As such, they enable us to raise the question of the social and historical conditions that make social mobility possible-i.e., the factors that facilitate or obstruct the kind of mythified pathway embodied here by the eldest sisters. The differences in educational success and social status within this sibling group-primarily to the detriment of the boys-are undeniably linked to the decline in living conditions for the working classes, and the way in which their means of social and political support in the cités (projects) have weakened over the last fifteen to twenty years. The detailed follow-up of the educational, professional, marital, residential, and other paths taken by members of the same sibling group (with sixteen years separating the eldest from the youngest) also invites us to break with a particular meritocratic Republican political discourse that often exists around the supposed gradual integration of immigrants through social mobility via the school system. This ethnographic study does not of course claim general significance, but I believe it does enable better understanding, via gendered pathways that are contextualized in time within a single sibling group, of certain aspects of social mobility-both intra- and intergenerational-rarely revealed by statistical studies of social mobility. The “anecdotalization” of society (Gérard Noiriel’s “fait-diversification”) and exaggerated news reporting around French individuals of north African descent (such as Khaled Kelkal in 1995, Zacarias Moussaoui in 2001, and Mohamed Merah in 2012) have significantly contributed to disguising this very important, but no doubt less newsworthy phenomenon. The upward intergenerational mobility of north African families in France over the period 1970–2010 is confirmed by the (few) quantitative studies on the topic, but is still little acknowledged in the public sphere. Although its findings are piecemeal, this case study has the merit of presenting a detailed picture of the paths taken over the last forty years by eight siblings from an Algerian family, all experiencing upward social mobility. ĢThis meeting sparked an (ongoing) investigation that I aim to present in this article. I would later learn that my words had struck a chord with Samira, the eldest sister, because she recognized in them the characteristic features of her siblings’ lives. The talk was also an opportunity for me to consider the debate about the specificity of the sociological perspective, to contest the idea of “sociological excuses” in vogue among a certain strand of the left, to examine more closely the social conditions for the poorer achievement of boys “in the quartiers” (neighborhoods) and the socially deviant attitudes that some adopt. She “congratulates” me on my talk, during which I reminded those present of the long-established (and therefore entirely normal) presence of north African families in France and insisted on differentiating within this social group, whose recently emerged (and often invisible) “middle class” now coexists with the continued existence of socially disaffiliated young people who are conversely highly visible in the public space-Elias’s “minority of the worst”-and from whom most of the group are looking to set themselves apart. It is the eldest who begins the conversation. As I leave the hall, three young women-three sisters, in fact-are waiting to speak to me. I have been invited as a sociologist who has studied professional development among young working-class people and is assumed to know (a little) about community youth centers, their role, and history. 1It is June 2012, and I am attending an event to celebrate thirty years of the mission locale in Montville, a town in the working-class suburbs of Paris.
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