Upwardly mobile working-class adolescents: a biographical approach on habitus dislocation

Habitus dislocation is a much debatable term. By presenting life-histories of working-class adolescents, this article argues (i) that not all upwardly mobile working-class adolescents experience habitus dislocation and, (ii) that habitus dislocation has its roots in the self-initiated ruptures that face some of those who want to be upwardly mobile and who are trying to replace ‘second-nature’ dispositions with newly made schemes of action and with self-understandings disconnected from their childhood socialisation. It is not that social mobility produces habitus dislocation but that social mobility feeds and intensifies something that existed prior to their educational achievement. For this reason the authors consider that biographical method is an extremely powerful tool for grasping the way adolescents deal with the discontinuities created in their teen life-world experiences.