• National identities in general are still a key feature of our contemporary world and are likely to remain so in the next decades, despite the alleged ‘fragmenting’ effects of globalisation and advances in technologies of communication
• European integration and the possible development of a European identity are unlikely to lead to the disappearance of existing national identities, as national identities are (and are likely to remain in the near future) the main basis on which (pro or con) attitudes towards the EU and a sense of European identity (if any) are build upon. What is possible is that the process of European integration may lead to a re-definition of national identity, but this may not be the most likely scenario in the UK
• The impact of strong sub-state national identities, devolution and separatist movements in the UK remain uncertain, but the scenario of an upcoming break-up of Britain does not seem the most likely
• National identity is not necessarily incompatible with or threatened by multiculturalism, though current trends in the UK suggest that they may be seen as increasingly so.

The main theoretical argument that will be followed throughout the review is that national identities are intimately bound with the existence of ‘nationalist’ practices (ie practices that are framed explicitly or implicitly in national terms and within which nationality makes a difference), and with the extent to which these practices shape people’s everyday experiences. As long as nationalist practices endure, we are likely to retain national identities, whilst the particular meanings of national identities are also shaped by these practices. Although partial, the choice of this argument is not arbitrary. Indeed it enables the creation of a number of scenarios as to the future evolution of national identities, by providing a concrete basis on which to do so. It is arguably easier and more realistic to postulate about possible change in everyday practices – including those driven by technological developments – that could affect national identities than, say, trying to predict long-term changes in nationalist ideology or reactions to essentially unpredictable future political events.

The issue of the consequences of national identities will also be addressed in this review, an issue which is all the more important if national identities are not in decline. In particular, the review will ask how national identity impacts on relationships with foreigners or immigrants. Of course, whether the consequences of a sense of national identity are seen as positive or negative, and thus whether it should be encouraged or discouraged and in what ways heavily depends on the nature of political objectives which are open to political discussion and contestation. But even if there were to be a consensus at that level (eg reducing intergroup prejudice and discrimination is important), the consequences of national identities in attaining or undermining these objectives are not necessarily obvious. In this respect, the key argument will be that these depend on how national identities are defined, both in terms of content and boundaries.

1. Nationalist practices and banal nationalism

It is easy to argue that nationalism is still one of the most potent political forces in our contemporary world by pointing to such phenomena as the multitude of separatist movements across the world (including in the UK), the so-called ‘resurgence of nationalism’ in Eastern Europe following the collapse of the USSR, as well as the strength of anti-European feelings amongst part of the British population.

Yet it can be argued that limiting nationalism to such phenomena still underestimate its impact and omnipresence, as it tends to equate it with expressions of ‘hot nationalism’ (Billig, 1995). That is, nationalism is often exclusively associated with separatism, bloody conflicts, extreme right-wing politics, parochialism and prejudice against others, and with extraordinary, irrational and dangerous emotions. But, as Billig (1995) has shown, most nationalism is, in fact, ‘banal’. It lies in the myriads of institutions and practices that shape our everyday experiences and which presuppose and reinforce the idea that the world is organised in terms of nations. We have become so accustomed to these practices that we end up taking them for granted and fail to take notice of their nationalist dimension. This also applies to education, mass media, television and newspapers to maps, sports, weather forecasting, alimentary products, and so on. When the news bulletins talk about ‘the’ economy or the weather forecast about ‘the’ weather, they are implicitly referring to the national economy or the national weather – but that fact does not need to be mentioned. The flag on British beef or on a French baguette in the supermarket may not have to be waved or saluted – nevertheless it implies the relevance of national differences in the choice of what to eat for dinner.

To take another example that concerns education, in teaching history at school, and putting aside the perhaps understandable bias towards prioritising national history, there is still the fact, taken for granted, that it is each nation that has a history, albeit one that can include being relations with other nations, or being divided internally. That is, nations are the relevant categories around which history is organised and told. In the same spirit, Brubaker (1996) also underlines the role of state policies and administration which tend to take nationhood as a natural given.

Billig’s point is that the potency of nationalism, that can be seen most clearly in expressions of ‘hot nationalism’, can nevertheless only be explained if we take into account all of these practices that (banally) maintain nationalism and a sense of national identity on a regular basis in our everyday life. The strength of banal nationalism resides precisely in going unnoticed, and only its daily maintenance of nationalism can explain why nationalist sentiments can seem to surge suddenly and so strongly in times of crisis such as wars. He also points out that the difference between banal and hot nationalism is often the difference between our nationalism, which is taken for granted in the UK, and the more visible nationalism of others.

It is also clear that the practices that maintain the nation in existence (or indeed any large-scale social group) and our sense of national identity on an everyday basis are only possible because of technological devices. Indeed, Anderson (1991) has linked the very birth of national awareness in the 18^th century to the invention of print, which, together with the rise of capitalism that lead to the production and distribution of printed goods on a mass scale, allowed people to imagine themselves as members of a community, sharing the same experiences and information when, for instance, reading the same morning newspapers. Today we must add radio, television, internet, and all other means of mass communication and mass transport which make it possible for people to both imagine and relate to others as fellow members of the same national community, despite geographical distances (Adam, 1992; Calhoun, 1991; Condor, 1996a; Giddens, 1990).

It follows that the development of new technologies in this area has the potential to alter both the sense and meanings of national identities. What these technologies will be capable of, who has access to them, who controls the content that goes through them, and how they are used in practice will determine how national identity can be shaped and by whom. This will be explored in some more detail below.

As for nationalism, the fact that national identities are amongst the most potent collective identities individuals can have can be illustrated by resorting to examples of hot nationalism and bloody conflicts. There are, indeed, few identities that can lead people not only to kill other human beings, but, even more spectacularly, to die for others (Elshtain, 1993). At the same time, this may again underestimate the importance of national identities where such phenomena are not present and where the impact of national identity is less visible. There are indeed many reasons why overt expression of national pride and identification can be avoided, including its frequent association with ethnocentrism and parochialism, racism, prejudice and discrimination – all of which can lead to an underestimation of the prevalence of national identities.

For instance, Condor has shown that English respondents with liberal individualist values typically show great reluctance to talk about and define English identity. They overtly condemn expressions of nationalistic pride, and often deny that being English defines them in any important way (Condor, 1996b, 1997, 2000, 2006). Condor shows how such reluctance can be explained by the fact that, for these respondents, overt expression of nationalism are associated with Anglo-British xenophobia which conflict with their liberal individualist values. But Condor’s point is that this way of talking about English national identity is so frequent and so typical that it becomes, paradoxically, a characteristic way of expressing English national identity – only one whose content is to condemn overt expression of nationalism. England is, or should be, a place where ‘hot nationalism’ and its deplorable consequences should be avoided. Likewise, Billig (1992) showed how English people can use the downplaying of national pride as a way to distinguish themselves from Americans and their overt claim of national pride and greatness (ie ‘we are not like that, we don’t do that here’).

Condor acknowledges that this may be specific to English identity, at least when compared to other national identities in the UK, and certainly her own research (Condor and Abell, 2006) shows that Scots typically have no quarrel with asserting their national identity. More generally, other research suggests that group identity often is less salient, and individualism more prevalent, amongst dominant groups compared to minorities (Lorenzi-Cioldi, 1988; Oyserman and Markus, 1993). One factor may precisely be that identity can more easily be taken for granted in the former case, whilst the specific practices of minorities are made more ’salient’ (less ‘banal’) in contrast to those of the majority.

The result is that, in the UK, nationalism and having a strong sense of national identity is often seen as the exclusive property of either Scottish or Welsh separatists – or else, of those who still believe in old-fashioned British imperialism and/or are particularly hostile to foreigners. The SNP, Plaid Cymru, and the BNP are nationalist parties (though of a very different kind), but the Conservatives or the Labour Party are not, and their politicians can freely talk about the interests of ‘this country’ without calling upon themselves the label of ‘nationalist’. However, the argument here suggests that separatists appear as the only nationalists because their nationalist political project of separation is made salient by going against the established, taken for granted, nationalist project of maintaining the unity of Britain. As for the BNP, we may say that what differentiates it from other British parties is not the absence or presence of British nationalism but a very different definition of it (see the argument on the content of national identity, in sections 5 and 6).

2. Globalisation and technology: are national identities on the decline?

Although it has been argued that nationalism and national identities are important features of our contemporary world, there are nevertheless those who argue that nationalism and national identities are in decline as globalisation progresses inevitably and relentlessly (eg Kennedy and Danks, 2001; Dogan, 1994). A discussion of the cultural, economic, social and political changes that are grouped under the label of ‘globalisation’ is well beyond the scope of this review. However, an important part of the argument relies on the effect of developments in technologies of mass communication and transport. The increased ease with which, thanks to these developments, people are exposed to and can access information and consumption products from all over the world (through newspapers, TV, internet and well-provided supermarkets), learn about different cultures, travel in various countries and even settle in them if they wish to, means that cultural differences between nations are becoming more and more blurred while cultural homogeneity within the nation is becoming more fragmented (Hannerz, 1996). The psychological effect of this is that national identities are losing their psychological significance for individuals both as a system of categorisation and as locus of attachment.

To put it in the language of practices, the argument is that everyday life is less and less framed by nationalist practices and more and more by ‘global’ ones, and therefore that nationality and national divisions are less and less important parts of people’s experiences. People are exposed and can access information about what is happening outside as much as within their nation – thus the feeling of shared experience and information with others is no longer concurrent with the limits of the nation. The availability of consumption products from all over the world mean that consumption patterns are crossing national boundaries, while the extension of multi-nationals and international markets (from Coca-Cola to Hollywood movies, and so on.) also means that these patterns are becoming more homogeneous worldwide. The increased ease with which we can communicate instantly with anyone anywhere in the world means that social networks of acquaintances and friendship do not have to be limited by geographical factors as they used to be, and can easily extend beyond national boundaries. The idea is that such changes in practices lead a growing number of people to develop a ‘global’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ rather than national identities (Gergen, 1991; see Doering’s review).

At the same time, the same factors can promote differences within nations, as they provide people with more choice. People can develop specific lifestyles (Giddens, 1991) based on mixing up consumption products and leisure activities imported from a variety of different nations. These patterns of consumption and activities can develop into “lifestyle-based” identities (eg from Rappers and Goths to Yuppies) that cross national boundaries and contribute to undermining the sense of shared experiences at the national level. These new identities, not bound to a sense of place, compete with and can become more important than national identity.

However, the decline of the nation-state and the idea of a fragmentation or blurring of national identities have been long-standing topics in the sociological and political science literature (cf. eg Arendt, 1951; Held, 1989), only for analysts to be routinely surprised by their continuous persistence. The claim thus needs to be looked at critically and with caution.

First of all, one fundamental question regarding the supposed fragmenting effect of globalisation is whether so-called ‘global’ practices really transcend the nationality-based system of categorisation and make it irrelevant. Does the fact that they are marked by an international dimension mean that they are really ‘transnational’? We may have access to food and restaurants from a multitude of countries, but they are still mainly identified by nationhood (Italian, Chinese, etc) as opposed to any other basis of categorisation. Newspapers may contain international information, and perhaps more so than they did in the past, but as long as news are categorised as national vs international (or home vs away), the system of national categories remains. And while one can order goods on the internet from various countries in the world, posting charges will soon be a reminder that which nation one is residing in still matters. Likewise, one may be able to call anywhere in the world from anywhere with a roaming mobile phone, but the price of the call will change as soon as it crosses the national boundary, even where the actual geographical distance may be less than for a national call.

Moreover, where national markers are explicitly missing from practices and products, there is the question of whether this reflects a true nationality-blind cosmopolitanism or whether it is the expression of taken-for granted, banal nationalism and/or of hegemonic nationalism and cultural imperialism (Tomlinson, 1991; Billig, 1995; Smith, 1998) – such as when American products or practices are presented as global or English ones as British. Thus American movie stars are just ’stars’, and whilst there is ‘google.co.uk’, there is no ‘google.co.us’, just ‘google.com’ – which perhaps does not make it less a product of American culture.

Secondly, one important aspect of the ‘fragmentation’ argument relies on the fact that the improvements in technologies of communication and transport give people more choice and freedom in terms of the ability to express, develop, and maintain the identities they want, be they national or not. But this also means that people may well choose to use this increased freedom in order to reinforce their national identities as much as to develop alternative identities.

Research on the internet can be taken as a paradigmatic case to answer that question, as it is arguably the media that currently offers choice, freedom, ‘interactivity’ and ease of access to the greatest extent. Indeed it is often taken as the prototypical medium through which national boundaries are becoming less relevant, turning the planet into a ‘global village’. However, research in this area shows that the internet has so far mostly been used to strengthen rather than weaken nationalist identities (Eriksen, 2007; see also Schlesinger, 1987, 1991; Richmond, 1984). For instance, a study of internet usage amongst Trinidadians led Miller and Slater (2000) to conclude that

“Trinidadians’ national identity and culture is central to their use of the Internet. Contrary to all expectations of a global new medium, they anchor their encounter with the Internet in their specific place … Trinidadians on the net are always aware of representing Trinidad, and use the net to expound the virtues of their Island … Trinidadian business on the Internet includes a powerfully nationalistic aspiration that translates commercial success into evidence for the presence of Trinidad on a global stage.” (p24).

Instead of leading to the development of a new ‘global’ identity, people often use the internet as a place to express and maintain their national identity. It can be used to promote nationalistic goals, to access information on national culture, to facilitate the maintenance of ties and a sense of common identity between people sharing the same nationality, etc. The particular characteristics or advantages of the internet over older means of communication and publication (eg they are cheap to set up, they can be the work of one person in their spare time, etc; all of these aspects being likely to increase as technology progresses even further; see Reich’s review) are being used to that effect. More than that, the new possibilities offered by internet can be used to counteract the effects of other potentially fragmenting factors (eg diaspora nations, immigrants maintaining contact with their country of origins, etc; see Eriksen, 2007). Whatever the reasons, national identities matter to people, and, when given the choice, many are committed to ‘cultivate’ it. It is therefore quite possible that similar trends will be observed with other media such as TV and mobile phones, as they develop new technologies aimed at offering more choice and interactivity to their users in the future – something which they often aspire to.

Finally, data from large-scale surveys does not provide clear support for the claim of a strong decline in national identity. For instance, data from the Eurobarometer 65 (2007) show that the great majority of people in the EU (90%) and in the UK (88%) declare themselves to be attached or very attached to their country, with 52% in EU and 53% in UK belonging to the last category – suggesting that, if indeed there is decline, it still concerns only a small minority of people (see also Smith and Jarkko, 1998). A recent report (Heath and Roberts, 2008), based on survey data in the UK over several years (such as the British Election survey and the British Social Attitude Survey), and included as part of Lord Goldsmith’s “citizenship review”, concluded that, whilst there is evidence of some decline in the strength of British identity over the last decades, “a sense of British identity nevertheless remains widespread and in all three territories the majority of British residents continue to have dual identities, as both British and Scottish, British and Welsh or British and English” (p2). To date, only a minority of 10% of the population seems to reject all four national identities. Even so, there is a debate as to the meaning of this reject: whilst Fenton (2007) would argue that it reflects a real disengagement from nation identity, Condor’s research (see section 1) raises the question as to whether explicit indifference to nationality (or national self-derogation) has to be taken at face value.

The most important factor for the relative decline of British identification is actually not growth in exclusive sub-state national identities but age – younger people feel less British than older people. Admittedly, this is the most important category of people in terms of predicting the future. However, as the author point out, it is unsure whether this may reflect life-cycle processes (ie people developing a stronger sense of national identity as they get older) or generational differences (ie rooted in different experiences of the world and therefore more likely to remain as people get older). The author favours the last interpretation (Tilley and Heath, 2007), but even so it remains to be shown that this is an effect of changes due to globalisation (McCrone, 2002). It could as well, for instance, reflect the particularity of older people’s experiences (such as growing up during or just after the Second World War) as much as the experience of younger ones.

In any case national identity remains strong amongst the youth, and it seems that, if there is a decline, its effects are still modest at best. Even if that trend should confirms itself in the coming years, national identities will nevertheless remain, for the foreseeable future, a prominent feature of our world as well as a primary locus of identification for a great number of people.

3. National identity and the EU

Another aspect of globalisation is the growth of supra-national economic and political organisations which can, to a greater or lesser extent, put demands on, and limit the sovereignty of, nation-states (Held, 1989). This, according to some, also threatens to undermine national identities and favours the growth of cosmopolitanism (eg Dogan, 1994). The most notable example is the European Union. However, as for the impact of technologies, questions can be raised as to how much the process of European integration and attempts at building a sense of European identity has actually led or will lead to a decline in national (and British) identity.

First of all, it is true that the EU can be seen as threatening existing national identities, and, in the UK, this actually seems to be the case for a majority. According to the Eurobarometer 65 (2007), 39% of people in the EU say they are afraid that the building of Europe may lead to a loss of national identity and culture, the UK reaching the top of the list of EU members with a score of 63%. But, perhaps in part for this reason, it is also the case that attachment to Europe remains much weaker than existing national attachments, with only 63% of Europeans declaring themselves attached or very attached to Europe (46% in the UK, with only 9% of ‘very attached’) compared with the 90% of national attachment (see section 2). It is worth noting that this is despite the fact that attempts at strengthening a sense of European identity have been in place for a few decades through the establishment of common practices and symbols (eg the EU driving license, the appeal to Roman and Greek heritage, etc; see Marks, 1999; Risse, 2001, Sindic, Castano and Reicher, 2001).

Secondly, whilst the idea of a European identity may be seen by some as competing with and blurring existing national identities, for others there is no necessary incompatibility between the two (as a strong Scottish, Welsh or Irish identity is not necessarily incompatible with a sense of British identity and support for the Union. (See next section). In fact, according to the Eurobarometer 56 (2002), this seems to be the case for a slight majority of Europeans; with an average of 50% of Europeans saying that they feel both European and nationals compared to 44% identifying with their nation only and 3% feeling Europeans only – although in the UK, only 26% of people professed a dual identity compared to 71% feeling British only, confirming once again the more ‘Euro-sceptic’ tendency of the UK majority.

