Friendship and Diversity

FRIE NDSH IP
& DIV ERS I T Y

CLASS, ETHNICITY AND SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS IN THE CITY
Carol Vincent, Sarah Neal, Humera Iqbal

Friendship and Diversity
Carol Vincent
Sarah Neal • Humera Iqbal
Friendship and
Diversity
Class, Ethnicity and Social
Relationships in the City
Carol Vincent Sarah Neal
UCL Institute of Education Department of Sociological Studies
University College London University of Sheffield
London, UK Sheffield, UK
Humera Iqbal
UCL Institute of Education
University College London
London, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-73000-4 ISBN 978-3-319-73001-1 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73001-1
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Acknowledgements
First of all we wish to thank the teachers, parents and children who took
part in our study and kindly welcomed us and gave us their time and
thoughts. At the time of writing, the children will be in secondary school
and we hope that things are going well for them.
We also would like to thank the Economic and Social Research Council
for funding the research on which this book is based (award number ES/
K002384/1).
We are extremely grateful to Margaret Leggett for her—as ever—
entirely reliable and accurate transcribing, and also to Amani Noor Iqbal
for her careful and beautiful drawings inspired by the children’s friend-
ship maps.
Many people have supported both the research, and us as researchers,
since we started the fieldwork in 2013. We would like to thank our advi-
sory group: Sharon Gewirtz, Gail Lewis, Debbie Weekes-Bernard, Jess
Healy, Daanish Saeed, and Ros George, and the speakers at our dissemi-
nation conference, Ann Phoenix and Tim Butler, for their interest in and
enthusiasm for the project, and their valuable thoughts. Grateful thanks
also to Allan Cochrane for his last minute support!
In addition:
Carol would also like to thank Stephen Ball, Alice Bradbury, Annette
Braun, and Diane Reay for their unstinting academic and moral support.
It is much appreciated. Research students Sara Joiko and Manuela
v
vi Acknowledgements
Mendoza have also helped me clarify my thinking, for which I’m grateful.
Thanks also to all the parents with whom I have stood in a ‘cluster’ in my
children’s playground over the years. Their friendship was and is highly
valued. Finally, much love as ever to Ian, Madi and Dan for always keep-
ing work in its place!
Sarah would like to thank Les Back, Alice Bloch, Rachel Brooks,
Melissa Butcher, Allan Cochrane, Jon Garland, Andrew King, Gail Lewis,
Karim Murji, Greg Noble, John Solomos, Selvaraj Velayuthum, Sophie
Watson, Susanne Wessendorf and Amanda Wise—ever-insightful friends
and wise colleagues. And love and thanks to my moorings—Allan, and
Brock, who grew up in schools like the ones we write about.
Humera would like to thank Michela Franceschelli, Sarah Crafter,
Sophie Zadeh, Susan Golombok and Margaret O’Brien for being great
colleagues; each full of knowledge and great humour. Tabassum and
Zafar for always getting her to the school gates, Marshlee for being a true
friend and Hakim for being just being his wonderful self.
Parts of this book draw on, revise and expand on papers we have writ-
ten previously. We are grateful to the editors and publishers of these jour-
nals for permission to use material from the following papers:
Iqbal, H., Neal, S., & Vincent C. (2016). Children’s Friendships in Super-
Diverse Localities: Encounters with Social and Ethnic Difference. Childhood,
24(1), 128–142. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568216633741
Neal, S., & Vincent, C. (2013). Multiculture, Urban Middle Class Competencies
and Friendship Practices in Super-Diverse Geographies. Social and Cultural
Geography, 14(8), 909–929. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2013.837191
Neal, S., Vincent, C., & Iqbal, H. (2016). Extended Encounters: Shared Social
Resources, Connective Spaces and Sustained Conviviality in Socially and
Ethnically Complex Urban Geographies. Journal of Intercultural Studies,
37(5), 464–480. Licensed Under Creative Commons Attribution License.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Available at: https://doi.org/1
0.1080/07256868.2016.1211626
Vincent, C., Neal, S., & Iqbal, H. (2016a). Children’s Friendships in Diverse
Primary Schools: Teachers and the Processes of Policy Enactment. Journal of
Education Policy, 31(4), 482–494. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2015.
1130859
Acknowledgements
vii
Vincent, C., Neal, S., & Iqbal, H. (2016b). Encounters with Diversity:
Children’s Friendships and Parental Responses. Urban Studies, 54(8),
1974–1989. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098016634610
Vincent, C., Neal, S., & Iqbal, H. (2017). Living in the City: School Friendships,
Diversity and the Middle Classes. British Journal of Sociology. On-line first.
https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12296
Contents
1 Why Study Friendships and Diversity? Orientations

and Introduction to the Study 1
Introduction 1
An Emergent Sociology of Friendship 4
Friendship as a Marginalised Sociological Concept? 4
An Established Sociology of Friendship? 9
Approaching Diverse Friendships: Conceptual Orientations
and Methodological Challenges 16
The Pilot Study 16
The Main Project 18
How the Book Is Organised 20
Conclusion 22
References 23
2 Encounter, Conviviality and the City: New Directions

in Theorising Interaction Across Difference 29
Introduction 29
Multiculture and the City 30
Gentrification and Super-Diversity 33
Beyond Romanticising Encounter 38
Conviviality 40
ix
x Contents
Habitus: Disruption and Possibility 42

A Return to Place 48
Conclusion 49
References 51
3 Back at School: Research Methods, Design and Reflexive

Dramaturgy 59
Introduction 59
The Research Environment: The Case Study Primary Schools
and Their Geographies 62
Leewood School: An Area of Established Gentrification 64
Junction School: An Area of Emerging Gentrification 65
Fernhill School: An Area of Partial Gentrification 66
Back to School: The Primary School as a Total Institution? 68
Back to School: Dramaturgy and Managing Research
Environments 73
Research Design and Processes 77
The Children and Their Interviews 79
The Adults and Their Interviews 81
Conclusions 84
References 86
4 The Children’s Friendships: Difference, Commonality

and Proximity 89
Introduction 89
Children’s Friendship Relations Across Ethnic and Social
Difference: A Review 92
Bridging Different Worlds? 92
Friendship in Middle Childhood: Being Eight and Nine Years
Old 94
Friendships in Super-Diverse Classrooms 98
Social Networks 100
Crimson Class, Leewood School 104
Burgundy Class, Junction School 105
Contents
xi
Scarlet Class, Fernhill School 106

Recognising Difference: Convivial Dispositions? 109
Fluid Identifications and Complex Friendship Practices 114
Conclusion 116
References 119
5 Children’s Agency and Adult Intervention: Children’s

Friendships Through Adult Eyes 123
Introduction 123
School Policy and Practices 124
Managing Friendships and Feelings 126
Teachers’ Readings of Children’s Friendships 129
Reflections on Teachers’ Management of Children’s
Friendships 135
Parental Responses to Children’s Friendships: Social Mix
and Mixing 137
The Ease and Comfort of Similarity 138
After School Activities 140
Conclusion 144
References 147
6 Extended Social and Spatial Encounters in Primary School

Worlds 151
Introduction 151
Connecting and Making Up Social Space: Primary Schools,
Encounter and Places 153
Convivial Space? Social Exchange and Friendship-Making
in Primary School Worlds 157
Schools as Connective Conviviality Sites 162
Home Spaces, Social Intimacy and School-Based Friendships 167
Conclusions 173
References 175
xii Contents
7 Antagonisms, Ambivalences and Association: Parents’

Friendships and Strategies for Managing Difference
in Everyday Life 179
Introduction 179
A Continuum 180
Refusing Diversity 181
Accepting Homophily 183
Reflexive About Homophily and Difference 188
Enablers 192
Privileged Clusters? 198
Conclusion 202
References 204
8 Conclusion: Understanding Friendship and Diversity 207

Introduction 207
Contributing Themes 209
Civility and Conviviality 212
What Weighting for Friendships? 217
References 220
Appendix 223
Index 235
About the Authors
Humera Iqbal is a Lecturer in Psychology at UCL Institute of Education and

based at the Thomas Coram Research Unit. She is interested in identity and the
migration experiences of families and young people; in particular, how they
engage with institutions in new settings, parenting and the impact of genera-
tions on family life. She is also interested in mental health and wellbeing in
young people, particularly from minority groups. Humera uses mixed methods
and arts- and film-based methods in her research. Her recent work has focused
on ‘child language brokers’—young people who translate for their families fol-
lowing migration to a new host setting.
Sarah Neal is Professor of Sociology at the University of Sheffield.
Sarah researches and writes in the fields of race, ethnicity, multiculture, com-
munity, belonging and place. Recent publications include The Lived Experience
of Multiculture: The New Spatial and Social Relations of Diversity (Routledge
2018 with K. Bennett, A. Cochrane and G. Mohan); ‘Living in the city: school
friendships, diversity and the middle classes’, British Journal of Sociology (2017
with C. Vincent and H. Iqbal); and ‘Sociologies of Everyday Life’, Sociology
(2015 with K. Murji). She is co-editor of Current Sociology and an editorial
board member of Ethnic and Racial Studies.
Carol Vincent is a Professor of Sociology at UCL Institute of Education. She
has written and researched extensively about parents’ relationships with educa-
tion and schools and the ways in which those relationships are shaped by social
xiii
xiv About the Authors
class and ethnicity. Other research interests include education policy, and the
teaching of citizenship and values in schools. She has been awarded a Leverhulme
Major Research fellowship to explore the teaching of ‘British values’ in schools.
Previously funded research projects have included the educational strategies of
the Black middle classes and the childcare choices of working and middle class
parents. She is a Lead Editor for Journal of Education Policy and an Executive
Editor for British Journal of Sociology of Education.
List of Figures
Fig. 4.1 Friendship map of Crimson class. (NB: The social class
information featured in Figs. 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3 is derived from
parental occupation and education, so is only available for those
children whose parents also participated in the research. Please
also see endnote 1 on ethnic categorisation)101
Fig. 4.2 Friendship map of Burgundy class 102
Fig. 4.3 Friendship map of Scarlet class 103
xv
List of Tables
Table 3.1 Overview of the schools and classrooms in the study 64

Table A.1 Details for the parent participants 224
Table A.2 Details for the child participants 231
Table A.3 Details for the teacher participants 233
xvii
1
Why Study Friendships and Diversity?
Orientations and Introduction
to the Study
In brief: Introducing the sociology of friendship, the use of primary schools as

a research site and the theoretical and methodological orientations of the
research.
Introduction
I think somebody’s social class or their ethnicity is very, very irrelevant to me and
it is more about whether we can get along with each other and understand each
other and can engage with each other and you know I don’t have pre-conceived
ideas about people and it stands me in quite good stead because I make friend-
ships in unexpected places […] There is an administrator at the university
[where I work] who is on a fixed term contract ….and I always thought that
she and I got on extremely well and she was very, very efficient and she would
interrogate the data that I had requested from her to produce for me in ways
that I found quite unexpected. And I thought, “ooh here is somebody who pays
attention to detail” and so we went out for a drink, very, very kind of tenta-
tively, you know about six months ago, and I discovered that she is South
American, she is Colombian, but she spent a great deal of her life in Argentina
and she is trained as a lawyer. I used to be lawyer in a previous life and that is
how it is, I think, that Sammie and I get on really well. (Aarthi)
© The Author(s) 2018 1

C. Vincent et al., Friendship and Diversity,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73001-1_1
2 C. Vincent et al.
We begin with Aarthi, a middle-class, mixed South Asian heritage par-

ent who was one of the participants in the research project on which the
book is based. This is because Aarthi’s account of her approach to her
friendships and the narrative of her friendship with Sammie powerfully
captures some of the difficulties associated with the concept of friend-
ship. It is a form of social relationship that seems to be shaped by the
‘freest’ of individual choices (Blatterer 2014) and affective serendipity—as
Aarthi puts it, who she is friends with is driven by her perception of
‘whether we can get along’, ‘understand each other’, can ‘engage’. But
despite this sense of agency and an apparent absence of social formality,
friendships tend to be socially and ethnically patterned.
In Aarthi’s example of Sammie, it is the surprise of their shared past
professional identities as lawyers with which Aarthi identifies and on
which she settles, as the explanation for their ‘getting on really well’. In
this way Aarthi’s account of her relationship with Sammie would seem to
reflect the ways in which friendships can, in the words of Bunnell et al.
(2012, p. 491), ‘form a meso-scale of analysis, between dyadic relations
and broader structural categories (class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality etc.)
The latter can be reproduced and strengthened through the work of
friendship. As such friendship is not merely important in its own right
but also plays a role in broader processes of social ordering and
transformation’.
With Bunnell and colleagues’ argument in mind, this book explores
what adults’ and children’s friendships might reveal about the nature and
extent of social divisions in socially and ethnically heterogeneous geogra-
phies. How do adults conceive of and respond to their own and their
children’s friendship relations and the extent to which these are socially
and ethnically diverse? To what extent do friendship relations cross (and
thereby potentially transform) social and ethnic difference or remain
within these boundaries (and thereby reproduce/affirm them)?
We set out to respond to these questions by examining the ways in
which adults’ and children’s friendship relationships and friendship prac-
tices work, within a localised, ‘throwntogether’ (Massey 2005) urban
population who routinely experience social and ethnic difference through
geographical proximity. We develop our analysis through a focus on the
social interactions of those parents and children who live in diverse
Why Study Friendships and Diversity? Orientations… 3
localities, but also meet through their collective use of a particular key
social resource—the primary (elementary) school. The focus on the pri-
mary school is very deliberate in that it allows us to access a particularly
affective social world that is populated by both children and adults.
Primary schools often work as what Deborah Chambers (2006) has called
the ‘hub and spoke’ of social networks; namely, they are particular social
sites within localities and communities that radiate outwards, and are
able to generate wider social connections. In this way primary schools
are, as Collins and Coleman (2008, p. 296) observe, ‘places that matter
to many people’.
Through their collective, habitual and sustained use, primary schools
are disposed to, and productive of, sociality and encounter with known
and unknown others. Indeed, hypothetically, the nature of the unknown
other is mediated by the shared use of the school so that the regular
engagement with primary school worlds means that even unknown oth-
ers become recognised strangers, with the potential for social interaction
as well as the formation of closer relationships. From that perspective,
primary schools can be understood as a form of ‘social commons’; that is,
a space within which a series of shared cultural and other resources are
available to those with access to it. The role of schools as places of
friendship-making and the evidence that school-related friendships can
have particular longevity in people’s lives is recognised, in Savage et al.’s
(2005, p. 143) study of localised belonging and globalisation in the
Northern English city of Manchester. They report that most of their par-
ticipants described their closest friends as those that had been made in
childhood or at their children’s schools. We explore some of this same
ground in this book, considering the range of friendship formations that
can emerge through and within primary schools, both for children and
adults.
Assembling a research investigation through the simultaneous layering
of personal life and friendship relations, the routine experience of proxi-
mate (and often radical) social and cultural difference, and ‘lived in’ local-
ities and collectively used primary schools, allowed us first, to access the
multi-scale, intersecting lifeworlds of individuals, school institutions and
of place; second, to map the nature and extent of social division and
cohesion in highly diverse areas; and third, to consider the ways in which
4 C. Vincent et al.
intimate, spontaneous and micro-social interactions and networks are

structured in relationship to power (Bottero 2009, p. 407). It is all too
easy, as Sivamohan Valluvan (2016) has noted in relation to ‘the ortho-
doxies of integration’, for discussions of friendship in particular, but also
any informal, positive encounter in the context of multicultural urban
populations, to be dominated by ‘normative values’ which simply iden-
tify these optimistically, as progressive, without any acknowledgement of
the possibility of more problematic assumptions and contradictions—the
uneven power symmetries of who has to integrate, the uncertainties and
instabilities of friendships and so on (Smart et al. 2012). In focusing on
these overlapping issues as sites of attention and analysis we recognise
some of the inherent dangers of making such assumptions and fore-
ground Valluvan’s assertion (2016, p. 207) ‘that ethnic differences do not
require accommodation, remaking or respectful recognition vis-à-vis the
White majority, but should simply cease to require scrutiny and evalua-
tion in the first place.’
For these reasons, we would want to emphasise the unpredictable
and socially stratified dynamics shaping friendship relations and
exchanges across difference in the racialised contexts in which urban
multiculture can still thrive, but may be also be diminished, contained
and avoided. It is with this in mind that this chapter first considers the
concept of friendship and develops the rationale for the development
of a sociology of friendship, and begins to outline the conceptual
resources on which we draw before then describing the broad contours
of the research project and design, and outlining the structure of the
book.
An Emergent Sociology of Friendship

Friendship as a Marginalised Sociological Concept?
Throughout this book we consider how people’s dispositions to think and

act in their everyday social relations are affected by their living in a highly
diverse environment. We explore the extent to which their relationships
are shaped by homophily—the idea that people’s networks and relation-

ships are based on similarity, as described by the proverb ‘birds of a feather
fit together’ (McPherson et al. 2001). Homophily is often assumed to be
the guiding principle in social relationships, both in terms of the net-
works to which people belong and their dyadic relationships. McPherson
et al. (2001) argue, in a review of research literature, that studies show an
‘extraordinary level of racial/ethnic homophily’ (p. 421) including those
of children’s friendships. They also find that possession of educational
qualifications is a key dimension for homophilous relationships, with
occupation being slightly less so (education and occupation being used as
indicators of social class). Their review emphasises the structured nature
of space, resulting in residential homogeneity as a key explanation for the
high degrees of homophily. However, most of the literature they consider
is from the USA, where residential segregation and all that that implies in
terms of opportunities for social relationships is more marked than in the
UK. Our research, in particular, takes place in highly socially and ethni-
cally diverse residential localities, which, through new migration flows
and gentrification processes, have increasingly characterised areas within
global cities such as London, New York, Singapore and Sydney.
Until relatively recently research on friendships has tended to be domi-
nated by work in the areas of social and developmental psychology and
while there have been a number of recent sociological explorations of
diverse environments, social networks and friendship homophily/het-
erophily across race, ethnicity or religion, this work has often been quan-
titative (see for example, Smith et al. 2016; Saeidibonab 2017; Leszczensky
and Pink 2017). It has tended to evidence patterns of ethnic, religious,
and national symmetry in people’s social networks, but still leaves gaps in
understanding the nature of friendship formation and everyday interac-
tions in contexts of difference—as Leszczensky and Pink (2017) conclude
in their study of adolescents and religious homophily, their data leaves
unexplained the question of ‘why religion affects friendship formation in
the first place’. Given these limits and our concern with the nature and
role of friendship relations and their social patterning, we turn now to
consider qualitative work on friendships and discuss the status of such
work within sociology.
6 C. Vincent et al.
In their seminal study of friendship, Liz Spencer and Ray Pahl (2006:
197) describe friends as those people in personal lives who take on the role
of ‘comforter, confidants and soulmates’. Their book sets out their argu-
ment that in the socially changing and unpredictable world in which tradi-
tional and more established points of social care—family, work,
community—are reduced and eroded from the centre of people’s lifeworlds,
it is ‘friendship [that] can act as a vital safety net providing much needed
support and intimacy’ (2006, p. 210). Given their centrality to social and
personal life there is something of a puzzle as to why, as has been widely
observed, adult friendships have tended to be one of the most neglected of
social relations (Eve 2002; Pahl 2000, 2002). Analysing sociology’s relative
lack of interest in friendship, Graham Allan (1996, p. 3) describes friend-
ships as something of a ‘Cinderella topic’ in sociology, and in doing so
captures its potential significance as a social relationship but also the extent
to which this potential has not been extensively scrutinised.
Bunnell et al. (2012, p. 490) also highlight the paradox between the
centrality of friendship relations to personal lives and the ongoing mar-
ginal status friendship has had in the social sciences when they note that
‘friendship is the means through which people across the world maintain
intimate social relations [and are] an important part of what makes us
[…] human […] although friends and friendship are more likely to be
consigned to the preface or acknowledgements of books and articles than
to feature in conceptualisation or substantive content.’ The strangeness of
this marginalisation of friendship is further underlined by the extent to
which it is a focus and preoccupation in social life outside of the social
sciences—as Louise Ryan (2015, p. 1667) observes, ‘friendship is a topic
of seemingly endless fascination in popular culture and on social media’.
How, then, to explain this sociological neglect of friendship?
For Michael Eve (2002, p. 386) the answer to this question lies in the
ways in which friendship is perceived and presented as a source of ‘emo-
tional support and small services but little else’. The spontaneous infor-
mality of one-to-one connections of the type that Aarthi, in the opening
quotation, describes as the driver of her friendships is, in Eve’s argument,
at the heart of why it is simply too inconsequential for serious sociologi-
cal engagement. In Eve’s conception friendship needs structural signifi-
cance to matter. He calls for an emphasis within sociology on rethinking
friendship but through conceiving it as a structural relation, operating

beyond a dyadic arrangement, as a broader dynamic involving multiple
relations and connections through which practices operate and resources
are secured. In short, Eve’s argument is that the non-institutionalised
nature and intimacy of friendship invites its marginal status. This argu-
ment has been influential and explains the ways in which the thinking
around friendships has been subsumed into work on social networks and
social capital. The interest in social networks in social science has been
significant in the last few decades and has dominated interest in interper-
sonal relationships, social ties and social life (see, for example, Wellman
and Berkowitz 1988; Chambers 2006; Ryan 2015). The dominance of an
interest in social networks over and above friendship relations has con-
solidated—and converged—with the (different) concept of social capital
as the lens through which to situate the individual in relation to the wider
structural environment.
However, as Pahl (2002) argues in his response to Eve, the latter’s argu-
ment depends on a rather selective overemphasis on the dyadic dynamics
of friendship. Pahl highlights the ways in which sociologists such as
Adams and Allan (1998) have incorporated a more environmental and
less dyadic friendship focus into their work. And, as the later research of
Spencer and Pahl (2006) sought to illustrate, friendship relations were at
the core of social support and care in late modernity as older, more tradi-
tional social institutions such as families, communities, religion became
less central in personal lives:
We were struck by the language of suffusion used by our respondents, illus-

trating the way in which some used kin and friendship terms interchange-
ably, with very distinctive meanings. When a family member was perceived
as being ‘like a friend’ and, conversely a friend was considered as kin, the
comparison was positive and strengthened the quality of the tie, except
where a friendship was seen as a ‘duty’ and was then pejoratively described
as ‘family-like’. (Pahl 2002: 413)
And, as Pahl goes on to note, ‘in my own research with Liz Spencer, we
attempted to describe the emergence of personal communities, formed
over time in distinctive domains and fluctuating as social convoys over
8 C. Vincent et al.
the life course’ (2002, p. 421). For Pahl (2002) and for Spencer and Pahl
(2006) the emphasis is not on networks of friendships so much as the
‘personal communities’ that individuals assemble through their social
environments and lives. But perhaps most relevant to us, Pahl (2002) also
suggested in his critique of Eve that Eve underestimated the ‘importance
of friendships in social stratifications and power’. In other words, it is
both the agency of affective ties and also the multiple ways in which
structural power relations become sutured into friendship relations that
warrants sociological attention.
Aarthi’s comments on her friendships hint at how this suturing takes
place, but the process was particularly explicit in the friendship vignette
given to us by Jeanne, a parent from the pilot study we conducted prior
to our main study (Neal and Vincent 2013, see below for more details).
Jeanne is a mixed heritage, affluent, middle-class mother who had formed
what she described as a close friendship with Aiysha, a low-income Somali
refugee parent whom she met as their sons became friends. Connected
through their children, Jeanne and Ayisha have developed their own
friendship and each has offered the other significant mutual support dur-
ing difficult periods—the death of a parent, and redundancy. Jeanne
recounts the closeness they have but explains how their relationship is
always bounded by the lack of a shared private space where they can be
comfortable. As Jeanne explained, when Ayisha came to her house ‘she
didn’t ever seem at ease’. Jeanne felt this might be because of the house
presenting a very obvious middle-class material environment, a percep-
tion that was reinforced by Ayisha not ever inviting Jeanne to her house.
In his ethnography of a London street, Daniel Miller (2008, p. 287)
reminds us that home spaces and the objects within these can very power-
fully ‘speak to the nature of [social] relations’ and a similar awareness
seeped into Jeanne’s reflections as to the ways in which her affluent home
space could make Ayisha feel ‘out of place’. In response, Jeanne described
seeking alternative places for them both to go. However, going to cafes
almost inevitably involved costs, and Jeanne was very aware of the inequal-
ities in the women’s incomes. The limited material spaces where Jeanne
and Ayisha can actually be friends serves to constrain their friendship.
This means that the depth of the affective bonds between them—‘She
[Ayisha] feels like that kind of friend, that we could rely on each other
in crisis’—could not counter the wider inequalities that their friendship

exposed. So as Jeanne explained, their friendship is conducted only within
the neutrality of public space—‘I have never been in her flat [and] we’ll
[have to] stand for an hour on the street corner’.
There are some echoes of Jeanne and Aiysha in Spencer and Pahl’s
(2006, p. 171) story of Terry and Doreen. Spencer and Pahl argue that
diverse ‘personal communities’ (i.e. friendship networks) do exist across
class and ethnic differences (2006, p. 89). They give the example of Terry
and Doreen, a working-class couple, who met and made friends with a
middle-class couple on holiday, and maintained this friendship over 12
years. Terry and Doreen explain how they manage the very different home
spaces in their friendship—the richer, middle-class couple do not stay at
Terry and Doreen’s house, but Terry and Doreen do stay with them.
Spencer and Pahl use this data to suggest that class differences may pro-
vide different material resources and encourage different patterns of socia-
bility and reliance, and that ‘different statuses and lifestyles may act as a
filter in the formation of friendships’ (p. 171). Similarly, in a Hungarian
study of friends with different levels of income, Lena Pellandini-Simanyi
(2017) argues that the wealthier person in the friendship may disguise or
play down their wealth, or alternatively resort to meritocratic explana-
tions that legitimise success and inequality. As Pellandini-Simanyi points
out, these strategies may ultimately result in a weakening of the friendship
bonds and suggests that growing income inequalities increase the diffi-
culty of finding activities and spaces in which affluent and non-affluent
friends can meet and interact. Thus, Pellandini-Samanyi’s research, and
the narratives of Jeanne and Aiysha, and Terry and Doreen, all suggest
that while friendships across social difference do take place, they are mun-
danely—but profoundly—impacted by structural factors.
An Established Sociology of Friendship?
It is in the context of gathering narratives such as those of Aarthi and

Jeanne, that we follow Eve and Pahl in their push for a sociology of
friendship. However, we also suggest that this sociology of friendship is,
in fact, more advanced than either Eve or Pahl indicate. As further
10 C. Vincent et al.
explored in Chap. 4, there is a relatively well-established focus on chil-

dren and young people’s friendships and what social and ethnic difference
means in terms of formations of interpersonal relationships (e.g. Hewitt
1986; Jones 1988; Back 1996; Bruegel 2006; Reay 2007; Hollingworth
and Mansaray 2012; Harris 2013). For example, Roger Hewitt focussed
specifically on adolescent interethnic friendships on a social housing
estate in South London, examining how racism and cultural difference
were continually negotiated and manipulated by the teenage participants
in his study through invariably complicated practices, with attention also
being paid to their parents’ opinions on particular ‘mixed’ friendships.
Irene Bruegel (2006), studying friendships in primary schools, concludes
that these can and do cross ethnic divides, when children are in multi-
ethnic schools. Bruegel argues that it is the sharing of daily routines that
leads to such relationships, rather than more artificial cohesion initiatives
such as twinning schools. Her report concludes by noting that some par-
ents in the study became more positive about those of different back-
grounds as a result of their children’s friendships, and agrees with Putnam
(2000) that ‘more communal schools’ can foster ‘civic re-engagement’.
Bruegel’s later work (Weller and Bruegel 2009) also emphasises the role
children play in the generation of neighbourhood social capital, directly
through their own local relationships, and indirectly, as parents come to
form new networks around their children (also Byrne 2006).
Adult friendship experiences and the changing roles and forms of
friendships in personal lives and contemporary social relations have been
the focus of the work of a range of scholars such as Roseneil and
Budgeon (2004), Savage et al. (2005), Savage et al. (2013), Smart et al.
(2012), Bunnell et al. (2012), Kathiravelu (2013), and Ryan (2015). This
body of work variously engages with gender, ethnicity, sexuality and social
class and their effects on social relationships. For example, in their study of
localities, globalisations and belonging, Savage et al. (2005) demonstrate
the relevance of spatial and social stratifications to adult friendship prac-
tices. They found that most of their participants identified as having a ‘best
friend’, but that this relationship was largely abstract and geographically
distant. The best friend was not someone with whom p articipants had
routine and regular contact but was usually someone met in child/young
adulthood rather than someone who lived near to them in the present
day. In their ‘most working class’ area (defined using a range of criteria),
Savage et al. found that the friendship ties were mostly local, but this was
also the area in which the lowest number of participants reported having
a best friend. For Savage et al., then, the dispersed geography of ‘best
friends’ and infrequent face-to-face contact reinforced the concept of
elective belonging (i.e. an articulated commitment to particular places,
rather than an attachment that arose through embedded historical social
ties to a locality) because participants demonstrated that they were deeply
connected to ‘people living elsewhere […] belonging to social groups
scattered in space’ (2005, p. 151). The variety and complexities of what
defines friendship relations for children and for adults— longevity, emo-
tional closeness, trust, care giving, shared beliefs, life stage, the situa-
tional moment, and so on—have also emerged as key features in our
work and these variations all tend to involve a spatial dimension (see
Chaps. 4 and 6).
More recently, in their Bourdieusian redefining of class categories in
the UK, Savage et al. (2013) include friendship networks as part of the
social capital that shapes and reinforces people’s class location. The role of
social capital in friendship networks also informs Ryan’s (2015) study of
the friendship-making practices of professional Irish migrants in the
UK. Ryan concludes that rather than co-ethnic ties formed though shared
Irish identities (ethnic homophily), her participants’ networks were more
accurately defined by multiple, cross-ethnic and complementary friend-
ship formations and practices, with friendship relations being established
and maintained through a variety of professional and other immediate
social environments: ‘far from simple linear progression from mainly co-
ethnic to mainly ethnically diverse friendships over time, I have shown
how networks may bring together a mix of friends reflecting the com-
plexity and multidimensionality of identities—including professional
identity’ (2015, p. 1680).
Extending this argument about the complexities of identities in friend-
ship formation, Pellandini-Simanyi emphasises how some of her partici-
pants in income-difference friendships used their sense of social justice to
mobilise strategies in their attempt to manage and flatten the impact of
the income differences. These had limited success because as Pellandini-
Simanyi observes they are trying ‘to resolve structural contradictions at a
micro, everyday level, and therefore they are only able to reach limited
solutions. Even if they are aware and acknowledge structural and unjust
causes of inequalities, it is impossible to resolve these injustices within the
context of a friendship, which by definition is based on principles of reci-
procity and equality’ (2017, p. 604).
However, the extent to which, like Ryan’s more granular social net-
works, Pellandini-Simanyi’s participants were aware of and committed to
attempts to counter the inequalities in their friendships remains signifi-
cant. That people have a lay awareness of difference and sense of injustice
and that this may filter into their affective practices and everyday interac-
tions is an argument that resonates with other work in the field of the
lived experiences of multiculture (Amin 2012; Wise 2005, 2009; Wise
and Noble 2016; Valluvan 2016; Neal et al. 2016, 2018). A core puzzle
that we explore in the book is this tension between the drift in friendship
relations towards homophily on the one hand, and on the other, friend-
ship practices that are shaped and enacted by individuals whose values
and attitudes to ethnic diversity and inclusion are more open—even if, as
Pellandini-Simanyi suggests, it is not fully possible to counter wider social
inequalities within the limits of the friendship relation.
However, while these developments in the study of friendship evidence
the establishment of a sociology of friendship, what is more absent in the
study of friendship is a sustained focus on the effects of social and ethnic
difference on friendship relations, and this is seems a particular lacuna
given the context of rapidly changing contemporary urban environments.
Following Eve (2002), we emphasise the importance of the context in
which friendships are formed and maintained, and from Pahl (2002), we
take the need to approach the friendship relation as personal but also
socially situated. We suggest that it is the strangely simultaneous, non-
institutionalised and institutionalised affective and social content of
friendship that makes it a relevant (and necessary) focus of sociological
attention. And, in the context of exploring the experiential dimensions of
contemporary urban diversity, the friendship relation, with its ability to
condense (and converge) affective and personal lives and social divisions
and structural forces means it has escaped its marginal status and increas-
ingly moved towards the mainstream of sociological agendas.
onviviality, Heterogeneity, Encounter and Proximity:

C
The Timeliness of Developing a Sociology of Friendship
Thus, we understand friendship as having both an interior- and exterior-

world duality. As Kathirvelu notes, ‘friendship can then work dually – as
a lens through which we can understand how diverse cities work, but also
as an example of a site for plural and pleasurable interactions’ (2013,
p. 8). This makes it a pertinent and timely lens through which to reflect
on, connect with and inform current debates about everyday multicul-
ture and social mixing practices (and avoidances) in urban environments.
While Chaps. 2 and 6 explore these debates in fuller detail, we note here
the growing interest in research, policy, and political circles in friend-
ships, everyday encounters and social interactions of communities in the
increasing number of localities which are characterised by significant
social and ethnic difference (Cantle 2001; Amin 2002, 2012; Gilroy
2004; Commission for Integration and Cohesion 2007; Putnam 2007;
Wise and Velayuthum 2009; Noble 2009; Hemming 2011; Neal et al.
2018). While very differently inflected, this body of work shares an
emphasis on informal social interactions. In the more policy-oriented
social cohesion literature, friendships are particularly apparent, and of
interest, because of the assumed informal ‘social glue’ qualities of social
interaction. This means that friendship relations—and particularly affec-
tive social connections—do tend to feature in social capital, capacity and
cohesion debates (Pahl 2002; Cantle 2001; Commission for Integration
and Cohesion 2007; Casey 2016).
The former UK governments’ various policy concerns for building
community cohesion in England (New Labour government 1997–2010),
developing ‘stronger families and stronger communities’ in the Coalition
(2010–15) government’s Big Society initiative, and the more recent inte-
gration and securitisation agenda (Conservative government 2015
onwards) each illustrate forms of ongoing policy and political engage-
ment with micro interactions, social responsibility and local capacity. For
example, both the Cantle report (2001) with its concerns about ethnic
segregation and the report of the Commission on Cohesion and
Integration (2007) with its focus on locality and place, stress the
importance of contact, civic exchange, neighbourliness, capacity and

community for achieving social cohesion and stability (for a local exam-
ple see Hackney Council’s 2013 Corporate Equality and Cohesion
Policy).
In particular it is in relation to race and ethnicity, where friendship has
been presented as having the potential (i) to be a socially transformative
relationship, (ii) offer evidence of quotidian multiculture practices and
competencies (Neal and Vincent 2013; Neal et al. 2018; Wise 2009), and
(iii) to work as an evidential marker of social cohesion. Over the last ten
years, three pieces of research—from the Commission for Racial Equality
(Finney and Simpson 2009, p. 96), the Citizenship Survey (Kitchen et al.
2006, p. 20) and Cantle’s 2017 report focusing on understanding school
segregation (Cantle 2017)—argued that friendship patterns between dif-
ferent ethnic groups were a key barometer of levels of ethnic integration/
segregation. In these reports, especially the first two, there was a focus on
different religious as well as ethnic groups. Here, it is the intimate, micro-
social processes of friendship that are being interpreted as an evidential
measure of social cohesion and integration.
While an emphasis on the presence, or absence, of cross-ethnic friend-
ship patterns is part of a response to wider anxieties that regularly circu-
late about ethnic and religious segregation, social class-based segregation
is a more unspoken and, to some extent, an assumed division. This con-
trasts with the ‘noise’ around the claims of increasing ethnic segregation
(Neal et al. 2013). In other words, cross-ethnic friendships are explicitly
identified as evidence of integration and cohesion while cross-class friend-
ships lack a particular policy focus. Class separations can be complicated,
especially in socially diverse urban localities where gentrification pro-
cesses deliver socially mixed geographies (see Chaps. 2 and 6). As research
into education in heterogeneous urban areas has shown, interac-
tions across social class can be directly and indirectly contained and man-
aged by a series of parental strategies and practices (Butler and Hamnett
2011; Byrne 2006; Reay et al. 2011).
The tensions between the possibilities and constraints afforded by the
convergence of gentrification and migration that shapes the profiles of
particular urban localities, is further discussed in the following chapter
and we would only want to note here that there has been a focus in much
of this work to recognise the everyday or ‘ordinary-ness’ of multiculture

where ‘differences are negotiated on the smallest of scales’ (Wilson 2011,
p. 635) and often in unpanicked and routine ways (Noble 2009). Such
small, mundane interactions are seen to be of importance for their poten-
tial to offer evidence of quotidian intercultural practices and multicul-
tural competencies. Reflecting this, we finish this section by giving some
examples of the way in which small-scale social interactions can provide
connections between individuals otherwise distant from each in social
space. For example, Amanda Wise’s (2005, 2009) work on reciprocity
and practices of gift giving (objects and care acts) between neighbours in
an Australian suburb, found that cross-cultural encounters were gener-
ated, which while not ‘necessarily close enough to describe as friendship
do in fact through a relation of care, produce capacities for the recogni-
tion […] of otherness’ (2009, p. 35) and ‘dissolve boundaries’ (2009,
p. 37). While Wise does not directly comment on the geography of the
cross-cultural exchanges in her study, it is the propinquity involved
through the physical sharing of material spaces that give rise to contact
and enable the gift-giving process.
Similarly, Helen Wilson’s work on school playground encounters in
a multicultural city addresses the ways in which the physical space of the
playground used by parents dropping off and picking up children pro-
vides a setting in which affective social difference mixing as well as avoid-
ances of social difference occur. Like Wise’s suburban street, the
playground in Wilson’s work delivers a particularly close and familiar
‘enclosed’ space that generates parents’ ‘spatial practices’ (2013, p. 627).
These habitual spatial practices can be about friendships, building alli-
ances, bonding, contact and can also be about exclusionary in-group for-
mations, which ‘become hardened, making it less easy for others to link
in or develop connections’ (2013, p. 631). The playground space seems
to lend itself to either experience. Vertovec (2015) uses the term ‘rooms
without walls’ (see also Chap. 6 and 7) to refer to the ways in people in
the same physical space tend to cluster as if in discrete rooms, and this
chimes with Wilson when she notes that late-arriving parents tend to
have to stand in the centre of the playground while early arrival parents
tend to stand in groups with similar others, and hug the edges of the
playground that are less exposed. The separations within the spaces were
not necessarily stable though. In Wilson’s study, children’s friendships,
their games, and movement around the playground meant that parents
might also have to move between groups and negotiate with others. In
this way children could act as points of rupture, ‘forging associations
between parents over time’ (2013, p. 636). We return to and develop
these ideas in Chap. 2.
pproaching Diverse Friendships: Conceptual

A
Orientations and Methodological Challenges
The Pilot Study
We introduced Jeanne and her story of her friendship with Ayisha in our
earlier discussions. Jeanne was part of a small-scale pilot we conducted in
2012, prior to the main research project on which this book is based. We
used this pilot project to help identify some of the key themes for the
larger scale project and also to inform our conceptual orientations and
methodological approaches to investigating affective personal relation-
ships (see Neal and Vincent 2013). The focus of the pilot was on parents,
and (unlike the main project) involved no interviews or other interaction
with children, whose experience is central to our concerns. Nevertheless,
two particular issues were raised in the pilot which we have gone on to
investigate in more depth in the main project. The first relates to the
extent to which some actors may play a significant role in negotiating
across difference; and the second to the ways in which others are more
reactive to difference, rather than actively seeking to generate connection
across it.
In the pilot study, it was apparent that some parents were able to
explicitly negotiate and navigate social and cultural difference and we
further explore this practice in later chapters of this book (see Chaps. 5,
6 and 7). In her study of working class multicultural suburbia in Sydney,
Australia, cited earlier, Wise (2009, pp. 30–31) identified individuals
‘who are engaged in facilitating intercultural exchanges’ and who she
describes as ‘transversal enablers’. Wise goes on to define these individu-
als as being ‘aware in everyday terms, of the problems of an uneven
distribution of power in a dominant culture guest/host relationship’

(2009, p. 31) and on the basis of this awareness would enact practices of
social inclusion and engagement across diversity.
In the pilot study we saw some of this same awareness in two of the
pilot participants, Jeanne and Carla (both middle-class mixed heritage
mothers). While all the participants in the pilot study spoke of the ways
in which they valued living in diverse urban environments, and wanted
their children to attend diverse primary schools, Jeanne and Carla
described going to some length to accommodate and encourage their
own children to develop diverse friendships. They had also both made
sustained attempts to involve other mothers in playground talk and
school social events. Thus in their everyday practices Jeanne and Carla
appeared to exhibit skills and competencies for negotiating difference.
However, in contrast to Jeanne and Carla, the other four pilot partici-
pants (all middle class White British parents) tended to be fairly reactive
to difference and veered towards a co-presence management of differ-
ence. They, and their children, were mostly friends with those like them-
selves. There was recognition of this but also an acceptance of it, rather
than a commitment to social strategies that could possibly deliver wider
interaction. But again this was not a straightforward retreat into homoph-
ily and a co-presence model of living social difference. These four partici-
pants recognised and were reflexive about the ‘thinness’ and limits of their
engagement with social difference. They were often self-critical about
this—one described her co-ethnic friendship network as reflecting her
‘laziness’ for not making more efforts to cross difference, and another
pilot participant described how her White middle-class network at school
(with which she identified) ‘can be insular, but there are so many posi-
tives I think it would be crazy to change’. So while the multiculturally
‘competent’ participants were the most explicit in their commitment to
the values of diversity and difference, we also found that those parents
who were not particularly multiculturally engaged, or even avoided and
felt anxious about diversity were, more broadly, disposed to view multi-
culture and difference positively. While we would not want to over-claim
the depth or extent of this disposition to accept difference on the basis of
this pilot study, we do want to highlight it as socially significant. In the
chapters that follow, we go on to investigate in further depth two
contradictory themes: engagement across and disposition to valorised

difference, alongside homophily, racialised avoidance, anxiety and uneasy
responses to social and ethnic difference. This leads us into reflection on
more reflexive and granulated positions on this mixophilia and mixopho-
bia (Bauman 2003). Throughout the study, we draw on a range of ideas
and concepts from geography, sociology, and education—notably the
rich literatures around urban multiculture, encounter, and the work of
Bourdieu and Goffman—in order to explore people’s expectations,
assumptions and reactions to sameness/difference in their relationships,
and how these are impacted by living in highly diverse surroundings.
The Main Project
While we detail and discuss the study and its research design in Chap. 3
we offer here an early methodological orientation to the project and what
the research involved. The two-years of fieldwork were qualitatively
designed and had an ethnographic inflection. Focused on three primary
schools with mixed social class and multi-ethnic populations, the data
were collected through various interviewing strategies and observation
methods. As well as interviews with children we completed 58 individual
interviews with 46 parents (using interpreters where necessary) and
paired interviews with 78 Year 4 children (aged 8/9 years old) across the
three schools. We also spoke with 13 of the teaching and school staff
(including governors). We spent a term in each of the three schools in a
strategy of focused ethnographic engagement in the school world. We
were participant observers in each of the Year 4 classrooms and spent
approximately 300 hours observing at school events such as assemblies,
fetes, fairs and parents’ evenings, as well as spending time immersed in
each of the school’s local environments. Interpreters were available for
participants but these were only required in a small number of interviews.
The interviews with parents lasted between one to two hours. Parents
were asked to self-define their social class and their ethnic identity, and
those of their children. All the interview data was fully transcribed and
each interview intra-text and inter-text analysed and coded with NVivo
software.
The research is based in multicultural, highly diverse London geogra-

phies characterised by a complex mix of older migrant, newer migrant,
and never migrant populations. This ethnic diversity is intensified by the
gentrification taking place in all the schools’ locations. Gentrification is
more extensively and deeply established in some of the areas of the proj-
ect than others but proximate social difference delivered through gentri-
fication is a feature of each of the schools in which we have been working.
The schools were chosen as sites of class and ethnic diversity with the help
of a range of official data and local knowledge. We spent approximately
ten weeks in each school spending 1–2 days per week in the Year 4 class
of each school. This ethnographic ‘being in’ the school, the classroom and
the locale facilitated our embeddedness in the wider geography of each
school as well as within the school itself.
Our ‘nested’ immersion within the classroom, within a school, within
a locality was used as the basis for getting to know, invite and recruit
adult participants. Participant recruitment strategies involved us building
up the relationship from just being familiar faces, to using the time we
spent in schools’ playgrounds, at home and drop-off time, at assemblies,
school events and in parent rooms, to chatting to and inviting parents to
be involved in the project. We also used snowballing techniques and the
social networks of the parents as we were ‘passed on’ to friends and other
parents once a few parents had vouched for us.
We were very aware that we were working within a complex environ-
ment in which parents might be more (or less) willing to talk to us because
they knew we were in the classroom doing research work with their chil-
dren. We were also aware that adults might feel more pressure to talk to
us because we were located within the school environment, although we
emphasised in the invitations and project information the completely
voluntary nature of participation. We also recognised that we would have
much less opportunity to include parents who did not engage with the
primary school world for a variety of issues (work, time, confidence,
exclusion, health, choice). The normative nature of conducting a project
on integration or mixing and on friendships that we noted at the begin-
ning of this chapter—namely, that both carry an implicit assumption of
being ‘a good thing’, evidence of positive social relationships—also made
the project data collection vulnerable to participants telling us what they
thought we might want to hear and what they might want to project.
While we return to reflect on these tensions in Chap. 3 it is important to
acknowledge how our data set comes from accessing particular popula-
tions and through the collection of what can only be partial and subjec-
tive narratives from participants.
How the Book Is Organised

