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I am a PhD student who studies language, culture, and processes of youth marginalization and belonging in London schools. In this article, I reflect on how ethnographic methods have shaped my engagement with grassroots education networks, drawing on two summers of preliminary linguistic ethnographic fieldwork in East London from 2024-2026. Before turning to research, I spent twelve years as an educator, activist, and youth ally in and around U.S. schools\u2014a background that attuned me to the role of language in educational contexts and shapes how I pay attention to, and am in solidarity with, grassroots networks.<\/em><\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCredit: <\/span> \t\t\t\t\t\t \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tA British flag hangs over a schoolyard at a prominent \u201cno excuses\u201d school in East London.\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n Over the past two summers, I have spent time in London learning from grassroots networks that are contesting the drastic increases in \u201cno excuses,\u201d \u201csilent corridor\u201d school disciplinary policies\u2014policies that remove students from ordinary classroom life for minor behavior infractions. Rooted in the\u00a0zero-tolerance policing strategies<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0marketized education reforms<\/a>\u00a0of the 1990s and 2000s that deregulated schools through discourses of accountability and standardization, these policies\u00a0draw on and activate longstanding moral panics about youth deviance and antisocial behavior<\/a>, which have intensified post-pandemic. These approaches are most visible in\u00a0schools<\/a>\u00a0that champion a return to \u201ctraditional education,\u201d\u00a0tying high academic attainment to hyper-strict discipline<\/a>.\u00a0Often, their curricula focus on English language and \u201cidentity\u201d for majority working-class, multilingual, and multiethnic student populations. These policies have expanded\u00a0amid growing right-wing nationalism, and punitive school disciplinary practices have been gaining ground in\u00a0the US<\/a>\u00a0and across Europe (notably in\u00a0Italy<\/a>,\u00a0Belgium<\/a>, and\u00a0France<\/a>).<\/p>\n What has struck me most is how, against considerable odds, grassroots networks are publicly challenging authoritarian ideas about schooling and belonging. Yet because their advocacy and activism are dispersed across settings and deeply relational, they are largely invisible to policy and media accounts that focus on top-down educational reforms rather than the everyday forms of sustained and creative labor that these reforms often depend on.\u00a0A\u00a0great deal of research<\/a>\u00a0has analyzed the causes and consequences of exclusionary discipline, demonstrating how these sorts of policies operate as a\u00a0mechanism of disenfranchisement<\/a>,\u00a0widen systemic inequalities, and truncate the educational trajectories of multiply marginalized youth. However, much less attention has focused on how communities understand, respond to, or contest these policies on their own terms. One of the distinctive capacities of ethnographic fieldwork is precisely this: its ability to tune us in to the pulse of grassroots activity, to peoples\u2019 sensemaking about inequality and marginalization, and to the collective work they engage in to negotiate these processes.<\/p>\n \u201cSchool exclusion,\u201d the UK term for suspension and expulsion, has\u00a0tripled<\/a>\u00a0in the last decade and has reached its\u00a0highest<\/a> recorded levels,\u00a0disproportionately impacting<\/a>\u00a0racialized and neurodivergent youth and those from working class-households. In many schools, students and their families face increasing rates of punitive and exclusionary discipline\u2014a system of consequences in which students are removed from classrooms for days, weeks, or months\u2014often for minor violations of the school\u2019s behavior policy. Young people can be sent to isolation rooms or suspended for not knowing the answer to a teacher\u2019s question, forgetting a pencil, talking in a corridor, or even wearing certain Black hairstyles or a colorful hijab. The most common official reason for exclusion is \u201cpersistent disruptive behavior<\/a>,\u201d a category that can mean almost anything.<\/p>\n Grassroots networks often use storytelling to highlight the consequences of \u201czero tolerance\u201d policies in practice. Celeste has been a teacher and school leader for twenty years, born and raised in the London borough where she now runs an advocacy organization for excluded students and their families. At a formal deputation brought to a local city council by a coalition of families, activists, and youth workers, she uses a small story to illustrate what \u201cpersistent disruptive behavior\u201d looks like in practice:<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not about coming into school with a knife or a gun or whatever. It\u2019s about consistently talking in the line or consistently coming in without your hair done\u2026 A student was put in [isolation] on the day of their maths exam. She wasn\u2019t allowed to sit her maths exam cause she had false eyelashes on. Come on.