Thinking with Bevereley Skeggs - Stockholms universitet

Returning then to the often-posed questions on what the youngpeople want to be, how they are getting on and have succeeded,these can be seen as linked to ideas of class as an objective fact.They are aiming at defining social positions and estimating anyclimbing up the social ladder. In other words, these questionsare instruments for determining and measuring class. They aremanifestations of class as a system of classification and as a scaleof judgement. They thereby form a ‘classing address’. So, theseseemingly innocent questions – posed out of curiosity about thecurrent social positions of the young people – contain elementsof positioning. And as mentioned, many of the young people– male as well as female – during the interviews also answeredthese classing questions even though I did not pose them.Place as space for class inscriptionA category that is often exposed to classing questions is peopleliving in so-called socially deprived areas. This was prominentwhen I studied schools in such an area for my thesis. The futureof the pupils and the matter of how they would succeed werein constant focus (Runfors 2003). This is also evident in myongoing project and manifested in the repeated questions on howthe ex-pupils nowadays are getting on.The future of these kids seemed to draw extra attention due tothe teachers’ assumptions that they were under- or working-classchildren – an assumption based on their residence in a stigmatizedurban area. Place in today’s Sweden is actually an often-usedcriterion for deciding people’s social starting points and definingtheir class affiliation. And living in places regarded as sociallydeprivedtherefore does not only prompt classing questions, butalso means that you are at risk of being classed as belonging tolower social strata (Runfors 2007; cf., e.g. Andersson 2003).When Abraham tells me about his time at StockholmUniversity he talks a lot about feeling socially odd, uncertainand uncomfortable. When I ask him why he feels this way he87