Chapters 1, 2 and 3 of this book review the relevant literatures informing
the project (this chapter and Chap. 2) and discuss the research design and
methods (Chap. 3). Chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7 introduce the reader to the
children and adult participants in the study and to their schools. Here we
discuss the data in detail. There are, as the reader, will become aware, dif-
ferent theoretical emphases in different chapters as we seek to utilise and
combine diverse theoretical sets of resources (as outlined here and in
Chap. 2) in order to describe and analyse the friendship practices of both
adults and children.
In Chap. 2 we discuss our chosen geographies, revisiting both the
super-diversity and gentrification debates. The chapter develops a more
nuanced account of different formations of gentrification and addresses
the ways in which middle class-settlement in urban neighbourhoods con-
verge—in a range of different ways—with super-diversity (Vertovec
2007a, b, 2015). We argue for the contradictory possibilities of encoun-
ters of difference; namely, what Les Back (1996) identified as the ‘metro-
politan paradox’ and others (Gilroy 2006; Noble 2009; Karner and
Parker 2011; Neal et al. 2018) have identified as the ways in which con-
flict and tension are integral to the unpredictable dynamics of convivial-
ity as a social process and the lived experience of intense formations of
difference in urban environments. We also consider how Bourdieu’s con-
cept of habitus and possible disruptions to the habitus could help us to
understand perceptions of and reactions to diversity.
With a focus on research relations with research environments and
with very different categories of participants, Chap. 3 describes the three
schools themselves and the three Year 4 classrooms (for 8/9-year-olds)
which were the focus of our research and the rationale, design and
methodology of the project itself. It draws on Goffman’s concepts of ‘the

total institution’ and dramaturgy to think through the ways in which
social research on diversity and personal lives, through the optic of pri-
mary schools, presents particular methodological challenges.
In Chap. 4, we focus on the children’s friendships. We introduce the
three classrooms, their class teachers and the children themselves.
Drawing on the children’s drawings and interviews, we develop a careful
analysis of the children’s friendship networks within their classroom,
looking in detail at both established and more fluid friendship groupings,
and discussing their make-up in terms of social class and ethnicity. We
illustrate how children’s friendship practices and management of complex
difference in the routine settings of their classrooms involved interactions
across difference, as well as entrenchments around similarity.
Chapter 5 extends this consideration to the adult—both educational
staff and parents— management of children’s friendships, and school
policy and practices on friendship. There are two main foci here. The first
is on the teacher practices and understandings of children’s friendships,
and school policy and practices to support the children’s friendships and
to help resolve tensions. The second focus is on the parental interventions
around their children’s friendships, particularly their management of the
children’s out of school time. We detail that particular parents displayed
different ways of negotiating difference and suggest that while the chil-
dren’s friendships were not bound by sameness, they were initiated and
practised on a terrain inscribed by largely unspoken, but still powerful
social divisions.
Drawing on geographies of education, Chap. 6 explores the nature
of the school world and its connective environs (school, locality,
home space) that make/shape social and spatial friendship networks
which can be either socially inclusive or exclusive. For this chapter
the focus is on the ways in which primary school worlds work as par-
ticularly intense sites of encounter, sociality and friendship-making.
In this context schools provide an environment in which adult friend-
ships and friendship networks can rapidly emerge, generated by, the
friendships of children themselves and the connective ways schools
can converge personal and local geographies. In socially and ethni-
cally diverse primary school settings school-based social relationships
can extend encounters with difference from schools into the wider social
spaces of localities as well as into intimate geographies of home space.
In Chap. 7 we build on adult friendship relations with a particular
emphasis on the attitudes of the parent participants to diversity. We note
that homophily is an easy description of the adult friendship networks.
However, we consider what the detail and nuance of the data reveals
about adult attitudes towards diversity, arguing that although there is a
homophilous element to the majority of the adult friendship networks,
this does not completely capture the range and scope of their social rela-
tionships. We place the respondents along a continuum stretching from
a mother who rejects diversity to a small group of minority ethnic par-
ents, who we have identified as—following Wise (2009)—‘enablers’.
In our concluding Chap. 8, we suggest that in geographies character-
ised by intense ethnic and economic diversity, our data show that despite
friendships being non-institutionalised social relationships there is a ten-
dency towards socially ordered adult and children friendships, with par-
ticipants developing sometimes contradictory approaches which veer
between open engagement and defensive avoidance of difference as they
negotiate sharing the primary school as a social commons. This is the
complex ambivalent and ambiguous social space between mixophilia and
mixophobia that most of our participants inhabit, and that in this book,
we have cast light on this space by tracing its delineation and the grounds
for both optimism and pessimism in the way we relate to those different
from ourselves.
Conclusion
As a final starting point, we want to briefly return to Aarthi. In her sense
that difference ‘is very, very irrelevant’, her initial caution about developing
a friendship with Sammie, and then her reassurance after discovering a
shared (albeit past) professional identity, Aarthi’s narrative captures neatly
some of the inclusive ambitions and contradictions—as well as serving as
a reminder of the stratifications and anxieties—that friendship relations
can involve. As we have tried to show in this opening chapter, a lot is
asked of, expected from and critiqued in friendship relations. Despite
their apparent informality and their micro-scale, friendships—whether

they exist or if they are absent—are powerful forms of intimate social
connection as well as potential conflict. As such they demand to be taken
seriously as sites of transformation and tension and it is this that in part
drives our thinking about the relevance of developing a sociology of
friendship. Friendship is also a key social relationship in the contempo-
rary lexicon of multicultural social relations, given the extent to which
friendship is mobilised in lay understandings, as well as more formal inte-
gration policy agendas, as an evidential measure of social cohesion. As
Kathiravelu (2013, p. 15) observes ‘friendship, in its ability to transcend
entrenched boundaries and discriminations, is a site and social encounter
that makes possible previously unconsidered socialities and configura-
tions […] This, however, does not imply that all friendships possess this
transgressive ability. Most friendship-based bonds reinforce rather than
transcend difference’. Given this tension, and in a context of evolving
multiculture and proximate social difference, we have argued that our
focus on the primary school worlds is important because these schools
present as a particular shared, situated and embedded social ‘commons’,
generative of invested and affective social interaction. Through a focus
on the school world we can map the variety of ways in which social inti-
macies and exchange, social change and conflict are played out within the
quotidian and wider geographies of a primary school. As each of the
chapters that follow show, these social interactions tend to happen in
ways that are not predictable and stable as differentiated populations are
required, through the process of sharing a school, to negotiate and man-
age their affective relationships across the emotive terrains of their per-
sonal lives, and within the larger institutional workings of the primary
school.
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2
Encounter, Conviviality and the City:
New Directions in Theorising Interaction
Across Difference
In brief: Reviewing the arguments on super-diversity, gentrification, encoun-

ter, conviviality, and disposition.
Introduction
Our research was conducted in rapidly changing areas with ‘super-diverse’
populations. These were also areas of economic diversity, a situation
largely brought about through the gentrification of previously working
class areas. Thus, our localities were (and still are) geographies character-
ised by ethnic difference as well as both poverty and affluence. Given this
context, this chapter reviews debates on encounter, super-diversity, gen-
trification, and conviviality, addressing issues arising from the conver-
gence of social and ethnic diversity. We argue that sociological and
geographical readings of the diverse city counter popular and policy nar-
ratives of urban isolation and alienation, by focusing on the quotidian
and accepting ways in which people commonly and competently navi-
gate diversity, and develop a sense of embeddedness in their localities.
Throughout this book, we are interested in whether and how a ‘convivial

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73001-1_2
disposition’ can be generated, and how living in an intensely diverse

locality impacts on the development of such a disposition.
Thus, in this chapter, we first discuss the research on everyday multi-
culture, which focuses on how people interact in everyday situations with
diverse others. Second, we consider the effect of processes of gentrifica-
tion and ‘super-diversity’ in shaping the populations of diverse localities.
Next, we address the contested question of the relationship between
everyday encounters and the development of more intimate relation-
ships. We suggest that routine encounters may be meaningful in them-
selves for what they reveal about people’s expectations, their assumptions,
and their acceptance of difference. Fourth, we offer a definition of con-
viviality which steps away from romanticised understandings of the term,
and allows for sometimes difficult as well as more harmonious relation-
ships (Neal et al. 2018). We discuss finally, drawing on Bourdieu, how we
might theoretically understand the processes affecting the development
of a capacity for conviviality, an openness to difference.
Multiculture and the City

Diversity is often portrayed as an actual or potential threat to social order
(Glick Schiller and Caglar 2016). In such readings, residents in diverse
localities are understood to have little trust in their neighbours, and to
have little sense of commonality or collectivity (e.g. Cantle 2001, 20041).
Robert Putnam, for example, argues that exposure to diverse social envi-
ronments leads individuals to withdraw from others and from social life
at large, to the extent that we end up trusting others—including those
belonging to our own ethnic groups—less. In an oft-cited phrase, Putnam
argues that ‘[…] people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to
“hunker down”—that is, to pull in like a turtle” (Putnam 2007, p. 149)’
(cited in Hewstone 2015, p. 419). With regard to families and schools—
the subject of our book—the problematic implications of diversity often
have a particular framing with a lack of ‘intergenerational closure’ being
assumed. The phrase belongs to James Coleman (2000), whose theory of
social capital emphasises the importance of social connections between
families; specifically, close networks of parents and children. He
Encounter, Conviviality and the City: New Directions… 31
understands such ‘intergenerational closure’ as a positive force for main-

taining high standards of behaviour on the part of children, as networks
of parents in local communities who know each other, establish a ‘dense
social structure of norms, extensive trust and obligations’ (Edwards et al.
2003, p. 4). All of this is understood, in the more dystopian readings of
city life, as lacking in diverse, multicultural localities, with the residents
sharing few social ties or indeed shared understandings regarding social
norms. Evidence of school segregation can create a particular anxiety. Ted
Cantle (2013, no page numbers) noted that ‘a divided school invariably
means a divided community’, and recent research (2017), which revealed
that minority ethnic pupils are more likely to attend schools where
minority ethnic groups are the majority, generated concerned headlines.2
Such segregation can prevent schools from capitalising on their poten-
tial—as highlighted in Chap. 1—to bring together and create opportuni-
ties for interaction between different groups. It is because of this view of
schools as potential assets in terms of providing opportunities for the
generation of social relationships across difference that we decided to
focus our research around school sites.
Many geographers and sociologists have argued that the narrative of
fracture and isolation does not encapsulate the complexity of people’s
daily reality and sociabilities. Indeed, empirical and theoretical research
and writing has led to the emergence of a ‘counter-narrative of convivial
encounter across difference (e.g. Back 1996; Amin 2002; Gilroy 2004;
Wise 2009; Gidley 2013)’ (Neal et al. 2015, p. 464). Such ethnographic
research often presents findings in relation to local and relatively small-
scale spaces. Hewitt explains this focus, arguing that
The reality of open public spaces in contemporary cities is one of territori-

alisation and transit, rather than the leisurely mingling and mixing of
diverse citizens as was previously imagined. Instead, it is the more intimate
spaces of the city in which diverse individuals contest and negotiate their
position in society and urban civic culture. (Amin 2012) (Hewitt 2016,
p. 358)
As Hemming (2011, p. 65) argues, geographers have employed the

idea of ‘encounter’ as ‘a way of thinking through how citizens can learn
to live with cultural difference by showing civility to others’. Thus, recent

examples include research which has identified at-ease, routine encoun-
ters across difference in public and semi-private spaces such as cafés and
restaurants (Jones et al. 2015; Wise and Velayutham 2014), parks (Neal
et al. 2015), schools (Hewitt 2016; Wilson 2013), public transport
(Wilson 2011), street markets (Hiebert et al. 2015) and neighbourhood
streets and squares (Blokland and Nast 2014; Husband et al. 2016); stud-
ies that reveal people engaging in ‘prosaic methods of accommodation’
(Wise 2013, p. 39), and the ‘routine de facto banality of co-existence’
(Husband et al. 2016, p. 147). The empirical research emphasises the
importance of the experience of sharing space with diverse others to cre-
ate a sense of acceptance of and indeed belonging to diverse localities,
perceptions that are at odds with the stereotype of cities being alienating
and isolating. Neal et al. (2015, p. 473) note in relation to public parks
that the ‘routine, repeated use of park spaces, of being in parks with
unknown others may generate….a connection to others’ even if signifi-
cant interaction is not forthcoming (also Husband et al. 2016, p. 215).
They cite Wilson’s (2011, p. 646) notion of a ‘temporary community’
being established amongst shared users of a particular space (in Wilson’s
original, the users are of public transport). Similarly, the same research
team argue that franchised café spaces used by ethnically mixed popula-
tions are sites where only a ‘slight sociality’ is required (Jones et al. 2015,
p. 658). Jones et al. argue, following Goffman, that ‘the patterning of
ordinary social contact’ (Goffman 1963, p. 6) is a fundamental indicator
of people’s ability to negotiate cultural difference. Such small, mundane
interactions are seen to be of importance for their potential to offer evi-
dence of quotidian intercultural practices and multicultural competen-
cies. In other words, socially and culturally mixed populations develop
what Richard Sennett (2012, p. 6) has called ‘skilled co-operation’ to
manage, and thrive, in increasingly heterogeneous urban environments.
The notion of people possessing everyday skills, knowledge and compe-
tencies that are mobilised and enacted as they live diversity is central to
our study. Similarly, Blokland and Nast’s study of multicultural residen-
tial localities in Berlin concludes that ‘public familiarity’ (which they
define as both recognising and being recognised in local spaces) creates a
‘zone of comfort in which we know what to expect’ (2014, p. 1156), and
this acts to increase an individual’s sense of belonging. Husband and col-

leagues, in their study of Manningham in Bradford in the north of
England, refer to ‘rubbing along’, described as ‘a normative level of
behavioural civility’ (2016, p. 126) that pervades everyday interactions.
However, accepted norms of behaviour in public places might vary some-
what, and cause tension (even if the tension is mostly hidden). Park users
in Neal et al.’s research feared or disapproved of some forms of behaviour.
Ye’s (2016) research on the practice of gui ju in Singapore shows how
notions of appropriate civil conduct (gui ju) organise ‘the micro-politics
of everyday co-existence’ (2016, p. 97). Ye illustrates how, when faced
with a behaviour one disapproves of, gui ju precludes direct confronta-
tion, but also acts as ‘a fine-tuned source of segregation through the dis-
ciplining of [particular] conducts’ (p. 101). Perceived negative behaviours
may be associated with particular groups. In Ye’s study, for example, the
Singaporean respondents understood disreputable behaviours, such as
talking very loudly, as more likely to be associated with new arrivals from
the Chinese mainland. As we can see from Ye’s research, this body of
work emphasising the importance of studying behaviour within shared
spaces ‘does not diminish antagonisms, but argues for a recognition of
the engagements and dialogue that are also part of the lived experience of
multiculture’ (Neal et al. 2015, p. 464; also Husband et al. 2016). We
will return to this argument later in the chapter.
Gentrification and Super-Diversity

We started this chapter with reference to populist and (some) policy
accounts of cities as alienating and antagonistic. Submerged in these nar-
ratives is the assumption that the residents are likely to be poor with a
poverty of culture (see e.g. Payne 2005). Laying aside the obvious
limitations of this view, the ‘inner city’ is, in a number of key European
and North American cities, recently transformed, as middle-class popula-
tions have moved in, seeking affordable housing, and wishing to live
closer to city-centre services and employment opportunities (Lees 2016;
Rankin and McLean 2015; August 2014; Bacque et al. 2014).
Gentrification has become what Lees and colleagues have called ‘a mass
produced, state-led process around the world, what Neil Smith calls a
“global urban strategy”’ (2010, p. xv). Of course, this is not to suggest
that the processes involved have been uniform across continents. Lees
and her colleagues (2008) argue for the need for ‘geographies of gentrifi-
cation’ which pay heed to spatial and temporal differences. A city’s politi-
cal and economic structuring and restructuring (e.g. through
gentrification) acts to shape neighbourhood dynamics and thus residents’
social relations (Glick Schiller and Caglar 2016). We can see this varia-
tion in relation to our case study schools. Even within one part of one
city, London, the differences between the form and degrees of gentrifica-
tion in our three localities are obvious—despite the fact that they are
within a six-mile radius of each other (see Chap. 3 for more detail).
The concept of ‘gentrification’ is itself a contested one, but can be
broadly defined as the transitioning of space ‘for progressively more afflu-
ent users’ (Hackworth 2002, p. 1; cited in Jackson and Butler 2015,
p. 2351). One theme of the large body of research on gentrification has
been on how place contributes to classed identity practices. Much of this
literature focuses on middle-class behaviour and practices, although
Paton (2014), Shaw and Hagemans (2015) and Butcher (2017) provide
exceptions. Paton’s study of Glasgow and Butcher’s study of Hackney in
London highlights the contradictory and complex ways working-class
residents engage with gentrification. The authors argue that a straightfor-
ward narrative of displacement and exclusion is not sufficient. Although
there are clearly strong elements of both, some working-class residents in
their studies also offered support for local gentrification. Despite this,
Shaw and Hagemans (2015) and Butcher (2017) argue that even if
working-class residents are not physically displaced, changes to local
shops and leisure sites can engender feelings of loss and exclusion as local-
ities change in appearance (see Mick in Chap. 7 as an example). Of
course, gentrification is not the only process affecting housing in a l ocality.
Increasing private rents in London’s inner suburbs and changes to the
benefit system (for example, the caps to the local housing allowance for
private renting tenants and the introduction of the bedroom tax3) have
affected the ability of some low income and social housing residents to
stay in their properties (Shelter 2017). In our three localities, we heard
reported instances of individuals having to leave in search of housing in
cheaper areas, although continued existence of social housing in all three

areas meant that they remained socially mixed, feeding mixed social class
populations into the three schools.
The ability to participate in expensive housing markets in gentrifying
areas is a fundamental divide between the residents of an area, and
working-class residents do not generally share the ability of the middle
classes to choose a residential location (although this choice is tempered
for many middle-class residents in London by the elevated house prices).
Savage et al. (2005) have argued that when they are in a position to make
such a choice, the middle classes prioritise a ‘fit’ between their sense of
themselves and the place in which they choose to live, which normally
includes the presence of other ‘people like us’, a process he and his col-
leagues term ‘elective belonging’.
The tendency of middle-class groups to disaffiliate from some aspects
of their surroundings has also been noted by others; Watt speaks of ‘selec-
tive belonging’ where residents choose which aspects of their locality to
identify with, and which to disassociate themselves from (Watt 2009;
Butler and Robson 2003). Pinkster, in her study of middle-class residents
living in disadvantaged areas of Amsterdam and The Hague, speaks sim-
ply of ‘non-belonging’, where residents do not wish to develop ‘meaning-
ful ties’ (2014, p. 16) with the area. Education can be a key arena for
disaffiliation. In relation to their London-based respondents, Jackson and
Butler note: ‘As so often with the middle classes their fears and sense of
identity were lived through their children’ (2015 p. 2362; also Bacque
et al. 2014, p. 1227). Middle-class residents may avoid local state school-
ing options, seeing them as containing disreputable classed and ethnic
‘others’ (see e.g. Vowden 2012). The middle-class respondents in our
study had made a positive choice to use their local schools (although some
with an initial degree of reluctance), and most had, if not the economic
resources or political outlook which would enable them to pay for private
education, the social and cultural capital necessary to try and get their
children into nearby, less socially diverse schools (we had accounts from
respondents of neighbours who had acted in this way), although we note
here (and develop in Chap. 3) that the three schools varied themselves in
the degree to which they were a popular choice locally—one, Leewood,
had long been the middle-class choice for schooling in the area.
Other studies on school choice (e.g. Ball 2003; Van Zanten 2003;
Reay et al. 2011; Boterman 2013; Benson et al. 2015) emphasise the
tendency of middle-class parents to evaluate their child’s potential peers
when making their choice. Mix may be acceptable but it has to be a
‘good’ mix (Bryne 2006; Vowden 2012), meaning a sizeable proportion
of other middle-class children. Even the ‘counter-intuitive’ middle-class
choosers in Reay et al.’s study (2011) (who eschew schools with strong
exam results in favour of choosing local, socially diverse schools with
lower results), differentiate their own child from those around them.
Reay et al. (2011) point to the relatively limited mixing—especially
across class amongst the pupils—and parents’ hesitancies and anxieties
over their children mixing with those unlike themselves.
Some parents clearly stated that they wanted their children to mix with
‘diverse’ groups because they themselves had never done so and did not
know how to do so. At the same time there is a constant concern of the
impact of getting too close and embracing the Other…This represents, on
the one hand, an appropriating desire for control and advantage, and, on
the other, an open receptivity that promises greater equality and valuing.
The result is a profound paradox that lies at the heart of liberal White
middle-class identity. (Reay et al. 2011, p. 164)
This mixture—desire for and openness to difference and the accompa-

nying hesitancy and wariness—that Reay and colleagues identify is also
found in the more general literature on gentrification. As other research-
ers have noted (e.g. Jackson and Butler 2015), ‘coping’ with diversity
becomes a form of cultural capital for the middle classes, or what Reay
et al. (2011) have called ‘multicultural capital’. Similarly, Bacque et al., in
their study of the Parisian suburb of Noisy, noted that it was a point of
pride for middle-class incomers to live in an area noted for being diverse
and poor (2014, p. 1222).
Findings like these have caused Tim Butler to remodel his concept of
social tectonics. Rather than a simple process of middle-class residents
living in parallel with working-class groups (that is alongside, but without
engagement), Butler and his colleagues now argue that in some localities,
the presence of ‘others’ is central to the active formation of middle-class
identities (Jackson and Butler 2015). Working-class ‘others’ especially,

provide both behaviours and situations to react against, but also provide
a way of affirming a liberal, cosmopolitan middle-class identity; one that
enjoys living in a diverse environment that is contrasted with the ‘blank’
sameness of established, more homogeneous middle- class localities
(Jackson and Benson 2014).4
The complexity of the picture increases when we consider the impact
of ‘super-diversity’. The term describes the diversity of the migrant popu-
lation, the multiplicity of origins of those who arrive in London and
other major cities, their varying immigration status, and social and ethnic
identifications, contributing to super-diverse urban populations (Vertovec
2007, 2015). ‘Such patterns have resulted in profound transformations
of local configurations of diversity in terms of ethnicity, religion, lan-
guage, gender, age, legal status, human capital and more’ (Hiebert et al.
2015, p. 13). Vertovec and his colleagues (2015) also point to the ‘layer-
ing’ of social complexity through new migrants moving into areas where
‘older’ migrant populations are already established.
In some urban areas, the extent of cultural difference has meant that the
notion of ‘super-diversity’ (a ‘diversification of diversity’) of Vertovec
(2007, p. 1025) has become a widely used shorthand for the more complex
pluralities and intersectionalities of contemporary multiculture. (Neal
et al. 2015, p. 464)
Meissner and Vertovec argue that super-diversity describes a social

phenomenon, but also has analytical potential revealing, among other
things, the way in which ‘migration-related diversity is increasingly being
seen as an ordinary part of everyday lives’ (Meissner and Vertovec 2015,
p. 547; also Wessendorf 2013). Such a focus is important for linking the
everyday and the local with global migration flows. The notion of super-
diversity can be used as a way to describe localities, and is indeed excel-
lent for foregrounding dynamic processes of change, the fluidity of local
populations. However, we argue that its analytical potential is less clear,
and thus we tend not to use the term. Detailed descriptions of everyday
interactions across difference can give the impression of not foreground-
ing social inequalities, but rather presenting an image of what Kofman
(cited in Humphris 2015) calls ‘flat’ or horizontal diversity (see Chap. 7

for further discussion). Vertovec (2015) and others (e.g. Valentine 2008)
argue that there is a danger of ‘overly generalizing the convivial or posi-
tive outcomes of difference, interaction and place’ (Vertovec 2015,
p. 256). This brings us back to debates about the nature and extent of ‘the
convivial turn’, which we discuss further below.
Beyond Romanticising Encounter

We indicated above that brief, fleeting encounters, especially if repeated
(exchanging greetings with a neighbour for instance) have value for devel-
oping a sense of familiarity, security and belonging to a neighbourhood.
In its discussion of the actual and potential significance of everyday
encounters, the literature marks a re-engagement with older ideas of con-
tact theory (Allport 1954), which argued that positive and relatively pro-
longed interpersonal contact between individuals from different racial
groups or ethnicities with equal status can lessen prejudice and anxiety
about the other. While contact theory fell out of favour in the later
decades of the twentieth century, given its limited recognition of the
structural nature of social inequalities which make ‘equal status’ difficult
to achieve, its more recent popularity stems from the room it allows for
individual agency, and the potential for individual encounters to be
transformative and ‘scaled up’ from the individual with whom one is in
contact to his/her group as a whole (Matejskova and Leitner 2011).
It is on this issue—whether we can assume that encounters have a
longer-term potential to reshape social relations across difference—that
we wish to focus next. As Neal and colleagues note:
That people mix with, encounter one another, and manage cultural differ-
ence and ethnic identity in more contingent, pragmatic, and ‘at ease’ or
convivial ways than is popularly imagined is a core argument of those
engaged in the emergent ‘everyday multiculture’ approach. This argument
does not ignore tension and discord, but rather attempts to reposition the
dominance of conflict and pay attention to the co-existence of other, often
slight and spontaneous and sometimes amicable forms of multicultural
social interaction that can occur and be thrown up in the vast range of set-
tings that are often moved through in any one day and night. Whether, and
to what extent, these informal, fleeting socialities can be recognised as
socially and culturally transformative – and thereby political – is a puzzle
with which the approach seeks to engage. (Neal et al. 2013, p. 315)
We would agree with Gill Valentine (2013) that friendly interactions,

on public transport or in local shops for example, between those who are
different, cannot be assumed to indicate positive, deep-rooted beliefs
about diversity and difference, or an individual’s propensity for mutual
care and respect; rather they may be understood as examples of urban
etiquette, the socially acceptable ways in which people negotiate with and
around each other, local and national variations on gui ju (Ye 2016).
Indeed, we can see from the ethnographic literature that routine, compe-
tent, appreciative even, mixing is common in diverse localities, but often
does not seem to transfer to more intimate relationships. Similarly, the
Commission for Social Integration recently commented that
Highly diverse areas are not necessarily integrated. For example, whilst
London is more diverse than the rest of the country and Londoners are
more likely to meet people who are different from them compared to peo-
ple outside the capital, Londoners’ friendship groups are in fact the least
likely to properly reflect the age, income and ethnic mix of the community
they live in. (2015, p. 6)
Valentine and Sadgrove further note that it is not a fleeting encounter,

nor spatial proximity alone ‘that overcomes social difference, but rather
closeness—it is the act of knowing—or the production of intimacy which
aligns different bodies in time and space’ (2012, p. 2060).
As can be seen above, there seems to be an implicit and often not
articulated sense of what ‘counts’ as a successful interaction, and we wish
to problematise this. Valentine and Sadgrove’s ‘closeness’ like our earlier
reference to ‘more intimate relationships’ are clearly highly subjective
descriptions. Our point is, therefore, that the order and degree of contact
documented in much of the encounter literature cited above appears to
be different from that desired by Valentine and colleagues, but that does
not necessarily mean that less substantial encounters have no value. As

indicated above, many of the encounter studies argue, in effect, that the
processes, the micro-politics, and the routine negotiation involved in liv-
ing in densely populated spaces with diverse others may not indicate sig-
nificant relationships across difference, but are meaningful in themselves
for they reveal if not a fundamental appreciation of others, at least an
acceptance of them. These are accounts where difference is routine, and
regularly negotiated in prosaic interactions and settings, often with ami-
cability (Hemming 2011; Amin 2002). In other words, the mundane,
the ordinary, the fleeting encounter in shops, public transport, shared
outdoor spaces can be understood as important in itself as a barometer
indicating an affective relationship to place, and a willingness to engage
with at least basic civility with other residents, differences in ethnicity,
race and social class notwithstanding. We return to these ideas later in the
book, using the idea of ‘civil attention’, but note here that this willingness
cannot be taken for granted, as shown by the recent increases in hate
crimes in London (Metropolitan Police 2017).
Conviviality
Concerns remain that some interpretations within encounter debates are
rose-tinted and tend to over-claim a transformative potential. Thus, we
turn next to the literature which considers the degree of, or depth of, our
capacity for conviviality, whether such a capacity can be formed and, if
so, how. Throughout the book, we consider whether people living in
areas of intense diversity do engage in tacitly managing and limiting their
interactions with diverse others, and if so, why they do this, or whether
they develop what Wise (2016) calls a ‘convivial open disposition’.
Authors writing about conviviality define the term with a care to avoid
romanticisation. Relevant here is Gilroy’s understanding of the Spanish
term ‘convivencia’, as cited by Wise and Noble (2016):
Convivencia as shared life, includes an emphasis on practice, effort, nego-

tiation and achievement. This sense of ‘rubbing along’ includes not just
‘happy togetherness’ but negotiation, friction and sometimes conflict. It
signals belonging and new forms of community as practice, as hard labour

(Wise and Noble 2016, p. 425)
Wise and Noble (2016, p. 423) themselves define conviviality as ‘our

capacity to live together’. Likewise, Amin argues, ‘Conviviality is not the
product of civic virtue or interpersonal recognition, but a habit of nego-
tiating multiplicity’ (Amin 2013, p. 1).
Several authors argue that conviviality, especially given the popular
definition (which differs from those cited above) as indicating sociability,
warmth, geniality and understanding can be, like encounter, understood
as celebratory, whilst ignoring persistent patterns of exclusion around
race, class and gender (Wessendorf 2016, p. 450; Wise and Noble 2016;
Noble 2013a). ‘Encounters in diverse societies eventuate between indi-
viduals who are positioned within a network of racialised [and we would
add, classed] relationships which are perpetuated in everyday interaction’
(Plage et al. 2017, p. 4). Similarly, Fortier emphasises ‘the relations of
distance, power and conflict that living with difference is embedded in’
(2007, p. 111). Analyses that do not foreground such inequalities pres-
ent, as we suggested earlier, a view of ‘flat’ diversity, implying that indi-
viduals of different ethnic, and/or religious, and/or social class
identifications meet in social and physical space as equal but different.
We argue that this is misleading and overlooks differential possession of
resources. In other words, to use Bourdieu’s terminology, described in
more detail below, different individuals have varying amounts of social,
economic and cultural capitals that are more or less valuable, and valued,
in different social fields (arenas). We discuss this further in relation to our
data in Chap. 7.
Many researchers recognise the contradictory possibilities embedded
in encounters of difference; that is, that individuals can at different times
be conflictual and antagonistic as well as open and engaged, inclined
towards both mixophilia and mixophobia (Bauman 2003). This apparent
contradiction is what Les Back (1996) identified as the ‘metropolitan
paradox’ and others (e.g. Gilroy 2006; Noble 2009; Karner and Parker
2011; Neal et al. 2013, 2015; Ho 2017) have identified as the ways in
which conflict and tension are integral to the unpredictable dynamics of
conviviality as a social process, and the lived experience of intense
formations of difference in urban environments. Harris (2016a, b) for

example, in her research on the sociabilities existing amongst young peo-
ple living in ethnically diverse areas of Sydney, argued that attempts to
construct positive feelings, understanding and sites of togetherness
through formal intercultural approaches served to position the young
people as in need of guidance and management and overlooked their
actually existing relationships across difference; relationships which could
be characterised by a range of positive and more negative emotions.
Whether and how a capacity for conviviality, a disposition towards
openness develops in individuals is another theme for consideration in the
literature (Noble 2013a). Social psychologist Hewstone argues that not
only the frequency of contact but also the quality determines the extent to
which contact positively affects attitudes (2015, p. 420). On the same
theme, Amin argues that opportunities for the development of more sus-
tained and productive—but not necessarily the managed relationships of
Harris’s (2016b) youth groups—can be available in what Amin (2002)
identifies as ‘micro-publics’ (p. 970), such as community groups or work-
places and Valentine (2013, p. 7) as ‘spaces of interdependence’. These,
for Amin, are those that elicit contribution and collaboration, thereby
generating a web of sustained connections (Hewitt 2016, p. 357). Such
moments can theoretically provide interactions that allow individuals to
realise the gap between individual lives and behaviours, and stereotypes
and assumptions around cultural and ethnic differences, thus increasing
‘intercultural understanding’ (Amin 2002). Given these arguments, we
have chosen to focus our research on schools, as discussed in Chap. 1, and
to consider the role of schools as micro-publics.
We turn next to a different set of theoretical ideas that can help us
think through potentials and capabilities for conviviality and how these
might develop.
Habitus: Disruption and Possibility

Living in intensely diverse localities, in terms of both ethnic and social
difference, was, for our respondent parents, part of their experience of
adulthood, and for some a relatively recent experience. A small number
had grown up in areas of ethnic diversity, but the degree of both ethnic
and social diversity in their current localities was new. We are interested
in how this experience impacted upon the parents and children. Most of
the latter had, in contrast to their parents, only experienced their diverse
home localities. We discussed above the idea of a convivial disposition. Is
it possible for such a disposition to be generated through the experience
of living with diversity? Perhaps the opposite reaction is likely, one of
withdrawal and disengagement, or following the findings of literature in
this area (as discussed above) a mixture of reactions: at different times and
in different circumstances, engagement and interaction alongside dis-
tancing and withdrawal?
We outline here ideas around disposition, drawing on the work of
French sociologist Bourdieu and other commentators in order to explore
people’s sense of themselves in relation to the social world, to try and
understand further the importance of homophily (Chap. 1) and a sense
of similarity—‘people like me’—to determining social relations, and how
that sense is affected by difference and by social inequality. Bourdieu
gives us one way of thinking through these issues, although this book
does not present an analysis viewed solely through his work. As noted in
Chap. 1, Bourdieu offers a set of conceptual resources, which form part
of our ‘thinking tools’ drawn from sociology and geography, to throw
light on the respondents’ perceptions, actions and reactions as they form
friendship relations with others in their locality. Bourdieu is an appropri-
ate resource here because of his ‘suggestive account of the processes
through which concrete, empirical individuals come to be what they are,
possess the masteries they do and yearn for what they do’ (Atkinson 2016,
p. 72). However, he might also seem to be a strange choice given that, as
Bottero notes, Bourdieu does not emphasise ‘the substance of social inter-
actions’ in his work, nor are his ideas around social networks (social capi-
tal) as developed as other aspects of his theorising (Bottero 2009, p. 399).
However, the scope of his work around the relationship between social
structures and individual agency, and the way in which it has inspired
plentiful and detailed discussions from other commentators—a very
small part of which we discuss here—makes his work a valuable resource
upon which to draw.
In this section we will use Bourdieu’s work to discuss a theoretical

understanding of how individuals’ habitus (a system of ingrained and
embodied dispositions which organise the way individuals perceive the
social world) is affected (if at all) by their experience of living within
diverse localities, and the possibilities for friendship with those unlike
themselves. We add empirical material in later chapters. In Chap. 1 we
identified, in our discussion of research on friendship, the tendency
towards homophily; that is, the apparent pull of sameness in friendship
relations. Bourdieu’s writings also appear to assume this tendency in
social relationships as can be seen in his presentation of concepts of social
capital and habitus, part of his well-known triad of habitus, capital and
field.5 Social capital refers to actual or potential resources deriving from
durable social networks. Briefly, habitus is a system of dispositions guid-
ing an individual to think and behave in particular ways—what seems to
them to be ‘natural’ and ‘right’—providing a degree of regularity to
action. Habitus, ‘in the broadest terms’, refers to ‘our overall orientation
to or way of being in the world […] a product of our upbringing […] it
is class-culture embodied’ (Sweetman 2003, p. 252). Habitus is ‘deeply
written within us by multiple, layered, intersecting and at times conflict-
ing social processes’ (Akram and Hogan 2015, pp. 608–9, original
emphasis). Thus, individuals are drawn together by shared conditions of
existence, shared or similar positions in social space, and shared relations
to different forms of social, economic and cultural capital. As a result,
Bourdieu’s ‘general view of the habitus [is of it] as tending to produce
homophily’ (Bottero 2009, p. 410) as individuals are drawn together by
similarities in habitus (Bottero and Crossley 2011, p. 102).
The nature of physical, as well as social space, in influencing interac-
tions is also discussed. In The Weight of the World (1999) Bourdieu con-
sidered the relationship between social and physical space. Using the
illustration of a ‘fashionable neighbourhood’ he argues that residents can
each ‘partake of the capital accumulated by the inhabitants as a whole’,
whereas a ‘stigmatized area symbolically degrades its inhabitants’ (1999,
p. 129). Here we see ‘Bourdieu’s concern to demonstrate that fields (social
arenas) matter concretely’, that the ‘power struggles they illuminate’ are
‘marked in the urban landscape itself ’ (Hanquinet et al. 2012, p. 512),
and that, indeed, ‘physical space is the concretization of social space’
(p. 514). Bourdieu, commenting on this relationship between habitus,

social and physical space, and social networks (social capital), argues that
individuals are involved in a struggle for the appropriation of physical
space, for ‘the legitimate occupation of a site’ (1999, p. 128)—this is
particularly relevant to gentrified localities as we will shall see—and, thus,
he is pessimistic about the potential of heterogeneous residential locali-
ties, arguing that, ‘socially distanced people find nothing more intolera-
ble than physical proximity’ (Bourdieu 1999, p. 128). As the respondents
in our study live in socially and ethnically diverse areas, we were struck by
this strong assertion and we consider throughout this book how much
such a statement reflects their perspectives and understandings of both
their feelings about where they live and their friendships. In a recent
article, Butcher (2017) considers the experience of young working-class
individuals in a rapidly gentrifying Hackney (in East London), where
experience of difference, and in some cases displacement, are met by
complex responses, including those that are positive; physical proximity
of the ‘other’ is not purely and straightforwardly felt as ‘intolerable’ as in
Bourdieu’s formula. However, in a study of Peckham’s Rye Lane (South
East London), Jackson and Benson (2014) find that the largely African-
Caribbean and African small businesses (butchers and other food shops)
are met with a mixture of repulsion and fascination from White middle-
class respondents living nearby. Similarly, and using Bourdieu’s ideas to
inform his empirical analysis, Davidson (2010) writing about social rela-
tions between ‘incomers’ living in new-build gentrified settlements in
London, and the established working-class residents, notes the relative
lack of social mixing across social class, and also foregrounds the appear-
ance of social distance, hinting also at social distaste. He concludes that
policy assumptions of social mix in housing leading to social mixing are
misleading at best: ‘ the absence of social mixing contains within it a class
politics, [thus] the assertion of social mixing in current urban policies is
therefore an “embodied lie: the denial of antagonism” (Zízeck 2000,
p. 187)’ (Davidson 2010, p. 541). Bourdieu’s work can explain this social
distance Davidson notes, as, for Bourdieu, early socialisation shapes who
it is that individuals see as their peer group, as potential friends, as people
‘like me’. Here we see the assumption of homophily.
This sense that early experiences ‘fix’ future actions speaks directly to
one of the major areas of contestation regarding Bourdieu’s work: the
extent to which habitus as a concept tends to ‘mute determinism’ (Farrugia
and Woodman 2015, p. 627)—that individuals’ perceptions and actions
are ‘set’ as inevitable consequences of early experiences and social posi-
tioning. However, Bourdieu’s conceptualisation is more sophisticated
than a presentation of simple determinism. He notes that habitus is
‘durable but not eternal’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 133), and
explains that habitus is initially a product of early socialisation, but can
be restructured by individuals’ encounters with the outside world.
‘Habitus changes constantly as a function of new experiences. Dispositions
are subject to a sort of permanent revision, but one that is never radical,
given that it operates on the basis of premises instituted in the previous
state’ (Bourdieu 2000, p. 161). As Zembylas states, ‘This generative view
of habitus may constitute a site of transformative emotion practices’, that
while individuals may be predisposed to act in particular ways, ‘the
potentiality for innovation and new affective connections with the world’
remains (Zembylas 2007, p. 448).
However, Bottero understands Bourdieu’s emphasis to be on the pres-
ervation of the original characteristics of habitus. ‘Bourdieu emphasizes
the acquisition of habitus as a ‘once and for all’ process (emerging from
early social experience, in networks characterised by homogamy, which
the habitus conservatively reinforces), limiting consideration of the
impact of networks upon lifeworld and practice’ (Bottero 2009, p. 408).
Thus, Bottero is arguing that Bourdieu’s apparent assumption of homoph-
ily in social networks gives a conservative character to the concept of
habitus. Such an assumption of ‘conservatism, in dispositions and con-
nections, ensures individuals share the same instinctive “feel for the
game”, with few disruptions to spark reflexivity’ (Bottero 2009, p. 409).
As a result she argues that Bourdieu does not consider the ways in which
‘the “lifeworld”6 that emerges within more heterogeneous networks will
be different to that created in networks marked by a high degree of
homophily or social similarity’ (Bottero 2009, p. 408). Further arguing
this point, Bottero and Crossley (2011) conclude that social relationships
are shaped by the habitus—as Bourdieu emphasises—but are also shaping
the habitus.
It is important to note here that Bourdieu often operated at an abstract

level, paying little detailed attention to the substance of social relation-
ships and ‘minimizing their theoretical significance’ (Bottero and Crossley
2011, p. 102). Working with empirical data, Diane Reay argues for an
understanding of the habitus as a product of conscious reflection, as well
as unconscious disposition. She argues that we should understand habi-
tus as describing not simply unconscious impulses, but also the workings
of ‘mundane everyday reflexivity’ (Reay 2004, p. 435). The introduction
of reflexivity—defined by Archer7 as individuals considering themselves
in relation to their social contexts (Akram and Hogan 2015, p. 607)—
offers a ‘broader conceptualisation of habitus’, and one that ‘weaves
together conscious deliberation with unconscious dispositions’ (Reay
2004, p. 438; also Farrugia and Woodman 2015).
The key issues in the above discussion are twofold: first, the degree to
which the concept of habitus allows for continuation and change, and
second, the degree of reflexivity allowed for in Bourdieu’s conceptualisa-
tion of habitus. What causes a disruption to the habitus and what effect
might such a disruption have?
Could living in a diverse area constitute a breach in the predictability
of everyday life (Akram and Hogan 2015), and thereby generate reflexiv-
ity? Might walking down the street and hearing languages one does not
recognise and seeing shops selling foodstuff that is similarly unrecogni-
sable, disrupt taken-for-granted expectations? If so, what is the result?
Degrees of anxiety and detachment, or reflexivity and acceptance? As
noted earlier, Melissa Butcher’s study of young working-class individuals
in gentrifying Hackney suggests that for many—but not all—of her
respondents, the ‘spatial breach’ caused by gentrification (as the urban
landscape alters and neighbourhoods lose their familiarity) results in
‘reflexive re-workings of self and space’ (2017, p. 3). Sweetman (2003)
addresses the same issues, suggesting that reflexivity may result from an
individual’s rapid movement across fields resulting in concomitant shifts
to the lifeworld (as in Bourdieu’s own journey from working-class origins
to eminent middle-class sociologist), and also from contemporary changes
taking place in the fields themselves (Sweetman’s example includes the
changing demands of the labour market, and the impact of consumer
culture). As a result, he suggests that it is plausible to refer to a flexible or
reflexive habitus ‘which means contemporary projects of identity may be

second nature for some’ (p. 529). However, this is not necessarily an
advantage for those individuals as it involves continual self-monitoring
and flexibility (p. 546) and we discuss such a requirement in relation to
some of the respondents in Chaps. 5, 6 and 7. A capacity for reflexivity is
also hinted at in the ‘everyday multiculture’ literature discussed earlier in
this chapter, that broadly suggests that people possess considerable capac-
ities with which not just to tolerate but also to appreciate diversity.
However, this book is about friendships; relationships of greater intimacy
than casual encounters in shops or in public spaces. Our empirical data
focuses on the respondent adults’ friends, their children’s friends, the
potential presence of the ‘other’ in the home space, and varying reactions
to this. Butcher (2017), as well as identifying amongst the young adults
in her study those with the will to explore and engage with change, also
finds those with a ‘“conservative impulse” (Marris 1974)’ leading to a
wish to retain familiarity, preserving ‘existing cultural frames of reference
and avoiding, or reorganising, that which engenders ambiguity and dis-
comfort’ (Butcher 2017, p. 5). With regard to our data, we consider
respondents’ degree of willingness to engage with ‘otherness’ in their
social relationships, and we will similarly argue that the reflexive re-
workings of self in response to lived diversity are partial, uneven and can-
not be assumed.
A Return to Place
In this chapter, we have reviewed several literatures focusing on the gen-
eral themes and arguments that arise within them. However, we want to
conclude with specifics, by noting that our research focuses on London,
a very particular global city with a highly diverse population and high
levels of gentrification (GLA 2013; Fenton 2015). With regard to the
latter, Cunningham and Savage argue for the exceptionality of London
‘as a highly specific spatial vortex’ for ‘a range of powerful and economi-
cally privileged elite agents’ (2015, p. 345). Thus social class inequalities
are high in the capital. In terms of ethnic diversity, Nava argues that
interracial relationships and “mixed-raceness”, ‘which in the London
context is an appellation more likely to indicate complex historical and

geographical trajectories than essential racial origins, ha[ve] become com-
mon place’ (2006, p. 45). This sense of ethnic diversity as a fundamental
part of everyday life is arguably reflected in the response to the 2016 EU
referendum where the localities in which the case study schools are
located polled in favour of Remain. This is not, of course, to suggest a
cosmopolitan paradise, especially given glaring social inequalities, but
rather to point to the particularities of our case study sites (see Chap. 3
for more details of the localities).
Conclusion
We have discussed a number of arguments in this chapter. First, we high-
lighted the complexities of city living. Through processes of gentrification
and super-diversity, local populations arise that differ in terms of social
class and race/ethnicity, as well as concomitant variations in religion,
legal status and so on. This results in areas of intense diversity. Second, we
noted the inadequacy of the populist narrative of the diverse city as lack-
ing in connections and sociabilities. We highlighted research on everyday
multiculture that suggest that brief, everyday encounters can have a
meaningful role in an individual’s life as rooting him/her within a local-
ity. The roots may prove fragile and relatively insubstantial in the long
term, but still capable of producing a present sense of familiarity and
belonging. However, diverse populations are divided in terms of the
social, economic and cultural capitals people possess and can put to use,
and such inequalities are overlooked in descriptions of ‘equal but differ-
ent’ population flows. Diversity is hierarchical, structured, graded, not
flat, and our understandings of how conviviality works must take social
inequality into account. We are exploring, in this volume, whether and
how living in diverse localities affects people’s dispositions, focusing on
their attitudes, beliefs and actions, as understood through the lens of
their friendship practices. Given the general tendency to homophily
identified in Chap. 1, we discuss in this book whether the experience of
living in diverse areas sparks a reflexive re-working of the self, and whether
that leads to a desire to engage with difference or a wish to withdraw.
Notes
1. There are policy exceptions, however, e.g. Commission for Integration
and Cohesion (2007) Our Shared Future.
2. https://www.demos.co.uk/press-release/61-of-ethnic-minority-kids-in-
england-and-90-in-london-begin-year-1-in-schools-where-ethnic-minor-
ities-are-the-majority-of-the-student-body, accessed 9th October 2017.
3. The ‘bedroom tax’ was introduced in 2013, and involves a cut to housing
benefit for those in social housing if they are deemed to have a spare
room.
4. We note here that the use of the binary ‘middle class’ and ‘working class’
has limitations. First, it overlooks class fractions within these broad group-
ings (see Vincent and Ball 2006) and, second, such a binary overlooks the
existence of the intermediate category about which there is relatively little
research (see Vincent 2017).
5. Bourdieu’s theorising is relational, thus Bourdieu’s ‘key concepts of habi-
tus and field designate bundles of relations’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992,
p. 16, original emphasis). Habitus realises itself in relation to field. Social
life is composed of many different ‘fields and sub fields’—such as educa-
tion, politics, law—‘an ensemble of relatively autonomous spheres of
“play” [action]… Each field prescribes its particular values and possesses
its own regulative principles. These principles delimit a socially structured
space in which agents struggle, depending on the position they occupy in
that space, either to change or to preserve its boundaries and form’
(Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 17). As Noble (2013b, p. 352) observes,
fields are both abstractions (e.g. the field of education) and arranged
around particular physical institutions and settings (e.g. schools, colleges,
homes, in the case of the field of education). Within these, individuals use
their available social, cultural and economic capitals in a struggle for
advantage in particular fields. Every individual has a ‘portfolio’ of capital
(Crossley 2008) that can present itself in three main forms: economic
(money and assets), social capital (social relationships and networks,
which Bourdieu emphasised can be used by some to perpetuate existing
privilege), and cultural capital which can itself take three forms, embodied
(‘in the form of long lasting dispositions of the mind and body’; Bourdieu
1997, p. 47), the objectified (cultural goods, such as books, pictures) and
the institutionalised (qualifications).
6. Atkinson (2010, p. 9) defines the lifeworld as partially constituted by the

habitus but is distinct from it and notes that the two can ‘jar’ if the ‘condi-
tions and experiences of the latter shift too rapidly’ (2010, p. 10). We can
see an example of this in the (rare) attitudes of refusal of difference and
(more common) avoidance of difference in Chaps. 6 and 7.
So, two agents close in social space have individual lifeworlds insofar as
they attended different schools, have different occupations and work-
places, live in different neighborhoods, and have had and have differ-
ent consociates – not just because of their membership of different
fields – and thus have distinctive experiences, biographies, and habi-
tus, but because all these facets of the lifeworld are structured to some
degree according to material conditions of existence, they and the
experiences and habitus they generate display clear analogies or, to use
Wittgenstein’s (1952) phrase, “family resemblances,” which are, as
Bourdieu so astutely noted, perceived by the agents themselves as a
sense of social similarity (they are “like me” or “one of us”).’ (pp. 9–10)
7. Broadly, Archer positioned her work in opposition to Bourdieu’s concept
of habitus (see for discussion Akram and Hogan 2015; Ferrugia and
Woodman 2015).
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3
Back at School: Research Methods,
Design and Reflexive Dramaturgy
In brief: Developing wider debates about the researching complex populations

as well as detailing the project’s research locations, research design and
methodology.
Introduction
Researching friendship means accessing, inhabiting and asking about
people’s socially intimate and personal lifeworlds. While friendships may
seem amongst the most personal and the least institutionalised of social
relations as we have argued in Chap. 1, they are profoundly socially pat-
terned. Friendships, as Blatterer notes, ‘refract aspects of the social system
and so give clues to the workings of social trends in everyday life’ (2014,
p. 2). Making a similar point Carol Smart (2007, p. 28) reminds us that
the category ‘“the personal” designates an area of social life which impacts
closely on people and means much to them but which does not presume
that there is an autonomous individual who makes free choices and exer-
cises unfettered agency’.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73001-1_3
Friendships are then something of a fraught and emotive place for

researchers to examine (Smart et al. 2012). Not only is there a tension
between them being agentic and socially shaped, but friendships are also
saturated with emotion, with senses of self and wider ties to, and affective
recognition with, others (Spencer and Pahl 2006). The challenges for
social researchers working on friendship relations involve managing and
engaging with these paradoxes. Urban primary schools are sites within
which difference is condensed. They routinely and proximately bring
together ethnic and social diversities, generational and gender diversities,
in reflections of local communities and changing places. This means that
the dynamics and contradictions of friendship experiences and practices
are even more uncertain and intense.
Each of the schools we worked in was distinct, and across the three
institutions the research participants—children, parents, teaching staff—
were differentially positioned within the day-to-day ecology and environ-
ment of the school. For us as researchers this different positioning meant
we were working across a range of potential challenges and vulnerabili-
ties. Most obviously, children are formally identified as a core category of
vulnerable research participant (Morrow 2008). With this in mind we
also recognised the need to interact in careful and bespoke ways with
child participants especially given the terrain of friendship relations and
classroom dynamics in which we were working. With parents we recog-
nised that we were asking potentially emotive and intimate questions
about their personal lives, as well as what could be politically sensitive
questions about their identities and engagements with social and cultural
difference. We were conducting research with teachers who are busy,
scrutinised public-sector professionals under pressure to deliver high lev-
els of care, emotional well-being and educational outcomes. This means
that there may be levels of professional vulnerability of which researchers
need to be aware in educational settings.
Given this context, this chapter sets out to respond to the questions of
how we interacted, observed and interviewed highly diverse groups of
children; how we engaged and built trust and talked with a highly diverse
parent population; and how we approached, observed, worked with and
interviewed classroom teachers, head teachers and related education
professionals.
Back at School: Research Methods, Design and Reflexive… 61
Alongside providing an overview and the detail of the project’s research

design and an account of our research practices in the field, in this chapter
we reflect on wider positional questions. In addressing these we are taking
seriously the imperative to make the research process transparent. As
Susie Scott and her colleagues observe, since the 1970s, feminist critiques
of the subjectivities, politics and power involved in being in the field and
in the processes of doing social research, have encouraged a recognition
of ensuring that ‘the researcher [is] rendered visible as a presence that
affects every stage of the research and whose authorial voice co-constructs
its emergent narrative’ (2012, p. 716).
Following this, the chapter is organized into four broad parts. We pro-
vided an orientation to the project in Chap. 1, and we expand on this
here by detailing the social geographies and profiles of the three schools.
In the second part of the chapter we consider the research environment of
the project and suggest that the primary school and its locale present a
very particular and a rather contradictory research context. Primary
schools are bounded, protected institutions which are often difficult to
access and we show how, for social researchers, primary schools can have
something of Goffman’s ‘total institution’ about them. Yet primary
schools are also very much connected with their wider environs and are
part of the communities in which they are embedded (see Chap. 6 for
more discussion of this). The third part of the chapter moves from a dis-
cussion of our relationship with the research setting to discuss our research
relationships with the very different categories of participants. We stay
with Goffman and draw on his concept of dramaturgy to think through
the ways in which the research team drew on different aspects of their
identities and experiences to manage the research interactions and
encounters with socially and ethnically diverse and very differently posi-
tioned research participants. We integrate detail of the project’s design
and methodology and some extracts from researcher field narratives into
all these discussions, and the final part of the chapter returns to the wider
questions raised by our research experiences.
It is important to acknowledge that the social identities, diversities and
commonalities of the research team itself influenced, impacted and
shaped the research process in every way and at every stage. Who we are
is threaded through the reflections and accounts given in this chapter and
we try to be as transparent about this where and when relevant. As an all

female, all middle class, research team we shared significant social ground
between us. But as two White British women (CV and SN) and one
British-Pakistani woman (HI) our experiences and identities are more
differentiated. Diversity in generation, geography and family status
within the team also shaped the research relationships. For example, both
Carol and Sarah were able to mobilize and draw on their experiences as
parents whose children had attended primary schools in London to build
connections with school staff and parents. Humera was able to draw from
her own cultural identity and background of migration and settlement in
different cities in different countries. Ethnicity, race and class saturated
the fieldwork in known and unknown, unspoken and spoken ways and
some of these inform our discussions in the chapter.
he Research Environment: The Case Study

