Abstract
This article explores the place-making and identifications practices of two high school girls in the out-of-classroom spaces of their school. We employ Henri Lefebvre's spatial triad, consisting of the interaction between the physical, social and mental dimensions of space, as the conceptual foundation for understanding how these girls turn space into place at their school. The article is based on an ethnographic study in which we utilised a range of methods, including unstructured, semi-structured and photo-elicitation interviews; participant observation; focus group discussions; student-produced photography and photo-diaries. We found that the ways in which the girls inhabited and ‘made place’ in the school's out-of-classroom spaces are determined by their unique biographies, interactions with the school's expressive culture, and the subsequent social networks, movements and practices that they mobilise in these out-of-classroom spaces. Via these daily practices, they turn their school spaces into a place which, in their unique ways, they are able to call home.
Introduction
School spaces form an integral part of young people's daily encounters with the world. We view these spaces as significant sites for gaining insight into the social identifications of these youths. The term ‘identification’ is understood in this article as the on-going construction of identity through the processes that individuals engage in to strategise and construct plans for their lives, with reference to available labels and identities (Appiah, 2005). In this article, we understand these identifications as constructed through the students’ personal biographies, and their interactions with each other in their school spaces.
The article emphasises ‘place-making’ as an on-going process entwined in students’ daily school-based lives. We argue that while these students are negotiating their place-based identifications, they are actively busy making place through their interactions at school. With the term ‘making place’ we refer to the ways the girls influence, negotiate and manage the simultaneous interaction of Henri Lefebvre's (1971/1991) articulated dimensions of space – physical, social and mental – as they occur at a particular moment in time. We focus in this article on the movements and activities of two female students, specifically their practices in the out-of-classroom spaces of their school. The two girls, Hannah and Ariya (pseudonyms), attend Mount Valley High (pseudonym), an independent school on the outskirts of Cape Town. They are in Grade 10 and formed part of a larger group of friends at the school who were the research participants of the study on which this article is based. We chose to focus on the two girls because they both expressed a firm and intimate connectedness with the school, while interacting in distinctive ways in the various spaces of the school.
Integral to their interactions were the relationship between their initial identifications when they arrived at the school and the school's expressive culture. We use the notion of expressive culture here in the way that Bernstein et al. (1966: 429) describe it, namely as consisting of activities, procedures and judgments involved in the school's production and transmission of values and norms, which in turn are the sources of the school's shared identity and cohesiveness. In this light, Mount Valley High exhibits an inclusive expressive culture that is evident in its daily operations. This is a consequence of the school's emphasis on an open and relaxed school ethos, flexible physical arrangements, the availability of supportive resources, and its relaxed and congenial relationships. Firmly established, its expressive culture aims to cultivate sensitivity and respect among its students and staff. It is important to note that the school's inclusive expressive culture attracts and situates each student uniquely in its environs, and influences the identifications they make within the school.
The article discusses the nature and extent of these two girls' identifications with their school by focusing on their lives in its informal spaces. The aim of the investigation on which this article is based is to understand how the school influences the girls and how the girls, in response to the physical space and expressive culture of the school, respond socially and develop their connectedness with the school. We argue that an integration of the girls' practices across the physical, social and mental dimensions of space contributes to the nature of the identifications that they made, and to the ways in which they chose to project themselves when engaging in place-making in the school.
Theorising place-making and place-based identifications
To understand place-making one must investigate theories that address the production of space and specifically how space is turned into a place and given meaning by the people who inhabit it. The terms ‘place’ and ‘space’ are conceptualised as interrelated yet understood as distinct. In order to clarify our theorising, we turn to the pioneering work of Lefebvre (1971/1991) on the production of space. Lefebvre believed that ‘[s]ocially lived space and time, socially produced, depends on physical and mental constructs’ (Elden, 2004: 190). He notes that space is produced as a social formation and as a conception, a mental construction. From these ideas, Lefebvre derives his conceptual triad of spatial practice in terms of which he views space in three ways: perceived, lived, and conceived. Space is understood as a unity of physical, social and mental space (Lefebvre, 1971/1991).
