Vid framtidens hitersta gräns: Om maskulina elevpositioner i en multietnisk skola

At the hither side of the future: Masculine pupil positions in a multiethnic school

The aim of this thesis is to highlight the central conditions, norms and values which enable the staging of certain masculine pupil positions and hinder others at a school located in the northern part of the municipality of Botkyrka, during 2004 2005. The school and the neighbourhood in this study are characterized by a high percentage of people with immigrant background, a result of urban ethnic segregation. The methodological approach is qualitative. The empirical data consists of interviews with 15 boys in grade 6, participant observations, and official documents. The study examines the central position of socially sanctioned conceptions of good becoming in society. Children are expected to control their own bodies and take on certain areas of knowledge in the correct way in order to create themselves as expanding subjects: they learn to ask for success and upward social mobility. But as this study shows this does not apply equally to all pupils. The boys in this study have to create themselves as pupils on terms that make it harder for them to establish themselves as successful pupils. The teaching they encounter in school, the socioeconomic conditions and the effects of the segregation that characterises the urban landscape they live in makes it harder for them to live up to the requirements of what an ideal pupil should be. The study also highlights the ways in which difference is being made between girls and boys in school, creating arenas that are more open for boys than for girls to enter into in everyday life, namely football and the multiethnic youth language. These arenas allowed the boys to stage masculine coded subject positions which in one way or another were connected with a positive social status. Thus boys in this study do not have as much reason to establish themselves in the position of a good pupil in comparison to girls since there is a greater variety in how they can create themselves within subject positions connected to social status.