T
Primary Schools and Their Geographies
Our research focused on three state (public) primary (elementary) schools
which were located in London. We have named these schools Leewood,
Junction and Fernhill. In each of these schools we worked in one classroom
of 8–9 year-old-children (Year 4).1
We selected Year 4 children and their parents to work with for a num-
ber of reasons. Middle childhood represents a formative period in terms
of children developing their own out-of-school social worlds—which still
have to be adult managed—and their friendship relations. It is a time
when children begin to express strong opinions on friendship choice and
social activities, yet at the same time are young enough to be influenced
by others (including adults). From an adult perspective, many parents
and carers maintain contact with the school and each other, as they con-
tinue to collect and drop their children from school and facilitate and
negotiate their children’s various social activities (play dates, birthday par-
ties, etc.). This contact was important for our project, as we aimed to
explore whether the school space acted as one in which encounters of
individuals from different social and ethnic backgrounds did or did not
result in friendship-making.
While the London geography in which we were working has a large

number of primary schools, we were targeting primary schools that pre-
sented particularly diverse social economic and multicultural profiles.
Using a combination of government sourced demographic Census data
(Office of National Statistics), education data such as Free School Meal
eligibility and the Pupil Premium grant (proxy indicator for relative pov-
erty), the reports of English school inspectors, Ofsted, and the research
team’s own local ‘backyard ethnographic’ knowledge, we selected approx-
imately 15 primary schools to contact and invite to become involved in
the research. The case study schools with which we eventually worked
were carefully selected because of their social and ethnic diversity and the
social and ethnic diversity of the localities in which they were based.
Diversity in the schools and in their wider surrounds is apparent across
a number of dimensions including social class, ethnic difference, levels of
migration into and out of the area, diversity in language and religious
beliefs, and levels of gentrification. The three schools are based within a
six-mile radius of one another, separated by dense housing, busy trans-
port routes and small-scale commercial streets, shopping and recreation
spaces characteristic of this part of London. The census data allowed us to
get a detailed profile across indices of diversity and social equality and we
were also able to find out the range of languages spoken in the areas
around the school. The most spoken languages across the three areas after
English were Turkish, Polish, Spanish and Bengali, reflecting established
and more recent population flows from Turkey, South Asia, Eastern
Europe and Latin America. Other significant populations in the schools
were Black British children (both from the Caribbean and from a num-
ber of African countries) and children of mixed heritage.
Each area comprised a mixture of social and expensive private housing,
resulting in a socially diverse population feeding into the local primary
school. Each of the neighbourhoods differed in degrees of gentrification
at the time in which the data was collected. All the schools were fairly
close to green public spaces. These green spaces were used extensively by
local families and served as spaces in which positive encounters with oth-
ers were possible. Each school at the time of the research was a maintained
primary school (i.e. these were not academy schools). The table below
offers an overview of the key features of the schools and the
Table 3.1 Overview of the schools and classrooms in the study

Leewood school Junction school Fernhill school
Locality Established area Emerging area of Area of partial
of gentrification gentrification gentrification
Free school meal 19.7% 32.8% 38.7%
(FSM) percentages
2013
Ofsted ranking 2013 Good (previously Good (previously Good (previously
‘outstanding’) ‘satisfactory’) ‘satisfactory’)
Year 4 class Crimson Burgundy Scarlet
Classroom size 30 28 20
classrooms being studied. Following this, we examine each of the schools

and localities in more depth (Table 3.1).
L eewood School: An Area of Established

Gentrification
The area in which Leewood School is located, Glen Park, is an established
area of gentrification in a highly diverse London borough. Across the
borough, social housing lies alongside private housing, whose value over
the past few years has increased dramatically. Glen Park is centred around
a collection of mostly independent shops and boutique restaurants and
cafes and ‘gastropubs’. The nature of the shops has changed in line with
the demands of changing populations over the last 20–25 years, with an
increase in businesses catering to an affluent population (see Mick’s cri-
tique in Chap. 7. There was also some gentle mockery of the ‘£5 crois-
sant’ (Phillip, teacher and resident, Leewood) from the middle-class
residents). Glen Park has a large park with a well-maintained playground
and other facilities. The park is a space (unlike the expensive shops and
services) that is used by all the Leewood children irrespective of class or
ethnicity.
Leewood School is a contemporary building in a side street away from
the bustling main road. It has a local reputation as a creative school as
well as one which is inclusive for children with special needs. It was a
popular choice for local parents and was heavily oversubscribed by
parents wanting their children to attend the school. The catchment area
also includes social housing and the school serves a mixed social class and
ethnic population, although by comparison with the other two schools,
the population in our target class—Crimson Class—had a higher pro-
portion of children with White British middle-class backgrounds.
Crimson Class was relatively large and had thirty 8/9-year-olds, most of
whom had been together for five years, since nursery. This stability and
continuity gave the children a secure level of familiarity with each other.
From our first encounter with them, we began to learn about the friend-
ship dynamics and liveliness of the class as Humera noted in her first field
notes after our initial introductory visit:
The children trickled into the class, eyeing us up with curiosity. There was a
delay with starting the class as a couple of the boys had not returned to their
seats following an altercation in the playground […] Once the children were
settled, it was quiet reading time, although even this was actually a fairly noisy
affair. In fact, throughout the afternoon, there was never a moment of complete
silence.
J unction School: An Area of Emerging

Gentrification
Junction school is in the Ross Road area. The school itself is located on a
side road, adjacent to a busy traffic and commercial street that leads into
a shopping centre. Ross Road is visibly more multi-ethnic than Glen
Park, as demonstrated by the range of shops (which also catered for a less
affluent population) and the surrounding places of worship.
The area around Junction School is one of emerging or more recent gen-
trification. The residential roads surrounding the school comprise large
Victorian terrace houses, which are increasingly popular with profes-
sional families priced out of other nearby middle-class neighbourhoods.
Other signs of emerging gentrification included the recent opening of a
boutique café, the redecoration of some local restaurants and rises in
house prices. Junction school, located in a Victorian building, empha-
sised its focus on drama and arts, and its environmental school creden-
tials, which include its well-developed school garden.
The composition of the school is very ethnically and socially mixed,

reflecting the demographic shifts in the school’s surrounding neighbour-
hood. One (White British) father informed us that he had heard it called
the ‘headscarf school’, a reference to the Muslim families whose children
attended the school, although the number of Muslim pupils was rela-
tively small. An increasing number of children of Central and Eastern
European origin reflected the demographic changes in the Ross Road
area. There was a higher level of pupil mobility in the school compared to
Leewood, and this was echoed in our selected Year 4 class, which we have
named Burgundy. Burgundy Class was made up of 28 children. Sarah
reflected on the mixed nature of the classroom in her field notes from her
first encounter with the class:
The children are visibly very mixed. They all wear uniforms [the only school
that did in our study] even so it is not that hard to read social difference as well
as ethnic and cultural difference. The afternoon is organised around a series of
out of class activities in which we all move around the school. The class manages
all this movement and activity in mixed ways—there are kids who misbehave,
others drift, others engage. They seem to interact with each other in mixed ways
too. Mostly there seems to be affection but there is some detachment and dis-
tance too I think.
F ernhill School: An Area of Partial

Gentrification
The area around Fernhill School—Hanson Green—is partially and more
unevenly gentrified with a mix of an established urban middle class but
also new settlements, particularly as a result of a recent housing regenera-
tion process. The nearby shops are a combination of cheaper, boutique,
and brand cafés and restaurants, a number of gastro and other pubs, and
large chain and smaller independent supermarkets. There is a large park
that is accessible from the school, and like Junction School, Fernhill
school is in a Victorian building, again in amongst residential streets but
relatively close to a busy high road, the nearby station and a range of
shops and cafés. It has a local reputation of being a school with a strong
community connection. Unlike Leewood and Junction, Fernhill School

had a large number of long-standing staff members (with some senior
members having been there for over 10 years) and these teachers were
well known to many parents. The mixed social and ethnic composition of
the school reflects the surrounding demographics of the neighbourhood.
There are a significant number of children from Turkish and Kurdish
families as well as children from the established (mostly) White British
middle-class population of the area. New flows of migration have seen
increasing numbers of children from Eastern Europe and Somalia.
Our Year 4 class, Scarlet Class, was smaller than the Year 4 classes in
Leewood and Junction Schools, as Fernhill was undersubscribed at the
time of the fieldwork. Scarlet Class had 20 pupils, with a noticeable gen-
der imbalance, as two-thirds of the class were boys. The gender imbalance
impacted on the children’s friendship patterns and came up in conversa-
tions with the class teacher. For example, Humera reflected on how she
‘was able to get a sense of the friendship groups in the class during lessons and
music time. What struck me was the gender divide between the boys and the
girls. The girls all stuck together in a group.’
We discuss our localities further in Chap. 6 and pick up on issues
around gentrification, as well as thinking more about the spaces in which
participants spend time, such as in parks, cafes and at home. The changes
in neighbourhood composition are particularly important in the context
of our study as changes in local demographics influence each of the
schools’ populations. As well as gentrification, changes to local social
housing provision affected the schools’ intake (see Chap. 2). The point
about housing and changing populace was picked up on by a senior staff
member from Junction school:
Well I think in terms of the changing face of the community yes ….there
has always been a core actually of middle-class kids but I think if you
look at the lower end of the school you can see that that has changed. I
think it will always be a mixed school because there is so much temporary
housing around [Ross Road] and we have quite a lot of movement and
also we have children who might have been here because they were in
temporary housing and when they have moved out they still try and
come here.
Having described the make-up of the localities and schools in which

we conducted our research, we now reflect on our fieldwork experiences
from working in these three schools.
ack to School: The Primary School as a Total

B
Institution?
We have already discussed the ways in which primary schools work as a
form of ‘commons’ for local populations (Chap. 1) and a key space in
which Amin’s (2002) notion of micro-publics (i.e. a socially and ethni-
cally diverse population that is regularly brought together through the
use of social goods) can be identified (Chap. 2). Here we want to empha-
sise the tensions in how primary schools operate as social institutions.
From one perspective schools are a constitutive part—and reflection of—
the localities in which they are rooted. The project focused not directly
on schools as education providers but as a shared social good, and as an
optic through which to explore rapid urban change and everyday social
relationships. Primary schools work as community institutions with rela-
tionships made within the school boundaries able to spill out, impact and
radiate out into a variety of spaces and social interactions beyond the
immediate school (see Chap. 6 for an extended discussion of this).
However, it is also important to acknowledge the extent to which pri-
mary schools are clearly protected spaces, presenting a number of charac-
teristics that fit with Goffman’s notion of ‘total institutions’. In some
ways it seems, then, contradictory that we first emphasise the schools as
‘hub’ institutions but then turn to Goffman’s work on asylum-like organ-
isations which are cut off, separated from the wider community, places
where residents live all aspects of their lives within the physical boundar-
ies of the institution (Goffman 1968). We contend though, that traces of
the total institution travel into understandings of the primary school and
that this is particularly experienced by social researchers working in
school environments.
As we noted earlier, the difficulties of establishing a research presence
in schools is well known. In securing the three schools we finally worked
with we relied on a mix of serendipity, and perseverance (we ran a sus-

tained campaign of repeated contact and follow up work). That we
secured access to the three schools reflects the success—and resilience—
of this access strategy, but it also shows the extent to which education
sites remain relatively enclosed. In understanding our difficulties with
access, we recognize the current pressures upon primary school teachers,
who operate within a performative regime with, in recent years, intense
increases in workload. However, we also note that access challenges offer
an ironic reflection on the institutional nature of primary schools; that is,
for all their being in and of communities and places, they are intensely
bounded and it is for this reason that the notion of ‘total institution’ has
some resonance. While Goffman’s (1968, p. 11) description of a total
institution ‘as a place of residence and work where a large number of like
situated individuals cut off from the wider society’ does not easily fit with
primary schools, the negotiation of access does fit with the experience of
gaining a route into a site that is not so much a commons, as a ‘cut off’
institution. Goffman defines total institutions as ‘tightly scheduled’,
where ‘daily activities [are] carried out in the immediate company of a
large batch of others, all of whom are treated alike and required to do the
same things together’ (1968, p. 17). The controlled day-to-day timeta-
bling and ‘large batch’ organising does reflect the requirements, rhythms
and processes of classrooms and primary school life.
In drawing attention to the materiality of the total institution, Goffman
(1968, p. 313) details the way in which ‘their total character is symbol-
ized by the barrier to social intercourse with the outside that is often built
right into the physical plant: locked doors, high walls, barbed wire, cliffs
and water, open terrain and so forth’. Again, this may seem to be pushing
at the credibility of the total institution and primary school comparison,
but the nature of the built environment of a primary school does present
aspects of the total institution. All schools, including our three primary
schools, are highly securitised spaces to ensure the safeguarding of the
children, and getting in and out of them is not straightforward. The sense
of crossing a border that is generated by the microprocesses of being
buzzed in at the main gate, waiting at the school office and signing the
visitors’ book, wearing a visitors’ badge and so forth all add to a feeling of
transitioning from the public space of the street outside and entering a
particular, sealed-off ‘bubble world’. The nature of fieldwork means the

outsider-to-insider border crossing is hard to avoid when doing educa-
tional research.
The materiality of the school space concretises this bubble world and
constantly reinforces it. So while the school design, its corridors, class-
room, halls and playground are all familiar to those parents, staff and
children who repeatedly visit, use and spend time in it, to the researcher,
the micro-geographies of school spaces are complex and often disorien-
tating. Victorian school buildings are particularly labyrinthine with dif-
ferent staircases, entrances and exits. Despite spending a regular and
extended time in the schools as researchers we did sometimes lost and
regularly had to request pupils (to their amusement!) or teachers to guide
us through the school building, an experience which reinforced the our
sense of being outsiders inside a unfamiliar and baffling space which oth-
ers—children and teachers especially, but also parents—knew
intimately.
Our weekly participant observation work over a term in each Year 4
classroom enabled us to become immersed in the classrooms and get to
know the children and teacher through sharing (and supporting) various
classroom activities, particularly reading and art, as well as spending time
in the school playground at the beginning and end of the school day,
going along to class and school assemblies and fetes. Our efforts at immer-
sion and becoming members of the schools’ worlds—establishing our
presence, building recognition, familiarity, rapport, trust—tended to be
rather mixed and only partially successful in all three schools. As with the
children, for parents as well, our presence within the school world always
felt a little uncertain, in contrast to clear, known, recognisable roles and
status that others—teachers, staff, parents, pupils—had in the school.
Much of this lessened over time, of course, and in the classrooms we
were working in we became familiar fixtures, but nevertheless we regu-
larly encountered jolt moments of slipping between insider and outsider
status within the school world. In many ways this was only to be expected;
we had no explicit stake in the primary schools in which we were work-
ing, we only had a temporary presence. Despite our project information
and consent forms (see ethics discussion) and the numerous informal
conversations in which we all engaged in the field, our project,
and social research more widely, were not a priority for anyone but us.
Some of this ‘only just an insider/always something of an outsider’ expe-
rience is apparent in Sarah’s field note about being at Fernhill School’s
summer fair:
The crowd feels very mixed. Looking at it and moving through it I navigate the
people; Muslim women in headscarves – Somali (?) and Turkish (?); Black
Caribbean (?) families, White English (?) families; mixed heritage South Asian,
Caribbean, Black African. Lots of men and lots of women. A lot of women
managing the various stalls although men doing the barbies…and class – again
it appears to be a real mix if difficult to be sure – but reading appearances –
hair styles, clothes, make up, shoes, bags, tattoos – what stands out is the mix of
the population; some mixing in conversations; in sitting arrangements espe-
cially in the food stall bit; a sense of conviviality and festivity – children weav-
ing in and out of it all. It is slightly disorientating being in the crowd trying to
think about what I am seeing and not seeing, not really being known and only
very tenuously being part of it (so extra nice when I am occasionally recognised
and greeted!)
It is not always straightforward to assess the implications of this ‘out-

sider position’ in terms of its impact on interview interactions and con-
versations. At times our social identities may have helped negotiate and
open up, or alternatively, close down interactions with both child and
adult participants. The nature of the school world itself—much of which
carries the imprint of the total institution in the daily activities set for the
class and governed by a single authoritative figure—created endlessly
ambivalent positions for us as researchers. Were we seen as official and
formal figures which meant participants felt more compelled to talk to
us? This may have been particularly felt by the child participants irrespec-
tive of the ethical practices of information-giving and consent (see below).
So while we worried over being incorporated into the hierarchical
dynamics of schools we also experienced senses of infantilisation as we
immersed ourselves in the daily rhythms of classroom life and relation-
ships—we sat on the carpet at story time, on the little chairs at the chil-
dren’s group tables, participated in music and PE classes. As a research
team, we have spent varying amounts of time in schools in recent years,
and for one of us at least, it was hard to avoid reverting to memories of
being a pupil at school, of being both in awe and in fear of teachers, aware
of having to do (and succeed) in an endless variety of tasks and activities
that can be fun, daunting, exposing or boring and always being hyper-
aware of the micro-social interactions of classroom life. As Sarah wrote in
one early set of field notes: ‘Spent the afternoon in Crimson class [at Leewood
School] and strongly felt that sense of a return to school and being in a
school—the constant if vague anxiety of being singled out, of not understand-
ing tasks, of not fitting in, of being told off’. Valentine and Holloway (2003)
make a similar point about the ways in which, in the micro-structures of
the day in a school, the timetable, the routines, the drill of the bell, the
need for obedience, generate a particularly acute awareness of institu-
tional demands.
At times there was also an ambiguity in the relationship between us as
university-based researchers and the school-based educational staff. For
example, in our introductory attempts to develop connections between the
research team and the teaching staff, Carol would note she had begun her
career as a primary teacher and while intended as an affirmation of mutual-
ity and shared ground, it also emphasised that Carol had left the teaching
profession and had a different career trajectory. Sarah similarly wrote of the
mundane challenges that could materialise when academic researchers are
involved through fieldwork, in being part of and regularly observing in
classrooms, presenting teachers and staff with another professional presence
to be aware of in the class. For example, she wrote of the process of managing
(supportive/competitive?) professional status after an incident of reassuring one
teacher about her spelling on the classroom whiteboard, and of the difficulty
of knowing how to appropriately respond to another teacher who had expe-
rienced a particularly difficult teaching session while we were in the class.
It is this ambivalence that characterised the research positionality that
we highlight here. The research setting of the primary school is not a
straightforwardly open or democratic social commons. Primary schools
can be read as embedded within localities and generative of social
interactions and routine collective use by a micro public of familiar
strangers. But whilst they can be warm, welcoming, inclusive and affir-
mative, they are also hierarchically organised with clear lines of authority,
set apart from the local, physically securitised and bounded, sites of dif-
ferentiation and micro-conflicts, isolations and misbehaviours. This
generates an ambivalent and complicated environment for wider pro-

cesses and practices of friendship making and maintenance for both chil-
dren and for adults. We turn next to discuss issues around eliciting,
listening to and understanding the friendship experiences and practices
of socially and ethnically diverse and differentiated participants.
ack to School: Dramaturgy and Managing

B
Research Environments
Schools are emotive institutions—they are heavily invested in by chil-
dren, parents, families and staff and occupy core elements of everyday
social life and well-being. As a research team we were aware of the com-
plexities of the setting and the ways in which our project amplified them.
By involving children and parents and teaching staff we were bringing
together key, but very differently positioned, populations within the
school world as we asked them about their friendship relations (children
and parents) and about the ways in which children’s (and related adult)
friendships were managed and facilitated, generated and patterned within
the classroom and the school (teaching staff).
How to effectively, empathetically and responsibly manage and interact
with this research world was an ongoing challenge. There was a balance to
be maintained between the need to adopt a professional and confident
researcher identity (Scott et al. 2012; Scott 2012), while respecting Ann
Oakley’s (1981, p. 41) reminder that the qualitative process of finding out
about people’s intimate lives works most ethically and effectively when the
relationship of interviewer and interviewee is non-hierarchical and when
the interviewer is prepared to invest his/her own personal identity in the
relationship. Enacting this strategy in the school research site required some
dexterity on the part of the research team. The fieldwork design meant that
being in the classroom and the wider school world could require us to move
from being with the children, either doing ethnographic observations or
conducting interviews; to talking to parents at the end of the school day to
arrange or conduct an interview; to talking to and/or interviewing teach-
ing staff. These different categories of research participants meant that
we moved through a variety of identities drawing on different personal

and social capitals to build relationships, trust, and productive, meaning-
ful dialogue. There was a particular sense of performativity here.
Increasingly, it was Goffman’s concept of dramaturgy on which we drew
as we managed our research selves with the project’s very different research
populations.
Goffman (1959, p. 16) defines dramaturgy as ‘the way in which the
individual […] presents himself and his activity to others, the ways in
which he guides and controls the impression they form of him and the
kinds of things he may or may not do while sustaining his performance
before them’. And he goes on to explain how,
regardless of the particular objective which the individual has in mind and
of his motive for having this objective it will be in his interests to control
the conduct of others, especially their responsive treatment of him […]
Thus when an individual appears in the presence of others, there will usu-
ally be some reason for him to mobilise his activity so that it will convey an
impression to others which is in his interests to convey.
There is a degree of discomfort about the emphasis on control and pre-

sentation, but dramaturgy should not be interpreted as duplicitous or a
disingenuous instrumentality but rather as a wider set of resources which
the individual self mobilises (consciously but also unconsciously) just to
competently exist and interact in the social world. In the same way, our
signal-giving and drawing on aspects of our identities and experiences to
connect to children (making the research experience feel safe and fun),
with parents (making the research experience feel safe and reciprocal) and
with education professionals (making the research environment feel safe
and professionally connective) should not be understood as manipulative.
Our aims and attempts to build trust and rapport with children, parents
and staff was not about making ‘fake friendships’ (Doucet and Mauthner
2003) but rather about finding ways to co-productively exist in and
respond to the diversity of the field in which we were researching.
While others have noted the ways in which researchers present and
manage themselves within qualitative work, as Scott et al. (2012, p. 718)
note such work, ‘has a tendency to depict the actor as emotionally neutral,
rational and self-contained [...] and to assume that his/her self-

presentation unfolds relatively unproblematically. We find scant recogni-
tion of how the researcher-self is practically accomplished (Atkinson
et al. 2003) as a role performance, and what this entails for the actor
behind the character’. We agree that it is necessary to recognise the emo-
tional labour involved on the part of the social researcher but would also
emphasise that working in particularly intimate and emotive research
contexts and researching intimate and emotive personal lives means
researchers have to be prepared to work through the lens of empathy,
shared identities, self-disclosure, common experience across difference.
In this way, appropriate aspects of our various identities—shared genera-
tion, being parents, gender, ethnicity, education professionals—could be
directly mobilised.
At other times, it was not our identities as much as shared experiences
and emotional responses that offered the space for building common
ground and the sense of connection required for good research talk. In
her ethnographic work with members of the far right organisation, the
English Defence League, Hilary Pilkington (2016) describes this ability
to close the research relationship gaps between very (politically) differ-
ently positioned researchers and participants through particular shared
experiences as ‘situational empathy’. She notes, ‘trust and camaraderie
emerges not from consciously generated rapport but everyday moments
of mutual support, concern, attention and care’ (2016, p. 22). Doing
ethnographically-designed fieldwork increases the opportunities of situ-
ational bonds developing. In this way being in assemblies, being at school
fetes, walking through the school building or the playground, or bump-
ing into participants at the bus stop or on the street on the way to
school—all of these offer micro moments in which research relationships
are layered down and researchers recognised. These events and situations
might not be always directly related to the project or directly impact a
relationship with a child, parent or member of the teaching staff but nev-
ertheless the process of sharing environments, interactions and experi-
ences can generate connection and bonds.
What was less explicitly mobilised but nevertheless a constant presence
were the categories of race, ethnicity and social class. The presence of race
and class was particularly apparent in the research relations with parents
but the nature of this was not always straightforward given the social and
ethnic diversity of the research participants and the research team, nor
did it shape the interview dialogue in predictable ways throughout the
research encounter. Sarah and Carol reflected on the extent to which
their Whiteness and/or shared middle classness can be read into the
assumptions and focus of some of the interview conversations with some
White and some non-White middle class parents—interview discussions
of anxiety or frustration about the levels of ethnic difference in friendship
networks, worries about how to manage or ‘talk to’ parents perceived as
culturally different or who were seen as of a different social class. Ethnic
difference and identification was also present, and although not mobil-
ised directly, did shape interactions and interview narratives. Humera, in
particular, was read in a variety of ways with her Scottish accent, her vis-
ible minority identity and her middle classness, differently picked up on
and responded to by both children and by adults. In an early interview
that Humera and Sarah did with Kaleb, a Black African refugee and
father at Leewood School, Kaleb was talking about his experiences of
belonging and not belonging in London and said very directly to Humera
‘you know what I mean’. In another example with Rabia, a working-class
mother at Junction School, Rabia and Humera drew on shared ethnic
identity as a connective point in the interview even as social class and
other differences remained, as Humera notes in her diary, ‘Rabia was
warm friendly and inviting. I feel like she is happy to open up because I am
Pakistani too; that there are things that I would understand. I definitely
tapped into the Pakistani side of me today, and brought things into the con-
versation and the odd Urdu word to build a rapport.’
Our emphasis in these discussions is that while researchers engage in
dramaturgical work in the field, this work was not an instrumental
attempt, cynically or duplicitously to impression manage for the benefit
of the project and the collection of good data. Drawing on the notion of
dramaturgy allows us to go beyond simple accounts of how to effectively
build rapport with research participants and incorporate the researcher
and the participant more iteratively and actively with the research rela-
tionship. Goffman’s argument is that everyone is managing themselves,
revealing and concealing aspects of themselves within social interactions.
After all, research participants are reading researcher performances in
particular and agentic ways and, at the same time, are also managing and
presenting their social selves. For research that is working in and with con-
texts of extensive difference and diversity and around emotive and personal
lives a dramaturgical account of doing research highlights the spaces in
which the front-stage performances of researchers generate the connec-
tions and confidence on the part of participants to share both their front-
stage but also reveal some of their ‘out of character’ (Goffman 1959)
backstage selves—what Alison Pugh (2013) calls the ‘honourable’ and the
‘visceral narratives’—the latter being those narratives in which anxieties,
doubts, contradictions and difficult reflections are shared and articulated.
In this way ‘a researcher’s reflexive self-awareness of his/her dramaturgical
status can ultimately cultivate a more authentic, sensitive orientation to the
qualitative research process’ (Scott et al. 2012, p. 719). In a context in
which difference and diversity characterise the demographic profiles of our
participants, the notion of dramaturgy takes us productively beyond both
standpoint research and identity-matching of researchers and participants,
and beyond technicist strategies of rapport-building to elicit better data. As
Pilkington (2016, p. 31) argues, ‘over and above any social demographic
variable that facilitated or hindered the research […] [it is] time spent in
the field that builds trust that the researcher is who they say they are; who
that is, is secondary.’ Sharing Pilkington’s emphasis on time spent in the
field, it is the processes of research design and practices that we now detail.
Research Design and Processes

As Chap. 1 details, we used a focused ethnographic approach; that is,
spending a short but intensive period of time—a school term—in each
school world. We used a qualitative methods mix of participant observation
(within the schools and in their localities), individual interviewing (with
adults) and paired interviewing (with children). The children’s interviews
were also facilitated by the children being invited to draw social maps
showing who their friends were and discussing the figures in their draw-
ings during the interviews. The process of conducting interviews along-
side a drawing task with the children is discussed further below and also
in Chap. 4. Tables A1, A2, and A3 (see Appendix) show the social
demographic profiles of all the participants. At the end of the parent inter-
views, participants filled in a ‘personal details form’ in which we asked
them to self-identify their own and their children’s ethnicity (parents
tended to reference the 2011 Census categories) and their social class, and
tell us their occupation and highest educational qualification. The key pat-
terns of those we spoke to show a gender imbalance with the majority of
our parent respondents being women and the majority falling into ethnic
categories other than White British. The participants were divided across
social class terms according to the National Statistics Socio-Economic
Classifications (NS-SEC) occupational categories, with the largest group
coming from categories 1 and 2, the professional middle classes. However a
larger majority self-ascribed to middle-class status, often using the phrase
‘lower middle class’ (please see the Appendix for more details). This reso-
nates with Savage et al. (2005) whose respondents were keen to present
themselves as ‘ordinary’. Class categorization relying on occupation is a
limited and contested process (see Savage et al. 2015), thus we also col-
lected data about educational qualifications and home ownership. In the
appendix we set out this detailed information. However, in the text we
have used the terms ‘middle class’, ‘intermediate’ and ‘working class’ as a
form of shorthand, understanding the intermediate grouping as those in
occupations which combine aspects from both the professional middle-
class service relationship and the working-class labour contract (ONS
2005). (When both parents are in employment we have used the ‘highest’
occupation). In terms of ethnicity, the mix of census and participants’ self-
definitions and those of their children mean that the granularity of ethnic
identifications is lost in the flattening work that a categorization involves.
However, where we have more detailed and specific self-descriptive par-
ticulars from participants we provide these in the tables in the Appendix.
Amongst the teaching staff participants only three of our total were men
(out of ten staff members), emphasising the continued over-representation of
women in primary school teaching. In terms of ethnicity, the majority of
teachers were White British. The children’s profiles were much more gender-
balanced, although as we noted above the number of boys in Scarlet Class in
Fernhill School stood out. The children whose parents we interviewed
described their ethnicity and we allocated parental social class to those chil-
dren whose parents we interviewed. We also asked all the children to describe
themselves and some spoke about their culture, religion and ethnicity. We
do not have social class information for children whose parents we did not
interview, although sometimes the discussions with the children provided
an indicator of a family’s living environment. Tables A1, A2, and A3 in the
Appendix detail the composition of the three classrooms.
Issues of confidentiality were continually present and required particu-
lar care. While we worked through the standard informed consent and
agreement procedures with each participant, the lived realities of research
meant that confidentiality and consent remain live throughout the
research process. This was especially the case for us as we were interview-
ing adults, many of whom knew each other and who often at times shared
personal information about other parents in their network or with chil-
dren in the classroom. Another area of concern we anticipated was par-
ents inquiring about what their children had said about their friendships
and our consent agreement with children assured them that only if we
were concerned about any harm would we disclose any information they
gave us. However, while there was an occasional question from a parent
or teacher, this was an infrequent rather than regular experience. On only
one occasion did a child talk to us about experiences of bullying (with the
child’s permission we informed the class teacher, who then intervened to
address this. For more details, please see the case of Layla in Chap. 4).
The Children and Their Interviews
A priority was for the children to feel safe, comfortable and confident
with us when talking about their friendships and social worlds. We spent
the early observation stages of the fieldwork in each classroom slowly
becoming familiar to the children in each class before we began any inter-
viewing. The issues of power and agency in conducting research with
children have been written about extensively (see, for example, Alanen
and Mayall 2001) and this slow research approach and immersion in the
classrooms allowed us to observe friendship and classroom relations and
interactions as well as to learn to fit into the children’s routines and build
trust with them. We made attempts to set ourselves apart from the teacher
and other adults in the classroom, reiterating to the children that we were
not staff and encouraging them to call us by our first names as well as ask
us questions. This also helped to signal to the children that we valued
both being able to spend time with them and what they told us about
their lives. While we were very careful about explaining that the interview
was their choice, no child opted not to participate and this raises ques-
tions about how easy would it have been for a child to refuse to take part
given the conformity shown by the rest of the group and our status as an
adult presence in their classroom. Our authority was also implicit in the
way in which the classroom teachers and assistants interacted with us in
each of the three classrooms, and were supportive of us conducting the
study. As well as getting consent from the children we also had to obtain
parental consent and all information sent home about the project and
circulated in the playgrounds was translated as required.
We developed a bespoke information sheet and consent form for the
children, which we read through with them at the start of each interview.
This was written in accessible language and stressed the confidentiality of
our interview and that the children could withdraw at any time. The
interviews, usually around 45 minutes long, were audio-recorded, and
were held in a separate space, away from the classroom. This meant that
the interviews were a break from regular routine, and as such appeared to
be welcomed by the children.
The pairing of the children for their interviews was carefully planned and
the pairs were chosen after much consideration following discussion with
the teacher. We suggested that the pairs comprise children who were not
particularly close friends and who did not regularly spend time together.
This was to avoid any of the children being hurt or upset, should it turn out
that their ‘close’ friends did not appear to fully reciprocate their friendship.
The interviews were conversationally designed and prompted by the
children drawing their social maps of their friendship networks (we asked
them to draw themselves in the middle of the paper with their friends
around them, the spacing of the pictures representing the level of emo-
tional closeness). These drawings allowed us to later construct ‘friendship
maps’ of the entire classroom and learn about reciprocity of friendship and
mixing across ethnic and class lines. These social maps also helped prompt
discussion of friendships and moved the interview away from being a for-
mal and intimidating discussion for the children. Many children produced
intricate and carefully constructed friendship maps, using the brightly
coloured pencils we gave them to demonstrate the physical appearance of
their friends. (The children’s networks are discussed in Chap. 4).
The children’s interviews often became wide ranging, with discussions

of their friendships, activities, school experiences, where they lived, their
families and their thoughts on the ethnic and social differences that they
noticed in school or in their neighbourhoods. The time we had spent in
the classrooms before doing any interviews meant that the children
seemed comfortable talking to us. Sometimes, a discussion sparked
another idea in their mind, or they wanted to tell us something in par-
ticular about their home life, their teachers or their peers. Scheurich
(1995) argues that respondents may engage with an interviewer by carv-
ing out an area of ‘chaos/freedom’, and this seems a fitting way to describe
the child respondents’ ability to talk about what they wished to talk
about, however tangentially related to our questions. This is, as Scheurich
argues, not necessarily resistance (although we can also see occasions
when some children were clearly resisting our questions), but rather a
dynamic understanding of the interview scenario as fluid conversation.
We sought a balance between letting the conversations be as open and
fun as possible while at the same time gently nudging the children
through our interview topics as they drew their maps. We explore what
they shared with us in these interviews in the next chapter.
The Adults and Their Interviews
The process of recruiting parents was not always easy and varied in each
school. For example, at Leewood School there was a more of a willingness
from parents to participate in the project, but greater reluctance in
Junction and Fernhill Schools. While the time we spent in the school
environment helped with the recruitment process we felt there were a
variety of reasons for agreeing or declining our invitations to participate,
which ranged from disposition, to the time parents had available, to how
it might benefit the school, to interest in the project, to caution about the
project and so forth. Given that our study explored friendship across
social and ethnic difference, it was important that we managed to recruit
a diverse sample of parents and there were a number of ways in which our
recruitment was facilitated. We first handed out and sent home informa-
tion about the project to parents. Direct contact with parents in the play-
ground at the beginning and end of the school day was an important way
of introducing ourselves. The class teachers in each of the schools also

helped to introduce us to parents. In addition, as we started interviewing,
we found snowballing to be effective, as parent respondents introduced
us to others. In all of these processes our ability to explain the project
succinctly, clearly (and invitingly!) as parents waited in the playground or
outside the classroom meant we relied on dramaturgical performances
mobilising particular aspects of ourselves.
While we had anticipated the need for interpreters, despite the diver-
sity of the schools’ populations we only used interpreters in two inter-
views. As others have noted, using interpreters can be fraught and in one
interview there were clear tensions between the interpreter and the
mother, both from Somalia, resulting in a fragmented and uneasy inter-
view. It was only following the interview, in the debriefing with the inter-
preter, that she pointed out she was from an ethnic group in Somalia that
had poor relations with the mother’s ethnic group, and that as members
of her community were more recently arrived in the UK perhaps the
mother did not want to speak to her in Somali. This incident demon-
strates the need to recognise the wider contexts of global politics when
working with a diverse research population. Care when hiring an
interpreter and further knowledge of the local politics and social norms
of the country of origin, are clearly important aspects to consider when
doing such research.
We offered parents the choice of location for their interview and,
reflecting the local embeddedness of the school, many of the participants
chose nearby cafés in which to talk to us. Again this choice was classed,
and ranged from chic boutique cafés to chain coffee shops (see Chap. 6).
Parents’ choices reflected their sense of spaces in which they felt comfort-
able (Neal et al. 2018) and with which they were familiar. Interviewing
in coffee shops often presented practical problems around audio-
recording, as well as variable levels of privacy and confidentiality chal-
lenges; on more than one occasion we would bump into other parents
while we were obviously interviewing. The few parents who did invite us
back to their homes were more likely to identify themselves as working
class and to be mothers from minority ethnic backgrounds. The home
choice was sometimes due to childcare issues, but also perhaps that these
mothers viewed their homes as a safe and familiar space.
The interviews with parents were often extensive as they involved con-
versation about their children, their children’s social and school lives,
their own lives and friendship networks and the locality. Talking about
social class and ethnicity was often overlaid with a variety of codes,
silences, absences and avoidances. While participants were mostly open
and confident in discussing ethnic and cultural difference, they were
noticeably less at ease talking about social class and difference, reflecting
the extent to which diversity and multiculturalism are very much part of
public debates and contemporary contestations, whereas social class
inequalities—especially involving children—appeared to prompt greater
levels of ambiguity. Terms such as ‘background’ were used by some of the
adult participants as a code for talking about social class difference. Again,
in all these interviews, we engaged in a range of performances—the
detached researcher, the empathetic researcher, the researcher who is also
a parent, the researcher who is also familiar with the locality—to enable
openness and reassurance.
In many ways, the interviews with school staff in the three case study
schools were the most straightforward of all our interviews. Once we had
succeeded in negotiating access, the school staff were very willing to help,
and we found a common ground of identity as education professionals.
While in some ways this contradicts the notion of the schools as
bounded total institutions it was an implicit appeal to the shared identity
of us as ‘all being educational professionals’ that perhaps meant we
encountered a willingness to be interviewed and an interest in the proj-
ect. In addition to the class teacher and the head/deputy head, we inter-
viewed other important staff members with responsibility for the
children’s well-being. At Fernhill and Junction Schools we also succeeded
in contacting and speaking with members from the governing body. At
all three schools, we also interviewed parents connected to the parent or
parent-teacher association’s committee (PA or PTA). These associations
were responsible for fundraising for the school through organising events,
such as fetes. We asked senior members of staff to give us an overview of
each school’s history and their sense of demographic changes in the local-
ity and in the school, as well as the school’s approach to friendships and
emotional literacy. With the Year 4 class teachers, we also asked about the
children’s friendships and how friendship is discussed in the classroom.
With the parents who formed part of the parent association, we were
interested to find out about the composition of the PA as well as about
activities organised by them.
We have detailed the participants and strategies for engaging them in
the project and the process of coming back to participants and dissemi-
nating findings was particularly important. We prepared three sets of
findings reports for each school, for parents, children and staff. The find-
ings report relating to parents’ interviews was sent home to parent-
participants, as well as being placed in public and accessible high traffic
parts of the school. We returned to each of the classes we had worked
with, and gave a child-friendly presentation of the findings for the chil-
dren, as well as a written copy of these, and a ‘lucky dip’ of thank you
gifts. For the feedback to the schools, we arranged for face-to-face meet-
ings with interested staff in each school and provided a written copy of
these findings. Additionally, we had a project website and blog in which
we presented emerging findings from our research. In a bespoke dissemi-
nation innovation to try to reconnect with a larger number of people
than those directly involved in the study, we attended the summer fairs at
our three schools and were able to meet families and talk about the
research with them. We set up a tombola stall for the children, and dis-
tributed a summary of our final report, as well as a booklet about chil-
dren’s friendship with anonymised extracts from the children’s interviews.
The outcomes of these multiple engagement strategies are not quantifi-
able and the reports tended to be diplomatically and carefully constructed,
reflecting the difficulties of making critical comment in environments in
which we were ethnographically connected and attached and been given
access to. But, throughout the life of the project we used a variety of ways
to maintain an open and transparent relationship with those involved in
the study.
Conclusions
In this chapter, we have provided an account of the research methods,
design and processes of the project, and we have also used it to explore
our relationship with the schools and the differently positioned
people who all participated in our project. We have attempted to examine

the ways in which a research team can effectively and responsibly empiri-
cally engage with very distinct and different categories of participants—
children, parents and teachers—who are brought together through the
particular social institution of a primary school. We began this book by
noting the paradox between friendships being both agentic and structur-
ally constrained social relationships and we have used this chapter to
show how this paradox extended into the process of researching friend-
ship relations. We have drawn on Goffman’s very differently scaled con-
cepts of ‘total institutions’ and of ‘dramaturgy’ to suggest that the research
environment and the research relationships will in contexts of social and
ethnic diversity and difference, shape and impact research practices and
fieldwork experiences. We have emphasised the ways in which, in the
field, qualitative research practices slip between the research interview as
a conversation with a purpose (Mason 2002) and the interview as a
social interaction (Atkinson et al. 2003). This slippage was acutely felt in
a project which combined the emotional challenges of friendship rela-
tions, the emotional space of a primary school, the sensitivities and
politics of social and ethnic difference and differentiation and a very dif-
ferently positioned research population.
In the complexity of these terrains it is the mobilisation of researchers’
composite identities, capitals, experiential resources and situational con-
nections that underpin the dexterous performances that allow—but are
also necessary for—researchers to build trust with very different groups of
participants. We have used this chapter to show how we were located in
the research sites and how we were able to assemble connective and pro-
ductive ways of interacting with participants who were engaged in similar
performances and processes of revelation and concealment about their
affective lives in and around primary schools. The diversity in the social
demographics of our participants and their very different positions in our
project was a particular characteristic of this research, but working with
diversity is an increasing feature of social research in contemporary urban
populations where heterogeneity should be expected and assumed. The
instrumentalism that can be a part of rapport as well as the limits of shared
identities mean researchers need to be able to develop more situational and
open strategies for connection and trust building and that this is especially
the case when the research involves social difference and stratification. This
requires a certain dexterity on the part of researchers and the concept of
dramaturgy, which emphasises how shifting modes of self-presentation
(necessary for all social interaction) provide a more co-productive space for
understanding how qualitative social researchers (sometimes consciously
but mostly unconsciously) facilitate the safe places and field relationships
for attentive dialogue and exchange with a range of participants who are
very differentially positioned within a social setting. In our next chapter we
begin our discussions of the findings that emerged from this commitment
to attentive dialogue.
Notes
1. We have anonymised all the schools and we decided, given concerns about
identifiability, not to use the names of the individual boroughs the schools
were in (see also Neal et al. 2016).
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4
The Children’s Friendships: Difference,
Commonality and Proximity
In brief: Mapping the children’s friendship networks, and the practices of

children’s friendships.
Introduction
In this chapter, we introduce the reader to the 78 child participants, an
empirically dense and, we recognise, potentially confusing population.
To minimise the possibility for confusion, we have featured all the chil-
dren on the friendship maps for each class and they are all listed in the
appendices. Drawing on the children’s pictures and interviews, we develop
a careful analysis of the children’s friendship networks within their class-
room, discussing their make-up in terms of social similarities and differ-
ences. Picking up on the Bourdieusian concepts mentioned in Chap. 2,
the diverse classroom is where the children’s habitus, socialised within the
family, comes into contact with difference in the field of urban
schooling.
We illustrate how children’s friendship practices and management of
complex diversity in the routine settings of their classrooms involved

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73001-1_4
interactions across difference, as well as entrenchments around similarity.