The triad of spatial practice, firstly, considers physical space such as the school's physical buildings, grounds and environment. This dimension of space is also referred to as perceived space, i.e. that which we can experience with our senses. Secondly, space consists of a lived dimension, known as social space. Here ‘space is produced and modified over time and through its use … invested with symbolism and meaning’ (Elden, 2004: 190). Thirdly, space entails a mental dimension, imagined space or conceived space. When Lefebvre (1971/1991) refers to mental space, he refers to it as ‘the space of the philosopher’, a dimension of place that pertains to the metaphysical and ideological. Mental or conceived space is also conceptualised as representational of space – i.e. the meaning that people derive from their experiences with space and consequently the way that they construct mental representations of reality. For our application of space in this study and for use in our analysis we view this mental dimension of space as a spatial conception integral to the Hannah and Ariya's place-making at school. We conceptualise this mental aspect of space as a mental process that occurs continuously while a person is experiencing the physical and the social. Mental space thus refers to the way in which the girls imagine the school, an aspect of space which influences the formation of both girls’ attachments and place-based identifications.
From space to place
Place is created by people while engaged in complex networks of social interactions and mental conceptualisations inside of physical spaces. ‘Empty’ or ‘lifeless’ physical space is transformed into something ‘lived’ through the presence of people and their interactions with each other as they are engaged in making it a place. We can therefore distinguish ‘place’ as ‘emerging from a complex web of on-going relations (material, social and discursive) and forms of practice, which in turn participate in the production of experiences, the composition of subjectivity and the construction of meaning in specific spaces’ (Gagnon et al., 2014: 3). The idea of place-making implies that places are not natural occurrences (Tupper et al., 2008). Schools are not mere buildings or fixed containers, but physical places shaped by people and their actions, and are subject to interpretation and the meaning-making processes of those who inhabit these spaces. The notion of place is re-conceptualised as ‘a meeting-place, the location of the intersection of particular bundles of activity spaces, of connections and interrelations, of influences and movements’ (Massey, 1995: 59).
In school, students' perceptions of school spaces are intimately connected to how places are negotiated and occupied (Tupper et al., 2008: 1088). Students' encounters and interactions in the school spaces beyond the classroom are significant to students' lived experiences of school and these experiences are closely connected to emotions. This emotional dimension influences our encounters with space and place. Therefore, to identify with a place is to imply strong feelings associated with that place (Rose, 1995) and indicates that the place is (or has been) lived, sensed and experienced. Our social experiences in the school convey our attachments to fellow school goers and the consequent identifications we make with the school. Therefore, to identify with a school as a particular place entails being involved in its social construction, underlining the view that a place is created, (re)produced and shaped by the people who inhabit it.
The process of place-making
The making of a place involves dynamic interaction between Lefebvre's (1971/1991) three ‘fields of space’. It entails an interaction between the physical dimension, or materiality, of the school, the social dimension created by the students (and other inhabitants), as well as the mental representations of each individual, and essentially how each person views herself in relation to the school via her identifications.
Examining the materiality of the informal, out-of-classroom spaces together with the ways in which the students inhabit and move through these spaces will assist us in understanding how students’ place-based identifications are formed through their school-going experiences. When scrutinising the physical school structures and available resources, the specific physicality, the built environment and way that it is organised should be central. McGregor (2004) argues that schools are built and organised in order to produce particular social interactions; therefore, the physical space becomes integral to the social relations that occur in them. Material spaces become active and actor, rather than remaining passive décor or background (Gumperz in Hirst and Vadeboncoeur, 2006: 205). School architecture, the physical buildings, ‘allow[s] certain movements and prohibits others, like the timetables that prescribe the daily activities, like the arrangements of cellular spaces that impose an external structure on the body that becomes internalised’ (Staiger, 2005: 568). The physical structure including the aesthetics of the school building thus ‘contributes to the many ways in which students move through, occupy, and feel about particular school spaces’ (Tupper et al., 2008: 1067).
