The ‘so many different other things you can be’

: how children are constructing the future of an increasingly diverse society

Abstract

This thesis investigates how children negotiate the ‘facts’ of everyday diversity and the ‘discourses’ surrounding this diversity, which they learn from within and outside school. My fieldwork took place during the 2021-22 school year with children aged nine to ten in what can be characterised as a ‘superdiverse’ primary school in the City of Bristol, United Kingdom. In a time when ‘diversity’ has become a significantly topical subject of discourse in educational institutions and the public and private spheres, I ethnographically explore how children are receiving these discourses and what they are doing with them.

Using child-led participatory methods, focus groups and participant observation, I found that children are daily navigating a ‘pedagogy of diversity’ at school, exercising agency within its rules and limitations and bringing their own ideas about diversity and difference into it. My research draws on literature from a wide range of disciplines, including education, children’s agency, anthropological theories on human diversity, linguistics and cultural theory. My findings show that children are actively learning to reproduce the enduring boundaries embedded in their social order but also resisting, interrogating and transforming them.

Date of Award	10 Dec 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Camilla Morelli (Supervisor) & Mhairi A Gibson (Supervisor)