Specifically, we show that the children in all three classrooms mix easily
across ethnicity, but that gender, disability, and social class, and cultural
difference (e.g. religion) can prove more problematic.
We have three underlying themes that shape our later discussion. The
first is well rehearsed in the field of childhood studies, and that is our
emphasis on the positioning of the children as agents, and a centring of
their autonomy in their decision-making around social relationships
(James 2013; James et al. 1998; Holloway et al. 2010; Corsaro 2006;
George 2007; Smart et al. 2001). We do also emphasise that this agency
is not unregulated and agree that there is a need to ‘explore’, as Mayall
(1994) notes, children’s position and experience as not just ‘actors’ but
also as ‘negotiators’ and the ‘acted upon’ which requires an additional
focus on adults’ agency (Plows 2012, p. 281). To explore this further, we
discuss the management of friendships by teachers and parents in
Chap. 5.
Our second theme is the importance of context and how ethnicity and
class are complexly and variously related across different settings and cir-
cumstances (Huber and Spyrou 2012; Morrow and Connolly 2006).
Locality and the history of relations between different groups in different
areas are highly important for understanding children and young people’s
behaviour. Ramiah et al. (2015), for example, find that in an ethnically
mixed secondary school in the north-west of England, young people
engaged in a process of ‘ethnic re-segregation’ when left to themselves in
the cafeteria. In order to properly understand this phenomenon, it is
important to note that the young people lived in a locality where ‘White’
and ‘Asian’ have long been used as signifiers for two groups in an area of
seemingly entrenched educational and residential segregation (the school
itself is the replacement for two older institutions with segregated popu-
lations). This is a very different situation from our primary schools in
highly diverse areas of London (as discussed in Chap. 3) where the chil-
dren routinely experience and interact with complex forms of difference
and diversity, as we will illustrate below.
The third theme is that the children’s interactions with each other cer-
tainly provided them with happiness, comfort, and security, but also with
moments of tension, conflict and distress. Different children varied in
The Children’s Friendships: Difference, Commonality… 91
how much their more negative experiences were visible to the teachers, or
indeed to us. It was only when we started analysing the children’s discus-
sions of their friendships that we became more fully aware of the com-
plexities of ongoing power plays in some of the friendship networks. The
desire for inclusion and varying degrees of uncertainty around the secu-
rity of that inclusion seemed present for nearly all the children. This is
not to suggest that the peer groups in the three classrooms offered atypi-
cally hostile environments, but rather that perhaps adults generally do
not notice the degree of emotional energy that peer relationships demand
of children. Similarly, Carter and Nutbrown (2016) comment on the
‘strategies’ the five- and six-year-olds in their research use to try and
ensure that they have someone to play with at playtime (for example, not
being late in the playground to avoid games having started, or taking a
small toy to school to play with in case they do find themselves alone). To
an adult eye, in the absence of visible distress, the children are simply
going out to play, and the accompanying affective management remains
hidden. This theme is introduced here in relation to the children’s
thoughts about their relationships, whilst their teachers’ views are dis-
cussed in Chap. 5.
In this chapter, our focus is the children’s emerging dispositions
towards difference. We begin with a review of some key literature on
children’s friendships across social and ethnic difference, noting its
emphasis on the way in which children are aware of and also often com-
petently navigate difference, ethnic difference in particular, although the
literature on adolescents suggests a growing conformity to homophilous
relationships. We then turn to our interview and pictorial data (from
children’s hand-drawn social maps), to offer some insights into the expe-
rience of friendship in middle childhood, where the children are both
active in making and maintaining relationships, but also regulated by
parents and teachers. In the final sections of the chapter, we identify the
points of commonality and shared interests and identity that bring the
children together. We map the friendship networks in the three school
classes, to reveal both the influence of established social divisions, and
frequent instances of children making friends across difference (particu-
larly ethnic difference), and we then explore in detail how the children
discuss difference. As part of this, we include a focus on religion as a way
of illustrating the mobile and emergent nature of children’s identities and

identifications. We conclude that children in settings with a mix of social,
ethnic and cultural backgrounds recognise difference in often sophisti-
cated and unexpected ways.
hildren’s Friendship Relations Across Ethnic

C
and Social Difference: A Review
Before turning to our research sites, we briefly review some relevant
research on children’s friendships. We make two preliminary observa-
tions. First, we have drawn here largely on sociological literature (rather
than that of developmental or social psychology) that ‘focuses on how
children construct their own peer culture’ (Carter and Nutbrown 2016,
p. 397). Our second observation records Engdahl’s (2012) distinction
between friends—a relationship of some intimacy—and peer group
(cited in Hedges and Cooper 2017), and this is especially germane when
we consider school-based friendships, where those with whom children
spend their time is often determined by adults, rather than their own
affective preferences.
Bridging Different Worlds?
As is the case with adult friendships (see Chaps. 1 and 2), friendships
for children are often assumed to have an informal social cohesive prop-
erty, bringing individuals together despite differences in their back-
grounds, thereby facilitating ‘social mix’ and bridging different worlds.
This assumption has been investigated particularly with ethnically
diverse adolescents, (e.g. Nayak 2006; Hollingworth and Mansaray
2012; Rhamie et al. 2012; Harris 2014). This body of research has
explored friendship processes in schools, colleges, estates, youth groups,
neighbourhoods and communities in a range of cultural contexts.
Schools and colleges are a reoccurring site of research attention which
reflects their capacity to ‘bring together’ often-diverse local popula-
tions, and this underpins the argument on the importance of integrated
schools (see e.g. Cantle and Kaufman 2016). In this way, some schools
serve as a setting for the exploration of the ‘compulsory’ encounter of dif-
ference. The extent to which young people navigate and manage levels of
diversity in their day-to-day settings can involve cultural openness and
hybridity as well as ‘harder lines’ of cultural defensiveness (Harris 2014).
Some studies of adolescents suggest limitations to social mixing across
ethnic and, in particular, social class groupings. (e.g. Hollingworth and
Mansaray 2012; Rhamie et al. 2012; Hollingworth 2015). There is rela-
tively little work exploring cross-class friendships among younger chil-
dren, but there are examples of work on primary schools with ethnically
diverse pupils that evidences young children engaging in cross-difference
friendships. Rosalyn George’s (2007) study of primary-aged girls’ friend-
ships involving multi-ethnic groups focuses on the patterns of power
within the girls’ hierarchical networks. Irene Bruegel’s (2006) study, also
referenced in Chap. 1, found that young children’s friendships did cross
ethnic divides. Relatedly, Knifsend and Juvonen (2014) used the con-
struct of social identity complexity (Roccas and Brewer 2002) to examine
friendship groups amongst 11-year-olds in ethnically diverse schools in
the US. In the study, social identity complexity describes the overlap
between social groups with which children identify, based on common
interests such as football and dance. They found social connectedness
across ethnic groups increased when children perceived a connection of
interests. Correspondingly, Sedano, using Bourdieusian concepts in an
in-depth study of ‘Moroccan’ and ‘Gypsy’ 7–13-year-old children in
Andalucía, Spain, argues that ethnicity is not a divisive force in children’s
friendships, rather it is the ‘gradual construction of shared cultural pat-
terns’ (2012, p. 382) that influences friendship-making, as the passing of
time allows for the development of points of commonality and the
appearance of ‘cultural proximity’ (p. 386).
Young children’s cognitive recognition of difference is core to Connolly’s
work on young children and patterns of division. In Racism in Children’s
Lives (1998), he evidences the extent to which children as young as five,
in an urban, ethnically mixed, working-class area very much recognised,
ascribed, and engaged in racialised distinctions between themselves. Here,
Connolly highlights the intersection of ‘their ethnicity, gender, class and
sexuality. These all came together within specific contexts to provide the
background against which the children developed their sense of identity’

(1998, p. 187). For Connolly (also Connolly et al. 2009; Connolly 2011),
children’s early years are not a period of being oblivious to difference, but
the opposite—a critical time in which identifications around ethnicity
form. Connolly argues that children were not simply repeating racism over-
heard and learnt from adults, but more actively reworking adult racialised
discourses to make sense of their own social worlds and relationships. Given
this degree of agency, and difference as a sense-making ‘resource’, Connolly
notes various initiatives to work with and talk to young children about
diversity in order to find ways to ‘unthink’ racialisations and negative per-
ceptions of difference by young children (also Van Ausdale and Feagin’s
2002). Fox and Miller-Idriss build on this work stressing that it is ‘everyday
ethnicity’ (2008, 538) which needs to be studied; namely, the everyday life
of a child and how they exhibit identities and belonging in different con-
texts and in their relationships with different people.
These literatures highlight the extent to which social divisions and dif-
ference are recognised, known and used in children’s worlds and in their
friendship relations and practices. In our analysis below, based in settings
comprised of highly complex mixes of social and ethnic diversity, we
focus on the ways and extent to which this complexity is routinely nego-
tiated by young children.
F riendship in Middle Childhood: Being Eight

and Nine Years Old
The interview and pictorial data overwhelmingly (and unsurprisingly)
illustrate the extent to which friendships were hugely important to the
children. The valued nature of friendships, especially in countering isola-
tion and providing kindness and care in the participants’ lives, was a
recurrent feature of the narratives we heard as the examples below
illustrate.
Well I kind of like Musa a lot because whenever we play a game and I’m
getting a bit confused he will explain it to me. He will kind of understand.
(Tyler, Black British, Junction1)
When we are talking we both laugh at the same time, and I like [my best
friend] because she is not like surface, and she is really kind to me. My
friends don’t like ever leave me alone, when I’m sad they come next to me
and they don’t never make me sad (Iper, White other, Fernhill)
Gabra: Kwame and Callum had a fight

Tim: You should have saw them [addressed to interviewer]. I got in
the way…[one of them] pushed me, I went flying over the blue
wall. Luckily Kemel [Tim’s friend] catched me. I don’t know
how he catched me…he stopped me from rolling. And that’s
called a good friend (Tim, White British, & Gabra, Black
African, Leewood).
Given that their friendships were relationships of care and connection

and not simply valued for being about fun, the children felt any disrup-
tions and tensions to their friendships keenly, to an extent not generally
appreciated by the adults around them who felt that the children fell out
and made up both frequently and easily. However, the children’s descrip-
tions reveal the exercise of unequal power in some friendships, a power
that is clear to those on the receiving end (also George 2007).
Friends don’t really want you going to play with someone else [in the class]
because they feel their love is lost. So you don’t really play with other peo-
ple. (Krystina, White other, Junction)
She never apologises, so that is why Courtney sometimes can be really nice,
but can be really horrible in some ways…She is popular and everyone is her
friend…Anyone that I start to play with, she always goes up to them […]
she is turning them away from me, so I can’t have no-one to play with […]
I want to be her friend but I don’t really want to be her friend. (Nayna,
Black Caribbean, Fernhill)
Aslam (Black African) at Fernhill identifies Usain (Black Caribbean) as

his best friend but comments that he is, ‘rude sometimes and he some-
times plays around and slaps people […] Friends can get too comfortable
and they can start doing whatever they want and then they can be like
rude to you’.
We identified only one clear example of bullying from within the Year
4 class groups.2 The class teacher (at Junction) thought the situation had
been resolved, but the victim, in talking with Humera, disclosed that it
was still ongoing:
Every day [other children] kept on bothering me and bothering me, and
after that I told the teacher and she was like ‘If they keep on doing it, tell
me’ and they kept on doing it, and I told the teacher, and then she said the
same thing again […] And then after they kept on throwing things at me…
and [the teacher] took them to the [headteacher], but they keep on doing
it…a little bit, not often […] They are popular in the class, so I think I
[should] listen to them. (Layla, Black African)
The stability of the children’s current friendship networks varied

hugely. Most were clear on who was and who was not their friend, a few
less so. One boy at Fernhill (Caine), who was identified by the school as
having problematic social relationships, identified three others who he
said were friends, and then changed his mind about each one.
The children feared the potential fragility of friendships:
Helen (White British): I have my friend that I have been playing with
since I first got to school, called Aisha and she
has moved [house, so she does not live close to
Helen anymore]. I have been to every single one
of her birthdays and all I see is me there, and my
birthdays all I see is her there. Because that is
how nice she is to me […] But now she has
switched to Queenie [another girl in the friend-
ship group] a bit more.
Andy (White British): Every time a new person arrives in class I get
worried that they are going to be a best friend to
somebody who is my best friend, one of my
friends.
Helen: And they are going to be taking your best friend?
That is what I always worry. (Leewood School)
Changing friendship patterns were particularly difficult to manage

with several children noting others they had been friends with in the past,
but had since instigated or suffered the breaking of the friendship. Such
alterations had an impact on the whole network:
I just wish me and Musa could just play together, just because like Tyler
and Ollie are always getting into arguments….we kind of get blamed for it.
Tyler is close to Ollie because they started in Nursery [together]. They were
like kind of like friends before like for nearly their whole life. And they just
get into arguments [now]…It just gets more and more annoying (Sam,
White British, Junction School)
A few children felt lonely—Samad (Black African) said about the chil-
dren in his class that he identified as friends ‘they don’t talk to me all that
much’—but only one child, whose conversation with us shows that she is
clearly disenchanted with some of her peer group, denied a wish for many
friends. Her comments draw attention to the felt imperative to be socia-
ble and to mix.
People don’t really like me that much ‘cause I am feeling really silent, and
people think that you should be with everybody else, but I really want to
be myself with few less people in a small corner. (Fatimah, Black African,
Leewood)
What these narratives show is the way the children’s friendships prac-
tices were both active and passive. They frequently discussed their ability
to resolve quarrels without adult help, although adult strictures and
school practices were clearly reflected in their actions and attitudes: ‘If
you say sorry then you can be their friend again and they won’t mind’
(Ahmed); ‘Sometimes we disagree with each other, we just forget it, like
next, the next minute we just apologise and carry on with the day’ (Joyce);
and certain children seemed to inhabit a role as peacemaker, one that
could be successful but as Queenie (Black Caribbean) noted, laborious:
Helen and Pippa really get into fights sometimes. And it is not like that
great, because we have to sort it out all the time […] because they are really
angry…. I go and see what they say about each other and then I get them
together and I say, ‘You say sorry for saying that’, ‘You say sorry for saying
that’ and then I make them shake hands (NB, this is a copy of the restorative
justice processes as practised in the school) and hug and they are all friends
again…Sometimes that works…It is really hard work. (Queenie, Leewood)
However, the children were also passive because they were subject to
adult decisions. Children could be moved into different classes by teach-
ers, and of course, to different schools, by their parents, often with no
continuing contact, (Samad, Black African, Fernhill: ‘Now I have a lot of
little bit friends, but Jameel [who has left the school] never leaved me. He
stayed close to me’).
The children’s worlds, then, were coloured by highly intense experi-
ences of friendship, which caused them both happiness and occasional
pain and, as with adult friendships, children’s friendships were an emo-
tional resource for being in and managing the classroom and the school.
Friendships in Super-Diverse Classrooms

In conversation with us, the children differentiated themselves from
some, and claimed similarity with others on multiple aspects, including
gender, ethnicity, religion, country of origin, possessions, liking particu-
lar games, not being naughty, not being too good, physical characteris-
tics, and living in the same street/estate. Their ways of defining difference
and similarity were more fluid than the categories commonly used by
adults. For example, Emily (White British) at Leewood was close friends
with Cindy (mixed heritage). Friends, Emily told us, ‘look like you, play
like you, and speak like you’. Emily and Cindy do not look alike as they
are of different ethnicities, but the families occupy similar social spaces
within the local working class, and the girls enjoy doing the same sort of
activities. Within their friendship world the differences in skin colour
appeared to have no significance or resonance for them.
We used the children’s friendship maps in order to gain insight into the
social networks across the three classrooms. Contrary to the research that
suggests that inter-ethnic friendships are less frequent (Windzio and
Wingens 2014) and those that do occur less ‘stable’ (Sime and Fox 2015),
nearly all of the children in our research had close friendships with others
in their class who were from a different ethnic group to themselves (we
defined ‘close’ as meaning amongst their ‘top five’ friends). This indicates
the importance of context; as living and going to school in the highly
diverse localities in which we were researching presents fewer opportuni-
ties for identifying solely with one’s own ethnic group, than in situations
where children are divided by themselves or others into say, two main
groups (e.g. migrant and ‘native’, White and Asian, Roma and non-
Roma). Such binary divisions, often made by adults, miss other potential
similarities and divisions between children, and their ‘multiple cultural
frameworks’ (Sime and Fox 2015, p. 388). Sedano, drawing on Bourdieu’s
concept of field as a socially structured space, argues that for the children
in her study (discussed above), ethnicity was of relatively little impor-
tance in the ‘play’ field where the children had most agency (compared to
school and home). We also found close cross-class friendships, but fewer
in number than cross-ethnic friendships. However, a majority of the
children had close friends—in their top five—who had a different social
background to themselves. When we looked at who the children said
their closest friend was, there were still a significant number of friend-
ships across ethnic difference (nearly three quarters). There were far fewer
‘best friend’ friendships across class difference (just over a quarter).
Across the 78 child participants in all three school classes there were
identifiable friendship groups. However, sharing classroom and play
cultures was a source of commonality and bonding, and meant that
membership of the different friendship groups was fairly fluid, rather
than completely fixed. In each of the Year 4 classes the children were
encouraged by their class teacher to develop a shared identity as a mem-
ber of their particular classroom, so that they were frequently hailed as
a collective—‘Crimson class’, for example. In addition to this wider
shared classroom identification, there was a ‘loose’ set of affective con-
nections that existed between the children around music, computer
and playground games. Choice of leisure activities is, of course, heavily
coded by social class where adults are concerned (Bennett et al. 2009),
and we discuss in Chap. 5 the classed implications of how the children
spend their out-of-school time. However, we suggest that for children
in middle childhood, within one particular school, choices of games

and pastimes are only loosely classed, although they are heavily gen-
dered. Football was the most marked example of this, being played
largely by boys in all three schools (also see Renold 2004), although
football was also productive for mixing across social class and ethnicity
amongst the boys and occasional girl that played. However, some games
mentioned by the children, such as a range of chasing and catching
games, were more inclusive in terms of gender, and often played by
mixed groups. School ‘crazes’—those particular intense moments of
collective desire and engagement around an object or practice—worked
as ‘super-mixers’ bridging ethnic, class and often gender difference.
Loom bands—brightly coloured rubber bands that were woven into
bracelets—were one such example at the time of the fieldwork in Scarlet
class in Fernhill School. The relative cheap cost of the bands made this
an accessible, inclusive enthusiasm for both boys and girls. The process
of making the bands and gifting them to others produced high levels of
interaction and exchange across difference. In this way, children’s prac-
tices, their ‘doing things’, are effective in creating ‘bringing together’
moments. Askins and Pain (2011), writing about young people and a
community art project, also found the role of the materials themselves
and the processes of ‘doing’, allowed the significance of difference in the
social dynamics of the group to diminish (see also Knifsend and
Juvonen 2014 above).
Social Networks
The friendship maps (see Figs. 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3 below) have been con-
structed from each of the 78 individual friendship maps that the child
participants drew as part of their interview. The maps shown here are
then aggregate patterns showing the dominant friendship clusters, after
analysing the children’s interviews and their drawings. The maps show
clusters only, rather than connecting lines to show reciprocity/non-
reciprocity, as we wish to avoid giving the impression of static groups,
because this would not adequately represent the ‘reality’ the children
described to us. We did, however, collect data on reciprocity through the
The Children’s Friendships: Difference, Commonality…
Fig. 4.1 Friendship map of Crimson class. (NB: The social class information featured in Figs. 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3 is derived from
parental occupation and education, so is only available for those children whose parents also participated in the research.
101
Please also see endnote 1 on ethnic categorisation)

102
C. Vincent et al.
Fig. 4.2 Friendship map of Burgundy class

Friendship map of Scarlet class

Fig. 4.3
children’s positioning of their friends as proximate or distant from them-

selves as a way to capture their emotional connection and we have used
this locational device, alongside the interview conversation, to inform the
analysis below. The maps reveal the strong gender divisions in friend-
ships, taken for granted by nearly all the children, teachers and parents.
Additionally, the maps focus on children’s relationships with their same-
aged peers in their classes; the age dividers in the structuring of English
education, again, being a common-sense, taken-for-granted point of
separation.
Crimson Class, Leewood School
The map of Crimson class reveals a series of divides in the friendship

groups in terms of class, ethnicity, (dis)ability, and religion as well as
evidencing friendships across social and cultural difference. The uneven
nature of these patterns can be connected to the school’s locality and the
long-established nature of its gentrification and the presence of a size-
able, affluent (not completely White) middle class. The children them-
selves described in interview several main friendship groups: a group of
girls, described by their teacher as the ‘White middle class girls’ group
(Megan, Joyce, Emma, Shauna, Phoebe); which encompasses the major-
ity of White British middle-class girls in the class, and two overlapping
groups, a boys’ football group which is Black British group (Amman,
Callum, Kwame, sometimes Daine). This group often played with
another boys’ grouping—mixed in terms of ethnicity and social class—
who played football but often other games as well (Harris, Ethan,
Satnaam, Alfie, Andy and Ben). There was also a working-class and eth-
nically mixed non-footballing boys group (Iraz, Tim, Kemel) and a
mixed girls’ group (which is more diverse in terms of class and ethnicity
than the other girl group (Helen, Queenie, Gabra, Aisha, Pippa,
Yazimine). Moving in and out of this latter group are another clearly
identifiable pair of working-class girls who are close friends (Emily and
Cindy). The first of two isolated pairs is Zayla and Fatimah, the only
practising Muslim children in the class. The other isolated pair is Peter
and Lucas, both of whom have complex learning needs and some degree
of physical disability. We discuss in Chap 5 how their parents challenged

the school to integrate these two boys more into the class.
Within the groups, relationships are not of course, equal or necessarily
reciprocated.
The most coherent of these groups was the group of ‘White middle-
class girls’ who spent a considerable amount of time outside school
together, either at each other’s houses or engaged in paid-for activities
(see Chap. 5 for more detail). Thus, we can see both easy mixing across
difference but also the more entrenched homophilous configurations
around social class, religion and disability.
Burgundy Class, Junction School
Although only a few miles from Leewood School and Crimson class the
friendship relations and groupings in Junction School and Burgundy class
were distinct. The geography of the school and its location in an area that
was only recently experiencing gentrification—as well as the settlement of
newer Eastern European and Latin American migrants—can be seen to be
shaping the higher levels of diversity in all the friendship groups. The
previous year, the staff had intervened to separate four children, two boys
and two girls, who had been caught up in a web of apparently destructive
relationships. A complicated intervention was in place, using lunchtime
clubs and the two playgrounds that ensured that these children were not
all in the same place at lunchtime and some of this group had been moved
from Burgundy into the parallel class. The class teacher saw Burgundy
class as not currently having clear friendship groups, but rather temporary
alliances which ‘dissipate quite regularly’, with the exception of a small
group of White middle-class children who he felt were held together by
their shared experience of outside activities and their parents’ friendships.
However, our conversations with the children revealed stronger bonds
and networks than was suggested by their teacher, although there were
children who did not clearly belong to particular friendship groups.
There was a group of three White girls and one British Asian girl
(Krystina, Gwyneth, Bethany and Amy), and a multi-ethnic quartet of
boys (Sam, Ollie, Tyler, and Musa), the latter now experiencing some
tension, with one of the boys (Ollie) moving to the periphery of that
group. Both these groups mixed out of school. A larger, more fluid group
of boys play football together often (Alex, Ahmed, Usman, Sultan,
Abdullah and Omar). However, relationships within this latter group are
largely confined to school, as is the case with another group of mixed
ethnicity girls (Amica, Tina, Grace, Jamilah, Arzu and Amina). The chil-
dren’s interviews revealed more tensions than in Leewood School, with
one girl (Layla) in particular describing her experience of prolonged bul-
lying from another child in the classroom (see Chap. 3 on how we
responded as researchers to this situation). Being Muslim in Burgundy
class was more frequently discussed in the children’s interviews, than in
Crimson class where there were only two practising Muslim children. In
Burgundy class, children talking about participating in after-school
Koranic classes were common, and Eid (which took place during the
fieldwork) was talked about as an exciting event, (although Eid was barely
being celebrated by Junction School in marked contrast to the emphasis
placed upon Christmas there). Two recent arrivals were relatively isolated:
Juan who was of Latin American heritage and recently arrived from
Spain, and Jordan who was on the autistic spectrum (Jordan is further
discussed in Chap. 5).
Thus Burgundy class had more fluid friendship groups than those in
Crimson class, although there is a parallel of a child with complex needs
being sidelined. The quartet of boys—Sam, Musa, Ollie and Tyler—who
were mixed in terms of class and ethnicity and who also socialised out of
school at each other’s houses (which required parental engagement) were,
as can be seen, relatively unusual in this research.
Scarlet Class, Fernhill School
Scarlet class at Fernhill School numbered just 20 children (Fernhill was,

during the fieldwork, an undersubscribed school). Like Leewood and
Junction schools, the classroom population and the friendship relations
in this case can be seen as shaped by the wider social geography in which
the school was located. In addition to gentrification, changes to social
housing, and the settlement of recently arrived populations were also
drivers of social change. The class was also unusual for its marked gender
imbalance with just seven girls. Additionally, friendships in Fernhill were
affected by the policy of mixing up the two classes in each year group for
the school year to come. This was done mainly for behaviour manage-
ment reasons, although staff also argued that this encouraged the chil-
dren to make friends widely within their year group. The disadvantage
was that friends were separated. Even though we did the fieldwork in the
summer (i.e. third) term of the year, one boy, Samad, remained fairly
isolated within the class (mentioned by one other child as a friend, and
not featuring in anyone’s accounts of their closest friendships), and talked
wistfully of his friends in the parallel class.
In Scarlet class, as in the other two classes, there was a strong gender
divide although two of the girls (Noor and Bella) played with the boys
occasionally ‘because the girls are all like girly girls and the boys always
play fun games’ (Noor, Black African). The loose network of boys mainly
played football (Ammar, Donatello, Caine, Usain, Finley, Ali, Aslam),
although, as in the other two classes, there was a group of n on-football-
playing boys (David, Jason, Adil and Andre). Andre (White other) had
realised that football offered integration into the main boy group, (‘I
want to start playing football but the boys may think I’m weird, because
I am crap at football’). The opportunities to play football were also lim-
ited by the staff, and a variety of chasing and ball games were encouraged.
Caine, who received considerable adult intervention around peer group
interactions and behaviour, was treated warily by some of the other chil-
dren. Few of the boys’ friendships went outside school, although the
occasional meeting up of Aslam and Usain is discussed in Chap. 7.
Exceptions to this were Adil and Andre, and David and Jason. Both pairs
of boys had mothers who had also made friends.
In terms of the girls’ friendships, there are two identifiable pairs, both
ethnically mixed: Courtney and Kelly were close friends, with Nayna in
an uneasy triangle with them. Serena and Iper were also close friends at
school. It is in this context that the remaining two girls, Noor and Bella
will often go and play with the boys. The girls do mix to a limited extent
outside school. Again we see in Scarlet class, as in the other two classes,
that the children mixed easily across ethnicity, and that enthusiasm for
football drew a mixed ethnic group of boys together.
Navigating Social Space
In this section, we consider the emergence of the children’s attitudes

towards diversity, drawing on Bourdieusian theoretical resources and also
the literature on conviviality discussed earlier in Chap. 2. We wish to
focus upon the ‘practices of inhabiting diversity’ (Wise and Noble 2016,
p. 425, original emphasis) and what they can tell us about the children’s
emerging understandings of and attitudes towards diversity, difference,
and commonality.
We start with Bourdieu’s concept of habitus (discussed in Chap. 2)
which understands the family as the site of early socialisation, devel-
oping a child’s disposition, their sense of what seems ‘right’ and ‘natu-
ral’, in terms of attitudes and behaviours. However, from an early age
children are also ‘integrated into social space’ (Atkinson 2016, p. 97).
Atkinson suggests that the education system is one of the key fields for
this process of integration through offering ‘convergent or divergent
models of difference, legitimacy, similarity (‘people like me’)’ (p. 98).
This integration takes place largely through the taught curriculum
(especially now that many primary schools focus on the explicit teach-
ing of values), and also through the sorting and selecting function of
the education system, which generates identities of academic worth
amongst children (see e.g. Reay and Wiliam 1999). However, friend-
ships, and the insights they offer into particular ways of living, are
another way in which children learn about difference, similarity and
legitimacy. The children at Fernhill, Leewood and Junction, living in
highly diverse areas and attending highly diverse schools, are receiving
a very different social and cultural experience from their parents, who
were mostly educated in more homogeneous environments. Thus, the
heterogeneous classrooms play a part in constituting the children’s
‘lifeworlds’. The essence of the idea of ‘lifeworld’ is the individual’s
sense of his or her everyday life and surroundings shaped by habitus,
(Atkinson 2010, p. 9). Habitus is not a deterministic concept, but
allows for the altering role of experiences, as Crossley indicates, when
he speaks of the ‘incorporation of the role or perspective of the other
within our own habitus’ (Crossley 2001, p. 112, cited in Bottero

2010, p. 12). Bottero argues that interactions with ‘the other’ have the
potential to stimulate ‘disruptions to spark reflexivity’ (Bottero 2009,
p. 409) and thus potentially lead to alterations in settled dispositions.
Bottero is discussing adult interactions, and it is worth reiterating
here that the children’s young age means that their own family’s way
of living is their norm, with relatively few opportunities to experience
and process other lifestyles. Additionally, the lifeworld of each child
clearly remains structured and ‘patterned by the material and cultural
conditions of existence’ (Atkinson 2010, p. 9). We see this in our data:
children from different social and ethnic backgrounds clearly mixed;
they made friends because of shared enjoyments. In the data presented
below we give some sense of the nature of the children’s ‘spatio-tem-
poral’ lifeworlds (Atkinson 2016, p. 99). Thus we explore how the
children work to situate themselves comfortably and securely in the
diverse social world of the classroom. Their social relationships give
the children glimpses into worlds different to their own, where the
everyday routines and practises of their own families are not necessar-
ily shared by others. We explore the degree to which they are open to
the different disposition of the ‘other’; in other words, we trace the
emergence of a convivial disposition, an openness to difference, and a
‘capacity to live together’ (Wise and Noble 2016, p. 423, see also
Chap. 2).
Recognising Difference: Convivial Dispositions?
The children did recognise and were aware of the high levels of cultural
diversity that were part of their daily worlds. In their conversations with
us, and in our observations of classroom and playground interactions the
children appeared to perceive and interpret social diversity, including eth-
nic, religious and linguistic diversity, as a given and very much part of
everyday social life. The schools all encouraged explicitly celebratory sen-
sibilities around diversity; each held International Evenings for families
who were encouraged to bring food from the parents’ country of origin,
celebrated a range of festivals, and positively referenced children’s bilin-

gualism and the range of countries which their families represented.
These sensibilities were often articulated by the children in interviews.
For example, Callum (Black British, Leewood School) explained to us:
Oh yeah like the school don’t really have a lot of the same cultures, [we are]
all mixed. It is not really—like you wouldn’t say that there is like one popu-
lar culture here, because literally we are all mixed… you get to learn more
about other people and how they live and stuff.
The schools also emphasise—through the taught and hidden curri-

cula—commonalities, and Nayna (Black Caribbean, Fernhill) reflects
this approach, that differences are superficial compared to a collective
shared humanity.
I do notice [differences] but it doesn’t make a difference because everybody

is the same, everybody comes from earth and stuff so I don’t talk nothing
serious and bad about them, so […] it doesn’t matter what culture they are,
what nationality, what colour they are, they are still human beings.
Nayna was paired with Aslam (Black African) in their interview with
us, and several lines further on, Aslam also picks up this celebratory
language
Some of [my friends] are from Somalia, Romania, Turkey, Poland, England,
Morocco. There’s many different cultures at this school like nationalities
and stuff, so it is kind of nice to have different mixes and mixtures in the
school so we have someone new to play with and someone that we can talk
to in their own language and stuff.
In her study of Hackney in London, Wessendorf (2014) uses the term

‘commonplace diversity’ to argue for a similar phenomenon where adults
routinely experience ethnic difference and this is viewed positively, but
also as unexceptional (see Chap. 2). Diversity understood as ‘ordinary’
was also illustrated by many of the children’s accounts. We found, like
Connolly (1998, 2011), that children drew on their understandings of
difference to interpret and make sense of their worlds. This took place
through a range of sites and signs which were read through difference—
dress, types of food, languages spoken, what children were allowed to do
at home, the possessions other children had, holidays, pets and so on. The
conceptualisation of difference by the children in our study counters the
narrative of ‘social invisibility’ (see Hunter et al. 2012) that suggests that
young children do not perceive social difference nor assign it any social
significance due to their ‘innocent’, unformed nature. The children were
not, however, necessarily interested in or knowledgeable about difference
in a cultural sense, although they were taught about different religions
and customs as part of the curriculum. In the interview with Bethany
(White British) and Tyler (Black British), both at Junction School, the
conversation turns to Eid, as Tyler’s close friend Musa (British Asian) is
absent from school to celebrate Eid. However, Tyler says he knows noth-
ing about the festival except that ‘they always go fun places like funfairs
and things’.3 Bethany’s friend, Krystina (White other), has a different
national background to her, and Bethany does note some engagement
with this, saying she has learnt some words and a song in Krystina’s first
language. These examples illustrate the children’s openness to difference
but also their partial and uneven capacities to respond to it.
The children’s friendship maps and accounts also demonstrated the
influence of social divisions on their friendships. Explicit discussion
about ethnicity, race and/or class was less common. In the interviews, the
children negotiated racial differences in a relatively straightforward man-
ner, discussing suitable colours to use in their drawings to denote skin
tone, for example. Noor (Black African) at Fernhill was quick to correct
Andre (White other) who, whilst drawing her, refers to her as ‘brown’
(‘Black. Here you go’—Noor hands him the correct pencil). Tyler, in the
interview with Bethany referred to above, did express surprise when
glancing at Bethany’s drawing of her friends both at school and outside,
commenting ‘Oh my God you have so many blondes, one, two, three,
four, five.’ Bethany’s network is indeed composed largely composed of
White British girls. Krystina, with her Eastern European background,
adds a slightly exotic touch in which Bethany is interested, but Krystina
largely fits in with Bethany’s range of interests and activities, so does not
disturb her homophilous network.
The verbalising of explicit racism was rare and treated as a serious

matter by all three schools, and this was recognised by the children.
However, there were a few instances in our conversations with the chil-
dren. For example, a boy in Crimson class at Leewood School described
a Black British boy (Daine) as being like a ‘monkey’ who needed to ‘go
to the jungle’. Daine was on the autistic spectrum. His frustration had
manifested itself in the past as anger. We suggest here that the intersec-
tions of Daine’s relative isolation in the classroom, his identity as a
child with particular support needs and his Black British ethnicity posi-
tioned him as particularly vulnerable to a process of ‘othering’ and
racism.
Alongside ethnicity, social class as a site of difference was perceived by
some children, although with a specific focus and understanding, which
positioned materialities as a key and common mode through which dif-
ference was noted. For example, how children spoke about housing was
particularly interesting in relation to their understanding of social class
difference. Gabra, (Black African, Leewood School) was part of an eth-
nically diverse friendship group in Crimson class. One girl in the group,
Pippa (White British) is from an affluent background, and Gabra
describes how she enjoys going to Pippa’s home but explains feeling
uncomfortable when Pippa visits her own home, a smaller council
house.
Gabra: I like going to Pippa’s house because it feels a bit weird when
Pippa comes to my house.
INT: Why does it feel weird?
Gabra: Because I don’t know what to do. [….] And Pippa’s mum and
dad’s room and there’s a bathroom like inside and it’s like a
palace bathroom and it looks cool because the floor is like
stone.
INT: Marble?
Gabra: Yeah, marble and it looks so cool.
Gabra’s experience of social differentiation speaks to recent culturalist

turn in social class debates (Savage et al. 2013; Tyler 2013), which have
emerged due to the intensifying social inequalities relating not only
to wealth and income but social and cultural indicators such as educa-
tional attainment, housing conditions, and forms of leisure participation.
Each of these serves as a means of capturing the role of social and cultural
processes in generating divisions.
Thus an understanding or ‘seeing’ of difference based on materiality
was the mode in which diversity was most recurrent in children’s accounts
of difference. Morrow (2001) also points to this relationship between
social capital and symbolic capital in being points of negotiation in chil-
dren’s friendships. Symbolic markers such as particular material posses-
sions (e.g. branded goods) can provide a sense of belonging or familiarity
and thus facilitate social relationships. In an exchange between two chil-
dren in Leewood, the possession of the latest technology was a point in
which the two children who normally have little interaction, were able, in
the interview, to find commonality:
Ethan (mixed heritage): So I have an iPod and a laptop (…).

Megan (White British): I have got an X box.
Ethan: The same!
Megan: And I have got a DS.
Ethan: I have a DS!
However, for others, differences in their ability to access material pos-

sessions became clear. In her interview, Nayna (Black Caribbean) describes
the phones and tablets her older brothers and sisters have, claiming she
will be given an ‘iPhone 5C in blue, because blue is my favourite colour’.
Her co-interviewee, Aslam (Black African) then comments ‘I don’t have
that much stuff because my mum usually gives all the money to like
spend it on food, because [mine] is a big family’.
Inequalities in access to class-based resources clearly result in variations
in lifestyle, causing different sets of visibilities and invisibilities and differ-
ent forms of knowing. For example, during another discussion with chil-
dren from Scarlet class (Fernhill School) between Serena (White British)
and Cain (mixed heritage), disparities in class-based resources could be
clearly seen during discussions around local shops. Serena clearly was not
aware of the UK supermarket chain ‘Iceland’ that offers low-cost frozen
foods.
Serena: I live in [near] a big car park.

Cain: Yeah and then you have got Iceland there [near where Serena
lives].
Serena: Iceland?
Cain: Yeah you have got Iceland all the way down there.
Serena: What’s Iceland?
Cain: I can’t believe she doesn’t know what Iceland is [directed at
interviewer]
Serena: Is it a shop?
Cain: Yeah.
Serena: Oh! I thought it was a funfair kind of place.
In this account the difference in the social worlds of Cain and Serena
is revealed, but the exchange also shows how they avoid shaming the
other; for example, Cain’s disbelief is directed towards us rather than
Serena herself, and her imagining of Iceland as a ‘funfair’ is positive. The
effect is to avoid a culturalist stigmatising of social class (Tyler 2013).
We continue to consider this capacity to navigate multiple differences
within friendship networks by considering the relationship with
religion.
F luid Identifications and Complex Friendship

Practices
Holloway et al. (2010), discuss the importance of identity positioning
and the consideration of performances of identity in young people’s lives,
particularly in a mixed classroom setting. We found that social class and
ethnic markers, at times, infiltrate the discussions children had around
identity with individuals making bids for credible status and cultural
capital. Materiality was again a key site for these delineations to be made
(see earlier example of Ethan and Megan). However, in Junction School
with its large number of Muslim children, religious identity was also sig-
nificant (Windzio and Wingens 2014). Being Muslim in Burgundy class
at Junction School was more frequently cited and discussed in the chil-
dren’s interviews, than in Crimson or Scarlet class at the other two
schools, where there were fewer Muslim children. In contrast to anti-

Muslim discourses circulating in the wider British political and social
world, in Burgundy class Muslim identity was of high status,4 to the
extent that one girl, not from a practising Muslim family, claimed that
identity for herself. Kim (mixed heritage) is in discussion with Abner
(Black African), and the interviewer. Kim describes her best friend
Mehreen who is in a different class at school, and who is of Muslim
background. The children debate what it means to be a Muslim and its
intersection with other identities.
Kim: [Mehreen] is kind of like [me], because we are Muslims she is

my Islamic sister.
INT: Okay so is your mum Muslim and your dad Muslim?
Kim: My dad is not Muslim but my mum is.
INT: Your mum is Muslim?
Abner: Yes her dad is from Jamaica, Jamaican African.
INT: So what do you mean by Islamic sisters?
Kim: That means Muslim sister […] Some people like tease me and
say ‘You are not a Muslim, you are not a Muslim’. I know I am
a Muslim.
INT: Why would they say that to you?
Abner: That is what Sultan [boy in class] said to her.
Kim: Because I don’t celebrate things that I am supposed to. But
some people didn’t.
Abner: You are not like a real Muslim like—
Kim: I am.
Abner: Not like—she is a Muslim but not like a strict one. The ones
that are proper Muslims, you are not like a proper Muslim.
Like because your mum doesn’t wear a scarf.
Kim appears to want to identify with being Muslim in order to bring

her closer to her friend Mehreen. This exchange shows the children nego-
tiating difference in order to produce high status identities. Whilst Abner
does not directly challenge Kim’s claim to be Muslim, he does not let her
claim go entirely uncontested either—he will allow that she is a Muslim,
just not a ‘proper’ one, as ‘proper’ female Muslims have visibly identifiable
markers (e.g. a headscarf ). Given the diverse nature of Muslim popula-

tions worldwide, it is perhaps, not surprising that the children had differ-
ent ideas about a ‘proper’ Muslim identity (also Zine 2001). The exchange
highlights the dynamic nature both of identities—in this instance reli-
gious identity—and the processes of identification that c hildren engage
in as they emphasise particular identity markers in different contexts,
allowing them to develop affective relationships with a range of peers.
Furthermore, Huber and Spyrou (2012) describe this ability of children
to cross borders, forming new and blurring old boundaries as a means of
appropriating, reinterpreting or subverting dominant norms. They argue
that the trading of different discourses by children can allow for them to
cope with stigma and ethnic stereotyping and produce more inclusive
identities. This highlights the agency and ability of children to interact
within different social environments and adapt their behaviour according
to different contexts.
Conclusion
Investigating the friendships of children in highly diverse primary
school settings allows us to explore how children from varied social,
religious, and ethnic backgrounds negotiate the complexities of their
particular micro-environments. The children viewed diversity as an
ordinary part of their everyday lives; but at the same time, as some-
thing that is the subject of a celebratory phenomenon by their schools.
These two positionings—the ordinary and the celebratory—make up a
social terrain that they are required to negotiate and manage. We have
suggested that the children drew on a multidimensional awareness of
difference to make sense of their worlds and their friendship relations.
Our work chimes with Connolly’s argument that young children are
very much engaged in identification processes that include conceptions
of ethnicity and class. However, unlike the more disadvantaged and/or
conflict environments of Connolly’s and Ramiah et al.’s work, the
diverse localities in this project meant that most of the children were
surrounded by intense levels of social, ethnic and religious differences
and were themselves constituents of these complex populations with
their own complex identities. As a father at Junction School com-

mented, ‘I can definitely remember as a child, thinking, “oh this is
strange, not everybody is like me”, whereas I am pretty sure my chil-
dren don’t even enter that thought…that is a massive, massive part of
education’ (Patrick, White British middle-class, Junction School).
Although we argue that the data illustrates that the children do recog-
nise difference, we agree with Patrick that they are not surprised by it,
and that they appeared to be able to participate across difference in
proto-skilled ways, to generally mix competently and without major
tensions or frequent recourse to racialisation and othering. In this way,
our findings speak to those of Weller and Bruegel (2009) in relation to
primary school children’s capacities to manage and interact with social
and ethnic difference in their school worlds. We would stress that these
capacities were partial and uneven. A coexistence of interactions and
separations (Harris 2014) prevailed, such that instances of social and
ethnic interactions, of friendship formations across difference were also
coupled with indifference towards ‘the other’, as well as relationships of
affinity towards those socially and ethnically similar to themselves. In
relation to the latter, the aforementioned ‘White middle-class girl’
group at Leewood, and Bethany’s ‘blonde’ friendship network offer
examples. However, the descriptions of the children’s networks across
all three classrooms illustrate the way in which they frequently forge
relationships across ethnic and/or social class difference. Thus, we argue
that that in the field of diverse urban schooling, the children’s habitus
is exposed to and shaped by experiences of both social similarity and
difference through their diverse friendship networks. As we discuss fur-
ther in Chaps. 5 and 6, these heterophilous bonds may not travel far
outside the school walls or far along the journey to adolescence, but we
argue that for these children, these relationships signal emergent dispo-
sitions of openness and engagement—the indicators of a convivial
disposition.
We have also argued that materialities and related practices inform
children’s recognitions of differences, but these can be, and often are,
negotiated and diminished through referencing points of commonality.
This highlights how context and situation are key constituents shaping
friendship relations. For example, Islam as a form of capital was at its
highest value in Burgundy class at Junction School. Additionally, as we

have noted, friendships inside the classrooms were not always replicated
outside, as parental management of children’s out-of-school friendships
influenced their opportunities to meet and mix beyond the classroom. It
was also clear that mixing across class distinctions occurred less frequently
than mixing across ethnicity, and that gender, perceived disability, and
religion were other important factors in the children’s friendship
configurations.
What emerged was the ability of children to engage in a process of
identity building and management: learning to ‘define’ themselves in dif-
ferent ways in different contexts (Allan 2011). However, this process is
partial; the children do not have complete freedom here, as their peers,
parents and teachers are all engaged in additional readings of them, their
social relationships and perceived social competencies. The children’s
friendships are not independent of the adult world surrounding them as
we explore further in Chap. 5. However, despite this, the ability of the
children to negotiate different identities, according to setting and con-
text, allowed for friendships across difference, and some indicators of the
emergence of a convivial disposition as the children absorbed the prac-
tices of diverse others into their lifeworlds.
Notes
1. We have identified the children’s ethnicity here using census categories.
We are aware of the inadequacies of these, and the problematic of append-
ing ‘British’ to some groups and not all. However, to keep our account as
readable as possible and given the familiarity of the census categories to
readers, we would argue that they are suitable to use here. We distinguish
between Black Caribbean and Black African, where we have that informa-
tion. Otherwise we use the more general ‘Black British’. Where we have
fuller information, this is detailed in Appendix.
2. We collected details of another example of bullying referenced in Vincent
et al. 2017, but the child concerned was not in our target classes. The
mother had specifically asked participate in the research when she heard
of its topic.
3. Similarly:
Int: Where is Noor from then?

