Paper short abstract:

In this paper I explore how sameness and difference are reproduced through age-based categories of identification and belonging in an English secondary school.

Paper long abstract:

I explore how sameness and difference are reproduced through age-based categories of identification and belonging in an English school. I begin by outlining age and generation as structuring and disciplining taxonomies in schooling. I track the emergence of an age-based approach to organising schooling, and by demonstrating, via theoretical traditions in anthropology, youth studies, and the sociology of education, the wider implications for social organization of this particularly rigid, gerontological approach to structuring school experiences. This leads me to the concept of age imaginaries - a term that I use to further complicate the tension between structural and ideological framings of age, on one hand, and on the other, age as it is experienced as a more complex and fluid organising concept in the everyday lives of pupils and teachers. In the second half of the chapter, I deploy the concept of age imaginaries to show how sameness and difference are reproduced in familiar and unexpected ways in the context of Lakefield School, a secondary school (ages 11-18) in England . In turn, I consider age imaginaries in relation to school discourse, embodiment, resistance, and in the convergence of sameness and difference. I suggest that in spite of significant societal change since the ethnography took place in 2007-8, the enduring age-based structures of schooling in England demonstrate the continued importance of reproducing age taxonomies in schooling in order to maintain modernist economic, political and social systems of predicated on sameness and difference, on inclusion and exclusion, in wider English society.