Ideally, school would be a place where all students feel that they belong. However, the reality is that many students feel as though they do not belong to their school community. Alienated or disaffected students are an endemic problem in schools in Australia, as elsewhere, affecting the whole school community along with the life chances for the students themselves once they have left school. The crux of this matter, the authors believe, are the tensions between the desire to connect to the school community, and the frustrations experienced by some students as a result of their subjectification by the school system. By subjectification, the authors mean the ways in which power is negotiated in people's lives so that they become certain types of people located within identifiable power structures. One of the ideas regarding student experiences about school that this work examines is the possibility that students identified as alienated or disaffected in their schools may in fact be resisting the accepted negotiations of power that underpin the school system. In part, these students have a tacit awareness of their subjectivity that they find frustrating, as schools are built on the rhetoric of agency and autonomy. This article probes the issue of power relations within a school, and student reaction to what Foucault would term their "subjectification". This article draws on research carried out as part of a larger study. Its focus is on student responses to the issue of connectedness within a secondary school. Through looking at their responses, a better understanding of the different realities that students experience in a school situation will emerge. This will have implications for schools exploring strategies to promote positive school experiences for all students. A Foucaultean framework has been utilised to analyse student responses to their experiences of connectedness. (Contains 32 notes.)