Caine Islam
(mixed
heritage):
Int: She’s from Islam?
Caine: I think it is Islam. I don’t know. Ask Noor where she
is from […] I wasn’t trying to be rude but I don’t
know […] She worships Jesus as God.
4. See also Van Ausdale and Feagin 2002 for a discussion of other situations
where children place high status on racial/ethnic attributes of groups that
are minoritised and marginalised in wider American society.
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5
Children’s Agency and Adult
Intervention: Children’s Friendships
Through Adult Eyes
In brief: Teachers’ and parents’ engagement with and interventions into the
children’s friendships.
Introduction
Picking up on the point made at the end of Chap. 4 that the children’s
friendships are not independent of the adult world surrounding them,
this chapter focuses on adults’ intervention in and management of the
children’s friendships. We return to the point made in Chap. 1 that, fol-
lowing Eve (2002), we emphasise the importance of the context in which
friendships are formed and maintained, and from Pahl (2002) we take
the need to approach the friendship relation as personal but also socially
situated. We discuss here, first the role of teachers, and then that of par-
ents, in relation to the children’s friendships.
In our focus on the schools and teachers, we explore their policies and
practices in relation to friendship. We argue that the teachers’ knowledge
of the children’s friendships maps accurately onto the children’s accounts,

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73001-1_5
but that their efforts to engage in supportive practices around the chil-
dren’s friendships are undermined by the weight of other responsibilities,
and in the case of some teachers, their ‘common sense’ view that the
children’s friendships were light, flexible relationships. Moreover, some
children were positioned as better able to manage social relationships in
an emotionally competent way, and we argue that ‘the emotional can be
understood as a key form of capital’ (Holt et al. 2013, p. 34; referencing
Reay 2004), with those perceived to be struggling with appropriate inter-
actional behaviours subject to greater intervention and management
around their friendships.
The second part of the chapter turns to the parents and we argue that
despite their appreciation of diverse schools, few parents prioritised their
children having a diverse range of friends. We discuss the ease and com-
fort of homophily. How the children spent their out-of-school time was,
given their age, still heavily guided by their parents, and so varied depend-
ing on their parents’ circumstances and their sense of what is possible and
desirable in terms of how children spend their leisure time. We finish by
concluding that although the children retain some agency in terms of
their friendship practices, a full understanding of these practices needs to
include consideration of the adults in their lives as well as their peers.
School Policy and Practices

We discuss here the work that staff do in order to maintain all three
schools as warm, welcoming spaces for children, and ones that recognise
and appreciate diversity. This speaks to a particular set of priorities around
inclusion and diversity frequently held by primary school teachers in
urban areas (Maguire et al. 2006). We illustrate below how teachers’ car-
ing is shaped by competing demands laid on teachers (Braun 2012), and,
in the case of some individuals in the research, by their minimising
approach to the children’s friendships.
Teachers at all three schools stressed the character of their school as inclu-
sive and appreciative of the diversity of the school’s population. In comparison
to the children’s parents, who often commented that the children did not ‘see’
difference because of their young age (also Hunter et al. 2012), the teachers
Children’s Agency and Adult Intervention: Children’s… 125
were more likely to recognise that the children were aware of social differ-
ence—so Tanya (Black British) at Junction School discussed how historic
tension between local Turkish and Kurdish populations had affected the
children’s friendships, but that this tension had dissipated in recent years
making cross-ethnic friendship possible. Phillip (White British) at
Leewood School and Jacqui (mixed heritage) at Fernhill School talked of
the children recognising social inequalities (in terms of who had holidays
abroad and access to consumer goods). However, the teachers overlaid
their recognition of difference and inequality with an emphasis on equal
opportunities.
[As if talking to the children] ‘You are all equals when it comes down to it;
it is your parents who are different to each other. You are not different, your
experiences are different in life, but you have got equal access to everything
in the end and it starts here’.
So it is about kind of trying to inspire them and making them see that
okay so you don’t have all this stuff maybe, or you don’t do what Tommy
does when he goes home. You don’t go to Australia for two weeks [as one
child in the class did] but actually you can, you can, and it might not hap-
pen now but it can happen. You are no different to anybody else. So I think
a bit of empathy and just looking at everybody’s situation as—well every-
thing is possible isn’t it? […] As a teacher you do just think that way by
default, I imagine. (Jacqui, Fernhill School)
As Jacqui suggests this emphasis on equal opportunities and raising

aspiration is part of many teachers’ default understandings, fundamental
attitudes and priorities commonly developed as part of the role.1 Senior
leaders in particular took this further and spoke of the opportunities
offered by their schools in terms of access to activities and places that the
children from less affluent families might not otherwise experience. All
the schools, for instance, offered after-school activities, with a particularly
wide range at Junction and Leewood (offered by both teachers and out-
side providers). Staff spoke of their attempts to keep the prices for these
low and to discreetly subsidise children whose families may not be able to
afford to pay for them.
The low/no-cost school clubs were just one way in which the schools
sought to recognise, appreciate and cater for the social diversity in their
populations. Other initiatives included International Evenings held at all

three schools (where families bought a food dish from their country of
origin to share with others), and parents’ coffee mornings. The latter
aimed to encourage parents to come into school and also to meet and mix
with each other. Junction School had a well-used parents’ room, and also
offered coffee and biscuits to encourage general mingling amongst par-
ents who came to watch class performances. Leewood had a Turkish-
speaking mothers’ coffee morning (established at the parents’ request)
and an open-to-all coffee morning (described by one of the class teachers
as the ‘slightly more chichi one’, indicating the social divisions in the
school population). All schools held summer fairs and the one at Fernhill
in particular attracted a wide range of families and local residents.
Managing Friendships and Feelings

In this section, we discuss how teachers understand, respond to and seek
to manage the children’s friendships. We wish to understand how the
opportunities available for different children to mix, and the subsequent
workings out of the children’s friendships are shaped by features of school
organisation, management and ethos, some of which are particular to the
three individual case study schools and their staffing at the time of the
research, and others which are common features marking contemporary
primary schooling. As already acknowledged, teachers were concerned to
create an inclusive atmosphere in the schools and recognised and appreci-
ated the importance of friendships for the children’s well-being. However
there were pressures and priorities that undercut these attempts to facili-
tate and support friendships. Here we identify two sets of pressures: the
first speaks to the current policy climate affecting all state primary schools:
the crowded nature of the primary school curriculum, the rising work-
load of primary school teachers (DfE 2014) and the current emphasis
upon targets. One result of this was that the children were often in ‘abil-
ity’ groups in the classroom, and this obviously affected who they spent
time with.2 The second set of pressures results from the first: that the
work that is carried out with children around friendship tends to be reac-
tive rather than proactive, and focuses on those children whose friendship
practices are seen as problematic. We illustrate too how some children are
positioned as ‘better at’ friendships than others. This reactive work is
underpinned by a sense amongst some staff that children’s friendships are
insubstantial, fluid relationships.
With regard to facilitating the children’s friendships, in terms of prac-
tices, there were considerable areas of commonality amongst the case-
study schools. They all had a range of both reactive and proactive strategies
with regard to supporting and developing friendships. The former included
circle time, ‘buddy’ schemes, alternative spaces for children not happy in
the playground and other interventions tailored for particular chil-
dren. The schools also used restorative justice and ‘peaceful problem solv-
ing’ approaches in response to quarrels.3 More proactive strategies included
circle time, Anti-Bullying Week (a national initiative), ‘action boxes’ (pri-
vate messages for the teacher), drama, adult mentors in the playground
organising games and art activities, reiterations of school vision statements
about ‘how we behave to others in our school’, and so on.
The staff to whom we spoke at the three schools all emphasised that
children’s emotional well-being was fundamental to enabling them to learn
and flourish at school, and they were often highly reflexive concerning the
school’s role in enabling well-being. However, they were working within
contexts shaped by the demands of a crowded timetable and a performative
policy agenda, leading to an increasing tendency to assess and quantify
school experiences (Ball 2017). Peer relationships fall under the curriculum
heading of Personal Social and Health Education (PSHE), a non-statutory,
but recommended area.4 PSHE includes social and emotional learning
(SEL) alongside a wide variety of other topics including drugs, safety,
health education, financial education, and more recently (introduced after
our field work for this project was complete), the promotion of ‘British
values’.5 PSHE is a baggy curricula ‘holdall’ for topics that do not fit within
the formal, assessed curriculum. Therefore, for schools and teachers, PSHE
is, at the time of writing, a liminal area in a curriculum governed by the
need—at primary stage—to ensure ‘good’ results in English and maths for
children transferring to secondary school (also George and Clay 2013).
These subjects are mandatory; currently PSHE is not. Different aspects of
PSHE have, for schools, become more or less visible over time, the promo-
tion of British values referred to above being the latest example of
prominence. In terms of the PSHE dimension on relationships and Social

and Emotional Learning (SEL), these were given a particular distinction
under the recent Labour governments as part of the Every Child Matters
suite of policies, and funding was given to develop and support schools
in using SEAL (Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning) materials.
This programme is no longer funded but the materials are archived and
all the three schools used the SEAL materials, in a piecemeal fashion, as
their source for any work on friendships. The emphasis on social and
emotional learning is still present in schools, but often referred to now as
character or values education (Arthur et al. 2017; Elias 2014).
Out of the three schools, Fernhill was the only one to have a named
policy on PSHE. Recently developed (2014), it set out the curriculum
content of PSHE in the school, adhering closely to the programmes
offered by the PSHE Association. Such texts can play a role in demon-
strating that a requirement for policy in this area has been met, without
changing practice (Braun et al. 2011), but Fernhill had a history of pri-
oritising SEL. The school had a long-established staff group, so the same
senior member of staff (Holly, White British) had been involved in the
original trials of the SEAL materials a decade ago. Her interest had
ensured the continuity of the SEAL focus over time, and the work had
become a key part of how the school understood itself. In Junction, and
Leewood, several staff changes in senior management over the last
5–7 years meant that it was harder to trace a continuous policy focus on
this area. A lack of written policy, however, did not mean that there was
no commitment to the area. Junction, like Fernhill, had been eligible in
the past for funding for areas of deprivation (New Labour’s Excellence in
Cities policy) and used this to appoint staff to develop SEL work. After
the funding finished, both schools acted to partially retain this staffing
from their own budgets. Fernhill’s original interest was provoked by
teachers’ understanding of the children in their traditionally working-
class, racially diverse intake, as having pronounced needs.
[A decade ago] we were dealing with some very high-end children that
were probably misplaced in mainstream schools […] so we worked with
the whole team of schools [trialling SEAL] around behaviour improve-
ment. (Holly, deputy head, Fernhill)
Although gentrification and the increasing popularity of the school

were understood to be bringing in a cohort of children who were appar-
ently less problematic in terms of behaviour—a point also made at
Junction which was witnessing a similarly increasing middle-class
intake—Holly argues that the school’s continued commitment to SEAL
is necessary as an equalising measure, in order to allow disadvantaged
children to access the curriculum, and to supplement parental deficit.
I think our kids come from such a range of backgrounds [now], you know
we have some very eloquent children, some very well supported and privi-
leged children, but we have a huge number of children that don’t have
those advantages… so they come to school at disadvantage, their vocabu-
lary is limited. You know perhaps they don’t have the social skills. The
parents may not have the aspiration for them to do well and achieve […] I
don’t think we could deliver the curriculum unless we had a commitment
to that [SEAL].
Curriculum initiatives such as those listed above that prioritise friend-

ships, and affective connections, merged uneasily with some of the teach-
ers’ more general common-sense understandings of the children’s
friendships, which positioned them as somewhat insubstantial.
Teachers’ Readings of Children’s Friendships
Within the teachers’ general professional framework of concern and car-

ing, we wish to emphasise the work done by adults’ ‘common-sense’
understandings of children’s friendship, and we identify here the way
that such understandings deliver the idea that these were often light,
flexible relationships of convenience. Some examples from the class
teachers:
I see kind of partnerships formed and then kind of dissipate quite regularly.
Especially with the girls […] you kind of see it chop and change (Gary,
White British, Junction)
It is very, very fluid, it is not stable at all’ (Jacqui, mixed heritage, Fernhill)
I am not so sure about how solid it all is really. I think they all get on with
each other because they are all together […] But I think if suddenly there
were two classes in that year and it got split up I am not sure how desperate
some of them would be to carry on playing with the people that they cur-
rently play with. I think they would be quite happy to switch (Phillip,
White British, second class teacher, Leewood)
These comments seem to substantiate Mary Healy’s claim that,
The issue of friendship and how we bond with others ought to be an

important concept for education, yet schools rarely take the forming, nur-
turing and nourishing of friendship beyond helping to deal with disputes
between friends when they disrupt school life. The general attitude tends to
be a ‘bus theory’ of friendship: do not worry—if you miss one, another will
be along in a minute. (Healy 2011, p. 442)
However, as discussed in Chap. 4, our data illustrate that children

experience their friendships keenly, and value loyalty highly. Teachers’
rather more cavalier reactions may be understood as a defence against the
children’s negative emotions, their displays of anger, pain (also Watson
et al. 2012), and/or the maintenance of the professional imperative to
care but also to remain emotionally detached (Braun 2012). More prosai-
cally, they could also be responding to the tedium and time pressure of
sorting out recurrent issues with ‘the same children’ (Phillip, second class
teacher, Leewood). On a more practical level, understanding the chil-
dren’s relationships as flexible allowed teachers, by directing bodies—into
new seating plans for example—to use the children’s affective relation-
ships as a management tool to produce calm behaviour in the classroom.
As noted in Chap. 4, Fernhill routinely mixed up the two classes in a year
group at the end of every year, a policy which annually caused angst
amongst children and parents as friends were separated. The changes
were primarily designed to ensure a balance of children in terms of aca-
demic attainment and behaviour across the two classes, with existing
friendships being a ‘contributing factor’ but ‘[to be] upfront, that’s not
your first criteria’ (head teacher, White British, Fernhill). George (2007)
finds the same minimizing response from teachers in her study of girls’
friendships:
[Teachers] appeared to trivialize the emotional impact [changes in group

relationships] had on individual group members. It would appear that
these teachers drawing on the cultural ideas of ‘real’ friendship (Allan
1989) discounted any ruptures to the girls’ relationships, brushing aside
their upset, assuming that the next day will see a restoration in the friend-
ship. (2007, p. 95)
Clearly, teachers are not all the same and even within our small sample
there were visible differences in how much weight was given to the chil-
dren’s friendships, with Tanya (Junction) and Holly (Fernhill) particu-
larly emphasising the need to make friendship an explicit focus for
learning and discussion with the children. Jacqui also spoke of how in her
seating arrangements, she tried to both respect children’s existing rela-
tionships, and also direct pairings in ways that ‘formed new bonds’. Tanya
(with a pastoral care post) and Gary (a class teacher) at Junction provide
an example of the differences in approach between teachers. Tanya
described the policy of placing Action Boxes in each class that allowed the
children to post a message to their teacher, alerting them to the child’s
concerns. She acknowledges that their use ‘depends on the class teacher
really’ and we found that Gary’s was infrequently used. Also at Junction,
in an attempt to reverse the marginalisation of PSHE in a crowded time-
table, senior leaders had decided to remove an assembly, so that the time
freed up could be used for circle time. However, Gary focused this time
on ‘learning behaviour’, feeling that ‘they had a huge amount of that
[circle time] last year’.
Our second point concerning teachers’ understandings, is that buried
in some of their accounts seemed to be a sense that there was a proper
way to ‘do’ friendship, what Allan (2011) calls a ‘friendship blueprint’,
which generated relationships more whole, complete and profound than
others. Holly seems to imply above that more ‘privileged’ children have
developed social skills, and tend not to display problematic friendship
behaviours. Similarly, one teacher at Leewood (Phillip) notes that it is the
close-knit group of five White middle-class girls in Crimson class, with
their out-of-school networks, shared activities, sleepovers, and so on,
whom he sees as having friendships with ‘deeper roots’. However, this
understanding overlooks the extent to which such out-of-school activities
(paid-for classes, summer camps, shared holidays abroad) depend on and

derive from classed resources. As a result, the range of opportunities the
girls have to be together out of school were simply not available to other
children.
Children whose friendship behaviours were perceived as problematic
received more targeted support, often very detailed, breaking friendship
practices down into a series of steps. Darren (a Black British Teaching
Assistant with pastoral care responsibilities) describes his work with one
boy at Fernhill.
So how you behaved, what you showed other people, your facial expres-
sions, your body language. When you are playing games, are you fair?
When you are doing activities, are you able to let someone else have a
choice? Can you also listen to people’s points? So we worked a lot on that.
Your behaviour in class, do you listen, because if you don’t listen people see
that you are getting in trouble, they might not want to be drawn to that.
So we worked a lot on that and now the child […] is there playing with all
kinds of different children. (Darren)
Clearly, such work is very valuable in embedding previously isolated

children into peer networks. However, researchers have argued that mate-
rial commonly used in ‘well-being’ segments of PSHE teaches techniques
which help children work on themselves, in order to better conform to
school, by managing themselves more effectively. For example, Clack
(2012, p. 499) identifies resilience, stoicism, optimism, altruism, emo-
tional regulation and mindfulness as the psychological constructs deemed
necessary for emotional well-being. We note here that friendship—a com-
plex mixture of emotional and emotive connections—is often reduced in
SEL practices to a series of attributes and learnt techniques, as above.
Several commentators have argued that as a consequence of these practices,
those children who are seemingly not able to avoid conflictual social rela-
tionships in school have ‘identities [that] are devalued within school spaces’
(Holt et al. 2013, p. 33; Gillies 2011). Ecclestone and Lewis (2014) have
argued that social and emotional well-being is a ‘new form of governance
that shapes desirable citizens’ (p. 203). Hoffman agrees, ‘now even emo-
tional competencies can be subject to measurement and those who don’t
measure up can be found lacking’ (2010, pp. 391–2). Making a similar

point but using terms derived from Bourdieu, Zembylas argues that ‘dif-
ferent emotional practices are implicated in the production of unequal
forms of capital’ (2007, p. 457), and Holt and colleagues’ (2013) study
of young people defined as having Social, Emotional and Behavioural
Difficulties (SEBD) argue that these individuals have reciprocal and val-
ued social relationships with families and friends outside school, but are
seen as lacking in the possession of the emotional resources valued in the
school field. In our study, across the three classes, the children that were
presented as challenging in terms of their friendships numbered 14 (out
of 78). Of these 14 children, 12 were Black or mixed heritage children (a
third of the total number of Black and mixed heritage child respondents),
and ten were boys. Given the small sample, we are not able to make any
claims about the role of race and gender in this process, but as qualitative
research (e.g. Gillborn and Youdell 2000; Gazeley et al. 2013; Gillborn
et al. 2016) suggests that Black and mixed race boys are more likely to be
positioned as emotionally or behaviourally problematic, this is a concern-
ing observation, albeit based on a very limited sample.
Children with complex learning needs also had their ability to develop
friendships questioned. Peter, Lucas (both Leewood School) and Jordan
(Junction School) all had complex learning needs. They were understood
by their class teachers as not being able to have ‘proper’ friendships with
children without special needs. Peter and Lucas were close friends. The
class teacher and the boys’ parents had different views on this. The teacher
felt the friendship should be celebrated, a positive view which seemed to
be undercut with a sense that the boys could not hope, because of their
disabilities, to maintain friendships with any of the other children.
What is terribly interesting about Lucas and Peter was, I had a bit of a fight
with the parents last year because they didn’t want Lucas and Peter to be
friends with one another […] And you are kind of thinking, well how fan-
tastic that they have—because they love one another […] but we have been
kind of pushed to say—and I understand because I think they felt that the
others weren’t being friends with them but I don’t think they ever will—I
don’t think they can. They can be really lovely to them and really friendly.
But I don’t think they can be friends.
INT: Because of the learning difficulties the two children have?

R: Yes, and yet they found one another. They have found a friendship
which is really profound. I think that is so worth celebrating but
[their parents] didn’t want it. I did wonder why. (Jessica, White
British, class teacher, Crimson class, Leewood School)
In our interviews with them, it became clear that the boys’ mothers
were not rejecting the boys’ existing friendship, but were concerned that
the other children were encouraged to be kind to their boys, rather than
to seek them out as equals. They were challenging the view that the able-
bodied/disabled divide was sufficiently fixed so as to make friendships
impossible across this dimension of difference. In an example of Foucault’s
‘bio-politics’—contestations over ‘the vital characteristics of human exis-
tence’ (Rabinow and Rose 2006, p. 196)—Lucas’s and Peter’s mothers,
wanting more mixing, successfully insisted that their children were not
always put together and that they spent more time in the classroom (not
outside it with their Teaching Assistants (TAs).
Jordan at Junction School was on the autistic spectrum. He had
recently transferred from another school, and had not, when we were in
Burgundy class, made any friendships according to his mother. At the
time we conducted the interviews with the children (although this later
changed), he received the most segregated educational experience of all
the children across the three schools, as he spent nearly all his time sitting
in a corner of the classroom with his TA. His mother described his friend-
ships with children out of school as including a close friendship with
another child on the spectrum, and also with neuro-typical children.
However, his teacher commented that the most that could be expected
was for the other children to ‘be kind’.
The children kind of make sure he is accommodated and they are very, very
accepting and supportive of him […] If he wants to play games, they will
play with him and they will involve him, and he kind of just does what he
does […] They are being kind to him. I think it would be difficult to form
friendships with Jordan because the communication is very difficult…I
don’t know how much there is a kind of conversation going on that you
would characterise as a friendship, a strong friendship (Gary, teacher,
Burgundy class, Junction School)
Although after our main fieldwork period, the school worked to create
situations in which Jordan could be more effectively integrated into the
class, again it was his mother Pat who played a lead role in addressing his
social relations. In a re-interview, she described organizing a birthday trip
to the cinema and to a restaurant popular with local children, and inviting
the whole class. Several other parents offered to help and nearly the entire
class attended in a ‘moment’ that drew together very different families, and
provided Jordan with a birthday party experience relatively common
amongst neuro-typical children (at least those from families with sufficient
economic capital). We argue here that the ‘truth discourse’ concerning
friendship and children with complex needs as promulgated by the two
class teachers at Leewood and Junction Schools, laid a limited expectation
on the other children of ‘being kind’. This was understood by the teachers
as a realistic common-sense response to the realities of disability. It was
then left to the children’s parents to challenge these ‘barriers to being’
(Thomas 1999, cited in Connors and Stalker 2007) as best they could.
eflections on Teachers’ Management

R
of Children’s Friendships
Despite the pressures upon them, we see sustained commitment from
two senior leaders (Tanya at Junction School and Holly at Fernhill)
over a period of years in emphasising the importance of children’s
friendships to their well-being. Other teachers also worked to try and
create spaces in which children could discuss emotional and social
issues, and spent time in observing and thinking about the children’s
friendships. In some cases, this led to particular children being identi-
fied as emotionally vulnerable and becoming the focus of teacher atten-
tion in order that the children work on themselves, as we suggest above.
How children managed their emotional investments in others acted to
variously position them as emotionally competent within the field of
the school, a positioning which could be advantageous or not in terms
of converting their perceived emotional competencies into other forms
of social and cultural capital. However, power does not simply operate
from the top down; instead, power relations are ‘a dense web that passes
through apparatuses and institutions without being exactly localized in
them’ (Foucault 1998, p. 96). As a result, the teachers’ understandings
do not define the children’s subjectivities, and even the most ‘vulnera-
ble’ retain some freedom and agency with regard to their friendships.
Many of the intricacies of children’s peer groups remain hidden from
adults (including researchers). It is difficult for adults to ‘see’ as pre-
teen children see; hence the frequent teacher emphasis on the casual
and fluid nature of many of the children’s alliances that acts to ration-
alise and minimise what to the children are emotive and major hap-
penings. The teachers’ reactive and targeted interventions and strategies
are understandable given the many responsibilities laid upon them in
the contemporary primary school setting. However, our interviews
with the children lead us to argue that such approaches miss the qui-
eter exclusion and marginalisation of children, girls especially (also
George 2007), who conduct their relationships under the adult radar.
Only some children make visible problems and tensions. Tayna
(Junction School) talks of ‘allegiances that you would not call friend-
ships’, where there is an unbalanced play of power, for instance, by one
child over another. Then there were children whose loneliness was not
recognised. These children are generally not seen as problematic in
terms of friendship, because their difficulties and distress do not play
out in confrontations.
We have rehearsed some themes within the critiques of social and
emotional learning here; namely, SEL’s disciplinary focus on the indi-
vidual. However, we are not suggesting that this work should disappear
from schools. If teachers find the space in which to emphasise SEL as
part of PSHE, they have a fair amount of autonomy over how they do
so. A recent study of SEAL initiatives (Bannerjee et al. 2014) recom-
mends whole-school and universal (rather than targeted) approaches. If
teachers were able to focus on the subject of friendship as an important
topic for all children, and not solely as a site for the production of well-
behaved, self-governing bodies, a different approach could be possible.
This would require that issues and topics for discussion would not be
guided primarily by teachers’ concern with behaviour management, but
be open to identification by the children, in order to reach the concerns

around friendship that they hold. Such work could serve to challenge
the current differentiation of children that distinguishes those who are
‘good at’ friendship from those who are not, as on the basis of our field-
work, such a division seems to reflect and further reinforce existing
social inequalities.
arental Responses to Children’s Friendships:

P
Social Mix and Mixing
In this section of the chapter, we consider how parents variously react to
and manage their children’s out-of-school time, including time spent
with friends.
We have discussed in Chap. 4 our finding that the children’s friend-
ships were more likely to cross ethnic difference than social class differ-
ence (although of course, the two dimensions intersect), and we will
make the same argument in relation to their parents (see Chap. 7). This
finding confirms the work of others who have shown the socially pat-
terned nature of social intimacy (Pahl 2002; Spencer and Pahl 2006;
Savage et al. 2013; Blatterer 2015). Our study shows similar social class
patterning persisting in the three primary schools. We suggest that
diversity was both a source of desire and hesitation for the majority of
the parent participants, and that this ambivalence can be identified
across different class and ethnic groups (see also Reay et al. 2011 for a
discussion of similar ambivalences amongst the middle-class parents in
their study). We develop this argument in the rest of this chapter, and
through Chaps. 6 and 7. Here we identify first the homophilous ten-
dencies of many parents and the sense of social distance from ‘others’
that informs homophily. Second, we discuss briefly different family
practices and priorities, as well as differing economic resources, all of
which shape how the children spent their out-of-school time. We con-
clude this section by contrasting homophilous practices with the
enabling behaviours of one father, Kaleb (see also Chap. 7 for further
discussion of enabling parents).
The Ease and Comfort of Similarity

We found that a tendency towards homophilous friendships was appar-
ent for nearly all the parents to whom we spoke, across all social class and
ethnic groups. We discuss this in relation to the adults’ own friendships
in Chap. 7, but here our focus is on their understandings of the children’s
friendships. Although appreciative of the diversity offered by the school,
very few parents spoke about encouraging their children to have a diverse
range of friends, or went out of their way to facilitate such friendships.
This apparent contradiction can be resolved if we consider that a prefer-
ence for friendships with those who are the same or very similar can coex-
ist with a desire for diversity. The two can inhabit different spheres:
diversity in the public sphere of the school and sameness in the private
sphere of the home, although as Chap. 6 shows, the two spheres are not
wholly distinct and self-contained as the school spreads out and into the
home and vice-versa. For example, Clive discusses with us his support for
diverse school populations. His eldest child, despite being in a mixed
classroom setting, was close friends only with other middle-class girls.
Clive accepted this without concern:
I think the fact that [the children] spend six or seven hours in school with
their friends five days a week and a lot of time is playing and you know, it
is fantastic, you know, learning about other people’s cultures, and religion,
everyone learns about other people’s religion [in all state schools] that is
fine, but just to learn about other people’s cultures and to hear them speak
other languages, there are kids in their class who speak two or three lan-
guages. […] I do feel very strongly that our kids are growing up in a very
multicultural world …if they live in London they will need to be tolerant
of other cultures and religions. (Clive, White British middle-class father,
Junction School)
Thus, for Clive, the diversity of the school can offer what Reay et al.
(2011) refer to as ‘multicultural capital’ to White British, middle-class
children that will allow them to negotiate diverse employment, social and
residential settings when they are older. Diversity, then, for some parents,
remains at a distance, something ‘tolerated’, rather than directly engaged
with. Olivia, with a daughter in the White British middle-class girls’ clus-
ter in Crimson class, Leewood School (see Chap. 4), reflects on the
homogeneity of this friendship cluster.
I wonder if [children] are going for similar kids who have got, like I said,
similar radio on in the background, similar books, similar newspapers,
similar kinds of outlook and faith, if they have got a faith. So they are going
for the familiar. And it is boosted by parents who encourage it…I like the
parents therefore you can be friends with and we can have coffee…It flows
more easily…the easy path. Whereas if [daughter] was friends with
Queenie, beautiful girl, black skin, yeah it would be different. I think we
are all a bit racist inside, may be not racist, just culturalist. (Olivia, White
British middle-class mother, Leewood School)
Queenie is not from a middle class family, so presents an example for

Olivia of racial and social class difference. Olivia here is describing the
pull of familiarity for both children and adults, and indeed some of the
adults clearly found it difficult to bridge difference, in relation to the
‘other’ children at school. They were concerned over both different mores
and values and/or the social awkwardness that might result from differing
lifestyles. We give an example of this here in relation to Ollie’s mother,
Elizabeth (White British middle class) and Tyler’s mother, Chantelle
(Black British). The boys, at Junction School, have been friends for sev-
eral years, and their older sisters are also friendly. Elizabeth describes her
relationship with Chantelle (who did not wish to be interviewed), as gen-
erally operating smoothly, although marked by a clear awareness of differ-
ence. Here class and ethnicity, reflected in age, family structure, and
presentation of self, intersect to position these two mothers at a social
distance from each other; friendship is presented as an impossibility.
Oliver’s friends parents are not our friends […] So Tyler’s mum, I am prob-
ably old enough to be her mother, in fact probably older than her mother
[…] It has been quite easy to establish – even though she and I will never
be friends because we are so different – to establish going to each other’s
houses and to talk about difficulties where necessary, and that is brilliant,
but very unusual in my experience […] I have a very different life from
Tyler’s mum. I really like her, but I have very little in common. I’m 46. I
think she is about 25 now, she is a single mum of three kids. It is just totally
different. I went to pick Oliver up from her a few weeks ago, and she had
had hair extensions, and I went ‘Oh they look nice, really lovely’, quite
spontaneous, and she went ‘I didn’t know you knew about hair extensions’.
Well, I don’t, I just know that that is what they are called! (Elizabeth, White
British middle-class mother, Junction school)
As Nast and Blokland (2014) note, people may bridge difference for
certain purposes—such as facilitating children’s friendships—for particu-
lar periods of time. Despite the acute sense of difference and awkward-
ness that pervades Elizabeth’s words, it is clear that the two women try
and communicate across the perceived social space in order to facilitate
their sons’ friendship (see also Neal and Vincent 2013). Similarly, Oliver
(Ollie) and Tyler are in a group of boys who, unusually in the data, are
from different class and ethnic backgrounds and who do meet out of
school. This group includes Musa (British Asian) and Sam (White
British), as well as Oliver and Tyler [this group is also referred to in Chaps.
4 and 6]. Musa and Sam’s parents have not known each other for as long
as Elizabeth and Chantelle have, and they described to us the cordial
relationships that have been established in order to facilitate the necessary
arrangements for the children to go home with another family: ‘We
haven’t become close, but we meet at school and say hello. If they go
round to visit, I go to their houses to pick up Musa’ (Nadeem, British
Asian, intermediate class). ‘Obviously we talk and we pass the time of day
and we organise them to come to each other’s houses and things like that.
But nothing as a close relationship. No,’ (Lorna, White British, interme-
diate class).6
Having homophilous social relationships with other parents also
increases the possibility that they share similar views about appropriate
activities for children, and it is this to which we turn next.
After School Activities
After-school activities were one way in which parents managed their chil-
dren’s out of school lives. We have no data to suggest that the choice and
use of particular activities (or no activities) was arranged in a conscious
attempt to build networks of similar children. Instead, we wish to explore

‘families as realised social fictions’ (Burke et al. 2013, p. 172), the stories
families tell about themselves—how ‘we’ do things here, what ‘we’ value,
how ‘we’ spend time—allows us to analyse how their understandings
shape their childrearing styles. Of course, family practices develop with
and around growing children so that children have (different) degrees of
agency and voice within the family as they get older (Atkinson 2016,
p. 45).
For some parents, the ‘right’ (and possible) thing to do as a parent was
to arrange the child’s participation in an array of activities designed in
order to develop particular skills and talents. One of us has written else-
where about the key role organised and paid-for activities play in an
understanding of a ‘good’ childhood as held by many, mostly middle-
class parents (e.g. Vincent 2017; Vincent and Maxwell 2016; Vincent
et al. 2013). An example here from Leewood: Emma is in the friendship
group of White middle-class girls—Emma, Shauna, Phoebe, Joyce and
Megan—in Crimson class. Her mother describes her after-school time as
spent with the same girls.
[Emma] does dancing on a Monday, Wednesday she has piano followed by

her tutor, Thursday gymnastics [at school]. So she has got Tuesdays and
Fridays free […] Shauna does the dance [too], Phoebe and Megan do the
gymnastics. She is going to [day summer camp] with Joyce and Phoebe in
the summer (Catherine, White British middle-class mother, Leewood
School)
We can see here that the out-of-school mixing helped to reinforce the
children’s friendships as a distinctive and homogeneous group, one which
as we noted earlier their class-teacher described as having ‘deeper roots’
than other friendship clusters in the class. All the girls in the friendship
group could share in such activities, unencumbered by concerns about
the cost or practicalities in attending commercially run activities. These
are, of course, much more exclusive than school-run clubs, as they are
more costly both in terms of money for the activity itself and any associ-
ated equipment costs, but also parental time and labour (someone has to
take the children to and from the activities, and usually wait for them
whilst they are there). Claire, the mother of Andy, also in Crimson class,
comments that her son’s friendships with socially similar peers has been
reinforced by attending the same out-of-school activities:
So that [shared activities] is where the friendships just bonded, it seems to

be that is where the kids spend more time with each other outside school,
the older they get, it becomes more important. (Claire, White other,
middle-class mother, Leewood School)
Other children regularly attended Qu’ranic classes at the local mosque,

or went straight to their own homes. The whole notion of play dates or
‘coming home for tea’, seen as a routine, but expected and important,
part of childhood by many parents, alarmed others, who felt they could
not let their children go to houses where they did not have an existing
relationship with the parents or where their children might have to nego-
tiate difficult situations (being given inappropriate food for example, see
Chap. 6). As families differed in their emphasis on out-of-school interac-
tion, this sometimes led to miscommunication and misunderstanding, if
invitations were not responded to or reciprocated (see Chap. 7 for
examples).
Thus, we argue that the focus on the ease and comfort of similarity by
most of the parents resulted in many of the children’s friendships, espe-
cially out-of-school, being populated by those in similar social groupings.
This was not, we argue, necessarily a conscious indicator of a desire for
withdrawal or avoidance of ‘others’, but rather an unarticulated, often
unperceived, caution about mixing and what was possible and manage-
able, which gave rise to a degree of inactivity.
Supporting friendships across difference and diversity can indeed
involve considerable parental labour. Despite this, there was a minority of
parents who made marked attempts to facilitate social relationships across
difference. We refer to these as ‘enablers’ (see Chaps. 1 and 7 for further
definition and discussion). These are parents who make intentional and
purposeful efforts to bridge difference. We focus here on Kaleb (Black
African middle-class father) at Leewood School, as he specifically
described encouraging his children to find friends from a diversity of
backgrounds. ‘I am also advising them to make their friends diversified,
from Black, White, Christian, Muslim … to be more friendly and gener-

ous with the disabled students’. Kaleb also recognises the socio-economic,
as well as ethnic, diversity of his locality, and discusses how different
adults and children meet through the school, presenting opportunities
for friendships across social class. His desire to bridge difference also leads
him to spend a considerable amount of time and ‘conscious’ effort mak-
ing friends with his ‘English’ neighbours and their children, an effort
which eventually pays off, as he described in his second interview with us.
A little bit of a positive development from one of our neighbours and espe-
cially with Christmas cards. And we just were surprised, for the first time,
we received a Christmas card [from them], even before we went out and
gave them their cards, so that is a positive thing [….] Now they allow their
children to play with us [in the communal garden]… yeah, it is getting
better, yes. (Kaleb, Leewood School, Black African, middle-class father)
Given that enabler parents were in a small minority in our sample, it is

possible to read our data as presenting a majority that lives difference
largely through ‘co-presence’ rather than ‘collaboration’ (Amin 2012, p.
59) (although see Chap. 6). We observed earlier that the social is heavily
classed, as friendship across class difference (amongst the children and the
adults) was less common than friendship across ethnic difference. Those
parents with homogenous friendship networks themselves did not gener-
ally reflect on how the nature of their own friendship practices might
influence their children’s understandings and experiences. Rather the
common perception was of children as not ‘seeing’ difference, and so they
were assumed to have the capacity to form relationships independently of
social divisions.
It seems to us that one explanatory factor for this tendency towards
homophily may be parental anxiety. Educational research, influenced by
psychoanalysis (Bibby 2001; Lucey and Reay 2002; Walkerdine et al.
2001) points to the way in which behaviour is shaped by conscious and
unconscious defensive reactions to managing anxiety. We are not adopt-
ing a fully-fledged psychosocial framework here, but we do suggest that
the parental reactions we see to negotiating diversity are ways of managing
anxiety. This is not to suggest a consciously anxious, alert, stressed
population, but rather that many adults whilst consciously, and for the
most part competently managing diverse encounters, experienced some
level of anxiety about close contact with others not like themselves. This
is a form of what Radford calls ‘everyday otherness’, by which he means
that in the moment of everyday encounters across difference there is a
sense of ‘othering’. That is, an identification of others as different and that
that difference may oppose ‘us’ in some way (Radford 2016). This sense
was very much to the surface in Radford’s research context—rural
Australia with a population of established White Australians and newer
Afghan settlers. However, in our London contexts, such a sense was
largely submerged—given the pervasiveness, degree and familiarity of
social and ethnic diversity—but still influential. The parent respondents
in our study were all content, and many enthusiastic, to have their chil-
dren in schools with diverse populations. However, ‘convivial living is a
process, not an outcome’ (Harris 2013, p. 142). Thus, within the context
of this broad acceptance of, and often stated enthusiasm for, diversity,
different parents displayed different ways of negotiating difference, and
the often submerged sense of unease it sometimes provoked. Some man-
aged those who came into the house or limited the houses their children
went to. For others, the private space of the home was more open as dis-
cussed in Chap. 6, but a process of managing difference still took place,
through the consignment of others not like themselves to the periphery
of the social encounter, centring instead the dense networks of other
‘people like me’, through, for example, organising the children’s out-of-
school time. As a result, the children’s friendships, as we showed in Chap.
4, were not bound by homophily, but they were initiated and practised
on a terrain inscribed by largely unspoken, but still powerful social divi-
sions (Smart 2007; May 2011).
Conclusion
In this chapter we have illustrated how adults intervene to manage the
children’s friendships. Inside school, children’s interactions are obviously
subject to teachers’ directions. We see that although there are particular
teachers who are alert to the impact and complexities of the children’s
relationships, there is also a tendency— speaking to the children’s rela-
tively young age, and working from within a demanding policy climate—
to assess friendship practices in terms of quantifiable competencies. Thus,
as Ecclestone and Lewis comment, children who are already able to
appear as ‘emotionally competent, literate and confident…gain new
advantages’ (2014, p. 2013) in the moral economy of schools.
We have also identified the way in which parents’ differing degrees of
desire for the ease and comfort of similarity establish the space within
which their children can maintain friendships outside school. We note,
however, that children’s requests to see their friends out of school can
often act as drivers for parents to negotiate a workable, cordial relation-
ship with ‘others’ in order to facilitate the children socialising (see also
Chaps. 6 and 7).
Returning to the question of children’s agency first introduced in
Chap. 4, we do not mean to suggest a straightforward exercise of disci-
plinary power by either teachers or parents. Rather, we note that chil-
dren’s freedom to make and maintain friendships was, in our data, rarely
severely limited by parents or teachers. Both parents and teachers under-
stood a child’s happiness to be a priority and that friendships were a key
influence upon that happiness. Instances of unhappiness and friendship
tensions could cause parental unease, and occasionally even distress, but
we have no data where parents forbade particular friendships.
Circumscription of friendships by teachers did occasionally happen, as a
form of behaviour management. We referred, for example, in Chap. 4 to
one case at Junction where ongoing conflict between children led to the
teachers putting particular children in different classes, and arranging
their lunchtime activities so that they spent little time together. Thus, we
cannot talk in simple terms of children’s agency and their resistance to
teachers and parents (Coffey and Farrugia 2014). Teachers and parents as
adults could certainly direct these young children’s bodies, moving them
around in school, home, and neighbourhood spaces. Yet, this does not
suggest that the children were ‘powerless’ and the adults ‘powerful’.
Rather, in order to understand the configurations of any one child’s
friendships we need to consider the web of power relations between all
parties: an individual child, his/her peers, and his/her teachers and

parents. Neither teachers, parents, nor pupils are ‘entit[ies] which [are]
“acted upon” but come into being through an active engagement with
systems of power relations that pre-exist the individual’ (Coffey and
Farrugia 2014, p. 469). In this way we can begin to understand the com-
plexity of interactions between differently positioned individuals and the
social structures surrounding them, all of which act to shape a child’s
experiences and practices of friendship.
Notes
1. This has been conceptualised as ‘vocational habitus’—an extension of
Bourdieu’s original concept. Colley (2006) understands vocational habitus as
‘a powerful aspect of the vocational culture: the combination of idealised and
realised dispositions’ which must be adopted and learnt in ‘order to become
the right person for the job’ (see also Braun 2012 for further discussion).
2. After the fieldwork period, we were told that Junction School had intro-
duced a system of changing ‘learning partners’ so that the children worked
with a range of others.
3. ‘Peaceful Problem solving’ is an approach that encourages calm discussion
between protagonists. See e.g. www.thegrid.org.uk/learning/behav-
iour/…/peaceful_problem_solving_poster.pdf
‘Restorative justice’ is a process that resolves conflict by encouraging
children to take responsibility for their actions and respect the views of
others. See, for example, http://www.restorativejustice4schools.co.uk
which emphasises the use of the approach for behaviour management,
another example of the affective nature of friendship being reduced to
emotional and behaviour self-responsibility (see Watson et al. 2012 for a
critique). ‘Circle time’ provides a space in which children can gather
together to discuss personal/emotional issues, and can be used as a reactive
or proactive strategy with regards to friendship.
4. Since we conducted our fieldwork, schools are required to publish details
of their PSHE programme.
5. ‘British values’ are identified by the government as: democracy, rule of
law, individual liberty, mutual respect and tolerance.
6. As noted in Chap. 3, we use ‘intermediate class’ to describe families where
occupations combine aspects from both the professional middle classes,
sometimes known as the ‘service class’, and those with a labour contract
(working-class routine jobs). In this case Lorna is working temporarily as

a school meals supervisor, and her partner is self-employed as a craftsman/
artist.
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6
Extended Social and Spatial Encounters
in Primary School Worlds
In brief: Focusing on school-based parent friendship relationships and prac-

tices, and the way in which the school world and its connective environs
(school, locality, home space) make/shape social and spatial friendship
networks.
Introduction
In this chapter we shift our concern to the spatial dimensions of the
school worlds and the social relationships associated with the schools.
Drawing on recent debates in geographies of education (Butler and
Robson 2001; Holloway and Valentine 2003; Collins and Coleman
2008; Hanson Thiem 2009; Holloway et al. 2010) which are interested
in how ‘education makes space’ (Hanson Thiem 2009, p. 157) we exam-
ine the ways that the school world—and the social interactions and
relationships that constitute that world—radiate out beyond the school
as a bounded institution (see Chap. 3) and into the surrounding
neighbourhood.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73001-1_6
As we explored in Chap. 2, one of the preoccupations in understand-

ing how increasingly heterogeneous urban populations share and inter-
act within urban public and semi-public space has been the extent to
which moments of interaction between people across cultural differ-
ence—a spontaneous conversation in the park, the queue for the bus,
over the shop counter; an act of kindness and civility in helping with a
buggy up a flight of stairs, holding a door open, giving directions, a
smile in passing—are just that: moments. The temporality and ‘thin-
ness’ of these encounters generates questions about their social signifi-
cance (Valentine 2008; Clayton 2012, Vertovec 2015). However, we
have argued in Chap. 2 that it is these forms of urban etiquette that are
important for navigating complex social and spatial landscapes (Noble
2009) and additionally that the momentary can be understood as hav-
ing a long reach and affective power, far beyond its actual time frame
(Neal et al. 2015). There has also been a claim that momentary encoun-
ters, repeated and sustained over time, may be cumulative, becoming
significant for informing the everyday negotiation of cultural difference
and the development of social capacities (Onyx et al. 2011; Noble
2015; Hall 2015).
It is in these contexts that we use this chapter to examine the notion
and impact of what we describe as ‘extended encounters’. These are not
only encounters that are repeated over time (although this is important)
but encounters that continue from one space into in a range of different
but connected spaces. The extension of the encounter takes place through
the habitual practices necessary involved in sharing social goods but it
happens also because a social good may itself generate interactions beyond
its immediate boundaries and location. Routine encounters and recogni-
tions can travel further into other social sites, locations and personal
geographies. Primary schools in the UK provide an exemplar of such a
social resource because of their intensely localised and social nature. As
Collins and Coleman (2008, p. 283) observe ‘school is a place’ but also
‘schools have a place with broader social landscapes’. While Chap. 4 has
examined the friendship practices of children, this chapter focuses on the
ways in which schools can generate social life, friendship relations and
interactions beyond the physical boundaries of the institution and into
other spaces of the locality and home. The theme of the connective settings
of encounters across difference and over time was emphasised by Kaleb,
Extended Social and Spatial Encounters in Primary School Worlds 153
(a Black African, middle-class father) who suggested that one of the areas
in which people mixed was
In the school—activities and you know, parent meetings—whenever there

are events [...] It’s my view, the society is a little bit, you know, a reserved
society. Apart from that [in] places like pubs, places like meetings, events,
sometimes in parks areas as well, or where children can go and play, you
can see people opening up, opening themselves, so you can have such kinds
of interactions and in rare situations, rare conditions, making friends.
The chapter picks up on Kaleb’s observations of interaction and ‘reserva-

tion’ and looks at the ways in which particular social spaces—primary
school worlds and their social geographies (their playgrounds and the
houses, streets, roads, parks, cafés, shops that surround them) and the social
practices of using/being in them (playing in the park, walking to/from
school, negotiating the playground, going to others’ homes and inviting
others home)—may generate affective interactions and social intimacy.
Bringing together the geographies of education, friendship relations and
Amin’s (2002, 2012) notions of ‘micro-publics’ and ‘collaborative strangers’
this chapter considers how schools, as sites of social resource, make place,
generate friendships and affective social life and bring complexly diverse
populations together in sustained social and spatial proximities with differ-
ence. It goes on to consider the situated nature of school-based social inter-
actions, suggesting that these are connective, radiating out from the
institutional boundaries to other non-institutional neighbourhood spaces
and to the home spaces of parents and their children. The conclusion
returns to consider the primary school as generative; a shared social resource
where, even if exchange is mostly avoided or slight, the situated and sus-
tained experience of the school world requires interaction with difference.
onnecting and Making Up Social Space:

