The School Assemblage and Persistent School Absence – Analyses of Students in Pursuit of Viable Lives

In this article, we seek to gain knowledge about the phenomenon of persistent school absence. Situations where a student is absent from school for long periods are often characterized by high levels of frustration among adults and a tendency to blame either the school or the parents. However, in contrast to most research in school absence, we do not ask why some students become persistently absent from school. Rather, we take up the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of the assemblage and their concept of lines of flight (Deleuze and Guattari A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia, 1987) to analyze the school as an assemblage and how it works as an arrangement of elements and movements to ensure that children’s bodies can be found on the school premises during certain hours of the day. We then analyze and discuss the processes set in motion when students start to flee the assemblage by staying home, gradually enabling the persistent school absence assemblage to emerge and territorialize. Finally, based on Puig de la Bellacasa’s (de la Puig Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds, 2017) conceptualization of care, we discuss how the school assemblage might succeed in recruiting the persistently absent students if it generated more care.