Accessing the Elite World: Managing Identities at an Elite School
Vikash Sharan
Research Scholar, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
The renewed interest in the lives of elites, owing to aggravating inequalities the world over, has led to a surge in research of spaces that elites inhabit. One of such “spaces of privilege” is the elite schools that cater to the dominant groups or crème de la crème of society (Jodhka & Naudet, 2019, p. xi). My research also takes elite schools as its object of study, where the process of schooling leads to elite formation in a regional context. For the purpose of my research, I define elite schools as institutions which subscribe to high academic standards, great reputation and standing, provisions of well-resourced and well-rounded education, proud and celebrated alumni, significant records of success, with more than a century of legacy (Fahey et al., 2015; Kenway & Lazarus, 2017).
While I spent a year in the field, I divided my time between two schools. I avoid calling my research an ethnography as it does not fit the criteria as discussed by Shah (2017). I prefer to use the term qualitative methodology to describe my fieldwork. In terms of method, I used interviews, observation, and archival research. I conducted semi-structured interviews with teachers, administrators, and parents, as well as focus group discussions with students studying there. I also interviewed experts in the field of education in the city to make sense of the long-term changes that have occurred over the years.
Access to such spaces has always been an important dimension of elite studies (Hoffman, 1980; Khan, 2011; Gaztambide & Howard, 2012). Literature argues that access to the elite world has been found difficult owing to a variety of reasons including practical ones such as elites being busy and occupied to their having their own ways of articulating their lives, to their disinterest in being studied in order to avoid sociological or public gaze, to their invisibility in the public sphere as well as the lack of self-acknowledgement as elites (Courtois, 2018).
My research began with this conundrum. The school chosen in the field was defined as an elite school based on the criteria mentioned above. It is a co-ed school which follows standard curriculum as instituted by the Centre Board for Secondary Education (CBSE) with an unblemished reputation and standing in the city and a rich and decades of excellent academic achievements behind it. In my initial attempts at entering the school, I had to foreground dimensions of my identity in order to gain access. As a research scholar studying at one of the premier yet controversial social science institutes, the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, I entered my field with a sense of confidence as well as perturbation. I was not entirely confident that I would be given an audience. There was a sense of identity anxiety (Erikson, 1968). I concluded on the need to foreground my identity both as a research scholar, which holds currency in the context of education, as well as coming from a national institute. My anticipations, as they turned out, were not completely mistaken. Most of my respondents had some opinion about my institute. This act of foregrounding allowed me to pitch my research topic to the principal of the school, who was doing his doctorate himself. I immediately found a space to “talk shop” (Gaztambide, 2009, p. 3). This part of my identity also gave me an outsider status in the world I was entering and planning to study. However, I was born and raised in the same city (although I had not lived there for a decade), which lent me an insider status among my respondents, who included members of the administration as well as teachers. This dual identity of being both an insider and an outsider both limited and expanded my research areas. For example, I employed my outsider status when I had to enquire more deeply about something by expressing inability or ignorance about a particular phrase, or when I had to shirk any presumptions by the respondents of understanding what they were trying to convey. In the same way, I employed my insider identity to develop rapport to dig more deeply into any topic that required clarification.
Moreover, my other identities also played a role. I, as a male researcher, was withheld from some avenues in my research, which precluded me from pursuing gender in totality as an important marker of schooling life. While I spent my time around boys and talked to them about their aspirations and daily lives, I did not have the same measure of access with the girls at school. Equally important is that my concern remained focused on elite formation, where gender, while being an important marker of that process (Chase, 2008), was nevertheless secondary to my research questions.
An important process at play was misrecognition (Bourdieu, 2000) on the part of my respondents who considered me an elite (an insider to their world). An instance would suffice here. One time, a respondent made a passing comment on my presentability, saying that I represent an ‘old-money fashion’. This sense of aesthetics was drawn from the way I dressed in my field. My own style of dressing, where I preferred cardigans over blazers, seemed to have that effect. My inquiry into this comment revealed that the student was referring to the old money aesthetics and that he prefers to do the same. This fortuitous misrecognition became an important tool for me to engage with the elite worldview. However, in my conversations with the students from middle class backgrounds, I had to highlight my own middle class upbringing. This helped me in understanding the elite aspirations of the middle class students.
Another important aspect of my identity played a major role in accessing my field. Although I studied in Patna, I did not go to this particular elite school. This turned out to be a very crucial process for my respondents to locate and identify me. Almost all my respondents began the conversation by presuming that I studied at the same school and, in fact, asked me about my batch. There was an immediate but quite perceptible change in their demeanour once I informed them of my schooling elsewhere. I suddenly felt a loss of interest and intent to share the details of their lives with me. This was made clear to me in another way when, despite my repeated requests to meet with these respondents later, I failed to establish contact with some of them.
I realise, in retrospect, that my access to the school was presumed by my respondents to be the marker of my insider status. It is important to note that no other researcher had been given permission to study the school for a long time. I later learned about it when a fellow researcher told me that he had also tried to access the school but was not granted access. Whether the knowledge of my being an outsider to the school affected my respondents’ sharing of data remains an open question. It is, however, important to highlight that most research emerges from a social location and limitations, if any, of the research are inadvertently a product of such social locations that one’s respondents place them in.
Access to the field has been (mis)understood as a one-time event that ends with the grant of permissions in the initial phase of research. However, literature on the issue (Hoffman, 1980; Howard, 2013; Courtois, 2018) reveals that access to the field is not a static event but a continual practice. Every day at school, for me, was an attempt to access various dimensions of the school life, such as being available at sports events, or being present in the assembly or classrooms, where the measure of my success depended on the navigation of my identity matrix. There were occasions where access was not granted to me due to being an outsider to the school, but as I mentioned, my curiosity, knowledge, or expertise in any particular area, I was granted a participating role through my identity. For instance, once I informed the school authorities about my background in theatre, I was asked to assist a theatre guide for the annual event at school. These were moments where I had to immediately switch to a different identity in order to gain access. Such negotiations required me to be at my edge and ready to express a dimension of my identity that I otherwise choose not to do.
My experience of the fieldwork became a lesson in strategic manoeuvring of the self and the surroundings, where neither is a fixed entity but constructed, constricted, and cultivated through on-site processes of navigation and negotiation. Such a positioning heeds the invitation by Bourdieu on “reflexive sociology” (Willis, 2016). The concept of reflexive sociology helps the researchers not just to be aware of their social positions and biases during their research but to objectify their own selves, helping in highlighting their role in shaping that research. It is through the concept of reflexive sociology that I make sense of the way my identity became a free-floating entity and, in fact, shaped my access and understanding of the elite world. In such a scenario, identity stops being a static point of singularity but a flowing space capable of shifts and switches. Reflexivity becomes a heuristic tool for conducting fieldwork and analysis later.
Bio:
Vikash Sharan is a research scholar associated with Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, working under Prof. Surinder S. Jodhka on the topic of privilege and elite formation. He has a Master’s in English Literature from the same institution and graduated from Patna University. His research interests range from social inequality and stratification to the understanding of privilege, which emerges from a critical gaze on the social world around him. He is currently writing his thesis after completing one year (February 2024- February 2025) of fieldwork in Patna.
References
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