C
Primary Schools, Encounter and Places
As discussed in Chap. 2, the tendency in the encounter literature to focus
on the mobile populations inhabiting the informal, busy spaces of urban
landscapes—shopping centres (Wise 2010; Anderson 2011), markets
(Watson 2006; Rhys-Taylor 2013), buses (Wilson 2011), parks (Neal

et al. 2018), cafés (Hall 2012; Neal et al. 2018), the street (Nast and
Blokland 2014; Hall 2015)—has contributed to a lack of focus on social
interdependency in interpretations of conviviality. Socially, little is owed
or expected of unknown others in these settings beyond an urban eti-
quette and a relatively low threshold of social care and civility. Even in the
encounter work that examines repeated contact and interaction through
residential proximity and suburban neighbourliness—such as Wise’s
(2009, p. 37) study of practices of gift giving and the capacity of such
neighbourly practices to ‘dissolve boundaries’—the focus tends to be on
informal, elective interaction between only loosely connected others
rather than an interdependent population that is bounded and brought
into being through the processes and practices of routinely sharing a par-
ticular social resource and the setting of that resource. Exploring the rela-
tionships between socially and ethnically complex urban populations
who share a social resource, such as school, builds on Amin’s concept of
the ‘micro-publics of everyday social contact’ (2002, p. 959). Our data
add empirical detail to the argument that encounters in sites such as
‘workplaces, colleges, youth centres, sports or music clubs, theatre groups,
communal gardens and so on’ are more likely to have meaning and impact
because of the repeated nature of coming together of different others.
Following this we suggest that not only are primary schools micro-public
sites but that they go beyond this as they are also able to connect into a
school’s wider social networks and spaces. As Collins and Coleman (2008,
p. 281) argue, primary schools ‘are central to the social geographies of
everyday life’, and have a ‘social significance for households [and] neigh-
bourhoods’ (2008, p. 282) as well as an ‘ability to foster a sense of com-
munity’ (2008, p. 291). In their study of early twenty-first century
gentrification in inner London, Butler and Robson (2001) found that
primary schools were often core to the social networks of establishing
middle classes. In Telegraph Hill (an area in the south-east of the city)
they note, for example, that
The area’s strong and well-deployed stock of social capital […] arises,
for the most part, from networks centred on its primary school and
residents’ association. The local primary school has become the domi-
nant focus of the community: almost all of the children of our respon-
dents were at the school, had been there or would be going there […]
Over the past two decades, the school has been nurtured by middle-
class parents and it is the focal point of social interaction and friend-
ship networks that continue long after the children have left the school.
(2001, p. 2150)
The co-productive—and reproductive—social and spatial dynamics

generated by schools that Butler and Robson identify has meant that
education institutions have increasingly drawn the attention of social
geographers who use education spaces not to understand education
processes per se but rather to use schools as a lens through which to
examine social, economic and cultural forces within particular environ-
ments and, as Holloway et al. put it, ‘conceptual[ise] education spaces
as essentially shaped by wider processes’ (2010, p. 584). This emphasis
on ‘outward’ perspective in geographies of education is not confined to
the incorporation of the wider social contexts of schools and the net-
works which emanate from these. It has also sought to highlight the
ways in which extra-curricular practices (pre- and after-school clubs and
activities) and use of local spaces (homes, parks, streets, the journey to
and from school, shops) extend the institutional boundaries of a school
and of the social relations made through it. This is captured in Holloway’s
et al.’s observation that ‘[i]n conceptual terms, we need to expand our
interpretation of what counts as spaces of education. Traditional sites of
education such as schools and universities remain important in our
envisioning of the field of research, but we must also pay greater atten-
tion to the home, pre-school provision, neighbourhood spaces and
after-school care’ (2010, p. 595). An example of this can be seen in
Christy Kulz’s ethnographic work in ‘Dreamfields’, a socially and ethni-
cally mixed, authoritarian and aspirational secondary school located in
a multicultural urban environment. She discusses the ways in which the
school seeks to seal itself off from its ‘chaotic urban’ outside and strictly
manages pupils in the local environment when they have to go into it
(i.e. at arrival and home times). Recognising the leakiness of the school
local environment boundary, Kulz describes how Dreamfields extends

its disciplinary geographical reach: ‘senior staff members are dispatched
in pairs to walk the streets after school, ensuring students wear the uni-
form correctly and do not enter shops or loiter on their way home’
(2017, p. 48). While our focus is not the disciplinary reach of schools
we share the emphasis on the ways in which schools have a spatial
stretch deep into their localities. In the context of primary schools this
social extension of the school space means that primary schools ‘are
places that matter to many (perhaps most?) people’ (Collins and
Coleman 2008, p. 296 original emphasis).
The geographies of education debates are helpful to us in under-
standing how schools work as places and in places, but when these
institutional and neighbourhood places are characterised by ethnic
and social difference it is Amin’s concept of ‘collaborative strangers’
directed at analysing social interactions and attachments within and
extending out from primary school worlds that allows us to extend
Collins’ and Coleman’s argument that schools matter. The concept of
collaborative strangers highlights the ways in which differentiated
others can come together in ‘joint endeavour’ and ‘productive collec-
tive venture’ [but] without the expectation that they will necessarily
‘develop close affinities’ (2012, p. 56). The emphasis that the ‘collab-
orative’ gives here is significant in that it emphasises the iterative bal-
ance between interdependency and ‘lighter’ forms of togetherness
that particularly resonates with primary schools worlds. This is
because they involve repeated and routinised encounters between an
intergenerational, semi-closed, school ‘user’ population over an
extended period of time (seven years), and also because they can gen-
erate a collective institutional mutuality (caring about a school) and
lead to wider encounters and social interactions in associated public,
semi-public and home spaces. In short, primary schools are socially
productive sites. This is not to diminish the point that schools are
reproductive of social divisions and inequalities (and we explore some
of this tension below and in Chap. 7) but it is the impact schools can
have on social and personal intergenerational life—and the connected
spaces of this—that we consider next.
onvivial Space? Social Exchange

C
and Friendship-Making in Primary School
Worlds
In an echo of Butler’s and Robson’s portrayal of Telegraph Hill’s primary
schools as a key site for place and friendship making, Savage et al. (2005,
p. 143) found in their study of globalisation, locality and belonging, that
most participants they interviewed identified their close friends as having
been made in childhood or through their children’s schools (see Chap. 1).
In our study, it was similarly apparent that in our participants’ adult lives,
schools continued to work as friendship-making sites. Nearly all of the
participants in our three schools had established some degree of friend-
ship and social networks through their child/children attending primary
school. However, there was significant variation in the depth and type of
these friendship formations.
We have suggested that adult friendships tend to reflect uneven degrees
of intimacy. While some friendship forms correspond to Spencer’s and
Pahl’s definition of friends as ‘comforters, confidants and soulmates’ act-
ing ‘as a vital safety net providing much needed support and intimacy’
(2006, p. 197 and 210), other friendships are more situational and life-
course generated. As one participant, Aarthi (a mixed heritage, middle-
class mother at Leewood School, introduced in Chap. 1) explained in
relation to her children’s school, ‘you see a lot of circumstantial friend-
ships’, and another mother (White British middle-class at Leewood
School) pointed to the significance of ‘disposable friends’. These descrip-
tions echo with Savage et al.’s findings (cited in Chap. 1) that ‘best friend-
ships’ require less frequent contact, while ‘high contact’ friendships tend
not to be so emotionally intense. The situational focus of these friendship
descriptions is also consistent with the work of Smart et al. who suggest
that there is ‘movement in and out of friendships’ and that ‘friendship,
like kinship, cannot be a static relationship’ (2012, p. 92).
However, the seeming paradox of high contact, but thinner, situational
friendships does not mean that these were unimportant friendships. A
recurring pattern across our interview conversations with all the parents
was that primary schools were a key source of affective connections and
these could be emotionally meaningful and supportive social relation-

ships. We return to Aarthi here because she was not unusual in her
description of how, despite the circumstantial friendships that she saw
and had herself experienced, her closest and most valued friendships had
come from meeting people at Leewood School where each of her three
children were or had been pupils:
I think the friendships that I have had that have been most enduring have
been the ones that I have had with the parents of [son’s] classmates, my
oldest boy, and [daughter’s] classmates’ parents.
Alongside experiences of situational and long-lasting friendships made

through their children’s schools was a recognition of the importance of
the school as a key setting for making friends and building wider social
connections through these relationships, as Elif, a Turkish, working-class
mother, explains:
It is not easy to make new friends, new social groups, you do it through
kids’ schools or your school if you are studying, or your job. But mostly I
think these days we do make, most of us, friends through our kids’ school
because if you want to be involved in the school life that is what you do.
You do learn more about people through your kids’ friendships.
Elif ’s reference to ‘most of us’ is gendered if only because most

(although not all) of the participating parents directly involved in school
life were women. Harry (a White British, working-class father at Leewood
School) contrasts what happens when his partner (also White British
working-class) takes the children to school with his own experience:
She knows a lot of other people, like in the school. She gets on with a lot
of people, so she tends to … it could take her twenty minutes to get out of
the playground after she drops [daughter] off, whereas I’m usually in and
out …[Laughter] and like home by five past nine [school starts 8.50 am].
She’s rolling in at half nine and I’m thinking like where have you been?
That’s just from her chatting to everyone in the playground!
However, what is perhaps more significant in these friendship accounts

is the emphasis that both Elif and Harry place on the school as generative
of friendship relations and as a wider environment of affective and com-

munal social care. This is consistent with Hage (1998, 2003) and Amin
(2012) who use notions of the ethics of care and public care to refer to a
non-defensive, more open and mutual recognition of others. A hopeful
reciprocity lies at the heart of such ideas—Hage refers to the ‘very pres-
ence of the other as a gift’ as this presence may elicit our humanity for
example (2003, p. 151). In her interview, Rabia, a Pakistani, working-
class mother at Junction School, highlighted how, by being part of what
Hage calls ‘an imaginary collectivity’ (2003, p. 99), the particular interac-
tive civilities of the primary school world and the concomitant encoun-
ters between parents meant that primary schools differed from other
social sites:
I think the school is the best place, when you go and see each other and you
meet people, otherwise if you stay home you don’t do anything, you don’t
go out, you don’t get to see any other person you know. Normally when
you go shopping and stuff you don’t see people and say ‘Hello Hi’, it is just
I think school […] I think it is probably because you go every day, you see
them every day, so obviously you will get to know them and you will meet
many people.
As well as identifying the civic interaction that school world requires

from those who are within it, Rabia (like Elif and Harry) also picks up on
the importance of the ways in which familiarity and public intimacy are
accumulated through daily routines—‘you go every day and see them
every day’. In the three schools such routines tended to generate what we
would call ‘civil attention’ or the tacit and affective acknowledgement of
others (see Noble 2015). Goffman’s (1963) concept of civil inattention—
the unfocused, minimally interactive but non-hostile acknowledgement
of others—is helpful in understanding how public and semi-public lei-
sure and consumption spaces are used by multicultural populations (see
Neal et al. 2018). We shift this notion of ‘inattention’ to ‘attention’ to
highlight the different mutualism that the sustained sharing of social
goods can involve. In short, there is a more focused and active recognition
of diverse others required when a population repeatedly inhabits and
shares the same (school) world. Similarly, in his distinction between ‘col-
laborating strangers’ and ‘co-present strangers’ Amin (2012, p. 37)
emphasises labour and practices, as it is ‘the nature of work that sustains

productive alignment between strangers’ (2012, p. 37). Over time it is
processes of ‘doing’ that bind and enrol strangers into a shared project as
particular populations become interdependently, intimately and repeat-
edly thrown together, as they access a particular social good (such as edu-
cation) through shared material spaces (such as a school).
As an enrolment project, the world of the primary school amplifies the
need for collaborative practice. The thickness of interaction and acknowl-
edgment will vary significantly—from a smile, passing ‘hi, hello’ greet-
ings and chats, to friendship relations—but there is a thin line of civil
attention that runs through all these practices. This thin line, or mini-
mum threshold of civility, is similar to the ‘delicate adjustment’ to the
presence of the other that is a feature of civil inattention (Goffman 1963,
p. 76). However, what makes it possible to talk of civil attention is the
extent to which there is more of an orientation towards a moment of
discursive and non-discursive (smiles and nods were experienced by par-
ticipants as convivial codes) recognition of collaborative belonging. At
the same time, it is also necessary to acknowledge that we observed and
were told about clusterings of parent friendship groups which often had
social class and/or ethnic dimensions and were perceived as exclusive, and
for some participants these meant that school environments were not
experienced as easy social spaces (see Chap. 7 for more discussion of this).
But, we would also emphasise here that participants did not always, or
straightforwardly, view particular ethnic clusterings with unease or see
them as necessarily divisive or exclusive. For example, Elif ’s interview
reveals a more complex response to the ethnicised social interaction she
sees in the school:
In a way I think it is mixed but in other ways I think not. Because it’s okay
for them to say to each other ‘hello’ in a few minutes, but then again there
are groups that I can see in the playground that most of the mums kind of
go with their cultures. I can see Turkish ones kind of becoming a little
group. Germans, we have quite many Germans now. The Germans are
kind of becoming their own group. And we have Somali mums they are
kind of becoming their little group. I can see that they are trying to act
together. As long as those people socialise I have no problem because I
don’t like to see people stone faced, walking around, I think it is a good
thing and they all bring different qualities to school…
Same ethnicity parent clusterings are not seen as problematic per se by

Elif because they do not prevent a wider set of practices in which parents
acknowledge each other (the quick hellos) and can come together, while
their more ‘closed’ sociality is also able to lend itself to a wider sociality
(people not being ‘stone faced’). Elif ’s interpretations of the playground
relationships she observes are significant as she values the sociality gener-
ated by the groupings rather than perceiving them as signalling an absence
of interaction across difference. While other parents experienced the
playground relationships as more exclusionary, the importance of being
able to acknowledge others through sociality was emphasised by some. In
the same way Rabia at Junction School, mentioned above, practised a
routine, inclusive sociality:
I go and say ‘Hello, Hi’ to everybody in the morning and at night time like
afternoon as well. [I know] loads of people […] It is not like [just those]
from Pakistan it is everybody like, so I just say ‘Hello’, but especially the
kids’ friends, so we know the parents, so we say, ‘Hello Hi’ basically.
Our observations of school spaces tended to confirm them as sites of

collaborative sociality and friendly interactions which varied from the
‘Hi, hello’ exchanges Rabia identifies to friendship groupings and more
intimate friendships. The playgrounds were the most obvious settings for
observing these, but other public spaces in the schools, such as the foyer
areas in Leewood and Fernhill Schools which had comfortable seating
with cheerful notice boards and the well-used Parents’ Room at Junction
School, also worked to invite lingering, chatting and interaction. This is
not to gloss over the experiences of unease or apathy of parents who ‘look
a bit tired and bored’ as one mother at Fernhill School described the
social landscape of playground. It is rather to confirm that the routinised,
etiquette-demanding spaces of primary schools are first, difficult (although
not impossible) to navigate without some civic and social interaction;
second, such familiarities and social interactions do generate friendships/
friendship-like social relations; and third, they have an accumulative sen-
sory effect of creating atmospheres of social engagement and mutual rec-
ognition (see Anderson 2014) which are able to incorporate ethnic
diversity and cultural difference. The extent to which these extend beyond
school spaces is what we consider next.
Schools as Connective Conviviality Sites

As well as approaching schools as collaborative sites of encounter we also
see primary schools as situated institutions. As Collins and Coleman
(2008, p. 291) note ‘the social geographies of schools extends well beyond
their physical boundaries […] they are sites of common experience within
neighbourhoods, which link different generations and provide a physical
site for the maintenance of local social contacts’. As we argued earlier,
primary schools should be approached not only as total institutions or as
bounded social resources, but they can also be understood in topological
terms, acting as nodes within webs of localised social connection. Social
relations are made in, around, through and outside of schools creating
social and spatial associations between the school and related elsewheres
(Allen 2016; Kulz 2017). So, for example, Fareeda, a mother at Junction
School, told us,
My sister-in-law, she lives in [X] now, so she came over and we all went [out
locally] for a meal and I think every few yards, she was like, ‘Oh my God
you are like a celebrity’. It was the half term holiday and it was [constantly],
‘Oh Hello’ you know, and [all] the mums—because everyone is out and
about aren’t they? So it is nice, it is not just something that happens in
school. I know when I am outside, if I don’t know someone they will say
[…], it is nice to introduce people that can help other people or just, you
know, even friendship-wise, it is nice isn’t it, someone to talk to? (Fareeda,
British Asian, middle-class mother)
In this account the extension of school-based relationships into the

wider, non-school environment is affectively experienced and valued (for
example Fareeda uses ‘nice’ repeatedly). What Fareeda describes as her
social interactions both inside and outside of her child’s school is a pri-
mary school’s mix of topology and topography. There is a geographic
proximity to her experience of the school space but this can mutate
beyond being ‘place-based in a simple territorial sense’ (Allen and
Cochrane 2014, p. 1614) into broader networks of school-related con-
vivial social interactions and recognitions. This resonates with Holloway
et al.’s proposal that there is a need to ‘broaden our spatial lens [and this]
also require us to consider spatial networks. Rather than focusing on edu-

cation within specific sites, we need to trace the webs of connections
between, for example, home and school, showing how socio-spatial prac-
tices in each shape children, youth and families’ experiences of both sites’
(2010, p. 595). With this spatial turn in mind we continually approached
‘our’ schools as being very much within their local geographies (see also
Chap. 3). The three schools were all surrounded by residential streets and
this contributed to the high number of children who primarily walked to
school with a parent. These daily journeys to and from school can be seen
as part of the connective, iterative extension of each of the schools into
their local environment with families walking along the streets and stop-
ping to chat on the pavement or go into shops. The practices of drop-off
and collection, of walking with and then without children, increase the
likelihood of interaction and a number of participants spoke of this as
being their first point of establishing friendship exchanges and public
intimacies with others involved in the same spatial and social process (see
also Vowden 2012). The often-shared nature of the routes and walks to
and from school highlight the productive nature of space for social
exchange and friendship-relations, as routine spatial practices work to
draw people together. More than just the proximity of diversity, it is the
effect of the same spaces being used for the same things by different
groups, which allowed for recognition and, at times, facilitated more
interactive connection.
This spatial productivity extended to neighbour relationships in which
residential and school intimacies overlapped and intersected. As Ava (a
Black Caribbean working-class mother at Leewood School) explained to
us,
Interviewer: […] obviously you know Pippa’s dad because you were
talking to him. Do you know other parents?
Ava: Yeah, Cindy’s mum. Queenie used to go there [to Cindy’s
house] every Wednesday after school, so yeah we used to
go there a lot. Cindy’s mum, Aisha’s mum, Gabra’s mum—
and I think because we all live next to each other as well,
Daine’s mum [too]…so we always see each other out of
the school.
Ava is describing a working-class friendship group which was ethni-

cally diverse and whose members had long known each other as neigh-
bours on a social housing estate close to Leewood. In Junction School
there was also a strong friendship group that walked to school together,
was sociable, had friendship relations and lived in the same small network
of roads. Unlike Ava’s, this group was predominantly White British and
middle class in a just-gentrifying locality and there was a sense in which
members of this group deliberately sought each other out and were per-
ceived by other parents as doing so. Lorna (a White British intermediate
class mother)1 commented on this group and what she perceived to be
their exclusivity—she did not see herself as part of it. Lorna explained
how her walk to and from school is a part of her school-based friendship
practices (she walked with another mother) but she also identifies the
ways in which the walking-to-school and friendship connection is socially
ordered:
I often walk back with Jordan’s mum [Pat, Black Caribbean] […], but […]
the people who live in [X, an intricate network of residential roads] that is
quite a tight knit community, there is a definite group of those people.
They are all very friendly [with each other] and obviously do lots of things
together.
While these residential geographies were socially mixed, with social

housing estates next to increasingly expensive owner-occupied, mostly
Victorian housing, the school walk, especially at Junction School, largely
appeared to reinforce social orderings. Both Ava’s and Lorna’s narratives
illustrate the ways in which neighbourhood spaces become school-related
spaces, particularly at the beginning and end of the school day. While
Lorna’s account shows that these journeys can reinforce the exclusivity of
some parent groups, the daily to-and-from school journeys presented a
space of interaction and friendship, as Lorna’s and Patricia’s relationship
evidences. Recognition of parents’ and children’s exchanges meant that
friend-like acknowledgements were always either present or possible in
the ‘hi hello’ public intimacy of the rhythms and routines of school arrival
and departure. Other social spaces in the schools’ environments—shops,
bus stops, parks and local cafés—also contributed to this school-generated
affective landscape. For example, in the established gentrification around

Leewood School the abundance of boutique, independent cafés had facil-
itated a flourishing sociality of going for a coffee after/before the school
drop-off. Our field notes detail seeing some of the participants sitting in
what they described in their interviews as, their ‘favourite’ cafés, just
around the corner of Leewood School before school began as well as after
the morning drop-off. The newer or more partial gentrification around
Junction and Fernhill Schools meant there were fewer boutique cafés
although those that existed were a particular focus for sociality among
middle-class parents.
Going to these cafés was often a heavily classed practice with certain
café spaces articulating a particular class ‘grammar’ which also worked
across ethnicity, with some of the middle-class Black and minority ethnic
participants also using these boutique café spaces (see Anderson 2011).
However, some cheaper independent cafés (at Leewood and Junction
Schools) and brand cafés (at Junction and Fernhill) presented more acces-
sible class and culturally ‘neutral’ environment used by a varied range of
parents (see Neal et al. 2018). In her work on place and, specifically, in
her concept of urban space as ‘thrown-together’ Doreen Massey (2005)
reminds us that space gets shaped by coexisting, ‘distinct trajectories’. As
a result, what appear to be the same material spaces, are very differently
experienced, felt, used, or avoided by different groups within ‘local popu-
lations’ (see also Hall 2012). In this context these café spaces can be
understood as sites where school-based adult friendship relations and
networks were enacted, practised and maintained, but they also highlight
the ways in which such sites may reproduce or sustain difference particu-
larly in terms of social class.
It was local parks, particularly at Leewood and Fernhill Schools, that
presented the most socially and ethnically mixed sites of convivial
exchange and friendship-related sociality (see Neal et al. 2015). While
Amin (2012, p. 59) argues that co-present strangers in public spaces and
collaborating strangers in organisational settings are different and pro-
duce distinct forms of common habitation or togetherness, green public
spaces with their sensory materialities (trees, benches, lawns, lakes, walk-
ways) and their civic associations (play grounds, tennis courts, football
pitches, bandstands) can work as inclusive sites which bridge co-presence
and collaboration. In their work on green public space, Neal et al. (2015)
suggest that these play a key role in senses of localised attachment. The
parks near to Leewood and Fernhill were routinely used by the schools
for various events, such as classroom trips, school sports days and school
picnics. But these park spaces, especially the park next to Leewood
School, were also heavily used by the participants in everyday ways and
were frequently identified, by both the child and adult participants, as
one of the special things about the school’s locality, as sites of meeting up,
being in and ‘bumping into’ well-known and less known but recognised
parents. For example, Elif told us how she had organised her son Iraz’s
birthday party to be held in the park, and in her re-interview Mira (a
mixed heritage, middle-class mother) told a story of how she had been
thinking about the research project because she had been sitting in the
park and been joined by Julia (a White British working-class mother)
whom she had not really ever spoken to before. They had sat on the park
bench and chatted ‘for ages’ and Julia’s older daughter now babysat for
Mira. Kaleb, too, spoke about the ways in which the park worked as a
spontaneous social and destination place for parents and children, often
prompting parents to get together, ‘you can call [and say] ‘let’s meet, it’s
a nice shiny sunny day, so come on, get out [laughs] … and you meet
there’. However, the park spaces at Junction and Fernhill Schools were
used rather differently. At both these schools the park spaces were men-
tioned by children and parents as being used for going to play and walk
but not as regularly as in the Leewood School interviews. The park spaces
were more of a distance from both of these schools. However, Junction
School had a small recreational play space almost directly next to it and
this was heavily used by the children after and before school. Neal et al.
(2018) argue that more ‘successful public parks’ are associated with safety,
and well-resourced children’s leisure facilities are often critical to this.
While the proximity of park space to schools seemed to be the biggest
factor in the levels of use by children and parents the nature and percep-
tions of the park space will impact on use.
In this way the school-proximate and well-looked-after green public
spaces, with their children’s recreational spaces, were sites of shared
resource as well as settings in which school-related interactions and
friendship relations were enacted and ‘done’. This is consistent with work
that has focused on the role of (successful) park spaces for fostering senses
of belonging and place attachment among diverse populations (Cattell
et al. 2008; Peters et al. 2010; Neal et al. 2018). If public and semi-public
spaces were sites into which school-based social intimacies and related
friendship-making and practices stretched, potentially interrupting and
reinforcing ethnic and social difference, what of the more private geogra-
phies of home spaces?
ome Spaces, Social Intimacy and School-

H
Based Friendships
While home space has been a particular focus for education sociologists,
they have mostly approached it in terms of social class and the interaction
of home–school boundaries, and its impact on school experiences and
educational outcomes (see for example Vincent 1996; Lareau 2011; Reay
et al. 2011; Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson, 2014; Kulz 2017). In other
words, the focus has been on the way that home space comes into educa-
tional space. In wider sociological work, home has been a focus for under-
standing gendered, familial and classed social relations as well as social
change and Miller (2008) reminds us that social relationships, identities
and experiences are embedded into the materialities of home space. For
Smart (2007, p. 163) what this means is that we need to think of home as
‘having no fixed meaning’ and ‘being a part of the way in which people
experience and make their relationships (2007, p. 165). Picking up on
these debates geographers Valentine and Hughes (2012, p. 254) argue,
‘home is […] the space where families must manage a transition from
dispersion to convergence. The space of the home is a complex, yet often
taken-for-granted, phenomenon that reflects changing ideas and realities
about spatial entitlements, privacy and so on.’ The idea of convergence
and home space that Valentine and Hughes raise here is interesting for us
because it allows us to focus on the way education space comes into home
space. So who is brought together into the home in the context of school
worlds—which friends, acquaintances, other parents from that school
world get bundled up into the convergence processes in the home? Putting
home space as central to debates about cultural difference and affective
relationships remains under-researched and home tends to be seen as out-

side of or apart from the public and semi-public spaces of encounter. For
example, in her work on social relations in the diverse context of Hackney,
Wessendorf (2014) has argued that while mixing and interaction across
cultural difference in public and parochial space is increasingly common-
place and taken for granted, what she calls private social spaces remain
sites of separation and division, ‘people deal with diversity on a day to day
basis in public and parochial space. But privately, at home and with
friends, they want to relax and not deal with negotiations of difference’
(2014, p. 144). While Wessendorf uses private social spaces primarily to
mean more intimate social networks and friendships, home spaces are at
times alluded to as part of private space (e.g. ‘people go home separately’
2014, p. 145). While we too found the homophily that Wessendorf iden-
tifies in her participants’ friendship networks, what was also apparent was
that, at times, the home space reflected the topological nature of the pri-
mary school world, and became part of the connective reach of school-
based social intimacies and (adults and children’s) friendships as the
boundaries of home space could be interrupted and crossed by the rela-
tionships of the more public education space.
This extension of school-based social relationships and friendships into
the intimacy of home spaces was often ambivalent, complex and at
times, directly avoided. Home space was distinct as a site of difference
encounter and particularly managed. Anxieties over home space and
school-based friendships were sometimes expressed in worries about the
home environments of other parents relating to a range of care practices;
for example, the provision of right food, supervision of bed times, televi-
sion and internet access, and so on, as well as more generic concerns about
trust and the safety of a child and these were shared by all parents we
spoke to. For example, Sahar (a working-class, Arab mother at Junction
School) explained that ‘if I don’t know the parents really, if I don’t have a
friendship with them, I can’t let my child go’. This was echoed by other
parents. As Faruk (a Turkish, working-class father at Leewood School)
admitted, ‘I don’t believe everyone is as cautious, and as protective and as
caring as me’. However, we found that parents, often in response to their
children’s requests to see their friends after school, did make efforts to
negotiate difference whilst maintaining a sense of security. As suggested
above, one reason for not allowing children to visit other people’s houses
was concern over whether the children would easily be able to uphold
religious practices. Such stances have tended to be explained through pop-
ulist discourses of ‘self-segregation’ by particular minority ethnic groups,
most notably Muslims (Crozier and Davies 2008; Phillips 2006). We
found, as Chap. 4 illustrates, that religious differences were a factor that
affected the configuration of children’s friendships, but that self-segrega-
tion was a far from adequate explanation. Majority attitudes are not always
inclusive. Bercu (the mother of Zayla in Crimson class), described being
made to feel uncomfortable for wanting her daughter to eat halal food:
We went to a birthday party with my daughter and I didn’t know what was
in the food and I had to refuse and I had to make Zayla refuse as well. But
with Fatimah [friend from Crimson class] because it’s all halal food, then I
can send my daughter there with a good heart […] After that incident
because they [other parents] look at you a little bit differently when you
don’t eat the food, then nowadays she just goes to birthday parties of
Turkish families (Bercu, Turkish working-class mother, Leewood School)
Rabia, who we discussed earlier, who spoke of saying ‘hi hello’ to

everyone at Junction School, and who was very keen that her children
had friends at school, and interacted with all their peers, also worried
about her children visiting unfamiliar and non-Muslim homes. In the
interview extract below, Rabia’s sense of discomfort comes from an anxi-
ety that she may be ‘operating in a space with which [her] personal moral
disposition is not compatible’ (Valentine and Sadgrove 2012, p. 2060):
It is just that I recognise that they [other families] have got different tradi-
tions, and you know we have to follow a few things. When they go there
[to others’ houses], obviously they will get to know many things […] I can
just limit them [her children] and make them understand what is good,
what is not for us. […] It is not that I am going to try and stop them all
through [their childhood], as soon as they go to secondary [school], they
are not in my hands.
We want to make three points here regarding her apparent avoidance

of difference. First, that parental anxiety around their children attending
the homes of an unknown ‘other’ was a wider parental anxiety and by no

means confined to parents of a particular ethnic or religious background,
and not all the parents to whom we spoke who identified as Muslim took
this view (see Nadeem cited below). Second, Rabia is not trying to pre-
vent her children’s friendships, but rather to preserve her sense of security
around her children and manage home space. Rabia goes on to explain in
her interview how, to compensate for any missed social opportunities,
she hosts a party at home for her children’s friends, indicating her willing-
ness to invite diverse children into her home. Furthermore, Rabia recog-
nised that her approach to the home spaces of others will change as her
children age. Therefore, we argue that Rabia is not presenting an example
of withdrawal and segregation, but one of management and negotiation,
of her own feelings as well as of the wider context of the everyday school
world. Third, and very pertinent for our purposes, a reluctance to mix is
often assigned to minority groups, whereas patterns of separation, around
social class for instance, in the majority White population are often
ignored. So, alongside worries articulated around trust and religious and
cultural otherness and/or sameness participants also agonised about the
ways in which ethnic and social class differences within home spaces
might be emotionally difficult and uncomfortable.
A version of this social unease is present in Elizabeth’s (White British,
middle-class Junction School mother, introduced in Chap. 5) delibera-
tions over using home spaces for her son’s school-based socially and eth-
nically mixed friendship group:
I have thought about inviting some of Ollie’s friends from his class and
their parents all round here and I’ve never done it because … I’m not sure
how it would be enjoyable for the parents, it would be awkward. Although
as I talk to you now I think, oh I must do that, it would be good. But again
it would be an effort and because it would be an effort I don’t know who
would come and who wouldn’t…’
Elizabeth’s anxieties about inviting particular (i.e. the more ethnically

and socially mixed) school-based social relationships into her home have
a number of articulations—the labour involved (it would be an ‘effort’)
and social discomfort (it would be ‘awkward’)—but these do not quite

dispel her sense that using her home as a site of sociality for diverse adults
and children could be positive (‘it would be good’). In the agonising and
ambivalences in Elizabeth’s position there are glimpses of how her avoid-
ance of difference might be opened up to social interaction. In contrast to
Elizabeth there were, however, other more straightforward narratives of
home spaces being deliberately used as sites of inclusive school-related
socialising and friendship practices. For example, Elif, (working-class
Turkish mother at Leewood School) told us that,
because my place is small we don’t do the big parties […but] you know I
had one before Christmas, I invited the mums from the school. Only the
mums from [child’s] class and the mums that I do know from the other
classrooms as well…Yes, for everyone I cooked…yes, [and] my friend had
the evening party…We are doing a little evening drinks [and] at Halloween
we had [a party] at my friend’s house.
Home spaces were, then, whether avoided or a focus for social inti-
macy and friendship practices, part of the landscape in which school-
related friendship and social care relations were enacted and had to be
routinely negotiated by parents. Nadeem, a British Asian father at
Junction School with an intermediate class identity explained how his
son’s in-school friendships regularly involved home spaces in their out-
of-school friendship activities, ‘most of my son’s friends are—two of
them are English—Sam and Ollie, they invite him round, we invite his
friends round [….] So they have come round to our house, he has gone
round to their houses to play’. While this account of out-of-school mix-
ing of a mixed social class, mixed ethnicity quartet (Tyler was also part of
this group) was relatively unusual across the data, what Nadeem illus-
trates is the nature of the social world of primary schools and the extent
to which some children can use and rely on home spaces for their friend-
ships—for play dates, birthday parties, or sleepovers. This situational
mixing meant, as Nadeem explains, that parents were, at times, required
to interact convivially with each other and most parents had experienced
and/or evolved a variety of strategies for managing their own and their
children’s friendships in home spaces. Kaleb, whom we cited in our intro-

duction, explained his experience of this:
… apart from school events there are occasions in which you get to know
other parents better [and] one of the best events is birthday parties. So we
invite their parents and they also invite us. And in those occasions we will
have the opportunity to sit down together with them and have little discus-
sions […] in those situations, you exchange ideas [….] Those parents, espe-
cially the parents of the children who are very close to our children […] we
are building up close relationships with their families as well, in particular
with opportunities like birthdays and like that.
Kaleb’s account, like Elif ’s, shows that school-sourced, but home-
based, social intimacy may become established through birthday parties
and similar celebratory/get together occasions which may generate inter-
action across difference for both children and adults in personal geogra-
phies. This is not to suggest these encounters are straightforward or easy.
We discussed how Bercu now avoided them altogether, and some of the
labour of convivial interaction is illustrated in Kaleb’s description of
birthday parties with his use of terms such as ‘little discussions’, ‘building
up relationships’, and ‘using opportunities’ (Noble 2009). In an echo of
our discussions in Chap. 5, in many of the accounts we have explored
here there is a sense that participants engage in careful and deliberated
strategies for managing difference in home space. While we are cautious
about over-claiming the extent to which home spaces became sites of
extended encounter—we have noted that they were sites of difference
anxiety and avoidance—we suggest that the stretch of the primary school-
based social interactions and friendship relations means that home spaces
are entangled in the experience of living with proximate difference and
known and unknown others. Most of the participants had strategies for
managing difference in their own and their children’s school-based friend-
ships outside of the school world and while these were enacted and wor-
ried over in a variety of ways, what is evidenced is the ways in which the
personal geographies of home space were not simply bounded or priva-
tised and sealed off from difference but were, through the topology of the
school world, also sites of exchange and encounter that required some
form of negotiation.
Conclusions
We began this chapter by arguing for the importance of a social geogra-
phy of education (Butler and Robson 2001; Collins and Coleman 2008;
Holloway et al. 2010) as a way to contextualise the multidimensionality
of primary schools. Schools are not ‘self-contained’ (Collins and Coleman
2008, p. 296) and, beyond the provision of education services, primary
schools in particular generate wider social worlds for parents and children
and extend the school world well beyond the institution’s physical bound-
aries creating wider public, semi-public and personal spatial networks,
webs and connections between familiar others. While the work on
encounter and conviviality is often very much set in place (e.g. Back
1996; Wise and Velayutham 2009; Hall 2012; Neal and Vincent 2013;
Rhys-Taylor 2013; Wessendorf 2014; Neal et al. 2018), the ways in
which sustained encounters of difference travel between and extend into
connected but distinct material spaces has received less empirical atten-
tion. The project’s primary schools can be understood as situated, co-
productive resource sites where the social interactions and relationships
made within them topologically extend and get iteratively maintained
elsewhere (see also Kulz 2017).
In this context we consider primary school worlds as generative of
affective social relationships—all of the participants in our study had
experienced some form of friendship relations with other parents through
their children’s schools—and as sites in which localised social relations in
rapidly changing and heterogeneous urban environments have to be nav-
igated. While there has been comment on the social capital building role
of primary schools in localities and communities (see Butler and Robson
2001; Hillyard and Bagely 2013, for example) what, as Collins and
Coleman (2008) note, has been less scrutinised are the ways in which
primary schools and their geographies work as intergenerational collab-
orative spaces, as children’s social worlds demand that many parents
negotiate difference to some degree in their personal lives. We have drawn
on data to suggest that this can give rise to social networks and in some
instances generate adult friendship relations, emphasising how a primary
school world can be a collective experience, shared over time, in which
social interaction between unknown and different others is difficult to
avoid. In this context we add empirical depth and develop Amin’s (2002)
identification of micro-publics to suggest that the nature of the social
resource being shared and the wider social geography of the particular site
of multicultural interaction matter. Amin’s (2012) later emphasis on col-
laborative and co-present strangers is also helpful here. In this delineation
it is possible to see how primary schools operate as ‘common ground’
(Amin 2012, pp. 78–80) spaces in which civil attention, or what might
be thought of as civic convivial practices, contribute to the collective,
interdependent, equally entitled use of social resource by diverse known
and unknown others. This is not to underplay tensions or antagonisms
within this environment but to suggest that given this mutualism there
are processes of management and resolution of these. Elif ’s ‘mixed, but in
other ways not’ observation about the behaviours of parents in the
Leewood playground provides an example of such a process. Elif chose to
focus on the broader contribution of these friendship groups to the con-
vivial atmosphere of the playground even as she is outside of (some of )
these.
In this way civil attention and conviviality is a more dynamic, reflexive
and ongoing form of social negotiation. This process can involve the rec-
ognition of proximate difference and the need to negotiate the diversity
of those relationships that are developed through being part of the pri-
mary school world as Kaleb’s, Elif ’s and Nadeem’s accounts each evidence.
There remain practices of classed and ethnicised avoidance, anxiety,
exclusion and social ordering as parents seek the homophilic reassurance
of others like them—groups of similar people in the playground, going
to a certain café, the careful governance of home space—even as there are
processes of recognition and dialogue with others. Put differently, being
part of primary school worlds often requires forms of civil attention and
may generate collaborative practice which gives a ‘more than just proxim-
ity of difference’ dynamic to social relations within schools and beyond
the boundaries of the school space. In this context our data show connec-
tive social and spatial threads running through the local and personal
geographies of those who are part of their world.
This is not to diminish the significance of intersecting ethnic and social
stratifications and the capacities for difference avoidance (see Elizabeth’s
and Rabia’s narratives, for example). Our data does not contradict Reay
et al.’s conclusion that the urban middle class’s ‘yearning after and for dif-
ference’ (2011, p. 121) is more evident in an abstract disposition for mul-
ticultural living rather than in concrete practices to bridge diversity (see
also Chap. 2). But, we suggest, in the unpredictable sharing of the pri-
mary school as a particular form of commons, a range of situational fac-
tors can mediate and interrupt separations, creating as Rabia’s and
Elizabeth’s narratives also show, the possibilities, albeit fragile and uncer-
tain, for more negotiated interactions and reflexive encounters. It is these
simultaneous tensions and openings that we now consider in the follow-
ing chapter.
Notes
1. As noted in chapter 3 we use ‘intermediate class’ to describe families where
sometimes known as the ‘service class,’ and those with a labour contract
(working class routine jobs). In this case Lorna is working temporarily as
a school meals supervisor and her partner is self employed as a craftsman/
artist. Nadeem cited below, works in retail and his partner is an at home
mother.
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7
Antagonisms, Ambivalences
and Association: Parents’ Friendships
and Strategies for Managing Difference
in Everyday Life
In brief: Adults’ attitudes towards diversity and their friendship practices; set-
ting out a continuum of attitudes and practices.
Introduction
In this chapter we continue with the discussion we introduced in Chap.
6, regarding the complexities of the respondent parents’ own adult friend-
ships. As noted earlier, our data reveal parents’ appreciation for the diver-
sity of their neighbourhoods. Their relative ease with living in areas with
an intense concentration of difference allowed the generation of a shared
feeling of belonging to both the localities, and more specifically, to the
three primary schools. Encounters with ‘other’ parents in the playground,
at school events, and in the localities were largely positive, and we have
identified the importance of forms of civil attention that are required for
sharing the school space. However, our analysis also reveals a degree of
both ambivalence and anxiety over too close an encounter with different
others, which fosters a tendency towards homophilous social contacts
(how parents manage this in relation to the children’s friendships is

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73001-1_7
discussed in Chap. 5). In this chapter, we use Bourdieu’s work introduced

in Chap. 2, to further elucidate the relationship between an individual’s
habitus (a system of dispositions, embodied ways of being and acting) and
their social capital (social relationships and networks), in order to con-
sider whether living in a highly diverse locality does have some potential
to act as a ‘disruption’ to the ‘common sense’ of homophily (see Chap. 5).
We described the work of Bourdieu in Chap. 2, focusing on his appar-
ent assumption in The Weight of the World (1999) that social relationships
across difference will struggle to flourish, and are marked with incompre-
hension, discomfort, and even distaste. One of the aims of our book is to
interrogate this assumption. In Chap. 2, we cited Wendy Bottero’s criti-
cism of Bourdieu’s apparent assumption that habitus directs social rela-
tionships in a manner that produces homophily (Bottero 2009, p. 410).
Homophily arises because individuals are drawn together by similarities
in habitus that derive from their shared or similar positions in social
space. However, Bottero argues that this understanding positions the
habitus as a conservative force, minimising any potential for change
(either positive or negative) and overlooking any effect of heterogeneous
social relationships upon an individual’s lifeworld. We do not have
detailed data about the parents’ childhood, so are limited in the claims we
can make about the early socialisation of the habitus. Rather we have
analysed the data in the form of a continuum of differing approaches
towards diversity and friendship in order to cast light on individual dis-
positions towards difference.
A Continuum
To maximise our ‘empirical attentiveness’ (Back and Puwar 2012) to the
reflexive and emotional content of participants’ narratives, we draw here
on sometimes extended, individual accounts. We describe a continuum
in attitudes towards diversity that we have developed following careful
analysis of the data—from refusing difference, through accepting homoph-
ily and being reflexive about both homophily and difference, to enabling
relationships across difference. We have described below respondents that
reflect particular positions on this continuum.
Antagonisms, Ambivalences and Association: Parents’… 181
However, it is important to be clear that a straightforward positioning

of parents on this continuum is too simplistic. Respondents had different
practices in different areas of their life, so friends from their work—espe-
cially for those who worked in the public sector in London—could be
from a diversity of backgrounds, and a respondent might value these rela-
tionships, but not necessarily seek to encourage their children to mix
across difference. Conversely, some respondents had social networks that
were marked by similarity, but were highly appreciative of the diverse
range of children with whom their son or daughter shared a classroom.
Only a few sought to actively encourage their children to make or main-
tain friendships across difference. Unsurprisingly, the respondents’ priori-
ties and behaviours were not necessarily simple, coherent packages.
Additionally, some seemingly ignored tensions and contradictions, whilst
others noted and reflected on them. In Chap. 1, we noted the difficulty
of avoiding normative assumptions—such as, that it is ‘good’ to have a
diverse range of friends—and this issue is particularly acute in this chap-
ter, as we realise the presentation of a continuum may give the impression
of more and less desirable behaviours. We feel that, in some respects, this
cannot entirely be avoided but we do want to emphasise here that our
aim is to understand the many reasons why people take up the positions
that they do.
Refusing Diversity
The only respondent who spoke out strongly against diversity was
Annette, a White mother from northern Europe, who had a daughter,
Serena, at Fernhill, and also a son, now at secondary school. Her critique
of multiculturalism has arisen, she feels, from experience rather than
principle, as can be seen from the quote below. It is the practice rather
than the abstract idea of social mix that is difficult.
Annette’s main concern is that her daughter’s year does not have the
‘right’ kind of mix (Ball et al. 2013), and as a result she finds herself iso-
lated with regard to other parents in Serena’s class: ‘there is pretty much
zero people I can relate to’. Hers is primarily a concern with ethnic diver-
sity, although class appears also to be a factor.
Out of 50 kids [in the year group], I counted four [White] kids and out of
the four I don’t think there was a single English one. Or perhaps a mixed
English, perhaps two or three that had mixed English but of Caucasian
complexion. Yes I mean we live in London, we live in Europe, we are a
European country, yet out of 50 kids I counted four White kids […] And
I thought this was too much, it is like what is going on? I am sounding like
some people, whatever, but I was like thinking – I was upset. [In son’s year]
there was also a coloured majority of kids, but there was a core of White
kids […] When [son] was a baby I had this utopian idea that everybody
mixed and I realised actually when I go [to Fernhill] that people do not
mix…I really think it is cultural and that people from different cultures
don’t associate with people outside of their culture.
This situation, she feels, impacts on her daughter as arranging play

dates proves difficult. In particular, her complaint is directed towards a
mixed heritage mother (Jackie) who appeared very friendly, and then
retreated (Jackie, also a participant in the project, has poor mental health,
although that was not known by Annette), and towards a father, a ‘com-
plete Islamic man from head to toe’ who did not send his daughter to a
birthday party, after apparently responding positively to the invitation.
On the one hand he was very nice, “how is the family?” and all that. But
really he is like “she [Serena] is not Muslim and she is going to have a party,
and I can’t allow that [my daughter to attend]”. But why say yes, you know?
Maybe people don’t know how to say no. And maybe they don’t know how
to think things through, and the implications, and maybe they don’t value
the implications on the children.
Her contrast is her son’s former Fernhill peers, where Annette made a
strong friendship with a White middle-class mother despite the fact that
she thought initially they would have little in common as the woman and
her partner are, according to Annette’s understanding, from a different,
more affluent and traditional middle-class fraction: ‘they have proper
working good jobs and a big house’. However, she notes that she has
upper middle-class family origins which helped her bond with this cou-
ple. In this friendship, there is a shared acceptance of both the children
spending time together outside school, and a reciprocity of care arrange-
ments, ‘it was easy’.
At the time we were conducting fieldwork in Fernhill, the school

started a lunchtime Ramadan club, primarily as a quiet space for children
who were fasting, but open to all. Serena started to attend the club, which
alarmed her mother who sees the club’s existence as an indicator of Islam
‘finding an entry point [at the school]’. However, she does not stop her
daughter attending. ‘Go for it and explore. As long as it doesn’t become a
prominent thing. So go and explore now to leave it behind.’ At home, she
speaks with Serena, in order, she says, to ‘put the fear of Islam into her’.
Her prejudice here is clear. However, Annette’s is not a straightforward
refusal of difference. She is in a situation of being a minority, which many
majority parents would avoid, as they would opt for maintaining exclusive
forms of social capital instead (Cunningham and Savage 2015; Reay et al.
2011; Bryne 2006). She is open to Serena having friends from different
social class and ethnic backgrounds, but on her terms. Play dates and par-
ties are to her, as to many others, a fundamental part of a ‘good’ primary
school childhood, and so she desires the presence of other families who
also prioritise out-of-school socialising and reciprocate invitations, with
those who do not falling short of her expectations. Thus, Fernhill (or more
accurately her daughter’s year group) is seemingly not able to provide
Annette with like-minded others. Annette’s disposition in terms of social
capital is broadly conservative. The role of early socialisation of the habitus
is indicated by her reference to being able to bond with the White middle-
class family of her son’s friend, thanks to her family background. She
clearly prefers homophilous networks, and crucially, it seems from her
reference to her ‘earlier utopian idea that everyone mixed’, that the experi-
ence of parenting at a diverse school like Fernhill has increased, rather
than decreased her tendency to homophily. Having her daughter attend a
diverse school has led to some reflexivity and change—but in the direction
of reinforcing the conservative impulses of her habitus.
Accepting Homophily
These parents did not express any negative opinions about the diversity of
their school or neighbourhood populations. However, they felt that
homophily was natural and inevitable, and that difference created barriers
in a developing relationship, lessening the likelihood that both parties

