ABSTRACT
This chapter draws together the major contributions of the book: the importance of young people’s own socialities to their experiences of school, and how young people are critical in the reproduction and potential transformation of enduring axes of difference and entrenched disadvantages around class, dis/ability, race/ethnicity, gender and other differences, which intersect. The way in which the original and new concepts contextual bodies/subjectivities/agencies and immersive geographies instigate new directions for social sciences and education is considered. As contextual bodies/subjectivities/agencies, young people are embodied yet contextual and dynamic in nature: young people become differently in different social, spatial, historical, political, economic and cultural contexts in interaction with their corporeality. As nodes of the intergenerational reproduction of enduring differences, young people frequently reproduce axes of power relations, which precede them and continue through time and space, and through which entrenched intergenerational differences continue. Yet finally, the book emphasises the powerful nature of young people and specifically their socialities and their power to reproduce but also to challenge and change enduring broader-scale inequalities via their everyday performances. The concepts of embodied emotional and social capital express this powerful and contextual nature of young people’s subjectivities and emphasise how they are forged within (and can challenge and change) broader socio-spatial contexts. The concept of immersive geographies provides original perspectives about how repeated proximity through space and time provide opportunities for young people to challenge and change enduring axes of power, which has implications much beyond the scope of this book. The book is a countertopographical or empowering project, and by reflecting upon the conditions of the emergence of socio-spatial relations which defy enduring embodied inequalities, some ways that schools can be empowering to young people are suggested. The book concludes with my original poem: A Circle.
