ABSTRACT
The introductory chapter sets out the context and key ideas of the book. The book makes one critical statement: that young people’s social worlds are at least as important to their experience of, and engagement with, education as any formal curricular activities, and are potentially transformational to educational and social inequalities. To examine this central contention, I set out two key overarching original ideas: first, that young people are dynamic, porous and connected contextual bodies/subjectivities/agencies; and second, that schools are immersive geographies. From young people as contextual bodies/subjectivities/agencies four central insights emerge. First, the embodied, material, nature of young people’s agencies. Second, the contextual and dynamic nature of young people who become differently in different social, spatial, historical, political, economic and cultural contexts. Third, young people as nodes of the intergenerational reproduction of enduring differences. Fourth, the powerful nature of young people and specifically their socialities to challenge and change enduring broader-scale inequalities through my original conceptualisation of immersive geographies. Immersive geographies explore the ways in which the coming together of (young) people through repeated encounters in space and time provides a potential for transforming difference, to create new worlds. This difference can be tied to enduring axes of power, such as socio-economic class, race/ethnicity, religion, gender/sex, sexuality and my specific research interest of dis/ability, along with how these intersect. The book is an empowering piece of research that seeks to make countertopographies that can produce new ways of being that challenge enduring inequalities.
