Rosalyn P. George

Challenging Pedagogy: Emotional Disruptions, Young Girls, Parents and Schools

This paper follows on from a research project which explored the inclusionary and exclusionary dynamics of young girls’ friendship groups. This initial study received considerable media attention in the UK, Europe and Australia and consequently came to the attention of a wider audience beyond the academy who were thus given an opportunity to engage with the research findings. Having previously explored and analysed the emotionally disabling everyday practices experienced by the girls in the initial research project, the voices of these other adults offered a possibility to explore, examine and analyse the experiences of their daughters and themselves and as a result offered insights that challenge the day to day practices in the classroom. The focus of this paper therefore, is to explore the emotionally raw moments as articulated through the stories told by these adults and to examine what meaning and sense is conveyed about the prevailing norms and values of the school underpinning their pedagogy and practice. We contextualise emotions within a theoretical framework of Sara Ahmed and bell hooks that views emotions in terms of power and culture. The data analysed include contributions from the public to a radio phone-in as well as email responses. The analysis makes explicit the dynamics of power in girls’ friendship groups revealing action/inaction by parents and their accounts about teachers which either disrupt or reinforce dominant practices that pertain. We advocate hooks’ concept of engaged pedagogy to challenge current practices underpinned by neo-liberal assumptions.

Dissident Daughters? The Psychic Life of Class Inheritance.

This paper arose through a chance meeting between the two authors who are feminist mothers of teenage and 20 years plus daughters. We were attending an Economic and Social Research Council-funded seminar focusing on ‘new femininities’ in the light of post-feminism and their worth and currency within the new politics of consumption and lifestyle. The seminar contributions resonated for us in two ways. Firstly, we have an interest in femininities, female friendships and how current understandings of these social bonds are being reconceptualised. Secondly, and on a personal note, we were increasingly aware that the seminar discussions framed within the landscape and biographies of risk and hope chimed with the ways our own daughters were currently playing out and negotiating their futures. How do we view the apparent contra-trajectory taken by our daughters who, unlike us, less concerned about seeing education as a ladder to ‘getting on’, seemed intent on ‘down classing’ in their various and successive ‘choices’ of educational pathways and boyfriends? In making sense of shared anxieties, our concerns coalesced around the personal, the familial and, in particular, the maternal relations. It is these inter-generational tensions entangled with the emotional politics of class that are the focus of this paper.

Second Modernity, (In)equality, and Social (In)justice.

In the late 1990s the United Kingdom embarked on a process to make the most sweeping changes in anti-discrimination legislation in a generation (Clay and George 2013). Many of those engaged in the pursuit of equality have supported the expansion and inclusion of rights in the areas of disability, gender, age, religion, and sexual orientation despite some reservations. Through a process of analyzing and reflecting on its own experiences and that of others, the United Kingdom had the prospect of becoming a global leader in the development and implementation of the most progressive legislation and policy framework on human rights and equalities in the international community. The proposed merging of the distinct equality bodies such as the Equal Opportunities Commission, the Commission for Racial Equality and the Disability Rights Commission into a single Commission for Equality and Human Rights (CEHR) came about in October 2007 with the passing of the 2006 Equality Act. It has since been rebranded under the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition administration as the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) and is bound under legislation to act in a way that is compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. The forming of this umbrella body was considered broadly positive from the beginning with its declared intention to tackle inequality in a more holistic way; viewing equality as an organizing concept underpinning a framework that could provide a source of redress and support at the level of the individual and of the group. Yet it is here where difficulties arise. Adjudicating claims about what would be an appropriate equalizing intervention will be anything but straightforward in a complicated polity within which individuals face the difficult and challenging task of negotiating complex multiple identities. An opposing argument persists that failure to consider the nature of inequality at the specific level of gender, ethnicity, etc. risks losing the practical expertise gained by looking at a particular aspect of (in)equality that affects the human condition. As a consequence of these changes there was genuine apprehension that within an overall equality policy the whole would be less than the sum of the parts. For example, the leading Black pressure group, said,

Pedagogical responses to the changing position of girls and young women

This Special Issue arises from the UK Economic and Social Research Council-funded seminar series ‘Young Women in Movement: Sexualities, Vulnerabilities, Needs and Norms’, which took place between 2009 and 2011 at Goldsmiths, University of London. The series focused on girls and young women from ages 10 to 30, considering how recent and current developments affect different aspects of their lives. The papers in this Special Issue arise from the work in the seminar series that was focused on pedagogical approaches to girls and young women from across Europe. Contributors come from a variety of positions and starting points, and their perspectives reflect these. Academics and professionals working in the field of gender with particular reference to girls and young women are faced with a series of paradoxes. Over the last 20 years, the lives of young women in the UK and Europe have been transformed. They have gained considerable freedom and independence, but at the very same time, new, less tangible, forms of constraint and subordination play a defining role in the formation of their everyday subjectivities and identities. Young women have come to exemplify the pervasive sensibility of self-responsibility and self-organisation. The period of youth is nowadays stretched at both ends. Young women enter teenage social worlds at much younger ages than before, while many young women across Europe are also delaying the age of marriage, partnership and childbirth, extending the period of education and training, then entering the labour market and participating in leisure culture as singles. Consequently, our working definition of ‘young woman’ is fluid, and spans the age range 10–30. This is reflected in the papers in the Special Issue. While most of them focus on school-aged girls, others, including those by Graff and Davies, discuss the experiences of those who are moving into or already in their twenties. Our understanding of pedagogy is similarly fluid and broad, including youth work as well as schooland college-based approaches. We were anxious, as part of the seminar series, to interrogate the field of sexuality and its visualisation across new and old media in the context of