography has in the last 40 years spread in popularity through the social sciences, so there are now many versions of  ethnography depending on disciplinary background and epistemological outlook, rather than one single ethnography. Ethnography for the 21st century is also more complex, accounting for globalization, for example through multi-sited and virtual ethnography. Ethnography has also more recently become ‘sexy’ in the commercial world with 'drive-by' ethnography and pseudo-ethnography being used widely for marketing, advertising and consumer insight purposes. Ethnography in 2014 is a broad church indeed. 

Brookes in the Bronx: practice, product, way of being
I'd like to now turn to the contemporary example of ethnography from my own ongoing research at a high school in the Bronx. In brief, this study comprises a comparative two year ethnography of secondary education in London and New York City, exploring the themes of aspiration, imagined futures and transitions to adulthood. I am now three months in to the project and at the juncture in the research where I am becoming much more familiar with school while still wrangling the disparate possible threads of the research into a coherent whole. In this section I'd like to work through a number of ongoing methodological queries, in relation to the points explored above, before suggesting a few questions for discussion.

Doing an ethnography of schooling in a developed country where English is the predominant language provides an excellent opportunity to reflect on the ethnographic process. For an English ethnographer of education, a US high school is at once familiar  but also very strange - and it requires an ethnographic sensibility to take a step back and question both the things that are peculiar (from the credit system, to the process of going to the college, to issues with gangs, violence, and disadvantage) and those things that you take for granted (the age grading of schools, that nature of teacher-student relationships, the presumed content of the American Dream). When starting this research, some colleagues suggested that the similarities between the US and the UK would outweighs the differences and render the research less interesting. An important part of conducting the research has been to think critically about the supposed similarities (speaking English or American pop culture for example are not so simply dissected when the school context is largely non-white, first or second generation migrants with English as a second language), and to look for ways be make sense of both the very familiar (cheerleaders and American football players) and the rather strange. As for the process of ethnography, it has been very interesting to reflect on my positionality within this research and my reception as an individual in the school. Being English is suitably strange but also familiar (and harmless enough) enough for students to engage openly and in a friendly way that helps the research to progress. This raises interesting questions about positionality in the research and gender, ethnicity, and the confluence of these markers of identity with assumptions about cultural identity - all of which are important to keep in the balance when moving through data gathering to analysis. In this research I have been more conscious than in the past about the ongoing coding of observation notes, and of writing about the field experience (as I am now) as part of the process of analysis. By this I mean that writing (in this case reflective writing) is both part of the process of ethnography and the route to the finished product - the ethnographic monograph itself. Finally, this research is reminding me to be open and accepting of the uncertainty that comes with ethnographic practice. It is important to accept that you will not have all the answers at many points during the process, and that this uncertainty is what helps lead you to unexpected revelations and insights that will ultimately enrich and enliven the research.

Ethnography: opportunities and challenges
Bearing in mind what we have discussed so far, I'd like to propose the following questions to explore:

Choose one of the following contexts for an ethnography:

An ethnography of a prison: 
An ethnography of a Master’s programme: 
An ethnography of sneezing
An ethnography of Harcourt Hill 

Activity: In a short paragraph, state your ethnographic context and then provide a few lines or bullet points on each of the following questions: 

What topic would you choose to focus on?
How would you go about doing the ethnography?
What would be the major challenges in conducting these ethnographies?
Please respond with reflections or constructive comments on the contributions of at least two other students in the forum. 

Further reading
DELAMONT, S (2014) Key Themes in the Ethnography of Education: Achievements and Agendas. London: Sage. 

YON, D (2003) Highlights and Overview of the History of Educational Ethnography, Annual Review of Anthropology Vol. 32: 411-429. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.anthro32.061002.093449

LANCLOS, D. (2003) At Play in Befast: Children's Folklore and Identity in Northern Ireland, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press.

Thursday 9 October 2014

Brookes in the Bronx: Civilly Disobedient Youth

 
From New York City to Hong Kong (both places close to my heart), the past few weeks have provided good cause for reflection on the relationship between issues of civic participation, disobedience, and the place of 'youth' and young people in imagining new political futures.

