Heather Mendick

Young people's uses of celebrity: class, gender and ‘improper’ celebrity

In this article, we explore the question of how celebrity operates in young peoples everyday lives, thus contributing to the urgent need to address celebritys social function. Drawing on data from three studies in England on young peoples perspectives on their educational and work futures, we show how celebrity operates as a classed and gendered discursive device within young peoples identity work. We illustrate how young people draw upon class and gender distinctions that circulate within celebrity discourses (proper/improper, deserving/undeserving, talented/talentless and respectable/tacky) as they construct their own identities in relation to notions of work, aspiration and achievement. We argue that these distinctions operate as part of neoliberal demands to produce oneself as a ‘subject of value’. However, some participants produced readings that show ambivalence and even resistance to these dominant discourses. Young peoples responses to celebrity are shown to relate to their own class and gender position.

Imagining the Mathematician: Young People Talking about Popular Representations of Maths.

This paper makes both a critical analysis of some popular cultural texts about mathematics and mathematicians, and explores the ways in which young people deploy the discourses produced in these texts. We argue that there are particular (and sometimes contradictory) meanings and discourses about mathematics that circulate in popular culture, that young people use these as resources in identity making as (non-)mathematicians, negotiating their meaning in ways that are not always predictable, and that their influence on young people is diffuse and nevertheless important. The paper discusses the discourses that prevail in some of the popular cultural images of mathematics and mathematicians that came up in our research. We show how mathematics is represented as a secret language, while mathematicians are often mad, mostly male and almost invariably white. We then explore how young people negotiate these discourses, positioning themselves in relation to mathematics. Here we draw attention to the fact that both those who continue with mathematics after it ceases to be compulsory and those who do not, deploy similar images of mathematics and mathematicians. What is different is how they respond to and negotiate these images.

Keeping it Real? Social Class, Young People and ‘Authenticity’ in Reality TV

In this article, we offer an empirical contribution to complement cultural analyses of social class-making in Reality Television (RTV). We draw on qualitative interviews with young people in England (aged 14–19). Analysing these discursively, we explore how young people take up, resist and rework discourses of ‘authenticity’ within RTV shows including The Apprentice and The X Factor. We conceptualise young people’s talk about RTV as performative, part of their ‘identity work’ through which they position themselves and others, and as embedded in wider processes of social distinction. We show that young people reject RTV contestants who are seen as too authentic in order to construct themselves as ordinary and thus normalise middle-classness. However, despite inviting audiences to make classed moral judgements, RTV provokes multiple readings. Specifically, some, mainly working-class, young people reject dominant discourses that pathologise working-class RTV contestants and instead value their lack of pretentiousness.

Processes of middle‐class reproduction in a graduate employment scheme

Teach First is an educational charity that places graduates to teach in ‘challenging’ schools for two years. It is marketed as an opportunity to develop employability while ‘making a difference’. In this paper, I examine the process of class reproduction occurring in this graduate employment scheme through examining the discourses used in Teach First marketing and by Teach First participants. I begin by arguing that the Teach First participants interviewed as part of an evaluation were predominantly middle‐class, and possessed social and cultural capital which had facilitated their access to the Teach First scheme. I then illustrate three processes of middle‐class reproduction within Teach First. The first is the accumulation by participants of additional social and cultural capital. The second is the reproduction of middle‐class values and stereotypes of the working‐class other, and the third is the obscuring of middle‐class advantage through discourses of ‘natural ability’. I conclude that although well‐intentioned Teach First participants worked extremely hard to combat educational disadvantage, their actions were twisted by class forces, and resulted in the reproduction of middle‐class privilege.

‘We can Get Everything We Want if We Try Hard’: Young People, Celebrity, Hard Work

ABSTRACT Drawing on 24 group interviews on celebrity with 148 students aged 14–17 across six schools, we show that ‘hard work’ is valued by young people in England. We argue that we should not simply celebrate this investment in hard work. While it opens up successful subjectivities to previously excluded groups, it reproduces neoliberal meritocratic discourses and class and gender distinctions.

Boffin and Geek Identities: Abject or Privileged?.

High achievement, and in particular, the role of the academically diligent and successful ‘boffin’ or ‘geek’, are notably under-researched areas in the sociology of education. Issues around gender and other aspects of identity in relation to such pupils are particularly under-researched. In this Viewpoint article we draw on evidence from our recent research projects including young people interpolated to, or identifying with, the subject position of ‘boffin/geek’ and media representations of such positions. We debate some tensions between our work, drawing out shared findings. The article considers issues around capital, experience, and the extent of exclusion/inclusion for boffins/geeks, discussing to what extent such young people can be considered marginalised and abjected or agentic and privileged. We argue that structural factors such as gender, social class, ‘race’, age, and institutional location impact on these constructions and outcomes.

