ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I explore how friendships and social relationships are inherently powerful, with a generative and affirmative power of subjectification and recognition or more exclusionary forms of power, where other young people are isolated, excluded, marginalised or stigmatised. These, I argue, demonstrate socio-psychic geographies of ‘othering’ and of ‘abjection’ and ‘distanciation’. These findings reflect upon the ‘power’ of young people’s geographies to forge subjectivities that belong and do not belong to specific social groups or micro-geographies within the school space. The practices of ‘including’, ‘excluding’ and positioning are deliberate and reflect who young people identify and empathise more or less with; however, an affect which is probably beyond conscious is that these practices often follow lines of ‘difference’ and ‘othering’ around gender, socio-economic group, and especially poverty, ability and bodily, emotional, mind and learning ‘differences’, and race/ethnicity. In addition, social and cultural capital intersect as those young people who have friends and good friends tend to have more positive views and engagement with school, although the broader socio-spatial contexts of schools also influence social relationships. In this way, young people are often ‘nodes’ in the reproduction of enduring differences. Of course, this is not all that they are.