Here in NYC, as the first golden brown leaves shimmered down in Central Park, the arrival of the UN General Assembly in mid-September brought about mass demonstrations around the connected issues of global capitalism and climate change. On 22nd September approximately 300,00 people marched through the streets of the city under the banner of the 'People's Climate March', bringing traffic to a standstill and sending Instagram accounts into overdrive. This was the largest public demonstration focusing on climate change in history, organised to coincide with UN talks on environment. The intention was to show popular outcry about the current state of the planet. When the Yankees finished playing in the Bronx, and the Giants finished up in New Jersey, New York's transit systems were flooded with an odd mix of baseball fans, football bros and hippies, activists, families and climate change voyeurs of all descriptions. It took a long time to get home that day.

While the People's Climate March attracted individuals of all different ages and backgrounds, it was in many ways shaped by discourses of youth and childhood. After all, climate change is particularly susceptible to what's sometimes known (to me at least) as the Whitney Houston doctine of childhood: we believe the children are the future (not the present), and all our actions to preserve the environment now are for the benefit of future generations. This is a discourse of activism fundamentally grounded in the temporal framework of generations - and it is also almost always the 'youth' who are imagined to be at the balustrades of the eco-revolution. As such, when things progressed from the peaceful mass demonstrations of 22nd September to the occupation and arrests at Wall St the following day, it was the face of angry young men and women that littered the newspapers. Families may demonstrate at the sanctioned events, but it will be the young - those idealistic, reckless, idealised youth with nothing to lose and so much hope for the future - that will be dragged away by tired looking New York City cops for a night in the cells. A few news cycles later and it's like it didn't happen; but in the moment, the youth were rubbing up uncomfortably against the estbalishment - a rather familiar framing of how disobedience and resistance rise and fall out of view in civil society. 

Several thousand miles away, in my hometown of Hong Kong, secondary school students and university-age young adults were also on the verge of mass civil disobedience. The Occupy Central movement (Central is Hong Kong's principal financial district and the seat of its legislative council) took cues from New York City's Occupy Wall St legacy and transformed it into a movement focusing not on anti-capitalism per se, but on limited democratic reform of Hong Kong's rather peculiar cocktail of hypercapitalism and reactionary pseudo-Communist politics. Young people in Hong Kong have for the past few weeks led an incredibly well-behaved, considerate, thoughtful charge towards a new kind of democratic engagement not seen in China for more than twenty years. the HKSAR government's reaction couldn't have been less 'hip' to the political times: tear gas, clubbings, alleged hiring of triad gangs as thugs and sexual assailants bent on breaking up the peaceful mobs all smack of a generation of politicians out of touch both with their popular political opponents and with the global media watching on. Seeing these scenes played out on the streets and thoroughfares of my own expatriate youth in Hong Kong made this kind of old-time political activity seem all the more surreal. The first wave of demonstrations ended last week with a fizzle; but already it seems that renewed reactionism from China will lead the youth to go wild - calmly, politely, peacefully - once more. It's worth reflecting on how this very civil disobedience jars with a traditional framing of youthful resistance: the absence of bandanas and Molotov cocktails might actually lead to an enduring presence of politically engaged youth in Hong Kong.

In both these cases, imaginings of youth, and imaginings of future are at play, and it has been revealing for me to reflect on what specifically it is that defines this cohort of young people as 'youth' that are politically and civically engaged. What is interesting about the particular generational experience of school leavers and college students in Hong Kong, and their contemporaries in NYC, is that both have perhaps even less to lose than have recent previous generations. The global recession has made them suspicious of the promises to social mobility that are the backdrop to their participation in formal education; and where previous generations of young people may have been cynical or disengaged about their potential impact on political and economic systems (it's easier to believe in individualism, after all), this generation is bouyed by the real, tangible impact that collective, technologically-engaged action has had in movements as disparate as the Arab Spring, Anonymous and the Occupy movement. They might actually make a difference - and they might even do it on their own terms. Don't these sound like 'youthful' aspirations? Shouldn't we be proud of these young people for flying the flag for real, progressive change in civil society? Aren't they imagining the kind of civically-engaged, enlightened future that we might ideally like them to create in the lengthening shadow of late modern capitalist society?

