‘Non-Servile Virtuosi’ in Insubordinate Spaces: School Disaffection, Refusal and Resistance in a Former English Coalfield

Abstract

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.

‘Off The Model’: resistant spaces, school disaffection and ‘aspiration’ in a former coal-mining community

“…If, though, as Diane Reay (2009, p.27) has suggested, 'children negotiate schooling not only directly through their own experiences but also through the sedimented experiences of parents or even grandparents' then we would expect to see this history influence young people, and it is there. There is a transmission of resistance: Bright, 2009Bright, , 2010bBright, , 2010c. It is aimed at the world beyond the village generally but specifically at that world as it is represented through compulsory schooling.…”

Non-compliance as a substitute for voice

“…Ultimately, non-compliance becomes a means by which to exercise voice. This resistance contests power, reaching beyond the reactive and private, becoming political (Bright 2011). By rejecting aspects of education that the participants felt were inappropriate for them they demonstrate their desire to form a sense of self through narrating their own lives (Cavarero 2000).…”

Towards a new conceptualisation of marginalisation

“…Denied by the individual as relating to: social exclusion, arising from a lack of equal opportunities and barriers to learning and participation (Messiou, 2012;Petrou et al, 2009); social justice and equity, seen through the lens of cultural and social capital (Brann-Barrett, 2011); the quest for 'inclusion for all' (Ainscow et al, 2006a;Messiou, 2012;Petrou et al, 2009;Slee and Allan, 2001); specific groups perceived to be specially vulnerable to exclusion and stigmatisation (Bottrell, 2007;Petrou et al, 2009); social and relational aspects of poverty (Carter-Wall and Whitfield, 2012;Dickerson and Popli, 2012;Ridge, 2011); and the need to give marginalised groups a voice (Slee and Allan, 2001). It is also perceived as 'identity work' and resistance (Bottrell, 2007;Bright, 2011); as expressed through 'clauses of conditionality' in public policy (Watts et al, 2014); and as being contextually related (pertaining to the concepts of relativity, agency and dynamics) (Mowat, 2010;Munn and Lloyd, 2005;Razer et al, 2013). Social Exclusion is defined by Razer et al as a state in which individuals or groups 'lack effective participation in key activities or benefits of the society in which they live ' (2013: 1152).…”

“…Bright makes the case that the resistance of young people to schooling is a manifestation of political action or what the author describes as ‘a propensity for “bottom-up action”’ (2011: 502) rooted in the historical memories and experiences of the community (what Bourdieu would describe as ‘habitus’) and patterns of school resistance exercised by older generations which the author characterises as ‘a dignified process of non-servile challenge from below’ (2011: 512).…”