2. The Classed, Gendered and Racialised Subject

The book is organised around notions of ‘formations’ and ‘developments’ through time and across place/space, in three braided strands: the social, educational and geo-political developments over historical time; developments in academic theorisations of class, gender, race and other systems of power and processes of subject formation during the period in question; and developments that take place across an individual life in processes of ‘becoming’, examined through contributors’ autoethnographies. This chapter covers the first two of these. It traces the huge changes that have taken place in relation to educational policy and provision and patterns of immigration in the period during which contributors grew up, and the political mobilisation of discourses first of meritocracy and social mobility and more recently of excellence, resilience and the entrepreneurial self, before discussing the way theorisations of classificatory systems have progressed—from a focus on social class as a form of stratification (and in particular on how ‘the working class’ has been conceived of and represented); through approaches which distinguished between ‘the economic’ and ‘the cultural’ (with the latter seen as critical in the analysis of gendered and racialised inequalities); the importance of psychological and ‘affective’ factors in the formation of subjects; the concept of ‘intersectionality’; the historical legacies of colonialism and global movements of people through migration and how these are integral to conceptualisations of class, gender, race and practices of ‘othering’; to approaches that focus on space/place, movement and time.