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This paper reports on a project exploring the friendships of children and adults in ‘super-diverse’ (Vertovec, 2007) localities in London, England, examining whether and how friendships are made and maintained across ethnic and social class differences. The aim is to identify what friendships reveal about the nature and extent of ethnic and social divisions in contemporary multicultural society. Drawing on interviews with children and their parents, this paper analyses affective parental responses to their children’s friendships, identifying instances where parents seek to manage these friendships. We identify the importance of the ‘ease of similarity’ for many parents concerning their children’s friendships, and the relative lack of concrete practices amongst parents to support their children’s friendships across difference. However, we also note parental support for living in super-diverse localities and children attending schools therein. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the processes by which middle-class belonging is generated, through the exploration of social and spatial trajectories in narratives of residential choice and mobility. It is based on an understanding of residential choice as indicative and constitutive of social mobilities. In particular the paper builds on the discussion of the match between habitus and field that lies at the root of the notions of middle-class belonging and place attachments to draw attention not only to the conditions under which ‘fit’ is possible, but also acknowledge that belonging is a dynamic process, generated and maintained through residence that feeds back into understandings of classed identities. This paper argues that residential space is not just appropriated to reflect pre-existing tastes and lifestyles, but may also contribute in the transformation of habitus to fit to particular neighbourhoods and ways of living. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper draws on social capital theory to discuss the way social class plays out in the friendships of teenage students. Based on data from individual interviews and focus groups with 75 students in four London secondary schools, it is suggested that students tend to form friendships with people who belong to the same social-class background as them. Social-class ‘sameness’ is considered to be an element that importantly exemplifies the quality of their friendships, and hence close, inter-class friendships were significantly less common than close, intra-class ones. In addition, class differentials were evident and often reproduced by students, even in the context of the rarer inter-class friendships. This paper concludes that social class is of continuous importance in teenagers’ lives and despite some agentic negotiation of class boundaries, as in the case of omnivorousness, students’ friendship networks are dynamically informed by class inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on a series of ethnographic encounters collected while hanging around at a seafood stand in east London, the following article aims to explore the relationship between individual expressions of distaste and the production of class, ethnic and generational forms of distinction. Starting with the visceral expressions of distaste directed towards a seafood stand, the following paragraphs draw on a combination of historical and ethnographic data rendered through a matrix of anthropological, sociological and psychoanalytic theory, to explore the role of everyday ambient experiences and the stratifying processes that cut across the lives of the city's inhabitants. Arguing against purely biological explanations of disgust, the paper explores how social histories and cultural experience inflect gut responses to the sensoria that suffuse urban environments. Moving the focus beyond the social construction of urban sensibilities, the paper goes on to develop an account of culturally inflected forms of distaste, shaping the city and the lives of its inhabitants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationship between social class and parental agency. It does so through an analysis of the findings of a recently completed qualitative research project exploring parental voice in relation to secondary schools. The first part of the paper presents a summary of a typology of parental interventions. This illustrates some of the differentials between parents in terms of their access to and deployment of a range of social, cultural and material resources, all of which translates into varying levels of effectiveness in finding and using a voice in their relationship with their children's school. The second part of the paper focuses on the middle-class parents at both schools, suggesting that more nuanced differences in their attitudes to various educational issues (namely discipline and appropriate parental involvement) are closely linked to the class fractions which they belong. It is argued that, despite the broad title of 'middleclass', variations within this general grouping in parental education, occupational pathways and spatial mobility affect their approaches to the education of their children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops previous analyses of data from an ESRC-funded study of middle-class parents' choices of childcare in two London locations (Battersea and Stoke Newington). It tentatively explores differences between the educational choices made in the two localities and connections which occur between educational and spatial preferences and practices. These connections within the two class fraction samples are presented using Basil Bernstein's arguments concerning the relations between pedagogical practices and social class. The argument is that the class fractions identified here use space differently and concomitantly engage in different kinds of social relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]