The short answer to the above questions may well be yes; but it's also interesting to consider that the qualities outlined above - the idealism, commitment, organisation and engagement borne of having little to lose in the current system of things - are not actually qualities solely imbued on the chronologically young. In fact, it might be that young people - school and university students - may be doing a good job of imagining and consuming the qualities of 'youth' that are actually open to people of all ages who may have also experienced a shrinking of their future horizons. In both New York and Hong Kong, those who have survived (or even thrived in) the recent recession may stay away from the demonstrations; but for those who are getting older without 'growing up' - without realising the dreams promised as the outcome of living 'youth' well, of attending university, of getting and keeping a well-paying job, of staying out of political trouble, of keeping one's media-feed clean and adhering to the accepted avenues of acceptable rebellion/disobedience -  there is increasingly less to lose by not taking part. Perhaps the most profound impact that the civically disobedient youth of today can have on their elders is to make them feel 'youth' again - but this time, in a different, altogether more politically dangerous and exciting way. 


 

Wednesday 17 September 2014

Brookes in the Bronx: understanding futurity and youth in a summer of fraught race relations

The unusually clement summer weather in New York City this summer has made it easier to get on with most things, it would seem. A soft breeze has blown across Manhattan from the Hudson since we arrived, and like a good Englishman I've been happy to talk (to anyone who would listen) about how lovely the weather is and how lucky we've been to avoid the usual Dog Days of Summer.

Where the weather has been mild, the tensions around issues of race and youth have been anything but. This has led me to reflect on the ways in which race and ethnicity are imagined in relation to gender and imagined futures - and on the potentially terminal consequences that dissonant, negative constructions of race and ethnicity can have on the lives of the young people involved.

In the context of the 24-hour news cycle, last summer's verdict on the shooting of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin by neighbourhood watch captain Michael Zimmerman seems like a distant memory (and more distant still for those of us across the pond who more readily associate Florida with Mickey and his friends). Zimmerman was acquitted on all charges connected with the fatal shooting of Martin, who was unarmed at the time of the incident. This led to demonstrations across the US, with Barack Obama calling for 'soul-searching' about how this reflected the broader state of race relations in American society - particularly for young people -and young men in particular- who are not considered white.

Similarly, the fatal shooting of black 29 year-old Mark Duggan by police in North London during the summer of 2011 led to wide-scale rioting and expressions of discontent on behalf of young people in disadvantaged areas of the city, many of whom were from black or ethnic minority backgrounds, and many of whom were articulating a combination of outcry at police brutality and outrage at the social marginalisation experienced in their everyday lives. Just as with the Martin case in Florida, the Duggan case led to acquittals and further demonstrations, but in the wash of other sad news about (mainly young) people dying around the world, it has been largely forgotten. It's become more of a static case study for social commentary and sociological analysis (cue folk devils and moral panic) than evidence from our very recent history of an issue that remains at the centre of many young people's lives.

Eric Garner died while being arrested by police in Staten Island.The pressing nature of these issues was nowhere more evident than in the US this summer. The news since July has been overshadowed by two cases of police using deadly force against black and minority men, young and slightly older. When I arrived in New York City on 5th August, the focus was on the case of Eric Garner, a 44 year-old Staten Island man who died when police put him in a choke hold during an arrest for selling 'loosies', or single cigarettes, on the street. Outcry over the death was widespread and led to massive demonstrations led by the Rev. Al Sharpton. The focus remained not on decrying the police en masse (police shootings and deaths in police custody are down considerably in the NYC area this year), but on recognising racial prejudice and abuses of power  perpetrated by a minority of law enforcement that discriminate against black men in particular. 