would share significant areas of commonality. The diversity that was
understood to be a barrier to friendship was both ethnic diversity and, as
a result of gentrification, social class diversity.
Most of my friends are quite similar to me. A lot of them, they are White,
mostly middle class […] I don’t worry about it too much because I think at
the end of the day, people get on with who they get on with (Carrie, White
British, middle class, Fernhill)
Similarity was defined in particular ways. Carrie, cited above, and

several White British middle-class Junction and Fernhill parents
described themselves as belonging to a particular middle-class fraction,
who are politically, socially and culturally liberal, make an active choice
to live in a diverse urban area, are mostly employed in public and/or the
voluntary sector (see also Vincent and Ball 2006 for this class fraction in
relation to Stoke Newington in London). Several did indeed make the
distinction between ‘people like us’ and those who worked in the City of
London and/or for large private sector corporations. As Carrie says, her
friends are those who are in ‘social kind of jobs that fit in with my
world’.
Similarity can, of course, operate along more than the one dimension
of social class ‘clustering’. Bercu at Leewood is introduced in Chap. 6.
She is Turkish and through her daughter, Bercu makes friends with a
Nigerian mother, Hasana, who is also Muslim. Despite a lack of a shared
country of origin, language (they can communicate in English to some
extent) and differences in their approach to Islam, the women were
brought together by their daughters’ friendship and a sense of common-
ality derived from their shared religion.1
Acceptors tend to give two main reasons for the stance they took: those
who were anxious regarding their children’s exposure to difference beyond
the experience of the classroom (examples given in Chap. 6), and those
who focused more on the importance of shared areas of experience to
adult friendships. Those parents who signalled that trusting a diverse
range of other families was difficult for them (10 out of 46 parents spe-
cifically mentioned trust and anxiety about letting their children stay at
the houses of others they did not know well) included—but was not
limited to—several first generation migrant parents, some of whom had
only been in the country a few years.
However, not all recent migrants take this view. Svetlana (White other,
intermediate,2 Junction School) had thrown herself into helping her
daughter make friends, and this included hosting play dates and letting
her daughter go to other houses. For some, however, migration was an
exhausting and corrosive process that sapped energy, enthusiasm and the
willingness to make new social contacts. Noble notes that migrants expe-
rience a ‘double absence’—not being in the home country and not yet
being of the host country (Noble 2013b, p. 346), leading to what
Bourdieu called hysteresis, a disjunction between habitus and field, caused
by a rapid change in field so that the habitus no longer easily fits (Hardy
2012). Both Svetlana and another recent migrant at Junction, Theresa
(White other, working class) were migrating for the second time. Both
women were outgoing and sociable, determined to make a new life for
their families. However, Svetlana was fluent in English, and had travelled
from Eastern Europe via a spell of several years in the United States where
she had felt well integrated. Theresa, originally from a Latin American
country, is learning English. She had migrated first to Spain where the
family had experienced some hostility, and left for London as the Spanish
economic situation worsened. Interacting with others was an increasing
strain, and making friends with people who were Spanish-speaking, a
relief.
Hmmm. I believe that…let me see what I can say…I don’t know, I am sort
of tired of meeting people…I don’t want to. I reached the moment when I
can say ‘Hello, hello’, but I don’t want to go further. (Theresa, Junction
School working-class mother. Response translated from Spanish)
The idea of letting her son go to others’ houses after school was an
alarming one: ‘I wouldn’t like to leave him in another person’s house, no,
no, I don’t trust’. Here we suggest that what may seem like evidence of a
‘conservative habitus’ (Bottero 2009, p. 409) may be misleading. We sug-
gest Theresa’s apparently homophilous approach to social relations is
actually a product of exhaustion and stress, with homophily providing a
safe space as she and her family settle in a new country. For Theresa, the
degree of hysteresis—disjunction between habitus and field—was greater
than for Svetlana.
The desire to have a shared set of experiences, interests and lifestyles
with others is well illustrated by Mick. Mick is White British working
class and has two children at Leewood. He grew up in Glen Park but now
visits frequently to see his family. Mick claimed that differences in eth-
nicities and religion are not very important to him—his locality has long
been a multiracial one, and as he explains, his employment sector (con-
struction), has a highly diverse workforce in terms of ethnicity and
nationality. However, differences in ‘background’—used in the interview
as a euphemism for social class—are key to his friendships. It is impor-
tant here to remember that Leewood is by far the most fully gentrified of
our three areas. The four British White and Black Caribbean parent-
respondents at Leewood who were not professional middle class had all
grown up in the area, and all commented on its gentrification. Paton
(2014) reminds us that accounts of gentrification from the viewpoint of
working-class residents are not common. Thus, we give space here to
Mick’s critique which was the strongest offered. In terms of the school, he
notes a ‘yuppie side to the playground’ that he contrasts with ‘people like
me grown up on the estates’ [social housing]. In terms of accent, prac-
tices, embodiment, consumption (he laments the end of ‘caffs’ that do
breakfast in an area now populated with boutique cafés3), Mick feels dif-
ferent to those who live in the owner-occupied housing. He comments
twice on how his appearance would stand out in ‘poncey’ [pretentious]
Glen Park wine bars or at school coffee mornings (he has tattoos and a
shaved head).
He talked in some detail of his local upbringing, laying claim to an
authentic, older Glen Park, detailing how the incoming middle-class
population has changed the shops and services, even how the area is
referred to (‘A lot of people moved into the area and they kind of tried to
build it up and they called it a “village” […] You have got people moved
in, they have got the money but they are a different calibre to what lived
here growing up all their life’). As Paton notes, ‘the implementation of
gentrification can gradually alter dispositions and social norms over time,
so that they become widely embodied’ (Paton 2014, p. 39). Similarly,
Bourdieu argues success in appropriating space, and avoiding feeling ‘out

of place’ ‘depends on the capital held (in its various types)’.
Indeed, for the occupants of a given habitat, the likely chances of appropri-
ating the different material or cultural goods and services associated with
that habitat come down to the specific capacities for appropriation each
one has (both materially – money, private means of transportation – and
culturally). A habitat can be occupied physically without really being inhab-
ited in the full sense of the term if the occupant does not dispose of the tacitly
required means of habitation, starting with a certain habitus. (Bourdieu
1999, p. 128, emphasis added)
Mick’s daughter, Helen, has friends from a range of ethnic groups but
they are, he says, of a similar background—‘kind of council housing’.
The exception is Helen’s friend, Pippa, who lives in a large house, and
whose mother has a high-paying occupation. However, Mick comments
that Pippa’s father, who he knows slightly, is ‘alright, down to earth. He
sounds like he comes from around here’ (Pippa’s dad has a London
accent), all of which makes him more ‘knowable’ and acceptable.
Differences in ‘background’ for Mick cannot be bridged, precisely because
they encompass too wide a range of issues to do with personal history and
current lifestyle. His stance reveals some difficulty with the idea of bridg-
ing social capital; the nature of Mick’s networks—firmly rooted in the
urban working class—are exclusive, as reflects his preference. Using the
metaphor of TV channels he says,
Sometimes you ain’t got nothing in common have you? You are not going
to talk about what was on BBC1 when you watch Channel 4 […] It does
make a difference I think…having grown up in the same areas, having the
same interests (Mick, White British, working-class father, Leewood School)
Mick seems to be an example of what Bourdieu describes as someone

who, for all his politeness and friendliness, dislikes living in proximity to
differently classed others. His habitus developed in his childhood in a
multi-ethnic, but thoroughly working-class Glen Park, shapes his social
networks, which remain firmly homophilous. Mick’s stance is, of course,
shaped by awareness of local power relations. He is indeed marginalised
within Glen Park. His income prevents him from using many of the
expensive Glen Park shops and he feels he stands out at school events. He
is acutely aware of and critical of the incoming gentrifiers’ ‘ability to
dominate space’ (Bourdieu 1999, p. 127), as ‘social space is inscribed…
in spatial structures’ (p. 126). As a result, and as Mick points out,
working-class families (like Mick’s siblings and friends), finding it hard to
maintain a foothold in London’s inner suburbs, are moving outside of the
capital.
Reflexive About Homophily and Difference
These parent respondents were those who were reflexive about difference
and the place difference plays in their lives. These tend to be comprised
of two groups. One is those parents—largely White British middle-class
parents—who are aware of, and feel a degree of unease about, their own
friendship networks being homophilous given the fact that they live, and
have often chosen to do so, in areas of diversity, and we focus here on
Hugh as an example. The other group are respondents who do have—
and enjoy—relatively heterogeneous networks, a result of their work-
place, the school, or neighbourhood friendships. Nadeem is our example
here.
Hugh, the father of Gwenyth, at Junction School, is an example of the
first group—those who feel guilt over the homogeneity of their social
networks. He comes from an affluent family who lived in a rural area, and
is now involved in the arts (details not given to avoid compromising ano-
nymity). He has lived in the neighbourhood for nearly eight years.
Despite an assumption in the literature that middle-class families choose
where to live, in London expensive house prices mean this is not always
possible (Jackson and Butler 2015), and ending up in the Ross Road area
was, for Hugh, driven by practicality.
Well we didn’t choose [the area] for a particular reason, we just chose the
house because that was what we could afford. We could afford it and there
was something about the area we liked...And the school was literally one
street up from the house and we liked the fact that it was representative of
the local community, we knew that there was a big Turkish community,
Greek community and Somalian and various subcultures, whatever, there

were quite a large number and that didn’t—I guess I didn’t think one way
or the other, I didn’t think it was a positive or negative thing, I just thought
this is where we live and that is our local school. (Hugh, White British
middle-class father, Junction School)
Hugh here displays a somewhat ambivalent attitude to the diversity of

his locality and Junction School that persists throughout his interview.
He says he liked the school being representative of the local community,
but also that when it came to sending his daughter to school, its diverse
population was neither ‘a positive or a negative thing’. Like Annette,
Hugh has attempted to aid his daughter’s integration into Junction
School, but feels his initial efforts were largely thwarted. Like Annette, he
is bemused about an apparent lack of response from some parents ‘from
other ethnic backgrounds’.
We gave them invites [to a party] and said ‘please come’. One turned up
late, we had no idea if they were coming or not, even though we phoned
them. I don’t know, it is not a judgment about their ethnicity or any-
thing…I know other people who had similar issues as well. And maybe
from their [the non-respondents’] point of view maybe they feel like they
don’t—they maybe don’t feel that they can talk to us or they feel we are too
different to them, maybe—I don’t know.
Hugh’s difficult experiences trying to reproduce the forms of social

capital (here, out-of-school socialising) that he saw as natural—as do
many other (but not all) parents—were relieved when his daughter
Gwenyth made friends with two new arrivals, Bethany, (also White
British middle class), and Kristina (White other, Svetlana’s daughter).
Before these two girls arrived, Hugh felt Gwenyth had been slightly
socially isolated in the class, but ‘when Gwenyth and Bethany met, they
immediately bonded, and I think maybe it was true that they had a more
similar background’.
Hugh reflects on the social homogeneity of his own friendships,
explaining first that his particular arts-based occupation is very ‘elitist’
and ethnically homogeneous, with few minority ethnic participants, and
then continuing:
I have often talked to [wife] or other friends about, and feeling a certain
guilt that here I am living in a diverse cultural environment, I don’t have
many friends myself from other ethnic backgrounds […] Say Chantelle
[Black British mother of child in same class] I do chat to her, but I don’t
know what it is, up to a certain point, and [my wife] felt the same […] And
I question myself saying what is it about myself that I can’t have a deep…
and certainly with the dads [in a regular pub meet-up group]…even if they
are from different ethnic backgrounds, the ones I have met either through
football, or they tend to be more university educated…And I do think that
is something that just, maybe it is a general thing that happens (Hugh,
Junction School)
Hugh’s habitus and early socialisation in the rural middle classes in the
English countryside has adapted to a middle-class ‘metropolitan habitus’,
where appreciation of diversity and tolerance are a necessary aspect
(Butler and Robson 2003). Across the fields of occupation and leisure, he
has achieved alignment between habitus and field. To a large extent in the
field of parenting (Boterman 2012) he is also able to do this—the other
parents he knows and his daughter’s friendship group are largely middle
class. Yet since Junction is such a diverse school, he is not able to avoid
negotiating that diversity, or to watch his daughter doing so. Indeed he
does not want to cocoon his family, he feels the imperative of the metro-
politan habitus to appreciate diversity, to have smooth relationships with
those who are different, to avoid prejudice or intolerance, experiencing
what (Ahmed 2014) refers to as the ‘imperative to love difference’. The
difficulties he finds with doing this cause him concern and unease, and as
a result his new experiences—being a parent at Junction School—have
added ‘inconsistencies’ to his habitus (Boterman 2015, personal commu-
nication), causing it to be unsettled with somewhat contradictory dispo-
sitions. His narrative, like that of some of the other White middle-class
parents at the three schools (e.g. Elizabeth, Olive, cited earlier), suggests
that the experience of living in diversity has promoted degrees of ‘increased
reflexivity in Bourdieu’s sense of heightened consciousness, lucidity, and
critique’ (Aarseth et al. 2016, p. 158) but that that reflexivity ‘does not
necessarily produce change’ (ibid.). We do not underestimate the demands
of bridging difference, however, and, like the respondents in Aarseth and
colleagues’ study, we understand this group of participants to be trying to

find a way forward between anxiety and desire.
We turn next to another father at Junction School, Nadeem, who we
met in Chap. 6. We argue that he presents an example of a relatively com-
fortable fit with his diverse locality. He is aware of, accepting, and at ease
with difference. He is British Bangladeshi and (according to NS-SEC
occupational categories) intermediate class. He was born in and grew up
in inner London. He has recently returned to the area around Junction
School, after living in outer London, and much prefers the diversity of the
Ross Road area. His son is in a friendship group with three other boys of
different ethnicities, and the boys see each other occasionally outside
school (the group is mentioned in Chaps. 4, 5 and 6). The parents are
friendly enough to facilitate this, but as Nadeem says ‘not close friends’; he
feels closer relationships might develop (‘[Sam’s] mum [Lorna] is really
friendly…a lot of the parents they are like that as well. So I think it might
change’). Nadeem has no qualms about letting his son visit non-Muslim
homes. He trusts his son to avoid non-halal foods, and trusts other parents
to accommodate his dietary needs.4 Nadeem has a diverse range of friends
from his work (in retail) and university, but most of his leisure time is
taken up in visiting extended family, and his voluntary work in his local
mosque, promoting community relationships. The mosque itself attracts a
wide range of different nationalities. Like many other parents, Nadeem is
positive about the diversity of his local area. He is reflective about differ-
ences, particularly of religion and ethnicity. However, unlike Hugh above,
he actively negotiates diversity. ‘Minoritised’ individuals are sometimes
presented as cocooning themselves, living ‘parallel lives’ (see Cantle 2008;
Cameron 20155), yet Nadeem clearly negotiates a path between a majority
secular society and his own Bangladeshi-origin and practising Muslim
identity. He comments that he ‘goes the extra mile’ to celebrate Eid with
his children, aware that, at school, Christmas is celebrated as the major
festival. He maintains friendly relations with his diverse work colleagues,
and is asked to socialise outside work, although rarely does this. He notes
prejudice against Muslims as he fears for the safety of his wife who wears
a hijab, and emphasises the importance of promoting the mosque to non-
Muslims, as part of an effort to dispel myths about Islam. To this end he
has organised the mosque’s open day. His habitus, developed as a minority
British-Bangladeshi growing up in London, leads him to develop hetero-

geneous social relationships in the fields of parenting, education and
employment, and thus his ‘lifeworld’ is shaped by his active negotiation of
difference, as he aims to consolidate and combine his strong commitment
to his Muslim faith, and also his position, and that of his family, as British
citizens. Nadeem can perhaps be best understood as an example of the
fluidity of respondents’ positions on the continuum, blurring the imposi-
tion of our artificial boundaries, as he moves between this reflexive posi-
tion and the next on our continuum, which is that of enabler—briefly
described as those who engage in intentional and purposive effort to make
relationships across difference. Nadeem maintains cordial relationships
with a range of ‘others’, and is encouraging of his son’s friendships with
children from different ethnic, religious and social backgrounds, but he
does not develop any close friendships himself with ‘others’, nor engage in
planned, purposive labour in order to ‘enable’ relationships across differ-
ence.6 Such behaviour can however be seen in the (small) group of those
respondents we have labelled as enablers.
Enablers
We identified a small number of parents, not all of whom were middle

class as defined by their current occupation, but, interestingly, all of
whom had higher levels of education (Bachelor degree upwards) who
were particular bridging figures (Putnam 2000) or ‘transversal enablers’
(Wise 2009). For Wise, these are those ‘personalities who are engaged in
facilitating intercultural exchanges’ (2009, p. 10). She describes further,
[The transversal enabler] are the ones who kind of zip around the locality
or context, the ones who gather everybody in, who can be in the hallway
and get everyone to lunch, but also there is a particular kind of disposition
to do that. Transversality comes out of the tradition of feminist scholarship.
It goes beyond connection to borders—I’m interested in how boundaries
open up and can be reconfigured and transversality is pointing to that.
These are figures that open up and connect across difference or even differ-
ent sections of the community, together opening up borders. (Wise speak-
ing in Neal 2015, p. 991)
In a later account, Wise discusses a ‘convivial sensibility that is not so

much about “loving of difference”, but open to difference, a disposition
with porous qualities and an affective orientation of hope, alive to the
possibilities of newness’ (Wise 2016, p. 2291). Similarly Noble (2013a,
p. 35) talks of ‘practical skills of recognition, negotiation and inclusion, a
particular ethos of engagement’.
Our examples were participants whose reflexive capacities in relations
to themselves and the social contexts of diversity were acutely attuned to
issues around difference and diversity. They engage in intentional and
purposive labour and effort to facilitate relationships across difference. Of
the four parents discussed here, three mothers and a father: Elif, Kaleb,
Fareeda and Iman—we wish to emphasise that only the first three fit
clearly within Wise’s definition for enablers. However, we include Iman
here as her account makes some important points about the impact of the
wider political and social context on enabling practices. We also note that
all four parents are members of minoritised groups, with three having
been born overseas, whilst Fareeda was born in England. The other three,
however, have all been in England for over 15 years.
For reasons of space we only discuss two mothers here in detail, Iman
and Fareeda. However, Elif and Kaleb feature in earlier chapters. Elif is a
working-class (as defined by NS-SEC categories) Turkish mother at
Leewood, who was introduced in Chap. 6. Elif has an open disposition,
and understands sociability to be highly important in forming relation-
ships across difference (‘I think you need to make the effort of knowing
people, you need to invite them or you need to, say “hello how are you?”
You need to kind of pay attention to each other lives, then you do make
that friendship’). Thus, she discusses (in Chap. 6) inviting other families
in the class to her house, and she has a wide range of friendships in terms
of both social class and ethnicity with other mothers from Leewood. She
is very active in the school, and acts to bridge relationships between
Turkish-speaking parents and Leewood School as she runs a weekly group
for Turkish parents (mentioned in Chap. 5). Kaleb (Chaps. 5 and 6) is a
middle-class East African father also at Leewood, who bases his approach
to difference in his political beliefs (‘I believe that people are born equal,
they should live equally and they should work equally and share any part
of the wealth of any country they live in equally’), and has a considered,
reflexive approach to the skills and competencies needed to live a life that
is open to relationships across difference and an awareness of the poten-
tial difficulties. In his efforts to develop relationships with the neighbours
in his block of flats, he is modelling for his children the importance of
these overtures and the persistence that they can require (see Chap. 5).
The enablers are not simply extroverts—Kaleb, for instance, comments
that he sees himself as a self-contained person—but there may be a cul-
tural element to the enablers’ approach to sociability with Kaleb and Elif
both commenting that they find British society reserved compared to the
norms in their countries of origin. All four parents were rooted in their
networks of co-ethnics but also had strong ties and relationships across
difference. Our focus on Fareeda and Iman offers several interesting
points of comparison in terms of their experiences, attitudes and prac-
tices, and thus, we hope, serves to illustrate the complexities inherent in
bridging difference.
Iman was born in Somalia, she has been in England for over 25 years,
and her children were all born here. Over the course of two interviews,
Iman spoke about her work, her position within the local Somali com-
munity, her son’s friends, and about being Black and Muslim in London
today.
Iman’s account, like Nadeem’s, shows the fluidity of individuals travel-
ling across the categories we are using. As we noted earlier, Iman does not
clearly fit within the category of enabler, although she does fulfil the cri-
teria we are using in some respects. For example, her work colleagues (the
first time we met her she was working as a community nutritionist as part
of a multiracial team) are very important to her, she talks of socialising
with them outside work, and these friendships persist after she leaves the
job. She also makes a concerted effort to get on more friendly terms with
her neighbours, although she experiences hostility from some of them.
Thus, in her relationships with adults she makes intentional and purpose-
ful efforts to cross difference. ‘You know I am the kind of person who
would like to be friends with everybody. You know to create an environ-
ment where everybody is mixing happy’.
With regard to her youngest son, Aslam (Fernhill School), however,
she is cautious in encouraging his out-of-school socialising (see Chap. 6).
Iman is happy to have Aslam’s friend Usain (Black Caribbean) at her
house for extended periods of time, but when Aslam goes to his friend’s
house, she feels uncomfortable after an hour or two and will go and get
him. At the root of her discomfort is the fact that she only has a slight
relationship with Usain’s mother, and feels she knows nothing about the
family, and therefore the environment into which her son is going. ‘You
don’t know […] That is why you cannot trust 100%….Their son is a
really good boy, [so] I thought, oh yes maybe the family, they are not that
bad’. The local Somali community can be expected, she feels, to offer the
behaviours and attitudes she finds important and so she feels easier in
Somali company but does not confine herself to it.
The context for Iman is that she can be and has been viewed negatively
on three grounds: as an immigrant, as a member of a minority ethnic
group, and as a Muslim (she and her daughters wear the hijab, so her
religion is visible). Talking of the hostility of some of her neighbours, she
describes an encounter with one who comments on her NHS lanyard.
So I explained where I work and all that, she is asking me but at least it let
them know that I am not what they think. Like most people they thought,
ok these people are coming from somewhere else, coming to live in this
country, … they are all getting income support…but I’m a tax payer as well
[…] [They judge me because of ] the way I look, my scarf and also because
I’m Black […]The good thing is that I don’t use public transport, [I drive]…
My daughters when they come from uni or work, they will say, even the
train or the bus, they say, everybody is moving away from you, saying all
these sort of words you know…terrorism and that […] And I am not
blaming them [the accusers] because of what is happening, it [recent ter-
rorist events] makes all this hatred (Iman, Black African middle-class,
Fernhill School)
Iman’s habitus derives from her socialisation in Somalia, and maintain-

ing her cultural and religious identity is important to her. Her habitus is
restructured to some degree by her experiences of migration, her employ-
ment, and bringing up her children in England. These have led to
increased contact with a range of people of different ethnic and social
backgrounds. Iman does enact enabling practices—as can be seen from
her positive attitude towards her multi-ethnic group of co-workers with
whom she maintains less distant relationships than Nadeem with his
co-workers. Iman chooses to socialise with them, and their friendship is

clearly important to her. However, her enabling practices are confined
and restricted by her own and her family’s experiences of racism and hos-
tility, which informs her protective attitude towards her son. This caution
inhibits her purposeful efforts to bridge difference. Her sense of belonging,
shaped by how she is perceived, is never quite secure (Healy 2016).
Despite her long residence in England, she is not ‘a citizen who experi-
ences their belonging unconditionally’ (Noble 2013b, p. 351).
A clearer example of enabling behaviour came from Fareeda, a mother
at Junction School. She is middle class, of Bangladeshi origin (born in
UK), and has a range of social networks across ethnicity and class. She
named these as her extended family; mothers at her children’s Quranic
classes; Bengali-speaking parents at school, her university friends (a
multi-ethnic group), and her close friendships with two White British
mothers at school (one, Lorna, is also a participant7). Fareeda is also a
parent governor at Junction School. She deliberately crosses borders. She
builds ‘bridging’ social capital; for her, making relationships with diverse
others is the way one should live in a diverse urban society. She uses these
links to challenge perceptions held by others in her different networks of
what it means to be a practising Muslim woman of Bangladeshi origin.
Talking about one of her close White friends at school, she says,
We value each other’s friendship because with everything that is going on

around the world it can be quite difficult for me as a Muslim to be friends
with everyone because they might see me as— this is what—how can I say
it, ‘this is what you are causing’, do you see? But I think…you should get to
know the person and the values that I have. Because yes I do practise Islam
but I’m not a fanatic, I’m not an extremist.
Fareeda also speaks of being perceived as having considerable indepen-

dence by some of the more conservative Muslim women in her networks,
but notes that she still maintains a respect for tradition (also see Hoque
2015).
I know some of the Bengali mums might see me as like ‘oh my God she has
got like so much independence’—but I still abide by my in-laws. I still
respect them, but yes, I do have that independence.
Fareeda was on the PTA committee at Junction School. The PTAs at

all three schools were dominated by White middle-class parents, mostly
mothers. Fareeda describes Junction’s PTA as ‘definitely White middle-
class. And then you have a few odd-bods like me’; the term ‘odd-bod’
neatly suggesting how ‘out of place’ her identity, her embodiment, was
in PTA circles. As Valentine notes ‘when individual identities are “done”
differently in particular temporal moments, they rub up against and so
expose the dominant spatial ordering that defines who is in place/out
of place, who belongs and who does not’ (2007 p.19). In Hannah Jones’
study, she describes one of her respondents, Amrit, a Ugandan-Asian,
married to a White British woman, and working for a race equality
organisation as living a ‘multi-faceted life […] The intersections of his
experience, of both exclusion and privilege of knowledge, of different
perspectives’ is highly influential in determining his practices and
beliefs (Jones 2014, pp. 80, 82). Jones argues Amrit feels what Du Bois
called ‘double consciousness’ (Du Bois 1994 (1903), this sense of ‘never
quite fitting the norm’ (Jones 2014, p. 82) that we suggest applies to
Fareeda also. Sweetman makes the point, cited in Chap. 2, that a flex-
ible or reflexive habitus —resulting in ‘contemporary projects of iden-
tity [as] second nature for some’ (2003, p. 529)—also involves
considerable self-monitoring, and this is pertinent. Fareeda enables,
both through her own willingness to be a minority in particular spaces,
and also through her ability to act as a conduit between various parts of
her social networks (between the school and Bengali-speaking mothers
for example). Thus, we can celebrate Fareeda for making social connec-
tions, for challenging stereotypes; but whilst doing so, also note that, as
with Iman, her efforts to maintain relationships across difference are
shaped by being a minority ethnic Muslim woman in a climate which
is, in many ways, hostile to Muslims, and which results in her sense
that she needs to prove that it is possible to be a practising Muslim and
not an ‘extremist’ (see also Husband et al. 2016). This exemplifies the
excessive burden on some to demonstrate a non-vilified identity, despite
a degree of social privilege. Rollock writes, ‘skin colour acts as a form of
embodied capital that disrupts and lessens the worth of the cultural
capital held by the Black middle classes’ (2014, p. 448). Thus a minori-
tised ethnic identity can redefine and reformulate class-related attitudes
and practices. Rollock et al. (2015) argue in their study of the Black
Caribbean-origin middle classes, that understandings of class within
the British context are racialised, shaped and informed by White privi-
lege, and a quiet, but persistent racism. We suggest that a similar argu-
ment can be made about intersecting minoritised religious and ethnic
identities. Fareeda does not mention the same kind of direct hostility
that Iman identifies. (It may be that Fareeda had experienced similar
behaviours, but chose not to divulge them to us). Nevertheless, activat-
ing her social and cultural capitals requires considerable labour from
Fareeda, as she seeks to maintain relationships with diverse others.
We have used the examples of Fareeda and Iman to show that enabling
behaviour requires a certain attitude as Wise discusses above—of open-
ness, of convivial intention, of a willingness to and emphasis upon bridg-
ing difference and developing relationships with the ‘other’. Yet, enabling
behaviours are also hugely affected by the political, social and cultural
context in which individuals are living. Issues around who is seen as an
outsider, and who is understood to belong (seemingly less of an issue for
British-born Fareeda than for Iman, although we have also emphasised
that Fareeda does not ‘experience [her] belonging unconditionally’
either), have profound effects on the dispositions and actions of even
those who prioritise bridging difference. Additionally, as we have shown,
enabling behaviours are labour-intensive, and we emphasise that in our
sample, the labour is carried out by minoritised and mostly female
individuals.
Privileged Clusters?
In the previous section of the chapter, we compiled a continuum of atti-
tudes towards diversity in order to interrogate the assumption that
homophilous networks can be assumed as the norm. We illustrated the
different positions the adult respondents took up regarding social
relationships and how these positions reflect the ‘intersubjective and
negotiated nature of difference’ (Bottero 2009, p. 418). We turn now to
consider the different degrees of privilege and social resources that
different networks bring to their participants. We suggest that something

as seemingly mundane and everyday as a group of parents chatting in the
playground can be a site of social reproduction, shaped by the intersec-
tion of ethnic and class identities.
As described in Chap. 6, particular clusters of parents could be identi-
fied standing together in the primary school playgrounds at the begin-
ning and end of the day. In all three schools, these included clearly
identifiable networks of mainly White, mainly British, middle-class par-
ents. We argue that the social capital generated by these networks and
added to the existing volumes of economic and cultural capital possessed
by the White middle classes, positions them strongly in relation to both
schooling and their neighbourhoods, and we trace the processes by which
the result is the generation of social advantage in these settings.
The speed of gentrification of the Ross Road (Junction School) and
Hanson Green (Fernhill School) areas was marked by the appearance of
shops and services to provision and provide spaces of comfort for the
middle classes. Across the two areas, we witnessed the arrival over a three-
year period (the two-year fieldwork period and a year after: 2013–2016)
of several boutique cafés, restaurants, delicatessens, a vintage shop, a gift
shop, an art gallery, and a wholefood shop. Glen Park (Leewoood School)
was already firmly gentrified (see description in Chap. 3). One Leewood
mother, now living in a neighbouring locality, also undergoing gentrifica-
tion, described the appearance of a shop selling ‘posh jam’ in her main
shopping street. The middle classes have the economic capital to change
the face of their local neighbourhoods.
They can also marshal their social and cultural resources to claim an
advantaged, resourced position via-à-vis the schools themselves. This is
not to develop stereotypes of ‘pushy’, ‘sharp elbowed’ (David Davis MP
2015, cited in Cassidy 2015) middle-class parents, as many put in large
amounts of time and effort in fund-raising for the schools and/or into the
operation of governing bodies which formally manage schools. We do
wish to recognise, however, the way in which the Parent-Teacher
Associations (PTAs) and the governing bodies at the schools were
dominated by middle-class, largely White British parents, and consider
the implications and effects of this. Other parents took part in school
events (such as the summer fairs), but the organising committees were
run by small groups of mainly White, middle-class parents. At all three
schools, governors and PTA committee members described attempts to
get wider representation on both the PTAs and the governing bodies,
which had some success, although there were some miss-steps (i.e. at
Leewood, PTA meetings were at one point held in a local pub, and we
heard of a fund-raising art auction which had taken place before the field-
work period and caused controversy due to the expense of the exhibits).
This exclusive representation is not a new finding (see also Posey-Maddox
2014), but we show that this applies even in highly diverse contexts such
as these three schools. We suggest that membership of the PTA commit-
tee/governing body acted as a sign of confident ‘belonging’ to the school
world. Those White middle-class parents who were not part of the formal
PTA/governing body structures—but usually knew those who were—
still held valuable social and cultural capital that gave them advantages in
the field of primary schooling. They knew the routines of the school,
understood the expectations of the staff, and were knowledgeable about
the curriculum and structure of primary schooling. Their networks pro-
vided sources of further knowledge about the schools.
Observing the playgrounds, we could see the way different groups
clustered together in ‘rooms without walls’—a term Vertovec use to
describe the way in which people in open outdoor spaces socially cluster
as if inside smaller, ‘carved out’ spaces (Vertovec 2015, p. 16). Gemma
describes the playground at Junction School:
There have been some occasions when you do go into the playground and
I think if there is a group of White middle-class parents standing around
having a chat, it is hard for someone else to come into it. In the same sense
if you have got a group of people speaking another language, sometimes
you are not even sure what language it is, it is harder to integrate. So I think
perhaps it cuts both ways, and we all gravitate to someone similar and it is
sometimes harder to break out of that than you think, perhaps the kids do
a bit (Gemma, White British, middle-class)
Gemma here presents a picture of what Kofman (cited in Humphris

2015) calls ‘flat’ or horizontal diversity, positioning individuals as equally
privileged in social space (see Chap. 2). However, this picture of ‘flat’
diversity is misleading. Collective spaces are not necessarily ones where
‘larger social inequalities’ are bracketed (Aptekar 2015, p. 118). Whilst
we would agree with Gemma that the affective micro-experience of being
excluded from a group might feel similar to two individuals, the larger
picture of playground relations differs depending on who you are. The
social networks are, of course, not equal, some provide more than an
enjoyable chat. The playgrounds, where parents meet, are highly strati-
fied, and as we argue above in relation to PTAs and governing bodies,
different parents bring different forms and volumes of social, economic
and cultural capitals, and some are more valuable than others in the field
of primary schooling, as part of the process of negotiating parents’ rela-
tionships with the school as an institution. Class and ethnicity-related
resources both play a part here. ‘White privilege’ (McIntosh 1988) is
often assumed by White people to be a reflection of the ‘normal’ social
order where one’s race remains invisible, despite accruing individual and
collective advantages for a White person. Thus, we suggest that the ben-
efits that accrued from White middle-class clustering were invisible to
this group of respondents. In interviews, they often positioned their clus-
tering as ‘natural’—what everyone does—they were one group amongst
many. However, in seeing themselves and their clustering as an identical
process of gathering together that could also be seen amongst minority
groups in the playgrounds, the White middle-class respondents occasion-
ally recognised, but often overlooked, the realities of their structural
advantages.
However, we would not want to suggest that playground relations are
completely fixed and stable in terms of the in/exclusionary capitals and
feelings they generate. Gemma’s description above exposes some of her
internal conversation about managing difference and a degree of reflexiv-
ity that recognises both a desire to seek sameness and the alternative to
it—her reference to children being able to ‘break out’. Similarly, we have
already described some of the White middle-class parents’ reflections and
concerns about their homogeneous networks, and the degree of
their engagement with the diverse communities of their localities, despite
their stated preference for and appreciation of such localities. However,
the tendency to manage difference by drifting towards forms of ‘cocoon-

ing’ clearly limits the degree of active ‘living together’.
Conclusion
In this chapter, we have drawn in some depth on individual narratives to
illustrate the complexities of individuals’ engagement with difference.
Physical location and social space are closely connected in these
intensely diverse areas of London through shared use of social resources
such as the primary schools, which engender encounters with difference.
For the recent migrant, such as Theresa, for those who have lived here
many years like Iman but remain acutely aware of their difference, as well
as those like Mick and Hugh whose surroundings have changed hugely
(for Mick a change from a familiar working-class locale to a gentrified
neighbourhood, and for Hugh, a change from the English countryside to
the city), the experience of living in areas with high levels of class and
ethnic diversity presents the habitus with a dislocating experience.
Habitus ‘is both a stable and conservative entity, and yet one which is
profoundly dynamic’ (Noble 2013b, p. 344). Thus the possibility of
destabilisation and dislocation leads to ambivalence in the habitus (ibid.
p. 347). As a result, approaches to difference are saturated by emotion:
ambivalence, anxiety and uncertainty, as well as positivity, security, and
confidence.
As we have shown, some of the parent respondents in our study,
responded by cocooning, sometimes with a certain degree of guilt in so
doing; other parents respond by negotiating the degree of interaction
with difference to a level with which they feel comfortable (e.g. Nadeem),
and a few, like Fareeda, by prioritising interactions across difference. We
have identified some examples of enabling behaviour, following Amanda
Wise’s definition, but also emphasise the labour that is involved for those
individuals. Additionally, we discussed Iman as an example of the effects
of being positioned as ‘other’ on one’s willingness to act to intentionally
bridge difference.
However, we can broadly conclude that Bourdieu’s assumption of dis-
taste for classed and ethnic ‘others’ does not generally apply to our respon-
dents living in diverse areas of twenty-first-century London, although we

have identified examples of discomfort. We found Bottero’s insistence on
the importance of exploring the ‘concrete nature of social networks as a
feature of social space’ (2009, p. 417) helpful, as we note the difference
that heterogeneous networks can make to the ‘lifeworld’. These differ-
ences are not always positive as they include anxiety and incomprehen-
sion, but also a responsiveness to difference, an openness, curiosity, and
reflexivity towards others’ behaviour and one’s own, and sometimes a
deep sense of satisfaction and fulfilment from living in and engaging with
a diverse social network. This is ‘a sense of the habitus as [a] transformed
and transformative means by which we negotiate intercultural relations,
and towards a sense of society transformed by those intercultural rela-
tions’ (Noble 2013b, p. 346, Zembylas 2007).
Notes
1. There were several instances when respondents noted the diversity of
nationalities represented by Muslims in London.
2. As noted in chap. 3, we use ‘intermediate class’ to describe families where
sometimes known as the ‘service class’, and those with a labour contract
(working-class routine jobs). In this case Svetlana works as a cleaner, and
runs a small cleaning business with a friend. Her partner is a sales assis-
tant. Nadeem, cited below, also works in retail but with supervisory
responsibilities and his partner is an at-home mother.
3. Here is an example of Bourdieu’s (1999, p.125) point that the sellers of
the ‘rarest goods’ can only be understood in their entirety by contrast with
other businesses. They are part of the same field, but in lesser positions.
All Mick’s local ‘caffs’ have either disappeared or been transformed into
boutique cafes selling—not his preference, a traditional fried breakfast—
but expensive drinks, sandwiches and cakes.
4. He notes that he understands Islam as not holding a child accountable for
accidentally breaking dietary laws.
5. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/extremism-pm-speech
6. Nadeem may engage in enabling behaviour at the mosque where he is
involved in community coordination, including the planning of open
days. However, we have limited data on this area of his life.
7. Lorna and Fareeda both clearly value their mutual friendship. (Lorna: ‘we
often go for tea and chat for hours on end yes, about goodness knows
what’). In our second interviews with her, Lorna notes that Fareeda is
tutoring her son for a selective state school, a move she disagrees with, but
their relationship survives. ‘It is just us having a conversation, this is what
she believes, this is what I believe. There are certain people that would get
quite aggressive about it and she doesn’t and I don’t’ (Lorna).
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8
Conclusion: Understanding Friendship
and Diversity
In brief: A discussion of the main themes of the book
Introduction
In a recent report on social cohesion intended to inform policy develop-
ment in London, Plumb et al. (2016) emphasise the identification of
spaces that seem to offer possibilities for mixing and engagement. In one
of their examples, they cite a community-based research report that dem-
onstrates ‘the power of well-designed informal meeting spaces (or ‘bump-
ing places’) to inspire connections between local people’ (Plumb et al.
2016, p. 41), and identify primary schools as offering particular opportu-
nities for this. Having spaces to ‘linger’ (like ‘the installation of a rain
shelter or benches for use by parents’ (Plumb et al. 2016, p. 41) is per-
ceived as an important aspect of enabling positive interaction. One par-
ticipant in the research cited by Plumb et al., describing her experience at
the school gates, stated: ‘It brings together a diverse group of people, but
you do have something in common. It’s not like standing next to some-
one on the train, you know you have a child in common and you have an
institution in common’ (Price 2015, p. 27).

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73001-1_8
We start the concluding chapter with this example, as throughout this

book, we have explored the idea of schools providing a site for mixing
across difference, but resisting the assumption that the processes involved
are straightforward. Indeed, our project has sought to extend understand-
ing of the ways in which diverse primary schools are experienced by chil-
dren and their parents as shared, yet also sometimes ambiguous spaces. In
our discussion of social relationships centring around primary schools,
we have identified the complex feelings and responses people have towards
social and ethnic difference, complexities that are not easily erased by
installing a rain shelter or benches. However, the notion of sharing and
mutuality expressed through the school (as described by the mother
above) has very much been one we have emphasised. We suggested in
Chap. 1 that primary schools can be understood as a very particular form
of shared resource or commons—not only do they affectively stretch
beyond their institutional boundaries into their surrounding communi-
ties and localities but they are the place of formation of children’s identi-
ties, of future citizens. In this context we suggest that in the familiar
routines, micro-social interactions and small-scale relations that shape a
primary school environment, there is evidence of ongoing, if sometimes
uneasy, multicultural participation (Neal et al. 2018). This book has been
an exploration of the connective web of personal lives and public sharing
in contexts of urban diversity. Our focus on the ways in which intergen-
erational, socially and ethnically diverse populations interact as they par-
ticipate in the primary school world can be understood as a focus on both
the possibilities of affective encounters and the nature of anxious closures
that are generated by and threaded through the everyday, routine and
habitual rhythms of being a pupil or parent.
Before going on to discuss the main themes of the book, we include a
reminder of the temporal and spatial context for the research. Set in
London, ‘a world city’ (Massey 2007), shaped by increasing levels of
diversity, gentrification and concomitant inequalities, our research was
undertaken prior to the 2016 EU referendum, and the terrorist attacks of
2017. We find ourselves asking whether these events have affected the
social and political context so that it is less conducive to civility across
difference than the years (2013–15) when we were collecting data. Hate
crimes appear to increase after each terror attack (NPCC 2017) and some
Conclusion: Understanding Friendship and Diversity 209
commentators have discussed whether these events are having a ‘closing

down’ effect on people’s capacity for openness and engagement (Stewart
2017; Sobolewska 2017). However, it is too early to pronounce on
longer-term effects, and we suggest that the research reported here offers
some grounds for hope in terms of the existence and persistence of civil-
ity and conviviality in diverse localities. So, in this concluding chapter,
we first discuss the themes and contribution of this book and, second,
offer some reflections on the form and significance of the social relations
we observed. We identify ‘civil attention’ and ‘convivial dispositions’ as
two ways of responding to ethnic and social diversity. Finally, we argue
for continued attention to friendships in discussions of living in and with
diversity.
Contributing Themes
In the opening chapter of this book, we identified and discussed some
key issues within the sociology of friendship. Throughout the intervening
pages, we have discussed the importance of space, place, habitus and
social structures for shaping impulses towards association and disassocia-
tion. We have written about friendships in relation to the pull of homoph-
ily, the changing nature of place, the intersections of class and ethnicity,
the role of schools, and the role of emotions in engaging with difference.
Using literature mainly from the urban multiculture, everyday encoun-
ters, and sociology of friendship literatures, and from Goffman and
Bourdieu, to further illuminate our data, we have offered analyses of
adults’ and children’s friendship relations focusing around three class-
rooms in three different primary schools. As well as identifying the pull
of homophily amongst the adults in relation to their own friendships, we
have also noted their appreciative attitudes towards the diversity of their
localities. This diversity is mostly described by the adults in terms of eth-
nic and cultural diversity; the socio-economic diversity was less frequently
mentioned, but its effects were palpable. One of the major contributions
of this book has been to consider diversity in terms of ethnicity and social
class, not solely the former. For example, in Chap. 7, we argued that the
appearance of shops and services to provision the middle classes changed
the local shopping streets, confirming the economic power of the middle
classes, and highlighting the processes of establishing middle-class
‘belonging’ to the area. We have also argued that both adults and children
cross ethnic difference in their friendships more frequently than class dif-
ference. We acknowledge, however, that there are overlaps between class
and ethnicity: although there are increasing numbers of people from
minority ethnic backgrounds in middle-class professional jobs, inequali-
ties in access persist, making many minority groups underrepresented in
the middle classes (Saggar et al. 2016). Certainly middle-class non-White
individuals were in a minority in this research, partly because some of the
parents born overseas were working in jobs classified (by NS-SEC) as
working-class occupations, which did not reflect their possession of for-
mal credentials and past experience.
We have also focused on school worlds, and argued for the impor-
tance of primary schools as an emotive and connective site that brings
together disparate and intergenerational family members with a shared
investment in the school as a social as well as an educational resource.
We have reflected on the social lives of children in and around the
schools, and we have also shown, particularly in Chap. 6, that it is not
impossible but very difficult to have children attend a diverse school
such as the three featured here, and not have some level of exchange with
and recognition of differently positioned others. We argue that the pri-
mary schools in our study do offer a space in which ‘new intimacies [can
be] struck and sustained…through a relational dynamic of co-cultiva-
tion, mutual regard and affinity between unexpected allies’ (Amin 2012,
p. 29; also Noble 2013).
Additionally, we have argued that the role of emotions cannot be over-
looked. This may seem like a truism when discussing friendship, but we are
also talking of a wide range of emotions that may limit opportunities for a
dyadic relationship to be established. An avoidance of difference threads
through a number of the accounts—sometimes racialised, sometimes
classed, sometimes both—and usually coded as awkwardness, anxiety,
unease over the behaviour of others (or possible or suspected behaviours),
a hesitation to trust, a sense of being somewhat on edge, not able to relax,
rather than as any more explicit antipathy or hostility. We have shown how
avoidance and discomfort with difference patterned social interactions
and school-based relations, impeding, limiting and preventing affective

overtures. Added to these the material conditions of living—the demands
of work and of existing friends and family, limited time, limited money,
limited space. The emotional and the material reinforce each other; thus
homophily, offering the ease and comfort of similarity, becomes, in many
situations, the default choice.
Bridging difference can be and often is work, and demanding work at
that. The enablers, the small group of parents who engaged in intentional
efforts to bridge difference, who demonstrated a convivial disposition
and for whom such a disposition of openness is habituated, provide evi-
dence of this. In Chap. 5, Kaleb talks of his sociable gestures towards his
neighbours, a slow and steady process of building trust. In Chap. 7,
Fareeda talks about her willingness to maintain her position in the PTA
despite describing herself in relation to the group as an ‘odd-bod’—some-
one out of place—her strangeness magnified by her identity as a minori-
tised woman, acting against the stereotypes of practising Muslim women
as isolationist and passive (Dwyer 1998). The enabler figures often spoke
in a language of social justice and inclusion (see Chap. 7), and we want
to emphasise that there are costs to them in taking up this position. For
example, Kaleb’s and Fareeda’s sense of themselves as active, as inhabiting
a convivial disposition, generated by a reflexive habitus, also involves
them in the emotional labour of working on themselves so that they are
‘at home’ in a variety of contexts, as well as the labour of making purpose-
ful attempts to bridge difference (Sweetman 2003).
We have noted already that the enablers in our study were from
minority backgrounds, and we are cautious in offering explanations
for this given the small number of enablers, but it may be that their
possession of multicultural competencies is influenced by their experi-
ence of liminality (Silva 2016), of being positioned in a particular
way, in a class-bound society that minoritises ethnic ‘others’. The
enablers in our study also had access to resources associated with the
middle classes.1 This position of both relative privilege and disadvan-
tage may have contributed to their willingness to step beyond the
boundaries of homophily. Such a willingness can be described as hav-
ing ‘resources both social and psychic to “stand in [different] spaces”’
(Silva 2016, p. 178). However, we obviously do not suggest that a
willingness to bridge difference can be or should be assumed amongst

all middle-class minority ethnic individuals, and we agree with Amin
that an emphasis on the importance of bridging difference and increas-
ing interpersonal contact can act as a form of ‘liberal tyranny, espe-
cially towards immigrants and minorities who are expected to do the
engaging and reconciling, while majorities and the mainstream are
treated as the unchanging core that does not need to shift far in its
cultural practices’ (Amin 2013, p. 7).
In terms of our somewhat eclectic range of theoretical resources, we
have used Bourdieu to theorise our understanding of the generation of
particular dispositions. We agree with Silva that, although family and
origins are privileged in Bourdieu’s theory, in terms of the formation and
durability of the habitus, people do have ‘relational lives beyond their
origin’ (Silva 2016, p. 79). Thus we concur with Bottero and Crossley
(2011) that social relationships are shaped by the habitus—as Bourdieu
emphasises—but are also shaping the habitus, and that living in situations
of intense diversity does prompt, for many of our respondents, a degree
of reflexivity concerning their social relationships. We believe that habi-
tus and the large body of commentary that it has engendered remain
crucial in helping us to understand the interaction of structure and
agency in generating dispositions and that concepts of the ‘reflexive’ hab-
itus or the ‘fragmented’ habitus (e.g. Sweetman 2003) can help further
our understanding of how habitus is shaped by both early socialisation
and by later experiences. From Goffman we have taken the concept of
‘civil inattention’ and extended it as ‘civil attention’, and from the urban
multiculture literature (Gilroy 2004; Neal et al. 2013, 2018; Wise and
Noble 2016; Valluvan 2016), we have worked with the idea of convivial-
ity, and in particular, a convivial disposition to proximate difference. We
now turn to a further discussion of these ideas.
Civility and Conviviality