Thirdly, not only can European and national identities be seen as compatible, but the development of a European identity, where it takes place, most often operates through national identity. Indeed, those who support the European Union typically argue that instead of posing a threat it actually enhances national identity and interests (Sindic, 2005; Hopkins and Reicher, 1996). One example is provided by the French Minister for European Affairs Michel Barnier, when he stated that Europe is “essential for our country’s future, its safety, its prosperity, its influence and identity” (1997, p.1). As Risse (2005) points out “the evidence suggests that socialization into European identity works not so much through trans-national processes or through exposure to European institutions, but on the national levels in a process whereby Europeanness or ‘becoming European’ is gradually being embedded in understandings of national identities” (p.1). Indeed, European and national identification are somewhat positively correlated in the majority of European countries, (Huici et al, 1997; Duchesne and Frognier, 1995; Marks, 1999), though this does not seem to be the case in the UK (Cinnirella, 1997)

As regards the future, it is possible, of course, that European identity will gain strength over time in the next decades. The efforts that the EU has made over the past decades to build a stronger European identity may be seen as doomed by Euro-sceptics as these try to strategically create an ‘artificial’ unity out of an irreducible diversity: Europeans do not speak a common language, do not share a common history, collective myths and symbols, or common religious and ethnic backgrounds (Risse, 2001; Smith 1992). However, the planned and strategic character of these efforts does not make them essentially different from typical strategies of nation-building that have been used all over the world for the last two centuries (Rochat, 2001; see also section 6), some of which have proven quite successful in the long-term.

Furthermore, the question of whether Europeans possess enough of a common history and symbols is very much a question of argument and perception. For instance, the use of historical figures such as Orwell, Bach, Mozart, Erasme, etc as European icons does not necessarily have to be seen as a distortion of history or the convenient denial of their national origins, but can also be seen as the recovery of the cosmopolitan influence they once had before they were appropriated by nationalist projects (Reszler, 1992). As Reichler (1992) points out, one of the difficulties in the European construction of Europe may not be the lack of possible common symbols but on the contrary that there are too many too choose from.

Nevertheless, the data above shows that European identity has certainly still a long way to go before it can even compete in strength with national identities, if it ever will. Moreover, there are strong reasons to doubt that it will replace or supersede national identities in the near future. Indeed, whilst European integration has led to the establishment of some common practices, these are arguably still outweighed both in terms of number and impact by the myriads of existing nationalist practices. In particular, electoral practices are still nationally-based, even for European elections, as it is through the nation that politicians gain their seats on the European Union. The audience to whom they have to appeal in these elections is national, and therefore it is no surprise that, as exemplified above, pro-European as much as anti-European arguments are still most frequently based on the national interest and identity instead of appealing to the interests and identity of Europe as a whole (see also section 6). As it stands, there is no election for, say, a European president, who would have to address the European audience at large, and where all Europeans would be involved in the same debates and shared experiences (and given the recent difficulties with the European constitution, it seems unlikely that anything of the sort will happen soon).

It can also be argued that Euro-sceptics are partly right when they point to language differences as a significant obstacle. As the existence of multi-language states such as Belgium and Switzerland show, language differences are not necessarily concomitant with national, ethnic or other identities, and they should therefore not be reified as insurmountable cultural differences. Nevertheless, language differences are a key factor in terms of the practices we have access to and take part in everyday life (such as, for instance, which media we follow), and thus in the development of distinct identities. There is, of course, the possibility that technological development may make language translation easier and faster in the future, through, for instance, the development of AI translation programs. But questions can be raised as to whether these will reach a level of efficiency more or less equivalent to human translation, so as to allow their regular use in daily, banal practices, such as watching TV or reading the newspaper.

Finally, whilst it has been argued that the development of a European identity does not generally act like a zero-sum game, requiring the effacement of national identity in the process, it may nevertheless require its re-definition. Where it is seen as a threat to existing notions of national identity, as is currently the case for the majority in the UK, the possibility of promoting a stronger sense of European identity would depend on re-defining either national or European identity so as to make them more compatible. But of course, attempts at doing so may fail and even backfire, as efforts at re-definitions may precisely be construed as part of why Europe is a threat to national identity and thus lead to widespread resentment and reactance. As it stands, the long history of the UK as one of the most Euro-sceptic countries in Europe (dating back to at least the 1970s), as well as the fact that common images of British specificity often relies on distinguishing itself strongly from the rest of Europe (eg British specificity as being rooted in the categorisation of British Isles vs the continent. See Abell, Condor, and Stevenson, 2006), mean that attempts at re-defining Britishness as more consonant with a European identity are faced with unfavourable odds.

4. National identity and separatism

In multi-national states like the UK, the presence of strong sub-state national identities is sometimes seen as a threat to the unity of the country. The concern over the alleged loss of an unifying sense of British identity is also that it may be linked (as cause or effect) to an increase in sub-state national identity (Scottish, Welsh, Irish), and that such transfer of identification might lead towards political separatism and precipitate the break-up of Britain. This concern was already part of the political debates leading to devolution, and some still fear that devolution might promote this process. The question here is not about the possible decline of national identity per se, but about the strengthening of one national identity at the expense of another. But is a sense of sub-state national identity necessarily linked with support for separatism, and is it necessarily incompatible with a sense of state-level national (British) identity?

In Scotland, survey data – including data from the Scottish Parliamentary Election Survey since 1979 – show that there is indeed a correlation between Scottish identity and support for separatism, as well as vote for the SNP (Paterson et al, 2001; Thomson, Park, and Brooks; 1999; Thomson, Park and Bryson, 2000, Brown, McCrone; Paterson and Surridge, 1999; see also Abrams, 1994). However, this correlation may be due to the fact that low identifiers are more likely to support the Union, whereas high identifiers may support the Union as well as separatism (Sindic and Reicher, in press). Indeed it is possible to defend the Union either on the basis of Scottish or British identities, whereas separatism can only be defended in the name of Scottish identity and interests.

Likewise, Paterson et al (2001) point out from the election surveys data that whilst (for instance), in 1999, 31% of Scottish identifiers supported independence, as opposed to 11% of British identifiers, this latter result also means that the majority of Scottish identifiers did not support independence, and therefore that “… thinking of oneself as Scottish does not guarantee support for independence” (p.112). These authors conclude that there is a poor correspondence between identity and political attitudes “not because it is unimportant, but because it is all-pervasive, and not the property of any single political party” (p.115-116) or any particular political project.

Political attitudes towards membership of a superordinate group may then depend on whether people feel that their identity is threatened by being part of that larger group (Hornsey and Hogg, 2001), and thus, on how such identity is defined. Indeed, Scots who do support separatism do so because they feel that being part of the UK undermines the Scottish way of life and the specificity of the Scottish ethos, as the UK practices are tailored to the interests and practices of the English. But strong Scottish identifiers may well support the Union if being part of the UK is seen as enhancing national identity and serving the Scottish interest (Sindic and Reicher, in press).

In that context, an interesting finding by Condor and Abell (2006) shows the very different relationship to British identity in England and Scotland. As indicated above, English people can often be reluctant to talk about Englishness; usually preferring to use British identity as they feel it is more inclusive of other nationalities in Britain, thus showing a lay understanding of the idea of identity threat. However, the use of British identity can often be more threatening for Scots, who can see it as a sign of ‘imperialism’ – of disguising English identity and interests under a more inclusive mask – and who would prefer English people to call themselves English.

But as noted in section 2, there is evidence that the majority of Scottish and Welsh people do actually have a dual identity, even though it is true that they are much more likely to choose Scottish or Welsh national identity over British identity as their primary identity, compared to English people vis-à-vis English identity (Heath and Roberts, 2008). Data from the Scottish Social Attitude Survey show that, in 2005, only 32% of Scots and 24% of Welsh people chose an exclusive national identity (ie feeling Scottish/Welsh, not British). Even amongst Scots who support independence, nearly half of them (49%) felt British to some extent (Bechhofer and McCrone, 2007).

As for the impact of devolution, it is difficult to make long-term predictions, because theoretical support can be found for both predictions made at the time that it would either increase or decrease the strength of Scottish identity and support for separatism. Proponents of devolution claimed that by giving more self-control to Scotland, it would alleviate Scots’ concerns as regards the expression of their specificity, thereby providing a safety valve for separatist sentiments. Such a reasoning can find support in the research on identity threat mentioned above, the implication of which is that respecting the specificity of different identities is the best strategy to avoid increasing support for separatism.

On the other hand, opponents of devolution claimed that it would exacerbate differences between England and Scotland and thereby feed both a sense of exclusive Scottish national identity and the support for independence. Theoretical support for this position can be found too. Indeed, if nationalism and nationalist sentiments are created and maintained by nationally-shaped practices (as argued in section 1), the fact that devolution did lead to the creation of differential practices North and South of the Border could lead to reinforce the sentiment of a separate Scottish identity. Although it has been argued above that (Scottish) national identification is not a sufficient condition to support the case for independence, it could nevertheless increase its likelihood if it is a necessary one.

As it stands, however, empirical data from the Scottish Social Attitudes survey (1992 to 2007) show that there is no real evidence that it has had a significant impact on either the strength of Scottish identity or support for independence, in either way. As regards Scottish identity, it seems that, if anything, there was some increase in Scottish identity before devolution was established, but it has since remained more or less constant (Heath and Roberts, 2008). As for support for independence, it was 28% in 1999 when the Scottish Parliament was put in place, did somewhat increased in 2004 (32%) and 2005 (34%), but then was down to 24% in 2007, virtually identical to the 23% of support found in 1992. At any rate, support for independence has so far never outweighed support for devolution which has ranged from 44% (2005) to 62% (2007), although it is true that the majority of Scots do favour increased powers for the Scottish Parliament.

Reviewing the evidence, Bechhofer and McCrone (2007) concluded in 2007 that “… the findings of our research over the past decade are such that we would be surprised if the break-up of Britain were to occur in the near future” (p.252). This, however, was just before the SNP was elected in the 2007 Scottish parliament election, with a mandate to conduct a referendum on independence. Nevertheless, support for independence and vote for the SNP are not necessarily identical phenomena (Paterson et al, 2001). Furthermore, even if an increase in support for separatism could be shown as an unequivocal fact, whether this is indeed due to devolution and the processes hypothesised above or to other factors would remain to be shown.

5. National identities and others

Beyond the concerns over the political unity of the UK, the recent angst over a possible crisis of British identity can also be explained by the fact that a solid, unifying sense of national identity is often seen as promoting solidarity, civic attitudes, a sense of citizenship and duty, and even as a key component of democracy by legitimising the representation process and the distribution of resources (Sears, Davies and Reid, 2008; Heath, 2007; Heath and Roberts, 2008; Marks, 1999). The downside of these political and social merits, however, is that the idea of a strong sense of national identity is also often associated with parochial, inward-looking and xenophobic attitudes and behaviours (see section 1). To take but one recent example, Kumar (2006) concerned by the possibility of a revival of English nationalism, does not hesitate to qualify nationalism as “increasingly quaint, if not downright reactionary and backward-looking” and as the opposite of being “outward looking” and “committed to the great causes of humanity” (p.10). But is having a strong national identity necessarily linked to parochialism, prejudice and hostility against others?

The anti-others reputation of national identity may seem to find some support in identity theories that emphasise the fact that a sense of identity is established by distinguishing oneself from others, and preferably in a positive way (Tajfel and Turner, 1979; Tajfel, 1978, 1981; Barth, 1969; Brewer, 1991). Thus discrimination and prejudice towards national outgroups may be seen as the expression of this quest for (positive) distinctiveness, especially where the target groups are seen as a threat to a cherished identity (Breakwell, 1983, 1986; Riek, Mania, and Gaertner, 2006; Brandscombe and Wann, 1984; Branscombe, Ellemers, Spears, and Doosje, 1999; Stephan and Stephan, 2000; Stephan and Renfro, 2003). Indeed, if comparison to others is intrinsic to defining oneself, then maintaining a distinctly positive ingroup identity seems to involve putting down others. And certainly, there is a vast amount of experimental studies that have illustrated how ‘easily’ people can be lead to discriminate against others, even where group distinctions are based on seemingly trivial and/or arbitrary differences, such as categorising people according to paintings’ preferences or the toss of a coin and asking them to allocate resources to both groups (Tajfel et al, 1971; Billig and Tajfel, 1973).

Such experiments are undoubtedly food for thought. Nonetheless, the idea that identification with a group (national or other) necessarily leads to prejudice and discrimination has not always been supported by empirical studies (see eg Hinkle and Brown, 1990).

In light of these inconsistent results, some authors have argued for a distinction to be made between ingroup favouritism/love and outgroup derogation/hate (eg see Brewer, 1999), with the idea that group identification should lead to the former, but not necessarily the latter. Within the more specific context of national identities, a similar distinction has been proposed between patriotism (the love of one’s country) and nationalism (the dislike of foreigners; see Mummendey, Klink and Brown, 1999; Blank and Schmidt, 2003; Rothi, Lyons, and Chryssochoou, 2005).

However, a criticism of these approaches is that they propose simplistic, rather Manichean distinctions which try to identify ‘good’ and ‘evil’ forms of group identification and nationalism. They therefore ignore the complexities of the meanings that can be attributed to national identities, where we can be tolerant of some people but not of others, and of some things but not of others (Hopkins, in press; Reicher and Hopkins, 2001). Moreover, even proponents of the distinction have to acknowledge that nationalism and patriotism are, in practice, correlated (Viki and Calitri, 2008).

Furthermore, even if we could accept such distinctions, we could still ask whether ‘mere’ ingroup favouritism or patriotism is necessarily always benign. In some cases, it may well lead to a more subtle form of passive discrimination. As Levine and Thompson (2004; Levine et al, 2005) have shown, seeing others as fellow members of the same group means that we are more likely to help them in times of need, with the implication that we are less likely to help those who are not, even if we do not get out of our way to harm them. While we may perhaps find it ‘fair game’ that each country favours their own first and accept to be on the downside of such preferential treatment when, say, we visit their country as tourists, it is certainly more problematic in the case of immigrant communities. This kind of passive discrimination, with which they may have to live on an everyday basis (from shop attendants taking more time to serve them to dealings with administration), together with the preferential treatment they may possibly get from their fellow immigrants (assuming that there is an immigrant community and that there are a part of it), can only reinforce the segregation of communities and of their daily practices.

Other researchers have emphasised that the consequences, in terms of intergroup behaviour, of identifying with the nation and of perceiving and acting on the base of national identity depend on the content of that identity (Livingstone and Haslam; 2008; Smith and Postmes, in press), as well as the target group’s identity (Billig, 1985) and how ‘they’ are seen to impact on ‘us’ (Reicher and Hopkins, 2001; Reicher, Hopkins, Levine and Rath, 2005). Thus, whilst people may need to differentiate themselves positively from others, they may well do so by defining themselves as being more charitable, more egalitarian, or more welcoming to others and act accordingly (Jetten, Spears and Manstead, 1996, 1997; Reicher, Cassidy, Hopkins and Levine, 2006). To take a counter-example, saying that Nazi anti-Semitism was due to the desire to establish a positive and distinct German identity does not explain why the Jews were a particular target, nor why they needed to be eradicated. This can only be explained if we take into account the particular content of the Nazi version of German identity and their whole theory of the world which defined the Jews as running an international conspiracy and as corrupting the master race.

Nevertheless, we should be careful to think that seemingly ‘positive’, pro-social contents of national identity necessarily lead to positive intergroup relationships. Rather, the consequences of any particular identity content depend on how they are inserted in larger narratives. In some cases positive content can even be used to justify hostility towards others (eg “we are tolerant, but they are not, therefore we can’t live together as they threaten our value of tolerance). Likewise, it would be dangerous (in fact very close to legitimising segregation and/or discrimination) to think that due to their contents certain identities are, by nature, essentially incompatible and therefore can only threaten each other. Without ignoring practical difficulties that can arise from different interests and ways of life, what identities are seen as compatible or not and whether identity is threatened by others is very much open to argumentation and political debate (see next section).

How national identities shape attitudes towards ‘minorities’ living in the country also depends, quite obviously, on whether they are included or excluded of the national category. The issue of who can and who cannot claim nationhood is related to the issue of content in that it may determine the criteria of belongingness. For instance, where national identity is defined in ethnic or racial terms, those who fail to fulfil these criteria will be excluded, whilst other criteria will present a different pattern of inclusion/exclusion. Whilst it may not always lead to open hostility, it will determine who enjoys solidarity(informal or not) and who does not. Like content, however, the issue of where the boundaries of belongingness are drawn and on what criteria they are based are very much open to argument and different interpretations.

6. The contested meanings and boundaries of national identity

If the nature of behaviour towards others based on a group or national identity is shaped by the content or meaning ascribed to this identity, investigating the content of national identities in the UK could help enlighten us about the risk and prevalence of nationally-based prejudice and discrimination in the UK.

However, such investigation is not simple because, as a lot of research has emphasised, national identity is constantly (re-)constructed through discourse, practices and everyday interactions (Condor, 2000; Hester and Housley, 2002; Johnston, 1999; McCrone et al, 1998; De Cillia, Reisigl and Wodak, R, 1999; Wodak et al, 1999). This means that identity definitions and boundaries are extremely flexible, so much so that doubts can be raised as to whether they can be attributed any fixed answer. Not only can people disagree over the meaning of being English, British (Condor, 1997; Jacobsen, 1997), Scottish (Reicher, Hopkins and Condor, 1997), Welsh (Fevre and Thompson, 1999) or Irish, and on who can legitimately claim to belong to these categories, but the same individual can make use of different definitions and/or criteria as a function of the context and/or of his/her current goals in specific interactions.

One of the main reasons for such variability stems from the fact that national identities and their definitions are primary rhetorical tools in terms of mobilising people towards specific political goals (Klein, Azzi, Brito, and Berckmans, 2000; Klein and Licata, 2003). For instance, Reicher and Hopkins (2001) have investigated in detail the variable constructions of Scottish identity and shown how history, heroes, icons and other symbols of nationhood can be used in flexible ways, as which of these elements are taken as key to define today’s national identity, and what these elements mean, is very much open to discussion (see also Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983), as are stereotypes of Scottishness and generally what it means to be Scottish. Their point, however, which goes beyond the particular case of Scottish identity, is that such variability in identity definitions is due to the fact that constructions of national identity are aimed at sustaining different political projects. As who we are defines what we want, what we need, and how we can and should act, these constructions are underpinned by attempts to shape interests, values and behaviour so as to create consensus and collective mobilisation in particular directions. In other words, accounts of what is national identity are underpinned by projects about what the nation should be.

