'Place-making': Investigating the place-based identity negotiations of high school girls in the informal spaces of their school

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT : This research study explores the navigation and negotiation of five Grade 10 high school girls' identities within their school spaces. The study privileges a link between space and identity which provides a conceptual platform in terms of which I was able to construct an investigation into how these high school girls go about their place-making inside their school. The investigation focuses on understanding how practices of place-making influences the identities of the students involved as well as the formation and transformation of the place, their high school.The theoretical framework is founded on a combination of Lefebvre's theory (1971/1991) regarding the production of space which includes the interaction of physical, social and mental dimensions of space on the one hand, and Proshansky, Fabian & Kaminoff (1983) theorisation of the formation of place-identities. Together with these theories, other researchers and theorists, such as: Nespor (1994, 1997), Massey (1991, 1994, 1995), Tupper et al. (2008), O'Donoghue (2007) and Marcouyeux & Fleury-Bahi (2011) have contributed to my theorisation of place-making and place-identities.This study is situated within the interpretivist paradigm and utilised a critical ethnographic research approach that produced qualitative data findings. Data were collected through the use of five qualitative data collection methods: (1) participant observations; (2) unstructured and semi-structured interviews; (3) focus group discussions; (4) photo-elicitation interviews utilising student produced photographs; and (5) photo-diaries.My main analytical findings reveal that these girls went about making place in ways that stretched across the three spatial dimensions (physical, social and mental) and they went about this in individual, communal and strategic ways guided by their affective positions in response to the affectivity of the place. I argue that through the school's encouragement of the students to express themselves in its spaces, the students went on to inhabit and create the school as a place in unanticipated ways. In the school's 'out-of-sight' spaces the girls were emoting, acting, negotiating and strategising in order to establish their emerging identities. Importantly, the culture of the school opened up the space for these girls to act and their acting at school was instrumental in reorganising and transforming the place. The school attempted to be an inclusive space that accommodates diversity, but the girls' affectivities, their bodies and their embodied dispositions, co-constituted the school as a specific type of place. I argue that the girls interpreted the culture of the school and acted in response to its discourses and their desire to belong and consequently constructed ways of living' at the school. It became clear that the character of the school as a place was constantly lived, experienced and reordered by those who moved through it.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University