Strategies, Statuses and Selves: A Linguistic Ethnographic Study of the Interplay between Leadership, Language and Identity in a North London Primary School

The aim of this thesis is to explore the relationship between language, leadership and identity in the talk of 10–11-year-old children attending a North London primary school. While existing research is already questioning the value of ‘grand theories’ of leadership and advocating for social constructionist approaches, the talk of older, secondary school-aged children, or adults, is often explored in environments created by researchers or teachers. This thesis combines analysis of talk from natural contexts with ethnographic knowledge to examine how leadership is meaningfully achieved at a local level. It considers two contexts. Firstly, curriculum-oriented talk, where the children make decisions towards completing a cross-curricular project, and, secondly, play-oriented talk, where the children play a verbal game and a video game in self-selected groups.

An important finding of this study is that, for these children, leadership is related to local social practices and language. It shows leadership is most successful when both girls and boys are able to draw on particular locally-accrued statuses, construct a local ethnographic position associated with kindness or niceness, and pay attention to relational practices by using linguistic strategies traditionally associated with indexing normative femininity.