This paper explores data from my intergenerational ethnography of educational disaffection in a former coalfield area of England (Bright, 2009, 2010) It will revisit fundamental questions of structure and agency that have troubled accounts of school resistance since Willis’s Learning to Labour (1977), rehearsing some of the debates that the milestone work generated and considering divergent developments of resistance theory as presented in the work of de Certeau, (1984), Giroux (1983) and McLaren (1995). Further, though, the key contribution the paper will make to the panel will be to explore data from my study and suggest a possibly novel reconfiguration of educational resistance - as an expressive form of ‘bottom up’ agency reaching beyond limitations of Butler’s ‘performativity’ - in the light of two relatively recent theoretical contributions in geography and political theory/philosophy. First, those, post Lefebvre, geographical accounts of space as site of socially created historical subjectivity (Harvey, 2000; Massey, 1994; Soja, 2000). Secondly, those recently translated articulations of resistant refusal and purposeful withdrawal as ‘exodus’ and ‘insubordination’ (Tronti, 1980; Virno, 1996) that have originated from the Italian Marxist autonomist politics of the 1970s.