300 capped and gowned seniors sat on folding chairs set up on the school quad, waiting to graduate. A casually but well-dressed audience of friends and family had gathered on the lawn with teachers and school staff to watch the proceedings.About halfway through the ceremonyöafter a young man had played a 10-minute, original and professional-caliber piano composition for the audience and the student body president recounted her pride in peers, who included a nationally recognized mathematics scholar and a number of outstanding athletesöthe Valedictorian stood up and began his speech:`H igh school is the pop whiz kaboom between the beep-beep sound of the alarm clock and the whine of the bell at the end of the day. The bell rings and students flee, into the open air, wild and free. Some gather with friends at brunch or lunch, pondering everything from the serious to the silly. Initial ramblings over how sweatpants are for people who just don't care anymore digress into lengthy political debates. [School name] brims with intellectuality, topped with a sprinkle of pure camaraderie.'' (2) The audience chuckled when the Valedictorian summed up high school in a series of`snapshots': sitting on the quad, sipping a Jamba juice while debating`metaphysical issues' during lunch; campus streakers parading across the lawn on a recent spring day; and a teacher's witty asides about Oedipus and Hamlet in an English class.

This article offers a comparative ethnographic examination of working-class Latina and middle-class white girls' narratives of aspiration and expressions of self-cultivation in early twenty-first-century Silicon Valley, USA. I argue that such girls' subjectmaking statements of aspiration and gendered practices of self-cultivation reflect their emotively charged negotiations of race and class differentiated ideals of feminine success, their experience of school and community spaces inscribed by hierarchies of race, class, and gender, and shifting political-economic circumstances. Moreover, I maintain that such statements and practices reveal girls' engagements with an openended gendered dynamic of responsibilization.

This article draws on ethnographic and archival material to examine a contemporary, neuroscience informed politics of care focused on the child sensorium (understood as an embodied neurobiological endowment and material and political resource). I frame care-taking practices focused on children’s sensory endowment, responsivity, and difference as a form of biopolitical regulation in which children, parents, therapists, and educators are implicated. As such, I examine how such care intersects with political, economic, and educational forces and circumstances that differentiate North American childhoods and reconfigure expectations of children and parents. In the process, I relate medicalized sensory difference to shifting skill demands for children that emphasize emotional control in public and educational contexts. Moreover, I highlight how privileged parental engagements with scientific knowledge and practices of therapeutic care focused on children’s sensory endowments and difference articulate with these new skill demands but also deploy embodied sensorial–neurological difference/neurodiversity as a means to transform dynamics of stigma and control within children’s and families’ lives and educational contexts. At the same time, I show how attempts to cultivate sensory capacities and engagements with medicalized sensory difference are implicated in broader biopolitical dynamic of exclusion that unevenly recognizes difference/disability.

This article focuses on the formation of aspirations among low-income, ‘at-risk’ Latino youth attending a state and privately funded Biotechnology Academy within a public high school in San Jose, California. I identify a pattern of aspiration among Academy youth that contradicts the goal of individual advancement in the regional information economy stressed in the Academy: the desire to give back to a ‘community’ or to the nation via public service, especially that focused on the monitoring of ‘at-risk’ communities or military service. I link this pattern of aspiration to a school environment that promoted students’ internalization of an ‘at-risk’ status and encouraged their assumption of personal responsibility for that status. I also seek to demonstrate the ways in which an urban politics of surveillance and experiences of social and economic marginalization outside of school articulated with daily school experiences of surveillance and discipline to produce unanticipated ways of assuming responsibility for an ‘at-risk’ status.

This article serves as an introduction to the special section on Sensorial Politics, which includes articles by Nicholas Caverly, Elsa Davidson, Susan Falls and Ali Kenner. The introduction outlines the arguments of the articles before proceeding to a discussion of the common themes they illuminate as a whole. In particular, they address four key issues: the relationship between the sensorial and the political; the role of sensorial disruption and its political effects; the issue of labor; and the issue of knowledge. We conclude that while these pieces advance our understanding of the relationships between the sensorium and politics, they also open up avenues for ongoing research and theorization, particularly in our contemporary situation, in which the Covid-19 pandemic has recast sensorial politics in new ways.