Becoming a Thriving Student:Intersectional Perspectives on School Wellbeing

Over the past decade, wellbeing has shifted from a general social concern into a central pillar of educational reforms, internationally and in Denmark (McLellan et al., 2022). In Denmark, following the 2013 national school reform, wellbeing became a core educational objective (Ministry of Children and Education, 2013). However, recent research indicates a decline in the number of students who report thriving in school — particularly female students (Nielsen et al., 2020), LGBTI+ students (Greve et al, 2024), and students from minority ethnic backgrounds (Gilliam, 2025). These disparities underscore the need for an intersectional perspective (Hancock, 2016) that moves beyond universalised, individualised framings and recognizes that wellbeing is dynamically shaped by the intersections of gender, social class, sexuality, ethnicity, and other social categories entangled with the whole- school environment. In this paper, we examine how students enact wellbeing in their everyday school lives through a qualitative case study in a 6th and 8th-grade class at a Danish public school. Drawing on observations, semi-structured interviews and a participatory photo activity, we analyse how wellbeing is configured through daily interac-tions, practices, and school spaces. We use Davies' concepts of ‘(be)longing’, and ‘landscape’ (Davies, 2000) together with Skeggs’ work with social class and gender (Skeggs, 1997), to illuminate the multiplicity of in-tersecting subjectivities and heterogeneity of students’ experiences of wellbeing as enacted in school. By mapping the discursive terrain and locating the discourses within the school landscape, the study shows how students, teachers, and the whole-school environment interact to produce normative attributions of difference, practices of regulation, classification, and categorisation in which some students are positioned as “normalized” and others are "wronged". These dynamics shape how students take up, resist, or shift and reconfigure available subject positions, as they strive to achieve a sense of being a” thriving student”.