WP59 An everyday poetics of class and ethnicity in stylization and crossing

This paper looks at how the artful and the everyday are interwoven in situated activity, and in its analysis of crossing and stylisation among adolescents, it suggests that the dynamic relationship between poetic and ordinary speech can help to clarify and reshape the worlds these young people inhabit, denaturalising hierarchy and domesticating difference. Admittedly, in order to make claims of this kind, the analysis has to be accurately aligned with the participants? own sense of what?s special and what?s routine, and the chapter identifies at least three obstacles to this. But it also identifies a range of methodological strategies to overcome these difficulties, and it goes on to argue that fine-grained accounts of the interplay of the poetic and mundane provide a corrective counterpoint to claims in social science and public discourse about contemporary political relations.