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Narratives like this surfaced repeatedly throughout my fieldwork, and over time I came to understand that they were not simply anecdotes recounting past harms, but forward-looking testimonies used by these networks to publicly call for and envision change. I heard versions of these stories in community meetings, council sessions, conferences, and conversations with youth workers, journalists, and elected officials. Another narrative, recounted by local council member Donna at a community conference, illustrates how these stories moved across settings, accumulating momentum as they travelled. She describes how a father whose child had been excluded from a local academy began gathering accounts from other parents:<\/p>\n \u201cSo, he got the parents together and he wrote up their testimonies, and he had 30 testimonies from parents\u2026 and when we went to the press, instead of having 30 testimonies, we very quickly ended up with 300 testimonies. And those testimonies were\u00a0not\u00a0just coming from the parents of pupil\u2014they were coming from the pupils themselves, who\u2019d left, who were now young adults, who wanted to talk about how badly they\u2019d been impacted by what happened. And also\u2014and we were perhaps most surprised by that\u2014quite a lot came from the teachers, who had been forced to implement these horrible policies and were finding that their bonuses and their references and what have you were being impacted by whether or not they were prepared to be super super-strict or not.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The resulting national news stories triggered the first-ever safeguarding investigation into the disciplinary practices of a school in 2024. Importantly, many people only contributed their stories once\u00a0<\/em>they knew a news story was being written; they understood that the same account lands differently depending on who is telling it, to whom, and in what context. Here, ethnography makes visible what a fragmented media landscape struggles to: that storytelling is a sustained, collective practice of sense-making that gathers force precisely by moving across settings.<\/p>\n I was able to learn from my interlocutors\u2019 interpretations of their stories and how they might relate to larger strategies for building power. Celeste urges parents of excluded youth to form groups: \u201cIt\u2019s there you\u2019ll realize you have more in common and can collectively challenge\u2026 Sometimes there\u2019s an opportunity to flip the script.\u201d For Celeste and many others, relationships are what interrupt the expected trajectories of exclusion.\u00a0<\/p>\n My fieldwork also led me to spend time inside some of the schools these networks have been challenging, trying to understand from the inside what it feels and looks like to be shaped by them. In June 2025, I visited a school that serves a primarily working-class, multiethnic population and is known for its high exam scores, emphasis on \u201ctraditional\u201d British literature and culture, and \u201cno-excuses\u201d approach to discipline.<\/p>\n At lunchtime, I sat on a small cafeteria chair, taking in the smells of cheap food, mildew, and disinfectant, and watched 300 students, standing with hands on hearts, perform their daily, full-throated recitation of \u201cInvictus\u201d\u2014a poem by William Ernest Henley that has become an emblem of \u201cstiff upper lip\u201d stoicism. As the poem ended, visitors, staff, and students erupted in a thunderous applause. I felt slightly sick from both the smell of the room and the intensity of the moment, and yet, I found my own hands also coming together. As I stood applauding, I noticed several students standing along the far edges of the cafeteria walls, a couple with tears in their eyes, separated from the rest of the school\u2014students I had been instructed not to speak to. Despite all my privileges and distance from everyday experiences of the youth lining the walls, it was clear to me that to not clap\u2014to not participate in this ritual\u2014would mark me. In this moment, I felt a dizzying sense that going along was not a choice but a condition of remaining in the room: a fleeting but embodied glimpse of a very different sort of belonging, one that is ready to foreclose everything and everyone it cannot absorb.\u00a0<\/p>\n In the midst of growing xenophobia and anti-migrant fervor in the UK and globally, there are clear parallels to paradoxical calls for both the stringent assimilation and the removal of non-conforming bodies. But these schools\u2019 approaches more clearly invoke the haunting, colonial discourses of a civilizing, authoritarian mission to save certain kinds of young people from backwardness. In the eyes of these schools and their proponents, these youth can only be successful if they are severed from their cultural and community contexts\u2014a process which requires a \u201cno excuses\u201d approach. At the same time, an intensified focus on white-nationalist curriculum and increasingly authoritarian policies are inexorably bound up with ideas about which young people should belong, on what terms, and towards what ends.\u00a0<\/p>\n When I think about my visits to London schools, I am reminded that the stories of Celeste, Donna, and others become fully legible in relation to the institutions they describe\u2014and that those schools, in turn, become interpretable through grassroots storytelling. Ethnography lets us listen closely to these stories in the contexts from which they emerge, and makes visible the seemingly-small, relational labor through which people strive to \u201cflip the script,\u201d as Celeste puts it, on who gets to define what educational belonging looks like.<\/p>\n Lauren Woodard is the section contributing editor for the Society for the Anthropology of Europe.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Article begins I am a PhD student who studies language, culture, and processes of youth marginalization and belonging in London schools. In this article, I reflect on how ethnographic methods have shaped my engagement with grassroots education networks, drawing on two summers of preliminary linguistic ethnographic fieldwork in East London from 2024-2026. 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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tMarika Krishnan<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n![\"Close-up](\"https:\/\/www.anthropology-news.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Marika-AN-photo-856x571.jpeg\")
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