This relatively peaceful response to an act of violence was then followed by demonstrations of a different kind, beginning on August 9th when Michael Brown, an unarmed 18 year-old black teenager, was shot by Darren Wilson, a white police officer. Rioting spread in Ferguson, Missouri, in response to the fatal shooting, with protesters raising their hands and carrying banners saying 'Don't Shoot!', reflecting the disputed final moments of Brown's life. As in the case of the London riots, this public demonstration of anger and frustration in some cases fuelled popular phantasmagoria about the public threat of young minority men in public spaces. But it also drew media attention once again to the precarious position that some young men are placed in, when faced with the real threat of injury or death at the hands of law enforcement who may imagine them to be people that they are not.   

Michael Brown's casket the day of his funeral Aug. 25.: Michael Brown's casket the day of his funeral Aug. 25.This is not the first run of summers where there have been cases of police brutality against young people, and I doubt it will be the last. Whatever the particular and varied details of these cases and the individuals involved, all point to the ongoing tension through which imaginings of race, ethnicity, social class, youth and gender are conflated with imaginings of social deviance, criminality and danger. 

This is not a new argument in sociological or anthropological understandings of race and ethnicity; and nor is it a new experience for people from black or minority backgrounds. But thinking in terms of aspiration (as I am prone to do these days), this particular racialised 'youth' is imagined as aspiring to crime, violence, lawlessness, self-interest, even social disorder and chaos - a different set of values altogether, apparently, from those ideally represented by law enforcement. Of course, each of these qualities is also socially constructed, and it's as easy to see how the actions of some police may also encapsulate each of the above rather anti-social aspirations, against which people might rightly protest. What is compelling is the extent to which black and minority youth are often associated a priori with present and/or future criminality - a temporally framed, negative imagining of race, ethnicity and 'youth' that suggests that it's not a matter of if these young people will aspire to criminality, but when. This process is abruptly stopped in its tracks for each of these men before the presumed aspiration to future deviance can grow into action. The same may also be said of imaginings of working class white young men, even if the police response may often be rather different. 

And this is also not just the experience of young men from minority backgrounds: just this week, the black Hollywood actress Daniele Watts of Django Unchained fame was handcuffed and held by LAPD for refusing to produce ID while being suspected of committing a leud act with her partner in their car on a public road. Leud acts aside, the issue in this detainment was that the officers involved apparently intimated that they thought they were dealing with a case of prostitution, because Watts is black and her partner is white. Without getting into the slightly convoluted details of this case (which you can read about here), once again the media circus focuses our attention on how imaginings of race and ethnicity are conflated with particular imaginings of deviance and criminality, many of which are also associated with 'youth', and with the inevitability of future deviance. Youth is, of course, a flexible concept, and in these stories it is stretched to include men aged 18-28 and women of indistinct age but 'youthful' appearance (trying to find out Watts' actual age is a difficult and thankless task, readers). We should also note that many of the police and law enforcement involved in these cases would by the same token also be described as young - but they do not embody the kind of 'youth' apparently associated with individuals like Brown, or Martin, or Watts for that matter.  

Each of these cases has caused me to reflect on the ways in which popular negative imaginings of black and minority youth may impact both how young people construct ideas about their futures, and how they go about attempting to achieve these futures. The young people that I have met so far in my current research aspire to be cardiologists, architects, sanitation workers, writers, and, more importantly, to be 'good people'. It must be difficult to maintain the integrity of these kinds of positive aspirations for the future when the negative popular imagining of 'youth' - and urban black and minority youth in particular - is built in some part around an assumption that one's future will inevitably lead to deviance and criminality. When this popular imagination exists in the minds of the police, and when certain police officers find themselves in positions where they can act irrevocably on these imaginings of inevitable future criminality - whether imminent or impending - the results can be fatal and future-killing.

As the nights draw slowly in at the end of this summer, and as the wind begins to bite in the fading sunshine, I feel like I'm only just starting to understand the complexity of how race, ethnicity, gender and youth collide in the various and often divergent, contested imaginings of the future that inhabit this city.        