Lefebvre (1971/1991) claims that it is almost impossible to capture the concept of space in a linear fashion; instead, he sees space as something which is produced and evolves through the social relations that occur within it. Although space seems natural, it is profoundly social. Space shapes us, just as we shape it (Baker and Foote, 2006: 93). Social relations do not just occur in physical space, but place and space are produced through the social (Massey, 2005). The creation of social space involves people, objects, movement as well as language and is a consequence of the interaction of all these elements in creating lived experiences and creating meaning (Frelin and Grannäs, 2014; Hirst and Vadeboncoeur, 2006).
The specifics of where we are and at what times we are there are connected to how we make sense of who we are; thus, the specifics of space profoundly influence our sense of self (Baker and Foote, 2006). At school, students’ behaviour is closely related to how they conceive and imagine those locales. This aspect of student life in schools relates to the mental dimension of space. We utilise the mental dimension of Lefebvre's spatial triad as the space where students engage in constructing mental and consequently emotional connections to school. The mental dimension of space becomes the meaning-making component in the ‘factory’ of constructing a place. We therefore propose that it is in the mental dimension where students construct ‘images’ of school and of themselves in relation to school, in other words, where they are negotiating their place-based identifications.
When considering place-based identifications, the student's personal identity is defined in relation to the specific environment, in this case the school (Proshansky, 1983). Complex patterns of cognition are forged in relation to specific ‘places’ and include ‘conscious and unconscious ideas, feelings, values, goals, preferences, skills, meanings, and behavioural tendencies’ (Marcouyeux and Fleury-Bahi, 2011: 345). We argue that ‘[t]he individual builds place identity to the extent that he or she feels attached to it’ (Marcouyeux and Fleury-Bahi, 2011: 346). Thus, for an individual to willingly maintain a relationship with a specific place, a link needs to be created through a process of identifying with and constructing an attachment to the specific place (Hidalgo and Hernandez, 2001). The fundamental objective of this article is to illustrate how the various socio-spatial processes at a school interact and enable each of the students to shape the place of school, thereby emphasising the prominence of the place-making process as something integral to the everyday lives of school-going youths.
Methodology
This article is based on an in-depth ethnographic research project done among a group of girls at a private high school in Cape Town. The article is based on two of the girls in the participant group, Hannah and Ariyah, whose stories illustrate distinct and engaged place-making practices. Ethnography is a research strategy that ‘seeks to understand the relationship of culture to social structures that largely escapes the awareness of actors while influencing how they act’ (Georgiou and Carspecken, 2002: 689). The ethnographic research approach provided us an opportunity for the practices, experiences and voices of the research participants to be heard. It allowed us access into the lifeworlds of the selected students, which enabled us, to some extent, to become ‘partial insiders’, rather than outsiders looking in. We adopted an observer stance based on immersion in the concrete, everyday world of these high school girls, so that we could better understand them as student participants and their lives at school (Titchen and Hobson, 2005).
With regard to the selection of girls for the study, the school principal as well as the head of department helped to identify a specific Grade 10 class group from which the participants emerged. Five Grade 10 girls volunteered to participate in the study. They were a racially and culturally diverse group. Integral to the participant criteria was that they had to form part of a group of friends who spend their time together outside of the formal classroom in the informal spaces of the school. Securing such a group of girls was subject to them volunteering as research participants. This research study specifically focused on girls and not boys. The aim of this study was not to compare findings related to gender.
In the time we spent at the school with the girls we collected rich qualitative data by using the following methods: participant observations, focus group discussions, individual semi-structured interviews, student-produced photographs, photo-elicitation interviews, and photo-diaries. Unstructured and semi-structured interviews form an integral part of ethnographic research, as they are able to generate insights into the interviewees’ point of view. Our use of unstructured interviews allowed us to clarify our observations and to strike up informal conversations with the students. These informal conversations differed in function and structure from the semi-structured interviews, which took on a more structured form of conversation. The conversations were guided by an interview schedule, which allowed the conversation to flow in a logical manner, covering the topics we wished to explore. The focus group discussions encouraged the participating students to articulate their thoughts in the presence of the group and enabled them to ‘develop ideas collectively, bringing forward their own priorities and perspectives’ (Smithson, 2009: 359). The questions focused specifically on how they form peer-affiliations, how they congregate in space and how they negotiate group social identities. The data generated by the methods described above enabled us to develop an in-depth account of the immediate context and backdrop for understanding Ariya and Hannah's place-making practices, which are the focus of this article.
