Valerie Hey

Gender/ed discourses and emotional sub-texts: Theorising emotion in UK higher education

This article engages with contemporary debates about the absence/presence of emotion in higher education. UK higher education has traditionally been constructed as an emotion-free zone, reflecting the dominance of Cartesian dualism with its rational/emotional, mind/body, male/female split. This construction has been challenged in recent years by the incursion of ‘new students’ into the academy, requirements to offer enhanced student support, and new neo-liberal employability/personal skills agendas. At the same time, theories on the significance of the emotions in education are gaining prominence, e.g. in relation to debates about ‘emotional intelligence’. This renewed emphasis on emotion, however, has also been constructed as a dangerous and regressive example of the growing ‘therapy culture’ in universities. Drawing on the rich tradition of sociological and psycho-social work on the affective, our concern is to further the theorisation of the place of emotion in higher education.

The contrasting social logics of sociality and survival: Cultures of classed be/longing in late modernity

Late modernity has been characterized as a space, place and ‘series of flows’, marking conditions of complexity, contradiction and diversity as the global economics of capital restructuring reach down into the local/e to radically disorganize prior social forms of collective and political identity and allegiance (Giddens, 1998). Individualization implies a de-coupling of self from the weight of group, community and tradition, thus more local, idiosyncratic and syncretic trajectories are now said to structure ‘biographies of choice’. My starting points for reflecting on this are Bourdieu’s conceptualization of the ‘social logics of the individual’ conceived as a thoroughly social subject. I use this idea to frame how two contrasting locales shape the subject within their respective interpersonal relations. Gender and class are central terms of the following discussion examining the newly improvized identities of the digitally enhanced and networked middle class, alongside the survival identities impelled by those ‘muddling through’ within disconnected locales.Late modernity has been characterized as a space, place and ‘series of flows’, marking conditions of complexity, contradiction and diversity as the global economics of capital restructuring reach down into the local/e to radically disorganize prior social forms of collective and political identity and allegiance (Giddens, 1998). Individualization implies a de-coupling of self from the weight of group, community and tradition, thus more local, idiosyncratic and syncretic trajectories are now said to structure ‘biographies of choice’. My starting points for reflecting on this are Bourdieu’s conceptualization of the ‘social logics of the individual’ conceived as a thoroughly social subject. I use this idea to frame how two contrasting locales shape the subject within their respective interpersonal relations. Gender and class are central terms of the following discussion examining the newly improvized identities of the digitally enhanced and networked middle class, alongside the survival identities impelled by those ‘muddling through’ within disconnected locales.

Talking back to power: Snowballs in hell and the imperative of insisting on structural explanations

This viewpoint explores and shares our experience of ‘doing’ feminism in the context of its apparent ‘demise’. We were recently invited to attend an event at the Cabinet Office, to ‘discuss the impact aspirations and expectations within the community have on the educational achievement of young people in deprived areas’. The seminar was entitled, ‘Expert Seminar with the Minister for the Cabinet Office: Community Aspirations and Educational Attainment’. Appalled, both at the grammar (!), and the deficit account implications underpinning the Cabinet Office Invitation, we made contact with one another, and agreed that we would attend the seminar with the specific intention of challenging this discursive premise. We seek to use this Viewpoint to reflect on the experience in relation to academic activism and ‘speaking back’, as well as to take the opportunity to re‐state a few of the key points that detonate the deficit discourse in relation to the educational attainment of working‐class pupils.

Imagining the university of the future: eyes wide open? Expanding the imaginary through critical and feminist ruminations in and on the university

This selected collection of papers arises out of an Economic and Social Research Council seminar series entitled ‘Imagining the University of the Future’ devised by Valerie Hey and Louise Morley. The main rationale expressed our desire to imagine the future cohabitation of equity and universities, in the light of the present continuing and compounding of persistent inequalities. We are the Co-director and the Director, respectively, of the Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research (CHEER) at the University of Sussex. This is a generative home for developing the intellectual and social capital which furnished the series, building on prior extensive work in CHEER (http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cheer/) marking a unique contribution to higher education. CHEER is the only dedicated centre of its kind in the world focused on equity and higher education. Its members have been engaged in critical research and commentaries on the successive moves of policy and practice notating their uneven and frequently unintended unequal consequences. This confluence of people and ideas continues to prove a fertile place for deciding the need for a new vocabulary—a sociology of higher education. We believe that we need to develop a vocabulary with greater capacity for bringing into view those silenced, hidden, and ‘difficult’ readings and experiences that are so often obscured in larger concerns with theorising transformation at the level of the global. The Contemporary Social Science Vol. 6, No. 2, 165–174, June 2011

The strange case of Nietzsche's tears: the power geometries of passionate attachments in education

Yet, if we concede pity a less pathological status as John Berger (2007) urges, seeing it as co-existing with appetite in the heart of desire, which is imagined as a wish for oblivion – a mode of protection from ‘the unmitigated hurt which flesh is heir to’ (Berger 2007, 125 ) – we open out on an alternative perspective. Namely, that if sanity requires pity’s suppression, this is the extraordinarily high price we pay for producing ourselves as rational. Nietzsche’s tears suggest the illegibility of human vulnerability and fragility in masculinity. It is the systematic ‘eradication’ or feminisation of the idea of inter/dependency that requires explanation. Following an alternative psycho-social relational logic would produce Nietzsche’s tears as an entirely understandable (possibly unconscious) compassionate point of identification with the horse’s suffering, folded into a newly recognised complicity that

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.