For example, those who support Scottish independence may underline that Scots are fundamentally collectivists compared to the individualist English and that therefore the Scottish ethos will always be repressed as long as it is part of Britain. But those who support the Union can underline that Scots are entrepreneurial at heart and therefore that being part of Britain is an opportunity for such qualities to shine. Another example concerns the use of Scottish heroes like William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, whose popularity as national icons is attested by their overwhelming presence in all sorts of media from books to movies such as Braveheart. Not surprisingly, their popularity make them a useful resource for separatists who present them as men who were ready to fight for (and die for in the case of Wallace) Scottish independence and whose example should be followed. Yet, this is not the only meaning they can take nor the only use they can be put to. For 19^th century unionist nationalists, the achievement of Wallace and the Bruce was to make Scotland strong enough to enter the Union and thrive within it. Today’s unionist conservatives can draw a similar picture by pointing out that the Bruce, in particular, stands for a strong, confident and victorious Scotland, and that therefore any suggestion that Scotland is weak, threatened, and oppressed by being part of the Union is a demeaning and inaccurate attack on Scottish identity. Of course, when it is found in openly political discourses, the political nature of these interpretations may appear more clearly; but the point is that, intentionally or not, all interpretations of the significance of national heroes, icons or symbols have specific political implications, be they found in history books, movies or other media rather than in political discourse per se.

None of this undermines the importance of identity content. On the contrary, it is precisely because this content has such important consequences in terms of collective behaviour that it is such a hotly debated topic by politicians, intellectuals, the media and the public alike. In that respect, Reicher and Hopkins’ research confirms the point made above that all political projects rely on using identity – at least when the audience they address is national and as they seek the mobilisation of that audience. Identity is too precious a resource to be left in the hands of separatists. As long as electoral practices and the media are nationally-shaped and addressed to national audiences, it is likely to stay that way (but for an argument that the British press is not so nationally shaped, see MacInnes et al, 2007).

If variability in conceptions of national identity reflects normal political and psychological processes, then the practical implication is that contestation and alternative constructions of national identities will always be with us and we should not expect it to disappear in the future. As long as people have different opinions as to the direction the nations should take, there will be contestation over the meaning of national identity. This should not necessarily be taken as a sign of a ‘weakening’ of identity. On the contrary, the more identity matters, the more various constructions will be deployed. Arguably, this is even the sign of a healthy democracy.

At the same time, there will also always be attempts at forming consensus and at convincing others of the merits of one’s construction over others. This, also, is part of the normal democratic process. The concern in terms of democracy would be if contestation reaches the point where it paralyses any form of political action and/or when this leads some to look towards non-democratic means of imposing unity. As Reicher et al (2005) points out: “…A distinction can be made between democratic discourse, which makes explicit the grounds on which proposals are linked to identities and hence opens up space for debate and alternatives, and autocratic discourse which takes the link for granted and hence rules out debate. ” (p. 636). Where doubt and confusion reign, those who do not doubt have a surer but not necessarily more legitimate vision of national identity, and have a greater chance at success, even if it mean by-passing democratic debate and processes (Haslam and Reicher, 2005; Reicher and Haslam, 2006).

7. Multiculturalism and Britishness

One issue regarding the meaning of national identity that has received much attention (especially since 9/11 and 7/7) by politicians, journalists, scholars and the media alike, is the issue of multiculturalism as threatening the cohesion and unity of Britishness. As Gilroy (2005) points out, following the onset of the ‘war on terror’ “from every part of the political spectrum, authoritative voices have pronounced multiculturalism dead … Fearful, anxious views about corrosive immigration and failed assimilation are again being expressed openly. Solidarity and diversity are pitted against each other in a zero-sum game. The very idea of convivial cohabitation across cultural, ethnic, religious and racial divisions has been thrown into disrepute by the perceived breakdown of assimilation and the crisis of national identity that now frames it.” (p. 432-433).

Without arguing that multiculturalist policies are a universal panacea to intergroup relations (eg see Verkuyten, 2006), and without denying the serious challenges and dilemmas entailed by putting it into practice through policies (not to mention the various meanings that multiculturalism can take both in theory and in practice), one can nevertheless question the necessity, as well as the desirability, of conceiving the issue of diversity and unity as a zero-sum game. In terms of necessity, one can point out that diversity and multiculturalism are not only essentially opposed to some unifying sense of identity, but they can even become one of its key aspects. Indeed it can be what defines and gives unity to national identity and even be used to differentiate ones nation from others, as Winter (2007) has shown in the case of defining Canadian identity as multicultural in opposition to American identity. Likewise, Condor (2006) has shown that, while English identity can be seen to embody homogeneity and xenophobia, British identity can be seen by some to embody pluralism, diversity and progressive social value, all aspects which can be used to differentiate oneself (positively) from other nations.

In terms of desirability, while attempts at forming consensus on national identity are to be expected, one can question the effects of doing so using constructions where unity can only be achieved at the expense of taming immigration and multiculturalism. The effect of the ‘zero-sum’ game construction is to present immigration and the expression of cultural diversity as being, at best, something that can be tolerated, as long as it is kept in check and allowed in ‘reasonable’ proportion, and at worst as an inherent pernicious threat to the nation, with the implication that we should look for either truce or war. It leaves little place for alternative narratives about how diversity can enrich a nation. As the war on terror is, according to its very proponents, a war without an end, it will be difficult to develop such alternative constructions as long as the issues of terrorism and immigration find themselves inextricably entangled in debates about national identity – be it in discourse that favours tolerance.

Such a trend in discourses on Britishness has already led to the instigation of the ‘citizenship test’ and may also affect the future of education if it is translated into concrete policies and programmes for the classrooms. However such an approach may well produce unexpected and undesired effects. Indeed, if it is natural and proper for people to have different visions of national identity, then attempts at promoting a common vision of it may well lead to resentment and reactions towards what may easily come to be perceived as the imposition of an artificial unity – especially where it is done in a context where the place for democratic debate and contestation is limited, as is often the case in schools. The question is by no means limited to immigrant minorities, though the fact that their claim to Britishness can more easily be contested may make them more sensitive to it. But as Bechhofer and McCrone (2007) note in relation to Scotland, although the majority of Scots have a sense of Britishness, “politicians cannot assume that, if they wish to appeal to Britishness, it means the same thing in England than in Scotland, or indeed to different groups in either country” (p.260). The same could be said of any school programme that wishes to appeal to Britishness.

Another possible scenario is that the coming years might see an increasing trend towards institutional acknowledgementof diversity, including the adaptation of school curricula. This has already taken place in the US where, for instance, teaching is provided in Spanish at some locations with a high concentration of population of Mexican origin. Although teaching in another language than English is already taking place in parts of Wales and Scotland, it seems quite unlikely at the moment that such an approach will be extended to immigrant minorities in the UK. But if Gilroy (2005) is right in thinking that the UK tends to look towards the US as representing the future of ethnic relations, it could perhaps lead the UK to import more and more of what Gilroy calls the US ‘color-coded’ approach. The advantage of an institutional recognition of cultural difference is that it may help managing problems of identity threat. However, as the term ‘color-coded’ suggests, the strategy may also present the danger of promoting the segregation of community, in particular when it is extended to language. As argued in section 4, language is a key factor in terms of the practices in which we take part.

Conclusion: national identity and education

The idea of promoting a sense of national identity through reforms of practices, policies and education is frequently associated with fears that it may promote xenophobia against foreigners and/or immigrants, leading to international quarrels and/or to the social and political exclusion of immigrants. Some may even see it as a melancholic attempt to recover the past greatness of the British Empire (Gilroy, 2004, 2005; Kumar, 2006). This fear is not baseless; national identity may not be automatically anti-others, but the potential for exclusion is certainly there, perhaps no more than for other types of identity but certainly with more large-scale consequences than most.

Nevertheless, as argued above, there are strong arguments to say that, for better or for worse, nationalism and national identities are here to stay for the foreseeable future. And if the everyday practices, including education, which contribute to the reproduction of national identity and transmit specific identity meanings in often implicit and banal ways, are likely to continue to so, then the question is whether it would not be better to make such transmission more explicit, so that specific meanings and their consequences can at least be opened up for discussion and debate. The question then becomes not whether or not to promote national identity, but how do we do it so as to avoid (politically, socially, psychologically) undesirable outcomes. As Heath and Roberts (2008) conclude in their review on British identity “Any reforms need to consider not only how to strengthen British identity but also what form of identity should be encouraged.” (p.3).

Still, finding the ‘right way’ of teaching about national identity and/or the ‘right form’ to encourage is certainly going to prove a significant challenge. It is likely to be trickier than relying on Manichean distinctions by, for instance, making sure that we encourage patriotism instead of nationalism. Equally, it cannot be reduced to teaching the ‘right content’, as specific symbols, events or other cultural resources can take very different meanings and be used for different purposes. Besides, as Sears et al (2008) point out, this would mean a return to a ‘pedagogy of acceptance’ which treated “students as sponges whose main function was to absorb that material and release it again when squeezed at exam time” (p.22). Instead, Sears et al (2008; see also Barton and Levstik, 2004) argue that whilst the exploration of national identity should be part of an education to citizenship, a deeper understanding and political commitment to democracy can be reached by “involving students in the process of constructing the meaning of democratic ideas for their own time and place. In other words not telling them what it means to be Australian, Canadian or English but introducing them, in an informed way, to the discussion of what those identities have been, are, and should be in the future. This can best be done by engaging students with both the internal complexity of national identity in their particular context as well as will alternative constructions of national identity across the world.” (p.23). One could add that this would also allow the exploration of the consequences of different constructions of national identity – be it in terms of relationship to foreigners and immigrants or in other respects – as well as to put an emphasis on the fact that debating about national identity matters not so much because it is about finding the reality of our past but because it is about the future we want to build.

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This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

The remit of this paper is to provide key information about either the current state or developing trends in the interaction of identity and disability, and where possible to make links with these and the future of education.

The paper addresses a number of issues judged to be current and important, including:

• The problems inherent in a medical model of disability, and the successes and problems inherent in the social model of disability
• The struggles of the disability movement to counter social barriers to disabled people within society, and to position disabled people as active and vocal – this trend is also seen within education
• Though technological advances may hold promise of some level of ‘cure’ to disabled people, research suggests that half of disabled people would not want to be cured for reasons of identity
• The importance of seeking out the viewpoint of disabled people themselves
• Constraints imposed by the use of dichotomous concepts in a range of fields
• The issue of multiple identity
• The question of disclosure of disability

These issues are linked to the future of education by signposting:

• The need for change in the structure of education, toward one that addresses disability inclusively as a matter of relevance to all students/pupils, teachers and leaders in education
• The need to direct focus onto the ways that education disables children and young people, and away from a primarily ‘within-person’ view of disability
• The importance of listening to the voice of disabled children and young people, and a need for increased amounts of educational research that does this
• The need for developing conceptual models in education that encompass complexity, diversity and fluidity with respect to both identity and disability

I will now provide some background information as a foundation for discussion of the papers.

The disability movement

The disability movement has been fundamental in identity formation for disabled people. The disability movement initiated a new way in which people with disabilities can represent themselves, live their lives, and campaign for their rights in Western countries, particularly the US and UK. It can be seen to follow on from other liberation movements, for example, class, race and gender, and many writers draw parallels between the disability movement and racial, women and gay/lesbian movements.

Before the disability movement, and still, currently, disability is primarily thought of as a problem within the disabled person, a perspective derived from a medical model where powerful professionals make choices for passive, needy patients. This kind of conceptualisation justifies the segregation and marginalisation of disabled people, because it asserts a biological cause that prevents disabled people from functioning normally within society. The purpose of the disability movement was, and is, to shift perceptions away from the medical model, where the problems of disability are perceived as being due to problems within the disabled person, to the idea that disability is a socially constructed barrier to a person with impairment.

The origin of this latter concept lies with The Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) who wrote the manifesto Fundamental Principles of Disability which stated ‘it is society which disables physically impaired people’ (quoted from Dowse 2001, UPIAS 1976, p14). Academics in the new area of Disability Studies developed this idea into ‘the social model of disability’ (Finkelstein 1980; Oliver 1990; Barnes 1991).

The social model of disability, because it was developed to challenge the medical model, emphasises a distinction between impairment, which is within-person, and disability, which results from barriers within society. This directs focus onto social change, away from rehabilitation. This distinction between impairment and disability forms the foundation for both the beneficial impact and shortcomings of the social model of disability (Shakespeare and Watson 2001), which will be discussed in more detail later.

Problems with inadequate representation of identity and disability

The very act of searching for research related to identity and disability, fore-fronted another issue of tension and difficulty within the field of disability and identity. To find relevant research meant using categories that simplify issues of identity and disability almost beyond recognition, and can serve to perpetuate marginalisation by reifying disability and representing aspects of disability and identity as concrete and discrete. The experience of disability is better represented as a continuum that changes over time and place, and includes dynamic interplay of issues of multiple identities both within and outside categories of disability. There is a need to develop concepts that fully encompass this complexity. Had I searched looking only at identity, feminism or perhaps issues of normalisation and dichotomy, where these problems of representation are at the fore, I would have been able to present more up-to-date conceptualisations. However, the field of identity and disability is only beginning to incorporate these.

The dominant perspective from which research is carried out in disability is from a professional perspective, with the medical model’s approach to disability as being ‘within person’. As an example of this dominance, a recent search on EBSCO for research on dyslexia in 2007 and 2008 found 80% of research to be from the perspectives of cognitive psychologists, neuro-psychologists and geneticists, who primarily focus on dyslexia as a problem within the person, and 12% was on developing intervention within schools to enable dyslexic children to attain within ‘normal’ levels, which views disability from a professional’s perspective. Only 8% researched the experience and perspectives of dyslexic people.

What is the significance of different impairment in relation to identity?

It would be impossible to characterise current or emerging trends in the interaction of identity and disability as a homogeneous whole. Issues of identity relate to the type of impairment experienced, and the range of impairment covered by ‘disability’ is huge. Though categorising disabilities is problematic, this paper will focus on three types of disability in order to demonstrate how different impairments can relate to issues of identity: intellectual disabilities, dyslexia and D/deafness.

Intellectual disabilities

A primary issue regarding identity for people with intellectual disabilities (ID) is that they are assumed to have conceptual barriers to understanding the social model of disability, and what it means to have an ID.

Intellectual disabilities are an important disability in relation to education and the future; the number of intellectually disabled children is increasing due to advances in science that mean premature infants are able to survive at a younger and younger age (Marlow, Wolke et al 2005).

At the same time, genetic counselling now results in the termination before birth of many intellectually disabled people, for example those with spina bifida or Down’s Syndrome. This raises moral questions relating to identity: is it ethical for a woman to decide to terminate on the basis of a characteristic of a foetus? Stainton (2003) argues that termination is unethical if the characterisation changes the foetus into a subject. Stainton also argues that the life of an intellectually disabled person is deemed less valuable on the basis of dominant identity politics, and not ’some essential truth of science’ (p537) which further questions the morality of termination due to ID. A recent article on the BBC news website, ‘Many keeping babies with Down’s’ (2008) reported that Down’s births are higher now than in 1989 when pre-natal testing began, suggesting that cultural views of Down’s Syndrome by non-disabled people is becoming more positive.

Tom Shakespeare (1998) and Patricia Rock (1996) discuss the complexities of pre-natal testing. Shakespeare documents professional pressure to abort in response to positive tests for disability, and Rock insists that such advice is given by those that carry prejudice about disabled life and know nothing of the quality of life many disabled people live.

To look at the specific place of ID within wider disabilities I will be reviewing Beart et al (2005), who carried out a literature review on how people with ID view their social identity. Their main points are:

Heavy stigma in relation to other disabilities

People who are intellectually disabled are the target of stigma that is heavy in relation to other disabilities, and this stigma includes the perception, at least by others, that this is the person’s dominant identity.

• For professionals a diagnosis of ID may overshadow other potential diagnoses
• This identity is likely to stay with the person over the span of their lifetime
• Families do not seek out this diagnosis for their children, in contrast to many other disabilities
• People with ID are often segregated, have few employment opportunities, are economically less well off, are less likely to marry or have satisfying social relationships, and experience fewer community leisure opportunities

Difficulty conceptualising their disability

Many people with ID may be unaware of their identity as intellectually disabled, at least on a discursive level.

• People with ID may have problems understanding the terms that are used to categorise themselves
• Parents and carers often do not talk to people with ID about their disability, but this does not necessarily prevent them from becoming aware of the stigma attached to this identity – they experience the stigma of their social identity through their interactions with others, and this experience is often an emotionally painful one
• It is likely that intellectually disabled people experience their identity at the level of experience rather than discourse, and this should be taken into account in further research

This paper addresses the issue of personal identity in terms of systematic empirical studies, and might be criticised for placing non-disabled ideas of ID ‘on’ the intellectually disabled person. Other research demonstrates the development of understanding about intellectual disabilities by people with ID in the context of Self Advocacy groups, including changes toward both positive personal and group identity (Goodley 2000; Beart, Hardy et al 2004). Thus, intellectually disabled people can have a voice and a positive identity as intellectually disabled, but it is one that is vulnerable and needs facilitation.

Dyslexia

A primary issue for dyslexic people is the history of cultural scepticism with which dyslexia and other ‘hidden disabilities’ are viewed. Dismissive or negative cultural attitudes challenge or undermine attempts to develop a positive sense of identity. Dyslexia is an important disability in relation to education because the structure of western educational systems particularly disables dyslexic people, and dyslexic adults often have negative emotional associations with school years. The following study is an unusual study, as noted above, because it recounts the experiences of dyslexic adults rather than approaching dyslexia from a professional standpoint.

Dale & Taylor (2001) carried out qualitative research with seven dyslexic attendees to an adult studies skills course ‘Learning for Life and Work’ that had been adapted so that it had a multi-sensory and experiential focus to support dyslexic learners. Using grounded theory the authors analysed transcripts from three focus groups, the students’ learning journals, statements from the wider group, and classroom observation.

Dyslexia had not been recognised in most of the students while at school, and they had a history of educational failure, which they internalised as personal failure. Within the focus group, but not the wider classroom, they explored negative school experience, which was common to all the students, and included humiliation and physical punishment, and the understanding that they were ‘thick’ or ’stupid’.

Through life experience the adults developed a self-belief that they were able. For many it related to greater success at work in relation to other colleagues who had educational qualifications. Personal recognition of dyslexia involved re-developing a self-identity of ‘able’ to replace the one developed at school of ’stupid’.

