This chapter aims to locate and situate the study informing the book. It seeks to highlight the importance of setting the research aims in their context and exploring the ethnographic fieldwork as a fluid, contingent and fragile process. The groundwork, missteps, realisations, accomplishments and disasters were formative in producing this account of internal school exclusion. Instead of polishing them out of the final version, I draw on them as a research resource here and show how they informed the interpretive process.

The motivation for conducting the study in the first place was formed somewhere in the middle of a hyperbolic policy cycle problematizing youth disorder and antisocial behaviour. Anxieties about ‘hoodies’ and ‘feral youths’ were crystallising into a moral panic at the beginning of the new millennium, echoing centuries old concerns over youth disorder, delinquency and societal contagion. By 2006, the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and his New Labour government were launching a ‘Respect Action Plan’, pledging to ‘eradicate the scourge of antisocial behaviour and restore respect to the communities of Britain’. Some areas of the UK were also pursuing a ‘naming and shaming’ policy, distributing leaflets or displaying posters carrying the images of alleged miscreant youths. Despite failing crime rates, marginalised children and young people were being problematised and targeted at an alarming rate, finding themselves issued with curfews, banned from public spaces and subject to civil orders limiting movements, behaviour and even in some cases the types of clothing they could wear.

References to disadvantaged young people were also increasingly articulated through the hate filled discourse of the ‘chav’ as an ignorant vulgar, loutish, lowlife (Tyler, 2008; Jones, 2010). In the context of this fear-filled antipathy a new electronic device was marketed with the explicit intention of dispersing and driving away young people from ‘trouble spots’. Widely reported at the time, the gadget was said to send out ultra-high pitched frequencies which can only be heard by those under the age of 20. Endorsed by the police and local authorities, the device was described in The Telegraph as ‘sweet revenge’, producing a sound ‘so distressing it forces them to clutch their ears in discomfort’.