Constructing social class: what matters to young children? A sociomaterial exploration of how class is produced by 4-5-year-old children in an English primary school

Abstract

This thesis examines whether young children construct social class through their day-to-day lives with peers, and if so, how. Accepting invitations posed by existing research, I reconsider a concept traditionally characterised through adult measures (i.e. occupation or education) and counter the prioritisation of children’s future developmental outcomes over their lives in the present.
Through engaging in a six-month ethnographic entanglement, I explore what aspects of classroom life come to matter to 4-5-year-old children at a school pseudonymised as Parkside Primary. Utilising a sociomaterial framework and drawing on Baradian posthuman performativity, social class is conceptualised as ‘doing’, something that is (re)made through micro-moments unfolding across all matters in the classroom. By involving the children in interpreting events, I attempt to challenge discourses of childhood that have previously excluded them from class research and weave their perspectives into how we can come to know class differently.
Findings illustrate how certain goods and experiences, such as branded water bottles or birthday parties, came to matter between children at Parkside and could be used to negotiate friendships in the classroom. Yet it was not these goods and experiences alone that construct class, but their tangling with the spatial, temporal and physical organisation of the classroom to produce moments where they can matter. Through their translation into an affective register, I propose that capitalist and neoliberal principles have become entwined with the construction of children’s lives, where what matters at Parkside is not universally accessible based on economic differences.
Through this, I hope to bring substance to the ghostly presence of social class, identifying, diversifying and democratising everyday opportunities to respond to neoliberal ways of being. In doing so, this project intends to show how social class can be explored with young children, through collaborative methods as well as by rethinking the concept.