Elite education and everyday encounters: Examining the multiple dimensions of privilege in young people’s lives

Hayley Sparks

doi:10.54474/herourou.1.1.2920221

Abstract

Elite education and everyday encounters: Examining the multiple dimensions of privilege in young people’s lives

Highlights

THE CONCEPT OF PRIVILEGEYoung people engaged in the research through interactive focus groups and online dialogic diaries
By embracing uncertainty, the research examined the geographies of privilege through engagement with young people who attend elite private schools in Auckland, New Zealand
The experiences and identities of young people who attend elite private schools presented in the research provide insight into how privilege structures everyday encounters, through the performance and resistance of privileged ways of knowing, being, and doing

Summary

THE CONCEPT OF PRIVILEGE

Young people engaged in the research through interactive focus groups and online dialogic diaries. Inequalities exist because some groups and individuals are privileged (Johnson, 2006) With this understanding, privilege has recently become the focus of a significant body of research. McIntosh’s (1989) foundational text explains how privilege consists of two dominant forms of advantage: unearned entitlements and conferred dominance These components highlight the main premise of privilege understood through an academic lens, in that privilege exists “when one group has something of value that is denied to others because of the groups they belong to rather than because of anything they’ve done or failed to do” Three key messages emerged from the research and are summarised in this review: 1. conceptualising privilege as a system; 2. intersectionality; 3. the contextual specificities of privilege

PRIVILEGE AS A SYSTEM

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CONTEXT