Thinking with Bevereley Skeggs - Stockholms universitet

present in schools. As he shows, the constant presence of thismatter teaches children things about society. It, for example,teaches them how to rate different futures and occupations. Inother words, it teaches them criteria for appraising and gradingsocial success.As we will see, Abraham’s account above shows that he haslearnt a lot about how social success is to be measured and valued.This awareness of a social status hierarchy was not unique forAbraham. On the contrary, all the young people I interviewed –both female and male – showed an awareness of dominating ideason success and status. They furthermore displayed responsivenessto such ideas.As mentioned Abraham’s statements on his future plans couldbe interpreted as a kind of response to the question on howhe has succeeded – or is about to succeed. For even if I didnot explicitly pose this question it was present in the interviewsituation. It was an implicit query flowing into our conversationfrom surrounding discourses. It was materialised in myself, orrather in Abraham’s ideas about whom I was, which stereotypesI had and what the research was all about. It was brought tothe fore, among other things, by the meeting between me, awhite, middle-class person from a educational institution, andAbraham, an ex-pupil, who I had met ten years earlier, an expupilfrom a stigmatized urban area.Class as a scale of judgementClass is often regarded as an objective fact. Yet, there is todayno consensus on which resources give access to different classpositions. Nor is there any consensus on which criteria arethe most suitable for defining social class. Simultaneouslyas there are big gaps between different groups in today’sSwedish society, there are growing difficulties in drawingclass boundaries and in deciding who belongs where. Butrather than regarding the concept of class as something85