BURA Collection:
http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/271
2024-03-16T04:06:55Z
2024-03-16T04:06:55Z
‘On road’ culture in context: masculinities, religion, and ‘trapping’ in inner city London
Reid, Ebony
http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/14817
2017-06-24T02:00:36Z
2017-01-01T00:00:00Z
Title: ‘On road’ culture in context: masculinities, religion, and ‘trapping’ in inner city London
Authors: Reid, Ebony
Abstract: The gang has been a focal concern in UK media, political discourse, policy, and policing interventions in the last decade, occupying the position of contemporary ‘folk devil’. Despite the heightened attention on urban ‘gang culture’, sociological research on gangs in the UK is limited. However, some sociologists do stress a deterministic relationship between gangs and black urban youth, rendering urban men a source of fascination and repulsion, easy scapegoats in explaining street violence. Arguably, current work that privileges the idea of gang membership misunderstands much about the lives of some men involved. This thesis contributes to correcting that misunderstanding. The study adopts a social constructionist perspective in understanding the (multiple) ways urban men in an inner city area of London construct their lives when immersed in what they refer to as being ‘on road’, a symbolic space in which everyday lives are played out. As a broadly ethnographic study, the data for the thesis were generated using participant observation and semi-structured interviews with a range of participants, including young and adult men. The study identifies three distinct ways in which some men become trapped in difficult experiences and identities ‘on road’. It focuses on the implications of the notion of ‘trappedness’ on their experiences in public space, employment opportunities and, self- identity. The ‘on road’ lives of the men in the study represent a paradox: the road appears to offer opportunity to build masculine identity but entangles them further in a trap, restricting freedom and stunting personal growth. This study has significance for sociological theory. Theoretically, the idea of being ‘on road’ can be understood as a discourse that persists in the language and symbolism that flows through these men’s experiences and narratives. As such the idea of ‘onroadness’ powerfully shapes all aspects of their lives. It is argued that more focus is needed on the psychosocial factors that force some men into volatile social worlds, and the personal contexts that frame local narratives of ‘on road’ culture, especially within wider experiences of friendship, faith, and identity. The thesis suggests that this form of analysis offers a critical explanatory framework within which it is possible to understand the lives of some of the young and adult men in certain inner city areas in the UK.
Description: This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University London
2017-01-01T00:00:00Z
Positive for youth work? Contested terrains of professional youth work in austerity England
Bradford, S
Cullen, F
http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/8309
2014-11-01T13:21:26Z
2014-01-01T00:00:00Z
Title: Positive for youth work? Contested terrains of professional youth work in austerity England
Authors: Bradford, S; Cullen, F
Abstract: This article considers professional youth work in England. It reflects on youth work's persistently anomalous position in the division of labour. Since their achievement of a contested professional status in the 1960s and 1970s, youth workers have pursued an occupational ideology that draws principally on a romantic humanism. Until recently, this provided a relatively stable basis to their practices. Under a dominant contemporary neo-liberalism, influential in different ways across Europe, youth work has been subjected to a range of managerialist practices that have further exposed its ambiguity as a profession. Austerity policy, enacted under the Coalition government, has further weakened professional youth work's position in the welfare division of labour. The article points to resistance to austerity on the part of some youth workers and speculates on the possible future of professional youth work in a policy regime that has little sympathy for the public professions.
Description: © 2014 Taylor & Francis. This article is available open access through the publisher’s website at the link below.
2014-01-01T00:00:00Z
Teachers’ views of teaching sex education: pedagogies and models of delivery
Alldred, P
David, ME
Smith, P
http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/1348
2014-11-01T11:39:37Z
2003-01-01T00:00:00Z
Title: Teachers’ views of teaching sex education: pedagogies and models of delivery
Authors: Alldred, P; David, ME; Smith, P
Abstract: This paper is based on a study of 17 secondary schools in an inner-city area of England deemed to have very high levels of teenage pregnancies. The New Labour Government argued that academic achievements and effective labour-market participation are inhibited by early or 'premature' parenthood (Social Exclusion Unit 1999). It therefore set in place policies to address these issues efectively in schools, through a revised school achievement agenda and a revised Sex & Relationship Education (SRE) programme. In this paper, we concentrate on the role and views of personal, social and/or health education coordinators charged with the delivery of SRE in secondary schools. We consider the way a broad-based, inclusive curriculum and pastoral programme fits into the subject-based and assessed curriculum of secondary schools for 11-16 where there is no tradition of open discussion of sexual matters. The legitimacy of teaching about sex and relationships in school has been hotly contested. The question of how to deal with teenage pregnancy and sexuality remains politically charged and sensitive and the teacher's role is thus contentious. We present a range of views about the professional or other pressures on schools, especially teachers, discussing difficulties within each of the main models of delivery. Teachers reprt considerable anxiety about SRE as a subject and its low status inthe curriculum, committed though they are to teaching it. This links with what is now seen as an overarching culture of anxiety regarding sex in contemporary society. Many teachers think that attending to young people's personal and social development - and especially their sexual identities - could help their education careers and academic achievement. Thus, from the teachers' accounts, we argue that there are important links between the revised sex education curriculum and the new emphasis on the achievement agenda in secondary schools in the UK.