Photographs played an integral role as part of the research and became especially important with the use of elicitation methods. We used photographs taken by students not only as data or research artefacts, but as stimuli during a method referred to as photo-elicitation interviewing. The students were asked to take photographs of school spaces which held significance for them and these photographs were then utilised in the elicitation interviews as a visual tool to trigger and support thoughts, memories and emotions regarding these physical spaces. Each student then used a selection of their photographs to create photo-diaries, where they wrote about their memories and feelings related to specific spaces at school. These tools enabled the students to become participants in the data-collection process and as such the research turned into a collaborative effort.
Through utilising a range of methods, our aim was to extract the most meaningful data in the time that we spent in the field. The aim of this ethnographic approach was to elicit understanding of the socio-spatial processes that made these two girls connect strongly with this specific school and to explain their place-making processes and how they differ not only from the rest of the participating group, but from each other, in order to arrive at an explanation of how they turned space into place.
Data presentation: Hannah and Ariya
Mount Valley High is situated in a peri-urban suburb of Cape Town on a farm-like setting with many plant-rich outdoor spaces and scattered classroom structures. The school's setting is conducive to the development of its inclusive and flexible expressive culture. This school actively goes about attracting and integrating children who find this openness and diversity appealing and accommodating to their individual needs. Hannah and Ariya, both in Grade 10, decided to attend Mount Valley High after searching for a suitable high school near their homes. They both found what they referred to as ‘a home’ when they settled in at Mount Valley High. Significantly, they struggled to fit into the culture of their previous schools and risked dropping out. However, at Mount Valley High something was different for both of these girls that made them express their strong place-based identifications in its environs.
Hannah is an energetic, cheerful and talkative girl at school. As an extrovert, she enjoys interacting with people and the various spaces at school offer her ample opportunity for creating and sustaining her large social network. At home, however, she has to tolerate a physically and verbally abusive mother, a single parent, who restricts her movements by denying her access to the outside world. A clear divide between home and school is evident in Hannah's current life situation. Ariya has a similar tale, which includes emotional suffering as part of her domestic lifeworld. She has been estranged from her mother for many years and more recently has been dealing with the death of her father. She explains that personal disasters in her life caused her to be ill-behaved and aggressive at her previous schools, which led to feelings of disconnection with her schooling, until she arrived at Mount Valley High. Mount Valley High managed to accommodate and assimilate both these girls into its schooling culture. Both of them verbalised their close connectedness to the school, which they referred to as a place where they ‘feel like home’. Our quest was to find out why this specific school for these girls could become such a different space compared to their previous schools, and how being there, together with the other students, influenced the school becoming a particular place for them.
Physical space: Occupying out-of-classroom spaces
This section shows how both girls went about occupying and utilising the available physical and social resources in personally driven and diverse ways. This discussion is based on a combination of photographic images of favourite school spaces taken by them and each of their comments to explain their perceptions and feelings with regard to these spaces. The informal, out-of-classroom school spaces, as illustrated in Figures 1 to 8, included hallways, playgrounds, outdoor quads, the steps and other commonly available outdoor spaces in and around the school buildings. The loosely arranged, scattered classroom buildings situated in and around patches of grass, gardens and trees made many private and secluded spaces available for their place-making practices.
