Discussions of 'aspiration' influencing contemporary education policy and practice are framed almost exclusively in terms of individual-or, at most, familial-ambitions towards economic prosperity. The failure to achieve 'social mobility' in British society is often posed as being due to the 'low aspirations' of working class children, particularly in formerly heavily industrialised areas. In a classic case of 'blaming the victim' the social exclusion that undoubtedly exists in such areas is blamed on those who suffer it. Things would be different, the argument goes, if only people aspired to 'get on'. This paper looks at material from an intergenerational ethnographic study of some former coal-mining communities in the north of England which are often popularly characterised as insular and lacking in ambition. In contrast to this stereotype, however, the data suggests that working class teenagers growing up in the impoverished and abandoned utopian geography of Victorian colliery model villages, rather than suffering a failure of aspiration, often angrily and powerfully aspire-but for something contrary to the dominant model. Reviewing the ethnographic data in the light of a sociological and historical literature that attests to the exceptional nature of coal-mining communities, I suggest that such exceptionality impacts on young people's dispositions towards the educational project as a whole through a complex process of cultural transmission. A historically and locally situated notion of counter aspiration-that I call, here, resistant aspiration-is evident. I propose, in conclusion, that an acknowledgement of such resistant aspiration might help understand the widespread 'school disaffection' of working class youngsters not only in these former coal-mining communities but also in other postindustrial settings-nationally and internationally-that are similarly characterised by contested histories.

Drawing on research in de-industrialised coal-mining communities in the north of England, this article focuses on how experiences of some young people might be approached through a notion of precarity linked to the idea of a 'social haunting' of the coalfields. Concentrating on data gathered in the period after the 2010 change of UK government, the article considers how localities suffering under the impact of 'austerity' measures have also witnessed moments of vivid, carnivalesque resurgence linked to celebrations of the death of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in April 2013 and of the thirtieth anniversary of the 1984-85 UK miners' strike during 2014-2015. These celebrations mark a watershed in the cultural and affective life of the communities, one aspect of which relates to how young people with very different educational trajectories have become involved alongside each other in those events as a result of their different experiences of precarity.

This article reviews excerpts from a body of ethnographic data examining some young people's disaffection from, and refusal of, the education project as a whole in a UK coalfield area. Key examples are used to illustrate intergenerational continuities and disjunctions in attitudes to formal education in these exceptional and sometimes 'insubordinate' localities. It is argued that reviewing such data in the light of concepts emerging from the literature on Italian autonomist politics of the 1970s -particularly Paulo Virno's work -is potentially fruitful in reclaiming a politics of educational refusal from the dual grip of a middle-class imaginary that abhors it as pathological and dangerous and a body of scholarship that seems incapable of moving beyond either lionising it as heroic or loathing it as nihilistic.

A practice of concrete utopia? Informal youth support and the possibility of 'redemptive remembering' in a UK coal-mining area.

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