The authors conclude that their purposeful role as ‘peers’ to the students, that as tutors they were learning also, and that one of the tutors was dyslexic, were important factors in breaking established negative educational patterns. The group functioned similarly to Self Advocacy, in that the group gave the students space to make sense of their social identity and gave a sense of control over their lives (Beart, Hardy et al 2004).

Within academic endeavours, unless dyslexia is recognised and understood, the person can experience stigma similar to ID. However, possibly because dyslexia on its own is problematic primarily in the context of academic endeavours, it is quite possible to form a positive dyslexic self- and group-identity. A positive dyslexic identity is also possible in schools; Robert Burden, in research within a special school for dyslexic boys, found overall a positive dyslexic identity, where the boys felt they were in control of their success and/or failure in school (Burden 2005).

Whether dyslexic adults disclose their disability or not is a common conundrum; the choice seems to be dependent on whether or not the context is perceived to be receptive and supportive, and on practical considerations (Olney and Kim 2001; Valle, Solis et al 2004).

Currently work is being carried out by schools, charities and the UK government to develop better support systems for dyslexic children. Theoretically, if schools support such children well, it is possible that in future there will be no such disability.

D/deafness

Tracey Skelton and Gill Valentine (2003) carried out qualitative research interviewing 15 D/deaf youth and five D/deaf lesbian and gay young people within a larger study to explore social exclusion and inclusion within varying spaces eg home, college/university, and community. This study is unusual in that it asks young D/deaf people about their experiences of different identities within D/deafness. Most D/deaf research carries out quantitative comparisons between D/deaf people and hearing people.

D/deaf refers simultaneously to ‘Deaf’ people – those that consider themselves a minority language, and ‘deaf’ people – those considering themselves ‘hearing impaired’, and/or those that orient themselves in an oral tradition. ‘Deaf’ or ‘deaf’ refers to these groups separately.

Deafness as minority language vs deafness as disability

Within the Deaf community there is a discourse that being Deaf is not to be disabled, but to belong to a minority language community. Within the group of young people interviewed, a number emphatically replied ‘no’ when asked if they were disabled; instead they saw Deafness as being about a difference between hearing and Deaf worlds. Another sub-group of young people identified with being deaf, and said they wanted to be able to hear and to speak, and be understood easily by the hearing community. The authors note that these two identities are not fixed, that they can change according to context and time.

The authors discuss the dilemma faced by young D/deaf people in choosing identity. The Deaf world tries to be independent of hearing culture, and provides huge support and positive identity for Deaf people. They do not align themselves with the disability movement, but campaign separately as a minority language. Learning British Sign Language (BSL) is often the starting point of belonging to the community.

A number of the young people that grew up in hearing families, and were discouraged to sign within oral education, commented on the power they felt when they learned BSL, that they could communicate easily and in depth, and with other people like themselves. They are part of BSL rather on the outside as they are when involved with oral language. In this way the Deaf community offers them a better quality of life.

However Deaf culture is simultaneously exclusionary and limited – for young people with other identity concerns (eg sexual, ethnic, religious) it has little to offer that is unrelated to Deafness. The Deaf world can also reject people that have links to a hearing practice, and exclude those with visual impairment due to the visual nature of BSL.

The authors point out that many students professing Deaf identities also receive Disabled Student Allowance, without noting this as a contradiction. This is understood as practicality rather than identity; their education is constructed so that to get round language barriers they need additional support. This is only one example of the fluidity of identity demonstrated in this study. Many participants worked with hearing people, where oral communication was the only option, so at work, others credited them with the identity ‘deaf’.

The authors conclude by stressing the complexities of D/deaf identity. They recommend researchers attend to the limitations imposed by binary constructions of D/deafness and deafness vs hearing.

Links to the future of education

These papers have highlighted a number of issues relating to disability and identity that can be present depending on type of impairment. The following are all issues that could be impacted more positively by the educational system in future:

• heavy stigma and/or discrimination by non-disabled people
• possibility for internalisation of negative views of non-disabled people
• difficulty conceptualising a disabled identity because of impairment
• issues of whether or not to disclose a disabled identity
• the possibility of a positive personal and group disabled identity
• the need for more research that consults disabled people
• the need for conceptualisations that encompass complexity
• the presence of disability according to context
• the presence of disability because of the structure of cultural systems.

A number of the papers suggest Self Advocacy groups are beneficial to support the development of positive personal and social identity for disabled people. Such groups adapted for disabled children and young people could be beneficial within schools. However, this would not address the core systemic problems of stigma and discrimination. The groups would single out those with a disability and bring attention to their difference, despite potential for developing positive self- and group- disabled identity.

In 2007, Sir Keith Ajegbo headed up a curriculum review entitled ‘Diversity & Citizenship’. The remit was to:

• ‘review the teaching specifically of ethnic, religious and cultural diversity across the curriculum to age 19
• in relation to Citizenship, explore particularly whether or not ‘modern British social and cultural history’ should be a fourth pillar of the Citizenship curriculum’ (p14).

Recommendations by the review included the need for whole-school exploration of identity, diversity and citizenship, to be brought about through pupil voice, leadership in inclusion, training for teachers and changes in the educational systems infrastructure including development of a fourth strand in the Citizenship curriculum to be called ‘Identity and Diversity: Living Together in the UK’.

The review echoes a number of areas of concern stated in this paper and in my opinion provides a possible way forward. Despite the close ties of disability with issues of cultural, religious and ethnic diversity and identity, questions of disability were not a specific part of the remit of the review, perhaps because of the common perception of disability as a medical issue, and/or under-recognised issues of discrimination.

Were issues of disability included as part of this fourth strand of Citizenship, it would provide an inclusive forum for discussion of disability along the lines of universalism (to be discussed later), where disability is viewed as something that all of us can expect to experience at one time or another; a normal aspect of diversity. It would provide a place in which stigma and discrimination could be discussed in historical terms, a place for the voice of disabled people to be disseminated, and would have the potential to impact a number of the issues relating to disability and identity summarised at the beginning of this section.

How has identity with respect to disability changed over time with political/social changes?

Jenny Corbett and Brahm Norwich (1997) provide a reflexive account of changes since the 1980s in Special Educational Needs (SEN) due to a general social shift from passive to active. In education focus shifted from an explanation of disability in sociology and psychology to a focus on policy-making and provision. Parents changed from relying on professional expertise in educational choices to demanding the right to make choices about their children according to their individual situation. Corbett and Norwich argue against the use of simplistic dichotomies in response to these changes, eg psychological vs sociological, inclusive vs market choice, as this oversimplifies complex relationships.

Trend from passive to active

Corbett & Norwich cite an increase in legislation and policy-making within education as signposts of political/social change. For example the Warnock report, followed by the 1981 Education Act, recognised the reciprocal causal nature of special educational needs, the rights of parents to be involved in decisions about their child’s education, and the right for children to be included in mainstream education. The 1993 Education Act further clarified that Local Education Authorities (LEAs) are responsible for funding SEN according to the limitations of their budgets.

The result of this legislation was a politicisation of special educational needs. Formerly disabled children were educated within specialist schools, which provided a non-political caring service similar to a medical practice. The schools changed with the above legislation to become more in line with other educational establishments, and the addition of parents in decision making introduced a ‘market economy’, where schools became competitors. This trend is true generally for schools, outside SEN, due to Ofsted inspections, government testing and league tables.

As LEAs became responsible for allocating funds for SEN, this process also became politicised. Fund allocation was based on a ’statement of education need’ derived from diagnostic information and recommendations from professional reports, resulting in an increase in the importance of ‘labelling’, as the diagnostic label became a necessary route to funding. The involvement of parents in the allocation of limited funds can mean that more funding goes to the children whose parents are most able to fight for it, adding to already-present class inequalities.

The disabled movement began at much the same time as this legislation, making public individual disabled peoples’ experiences of disadvantage within and resulting from attendance at special schools, which challenged professional hegemony. The idea of a positive disabled identity, that the problem was not in the disabled child but in the segregation and discrimination of disabled children within schools, contested the medical model’s view of ‘treatment rather than acceptance’ (p382).

Dichotomous ideology

The authors argue in their paper that it is counter-productive to approach current issues of SEN from extremes such as psychology vs. sociology, or inclusive vs market-driven values. They make a case for an increase in complexity within SEN because of political, social and economic developments, which require input from a variety of perspectives to give ‘richness of analysis’ (p384).

The social model of disability – successes and failures

The social model of disability has been the disability movement’s ‘battle cry’ because it provided a freeing framework for action by focusing political strategy away from rehabilitation toward removing social barriers and anti-discrimination legislation. Dowse (2001) describes the social model of disability as the disability movement’s ‘collective action frame’, according to social movement theory.

In terms of identity, the shift away from the medical model, which places the problem of disability within the person, to the social model, which places the problem of disability within society, was emancipating. It enabled a viewpoint from which a positive self-identity of a disabled person could be constructed, and still does. The new meanings of this perspective also involve a shift from ‘feeling sorry for oneself’ and being passive, to feeling angry and being active. It stimulated the formation of numerous disability groups, many that developed ‘identity politics’, where the aspect of group identity that formerly was stigmatising is turned round to become a mark of pride (Bickenbach, Chatterji et al 1999). Thus, the social model of disability has contributed a great deal toward improving issues of identity within disability. However, the social model has also been criticised in a number of ways, both by those outside the disability movement and those within (Bickenbach, Chatterji et al 1999; Shakespeare and Watson 2001).

Conceptual limitations/inconsistencies

The social model is based on a distinction between ‘impairment’, a feature of a person’s body or mind, and ‘disability’, the barriers of oppression society constructs that marginalise the person. The problem is with society, not with impairment, and the disability movement discourages gaze on impairment and encourages focus on society.

This is vital in the argument of the disability movement, because as soon as the issue of impairment becomes a focus, issues around equality also arise. If disabled people possess a biological impairment, they are in fact not equal with non-disabled people. Bickenbach et al (1999) likens this to the argument against feminism that patriarchy is biologically inevitable.

Multiple identity

The social model is narrow in that it only conceptualises issues of oppression linked with disability. Other marginalising factors (class, race, gender, sexuality, age), and how they interact with disability, are ignored. The changing and contextual nature of disability itself is also not addressed. Instead, in the social model, disability is represented as dichotomous – you either are or you aren’t. The social model also does not adequately conceptualise differences between disabled people, for example, differences between social responses to physical vs mental disabilities.

Suffering

The separation of ‘impairment’ from ‘disability’ discussed above relegates issues of the body and mind, and therefore issues of pain and/or suffering, invisible in discussion of disability under the social model. This excludes essential aspects of the experience of many disabled people, for whom physical pain and/or emotional suffering following from their ‘impairment’ may be an everyday occurrence (Morris 1991).

Inadequate representation

In the ways detailed above, the social model fails to adequately represent the experiences of many disabled people. Bickenbach et al (1999) points out major proponents of the disability movement tend to be ‘highly educated, white middle-class males with late onset physical disabilities and minimal needs’ (p1181), who fall short of representing the wider issues of disability. The disability movement also fails to represent the group of people who wish to refuse the ‘disability’ badge, who would prefer to be non-disabled. Shakespeare & Watson (2001) cite their ongoing research with disabled school-age children, the majority of whom disliked being identified as disabled (see also Priestley, Corker et al 1999)

Possible future ‘battle cries’ for the disability movement

Universalism

Bickenbach et al (1999) review and critique models of disability. They put forward a model of ‘universalism’ to replace the social model of disability, because ‘universalism as a model for theory development, research and advocacy serves disabled persons more effectively than a civil rights or ‘minority group’ approach’ (p1173).

The authors discuss the social model of disability and the disability movement in depth before introducing universalism. They point out that regardless of the success of the disability movement over the past 20 years, eventually use of the social model of disability will have to give way for the reasons stated above, but also because the problems of disability are not only about discrimination – they are also about ‘failures to provide the resources and opportunities needed to make participation feasible’ (p1181), which the authors call ‘positive freedom’. Problems of positive freedom revolve around distributive injustice – the unfair distribution of resources and services resulting in limited access to society. Unfair distribution is systemic; it is part of the structures of institutions and economies.

Universalism, based on the work of Zola (1989), addresses the problems of the social model of disability because it approaches disability as a contextual, ever-changing continuum that respects diversity and widens normalisation to include human variation. Disability is a universal feature of humanity, and we all can expect to experience disability in one form or another, or perhaps in many ways, over our lifetimes.

The details of universalism have not been worked out – but in terms of logical consistency and the scope to encompass the complexity of disability, universalism seems promising. One of the reasons for the extremity of the social model, though, as Shakespeare & Watson (2001) write, is the simplicity and power of its message: ‘disabled by society not by our bodies’ (p11). Universalism’s solution to issues of logical inconsistency and its theoretical ability to represent the complexities of disability are not likely to be quickly or easily grasped, and reasons to adopt universalism may be equally slippery to the non-specialist.

Sociology of impairment

Hughes & Paterson (1997) provide a discussion of the problems with the impairment/disability divide in the social model of disability. They propose that a combination of post-structuralism and phenomenology provide an approach with which to reframe it.

The authors discuss recent developments in the sociology of the body, which, with post-modernism, see the body and biology as social issues. The body is linked to advertising, consumerism and political struggle, and is the site of identity construction. On the other hand, the academic realms of biology, psychology and medicine, and indeed, disability studies, view the body as an object without history, without meaning, without agency, separate from the self; an object not socially produced.

The authors describe the work during the 1990s of feminists, particularly Judith Butler (1993) to rework the concept of sex-gender, from a biological-social bipolarisation to the construction of the body by social discourse.

Hughes & Paterson argue that by viewing the body as a social site, the issue of impairment can be included in the disability movement. The conceptualisations of the social model by disabled academic Mike Oliver (quoted in Hughes and Paterson 1997, p330) of impairment and disability as bipolar opposites can be dissolved by exploring disability as present at the junction between the mind, the body and society; an experience discursively produced.

Despite the advantages of a post-structuralist approach to the body in dissolving dichotomies, it also has the effect of actually dissolving the body – any sense of a real body is lost as it becomes the site of ‘multiple significations that give it meaning’ (p333). Hughes & Paterson therefore argue that phenomenology is needed to focus on the body as a site of lived experience. Phenomenological studies could add consciousness of sensation to issues of oppression and marginalisation in the body.

Post-structural analysis is relevant to the breadth of disability. Foucault’s work has links to social production and examination of power relations, cultures, discourse and difference (Armstrong 2007), so that course seems promising, though also presents problems of its own, as detailed above. Though post-structural analysis solves many problems of the social model, it does not address the problem of physical inequality. Phenomenology seems to be particularly relevant to researching people who experience physical pain as a result of disability.

Losing disabled identity: does technological and medical advancement enhance or detract?

Technological advancement offers the disabled person the possibility of ‘cure’ of their disability. Cochlear implants for deaf people is one example; another slightly different example, in that it does not offer ‘cure’ but an external way of getting round difficulties, is computers that read and spell for dyslexic people.

Is the assumption that a disabled person would want to be cured a ‘given’, or is this the negative perceptions of a non-disabled society? For the disabled person who is proud of who they are, for whom their identity as disabled has been an important part of making meaning about themselves and the people and the world they have known, the refusal of ‘cure’ can be the response.

Cure survey

Harlan Hahn and Todd Belt (2004) surveyed 156 disabled activists using a 7-point Likert scale exploring their responses to the question ‘even if I could take a magic pill, I would not want my disability to be cured’.

Results were approximately even, with 47% not wanting to be cured, 8% ambivalent, and 45% wanting to be cured. This is supported by two prior surveys that found a majority did not want ‘cure’ (Weinberg and Williams 1978; Weinberg 1988).

There were two significant predictors of which disabled adults would not want to be cured. Those who had a positive sense of personal identity as disabled were significantly more likely to not want cure (p<.001), and those with onset of disability before age 18 were significantly more likely to not want cure (p<.05).

The authors speculate that disabled adults with a positive disabled self-identity do not seek cure because this would take away their source of self-affirmation. They reason that disabled adults who become disabled before they are 18 have a stronger personal sense of identity, and this prevents them from desiring a cure for the same reason stated above.

The authors conclude that these results challenge current medical practice where focus is on ‘no harm’ to the public, with the expectation that people will be receptive to treatment that has been shown safe and effective.

The study would have been improved if it had been possible to carry out a selection of interviews to discuss why the disabled people chose the responses they did. It is also unfortunate that the authors did not find out the nature of the disabilities of each person, as it would have been valuable to discover if the type of disability influenced whether or not the adults wanted to be cured.

The research quoted above that found that schoolchildren did not want to be disabled because they did not want to be different than their peers (Priestley, Corker et al 1999; Shakespeare and Watson 2001), is in opposition to the above research, and needs to be researched further to understand any differences in the perception of disability between children and adults. For example, is it a difference of generation or maturation? Such research is important in informing future support of disabled children in schools.

Choosing deaf children

Hallvard Lillehammer (2005) develops an ethical argument supporting the choice by a real couple, Candace and Sharon, to obtain sperm from a deaf donor in order to increase their chance of having deaf children (they indeed now have 2 deaf children). David Shaw (2008) responds to Lillehammer, arguing the couple made an unethical choice.

The table below displays one of the contrasts in their views.

Lillehammer (2005) writes against the ‘conventional view’, meaning he assumes most people would agree that anyone who could choose would choose that their child not be disabled. He argues that the concept of ‘impartial perspective’ put forward by those of a conventional view is really ‘little more than the generalisation of one set of partial values to every conceivable case of a given type’ (p40).

Shaw (2008) writes from the ‘conventional viewpoint’. Aside from the logical arguments he makes, in his writing there is the sense that he conceptualises disability in quite negative terms. He calls deafness a disease, ‘the deaf case involves the intentional creation of children who have a disease’ (p408) and does not relate to the deaf couple’s viewpoint: ‘In fact, there is immediate prospect of resolving these disputes, because such philosophers are using social justice to adopt the impartial perspective of what is best for the future child, while the parents are choosing what they want without any regard for fairness’ (p413). This provides an example of a stereotypical ‘non-disabled’ viewpoint.

These papers show the central role both personal and group identity can play in the lives of disabled people in relation to medicine, and the social and political complexities that may arise in the future in response to medical advances.

Disability, identity and the internet

Natilene Bowker and Keith Tuffin (2002) carried out interviews with 15 physically disabled participants aged 30 to 59 years who regularly used the internet, including chat rooms. The authors’ aim was to explore whether or not participants disclosed their disability while online. Paterson & Hughes (1999) argue that failure to disclose works against the disability movement, as it prevents non-disabled people from being faced with contradictions to their false beliefs about disability. Bowker and Tuffin therefore were also interested, if the participants chose not to disclose, in seeking the reasons why.

