Carol Vincent (UCL
Institute of Education), Sarah Neal (University of Surrey) and Humera Iqbal
(UCL Institute of Education).
Our research project set out to address
the question, do people have friendships with those who are socially and
culturally different to themselves?
Focusing on primary schools in London that serve a diverse population in
terms of social class and ethnicity, we studied the friendships that both
children (8/9 years old) and their parents made, maintained and/or avoided. Our aim was to identify what friendships reveal about the
nature and extent of ethnic and social divisions in contemporary
multicultural society. We wished to contribute to the growing literature in
geography and sociology on how people living in conditions of intense diversity
interact with others not like themselves. On a more personal level, two of us had
experience of being mothers at diverse primary schools, similar to the ones we
studied, and had experienced both how social class and ethnic sameness could shape
social relationships for adults and children, but also how being a parent or a
child at a diverse schools could offer the possibility of friendships across
difference.
This paper is the initial analysis from the ESRC
funded research. In it, we outline the scope of the children’s networks and friendships
within their classrooms, and then report on how parents at two of the case
study schools felt about their children’s friendships. We conclude that social mix did not translate straight forwardly
into social mixing, despite the
diversity of the school populations and that of the surrounding areas. We find
that the social is heavily classed, as friendship across class difference was
less common than friendship across ethnic difference, both amongst the children
and the adults. We argue that many parents were explicitly enthusiastic about
the diverse populations at their children’s school, that they consciously, and
for the most part competently managed diverse encounters, and that we
identified some purposeful efforts to forge relationships across difference.
However, many parents also experienced
some level of anxiety about close contact with others not like themselves. Different parents displayed
different ways of negotiating difference. Some parents in our study managed
those who came into the house or limited the houses their children went to. For
others, the private space of the home was more open, but a process of managing
difference still took place, through the consignment of others not like
themselves to the periphery of the social encounter, centering instead the
dense networks of other ‘people like me’, through, for example, organising the
children’s out of school time. As a result, children’s friendships were not
bound by sameness, but they were initiated and practised on a terrain inscribed
by largely unspoken, but still powerful social divisions.
For more information about the
research, please see our website: https://friendshipacrossdifference.com
Intersting information! Thanks!
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