1. This study is part of a social justice project which is focussed on access to schooling particularly in communities away from urban centres. This study looks at one element of access to school, the daily transition young people make from home to schools and particularly the journey to school by bus . In this project, the school bus is conceptualised as an agentic assemblage (Bennet, 2005) which  emerges from a case study in a deprived rural community in the UK. This research reveals the school bus as a complex, troubling issue for young people and their transitions to school.  

A case study was done to explore the connections that the young people from this community make (or do not make) with their secondary school. The project ,underpinned with a social justice agenda, hoped to inform those looking to make schools more inclusive places which young people want to be part of. The case study included a group of young people and it became a project in listening (Veck, 2008). The methodological approaches involved , were considered rigorous, appropriate and ethical; I was being a ‘good methodologist’ (Mazzei and Jackson 2012, p. 747). As well as emerging themes in the data, identified by coding, I was also aware of immanent stories in the data that were more elusive. These lay within, outside and between the data and in my own body’s experiences and memories which were stirred during research project. MacLure (2013) suggests that experiences like these ‘where bodily matters simultaneously demand and defy translation into codes and significations’, call for a pursuit of ‘the possibility of materially informed research’ (p. 658). One of the immanent stories that was I was hearing but could not ‘pin down’ with the original analysis of the data, was that of the school bus the young people used to get to the secondary school. I could sense the school bus throughout the project and was aware these immanent stories were also flowing into and combining with my own memories of school bus experiences. I returned to the project, this time using an approach informed by Deluzian assemblage.

Through this approach, one of the immanent stories that coalesced was that of the of the school bus. There was little substantial evidence recorded in the ‘formal’ processes of the original research which could be analysed through coding and reported but it was clear the trouble with the school bus was everywhere. Through the use of the idea agentic assemblage with the textual data, autoethnographic reflections, memories and theory etc. it has been possible to discern and so report a story which is a significant social justice issue for young people. I argue that using the concept of assemblage may be useful in helping to coalesce momentary, complex and multiple instances into a shape that can be considered and communicated. We must to continue to engage with and find ways to carry out, report and communicate research that aims to raise consciousness about issues of social justice.. As Barad (2007) argues ‘justice...is not a state that can be achieved once and for all. There are no solutions: there is only the ongoing practice of being open and alive, each intra-action, so that we might use our ability to respond, our responsibility, to help awaken, to breathe life into ever new possibilities for living justly’. (P. x)