ABSTRACT
This chapter examines and analyzes how the annual upper secondary school fairs in Sweden represent a ritual for the school’s marketing. At the school fair, the school appears as a concrete marketplace, where representatives from the schools are present as salespeople and students as customers or consumers. The various educational options are here represented as products or brands. Based on fieldwork at school fairs and interviews with participants of school fairs in three medium-sized municipalities, a picture is shown of the importance and meaning-making of this phenomenon for the actors there. Drawing on discourse theory by Glynos and Howarth (2007) combined with a theory of rituals and “interpassive” behavior by Pfaller (2014), the chapter explores how participants make sense of the fairs, how they navigate between interpellations of “information/advertisements” and how they talk and act “as if” the fairs really made a difference for their future.
