Paper This paper will review themes emerging from an analysis of qualitative material gathered as part of a doctoral research programme registered at Sheffield Hallam University, U.K. The research is examining the lived experiences of boys and young men (age 14-19) in some former coal mining communities in Derbyshire, England, which were at the front-line of the British coal miners’ strike of 1984-85 and which have since seen all local mines closed as part of a rapidly occurring national closure programme. The focus will be on ethnographic accounts of experience given by marginalised young people and significant adults working in the communities such as youth workers, educators, community police officers and trade unionists.The intersections between experiences of education, gender, community, culture and social class will be explored as they emerge intergenerationally from the two sets of accounts. Historical continuities and discontinuities will be teased out. The accounts will be set in a broadly Foucauldian framework which interprets ‘disaffection’ as both a socially generated discourse and a socially located set of practices. With an awareness of Willis’s early milestone work on resistance in educational settings (see Willis 1977) and developments of the theory (Giroux, 1983) as well as emerging divergent emphases (De Certeau, I984) there will be a consideration of •whether resistance theory can still provide a helpful explanatory framework for understanding ‘school disaffection’ and ‘anti-social behaviour’ both generally and - when considered in the light of Massey’s (1994) contribution - in its specific, locally situated forms •The variety of sites and forms of resistance evident in the accounts, including the performatory celebration of ‘outsider community’ status •The links and/or disjunctions between contemporary youth resistance and historical episodes of political and social resistance in the local mining communities •The possible relationship between contemporary youth resistance and local, gendered, resistance during the British coal miners’ strike of 1984-5 The discussion will refer to work on ‘hegemonic masculinity’ and, more recently, on ‘protest masculinity’ (Connell, 1995) and will consider whether, as has been argued, ‘the form of gender identity in a particular locality is inflected not only by actually-existing regimes of work but also by nostalgic evocations of such regimes, even in the aftermath of their disappearance’ (Taylor and Jamieson, 1997, p. 153) and whether this might shape available contemporary modes of resistance. Overall, the paper will question the extent to which locally situated educational disaffection might be viewed in relation to the global dimensions of school disaffection increasingly noted in the literature (Bella and Mputu, 2004). Moreover, it is offered with the specific intention of opening up a discussion of how the local situation might usefully be considered in relation to similar European contexts marked by rapid economic restructuring, industrial closure and community change.

The overall methodology is ethnographical but with a strong auto-ethnographical element (see Reed-Danahay) capturing the author's own experience and his reflexive relationship to the emerging themes. Methods involved include unstructured and semistructured interviewing, participant observation, and auto-ethnographical writing

The resultant thesis will make an original contribution to the understanding of youth disaffection as it situates it contextually in a locally specific cultural, political and historical setting and illuminates the relationship between education, community and social resistance.