In our discussions of the social relationships of adults and children
attending three diverse primary schools we have drawn attention to the
significance of two related, but different-in-degree, approaches to living
in a diverse environment: civil attention and the enactment of a convivial

disposition.
Civil attention (see also Jones et al. 2015; Noble 2015), discussed in
Chap. 6, is an extension of Goffman’s concept of ‘civil inattention’ (1972)
which describes the mostly ‘delicate adjustments’ of the often non-
discursive process of acknowledging the presence of another (for exam-
ple, through brief eye contact) but not imposing on them. This is,
Goffman argues, a respectful process that maintains public order, and
allows people to coexist in urban spaces without intruding on others.
As discussed in Chap. 6, we use the phrase ‘civil attention’ to refer to a
recognition of others who share the same (school) world. This is to under-
stand the school both as a social commons linked into communities
beyond the school, and also the school as a place (for parents as well as
pupils) defined by its institutional enclosure and internal discipline
(Chap. 3). Civil attention describes a thin line, a minimum threshold of
civility—greetings and gestures (smiles and nods) that enable people to
signal recognition and awareness of the other’s legitimate presence and
their shared belonging in and of the school site. This describes the three
school playgrounds where there was little sign or report of hostility
between the adults meeting in the playgrounds.
For Goffman, civil inattention was intended to explain how people
behaved and managed themselves in public spaces. In itself it is a limited
outcome—seemingly a mannered interaction or form of urban etiquette
whose transformational impact on people’s attitudes towards diversity
may be limited. But what civil inattention does helpfully deliver is an
emphasis on how being in and sharing public space with unknown others
can be routinely managed. This emphasis is shared by our extension to
‘civil attention’. We argue that the diverse urban landscape will always
provide ‘degrees and modalities of strangeness and familiarity’ (Noble
2013, p. 33), and that civil attention is a way of responding to that. Civil
attention relations are more distant than those we would call friendships,
but also have a significant role, in that civil attention brings a focus on
and recognition of diverse others and a mutualism in the process of shar-
ing the same social resources. As Noble (2009, p. 63) suggests, ‘recogni-
tion is the beginning of something, not its end and the end is never a
given’.
As discussed in Chap. 2, convivial disposition is the term we use to

describe the ‘habit of negotiating multiplicity’ (Amin 2013, p. 1), the
capacity and will to engage with diversity and the ‘other’. We discuss
throughout the book the extent to which such a disposition is generated
by the experience of living in an intensely diverse locality, and, specifi-
cally, attending a diverse school (as either parent or child). We have
argued in Chap. 4 that convivial dispositions with regard to difference are
broadly reflected in the friendship practices of the children (although we
acknowledge that we cannot know if this conviviality will persist as the
children grow into young people). With the adults, the situation is more
varied and we have, in Chap. 7, indicated the different dispositions
towards diversity amongst the respondent parents. We understand a con-
vivial disposition in adults to be an alertness to how difference may limit
interactions or cause their avoidance, and a prioritising of bridging differ-
ence. This prioritising might not apply to all aspects of an individual’s life
or all through their life—what we have provided here can only be snap-
shots of adults’ and children’s friendship practices in a particular moment
in time.
We have noted that a convivial disposition can be most clearly seen in
the practices and attitudes of the small number of enabler parents
(although there is also variety in these parents’ practices as Chap. 7
shows). In identifying both the small number of parents who are willing
to engage in sustained, intentional and purposive behaviours to bridge
difference, and the degree of emotional labour that such wiliness requires,
we recognise that embodying a convivial disposition over a prolonged
period of time and in a number of areas of one’s life clearly does not
describe the majority of participants. However, we also see a value in the
conscious reflexivity of some respondents, their thinking about difference
and how to negotiate it (for example, Elizabeth, Hugh and Olive in their
concern over the gap between their valuing of diversity and their
homophilous practices, and, for example Nadeem in his active engage-
ment with difference) as evidence of a disposition to reflect on living with
difference.
Although civil attention and convivial dispositions are clearly differ-
ently pitched responses to diversity, we see them as connected through
the importance we wish to give to routine social interaction as providing
a sense of ‘domestic security’ (Husband et al. 2016, p. 215) which is

important in itself and has meaningful consequences in terms of attitudes
towards diversity. We see across our sample instances of both civil atten-
tion and the potential for and glimpses of convivial dispositions in a
range of pro-diversity competencies and attitudes. We suggest that
numerous activities—the journeys to school, the time spent in the class-
room, the playground or delivering/picking up children from school-
based wrap-around care, the friendships and friendship activities of
children; the school world with its routines and events such as sports day,
assemblies, parents’ evenings, fetes, and so on—are marked by social inti-
macy as well as proximity, and lend themselves to a collective imaginary
identified by Hage (cited in Chap. 6). These spaces and events provide
children especially, but also their parents, with a sense of belonging and
investment in the school, that they have a legitimate presence there. These
perceptions shape a willingness to recognise and engage with others dif-
ferent to oneself, but who also belong to the same institution (even if, in
some cases, this is a minimal engagement).
We concur with other researchers (see Chap. 2) that such repeated
‘light’ engagements have a weight beyond the apparent superficiality of a
chat about the weather, or a joke about the children, in terms of ‘anchor-
ing’ people within their localities, as part of a diverse, differentiated whole
(also Blokland and Nast 2014). The ‘habits of negotiating shared space’
(Amin 2012, p. 71) are being established, what Noble (2013, p. 34) refers
to as ‘forms of habituated comingling’. Further, we have argued that our
data reflects the ‘mundane everyday reflexivity’ (Reay 2004, p. 435) of the
adult respondents’ inner conversations, which in interviews with the
majority of parents reveal a desire to present themselves as open to and
appreciative of diversity, unsurprised by difference. This attitude might
not translate into significant relationships with the neighbouring ‘other’
but is, we argue, valid in itself. In addition, the possibility of closer
relationships remain. Thus, when circumstances bring Lorna and Fareeda
together in Junction School’s library, a close friendship develops. When
Hasana suggests a school-based Eid party at Leewood School, the plan-
ning of it involves her in meeting and working with other parents. When
Pat organises a class party for her son Jordan, at Junction School, she talks
about ‘slowly slowly’ getting to know the other mothers who offered to
help out. Mundane moments certainly, relationships that perhaps do not

last, but in and of themselves they are indicative of a willingness to engage
with others across difference, moments of enacting a convivial disposi-
tion. We have shown also how, for the children, diversity constitutes the
expected, the common sense of their lives, and how they bridge differ-
ence for the shared ground of commonly enjoyed games, the experience
of classroom routines and the commonalities of being a pupil at Leewood,
Junction or Fernhill Schools.
Wise (2016) suggests we should always remain alert to the circum-
stances and conditions that may help or hinder the production of ‘cos-
mopolitan practices of sociability’; what we have generally referred to
here as a convivial disposition. Thus, we suggest that the sharing of
the primary school as a particular form of commons can not only fos-
ter civil attention, but also possibilities for sustained encounters,
interactions and social bonds, and the potential to generate a conviv-
ial disposition, in which tension and strain are not absent, but accom-
modated within a reflective and granular response to the experience of
difference and the development of affective interactions and social
relations.
However, our data also show that civil attention and its potential to
encourage relationships, and the possibilities for the generation of a con-
vivial disposition are undercut by a variety of factors. We have drawn
attention in earlier chapters to structural inequalities of recognition and
of access to resources, and have argued that these divisions are perpetu-
ated through social anxiety, unease, and occasionally (in our research)
distaste and racist responses in interacting with those ‘not like me’. The
role of social inequalities is fundamental in shaping the landscape of the
schools in the three gentrified/gentrifying localities. We have discussed
how economic, social and cultural capitals are unevenly distributed
among the families in the research. Although we have limited data on
these factors, we are acutely aware that elements such as housing
situations, a family’s legal status in Britain, access to work and flexibility
of working life all shaped parents’ time, energy and well-being, affecting
how they approached the school as an institution and the playground as
a site of mixing. For example, Theresa, featured in Chap. 7, told us of her
exhaustion as she tried to establish her family in a new country for a
s econd time. This returns us to the notion (cited above) of an individual’s

social and psychic resources to ‘stand in different spaces’.
Contemporary social inequalities are, of course, affected by the wider
political and social context and we referred earlier to fears around security
and ‘outsiders’. Two years before the fieldwork, the then Prime Minister
David Cameron spoke of the need for ‘muscular liberalism’, the demise
of ‘passive tolerance’ and the assertion of ‘British’ values (against extrem-
ist Islam).2 There was, whilst we were collecting the data, a hardening of
public discourse around migration and difference. Additionally, the post-
2008 global economic recession and domestic welfare reforms led to a
climate of austerity, to which we have earlier (Chap. 2) alluded in refer-
ence to changing housing and welfare benefit systems, and the challenges
posed to London’s inhabitants by the lack of social housing relative to
demand, and the high cost of either owning or renting a house. A recent
report by the Institute of Fiscal Studies (Cribb et al. 2017) reveals that
London remains the most unequal part of the UK in terms of income.
When all these local, national and international factors coalesce, the cli-
mate is defensive, and not one of welcome to the ‘other’ who is a stranger
to oneself (Amin 2012). Given this context, the potential of school sites
to generate even light interactions across difference, and the existence and
persistence of civil and convivial relationships amongst children and par-
ents at the three schools, is significant.
What Weighting for Friendships?

We began in Chap. 1 by arguing that a lot is expected of friendship rela-
tions despite their informality and despite the limits of their ability to
counter the impacts of wider structural forces in personal and everyday
lives. But this does not mean that friendship relations and practices are
insignificant. The ambivalence of the friendship relation, caught between
being agentic and being socially patterned is reflected in a number of the
stories we have told in the previous chapters. The nature of friendship
relations and the affective power of the primary school as a social com-
mons means that primary schools have a long reach into the emotional
landscapes of those parents and children who are within their world for
seven years. As we note in Chap. 6, all the children and adult participants
spoke of having established and experienced some form of friendship
relations that they had developed through being part of the primary
school world.
Echoing Engin Isin’s description of cities as ‘difference machines’ (Isin
2002), primary schools can act as ‘friendship machines’ working effec-
tively as public sites of affective and invested social interaction. While the
nature of those friendship formations may vary—some emotionally close,
some more situational, not necessarily permanent, nor without conflict
or social patterning—the intergenerational, connective work primary
schools can do presents opportunities for mutualism, engagement and
interaction across difference. Primary schools in diverse localities, with
their geographical embeddedness and their topological stretch, are social
sites in which ethnic and social difference can be held at a distance but
where there is also a high likelihood that this distancing will not always
be possible and such strategies (conscious or otherwise) will be disrupted
at some points. The nature of the primary school world and the popula-
tion using it, as well as the intergenerational dynamics of the social rela-
tionships within it, can demand that difference has to be negotiated often
through an uneven mix of recognition, interaction or reflexivity.
In Chap. 2, we reviewed literature suggesting the co-presence of con-
flict and conviviality as integral to situations of dense and diverse urban
living, and noted that this emphasis may counter romanticised ‘impera-
tives to love difference’ (Ahmed 2014). However, such theoretical asser-
tions may also act to gloss over the costs for individuals of living with and
around conflict and tension. It may be that limiting one’s responses to
those who are different to oneself, confining oneself to the detachment of
urban etiquette, the thin line of civil attention, may allow individuals to
contain and/or avoid instances of conflict, and that this may be an easier
response to adopt than the more risky ‘openness’ to difference, a convivial
disposition. Similarly, Wessendorf (2014) argues that people even in
semi-public spaces (such as local groups and associations) refrain from
asking personal questions of each other, perhaps for fear of causing
offence. She continues, ‘not engaging with difference could also be inter-
preted as a way of avoiding conflict and tensions’ (Wessendorf 2014,
p. 402), a ‘tactical reserve of non-engagement’ (Husband et al. 2016,
p. 214). We have argued above, however, that such limited engagement is

of value for it reveals, at the least, an acceptance of others.
Amin takes this argument on ‘indifference’ further, promoting it as not
just an individual defence mechanism, but as a wider goal of public pol-
icy. Rather than focusing on developing affective relationships and ties,
he argues for a ‘politics of the impersonal’. This, he maintains, is the only
way to address the persistence of a ‘social hierarchy of worth’ (Amin
2013, p. 1). He discusses this hierarchy as ‘racial coding’ that positions
visible minorities as ‘inferior, discrepant and threatening’ (ibid.). We
would agree that such coding exists, and also further suggest that a simi-
lar hierarchy of worth applies to social class, which is often embodied in
terms of dress, speech, mannerisms, that may be swiftly ‘read’ and judged,
particularly by co-nationals (see Jones 2011). Thus, indifference can be
read as positive, Amin suggests; it can act to diminish this embodied rat-
ing of value and worth. He posits the value of ‘a politics of the commons’,
sustained by a defence of the public sphere ‘as constitutively open, shared,
plural and indivisible’. He continues,
I see arising out of such a politics a certain public indifference to difference

sustained through ample collective provisions and a civility of public
engagement that decentres the subject and subjective preferences and rein-
forces a sense of the communal as of and for everyone, including the
stranger […] so that the status and visibility of particular bodies recedes as
a measure of their social worth and entitlement. (Amin 2013, p. 7)
However, whilst we agree with Amin that a ‘politics of interpersonal

contact’ focusing on achieving greater cohesion through social relation-
ships is a fragile and insufficient basis for public policy without a focus on
structures, institutions and public provision, we argue that a focus on rela-
tionships, how we inhabit and live institutions, is also necessary (also Noble
2013); that Amin’s ‘civility of public engagement’ signals the necessity of,
at least, civil attention, and thus the importance of attending to relation-
ships. We have identified the limitations, disassociations and missed oppor-
tunities present in our data. But we also argue that the sharing of a school
by families different in class, ethnicity and on multiple other indicators
(language, religion, etc.) reflects a basic but fundamental acceptance of the
‘other’ and the other’s legitimate interest and investment in the school.
Building on this acceptance, interactions through and around the children,
and the children’s own mixing and fluidity, offer opportunities for a range
of thin and thicker, light, and more substantial and lasting affective rela-
tionships. We suggest that, while the outcomes may be complex, modest
and uncertain, these interactions are nevertheless potentially generative of
dispositions of civility and conviviality, encouraging small resistances to
the well-documented pull of homophily, and the ease and comfort of simi-
larity within personal lives and friendship relations.
Notes
1. We are thinking here for example of access to a level of economic resources
that ensured some degree of stability in addition to the possession of for-
mal education credentials.
2. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pms-speech-at-munich-
security-conference
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Appendix

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73001-1
Table A.1 Details for the parent participants
Leewood School—adult participants
Mother’s Father’s Child’s
highest highest Current ethnicity Self-description
Pseudonym Name of Mother’s Father’s education education housing Mother’s Father’s and of class by
of Parent child occupation occupation qualification qualification situation ethnicity ethnicity heritage NS-SECa participants
Kaleb (m) Gabra Meal Town planner Degree Postgraduate Council/ Black Black Black 2 Lower middle
supervisor degree housing African African African class
at school association
Elif (f) Iraz Full time Garment cutter Degree Vocational Council/ White White White 7 Lower middle
mother housing other other other class
association
Rosita (f) Yazmine Student Builder GCSE level Vocational Housing White White White 6 Working class
association other other other
Bercu (f) Zayla Full time Textile A levels A levels Council/ White White White 7 Working class
mother manufacture (equivalent) housing other other other
factory work association
Mary (f) Andy Public N/A Degree N/A Private rented White White White 2 Middle class
relations other British British
Jane (f) Peter Consultant N/A Degree N/A Owner White White White 1.2 Middle class
public occupied British other British
sector
Hasana (f) Fatimah Full time Library Degree Degree Housing Black Black Black 5 Working class
mother assistant association African African African
Faruk (m) Kemel Full time Taxi driver GCSEs None Council White White White 7 Working class
mother reported other other other
Olivia (f) Joyce Counsellor Economist Postgraduate Postgraduate Owner White White White 2 Middle class
degree degree occupied British British British (working class
background)
Miranda Child not Clinical nurse Accountant Specialist Professional Owner White Irish White White 1.2 Middle class
(f)b in class specialist nursing qualification occupied British British
qualification
Harry (m) Emily Full time Delivery driver GCSEs GCSEs Council White White White 7 Lower middle
mother housing British British British class
(continued )
Table A.1 (continued)
Leewood School—adult participants
Mother’s Father’s Child’s
highest highest Current ethnicity Self-description
Pseudonym Name of Mother’s Father’s education education housing Mother’s Father’s and of class by
of Parent child occupation occupation qualification qualification situation ethnicity ethnicity heritage NS-SECa participants
Stuart (m) Shauna University Electrician (own PhD PGCE Owner White White IrishWhite 1.2 Middle class
lecturer business) occupied British British
Mira (f) Harris Pub owner Pub owner Degree GCSEs Owner Mixed British Mixed 2 Middle class
occupied heritage Asian heritage
Mick (m) Helen No data Construction GCSEs GNVQ Council White White White 6 Working
housing British British British
Amanda (f) Lucas Curator Banker Postgraduate Postgraduate Owner White White White 1.1 Middle class
museum degree degree occupied other other British
Catherine Emma Full time Banker Degree N/A Owner White White White 1.2 Middle class
(f) mother occupied British British British
Ava (f) Queenie Child care N/A Child care N/A Council Black Black Black 6 Working class
worker training housing Caribbean Caribbean Caribbean
Julia (f) Alfie Teaching Building A levels A levels Owner White White White 3 Working class
assistant contractor occupied British British British
Aarthi (f) Ben University Banker Postgraduate Degree Owner Mixed White Mixed 1.1 Middle class
lecturer education occupied heritage British heritage
a
See table below for details of NS-SEC
b
Requested an interview. Child not in target class
Junction School—adult participants
Mother’s Father’s
highest highest Current Child’s Self-description
Pseudonym Name of Mother’s Father’s educational educational housing Mother’s Father’s ethnicity and of class by
of parent child occupation occupation qualification qualification situation ethnicity ethnicity heritage NS-SECa participants
Pat (f) Jordon Administrator N/A BTEC N/A Private Black N/A Black British 3 Working class
rented Caribbean
Nadeem (m) Musa Full time Retail GCSEs Degree Council/ British Asian British British Asian 3 Working class
mother housing Asian
association
Lorna (f) Sam Mother, school Own business A levels Degree Shared White White White British 4 Lower middle
meal ownership British British class
supervisor
Gemma (f) Bethany Marketing Private sector A levels Degree Owner White White White British 2 Middle class
manager occupied British British
Hugh (m) Gwenyth Arts Arts Degree Degree Owner White White White British 2 Middle class
occupied British British
Rabia (f) Ahmed Full time Electrician Degree Degree Owner British Asian British British Asian 5 Lower middle
mother occupied Asian class
Elizabeth (f) Ollie Third sector Third sector Postgraduate Postgraduate Owner White White White British 2 Middle class
degree degree occupied British British
Sahar (f) Omar Full time Mini cab Degree A levels Private Arab Arab Arab 7 Lower middle
mother driver rented
Kalina (f) Alex Nurse Driver Degree A levels Private White other White White other Not enough Working class
rented other data
Svetlana (f) Krystina Partner in Sales Degree A levels Private White other White White other 4 Lower middle
small assistant rented other
company
(continued )
(continued)
Junction School—adult participants
Mother’s Father’s
highest highest Current Child’s Self-description
Pseudonym Name of Mother’s Father’s educational educational housing Mother’s Father’s ethnicity and of class by
of parent child occupation occupation qualification qualification situation ethnicity ethnicity heritage NS-SECa participants
Dana (f) Abner Royal Mail N/A Degree N/A Private Black Black Black African 6 Working class
rented African African
Theresa (f) Juan English student Cleaner High school High school Private White other White White other 7 Working class
rented other
Jose (m) Tina Cleaning Full time Postgraduate High school Council/ White other White White other 5 Working class
supervisor mother degree housing other
association
Clive (m)b Child not HR director Public sector N/A Degree Owner White White White British 1.1 Middle class
in class consultant occupied British British
Fareeda (f)b In other Secondary Hospital Postgraduate Postgraduate Owner British Asian British British Asian 1.2 Middle class
class school consultant degree degree occupied Asian
teacher
a
See table below for details of NS-SEC
b
Interviewed as part of the Parents’ Association at the school. These parents are included in this table because their work in the Parents’ Association was only a small
part of the interview. Two mothers from Leewood who are included on the following table of school staff are there as the majority of their interview was about the
Parents’ Association and their work for it
Fernhill School—adult participants
Mother’s Father’s Child’s Self-
highest highest Current ethnicity description
Name of Mother’s Father’s educational educational housing Mother’s Father’s and of class by
Pseudonym child occupation occupation qualification qualification situation ethnicity ethnicity heritage NS-SECa participants
Mehek (f) Adil Student Store A levels Postgraduate Private British Asian British Asian British Asian 3 Lower
manager degree rented middle
class
Nadifa (f) Noor Retail N/A Primary N/A Council Black Black Black 6 Lower
school housing African African African middle
class
Patricia (f) Kelly Teacher N/A Degree N/A Owner Black N/A Black 2 Working
occupied Caribbean Caribbean class
Dawn (f) David Student Project Degree Degree Owner White other White White 1.1 Middle class
manager occupied British British
Iman (f) Aslam Nutritionist N/A Postgraduate N/A N/A Black Black Black 2 Middle class
degree African African African
Gabriela (f) Andre Cleaning Construction Degree High school Private White other White other White other 4 Working
manager rented class
Jackie (f) Bella Full-time N/A Access course N/A Council Black N/A Black 8 Working
mother foundation housing Caribbean Caribbean class
Rosina (f) Donatello Retail Private Postgraduate NVQ Council Black Black Black 2 Lower
banking sector degree housing African African African middle
customer class
services
Amal (f) Child not Full-time N/A No data N/A Council Black N/A Black No Working
in class mother housing African African data class
(continued )
(continued)
Fernhill School—adult participants
Mother’s Father’s Child’s Self-
highest highest Current ethnicity description
Name of Mother’s Father’s educational educational housing Mother’s Father’s and of class by
Pseudonym child occupation occupation qualification qualification situation ethnicity ethnicity heritage NS-SECa participants
Saija (f) Jason Full-time Public sector Degree Degree Rented White other British Asian Mixed 2 Middle class
mother manager heritage
Annette (f) Serena Therapist Builder Vocational None Owner White other White White 2 Middle class
occupied British British
Carrie (f)b Child not Social Public sector Postgraduate PhD Owner White White White 2 Middle class
in class worker manager degree occupied British British British
a
See table for details of NS-SEC
b
Interviewed as part of the Parents’ Association. These parents are included in this table because their role in the Parents’ Association at the school was only a
short part of the interview. Two mothers from Leewood who are included on the following table of school staff are there as the majority of their interview was
about the Parents’ Association and their work for it
230 Appendix
Other Notes
We asked parents to self-ascribe their ethnicity and social class. We have
given reduced this information and some of the information given
about occupations in the tables above to preserve anonymity. We have
reported social class using two separate columns—parents’ own descrip-
tion and the NS-SEC categories. Regarding ethnicity, we found parents
mostly used descriptions that related to census categories (we assume
because these were fairly familiar to parents), and so we have reported
these. We are aware of the inadequacies of these, and the problematic of
appending ‘British’ to some groups and not all. Where parents’ occupa-
tions would place them in different NS-SEC categories we have used
the ‘highest’.
To give a clearer picture of the range of ethnicities and nationalities
involved in the project, the largest ethnic groups amongst our parent
respondents were White other (15 parents including those from Turkey,
Eastern European, Western European, North America, and South
American countries), White British (13 parents), Black British (11 par-
ents in total: 7 Black African and 4 Black Caribbean origin), British Asian
(4 parents with origins in Pakistan and Bangladesh) and ‘other’ (3 par-
ents, Arab and mixed heritage).
The NS-SEC—Analytic classes
1 Higher managerial, administrative and professional occupations
1.1 Large employers and higher managerial and administrative occupations
1.2 Higher professional occupations
2 Lower managerial, administrative and professional occupations
3 Intermediate occupations
4 Small employers and own account workers
5 Lower supervisory and technical occupations
6 Semi-routine occupations
7 Routine occupations
8 Never worked and long-term unemployed
Appendix
231
Table A.2 Details for the child participants

Crimson class, Leewood School—children’s demographics
Child pseudonym Ethnicity Social class (where known)
Ethan Mixed heritage
Shauna White British 1.2
Kemel White other 7
Amaan Black British
Daine Black British
Ben Mixed heritage 1.1
Pippa White British
Alfie White British 3
Helen White British 5
Phoebe White British
Iraz White other 7
Fatimah Black African 5
Kwami Black British
Lucas White British 1.1
Joyce White British 2
Tim White British
Gabra Black African 2
Satnaam British Asian
Andy White British 2
Aisha Black British
Callum Black British
Emily White British 7
Yazmine White other 6
Emma White British 1.2
Peter White British 1.2
Queenie Black Caribbean 6
Megan White British
Cindy Mixed heritage
Harris Mixed heritage 2
Zeyla White other 7
Burgundy class, Junction School—children’s demographics

Abdullah British Asian
Arzu White other
Ollie White British 2
Grace White other
Tyler Black British
Amica Black British
Jamilah Black British
Amy British Asian
(continued )
232 Appendix
Table A.2 (continued)

Burgundy class, Junction School—children’s demographics
Gwenyth White British 2
Ahmed British Asian 5
Sam White British 4
Alex White other 2
Layla Black African
Harley Black British
Lawrence Black British
Jordon Black British 3
Tina White other 5
Bethany White British 2
Malakie Mixed heritage
Sultan White other
Juan White other 7
Abner Black African 6
Musa British Asian 2
Omar Arab 7
Kim Mixed heritage
Amina British Asian
Krystina White other 4
Usman Black British
Scarlet class, Fernhill School—children’s demographics

Pseudonym Ethnicity Social class (where known)
Samad Black British
Adil British Asian 5
Courtney White other
Jason Mixed heritage 2
Bella Black Caribbean 8
Ali White other
Kelly Black Caribbean 2
Noor Black African 6
Iper White other
Nayna Black Caribbean
Caine Mixed heritage
Aslam Black African 2
Serena White British 2
Donatello Black African 2
David White British 1.1
Connor Black Caribbean
Finley Black Caribbean
Andre White other 4
Ammar Arab
Usain Black Caribbean
Appendix
233
Table A.3 Details for the teacher participants

Teachers and school-related participants
Name School Role Ethnicity
Phillip Leewood Second Class teacher, Crimson White British
class
Jessica Leewood Class teacher, Crimson class White British
Gail Leewood Head teacher White British
Belinda and Leewood Members of parent teacher White other/
Sabina association White other
Gary Junction Class teacher, Burgundy class White British
Tanya Junction Senior pastoral care post Black British
Patrick Junction School governor White British
Jennifer Junction Deputy head White British
Jacqui Fernhill Class teacher, Scarlet class Mixed heritage
Darren Fernhill Teaching assistant with pastoral Black British
care responsibilities
Jill Fernhill Chair of school governors White British
Edwina Fernhill Head teacher White British
Holly Fernhill Deputy head White British
Index1
A Anxiety, 143, 144, 168–170, 179,

Adams, R. G., 7 184, 185
Agency, 8, 38, 59, 79, 124–145 Askins, K., 100
children, 90, 94, 116, 145–146 Atkinson, W., 108, 109
managing friendships and Autism, 112, 134–135
feelings, 126–135
parental responses to children’s
friendships, 124, 131–132, B
137–145 Back, Les, 20, 41
school policy and practices, Bacque, M-H., 36
124–126 Ball, Stephen, 36, 127, 181, 184
teachers’ management of Belonging, 11, 35, 196, 215
children’s friendships, Benson, M., 45
135–137 Blatterer, H., 59
teachers’ readings of children’s Blokland, T., 32, 140
friendships, 129–135 Bottero, Wendy, 43, 46, 109, 180,
Allan, Graham, 6, 7, 131 203, 212
Amin, A., 40–42, 68, 153, 154, 156, Bourdieu, P., 11, 18, 30, 41, 98–99,
158–160, 165, 174, 212, 219 133, 186–188, 190, 209
1
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73001-1
236 Index
Bourdieu (cont.) identity and complex friendship

habitus, 20, 42–48, 50n5, 51n6, practices, 114–118
89, 108–109, 117, 180, middle childhood friendships,
202–203, 212 94–98
hysteresis, 185, 186 negative experiences, 90–91
Braun, Annette, 124, 128, 130 out-of-school activities,
Bruegel, Irene, 10, 93, 116–117 131–132, 140–144,
Bullying, 96, 106 167–172
Bunnell, T., 2, 6 parental responses, 133–134,
Butcher, M., 34, 44–45, 47–48 137–145
Butler, T., 35–37, 154, 155 power, 95, 136, 146
problematic friendship
behaviours, 105, 132–133,
C 145
Cafes, 164–165 reflections on teachers’
Cantle, Ted, 14, 30–31 management of, 135–137
Carter, C., 90–92 relations across ethnic and
Chambers, Deborah, 3 social difference, 92–94
Children, 10, 15, 16, 21, 60, 62, 77, school policy and practices,
81, 90–103, 105, 106, 123–129
108–118, 123–146, social networks, 100
167–172 teachers’ management of, 105,
classroom profiles, 65–67 126–135, 145
friendships interviews with, 79–81
attitudes towards diversity, list of research study participants,
108–114, 116–117 231, 232
bullying, 96, 106 Cities
and complex learning needs, and gentrification, 33–38
111, 133–135 and multiculture, 30–33, 49
conviviality, 109–114 Citizenship Survey, 14
ethnicity and class influences, Civil attention/inattention, 40, 159,
90 160, 174, 209, 219
flexibility, 130–131 and conviviality, 212–217
fragility of, 96–98 Clack, B., 132
friendship blueprints, Class differences, 8, 9, 11, 14, 35,
131–132 36, 45, 83, 112, 137
friendship maps, 77, 81, Clustering, 15–16, 160, 161, 184,
98–103 198–202
Index
237
Coleman, James, 30 contradictions of, 41

Coleman, T., 3, 152–155, 162 and encounters, 38–40
Collaborative strangers concept, 153, flat diversity, 201
156, 159–160, 174 income differences, 8, 9, 11, 113,
Collins, D., 3, 152–155, 162 188
Commission for Racial Equality, 14 indifference, 219
Commission for Social Integration, 39 parental attitudes to, 138–144,
Commission on Cohesion and 180–198, 215
Integration, 13, 14 reflexivity about difference,
Community cohesion, 13–14 188–192
Confidentiality, 79, 80, 83 refusing diversity, 181–183
Connolly, P., 93, 94, 116 skills and competence for dealing
Contact theory, 38 with, 17, 31–33
Conviviality, 29–30, 40–42, 174, 209 social and ethnic difference,
children, 109–114 effects of, 12
and civil attention, 212–217 social difference, 16–18, 20, 23
schools as connective conviviality Dramaturgy, 61, 73–77, 85, 86
sites, 162–167
social exchange and friendship-
making in primary school E
worlds, 157–161 Ecclestone, K., 132
Crossley, N., 46, 47, 108, 109, 212 Emotions, 6, 11, 42, 60, 75, 85, 98,
Cunningham, N., 48 123–124, 209, 210
minimization of, 130–131
Social and Emotional Aspects of
D Learning (SEAL), 127–129,
Davidson, M., 45 132–133, 135
Difference and diversity, 4, 5, 10, 60, Enablers, 16, 22, 142, 143,
209 192–198, 211, 214
bridging difference, 92–94, Encounter, 3, 4, 18, 21, 22, 29–32,
99–100, 190, 192–194, 38–40
198, 211, 214 connective settings, 152
children’s attitudes to, 116–118 extended encounters, 152
children’s friendship relations primary schools, encounter and
across ethnic and social places, 153–156
difference, 92–94 Engdahl, I., 92
class differences, 8, 9, 11, 14, 35, Equal opportunities, 124–125
36, 45, 83, 112, 137 Eve, Michael, 6–8, 12, 123
238 Index
F Gilroy, P., 40
Fernhill School, 67, 71, 183 Goffman, E., 18, 21, 32, 61, 68–69,
children’s friendships, 103, 74, 76, 77, 85, 159, 209,
106–107 212, 213
list of research study participants, Governing bodies, 83, 199–200
children, 232
list of research study participants,
parents, 228–229 H
school policy and friendships, Habitus, 20, 42–48, 50n5, 51n6, 89,
128–131 108–109, 117, 146n1, 180,
Football, 100, 104, 107 202, 203, 212
Fox, E. J., 94 Hage, G., 158–159, 215
Friendship, 65, 209, 210 Hagemans, I., 34
concept of, 1–2 Harris, A., 42
dyadic dynamics of, 7 Hate crimes, 40, 208
establishment of a sociology of Healy, Mary, 130
friendship, 9–16, 217–220 Hemming, P., 31
friendship networks, 11 Hewitt, Roger, 10, 31
as a marginalised sociological Hewstone, M., 42
concept, 4–9 Hoffman, D., 132
social and ethnic difference, Holloway, S., 72, 114, 155, 162
effects of, 12 Home spaces, 167–172
sociology of friendship, need for Homophily, 4–5, 12, 22, 44–46,
development of, 13–16 211
structural factors, 6–9 and parents, 138, 140, 179–180,
See also Researching friendship 183–188
reflexivity about homophily,
188–192
G Housing, 34, 35, 67–68, 112, 113
Gender imbalance, 67, 99–100, 107 Huber, V. P., 115–116
Gentrification, 5, 14, 19, 20, 29, 30, Hughes, K. A., 167
47, 63, 64, 154, 165 Husband, C., 32, 33
emerging gentrification, 65, 66,
199
established gentrification, 66 I
partial gentrification, 66 Identities, 11–12
and super-diversity, 33–38 classroom identification, 99
working-class view of, 186–188 and complex friendship practices,
George, Rosalyn, 93, 130 114–117
Index
239
non-vilified identities, need for, list of research study participants,

197–198 children, 230–231
researchers, 73–77 list of research study participants,
social identity complexity, parents, 224–225
92–93 Leszczensky, L., 5
Income, 8, 9, 11, 113, 217 Lewis, L., 132
Inequalities, 12, 198–202, 211, Lifeworlds, 3, 6, 46, 47, 51n6, 108,
216–217 109, 202–203
Inter-ethnic friendships, 10, 14, London, 48, 208, 217
98–99
Intermediate class, 78
M
Massey, Doreen, 165
J Materiality, 113, 114, 117
Jackson, E., 35, 45 Mayall, B., 90
Jones, Hannah, 32, 197 Meissner, F., 37
Junction School, 66–68, 114–116, Metropolitan paradox, 20, 41
128 Micro-publics notion, 42, 68, 153,
children’s friendships, 101, 102, 154, 174
105, 106 Middle-classes, 34–36, 78, 154,
list of research study participants, 182–184, 209, 210
children, 231–232 white middle-classes, 199–201
list of research study participants, Miller, Daniel, 8, 167
parents, 226–227 Miller-Idriss, C., 94
Juvonen, J., 93 Mixophilia, 18, 22, 41
Mixophobia, 18, 22
Morrow, V., 113
K Multiculture, 12, 15, 17, 37, 38, 49,
Kathiravelu, L., 13, 23 209
Knifsend, C. A., 93 and the city, 30–33
Kulz, Christy, 155–156 Muslims, 169, 170, 182, 184, 196,
197, 211
and diversity, 191–192
L hostility to, 195, 196
Languages, 63 religious identity, 114–116
interpreters, 82
Lees, L., 33
Leewood School, 64, 72, 128 N
children’s friendships, 100, 101, Nast, J., 32, 140
104 Nava, M., 48
240 Index
Neal, S., 38, 39, 41, 165–167 reflexivity about homophily and
Noble, G., 40, 185, 193, 213, 215 difference, 188–192
Nutbrown, C., 91, 92 refusing diversity, 181–183
responses to children’s friendships,
125, 131–132
O school choice, 36
Oakley, Ann, 73 spatial practices, 15
Otherness, 15, 36, 37, 48, 112, 117, Parks, 165–166
118, 144, 170 Paton, K., 34, 186
Out-of-school activities, 131–132, Pellandini-Simanyi, L., 9, 11, 12
140–144 Personal communities, 7, 9
home spaces, 167–172 Personal Social and Health
Education (PSHE),
127–128
P Pilkington, Hilary, 75, 77
Pahl, R., 6–9, 12, 123, 157 Pink, S., 5
Pain, R., 100 Pinkster, F., 35
Parents, 2, 10, 14, 21, 60, 62, Plage, S., 41
130–132 Playgrounds, 15
anxiety, 169–170, 184, 186, 194 clustering in the playground,
clusters, 3, 15–16, 160, 161, 200
198–202 Plumb, N., 207
continuum in attitudes to Power, 17
diversity, 198 children’s friendships, 94–95
enablers, 16, 22, 192–198, 211 power symmetries, 3–4
friendships, 9–11, 22, 157–161, structural power relations, 7–9
164–165 Primary schools, 10, 60
homophilous tendencies, access to, 68–70
137–140, 183–188 case studies and geographies,
interviews with, 79–81 62–68
list of research study participants, encounter, places and primary
224–229 schools, 153–156, 208, 210,
main project methodology, 218
18–20 Fernhill School, 66–68, 72, 103,
migrant parents, 184–185 106–109, 128, 183, 228,
parent-teacher associations 232
(PTAs), 85, 199, 200, 211 friendship role, 2–3
pilot study, 16–18 governing bodies, 84, 199–200
Index
241
insider/outsider status of Islam, 115, 117, 182, 183,

researchers, 70–72 191–192, 196, 217
Junction School, 67–68, 102, Researching friendship, 79–85
105, 114–115, 226, 231 challenges of, 60
Leewood School, 64, 72, 101, child participants, 231
104, 128, 224, 231 confidentiality, 79, 80, 83
policy and practices on children’s dramaturgy and managing
friendships, 123–125, research environments, 61,
127–129 73–77, 85, 86
relationship extensions into the friendship maps, 80, 98–103
wider environment, insider/outsider status of
162–167, 173 researchers, 70–72
as a research environment, 61 main project methodology,
school choice, 36 18–20
schools and classrooms in the parent participants, 224–229
study, 64 pilot study, 16–18
social exchange and friendship- primary school case studies and
making in primary school geographies, 62–68
worlds, 157–161 race and class, influence of,
and the total institution concept, 75–76
68–74, 85 research design and processes,
Privilege, 198–202, 211 77–86
Pugh, Alison, 77 adults and their interviews,
Putnam, R., 10, 30 81–84
children and their interviews,
79–81
R findings reports, 84–85
Racism, 94, 112, 197, 198 research team, influence of, 61
racial coding, 219 schools and classrooms in the
Racism in Children’s Lives (Connolly), study, 64
93 schools and the total institution
Radford, D., 144 concept, 68–74, 85
Ramiah, A. A., 90, 116 self-presentation of researchers,
Reay, Diane, 36, 47, 174 73–77, 85–86
Reflexivity, 46, 48, 212 teachers and school related
and homophily and difference, participants, 233
188–192, 214 Residential segregation, 4–5
Religion, 5, 14, 91, 105, 184, 195 Robson, G., 154, 155
242 Index
Rollock, N., 197, 198 role in influencing interactions,

Ryan, Louise, 6, 7, 10–12 44–45
schools as connective conviviality
sites, 162–167
S school space, 70
Sadgrove, J., 39 sharing space, 31–33
Savage, M., 3, 10, 35, 48, 78, 157 social exchange and friendship-
Scheurich, J., 81 making in primary school
Scott, Susie, 61, 74, 77 worlds, 157–161
Sedano, L. J., 93, 98–99 urban etiquette, 152, 154, 218
Segregation, 4–5 Spencer, L., 6–9, 157
school segregation, 14, 30–31, 90 Spyrou, S., 115–116
self-segregation, 168–169 Structural factors, 7, 8, 12
Sennett, Richard, 32 Super-diversity, 30, 37
Shaw, K., 34 and children’s friendships, 98–100
Silva, E. B., 212 Sweetman, P., 47, 197
Smart, Carol, 59, 157, 167–168
Social and Emotional Aspects of
Learning (SEAL), 127–129, T
132–133, 135–137 Teachers, 21, 60, 72, 78
Social capital, 7, 30, 43 and bullying, 96
role in friendship networks, 11 intervention in children’s
Social difference, 17–18, 20, 23 friendships, 105, 123–124
Social networks, 2–3, 5, 7, 12, 19, interviews with, 83–84
43–45 list of research study participants,
children, 100–107 233
Sociology of friendship, 209 management of children’s
development of, need for, 13–16 friendships and feelings,
establishment of, 9–16 105, 144
marginalisation of, 2–9, 12, 16, policy and practices on children’s
20, 22 friendships, 123–125
Spatial aspects, 8, 11, 15–16, 21, 22 reflections on management of
cafes, 164, 165 children’s friendships,
connecting and making up social 135–137
space, 153–156 The Weight of the World (Bourdieu),
home spaces, 167–172 44
interview locations, 82 Total institution concept, 61, 68–74,
park, 165–166 85
Index
243
V Working-classes, 34, 36, 37, 45,

Valentine, Gill, 39, 42, 72, 167, 47–48
197–198 and gentrification, 186–188
Valluvan, S., 4
Vertovec, S., 15–16, 37, 200
Y
Ye, J., 33
W Young people (adolescents), 6, 10,
Watt, P., 35 45, 92–93
Weller, S., 116–117
Wessendorf, S., 110, 168, 218
Wilson, Helen, 15, 32 Z
Wise, Amanda, 15, 16, 40, 41, 153, Zembylas, M., 46, 133
154, 192, 216

Friendship and Diversity

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FRIE NDSH IP

& DIV ERS I T Y

Carol Vincent, Sarah Neal, Humera Iqbal

ISBN 978-3-319-73000-4 ISBN 978-3-319-73001-1 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018935410

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover design by Tjaša Krivec

Printed on acid-free paper

1 Why Study Friendships and Diversity? Orientations

2 Encounter, Conviviality and the City: New Directions

Habitus: Disruption and Possibility 42

3 Back at School: Research Methods, Design and Reflexive

4 The Children’s Friendships: Difference, Commonality

Scarlet Class, Fernhill School 106

5 Children’s Agency and Adult Intervention: Children’s

6 Extended Social and Spatial Encounters in Primary School

7 Antagonisms, Ambivalences and Association: Parents’

8 Conclusion: Understanding Friendship and Diversity 207

Humera Iqbal is a Lecturer in Psychology at UCL Institute of Education and

Table 3.1 Overview of the schools and classrooms in the study 64

In brief: Introducing the sociology of friendship, the use of primary schools as

© The Author(s) 2018 1

We begin with Aarthi, a middle-class, mixed South Asian heritage par-

intimate, spontaneous and micro-social interactions and networks are

An Emergent Sociology of Friendship

Throughout this book we consider how people’s dispositions to think and

are shaped by homophily—the idea that people’s networks and relation-

friendship but through conceiving it as a structural relation, operating

We were struck by the language of suffusion used by our respondents, illus-

in crisis’—could not counter the wider inequalities that their friendship

An Established Sociology of Friendship?

It is in the context of gathering narratives such as those of Aarthi and

explored in Chap. 4, there is a relatively well-established focus on chil-

 onviviality, Heterogeneity, Encounter and Proximity:

Thus, we understand friendship as having both an interior- and exterior-­

importance of contact, civic exchange, neighbourliness, capacity and

of this work to recognise the everyday or ‘ordinary-ness’ of multiculture

 pproaching Diverse Friendships: Conceptual

distribution of power in a dominant culture guest/host relationship’

contradictory themes: engagement across and disposition to valorised

The Main Project

The research is based in multicultural, highly diverse London geogra-

How the Book Is Organised

methodology of the project itself. It draws on Goffman’s concepts of ‘the

their apparent informality and their micro-scale, friendships—whether

Gilroy, P. (2006). Colonial Crimes and Convivial Cultures. Presentation at

Conviviality in Socially and Ethnically Complex Urban Geographies. Journal

In brief: Reviewing the arguments on super-diversity, gentrification, encoun-

© The Author(s) 2018 29

disposition’ can be generated, and how living in an intensely diverse

Multiculture and the City

understands such ‘intergenerational closure’ as a positive force for main-

The reality of open public spaces in contemporary cities is one of territori-

As Hemming (2011, p. 65) argues, geographers have employed the

to live with cultural difference by showing civility to others’. Thus, recent

this acts to increase an individual’s sense of belonging. Husband and col-

Gentrification and Super-Diversity

cheaper areas, although continued existence of social housing in all three

This mixture—desire for and openness to difference and the accompa-

identities (Jackson and Butler 2015). Working-class ‘others’ especially,

Meissner and Vertovec argue that super-diversity describes a social

(cited in Humphris 2015) calls ‘flat’ or horizontal diversity (see Chap. 7

Beyond Romanticising Encounter

1 Why Study Friendships and Diversity? Orientations

2 Encounter, Conviviality and the City: New Directions

Habitus: Disruption and Possibility 42

3 Back at School: Research Methods, Design and Reflexive

4 The Children’s Friendships: Difference, Commonality

Scarlet Class, Fernhill School 106

5 Children’s Agency and Adult Intervention: Children’s

6 Extended Social and Spatial Encounters in Primary School

7 Antagonisms, Ambivalences and Association: Parents’

8 Conclusion: Understanding Friendship and Diversity 207

Table 3.1 Overview of the schools and classrooms in the study 64

An Emergent Sociology of Friendship

An Established Sociology of Friendship?

onviviality, Heterogeneity, Encounter and Proximity:

Thus, we understand friendship as having both an interior- and exterior-

pproaching Diverse Friendships: Conceptual

The Main Project

How the Book Is Organised

Multiculture and the City

Gentrification and Super-Diversity

Beyond Romanticising Encounter

Habitus: Disruption and Possibility

he Research Environment: The Case Study

L eewood School: An Area of Established

J unction School: An Area of Emerging

F ernhill School: An Area of Partial

ack to School: The Primary School as a Total

ack to School: Dramaturgy and Managing

rational and self-contained [...] and to assume that his/her self-

Research Design and Processes

The Children and Their Interviews

The Adults and Their Interviews

hildren’s Friendship Relations Across Ethnic

Bridging Different Worlds?

F riendship in Middle Childhood: Being Eight

Friendships in Super-Diverse Classrooms