Interrogating the changing inequalities constituting 'popular' 'deviant' and 'ordinary' subjects of school/subculture in Ireland: Moments of new migrant student recognition, resistance and recuperation

This paper explores moments in which three new migrant students become constituted as particular types of learners and classmates, through the interplay of racialised, classed and gendered norms made available in one Irish school. Certainly, new migrant students’ subjectivities may be constrained due to already embedded school/subcultural inequalities. Yet rather than simply being entirely subject to the exclusionary norms underpinning ‘deviance’, ‘ordinariness’ and ‘popularity’, we can read moments where ‘Christian’, ‘Feyi’ and ‘Theresa’s’ subjectivities might expose, disrupt, or be reworked by them. This paper provides insight as to how the inequalities of a previously monoculturally styled context intersect with and/or elide now more tangibly local racialising processes of contemporary migration. Drawing on the critical work of Butler and Youdell, it is suggested that the means of recognising new/indigenous students as acceptable learners or classmates are unstable, thus constantly offering the possibility of contesting/jettisoning the rendering of ‘undesirable’ learner/classmate subjectivities.