The paper draws on the findings of a small-scale empirical study to discuss why the project of inclusion, despite a long history of legislative efforts from the Salamanca Statement onwards, still appears to be troubling. The study used scenarios to explore tensions between inclusion and individual choice experienced by young people in the context of everyday social interaction with reference to the intersection between disability, ethnicity, gender and social class. Building on the findings, we argue that understanding inclusion at the level of social interaction has important implications for inclusive education. We employ ideas from theoretical work on inclusion to suggest that in order to achieve inclusion in education or in society, a top down approach influenced by national and international policy and a rights discourse might not be sufficient; this is because inclusion processes also operate at the level of everyday social interaction where policy has less influence. Such processes, for instance individual choice, are often less explored or even ignored by the inclusion literature, as they are seen as questioning or threatening the moral imperative of including all people. This argument, thus, raises the question of how well we understand social inclusion and provides directions for further research. inclusion, inclusive education, homophily, social interaction, individual choice, scenarios '[…] a theory and praxis that considers disability subjectivities and knowledges in fluid relationships to all other forms of subjectivity and knowledge ' (p. 35). This understanding of inclusion as complex and situated is the starting point for this paper. 'The participation of students in key aspects of their schools: their cultures, that is their shared sets of values and expectations; their curricula, that is the learning experiences on offer; and their communities, that is the sets of relationships they sustain' (p. 12).'Talk of 'shared values' can be presumptuous. What evidence is there to suggest that [values] are indeed shared? (Pirrie and Head, 2007, p. 25).And also, more recently:'Although there seems to be broad consensus [on the meaning/ significance of inclusion] on a superficial level, there is much more ambiguity if one looks deeper into the values often associated with inclusion' (Felder, 2018, p. 55).'I think that from the religion point it's different, because he chooses to have his religion like that. I mean, if he's brought up that way, it's just the way he lives. But with the hearing problem, he cannot change that in any way […] But if he just refuses to speak to women, that's different -that's him actively cutting off like half of the population'. This is also the only variation where an alternative social situation was not suggested as a relevant resolution. This might indicate that unlike the case of disability or language barriers young people were not willing to put extra effort to accommodate cultural/ religious beliefs that they could not relate to, as these were seen as a matter of preferen...