About this photo, Hannah explains: I enjoy being here, watching the people walk past and the friends you can make here. For me it's the start of starting people's day. If I see someone sad, I'll go to them and go on with them until they laugh. So to me its like a positive start of a day basically. Hannah: We stand there and we talk and this is where they play music. I like to be there, because we sing and dance and it's fun. If you want to join in you can come and a lot of people can mix up here. All grades, special needs class, boys and girls. Hannah: ‘This is where everybody gets together when it's raining after school and then we sit and talk here. It would be like that happy moment where you make jokes and stuff.’ Hannah: The tuck shop is a place where I love to be. I love to eat; it brings me joy to eat. It's entertaining when the ball flies past and the people react. The boys play soccer on the grass here. Hannah: This is where a lot of people go in groups, in small groups and then they interact like in their own way. So, people sit on the chairs, they sit under the tree and then I would just like walk past and go to that group and then to that group and stand there. Some people sit on the steps, some people on the bench or on the grass. Ariya: This is the place that we are used to and we enjoy sitting there, because we are together. Other people walk past and then they feel intimidated, because we're ‘bigger’ than them, or we'll just look at them and they will be scared. When people have to go to the toilet [situated in this space] then they will take forever in the bathroom to try and avoid us. We control this space. If you sit in our space then I'll tell you to move, because I sit there. Ariya: This is my safe space. This is the corner where I sit. It's like my little space and then J sits next to me. I will get annoyed if someone else sits there and tell him or her to leave. You see me sitting there all the time. I'm used to that space, it's my space. Ariya: ‘My bag is very important to me. I take it everywhere, because I keep all my stuff in my bag. This is my private space.’
Hannah's physical occupation of school space
As portrayed by Hannah's wide variety of photographs and elaborate comments below, she made optimal use of available physical spaces and resources at school in order to grow and maintain her large social network.
This selection of photographs taken by Hannah demonstrates her presence in a wide range of physical spaces in the school in order for her to grow and maintain her social status and popularity. We observed that Hannah was strategic in covering a range of spaces in order to connect with numerous of her peers, even staff members and parents. In the light of her comments on her occupation of these physical spaces, it is evident that Hannah communicated her desire to create and sustain positive relationships and to be accepted by many. By doing this she believed that she could enjoy her time at school as well as contribute to the joy and wellbeing of others.
Ariya's physical occupation of school spaces
Contrary to Hannah's mobility, the photographs that Ariya chose portray her daily locatedness at school. Her choice of images revealed her restricted use of the physical school spaces and resources available to her at school. Ariya chose to occupy mainly one space with her small group of friends outside of classrooms.
Contrary to Hannah, Ariya's photographic images and comments illustrated her restricted spatial mobility outside the classroom. Although Ariya is restricted in her movements, we observed that she ensured dominance over her chosen physical spaces, even if it pertains to a specific seat or the importance of the privacy of her schoolbag. Ariya positioned herself socially as a dominant figure amongst her social group, often referred to as the ‘cool kids’ of Grade 10. We observed how Ariya acquired her ‘cool’ status through expressing a social harshness towards others in her occupation of this specific physical space, not permitting others to access this space, claiming the territory as if she and her group of friends owned the space. Rebellious Ariya, through a blatant expression of bullying behaviour, demarcated ‘her’ space as exclusive, only permitting herself and the other ‘cool’ kids access, thereby rejecting any of the other students.
Ariya's and Hannah's photographs and comments demonstrate their attempts to claim spaces which they can call their own. However, the spaces that they chose to occupy differ depending on their social needs. Hannah moved about and connected with many students in various spaces, whereas Ariya located herself in a specific spot for her exclusive use. Hannah negotiated alliances with a much wider range of her peers by becoming strategically mobile in order to assert her social status, whereas Ariya opted for a less mobile use of physical space as a strategy to assert her social dominance with greater effect.
Social space: Constructing peer networks
The negotiation of peer affiliations and the consequent construction of a peer network are integral to the creation of the social dimension of school space. Hannah's and Ariya's different ways of constructing their individual social networks illustrate the various ways by which social acceptance and assertion can be accomplished at school. Both these girls found a unique way of constructing and maintaining a peer network that led them to become embedded in the school, each in their distinct ways.
