Disclosure, disbelief, enclosure: listening with precarious kids in London

This article interrogates the role of testimonial disclosure as a mechanism of access and a barrier to visibility for marginal people, particularly adolescents, in the UK. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2021–2024 in alternative educational provision (AP), as well as in an English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) classes, with framing examples from third-sector welfare support spaces, the paper examines how disclosures are demanded but are consistently ill-attended. The paper explores how systemic disbelief, diagnostic delay, and educational enclosure may be seen to be the result of mismatched communication affordances, which ultimately foreclose pathways to support and progression for these interlocutors. I draw on multimodal ethnographic methods co-produced with young people as part of a programme I devised called Anthropology By Children/Communities or ABC, to foreground the ways that non-normative ways of being may lead to testimonial disclosures failing to be acknowledged because of the problem of divergent affordances, leading to epistemic injustice and educational enclosure. The paper advances the concept of “poverty of pathway” to challenge dominant tropes of “poverty of aspiration,” showing that young people aspire and even attempt to advocate, but are frequently misunderstood, made structurally-illegible and denied progression toward aimed-for futures.