Thursday 11 September 2014

Brookes in the Bronx: First Day of Term


The First Day of Term: reflections from the beginning of an ethnography
Here are some of my reflections from the very early stages of a two-year comparative ethnography exploring the themes of imagined futures, aspiration and transitions into adulthood among school leavers in New York City and London (See Imagining The Future for project details). Just two days into the ethnography, I find that there’s already room to reconsider some of the conceptual and political boundaries that have shaped the research ideas.

Research into aspiration and schooling is not exactly new ground in our field: on the contrary, it is a staple of the sub-discipline. The contestation of futurity is a theme that permeates the background of many anthropological and sociological studies of childhood and youth. So why do this research project? Do we really need another ethnography that documents the long shadow of work, educational failure, and the struggle that some have in ‘makin’ it’?

My short answer to the above question is ‘Yes, we really do’, but challenging the usefulness of more research on aspiration and schooling has led me to plot a different path into the project. Like many ethnographies of aspiration and schooling before it, this ethnography is clearly focused on the linked educational challenges of raising aspirations, raising levels of achievement and attainment in schools, closing the achievement gap, and improving access to Higher Education. It also addresses the question of how formal secondary education can more effectively serve as a scaffold for transitions into the precarious world of contemporary young adulthood. Importantly, however, this research also addresses the educational challenge of thinking critically about how 'aspiration' and imagined futures are framed within the context of public/state education systems, and in wider society. It is important to investigate and challenge the ideas that shape how we think about aspirations and the future – of being educated, going to college, getting a job, being a 'productive' member of society, 'dropping out', and so on. Of course, this is not a radical point of political or theoretical argument: the anthropology and sociology of childhood and youth has a long pedigree of scholarship that identifies and challenges the arbitrary nature of taken-for-granted assumptions about what counts as the ‘right’ kind of life to aspire to, through chidhood and into later adult life. But this research does put back into the centre of the frame the concept of futurity – of imagined futures, and imagined future selves - as something that must be critically understood in the context of anthropological studies of childhood and youth. Rethinking the spatio-temporal framing of social identity – what I consider to be a kind of ‘quantum personhood’ existing not only in the past, present, and future, but in multiple, concurrent versions or imaginings of each – may lead to interesting new ways of thinking about how we are socialised into futurity, and what impacts this may have on how we conceptualise and experience childhood and youth (how we imagine age).
These ideas had been dormant on the page for several months in anticipation of the beginning of the research project – and I remain a long way from pairing them neatly with data from the research. But it was this week, on a Tuesday morning soaked with the humid weight of a New York summer, that I boarded a crowded subway train to arrive at the school where these ideas would be challenged and honed. Empty of students before the beginning of term, the school felt like an immense ship being prepared for a familiar but long and arduous journey. Custodial staff sweated around the school, towels tucked in T-shirt necks, and shouted an echoing commentary to one another down shiny corridors as they hammered, painted, and jerry-rigged the school back into shape. Teachers weaved in and out of classrooms and offices, plain-clothed, switching quickly between smiling conversations about summer vacations, new haircuts, tans, and the weather, and serious hushed huddles about school politics, supplies, bureaucracy, and the coming storm of teenagers. The ebullient figure of the Principal loomed large in this scene, smiling and stating with happy sincerity that ‘everyday at (this school) is a good day!’. He gathered the teachers together to go through past progress statistics and talk about the year to come – a year that would be bigger and better not only for the students on the sometimes trecherous path towards graduation, but also for the school as an entity with its own collective aspirations and hopes for the future.
       
To me, this moment of caesura – this hurried but confident fixing of costumes before curtains-up – is a fascinating example of how futurity is constructed and reproduced through the mundane processes of schooling. Without putting too much weight on this rather scant data, I think that it is indicative of the ways in which schools help in subtle and explicit ways to socialise us not only into imagining a horizon upon which we can fix our gaze, but also into constructing a sense of social identity that is only sensible when framed in this particular future-gazing way. What remains to be seen is the process through which competing and contested futures are imagined, sometimes concurrently or divergently, and the more profane daily routines through which certain futures, and certain aspirations, slowly disappear out of view for some students.