Hannah's mobility and Ariya's locatedness form the basis of their routines at school. Being more mobile meant that Hannah could connect with a wider range of students, which included students from both the school's primary and high school sections. Hannah also expressed her desire to broaden her social network at school. She enjoyed conversations with teachers outside of the classroom and often connected with other non-teaching staff members as well as parents at the school gate or in the administration block. Through our observations we could understand that Hannah visibly maintained her social network on a daily basis. She moved around during break times to ‘visit’ with all the various groups of peers that she enjoyed connecting with, thereby maintaining these relationships. Her social mobility ensured her membership of a variety of social groups at school. Hannah would seek out certain peers to connect with depending on the activities that she was interested in on that specific day. Her daily activities would vary from sitting around and talking about popular trends in clothing, television programmes and especially music, singing, dancing and hanging around at the tuck shop for something to eat. When asked to label herself according to the available social labels at school – which included terms such as the ‘cool kids’, ‘rhinos’, ‘nerds’ and ‘smarties’ – Hannah struggled to label or define herself. She explained that she feared being seen as part of only one peer group, and as such be left out of other groups, which would compromise her popularity at school.
In contrast to Hannah's mobile social practices, Ariya expressed her affiliation to the ‘cool’ kids’ group, which is the only group of people that she chose to connect with. Outside of the classroom this group of friends would congregate in ‘their’ space, away from most other students, a space which they claimed as their own and over which they asserted their dominance. The ‘cool kids’ thought of themselves as typical teenagers who liked to party over weekends, occasionally drank alcohol, as well as dating ‘like-minded’ boys. Ariya positioned herself as one of the main members of this group. The girls in the group describe their interactions as often motivated by fights over boys and slandering each other. Ariya knew all her friends in this group from one of her previous primary schools and expressed the idea that the length of time that they knew each other had created a feeling of security amongst them as a peer group. In this group Ariya felt comfortable and secure enough for her to express herself openly and honestly.
Hannah's establishment and maintenance of an elaborate peer network versus Ariya's restricted exclusive selection of peers positioned each of them socio-spatially inside of their school. Their successful occupation of their carefully selected school spaces and consequent peer networks helped to embed both girls firmly in the school. Their socio-spatial practices enabled each of them to form a particular type of attachment to the school, which we believe led to the expression of their strong place-based identifications.
Mental space: Place-based identifications and attachments
Our application of Lefebvre's ‘mental space’ (see Lefebvre, 1971/1991) allows us to describe how Hannah and Ariya, through their interactions with their physical and social school spaces, interpreted and consequently conceptualised or imagined their school. Mental space refers to the meaning that people derive from their experiences with space and construct representations of reality (Lefebvre, 1971/1991).
The data portray the girls’ place-making practices and illustrate the creation of the mental dimension regarding their school space. The data show how the girls view themselves in relation to the school through their expressed place-based attachments. Hannah's and Ariya's ‘feeling at home’, their desire for acceptance and belonging, for security and the creation of self-worth and value are all examples of how they have interpreted their experiences of the physical and social aspects at school and have consequently constructed what they define Mount Valley High to be for them. Both girls had a history of negative experiences at previous schools, but Mount Valley High felt like home to them. In Nespor's (1997) terms, these two girls’ socio-spatial practices led them to become embedded in the fabric of the school.
Place identification is the expression of an individual's identification with a place and includes the expression of membership to a group of people defined by this particular location (Twigger-Ross and Uzzell, 1996). Hannah and Ariya strategically positioned themselves in specific spaces and in relation to particular peers as part of a larger on-going process of identity construction. The girls conveyed a desire to maintain a level of personal distinctiveness or uniqueness; however, they simultaneously expressed their desire for greater self-worth and to be accepted into one or several peer groups (see Breakwell, 1986, 1992, 1993). For Ariya it was sufficient to affiliate with only one group of her peers, while Hannah frequently stated that she was friends with everyone at school. The space offered both what they needed in order to feel secure and accepted at Mount Valley High.