The authors explored three themes in regard to disclosure: relevance, anonymity and normality. In relevance, participants chose not to disclose when the context meant this was inappropriate, however there were times they did disclose, for example if disability were misrepresented, disclosing disability gave added weight to the participant’s views. In anonymity, the participants chose to withhold, disclose or invent information to present an identity, including other information besides disability. The participants enjoyed their ability to be anonymous, and felt they had a right to choose to respond privately. In normality, the participants approached the internet as a place they could be ‘normal’. They choose not to disclose because they wanted to be a part of able-bodied culture, or wanted a ‘break’ from disability.

The authors conclude that disabled people valued their ability to choose to disclose or not on the internet very highly. Their comments about face-to-face interactions with others suggested they did not experience non-disabled identity except online. Being online allowed them a new space to interact and form ideas about themselves; ‘For those restricted to a self-description based on physical deviation from the norm, having access to other descriptions may lead to empowering outcomes’ (p342).

This study offers an interesting slant on identity and the possibilities offered by the internet to people with prominent physical disability.

Conclusion

Because of the history of medical hegemony in disability and the marginalisation of disabled people, the needs and desires of disabled people are most often approached from the perspective of the caregiver and institution. Stereotypes of disabled people have been of passive, helpless people to be pitied, to be repelled by, or idealised as ‘heroic’ for getting round their disability. However, with the disability movement the ‘voice’ of disabled people has begun to be heard. A common thread appearing within research that listens to disabled people is that they can live valuable, happy lives and many do not see themselves as disabled (Watson 2002) while some (at least hypothetically) would not want to be cured. Others, when freed from the necessity of disclosing their disability, for example by being online, choose not to. This is not only because ‘they have something to hide’, as some have suggested but because they enjoy the control they are otherwise denied when their disabilities are visible to others.

Research that engages with disabled people themselves and tries to represent their voice, instead of theorising disability from a medical model or from conventional viewpoints, is rare, and the papers here that explore the viewpoints of disabled people were sometimes the only ones available. In respect to future education, it would be advantageous to take the viewpoints of disabled children into account in order to avoid policy and practice designed to support them that may in fact be irrelevant and/or harmful to them. Many of the problematic, systemic issues need to be addressed through structural change within education, not only for disabled children and young people, but for all pupils and students, teachers, and educational leaders. One way forward is to take a similar approach to that recommended in the Ajegbo Report, in respect to disability.

Another common thread in the research papers is related to complexity. ‘Disabled’ represents a huge array of impairment, and social barriers differ accordingly (Deal 2003). It cannot be viewed as representing people who share a clear characteristic, in the way race and gender do. The variation in identity between and within disabilities means that groups and individuals respond differently within the disability movement, from refusing to advocate as ‘disabled’ as in the case of the Deaf community, to supporting the disability movement simply by being present at meetings, as may be the case for someone with severe ID.

This complexity means that in forecasting future trends, whatever happens is likely to affect different disabled young people in different ways. For example, if, in 25 years, education is structured through home computer use, visually impaired and/or children who have difficulty with fine motor control may be marginalised, while those with a visible physical disability may be freer in their choices of identity.

Complexity is also present in the multiple identities expressed by people, in terms of sexuality, race, class, role etc in addition to disability, and indeed, as Skelton & Valentine (2003) demonstrate, there are multiple identities within a particular disability. There is also complexity in that people combine and shift identity differently in different space and time according to context and choice. Though such complexity is commented on frequently, there is very little research done on more than one identity at a time.

Finally, the theme of bipolar concepts and the problems they cause was repeated in the research reviewed. The problem was discussed in many contexts, from opposing tensions between individual pupil rights and inclusion within schools, to the dichotomy of impairment and disability threatening the foundations of the disability movement, to the inability of a perspective from the ‘conventional view’ of disability to imagine it as anything other than disease, abnormality and misery.

We need to develop models that represent complexity, which can make sense of our postmodern, pluralistic culture. At the moment we are swamped by conflicting information that needs to be re-theorised in holistic, dynamic ways.

References

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This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

Getting to know Web 2.0

The technological innovations that have enabled what we call Web 2.0, or the Read/Write Web, are perhaps best understood in the context of the costs of contribution to the earlier incarnations of the World Wide Web. In the early days of the web, which we can call Web 1.0, posting information online was expensive, time-consuming, and required specialized knowledge. One had to register a domain name, hire a hosting server, learn HTML, and use FTP tools to upload files to a Web server in order to put a page on the World Wide Web. These barriers were not overwhelming, hobbyists could learn the skills and commit the resources to participate, but as a result of these barriers, only a tiny portion of the community which used the web was responsible for providing the content. Most people just went to read, and then later, as bandwidth grew, to listen and watch.

Over time, web developers increasingly added functionality to websites that allowed people to more easily contribute content to the web. Some of the earliest of these sites were discussion boards, a feature of the internet from even the days before the web, which allowed multiple users to easily contribute information to the web without needing to learn how to program in HTML or register a domain. These simple discussion spaces embodied the crucial design principle that has driven the development of Web 2.0: make it as simple, as time-cheap, and inexpensive as possible for ordinary Web users to contribute. We’ll soon turn to how this principle has found expression in a diverse variety of platforms – blogs, wikis, podcasts, social networks, virtual worlds – but first it’s worth teasing out the significance of designing for simplified contributions.

Lowering the costs of communicating and barriers to participation

To sum up the Web 2.0 phenomena in a sentence: lower communication costs have led to opportunities for more inclusive, collaborative, democratic online participation. Economists would say that when developers made it easier to contribute to the web, they were lowering the interaction costs of communication. As the costs of communicating online decreased, more people, millions more, decided that it was worth their while to participate in these communication networks. These people did not just communicate more, they started communicating in qualitatively different ways than before. As these millions found new media for expression and collaboration, they opened possibilities for a more inclusive, open, democratic society, possibilities which may or may not be realized. Understanding these social possibilities requires better understanding the technical design principle that has enabled them.

The dramatically lower costs of communicating information over the web can be illustrated with a simple thought experiment: how would you share a video with all of your friends in 1980 and today? In 1980, sharing a video message with your friends would involve the following steps: filming on a tape, transferring the tape to VHS, copying each individual VHS tape, packaging and addressing each tape, and mailing the tape to everyone you know. The time costs of such a venture were basically prohibitively high. People certainly had an interest in seeing each other’s video clips – recall the remarkable run of Bob Saget and America’s Funniest Home Videos – but they were simply too expensive to share within individual social networks.

Now consider the costs of adding video to YouTube. Click: I start my Web Cam, and I spout wisdom. Click: I save it. Click: I open YouTube. Click: I upload the file. Click: I label it with a “tag” so that others can find it (tagging is discussed further below). And for bonus points, Click: I change my Facebook status update to alert everyone in my social network that I’ve just added a video. There is some degree of learning curve to figure out how all of these applications and services work. But as people learn their way around one Web 2.0 service, they realize that Web 2.0 tools share many common features and it is increasingly easy to learn the next. Compared to the economic costs of these kinds of interactions in the past, global communication today is almost impossibly free.

Lowering communication costs doesn’t just lead to more communication, it leads to qualitatively different behavior by web users. For instance, it turns out that if you make it extremely time-cheap to contribute an article to an online encyclopedia, that people will create a Wikipedia with 2.5 million of them. It also turns out that if you make the editorial process decentralized and consensual, that people will anonymously and collaboratively edit those same 2.5 million articles and come to editorial loggerheads over only a tiny percentage of them. It turns out that if you make it time-cheap to post short updates about your day and read at a glance all of the updates of your friends and colleagues, that millions will start following the daily and hourly turns of people’s lives through tools like Facebook and Twitter (both to be discussed further). By itself, little updates like “Struggling with my statistics assignment,” are rather dull and prosaic. But aggregated into thousands of little updates, friends are tracking each other’s lives through Web 2.0 tools much more closely than has ever been possible by all but the closest social and working relationships. As a final example, the ease of producing and sharing online videos has allowed for the new social phenomena of viral videos, publically available online videos which are seen by hundreds of thousands or millions of people, which are typically created, published, and distributed outside of the traditional studio/publisher information networks. Because cheaper communication allows new communication media and practices, we have a whole new set of shared cultural texts created and distributed outside of the traditional, hierarchical publication networks.

Lowering the interaction costs of communication leads to perhaps the most important feature of Web 2.0: its inclusive, collaborative capacity. The new Read/Write web is allowing people to work together, share information, and reach new and potentially enormous audiences outside some of the traditional structures of power, authority, and communication in our society. The social developments that have resulted from the Web 2.0 phenomena are best understood through a lens of democratization, but we must keep in mind the caveat that democracy means many different things in many different places (Haste and Hogan, 2006). Democratizing the web may mean one thing for the wealthy in the West with instant access to the web through wireless-connected laptop computers, and another thing for the poor in the West who access the web through public connections in schools and libraries (Jenkins, 2007). Democratizing the web may mean one thing for students in rural Africa with dial-up modem connections on cast off computers from Europe, and another thing for bloggers in China whose content is scrutinized by an army of government censors and language police. While democratization may mean different things in these diverse areas, certain commonalities hold as well. More people are getting involved in a series of increasingly global conversations, more people have the capacity to share their thoughts and insights to the world, and more people have the capacity to weigh in on the value and virtue of media and commentary. In older media forms the boundaries between authorship and readership, speaker and listener, producer and consumer remained quite clear. “The new Web”, as professor Leon Watts notes “has broken down the authorship-readership roles into degrees of contact and reciprocation of infinitely variable granularity” (Personal Communication). In decentralizing the control over the flow of global information, Web 2.0 holds tremendous potential to shift the balance of power from the elite to the masses, with all of the chaos, creativity, exceptionality and mediocrity that have marked the expansion of political democracy.

Whether or not this potential is realized, whether or not the key Web 2.0 design principle of simplify contributing leads to gains in democratization depends on how developers, publishers, telecommunications companies and users negotiate the evolving spaces that allow for all this communication. Before considering possible scenarios for the future impact of Web 2.0 platforms on society, we should now examine what some of these platforms are and how they are evolving.

Instantiations of Web 2.0

Web 2.0 technologies may be animated by a single design principle, simplify contributing, but they take a wide array of forms. Some of the most visible Web 2.0 tools are categories of platforms. One of the first platforms of the Read/Write Web was Web logs, or blogs, which are websites that are like public journals. Blog authors, or bloggers, post chronologically-ordered journal entries to a site, and each entry has a feature that allows readers to comment, allowing for two-way interaction. Blog hosting services like Blogger, now owned by Google, developed around the turn of the century and allowed even people without any programming skills to create and publish blogs. Wikis, websites which are authored by a community of people, emerged as another platform that allowed for easy, collaborative publication of information. The most famous wiki, Wikipedia, is authored by millions of anonymous contributors, and indeed anyone can click on any page in Wikipedia at any time and add anything that they so desire. Podcasting tools allowed for the uploading and syndication of audio files, and podcasts are a kind of audio blog. YouTube pioneered online video sharing by creating a space where people could upload small video files and make them publically available. These diverse spaces have fostered new forms of global, multimedia, communication and publication.

Online social networks also fall within the domain of Web 2.0. In America, the two largest sites are MySpace and Facebook, where users create a web page profile, invite friends to connect to their profile, and use the page as a space to publish personal content and connect with friends and co-workers. While broad scale online social networks are the most well known, niche social networks exist as well, and services like Ning allow users to create their own mini online social networks, such as Classroom 2.0, a social network for educators interested in Web 2.0. Virtual worlds, including online games, are, to some degree, other forms of online social networks, where users create avatars which inhabit three-dimensional virtual worlds. Second Life is the largest online virtual world community, and World of Warcraft, with over 10 million members worldwide, is the world’s largest online game community. Both virtual worlds are also integrated with other forms of Web 2.0 tools like discussion boards, blogs, and wikis.

For those who have not closely followed the growth of Web 2.0, the scale of adoption is staggering. In America in 2006, over 50% of teenagers – across racial and socioeconomic lines – have created pages on online social networks like Facebook and MySpace, and in all likelihood this percentage has increased in the last two years (Lenhart, Madden, Macgill, and Smith, 2007). As of October 2008, Wikipedia had over 2.5 million pages, over 250 million page edits, over 8 million registered users, and over 150,000 people who had made an edit in the last 30 days. In February of 2008 Technorati was tracking over 112 million blogs, which doesn’t include as many as 73 million Chinese blogs (Helmond 2008). Even in the US education sector, which was rated dead last out of 30 sectors in technology adoption by the Department of Commerce in 2003, Web 2.0 is growing exponentially. PBwiki reports hosting over 250,000 education related wikis; Wikispaces reports that they have given away over 100,000 free wikis to K12 educators and they plan on donating 250,000 more; and Edublogs hosts over 100,000 education related blogs. And while these are statistics from some of the largest Web 2.0 service providers, they represent only a fraction of online applications within the education sector.

Web 2.0 refers to these simple, often free tools for adding content to the Web, but it also refers to systems that allow users to evaluate content. Tagging refers to the process of allowing users to apply key word labels to discrete bits of content. The service del.icio.us, for instance, allows users to tag Web sites such that del.icio.us community can bypass search engines like Google and instead search the Web using user-generated key words. This form of content organization has been dubbed “folksonomy,” a taxonomy generated organically by a community. Tagging is an essential feature of many Web 2.0 content sharing sites, like Flikr, a popular service for sharing photos.

Indeed this kind of convergence is one of the most common features in the evolution of Web 2.0 tools. User-generated videos from YouTube are embedded in wikis; podcasts are hosted by blogs, commerce sites like Amazon.com allow users to tag products and post reviews. Facebook attempts to serve as an individual’s one-stop Web 2.0 hub, allowing users to chat, post updates, blog, share links, host photos, share videos, coordinate events, share music, and so forth. As Web 2.0 develops, many features of the various platforms are converging and overlapping.

The development of Web 2.0 is also characterized by new innovations. Right now in America, one of the fastest growing Web 2.0 services is Twitter, which allows for micro-blogging. Users post, either online or through mobile phones, status updates of 160 characters or less. Individually, most posts are trivial. Taken collectively, they allow users to track the daily ebb and flow of another person’s life, creating a remarkable sense of intimacy and familiarity (Thompson, 2008). Twitter is now being integrated with Facebook and other tools, so that microblogging is just now entering the Web 2.0 milieu.

The ownership of these diverse spaces deserves careful consideration. Many of these platforms are created and managed by teams of volunteers who release their products under licenses like GNU or creative commons that allow others to share and build upon their achievements. Wikipedia is run by a non-profit agency funded by user donations, Wordpress gives away their blogging platform, and MediaWiki gives away a wiki platform. Other platforms are proprietary and for profit: Google owns Blogger and YouTube, Rupert Murdoch owns MySpace, and so forth. The transmission of data that enables these communications is made possible by telecommunications companies that are regulated by governments around the world. In many dimensions, the newly enabled communications of millions of users depend upon the infrastructure provided by corporations and governments, and the boundaries and possibilities of new communications will be negotiated by users, corporate interests and governments. Corporations may seek to constrain communications in ways that maximize profits and governments may seek to constrain communications in ways that maximize state control. Whether or not the democratic possibilities of Web 2.0 are realized depends a great deal upon the degree to which users can negotiate for freedom and autonomy within the networks created and controlled by established political and corporate interests.

The broad future direction of Web 2.0

The driving force behind Web 2.0, the desire to lower the costs of communication, will continue to be a force shaping the web in the decades ahead, and innovations in time-cheap communications are going to present a future full of new surprises. Three other trends at various levels will continue to act on and shape this driving force. First, new platforms will continue to emerge. Second, the functionality in platforms will continue to converge. Third, we should expect to see greater integration between Web 2.0 tools and handheld devices. Finally, we should consider the efforts to those who seek not to extend the Web 2.0 regime, but to transcend it.

Platforms

It’s hard to guess which web communication platforms are going to stick and which are going to fall to the wayside – the book has been pretty durable, the 8-track less so – but we can make some guesses. To step back and think broadly for a moment, platforms are essentially defined by their level of automation. Automation makes certain communication acts time-cheaper, but automation also acts as a constraint on communication forms. Blogs are highly automated. They take new posts and new comments, and they place them in chronological order. This means that making an online journal with collaborative comments is quite time-cheap, but it also means that it’s difficult to make a blog anything other than an online journal. Wikis, by contrast, are the blank canvases of the online world. Almost nothing is automated in a wiki, and so they have a tremendously flexible format which is much more time-expensive to manually design.

Blogs and wikis are two of the formats which seem to have a great potential to prove quite durable. The free, flexible nature of the wiki means that it will likely continue to be suitable for innovative new structural arrangements. The enduring nature of the journal across time and cultures suggests that blogs will long have a place. Likely developers will find new ways to make communication within these platforms cheaper and easier, but these durable platforms seem well-poised to endure.

Some of the more proprietary platforms are perhaps more vulnerable to replacement. Online social networks are probably going to persist in the decades ahead, but five years ago one might have predicted that MySpace would dominate in America, whereas Facebook has begun to very successfully compete broadly with MySpace, especially amongst the demographic of Americans with higher levels of education. As more adults join Facebook, it may be that youth look to escape to a new network (Friending your parents is very uncomfortable… not friending your parents even more so), and perhaps a new space will be born.

Undoubtedly new platforms will also emerge as people develop new ways to make certain forms of communication time-cheap. Some of these may be rather obvious in retrospect, like Goodreads, which allows readers to share lists of what they are reading, lists of their favourite books, and lists of the books on their to-read list. Others applications, like Twitter, may appear quite strange as they appear because they represent new forms of social communication.

Convergence

Virtually all wiki platforms have built-in discussion boards. The Wordpress blog editor has a built-in static web page creator and publisher. Facebook integrates seamlessly with Twitter and a 1,000 other applications. Podcasts can be distributed through blogs. Platforms which began as serving one particular function are increasingly being combined and woven into other platforms. Teens used to send instant messages through systems like AOL Instant Messenger, but increasingly chat online through integrated chat in Gmail or Facebook. In America, Facebook seems well posed to be the primary launching point to the Web 2.0 world for many Americans, and other services like the start page for Google Apps is competing for the same title of home base. Some of the clear distinctions which now exist among platforms may cease to exist as tools increasingly adopt the functionality of other tools.