2003-01-01T00:00:00Z
'Fit to parent'? Psychology, knowledge and popular debate
Alldred, Pamela Kay
http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/1344
2014-11-01T11:45:41Z
2001-01-01T00:00:00Z
Title: 'Fit to parent'? Psychology, knowledge and popular debate
Authors: Alldred, Pamela Kay
Abstract: This thesis examines the powerful appeals to psychology that are made in contemporary popular debate in Britain about parents. It focuses on the political implications of psychological discourse and the knowledge claims on which it rests. Using feminist and discourse theory, it critically examines psychological discourse, psychology as a knowledge practice, and considers the dilemmas of feminist knowledge production given the practices and relations it bolsters.
Constructions of mothers and fathers in parenting magazines and news-media images of lone mothers, lesbian mothers and ‘absent fathers’ are found to be profoundly gendered and conservative (hetero-gender normative) in spite of the rhetorical shift towards the gender-neutral discourse of ‘parents’. Gender essentialist and identity/status-bound understandings are most striking where people’s ‘fitness to parent’ is questioned, often implicitly, which suggests that such understandings are naturalised in representations of parents who are not problematised.
It is argued that the notion of ‘fitness to parent’, rather than contributing to discussion of parent-child relationships, obscures how impoverished popular debate is, because it has little ideological coherence despite its mobilisation of judgemental scrutiny and powerful condemnation. Ideas about ‘unfit’ parents do not, by exclusion, define a culturally ideal parent, but their implicit nature paves the way for common-sense appeals which deny their value-bases, reducing opportunities to challenge normative assumptions or superficial identity categories.
‘Second wave’ feminist analyses of family ideology are employed, but are criticised from a feminist post-structuralist perspective which highlights the limitations of ‘identity’ (for prematurely foreclosing understandings of subjectivity and desire), and of ‘social influence’ as a model of individual-society relation. A critique of identity politics is employed to highlight how parental identities deployed in popular debate are imbued with psychological presumptions, without necessarily referring to psychologically/emotionally meaningful qualities of relationships between parents and children. Instead, a relational, performative approach to thinking about parents, and a psychosocial approach for considering the politics of cultural discourses are advocated. An examination of recent social policy debates suggests that the former may be gaining in persuasive value and impact on policy.
Examining the authority of contemporary childrearing expertise suggests that arguments about parents are persuasive when they refer to psychological issues, whether or not they make explicit claims to expert knowledge. Paradoxically, as pop psychology becomes ubiquitous in Western cultures, the rising status attributed to the emotional realm can provide a means of contesting expert psychology, by undermining the valorisation of objectivity. However, the ‘psychologisation’ of contemporary social life reinforces psychology’s conceptual framework, which can, in turn, naturalise its conventional epistemology. This dilemma is explored in two spheres: feminist research and research with child participants. It is argued that feminists, and those critical of psychology’s modernist foundations, might employ their ‘expert’ warrant strategically in public debates about parents, but should also expose the politics of psychological knowledge. Similarly, despite theoretical limitations, identity politics might be put to good effect, such as to help children’s voices be heard today.
Finally, it is argued that, today, psychology is powerful, not only through experts or professionals, but as expertise, such that people draw on psychological discourses in their own reflexive projects of the self. Thus, psychological discourses, including implicit notions of fitness to parent, are implicated in the construction of contemporary parental subjectivities.
Description: This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by the University of East London.
2001-01-01T00:00:00Z