Tears and laughter in the margins

This article explores constructions of marginality in practices and processes in schools. The main focus is on games played in and around the margins by school students, and on the feelings of pleasure and anxiety generated in this process. The data are drawn from a collective ethnographic project Citizenship, Difference and Marginality in Schools: With Special Reference to Gender, exploring ways in which students are differentiated in terms of gender and other dimensions of inequality. Margins construct both inclusion and exclusion. Processes of marginalisation take place in the official school (teaching and learning), in the informal school (social interaction) and in the physical school (spatiality and embodiment). Emotions located in the margins are explored through these analytically differentiated but intertwined layers. Marginality is a social positioning, a spatial location and a subjective experience.