Handheld devices

Gcast is a service that allows any phone user to dial a phone number, record a message, and have that message published as a podcast within minutes. Jott is a service that transcribes and emails or publishes phone messages. Twitter updates can be made and read by text message, email, or on the web.

As handheld devices develop more sophisticated interfaces, increased functionality, and the ability to transmit more information more quickly, it’s likely that handhelds are going to make Web 2.0 platforms increasingly portable. Right now the clunkiness of thumb pads, the small sizes of screens, and the low bandwidth of mobile phones are limiting their integration into Web 2.0 platforms. It’s not time-cheap to add an article to Wikipedia through your mobile if you have to type out a whole article with your thumb and can only read 20 words of it at a time on your screen. However, as developers overcome these hurdles, mobile phones and other handheld devices will increasingly become integrated into the Read/Write web. At some level, this will simply mean more communication, but we should also expect qualitatively different forms of communication to emerge as well.

Web 3.0 and beyond…

Predicting the “knight’s move,” the radical changes that will reshape social phenomena is always a difficult task, though in the realm of science and technology we at least have the advantage that researchers and developers who are working on new breakthroughs are toiling in plain sight. Tim Berners-Lee, for instance, one of the founders of the World Wide Web, has been working for some time on developing tools to allow a “Semantic Web,” or a version of the web where computers would be able recognize the meaning of data at some level (Berners-Lee, Hendler and Lassila 2001). For instance, search engines can currently find every web page where the word “cat” appears. Clever programmers can even get computers to recognize that the work “cat” appears so frequently with the word “pet” that those words probably have some relationship. Computers cannot however, know what cat means or figure out that cats are a subset of pets. In the Semantic Web, computers would be able to identify these types of relationships, and thus one could do a web search for the phrase “all the types of pets” and the computer would not merely search for websites with those exact words, but would search throughout the data of the web to find all of the data considered a subset of pet, and then return that data to the user. Such a web would dramatically increase the meaning-making capacity of computers, allowing humans to focus even more of their time and energy on higher order thinking tasks, just as search engines on the web have allowed humans to find massive amounts of information in much less time.

Web 2.0 across the sectors

No facet of modern life will remain untransformed by the innovations of the Web 2.0. That’s a strong claim, but in the face of the scope and scale of the social transformations wrought by Web 2.0, it increasingly appears to be a defensible one. Across nearly every sector of the world, Web 2.0 is changing the way people interact and relate.

Business

Web 2.0 tools are sparking two major changes in business practices: how employees collaborate, and how businesses interact with customers. At the MathWorks near Boston, MA, software engineers are designing their entire products on wikis. Programmers no longer email snippets of code back and forth as they attempt to create and debug new features. Instead, programmers post their work to a wiki, which allows the entire MathWorks engineering community ready access to the entire database of code for their products. At BestBuy, the sales force of “Blue Shirts” participates in an online social network called Blue Shirt Nation, where employees can share strategies, give feedback to management, react to new products and campaigns, and help to shape the overall direction of the company (Li and Bernoff, 2008).

These practices represent both new efficiencies and new relationships within firms, and as of this moment it’s not yet clear which of these innovations will prove transformative. New efficiencies produced by collaborative work environments may be merely useful or they may be essential. Can a consumer durable retailer which has not harnessed the collective intelligence of its sales force compete with one who has? We may find that in certain economic sectors harnessing collective intelligence is more important than in other places, or we may find that firms who can use new Web 2.0 tools to empower their employees consistently out-compete those who do not.

Online networks may also upset hierarchical corporate structures. Will online communities within firms represent a new avenue for employee advancement? Will the Best Buy sales rep with the highest numbers be passed over for manager in favour of another employee who made several critical contributions to Blue Shirt Nation? Will the MathWorks wiki allow the most creative, productive programmers to be identified and recognized for their work, rather than the project manager who compiles and presents the final project to executives? These new platforms may allow different kinds of talents – talents related to online networking, communication and collaboration – to be more highly valued in the work place. They also may allow for employees at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy to more easily bend the ear of those at the top, and the examples of both Linux development and the Toyota production system lend support to this hypothesis (Evans and Wolf, 2005). These flatter, more democratic, more meritocratic social organizations may allow firms to draw out the strengths of their employees with less regard towards their position in the organization.

Lowering communication costs is also likely to accelerate the pace of globalization and outsourcing. As it becomes increasingly easier to collaborate online, both asynchronously and in real time, firms can employ people around the world and have those teams work together. For developing countries, this represents an incredible new opportunity for nations that can build the infrastructure for people to participate in this phenomena. For developed countries, it means greater competition in the global labour market.

Web 2.0 tools are also changing the ways that firms interact with consumers. For one rather silly example, take the case of the American film “Snakes on a Plane.” When New Line Cinema published that title amongst their list of films in development in 2005, it captured the attention of a segment of film buffs on the internet. Perhaps it was the way the title succinctly captures the central conflict of the film; perhaps it unlocked some deep psychological tensions around flying in post 9/11 America. In any event, blogs about the film sprouted, fans started generating and sharing content about a film that had not even been created yet. Fans knew that Samuel L. Jackson was to play a lead role, and one fan produced a sound clip where he imitated Jackson saying “I want these motherfucking snakes off the motherfucking plane!” The clip went viral – it spread rapidly through social networks and outside traditional publication channels – amongst fans of this yet-to-be movie, and the fans demanded that the line be added to the movie. So the studio went back into production in order to add the line, which became the signature moment of the film.

That moment represents a powerful symbolic change in the relationship between producers and consumers. The fans were not the simple recipients of the movie; instead, they helped to design the film. They were co-constructors of the product, and through that co-construction not only did they improve the product (in a marketing sense, if not an artistic one), but they also felt a greater sense of investment in the product. These fans, with their blogs, fan sites, and media clips, became a free marketing arm for New Line, and produced a buzz around the movie that few campy B-movies can hope to achieve.

Web 2.0 tools allow many variations on these kinds of two-way communication amongst firms and consumers. At Snorg T’s, about 1/3 of their ideas for new t-shirts, sold over the internet, come from consumers. At threadless.com, consumers not only submit t-shirt designs but vote on the ones that they want the company to produce, market and sell. Companies as diverse as Dell and Stonyfield Farms use blogs to talk and listen to consumers (Scoble and Israel, 2006). Proctor and Gamble launched Beinggirl.com as a space for girls to talk with each other and with health care professionals about issues of relationships and sexuality, sponsored throughout by advertisements for beauty and feminine care products (Li and Bernoff, 2008). As I write this, JetBlue airways has just announced its first flight from its new terminal at JFK via Twitter, sending the message directly to its 6,000 followers on Twitter. In these conversations, firms not only have the chance to learn from their consumers, but also to communicate directly with them, unfiltered through the media. In the best of circumstances, firms can help consumers feel like partners in the life of corporate products; consumers become part of the team.

Looking towards the future, if all that corporations do with these tools is find new ways to sell their products, then that won’t constitute a significant change in the economic sphere. If companies, however, go further in terms of listening to consumers, towards building partnerships with them, towards responding to their concerns and ideas, then we may see new ways for the marketplace to better serve consumers. If firms discover that they can draw strength from the ideas of consumers, that they can grow by building partnerships from consumers, and that they are vulnerable to widespread, online criticism of consumers, then that may shift the balance of power in capitalist society from the producers towards the consumers.

An alternative future where producers simply use Web 2.0 as a new medium to share advertising and propaganda with consumers is equally imaginable. BeingGirl.com may develop as an open forum where girls have a chance to speak with each other and with professionals about the challenging issues of adolescence, and Proctor and Gamble may get some incidental benefits from fostering this open space. On the other hand, Proctor and Gamble can exert powerful editorial controls over the content on BeingGirl in order to manipulate conversations towards the celebration of P&G products and the positioning of young girls as deficient beings without those products. We have to expect that Proctor and Gamble only cares about the interests of young girls to the extent that those interests coincide with their fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder profit. In these corporate sponsored spaces, which include Blogger, Facebook, MySpace, and many others, users and corporations will negotiate the norms of each space, and in the best possible future these negotiations will result in consumers working with producers to create a better marketplace. In the worst possible future, producers will use online spaces as a forum for cynical advertising to penetrate ever more deeply into the lives of consumers.

Politics and the civic sphere

Those who research the emerging Web trends in society are going to spend a considerable amount of time unpacking the role of the internet and other communication technologies in the Barack Obama presidential campaign. The Obama campaign reached out to voters through a wide variety of existing web platforms. The campaign has pages and groups on a variety of social network sites, posts regular updates on Twitter (where Obama has 100,000 followers), posts videos on YouTube, uploads pictures from the campaign trail to Flickr, and participates in other niche platforms like Faithbase and BlackPlanet. After Obama’s victory, we have good reason to believe that Web 2.0 tools will be an established feature of political campaigns.

The Obama campaign built a proprietary online community of over 1,000,000 members called my.barackobama.com (myBO). Users at myBO could join groups based on states, neighbourhood or interests (like Tango dancers or air traffic controllers). They signed up to contact local undecided voters in their neighborhood and received “Walk lists” in seconds. Users could create a fundraising page which tracked their efforts at getting friends and family to donate to the campaign, and they could create their own blogs with which to share their thoughts with others. While myBO posed a number of strong constraints within the network in order to maintain their message and brand, they allowed remarkable freedom to users in creating their own blogs and fundraising messages. These messages were screened, and objectionable language was removed and led to users being banned, but on the whole the campaign allowed users to craft their own personal message of support in the service of a shared goal.

All of these messages were also shared outside the bounds of the official Obama network. In some cases, users shared the Obama message by posting Obama updates to their own social network profile, or sharing YouTube videos from the campaign by email. At the same time, Obama supporters also took ownership of his message and created their own groups and communication platforms. Many people individually created their own blogs or groups, like the Obama-Mama blog or the Facebook group “I have more foreign policy experience than Sarah Palin.”

These tools allowed the Obama campaign to achieve two objectives. First, they used communication tools to speak directly to millions of voters and potential voters without being filtered through the media. The decision to announce Obama pick for V.P. via text message at an early morning hour allowed the Obama campaign to send their message directly to the voters, rather than mediated through some kind of press release or press conference. Consider the costs of sending all of the words, images and videos distributed by the Obama campaign through a combination of media ads and direct mailing: it would be a staggering sum. The costs of transmitting these materials become entirely manageable using the web, and in fact, Obama volunteers and supporters absorbed much of the cost of those interactions.

The role of volunteers in sharing the message speaks to the second online objective achieved through Web 2.0 tools: getting a small army of grass-roots supporters involved in the campaign. The online tools dramatically reduced the cost of mobilizing huge numbers of volunteers and supporters. Those volunteers worked both through official channels, like those who volunteered to print out Obama walk lists, and through unofficial channels, like those who posted an Obama video to their social network profile or blog outside of myBO. The Obama campaign’s online efforts gave supporters an online stake in the campaign and even gave them some control over personally shaping their version of the Obama message. By sharing this stake, the campaign unlocked entirely new bases of small donors, of volunteers, and of new voters.

While the Obama campaign is certainly the most prominent example of online civic mobilization, many other examples exist as well. On February 12, 2003, the largest coordinated protest in human history occurred across the world in opposition to the Iraq war, where somewhere between 12 and 20 million people took to the streets (Bennett, 2007). The protest was organized in a matter of months, and online communication played a critical role. At www.350.org, activists are mobilizing people to demand action on greenhouse gas emissions and reduce atmospheric carbon down to 350 ppm. At 350.org people can join the movement, find out about upcoming actions, organize their own actions and spread the word. Facebook has an application where individuals can create profiles dedicated to causes, where people can invite their friends to donate to or join in an action or effort. These tools will play an increasingly important role in grass-roots action over the decades ahead.

Just as we could imagine two alternative futures for Web 2.0 tools in the economic sphere – one which enhanced consumer power and one which co-opted consumer energy in the service of corporate power, so can we imagine two futures for these new political media. Whether you believe that Barack Obama is The One, That One, or just the next one, one has to assume that he’ll be under constant pressure to use his online network as a tool for generating support for his agenda rather than as a medium for developing his agenda. If myBO becomes another media for the Obama administration to spread a centrally constructed message, then it becomes another instrument of elite political power. If, however, myBO morphs into my.americangovernment.gov, a space where citizens have the opportunity to contribute and collaborate on solving problems and speaking truth to power, then the democratizing power of Web 2.0 tools may indeed lead to a more democratic republic. Given the pressure on politicians to consolidate their power, one has to assume that the better future will only come about if the citizenry organizes to demand that it happen.

Journalism and the media are also being profoundly affected by the emergence of Web 2.0 tools. In some cases, new media are simply being integrated into old media. Many New York Times columns are also published as blogs, and readers can comment back on the blogs, and columnists can respond to those responses in future columns. Certainly this kind of dialogue happened with letters in the past, but the communication is now faster and at a greater scale. More importantly, anyone can now read almost all of the comments left behind by others, so nearly the entire communication stream is publically available. The editorial control over the “letters to the editor” is greatly loosened, so hundreds of comments are published rather than just a few letters. Anyone who is willing to avoid vitriolic personal attacks and foul or hateful language can have their say on the pages of NYTimes.com and dozens of other newspapers.

Web 2.0 tools also allow new journalism platforms to emerge outside of the traditional media. The Drudge Report and the Daily Kos are two examples of partisan blog networks providing political news and opinion outside of the traditional corporate journalism structure. Blogs that provide coverage of niches, like particular celebrities, trends, or market sectors, have proven to be particularly successful in finding readerships in the media marketplace. In some cases, this citizen journalism has proven to be a powerful check on the mainstream media, such as when bloggers discovered and then demonstrated that documents that Dan Rather used to criticize George W. Bush’s Texas Air Guard record were fabricated. In other cases, Web 2.0 tools have been the source of media stories, such as when Senator George Allen called a young Indian man a Macaca at a campaign event, a racial slur which was captured on video and published on YouTube for the media to pick up on. Web 2.0 tools have both allowed new voices into journalism, and they have created a new bank of user-generated media to inform journalism. Established media conglomerates will undoubtedly attempt to harness, control and profit from these new domains, but the ease of creating and publishing widely available media suggests that media consumers will have a far wider array of media choices in the future, and they will have more opportunities to interact with others in national and international conversations about news events.

Relationships and identity

Friend is now a verb. To “friend” someone is to solicit or accept an invitation from another person on an online social network that denotes that person as one of your friends. In this context, friends are not necessarily friends as in other contexts. Friends may be acquaintances from school or work rather than people who you choose to have a social, affectionate relationship with. Yet the power of these online friendships is that Web 2.0 tools can allow them to have a degree of intimacy that offline friendships may not necessarily have.

For instance, this past summer I took a group of students to India. While in India, I left new status updates from the road, and when I returned I posted a series of photo albums to my Facebook site. I have several very dear, close, offline friends who know nothing about this trip; we have not been in touch since then. I also have several acquaintances in my Facebook network who I have not spoken to in years, who I don’t feel particularly emotionally close to, who followed this expedition quite closely. If I run into them, they can ask about what it was like to cross the high pass at 16,000 feet in the India Himalaya or about my relationship with Lado, the Indian mechanic who helped us with our service project. In several important respects, my Facebook friends know the shifting landscape of my moods, activities, and journey through life better than some of my offline friends with whom I have close emotional bonds but only a weak sense of the contours of their current life. For those outside the world online social networks, it’s easy to imagine that Facebook friends aren’t real friends. But when I look at who understands my life right now, the question “who are my real friends?” becomes much more complicated. In a sense, I have a whole new category of friends with whom I share a whole new category of intimacy. Social capital theory gives us a robust framework to understand how these relationships work as weak ties (Putnam, 2000), but social capital theory in its present form does not necessarily account for the significance of the new levels of intimacy that I have development with my acquaintances. As online social networks transform our social landscape, fundamental and remarkably durable notions of relationships and identity may evolve.

For many young people especially, the online world now is a parallel social space to the offline world. Just as teenagers carefully cultivate an image in school, through dress, activities, friendships, and conversations, so do teens carefully cultivate a second image offline. In shaping their MySpace or Facebook page, teenagers carefully choose which photos of themselves to display, what books and movies to list as their favorites, who to accept and reject as friends, and what other information and images should adorn their “profile.” Just as students may express one identity in the classroom, another in church, and another on the basketball court, so students can experiment with new identities online. In many cases, the lack of instant social feedback from acts of identity-shaping may allow people to be bolder in experimenting with self-expression; you might be taunted immediately for wearing an Arsenal jersey in the halls of a Manchester high school, but you have some insulation from insults if you post a picture of Adebayor on your profile, at least until your online friends find you. Certain online spaces are specifically designed for this identity experimentation and role-play. James Gee, writing about video games, describes the capacity to create “projective identities” in virtual worlds like World of Warcraft or Second Life, where people can experiment with designing new identities for virtual representations, or avatars, of themselves (Gee, 2007). These games, which require communication not only in game, but through other mechanisms like guild sites, forums, wikis, and blogs, allow people to experiment with new identities in new domains.

Exploration of how these online networks are reforming notions of identity has only just begun, but as one example of the changing social landscape consider the notion of persistence. The mobility of modern life in the West has allowed many people the opportunity to “start over” with a new identity. High school kids go off to college, people change jobs, switch schools, move to a different town. Someone who tires of being the class clown in middle school can try to shape a new identity in a new high school; someone who was a chess nerd in high school can join a party fraternity in college. Part of what enables these new experiments is the chance to abandon an old identity. But what happens to the nature of these changes if people travel from one offline social world to another while maintaining a consistent online social identity? What does it mean to have a single Facebook page from middle school through one’s working life? Is one’s Facebook profile sufficiently malleable to allow significant changes in identity, or does the durable nature of one’s public, online identity constrain people’s efforts to experiment as someone new? Some initial research suggests that the complexity of privacy setting tools in Facebook restricts people’s ability to maintain old ties while entering new communities with different expectations, but we have much more to learn (DiMicco and Millen 2007). Answering these questions will be critical to psychologists and other social scientists, to educators and parents, and to young people in the years ahead.

Over time, the English language has developed such that “virtual” is the antonym of “real,” and if social scientists accept this opposition, they will miss some of the most important phenomena developing in modern social relationships. Relationships developed in virtual or online worlds are not pale reflections of “real” world phenomena. They are a new class of meaningful and profound interactions which researchers will have to consider seriously as they try to understand the evolving nature of society in a Web 2.0 world.