In conversation with the girls they often referred to the difference between their previous public schools and their current private high school. The latter's inclusive culture suggested a distinctive lifestyle to which Ariya and Hannah could strongly connect to. Both girls seemed to ‘use a place-related self-referent in order to present themselves as distinct from others’ outside of the school (Twigger-Ross and Uzzell, 1996: 207). Ariya expressed her positive identifications with the peri-urban location of the school and its rural farm-like, peaceful atmosphere. She felt that the setting resonated with her domestic home environment and as such made her feel that she belonged as she had lost most of her familiar domestic spaces after her father passed away. Hannah, on the other hand, uses the place of school to create a sense of worth and social value (Korpela, 1989) that propelled her outside of her domestic lifeworld into a world where she could reimagine and reposition herself through the place identifications that she established at school. At school, Hannah was talkative and cheerful and projected a positive, care-free self-identity. It is evident that Mount Valley High provided Hannah with spaces where she was able to cultivate positive feelings about herself. The qualities of the place in essence enabled Hannah to ‘gain a boost to her self-esteem’ (Twigger-Ross and Uzzell, 1996: 208) and as such generated her positive attachment to the school.
The ways in which these girls identify with place seemed partially to be a consequence of the interaction between their personal histories connected to their domestic lifeworlds and previous schooling experiences entangled with the behaviours the expressive culture of the school allowed for and ecouraged. As a result, each girl established and projected particular strong place identifications with Mount Valley High. While both girls expressed their close connection with the school, each one went about making their school a ‘home’ by utilising quite diverse practices, illustrating the particularity and multiplicity of the process of place-making.
Discussion
Hannah and Ariya utilised the school spaces in noticeably different ways. Hannah desired to move around in order to extend and maintain her large social network, whereas Ariya preferred to utilise one school's out-of-the-way locations to carve out a private space for herself and her small group of friends. Each appropriated the physical landscape in order to fulfil their social needs. Importantly, they both explained that they could successfully negotiate a sense of belonging with their peers at Mount Valley High: Hannah, because of her success in maintaining her large social network, felt accepted and special, something she did not experience at home; and Ariya, because she formed part of the ‘cool’ kids at school and could be part of a close-knit group, who served as a family-like group of friends in the absence of her estranged mother and deceased father. In both cases the school became a place that was instrumental in responding to their personal needs for belonging and acceptance, and as such offered respite from the social void they experienced in their domestic environments.
A place such as Mount Valley High was viewed as ‘a meeting-place, the location of the intersection of particular bundles of activity spaces, of connections and interrelations, of influences and movements’ (Massey, 1995: 59). Hannah and Ariya constructed a place called Mount Valley High as perceived by each of them individually, while they engaged in unique social interactions within a complexity of networks and intersections in various physical spaces. Each girl interpreted and constructed opinions of the school in very particular ways, which led to them perceiving the school as a ‘home’. This, we argue, is an amalgamation, or coming together, of the physical, the social and the mental dimensions of space into a singular articulation of a place. We emphasise Lefebvre's (1971/1991) three dimensions of space as providing us with a framework for understanding this process of place-making and clearly shows how the physical, social and mental dimensions of space interact in Hannah's and Ariya's lives at school in order to create a place which is unique for each of them. Elden (2004) stresses Lefebvre's argument that ‘space is not just discovered by humans and occupied, but in the process it is transformed’ (p. 183), a transformation, which we refer to as place-making.
The two girls engaged in place-making through giving of their ‘soul’ to their chosen physical spaces, in effect creating a place where they could connect with others, endowing their spaces with meaning and turning them into something lived. When observing the various out-of-classroom spaces in the school, we noted students congregating in them, a diversity of bodies interacting based on friendships, camaraderie, segregation, tension, fellowship and competition. This, we argue, are the spaces where place is being made via the place-making practices that occur inside of them. These public school spaces then become places where people spend their time, partly because they have to, but also because they choose to.
Hannah and Ariya constructed strong bonds and positive connections with Mount Valley High in comparison to their previous negative experiences with schooling. We argue that the coming together of their various social practices at the school at the intersection of the physical, social and mental dimensions of space (Lefebvre, 1971/1991) clarifies how they have negotiated their belonging at Mount Valley High. What is key to our argument is an understanding of the differences as well as the similarities related to Hannah's and Ariya's lives at school in order to gain insights into their place-making practices and consequent positive place identifications. Evidently, even though both girls formed positive attachments with the school, they did so in diverse ways, which illustrates how place-making is an individualised process, unique for every person.
