When you enter the Southsea high school, you enter an open area called the “lounge”.  The lounge is a place you pass through, but it also serves as a place to hang out, meet other students and to take a break and rest in the comfort of the sofas. Everybody knows and notices that the lounge is primarily populated by the racialized minoritized students. The white students hang out in the canteen. This resonates with Beverly Daniel Tatum’s classic and poignant question ‘Why are all the Black Kids sitting together in the cafeteria?’ (Tatum 1997). In this paper I wish to follow another but related question, investigating the internal logics and negotiations of the majoritized white students and the minoritized racialized students in how they make sense of the ways in which they can take up space in the high school - and in society in general. 

I conceptualize racialization as an affective process (Ahmed 2012, Zembylas 2015, Manning 2023) of differentiation (Deleuze 1990, Massumi 2009) to understand the affective, spatial and embodied experience of standing out, blending in or passing as a racialized Other. Educational contexts and inclusion are seen as connected to how spaces are able to embody some bodies and not others as naturally belonging (Puwar 2004, Ahmed 2012). 

Based on group interviews utilizing the creative methodology of identity mapping (Futch & Fine 2014, Jaffe-Walter & Khawaja 2022) with students from both the lounge and the canteen, I ask how they negotiate their sense of embodied and spatialized belonging in relation to each other and the spaces they can inhabit.

The analysis shows how the students are actively engaged in creating inclusive spaces for themselves within and beyond the high school in a political and societal backdrop where high schools with high numbers of racialized minoritized students are seen as “ghetto schools” and problematized as less successful schools in terms of achieving integration and social cohesion. This paper sheds light on how the students themselves negotiate a sense of social cohesion and community and how it links to their sense of belonging in school and, more generally, in society.

Based on group interviews utilizing the creative methodology of identity mapping (Futch & Fine 2014, Jaffe-Walter & Khawaja 2022) with students from both the lounge and the canteen, I ask how they negotiate their sense of embodied and spatialized belonging in relation to each other and the spaces they can inhabit. Identity mapping invites the subject into a space of active, projective and visual imaginary – imagining oneself in different spaces and relations. The students have a blank piece of paper and different coloured markers in front of them and are asked to draw and visualise spaces and relations they relate to and feel they belong in/with. The paper shows how this method especially is suitable to capture the embodied and affective experiences of (non)belonging, sense of inclusion and racialization.

The paper sheds light on how both ethnic minoritized and majoritized students reflect on and negotiate their sense of belonging in the high school context - bringing a youth centered perspective on an issue that most often is problematized by school leaders and policy makers in regard to a concern of segregation, lack of integration and inclusion in schools. This paper shows how, what might seem as segregation, in fact is about creating a sense of social cohesion and community amongst the students. This links to the students ways of negotiating a sense of belonging in school and, more generally, in society.

Ahmed, S. (2012) On being included- Racism and diversity in institutional life, London, Duke University Press. Deleuze, G. (1990) Negotiations. New York, Columbia University Press Futch, V. A., & Fine, M. (2014). Mapping as a method: History and theoretical commitments. Qualitative Research in Psychology 11(1), 42–59. https://doi.org/10.1080/14780887.2012.719070 Jaffe-Walter, R., & Khawaja, I. (2022). “Why Do I Live Here?”: Using Identity Mapping to Explore Embodied Experiences of Racialization . In (Re)Mapping Migration and Education: Centering Methods and Methodologies (pp. 112-133). Brill. Manning, E. (2023) The being of relation, eFlux journal, Issue #135, April 2023, retrieved May 2023 https://www.e-flux.com/journal/135/529855/the-being-of-relation/ Massumi, B. (2009) Micropolitics : Exploring Ethico-Aesthetics. Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation. No. 3. October 2009. www.inflexions.org Puwar, N. (2004). Space invaders: Race, gender and bodies out of place. Oxford and New York, NY: Berg Publishers. Tatum, B. D. (1997). "Why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?" Basic Books/Hachette Book Group. Zembylas, M. (2015) Rethinking race and racism as technologies of affect: theorizing the implications for anti-racist politics and practice in education, Race Ethnicity and Education, 18:2, 145-162, DOI: 10.1080/13613324.2014.946492