‘Fitting in’ and ‘standing out’: the peer group and young people’s development of reader identity

Abstract

The benefits of reading for pleasure and positive reader identities have been well established in previous research. However, much discussion regarding young people’s reading is underpinned by a discourse of deficit, placing emphasis on what young people should be reading. In an attempt to move away from this discourse, this article considers reading in the context of young people’s broader social and cultural worlds, exploring the role of the peer group in young people’s development of a reader identity. The article argues that the reading practices young people engage in are part of their broader social and cultural participation and, consequently, part of a broader project of identity formation. By highlighting the complexity of young people’s development of a reader identity and the meaning ascribed to specific reading practices, the findings challenge deficit models of young people’s reading lives, which underpin attempts to redistribute cultural capital through educational and cultural policy.

Keywords:

• Reading
• peer group
• identity
• youth culture
• critical literacy
• cultural artefacts

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the Department of Education at the University of York for funding the PhD on which this research is based. Thanks also to Dr Richard Budd for his feedback and to the Sociological Review Foundation for a funded place at their early career researcher ECR writing retreat, at which an early draft of this article was written.

Disclosure statement

This work is the original work of the author and there is no conflict of interest. No part of the article has previously been published elsewhere.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a PhD studentship from the Department of Education at the University of York.