Education

On the slow pace of adoption

There is a subversive joke told amongst education technology advocates that if Rip van Winkle awoke today, he wouldn’t recognize or understand the work in an architect’s office where the drawings are done by AutoCAD, in a mechanic’s garage where computers run diagnostic tests, or at a retail counter where sales are made and tracked by computer. All of these places and interactions would be radically different from the world the Rip fell asleep in, but if Mr. van Winkle walked into a classroom where students were sitting in rows listening to teachers lecture by the blackboard, then Rip would finally feel right at home.

As Web 2.0 technologies reshape nearly every aspect of modern life, their adoption has been relatively slow within the classroom. “Relatively” needs to be put into perspective: three providers alone, PBWiki, Wikispaces, and Edublogs claim to host nearly half a million education-related blogs and wikis. In all likelihood, millions more are hosted on other large public services, on course-management systems like Moodle or Blackboard, on proprietary systems for particular schools, and through other means, though there is no certain way to count. So on the one hand, in terms of raw numbers we are seeing an exponential growth in the adoption of Web 2.0 tools in the classroom, and on the other hand we are seeing very little evidence that this adoption is penetrating normal classroom routines. Reconciling this tension will help us understand the present and future of these tools in the classroom.

Hypothesised benefits

Very little academic research has centered on Web 2.0 tools in education. From the literature that does exists though, one can unearth hypothesized benefits for using Web 2.0 tools in the classroom with students, which can be organized into four major categories. The first category involves increasing engagement. On the one hand, we have some evidence that by allowing students to publish in a public space over which they have some control and ownership, students are motivated by the chance to work in Web 2.0 environments. Several small studies and experiments suggest that students who write using these technologies write longer pieces, write more frequently, claim to take greater pride in their work, and claim to enjoy the process more (Cole, 2004; Dunleavy, Dexter, and Heinecke, 2007; Grant, 2006; Olander, 2007). Students enjoy the chance to use tools in schools that they use socially in the rest of their lives, and they enjoy the opportunities to connect and collaborate (Reich, 2008) . They are also pressured, usually in a positive way, to perform better when their work is public. They appreciate opportunities to connect with the world outside their classroom. At the same time educators also have observed that Web 2.0 tools allow increased participation in class discussions, since those who struggle to communicate orally have another avenue to contribute (Ellis, Goodyear, Prosser, and O’Hara, 2006; Reich, 2008).

Building on this increased engagement, Web 2.0 tools provide new avenues to teach fundamental skills, like writing, communication, collaboration, and new media literacy. One small recent study showed that students who blogged improved their writing skills more than students who completed assignments by hand or through word-processing (Roth, 2007). The author argued that these gains were largely connected to motivation, and while the sample of the study may be small, the results are suggestive if not conclusive. Another recent study showed that students may learn reasoning skills in online communication with their peers more than they learn such skills when modeled by adult instructors (Ellis et al 2006). The capacity of these tools to nurture collaboration skills has been noted by several authors (Reich and Daccord, 2008; Richardson, 2008) who argue that the communally-constructed nature of Web 2.0 spaces forces students to figure out how to work together to create final products. Several researchers have investigated the promises and challenges to use Web 2.0 tools to develop these kinds of collaboration skills (Armetta, 2007; Coyle, 2007). In addition to these established skills, other researchers, like Henry Jenkins at MIT, have noted that the proliferation of new media has necessitated learning a whole new set of literacies, like understanding distributed cognition and transmedia navigation, and of course it makes sense to study new media literacies in the context of new media platforms (Jenkins, 2007).

In addition to developing both old and new fundamental skills, students also need to rehearse for 21^st century situations. As noted above, businesses are adopting Web 2.0 tools at an astounding rate, and students in schools need to have access to the communication media that are at least similar to the types of environments that they will be expected to use in the future (Laurinen and Marttunen, 2007). In one specific example, several researchers have noted that most classroom writing instruction looks absolutely nothing like the kinds of writing that employees are expected to do in the work force. Collaborative writing where iterations are workshopped by multiple people using online media are the norm in many workplaces, whereas these practices are the rare exception in education (Garza and Hern, 2005). Researchers have also recognized that collaborative digital media is an increasingly important part of the civic sphere, both nationally and globally, and Civic Life Online (2008) provides numerous examples both of how people are organizing in the 21^st century to meet civic goals and some early efforts to ready students to participate in these new efforts (Bennett, 2007).

Underlying all of these proposed benefits is the notion that the normal routine of school life is insufficient for preparing students for the new labour force and civic sphere. As Levy and Murnane (2004) argue, computers are increasingly replacing many of the repetitive tasks that used to be performed by significant parts of the human labour force. As a result, schools need to prepare students with new skills where humans have a comparative advantage over computers, especially in terms of complex communication and critical thinking. Since Web 2.0 tools offer new mechanisms for teaching these critical skills which schools so often fail to teach, emerging Web tools can enlighten the critique of the contemporary state of education. The best Web 2.0 projects, which we will turn to in a moment, demonstrate the extraordinary capacity for communication tools to enrich our learning, especially in contrast to an educational system grounded in print technology and an industrial infrastructure. While technology may play a role in highlighting the needs for change, technology alone will not provide reform. As Prof. Barry Fishman has argued, “Technology needs school reform more than school reform needs technology” (Personal Communication).

The potential and reality of Web 2.0 tools

The best instantiations of Web 2.0 tools are extraordinary, and the bulk are, unfortunately, quite ordinary and quite well suited for fairly standard instructional models.

There are hundreds of exemplary examples of Web 2.0 projects (many of which can be found at edublogawards.com), and I’ll highlight just one here. The Flat Classroom Project of 2007, hosted at flatclasroomproject.wikispaces.com, was a collaboration amongst eight classrooms in America, Shanghai, Austria, Qatar, and India. Students in the classroom were divided into 10 teams of students from around the world in order to study the 10 world flatteners from Thomas Friedman’s book The World is Flat (Friedman, 2007). Each team took one of the world flatteners and explored its impact by creating a wiki page which included video, images, and collaboratively composed text. The videos were shot in one country and then “outsourced” to another for editing, so a student might film something in Qatar to be edited in America. The essays that followed the videos were written collaboratively, and the discussion pages “behind” the main project pages show the various project management, communication and teamwork skills that students needed to practice in order to successfully complete the project. In the process of designing the wiki page, students undertook a critical examination of an important phenomena and then worked together to create a multimedia performance of their understanding.

While no studies have looked widely across Web 2.0 tools, there is anecdotal evidence that this kind of project is a very rare exception to two normal states. The first normal state with Web 2.0 is failure. Of the hundreds of thousands of blogs and wikis created, most die on the vine. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as one of the advantages of Web 2.0 is that they are both inexpensive and time-cheap to create, and so one can fail repeatedly before finding a model that works. That said, these failed instantiations are not realizing any of the aforementioned hypothesized benefits. The second normal state for Web 2.0 tools are applications that fit neatly into standard, industrial models of education. In these states, a wiki might be used as an easy way for a teacher to create a website as a one-way delivery device for content, rather than a collaborative medium. Or perhaps a student creates a blog as a kind of online portfolio, but her writings are never published widely, never shared with others, or never commented upon by classmates. In a sense the blog has allowed the student to pass in her homework online, but none of the potentially benefits of publishing within a larger critical, collaborative community are realized. If these two states are indeed the norm, then right now Web 2.0 tools may offer tremendous potential for education, but this potential is not much realized.

There is also anecdotal evidence that the distribution of the use of these tools, sophisticated or not, is skewed towards wealthy, suburban communities rather than poorer rural or urban communities. In theory, free and simple Web 2.0 tools that can build learning communities within and beyond schools should be able to benefit a wide variety of students equitably. Indeed, under-resourced schools might plausibly even benefit disproportionately, since networked computing technologies can be used to bring a wide variety of intellectual resources into low-income communities, where higher-income communities can afford to bring more of those intellectual resources directly into the classroom. Unfortunately, this does not appear to be the scenario currently unfolding.

I hypothesize that the distribution of Web 2.0 tools is indeed uneven, and that schools that are more wealthy, more white, more selective, and more suburban are more likely to employ Web 2.0 teaching tools than schools where students are poorer, non-white, and from urban or rural communities. Though no empirical research has been done on this topic, my hypothesis has been shaped by anecdotal evidence from conversations with educators, online discussions amongst academic technology integrationists, and evaluations of renowned education-related wikis, blogs and social networks. At a first glance, it appears that new opportunities afforded by Web 2.0 tools are primarily available to those students with access to many other types of opportunities. Henry Jenkins (2007) has raised similar concerns around this “participation gap” between wealthy and middle class students with access to participatory online communities and working class students who are being left behind.

Moreover, I expect that there is not only a difference in the distribution of these tools, but qualitative inequities in their application. Researchers have found that instruction in poor, non-white, urban schools is dominated by didactic, teacher-centered forms of instruction, where white, suburban students enjoy more interactive, student-centered teaching (Diamond 2007). I believe that these inequities will extend into the digital domain, and that urban schools in low-income communities will use Web 2.0 tools in more teacher-centered, less collaborative ways than suburban schools in higher-income communities. Furthermore, it seems likely that this didactic instruction in under-resourced schools will be focused on training students on basic skills, and the more interactive instruction in wealthier school will involve nurturing students in the critical thinking and complex communication skills that are essential to the 21^st century (Levy and Murnane 2004). Thus in the absence of policy interventions, it may be that low-income students will have less access to educational experiences with Web 2.0 tools, and the experiences that they do have will be less collaborative, less empowering, and less relevant to the future needs of society.

Future scenarios for Web 2.0 in education

The picture painted above is a fairly gloomy picture of Web 2.0 in education: these tools have tremendous potential to nurture the skills that students will need for the 21^st century civic and economic spheres, and yet these tools remained largely under-utilized, especially in under-resourced environments. And without fairly dramatic intervention, there is no reason to believe that this will change in the future.

Educational institutions are conservative ones. In many systems, teachers are not fully professionalized, and very few systems have incentives that reward teachers for innovative instruction. A teacher who lectures at the front of the class gets paid the same as one who pours his heart into developing multimedia, cross-cultural collaborative projects. So classrooms prove remarkably resistant to change.

Changing the orientation of schools towards 21^st century skills and teaching methods would be hard enough, and it’s made even harder in America by standards-based instruction which directs schools to focus more on 19^th and 20^th century basic skills. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law forces schools, especially schools serving low-performing students, to focus on preparing students to take standardized tests in basic skills almost to the exclusion of every other goal. Within schools who feel threatened by the NCLB regime, there is a strong disincentive to focus on 21^st century skills that will not be measured by standardized tests. The principle at work in America and applicable across all contexts is that education regimes which measure success through standardized tests that demand performances of rote memory are unlikely to produce teachers who prepare their students for performances of 21^st century skill demonstration.

As a result of these disincentives, teachers who want to wisely incorporate technology into their instruction are something of a rarity, and they tend to appear in wealthy, suburban schools where the teachers and administrators face little threat of having any significant number of their students fail to pass state tests. As a result, students who already attend schools with a variety of resource advantages, enjoy the additional instructional advantages of using Web 20 tools to develop fundamental skills and rehearse for 21^st century environments, while their less well-off peers enjoy fewer opportunities in schools with fewer resources. Even extraordinary efforts to put more computers and bigger network connections in urban schools will provide little amelioration to the inequity because the appearance of machines is not going to change the incentive structure which rewards teachers who use computers for drilling students on basic math problems but not for involving them in collaborative, public performances of their understanding. In the most likely scenario unfolding in the United States, and perhaps in other Western countries, free Web 2.0 tools are likely to exacerbate the opportunity/achievement gap, since only schools with the luxury to largely ignore testing requirements will be able to afford the time to experiment with these new tools.

Changing this future scenario would require making some significant changes in the entire educational system. The most likely alternative scenario is one where business leaders demand that the educational system shifts its focus to 21^st century skills, as groups like the Partnership for 21^st Century Skills are trying to do in America. The growing gap between the applications of Web 2.0 tools in the world and in schools may be a critical part of the argument for more 21^st century instruction. Based on that call, national standards and laws would change to reward schools for trying to go beyond the basic skills to teach critical thinking and complex communication, or perhaps teach the basics in the context of these new, critical skills. From there, schools and teachers would have to conduct a campaign of education technology professional development for teachers that used a proportion of resources similar to those invested in getting computers in schools in the first place. Schools of education would need to do more to prepare pre-service teachers for using technology, which would of course require many of the professors in schools of education to learn something about how to go about doing so. These technology reform efforts, however, would need to be driven by a desire to reshape the goals of education, rather than the desire to simply integrate technology. Technology can abet school reform, but it cannot replace it.

There are several other factors which may nudge the future towards or away from greater educational adoption of Web 2.0 tools. As more young teachers, digital natives, enter the teaching service with their technological experience, they may find it easier to adopt new technologies. That said, it is unclear that there is a strong relationship between technological know-how and the use of technology in the classroom. Most teachers learn to teach from their own experience and from mentors, neither of which usually provide an exemplary model for technology use in the classroom.

Certain technological advances could give a nudge towards using more technologies. If the cost of computers drops dramatically, such that 1-1 computing models in schools become broadly feasible, that may allow for greater adoption of a wide variety of computing technologies. It would also help if school adopted software that gave teachers better control over computers, such that teachers could restrict and allow access to certain applications, websites etc. in real time during a class period. Those kinds of structures would make it easier for students to stay on task and easier for teachers to structure and scaffold learning. Internet filters are currently a serious obstacle towards using websites in the classroom. Most filters are knee-high fences around the internet which tech-savvy children jump over easily and which older teachers trip over. In many schools, filters serve to keep teachers off of the internet and away from employing novel teaching strategies while students happily employ proxy servers and other tricks to evade filters. Depending on these technological advances and policy decisions, we may see greater or lesser adoption of Web 2.0 tools in classrooms.

From the perspective of the university, the last thing that might be done to encourage a future where 21^st century skills are taught through practices involving Web 2.0 would be to provide research to the education policy community that can show the benefits of learning 21^st century skills in collaborative online environments and the inequitable distribution of these opportunities.

Gauging the future of the web

The collected works of Shakespeare include three categories of plays. In the comedies, things get better, and in the tragedies things get worse. It is in the histories that we find stories where some people are winners and others are not, and these histories probably provide the best models for predicting the future.

The driving technical principle behind the evolution of Web 2.0 tools is the reduction of the interaction costs of communication, and these costs will continue to be driven down. As these costs are driven down, we will continue to see the emergence of qualitatively new behaviors and the products of these behaviors will be as or more bizarre to future peoples as Wikipedia and Twitter are to us now. These new behaviors will be at some level democratizing, as they will involve harnessing collaborative energy and collective intelligence to meet cooperative goals. Many of these innovations will level hierarchies and include and involve more people in social systems. They will accelerate globalization by making cross-cultural, cross-content, cross-time-zone conversations even cheaper and take less time to achieve.

In some cases, business will use these tools to manipulate people into buying all manner of worthless products, and in other cases business will use these tools to allow consumers to participate in the design of new products that more effectively satisfy human needs. Global warming activists will use the tools to rally massive numbers of people to work to attend to this major crisis, and hate groups will use the tools to rally people together to oppress others. Some schools may use these tools to nurture new skill sets in their students, which may be essential and beneficial to national competitiveness, but create greater inequities between those who have, and those who lack, these 21^st century skills. Other schools will use new media to continue herding students through an outdated, industrialized mode of education. Individuals may develop wider networks of online friends and fewer close ties, and those without reliable internet access may be locked out of the social networks of prestige and power. Web 2.0 tools will erase some of the challenges of collaborating and communicating across time and geography, and they will enact a series of new challenges in the stead of the old.

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

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Certainly, such technological developments have been trumpeted for their alleged egalitarian and democratic progressiveness. However, it is also arguably the case that much of the discussion about new technological developments in this sphere very often submits to the temptation to see these developments themselves as independent of wider societal conflicts of interest. In so doing, a tacit top-down standpoint is adopted which misses the ideological investment by dominant forces in such controversies. It is these issues which the current review seeks to explore with regard to media representations.

The question of popular representations of the working class appears to be currently attracting renewed interest following the fashionable silence on class characterising the 1980s and most of the 1990s (Kirk, 2007). What emerges from this body of work is the argument that, contrary to widespread claims for classlessness, or at least declining class division, the arena of media representations is an important site where the ‘cold war’ of class struggle is fought out (Skeggs, 2004). It will be argued that if this is the case then educators need to acknowledge the significance of this pervasive and tenacious ideological context, and draw appropriate practical and organisational lessons if the systematic reproduction of educational disadvantage is to be interrupted.

In focusing on cultural meaning-making as an important realm in which class division is produced, it is useful to initially spell out this review’s underlying conceptualisation of class as an objective relationship. The working class, and indeed its political capacities, is viewed as a process of becoming. Thus what is fundamentally at issue are the complex dynamics of the ‘working class-in-the-making’ (Rowbotham and Beynon, 2001, p3). It is a standpoint which is grounded in a view of history as involving regular reshaping of the working class in accordance with wider economic and technological restructuring and its new productive requirements. This view aligns with the notion of class as primarily about one’s relationship to the organisation of social production (Ste Croix, 1981). While always manifesting in complex and conditional ways through a variety of more or less transitory visible ’symptoms’ – in the shape of different types of subjectivities, cultural forms and lifestyle behaviours – it is certainly not reducible to such things.

The connection between this reshaping of the working class, and the latter’s changing level of self-consciousness as a class, including as a political agent, is a much mediated one. But, essentially, a viewpoint which takes the working class as a process represents an important place from which to criticise common attempts to simply collapse the future into present states of consciousness; or, in other words, to conflate class as an analytic category into class as a category of consciousness: ‘as long as unequal and exploitative conditions persist, there is a strong likelihood of an awareness of class refiguring, even though the manner in which a new consciousness of class will be expressed is not apparent’ (Rowbotham and Beynon, 2001, p3).

Frozen working-classness

It had been suggested that modern society is partly characterised by tendencies which work to disorganise the working class – economically, politically, and ideologically – as a class, including through ‘pulverizing… [it]… into atoms easily manipulated by the bourgeoisie’ (Lukács, 1924/1997, p66). Various studies of media representations appear to confirm this process – at least as it operates at the ideological level – including the negative implications for the availability of valued independent working class identities. By inflating the individualised cultural realm of personal relations, consumption and self-fashioning of the private self, a situation arises whereby certain subjectivities, cultural attitudes and lifestyles come to be treated as wholly definitive of class. Correspondingly, the formative role of material constraints becomes obscured (Crompton and Scott, 2005; Harry, 2004). Class, the studies claim, is both present, with, for example, television viewers led to negatively judge participants’ assorted cultural and psychological faux pas from the stand-point of the middle class norm, and absent in that we have only isolated individuals with seemingly endogenous character traits, detached from any explanatory material circumstances.

