The Art of Privilege

Abstract

Students in elite schools live their lives largely through the prism of privilege and, in this chapter, we concentrate on what this means for their politics. We probe the ways students engage their privilege, what they currently do with it and what they plan to do with it in their futures, pointing to the political spectra across which they range. To understand the underlying qualities of this process, we look at the ways in which privilege is enacted by the young people who proceed through these schools in the different places, spaces and times of globalizing social circumstances. We draw here on the interviews and focus groups conducted with the students in 2011 and 2012. Our purpose is to illustrate how the students understand the unequal geographies of social and political power and privilege and how they place themselves and their peers, socially and politically.