Thinking with Bevereley Skeggs - Stockholms universitet

states: “You think they will look down on you because you arean immigrant, and because you are from the [deprived] suburb.They might assume that means you are from the lower classesand presume you like hip hop, are involved in criminality andspeak bad Swedish”. Abraham here expresses attentivenessto positioning practices that could class him as underclass orworking class. Among other things he articulates awarenessof places as spaces of class inscription. And many of the otheryoung people – both among the women and men – also displayedthis kind of consciousness.Education as classing criterionPeople who ask me about my ongoing study and how the youngpeople have succeeded tend to link success with higher educationin a self-evident manner. This was also the case with the teachersin the schools I studied for my thesis. As mentioned the future ofthese assumed under- or working-class children was additionallyhighlighted and the future hoped for was one containing highereducation after the compulsory nine years of schooling. Amongthe teachers one fear was that the pupils, rather than taking higherdegrees, would head for work in small family businesses, likemany of the parents (Runfors 2003).Promoting education, viewing it as something good forindividuals and associating it with success and valued socialpositions, is not something unusual. Rather the blessing ofschooling is a dominant value today. The benefit of educationcould actually be described as a global notion, closely associatedwith development and modernity (Boli 1989). And, as theanthropologist Annika Rabo (1992) points out, this notion hasbecome so dominant that it also seems indisputable (see alsoRunfors 2003). It has become objectified and as such madeinvisible as an idea and value.Even though the benefits of education per se are a global notion,the underlining of non-compulsory higher education can be88