Hannah made place through her optimal utilisation of the physical and social resources offered to her by Mount Valley High. She positioned herself through her mobility in order to generate and maintain her extensive social trajectories as she moved around a range of spaces in order to connect with a variety of her peers. She felt that her sense of belonging at school was subject to the size of her social network. The larger the network, the closer she would come to her social co-ownership of the school. Hannah's social life at school had a marked influence on her self-image, which was to a great extent dependent on the identity she conveyed at school. For Hannah, Mount Valley High was the only source of positive affirmation in her life. At home this was not the case. Her demeaning domestic circumstances forced her to seek acceptance and create a space of belonging somewhere else. Hannah's place-making at school thus functioned as a mechanism for her to sustain her identity in a positive way, rather than giving in to the negative social and emotional messages that she received at home. Through her mobile socio-spatial activities, mental representations and strong place identifications Hannah created a version, her version, of Mount Valley High, which was one of joy, excitement, vibrancy and acceptance, and which she imagined as closer to what home should feel like.
In contrast to Hannah's emphasis on her mobility at school, Ariya spent considerable time carving out a private space for herself and her peer group within the available out-of-classroom spaces at school. They collectively acted within this specific space in order to assert their social ownership of the space, which they could eventually call their own (Nespor, 1997). This act of claiming ownership of a space ensured their belonging in that space and they therefore could utilise it in whichever way they chose in order to express and negotiate their identities individually as well as communally. Ariya's located place-making did not require her to seek acceptance from a variety of students all over the school landscape. By locating herself in a secluded space, with a limited number of peers, whom she had known for many years, Ariya sought to sustain her belonging to that group, which had a positive effect on her identifications with this school. It seemed that this group felt that separating themselves from others would give them a superior status compared to the rest of the students. By forging some type of elite gang of ‘cool kids’, they believed that they would be feared by most of the younger students. Ariya could, through her located place-making, establish a place of belonging for herself among her close group of friends at school, something which was absent in her domestic lifeworld. She created a small, close-knit ‘family’ for herself at school and as such came to call Mount Valley High her ‘home’.
Nespor (1997) found that young people who were ‘displaced from comfortable space’ did not connect to the space in similar ways as those who were ‘embedded’ in the familiar space. Instead of feeling like disconnected bodies merely passing through the space, Hannah and Ariya connected firmly to the material and social spaces of Mount Valley High through imagining school as a place that feels like home. By doing this, they allowed the school's spaces to influence their personal identifications and as such extend and transform them (Nespor, 1997).
We have described Hannah and Ariya as embedded in their school space. These girls negotiated vastly different social networks, but because of their personal socialisation and activities at school they became rooted in the school and established deep and extensive place-based identifications. The school became a familiar and desirable space for the two girls. By acting within their school spaces in their particular ways, Hannah and Ariya were actively involved in place-making practices, which shaped and re-organised the spaces they interacted with and moved through.
Conclusion
This article aimed to illustrate how two high-school girls turn school space into place by actively engaging in the socio-spatial dynamics of their school-going lives in the informal spaces outside their classrooms. The analysis was based on ethnographic research and informed by Lefebvre's (1971/1991) theoretical account about the ‘production of space’. We presented the argument that consideration of the girls’ prior schooling experiences as well as understanding details about their domestic lives are crucial in grasping why they chose to connect so closely to this particular school. Furthermore, their social activities at school, referred to as place-making practices, situated each of them within Mount Valley High in a particular way. We found that the way in which the girls inhabited and ‘made place’ in the school's out-of-classroom spaces was determined by their unique interactions with the school's expressive culture and by the subsequent social networks, movements and practices that they mobilised in these spaces, which in turn influenced their identifications in the school and ultimately the place that they created for themselves at the school in order to fulfil their need to belong.
Footnotes
Authors' note
All photographs were taken by Elzahn Rinquest, one of the authors.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.