No-go- area, no-go- school: community discourses, local school market and children's identity work

Abstract

This article focuses on how 11-year-old children in a segregated Swedish suburb at the time of choosing school for Year 6 in the 9-year compulsory school used current community discourses in their identity work, while constructing an ‘us’ in relation to ‘them’. The segregation in the suburb was strengthened by the process of a school market, with competition among the schools. Even if the formal choice was made by the parents the study shows that the choosing process was also an important part of the children's identity work. The results show differentiations among the children with a majority of children involved in re-constructing both a neighbourhood and the neighbourhood's school as no-go-areas while other children rather choose that school.

Keywords:

• children
• identity work
• segregation
• community discourses
• school market

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the children, who participated in this study for sharing their narratives, maps, photos, and everyday life with me. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for helpful and constructive comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes

For reasons of anonymity names and details of places and children have been changed in the texts, maps, and photographs.

Three forms of tenure dominate Swedish cities: home ownership (usually single houses), co-operative housing (traditionally multi-family houses but lately also terrace-houses), and rental houses (mostly in multi-family buildings in large housing estates, often publicly owned and constructed in the 1960s and early 1970s). Social housing in the way it exists in the UK or USA does not exist in Sweden. The publicly owned rental flats are available to all households (Andersson 1999).

This pattern forms the basic elements in the spatial segregation processes in most Swedish cities. Immigrants are overly represented in the publicly owned rental flats and tend to remain in such housing for longer periods than the Swedish-born population, even if their economic resources improve (Andersson 1999, Bråmå 2006).

This type of advertisements is not unusual, see for example Irena Molina's study of the Swedish suburb Gottsunda (Molina 1997).

The differences in the time of transfer depends on the lack of space in Pine Tree School.

Red marks, places where you usually are; golden stars, favourite places; yellow marks, friends (girls); blue, friends (boys); black, places you avoid; area marked with blue pen, a whole area that you avoid; area marked with red pen, where you feel at home; pink line, your way to school.

By this time 19 children out of 21 in the school class from Hill School participated in this research (one pupil was absent due to illness the day the maps were made) and from Pine Tree School 29 out of 30 children in the school class participated (and also here one pupil was absent due to illness this particular day).

I have transferred the children's paper maps into a digital software program, MapInfo, by which I can analyse individual maps and groups of maps as well as different parts of the maps.

The marks in the eastern part of the map symbolise places outside the border of the map, in other areas of the city or in the city centre.

This can be compared with a ‘Save the Children’ project in a suburb of Stockholm where segregation was reinforced or reduced by how the school classes were put together. The children who went to mixed classes with children from both one-family housing areas and rental flat areas had friends in both areas but those who went to classes with children from either one-family or rental flat areas had their friends in their own area (Andersson-Brolin et al. 1997), see also Öhrn (2005).

For a discussion of the significance for children in Sweden, see for instance Björklid (2001) or Heurlin-Norinder (2005).

Of course was there an opportunity also for these children to choose another school, but it was nothing they discussed spontaneously and when asked it did not appear to be an important or problematic issue.

‘Immigrant’ is a blurred and problematic term that is used in both daily speech and official statistics. Here the children use the concept when talking about people they consider to be ‘more’ immigrants than others and by this also reproduce an ethnic hierarchy that is visible in the society on the whole (Molina 1997, Andersson 2001). For a more detailed discussion of how the children use the concept, see Gustafson (2006).

There are many any other examples of how these boys like to perform as adventurous boys doing dangerous things, like breaking rules, going to forbidden places, scrumping apples, etc. (Gustafson, 2006).

Who used to go to a parallel class to theirs in Pine Tree School.

In another article Reay (2007, as well as Bunar 2009) has shown how children in schools that are seen as unruly places paint a more complex picture of these schools, striving to present an image of both themselves and their schools as adequately good.

Thorne (1993) uses the concept ‘border work’ in gender-mixed activities and places, where differences in gender are frequently underlined and reinforced. She gives examples of border work, like contests between girls and boys, chasing, ‘cooties’, and invasions. Thorne's work in childhood studies has been seen as a guideline for how to study mechanisms in gender patterns (Hägglund 2001). In my expanded understanding of border work it is not only gender that is involved, as it is also part of children's identity work in constructing different us's, regardless of what kind.

These processes is not something that occurred just during these initial phase of school choice in Sweden when the fieldwork of this study was conducted, but still works in the present extended school market (Bunar 2009, Andersson et al. 2010).