Kim Allen

Becoming employable students and ‘ideal’ creative workers: exclusion and inequality in higher education work placements

In this paper we explore how the ‘employable’ student and ‘ideal’ future creative worker is prefigured, constructed and experienced through higher education work placements in the creative sector, based on a recent small-scale qualitative study. Drawing on interview data with students, staff and employers, we identify the discourses and practices through which students are produced and produce themselves as neoliberal subjects. We are particularly concerned with which students are excluded in this process. We show how normative evaluations of what makes a ‘successful’ and ‘employable’ student and ‘ideal’ creative worker are implicitly classed, raced and gendered. We argue that work placements operate as a key domain in which inequalities within both higher education and the graduate labour market are (re)produced and sustained. The paper offers some thoughts about how these inequalities might be addressed.

‘Sticky Subjects’ or ‘Cosmopolitan Creatives’? Social Class, Place and Urban Young People’s Aspirations for Work in the Knowledge Economy

Aspirations have been a key target of education policy, situated as central to meeting the needs of the ‘knowledge economy’. In the UK, there have been calls to raise young people’s aspirations for careers in the creative industries—identified as emblematic of the new economic order and a key growth sector. Yet, the sector is socially and spatially restricted, characterised by unclear entry routes, exclusionary working practices and uneven geographical concentration. This paper draws on research with young people (aged 14–16 years) living in three urban areas of deindustrialisation in England to examine the geography of young people’s aspirations for careers in the creative industries. The concept of place-specific habitus is used to problematise asocial and aspatial discourses of aspiration and to illuminate how social class and place powerfully and complexly interrelate to shape young people’s opportunities for social and geographical mobility through and for work in the knowledge economy.

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.

‘Blair's children’: young women as ‘aspirational subjects’ in the psychic landscape of class

This paper engages with the subjective experience of ‘doing’ aspiration, teasing out the psychic and social costs that accompany this as a classed process. It draws on a qualitative study of young women located in further education and contemplating their futures under New Labour, locating how the political rhetoric of aspiration gets institutionalized within school practices; how it intersects with maternal expectations and practices of involvement; and how these are lived and managed by subjects located in different positions in class-inflected social space. In attending to the tangled web of institutional, intergenerational and affective practices which shape young womens aspirations, the paper seeks to interrupt the celebratory and simplistic rhetoric of aspiration that characterizes the contemporary socio-political register of neoliberalism. As these ideals become further entrenched by the current Coalition government, there is an even greater urgency for such sociological enquiries.

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.

‘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.

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.

‘What Do You Need to Make It as a Woman in This Industry? Balls!’: Work Placements, Gender and the Cultural Industries

Higher Education (HE) is an important route into the cultural sector and published figures suggest that there is no shortage of women coming through the HE pipeline: women make up 60 per cent of the student population on HE courses aligned with the cultural sector in the UK (ECU, 2011). However, women represent 38 per cent of the UK cultural industries’ workforce (Skillset and Creative and Cultural Skills, 2011), below the UK labour market average of 46 per cent. Female representation varies significantly by sub-sector and occupational group but with markedly significant gender segregation across the sector: for example, in the audio-visual industries, 87 per cent of the workforce in make-up, hair and costume are female, yet women comprise only a very small minority in technical roles (Skillset, 2006). Despite being more highly qualified than their male counterparts, women earn less (Skillset and Creative and Cultural Skills, 2011) and are less likely to be found in top positions (Holden and McCarthy, 2007). Concurrently, workforce diversity agendas within the UK cultural sector have sought to increase female representation and progression.1

Turning to the empirical audience: the desired but denied object of celebrity studies?

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number ES/J022942/1].

‘Hard to Reach’ or Nomadic Resistance? Families ‘Choosing’ Not to Participate in Early Childhood Services

Taking seeming disinterest in early years music-making as its focal point, this article explores the Deleuzian notion of (affect)ive assemblages to consider the relationships between formal early childhood services, the familial home environment of the ‘hard to reach,’ and the use of populist musical resources. In drawing on post-structuralist and feminist theorisations of performance, subjectivity, language and meaning, the authors illustrate how discursive practices work at pathologising so that families are both contained and known within the nomenclature of ‘hard to reach’. The article then moves to work with a number of Deleuzian concepts, including ‘smooth/striated space’ as well as ‘nomad/nomadic’. In so doing, they illustrate nomadic resistance where new musical identities and affective relations between children, their families and musicality become possible for this elusive tribe. This article, understood as a rhizomatic journey, offers a conceptual stutter so as to destabilise dominant constructions about particular families. The lens of enquiry focuses upon the configuration of one white working-class family headed by a young single mother. In the English context, such parents have become routinely pathologised and labelled ‘Chav Mums’, yet this Deleuzoguattarian-inspired exploration seeks to offer a means of unsettling normative assumptions about family practices and the ‘becoming’ child within them, which will serve to inform social justice debates in other global contexts.