Changing School – Changing Self.

As education is of great importance for individual success, it perpetuates inequalities when ethnic minorities educate less than majority populations. Base on life stories with ethnic minority women who have done well in the Danish educational system, this article offers a detailed analysis of a critical time period in early adolescence where such young women’s dreams of upward social mobility were threatened. In the ‘contact zone’ of their local school classes, the proximity to ethnic majority pupils’ experiments with alcohol and cigarettes challenged the educational aspirations of the ethnic minority teenage girls. The article conceptualizes this challenging time as a ‘vital conjuncture’ – a critical life period in which both different futures and different identities are at stake – and shows how a school change could alleviate personal pressures, and avert the impending danger of school drop-out. This analytical approach demonstrates both how intersecting identities tied to ethnicity, gender, and class may operate in different ways, but with similar consequences of threatening educational success, and points to the scope of agency which ethnic minority teenage girls may exert as they struggle to shape their futures, but not in circumstances of their own choosing.