Constructions of Mathematicians in Popular Culture and Learners' Narratives: A Study of Mathematical and Non-Mathematical Subjectivities.

In this paper, based on a project funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council considering how people position themselves in relation to popular representations of mathematics and mathematicians, we explore constructions of mathematicians in popular culture and the ways learners make meanings from these. Drawing on an analysis of popular cultural texts, we argue that popular discourses overwhelmingly construct mathematicians as white, heterosexual, middle‐class men, yet also construct them as ‘other’ through systems of binary oppositions between those doing and those not doing mathematics. Turning to the analysis of a corpus of 27 focus groups with school and university students in England and Wales, we explore how such images are deployed by learners. We argue that while learners’ views of mathematicians parallel in key ways popular discourses, they are not passively absorbing these as they are simultaneously aware of the clichéd nature of popular cultural images.

Subtracting difference: troubling transitions from GCSE to AS-level mathematics

This article provides an approach to understanding the widely acknowledged difficulties experienced by young people in the transition from pre-16 to post-16 mathematics. Most approaches to understanding the disenchantment with and drop-out from AS-level mathematics focus on curriculum and assessment. In contrast, this article looks at the role of relationships, taking a psychosocial approach. It draws on data from a three-year qualitative study into why young people choose mathematics. It argues that educational practitioners and policy makers are responding to stories of failure and drop-out by excluding more people from access to mathematics. There is less and less room for difference within our mathematics classrooms. This happens because of the ways that discourses around mathematics fix how we think of the subject, who can learn it and what kind of relationships are possible between learners and mathematics. Instead the article argues for unfixing these through policies and pedagogies of difference.

Mathematical images and identities: entertainment, education, social justice

In the UK and many other countries, mathematics is an unpopular subject. Fewer people continue with it into post-compulsory education and many of those who do continue do so because they need the subject rather than because they actively enjoy it. Research shows that the image that mathematics has does not represent something appealing to most young people or something which they feel is compatible with their ‘‘identities’’ (Boaler, Wiliam, and Zervenbergen 2000; Picker and Berry 2000). This research study looks at the ways that popular cultural images of maths and mathematicians influence the relationships that young people form with the subject. In contrast with mathematics, popular culture has a growing influence on young people and there is a clear need to ‘‘ponder the role of school in the ‘age of desire’ . . . [and] to contemplate the purposes of schooling if the distinctions between advertising and entertainment diminish’’ (Kenway and Bullen 2001, 7). This is the first major research within mathematics education focusing on popular representations of mathematics and mathematicians and attempting to map their effects. As well as looking at the ways that discourses of mathematics and mathematicians are deployed by learners, the study explores how these are gendered, classed and raced. As well as textual data, data have been collected through a questionnaire survey, as well as interviews and focus groups conducted with 15 to 16 year-old school students and second and third year undergraduates in mathematics and the contrasting disciplines of media studies, English and sociology. In the ongoing analysis several areas are being focussed on, including: the relationship between representations of mathematics and learners constructions of the subject; the contrasting masculinities within fictional narratives of mathematicians, the role of popular culture in people’s educational decision-making generally and specifically those that relate to mathematics (and the role of the neoliberal context in this); how people understand juxtapositions of the popular, the everyday and the mathematical; the ways that learners negotiate their ideas about the absoluteness of mathematics and the pedagogic possibilities of working with popular culture (see www.londonmet.ac.uk/mathsimages for more information).

Welfare Queens, thrifty housewives, and do-It-all mums: Celebrity motherhood and the cultural politics of austerity

In this paper, we consider how the cultural politics of austerity within Britain plays out on the celebrity maternal body. We locate austerity as a discursive and disciplinary field and contribute to emerging feminist scholarship exploring how broader political and socio-economic shifts interact with cultural constructions of femininity and motherhood. To analyse the symbolic function of mediated celebrity maternity within austerity, the paper draws on a textual analysis of three celebrity mothers: Kate Middleton, Kim Kardashian, and Beyoncé. This analysis was undertaken as part of a larger qualitative study into celebrity culture and young peoples classed and gendered aspirations. We show how these celebrity mothers represent the folk devils and fantasy figures of the maternal under austerity—the thrifty, happy housewife, the benefits mum, and the do-it-all working mum—and attempt to unpick what cultural work they do in the context of austerity within Britain. Through the lens of celebrity motherhood, we offer a feminist critique of austerity as a programme that both consolidates unequal class relations and makes punishing demands on women in general, and mothers in particular.