New counter‐school cultures: female students' drug use at a high‐achieving secondary school

Abstract

We draw on case‐study research at a high‐achieving secondary school in London to illustrate how school experiences may influence drug use and reproduce inequalities in reconstructed ways in late modernity. Qualitative data were collected through semi‐structured interviews with students and teachers, and observations. We focus in particular on the accounts of three female students expressing a shared counter‐school identity and style to explore how drug use has become an important source of bonding, identity construction, coping and excitement for young women from disadvantaged families at high‐achieving schools, including as part of strategies to resist the narrow focus schools can place on academic attainment, monitoring and discipline. We propose that, in late modern times, class‐based counter‐school cultures are being replaced with new consumer‐based ones, but that secondary schools continue to act as sites for the reproduction of social stratification, as well as risk and harm relating to drug use.

Keywords:

• drug use
• gender
• schools
• youth cultures
• identity
• case‐study

Notes

1. Other studies have also highlighted the role of race and ethnicity in the formation of new school cultures (for example, Sewell 1997), although this is not the empirical focus of the analyses presented here.