Peer Relationships at School, livre ebook

• Introduces an alternative framework for analysing young people’s peer relationships, providing a new way of thinking that bridges cosmopolitan and communitarian perspectives.

• Recognises the multidimensionality of difference, allowing nuanced and intersectional understandings to emerge around the complexity of peer relationships in contexts of migration and diversity.

• Points to the hopeful and transformative nature of peer ‘encounters’ while showing how possibilities for mutual vulnerability are shaped by structural inequalities and indicating areas for intervention in policy and practice.

Available Open Access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

It is increasingly recognized that ethnonational frameworks are inadequate when examining the complexity of social life in contexts of migration and diversity.

This book draws on ethnographic research in two UK secondary schools, considering the shifting roles of migration status, language, ethnicity, religion and precarity in young people’s peer relationships. The book challenges culturalist understandings of social cohesion, highlighting the divisive impacts of neoliberalism, from pervasive temporariness and domestic abuse to technologization and neighbourhood violence.

Using Martin Buber’s relational model, the book explores the interplay of ‘I-It’ boundary-making with reciprocal ‘I-Thou’ encounters, pointing to the creative power of these encounters to subvert, reimagine and even transform social difference. The author provides a pragmatic and ultimately hopeful view of the dynamics of diversity in everyday life, offering valuable insights for social policy and practice.

Foreword - Susanne Wessendorf

1. Introduction

2. I-It, I-Thou, and Migration Studies

3. Migration, Memory, and Uncertain Futures

4. Societal Myths and the Consequences of Freedom

5. Funny Language? Curiosity, Contact, and Humour

6. Navigating Precarity

7. Conclusions and Beyond