‘Ellie is the coolest’: class, masculinity and place in vehicle engineering students’ talk about literature in a Swedish rural town school

Abstract

This article aims to show how boys in a vehicle engineering programme at an upper secondary school in Sweden use their reading and literature discussion in their identity construction and how the classroom is converted into a place where the boys create the social space that they are a part of. This article is written in the intersections between different disciplines, research fields, and theoretical and methodological perspectives, and it is argued that this approach makes it possible to exceed each respective limitation and present a more nuanced and far-reaching discussion about how children use literature discussions in the construction of identity and place.

Keywords:

• geography
• place
• identity
• reading
• literature reception
• class
• gender

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the two anonymous referees of the Children's Geographies for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this article.