Across a range of TV entertainment formats, including sitcoms, drama, and reality TV, common tropes through which working class people can be devalued relative to middle class identities have been identified. These include excess, waste and disgust; overly authentic; tastelessness; and lacking modernity (Skeggs, 2004). Recent detailed study of reality TV, for example, has shown it to offer an almost bottomless reservoir of scenarios for displaying the ‘moral failure’ of working class attitudes and self-management, such as in relation to child care or diet, for example. It is observed that while ‘”lifestyling” is often mooted as one of the indicators of the demise of class… it is in fact one of the rhetorical techniques used to devalue working-class taste and culture’ (Wood and Skeggs, 2007, p9). One witnesses then a class-based pathologizing of working class personhood and self. Although such studies do point to a few scattered moments of resistance to middle class evaluations, such moments only seem to confirm the overall atmosphere of futility. The final impression is a grim one of individuals trapped within unequal struggles over taste which they must almost always lose. Lawler refers to working class people becoming ‘little more than personae in a bourgeois drama’ (2005, p442).

More contradictory and less pre-closed scenarios do however emerge in other TV formats. A recent example is the series Jamie’s Ministry of Food, documenting the efforts of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver to show how people in the working class town of Rotherham who previously did not cook themselves, can learn an easy recipe in a short time and ‘pass it on’ to others. On one had, highlighting the significance of class in shaping people’s diets appears not to form the official agenda of the program. And indeed, Oliver himself, when subsequently appearing in front of a House of Commons select committee on health inequalities, publicly rejected the notion that poor diet was a class issue: ‘”There are plenty of City boys who earn – well, used to earn – a lot of money who can’t nourish their kids, even on a gold card… I can tell you it is categorically not about money or time. It’s about knowledge… It is a poverty of being able to nourish their family, in any class”‘ (quoted in Pidd, 2008). On the other hand, and despite this classless orientation, the powerful effect of material conditions on people’s dietary habits regularly bursts through in a striking fashion (Lawrence, 2008), as does the message that, contrary to some myths, working class people do not want to live on a diet of unhealthy food.

However, it remains the case that most of the time in the popular media circuits, the notions of change and working class consciousness is a contradiction in terms. There is a freezing of working-classness, such that future consciousness is identified with the permanently ‘fallen’ present, and temporally specific features appear as an inherent and eternal truth (Ollman, 1993). This erasure of potentiality for development is reinforced both by the one-sided perspectives in which people appear as psychologically fixed clichés and caricatures (Garnett, 2001); and by the invisibility of material and social conditions. But if there can be no progressive change in working class consciousness, it is often the case that the only solution to the ‘problem’ of this devalued consciousness is a change out of such consciousness by becoming more like the middle class (Lawler, 2000). And this involves adopting a version of individuality which represents the negation of working-classness. Thus while working-classness is always static (for change means negation of one’s classed position), it is sometimes also inherent and eternally fixed and thus cannot be escaped from via religious-style conversion.

This is illustrated with respect to the theme of cultural development. In most media portrayals, if there is such a thing as working class culture it is not ‘real’ culture but rather ‘non-culture’ in the sense of lacking all intelligence and intellectual aspiration, thus being the opposite to a culture of the mind (Lawler, 2005). Indeed, just as historically there was a distinction in the Social Democratic imagination between the mindless mass resembling inert matter, and the benevolent saviour from above representing pure idea and spirit (thus standing opposed to the notions of working class self-consciousness and self-emancipation) (Draper, 1978), so in contemporary representations the qualities of the mindless mass live on in the now individualised framing of the (overly) embodied working class figure.

Again, either the person is incapable of cultural development (and the raising of consciousness in general terms), or if it does happen it must be at the price of losing that which underpinned their own class identity. One can note in this regard how the tenacious image of working class stupidity or ‘buffoonery’ (Butsch, 2003) echoes the consistent efforts of the British class system to draw ‘a sharp distinction between workers and thinkers’ whereby ‘it was the prerogative of the latter to interpret religion, economics, society and literature for the former’ (Rose, 2001, p7). Such an image is contradicted however by recent scholarship which has further unearthed the extremely rich history of autodidactic culture amongst the British working class (Rose, 2001). Whether through the Mutual Improvement Societies, or the Workers Educational Association (WEA), whole generations of worker-intellectuals were able to utilise the contradictions of culture in order to appropriate specific aspects of canonical ‘Bourgeois’ literature, theatre and music in a way which ‘tended to ignite insurrections in the minds of workers’ (p9). Such a movement for self-education through the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, often based on a suspicion of state provision or middle-class philanthropy, was driven by the realisation of founders of the Labour Party and other self-educated radicals that ‘no disenfranchised people could be emancipated unless they created an autonomous intellectual life. Working people would have to develop their own ways of framing the world, their own political goals, their own strategies for achieving those goals’ (p7).

The record of very many of the educated classes treating this movement with hostility, realising the threat which it posed to their own social position, justifies the founding concern with defending intellectual independence. In this way they followed the balancing act whereby one ‘has to learn regardless of the fact that learning carries certain dangers because out of necessity one has to learn from one’s enemies’ (Trotsky, 1960, p205; see also Au, 2007).

A survey of the continuing reproduction of the thinker-worker distinction in the media realm would need to include the process of decontextualisation of working class people such that they find themselves disorientated in a setting alien to their usual class-stamped milieu. Thus one could note the role of the technological setting of the TV studio in helping foster images of working people as fundamentally feeble-minded and rarely with thoughtful things to say about their condition and the world. This is expressed in the following section of an interview with film maker Ken Loach:

“He believes that TV and broadcasting should be about ‘finding exactly what people have got to say rather than trying to confuse them into inarticulateness’. Instead the media usually ‘works against people being articulate’ by transplanting them into an alien setting, where they face unstated assumptions that cast them in predetermined roles.

‘A television studio is a very hostile place. You can be an articulate person but not be able to express yourself in a TV studio. The lights are very harsh, and you’re blinded. You are in a very strange environment, talking to somebody who is accustomed to a sound-bite politician. They won’t ask the core questions; they will ask the ones that are superficial. So you have to change the question in order to make your point, and that’s a skill in itself. If you put people in a situation where they feel at ease they will talk absolutely clearly. All you have to do is listen and ask the question that is central to the issue’.” (Rowbotham, 2001, p84)

Similar reference to the deployment of technological setting in reality TV to decontextualise people in the interest of devaluing them is also found in Skeggs (2007):

“Reality TV objectifies class by detaching persons from the set of relations (working-class) that make up their experience in the world, to place them inside another set of relations. Objectification is accomplished through the technologies deployed (camera angles, lighting, mis-en-scene, music, etc), performances, speaking to camera; all of which constitute aural and visual evidence about the person and their value. The technologies materialise a subject position. Personhood is bracketed out from the conditions of possibility through which it is constituted.” (p17)

Media coverage of everyday work life

Paradoxical though it seems, the other side of the coin to the counter-position of workers to thinkers is a severe absence of media coverage of working class people at work, as well as of the activity of associated institutions such as trade unions. In other words, central components of the daily lives of the large majority of a national population are treated as somehow not worthy of media attention. As such, yet another opportunity for class-based identification is closed down. The worker appears only as an abstract atomized citizen, rather than a concrete person occupying a specific position within social production. Kirk (2007) notes that ‘it is the economic where the working class is, or should be, most visible’, and that this ‘accounts for the tendency within middle class discourse on class, going as far back as the nineteenth century, to discount or displace or simply mystify economic relations, not to mention emphasizing strategies to weaken and to attack working class institutions… spaces through which working class identities might be voiced and celebrated’ (pp.101-2). Martin (2004) argues that in the ‘consumer is king’ society, the news media adopts a frame summed up in the statement ‘the process of production is none of our business’, and ‘collective economic action is bad’. Regarding the former, there is a clear preference for the process of production and work life in general to remain a hidden realm, with news characterising the lack of disclosure about this sphere as normal.

With reference to trade unions in the United States, Zweig (2000) claims that ‘organizations of working people, especially unions, are systematically ignored or attacked’ (p56). Similarly, despite British trade unions with their seven million members being the country’s largest voluntary organisation, there is minimal coverage of their work. And where they are mentioned it is often in a way which exaggerates their decline, helped by a very inaccurate picture of a disproportionately male and white membership (Harman, 2008). Studies have also argued that in the rare moments of media interest trade unions are generally presented as only ‘dispute’ organisations, and that broader everyday aspects of their work in negotiating central aspects of economic life – not to mention other social contributions such as concerted anti-racist work – remain invisible (Walsh, 1988). Ken Loach goes as far as to argue that this media suppression helps ensure that the ‘whole body of experience and ideas’ represented by the Labour movement ‘has no existence in our political and cultural life; it can only exist as an alternative’ (Rowbotham, 2001, p85).

However, evidence suggests that even when there is news focus on work life its framing can still reflect the over-expansion of the cultural and the personal spheres. Thus stark working class realities may be obscured by nostalgic middle class fantasies about the lives of those working in traditional industries. Kitch (2007), for example, considered media coverage of a coal mine explosion in Sago, West Virginia in which 12 miners died. Through notions of working-class heroes, following their ‘tough’, ‘proud’ and patriotic vocational duties in the ‘tradition of sacrifice’ as part of the national ‘family’, the rural miners were made to bear the weight of others’ romanticised expectations. Consequently, the working class disappears as a category with which to think about workers’ experience. And the notion of working class identity as tied to a conflict of interests is undermined in favour of the suggestion of an essential industrial and national harmony. Thus the nationally told story of Sago was not one about the horrible conditions of mining and a deadly industrial accident’ – one which was preventable if the proper health and safety regulations had been prioritised over cost-cutting – ‘but one about life-affirming acts of faith and sacrifice’ (p125) and ‘down-to-earth people who stand for the best in all of us’ (p128).

This example points to the particular susceptability of workers associated with declining traditional industries to being represented in ways which reflect the needs of commodification. Stangleman et al (1999) trace this process with regard to ex-mining communities which can be mythologised in both positive and negative terms. Attracting inward investment, for instance, may require an emphasis on the supposed impressive work ethic of the ex-miners. In this sense the mining industry is framed within a heritage discourse (Dicks, 2008). Alternatively, attributing a ‘culture of dependency’ may fit nicely into a narrative of modernization, whereby ‘backward’ character traits of the labour force can be blamed for their alleged failure to embrace new working conditions. Again, therefore, essentialising of certain personality traits excises an objective picture of developing class relations in the context of specific social and economic problems affecting former coalfield areas.

Consistent with the lack of attention given to work-based existence and institutions is an over-inflation of the image of the underclass wherein the working class poor are confined to a degraded space peripheral to productive life and thus economic power. This then comes at the cost of obscuring the reality of the overwhelming majority of working class people in regular employment, with, for instance, most part-time workers being permanent workers (Harman, 2008). A notable example of this underclass discourse is the recent concern with ‘Chavs’ (Tyler, 2007). In this case, immediately visible cultural markers such as purported habits of dress, lifestyle, deportment and speech come to signify a range of classic ‘underclass’ traits, such as dirt, sexual promiscuity, ignorance, psychological stasis, work-shy, aggressive masculinities, and over-fertile femininities – ones which continue the well-worn tradition of positing an existential divide between the ‘respectable’ and ‘disreputable’ working class. The overall result is that the wider context of significant rises in inequality, deindustrialization, the often sudden economic ’shock’ experienced by traditional sources of employment, and cuts in welfare services (Thomas and Dorling, 2007), remain hidden.

It is notable that in addition to the role of traditional news outlets in helping to foster such images, there has been an unprecedented growth of internet forums, such as chavscum and urbandictionary dedicated to especially violent expressions of class hate. Tyler suggests that ‘that the level of disgust directed at the chav is suggestive of a heightened class antagonism’ (p18). However, it is also useful to include not only objective increases in inequality in the explanation of such class snobbery, but also a range of political attacks on the working class poor, which involve individualised scapegoating as part of a heightened political authoritarianism (Callinicos, 2001).

Educational implications

These observations enable us to raise two broad issues with regard to education. Firstly, given that the study of media representations highlights various tenacious assumptions about working class people, it can help indicate how certain educational practices may confirm such assumptions and stereotypes, but also suggest how a school classroom can be an important site whereby such perspectives can be challenged. The second issue relates to the theme of the contradictions of culture – where, for example, the form and content of education will both express a middle class bias (Evans, 2006) at the same time as possessing aspects of a more universal value. In order for learners to access the latter, there is a need for educators to acknowledge the former, in the shape of respecting working class students’ own cultural and historical particularities.

This points to a challenge to the above-mentioned narrative characterising individual development exclusively in terms of becoming more middle class. As against the long tradition of students facing a stark alternative of school success or continuing involvement in their neighbourhood and friends, various evidence from community schools and projects ’show that learning is enriched and achievement rises when schools build on the lives and interests of the neighbourhood… This is the challenge whenever communities are at a distance from the orthodox school curriculum’ (Wrigley, 2005, p130; see also Ajegbo, 2007). A similar point applies to the language used in the classroom. Keeping any grammar – whether Cockney or Creole – other than Standard English outside the classroom was the norm for many years. But a growing body of argument has suggested that while general prejudice meant that ‘Black and white working class students would face serious disadvantage without competence in Standard English, both spoken and written’, such competence ‘could only be achieved on the basis of respect for other forms of speech and encouraging its use for school learning’ (Wrigley, 2005, p129).

A related point applies with regard to the highly standardised national curriculum, as well as more passive and disembedded forms of teaching and learning in general which replicates the same disorientating effect of the TV studio mentioned earlier. In the case of the former, by embodying a particular elite vision, it is highly likely to foster boredom, frustration and disengagement unless spaces emerge for critical questioning of the nature of worthwhile knowledge.

Here arises also the constant danger whereby educational practices can provoke a situation in which educators’ stereotypes concerning student’s intellectual inferiority can seem to gain confirmation, and so guide teachers’ perspectives, such that disadvantage is reproduced. This is especially pertinent with regard to the tendency for placing pupils from economically impoverished backgrounds, whose parents are less well educated or who speak little English at home, in ‘low ability’ groups. That these groups ‘are likely to have a less interesting curriculum, based heavily on dull and repetitive exercises without any meaningful context or purpose’ (Wrigley, 2006, p18), would in turn provoke resistant behaviour which seemingly reinforces the negative stereotypes.

Furthermore, the underclass discourse looms large in this respect. The more social and cultural distance between school and wider community/neighbourhood, the easier it is for teachers to ‘generalise from dramatic incidents and conclude that the neighbourhood they serve is nothing but a concrete jungle full of dysfunctional families and drug-crazed youths.’ Thus, any chance to appreciate the community for its positive features, including how its particular interests and social network can foster ‘different patterns of learning’ compared to the orthodox decontextualized classroom agenda, are likely to be sidelined (Wrigley, 2006, p69)

Finally, alongside the risk of excluding a specifically working class route to intellectual achievement, so also we have the appearance in policy of attempted accommodation to the traditional dichotomy between workers and thinkers with its pessimistic view of immutable consciousness. This is seen in the government’s Five Year Strategy for Children and Learners (Department for Education and Skills, 2004) whereby training for work is attributed the key role in making education more relevant and accessible for working class children. There is evidence that this has brought with it acceptance of unspoken limits on which children will be able to develop creativity, cooperation and thinking skills, and what they will be allowed to think creatively about. In this way, the universal entitlement of all students to gain a broad sweep of knowledge is sacrificed to the mantra of ‘preparation for work’.

Anti-racism and the question of the ‘white working class’

In the previous section we saw how media representations commonly work against both the acknowledgement of structured class disadvantage, and also the development of valued independent working class identities. It was also suggested how related tendencies in the educational sphere can lead to pupil alienation and the reproduction of class-based segregation. In what follows these themes will be expanded by considering a trend in certain areas of media discourse to defend a particular section of the working class. In the process, the idea of working class identity as standing for potential progressive and dynamic unity across different national and cultural traditions is undermined. Such a situation provides further support for incorporating respect for the category of the working class within anti-racist practice in school.

As part of the academic criticism of media treatment of the working class, the racialised nature of some of the representations has been noted, especially the way in which particularly white working class people have been targeted.

“Whilst the term chav is a term of abuse directed almost exclusively towards the white poor, chavs are not invisible normative whites, but rather hypervisible ‘filthy whites.’ In a way that bears striking similarities to other national stereotypes of the white poor such as the US ‘white trash’ figure, the chav foregrounds a dirty whiteness – a whiteness contaminated with poverty.” (Tyler, 2008, p25)

There is evidence that there is significant ambivalence in representations of poor whites: on one hand recognising their intimate proximity – geographical, cultural, familial and sexual – with working class blacks and Asians (Tyler, 2007; Collins, 2004); on the other hand still portrayed in terms of an ethnically exclusive grouping. Critics have suggested that whiteness can indeed come in certain situations to signify the ‘unmodern’ – such that poor working class whites are portrayed as specially prone to racism and general cultural backwardness (Skeggs, 2004), thus becoming a vessel into which middle class racism can conveniently be projected. A seemingly primitive psychology thus becomes emblematic of the idea that the working class no longer exists as a viable or privileged political agency. Consider, for example, the following passage from an article by journalist Janet Daly in The Times newspaper:

“This self-loathing, self-destructive tranche of the population is far less assimilable into morally constructive social life than any immigrant group… Those ethnic minorities which bring with them religion, cultural dignity and a sense of family will find a way. The only bar to their steady progress will be the mindless hatred of the indigenous working classes, who loathe them precisely for their cultural integrity… I fear that long after Britain has become a successful multi-racial society, it will be plagued by this diminishing (but increasingly alienated) detritus of the Industrial Revolution.” (Daly, 1994; cited in Haylett, 2001, p359).

One response to this sort of attack has been to defend white working class identity against what are seen as attempts to bolster middle class identities as precisely modern and forward-looking. And an issue is sometimes made of how the ‘white working class’ has been treated with embarrassed silence within an academic discourse primarily concerned with more ‘exotic’ oppressed identities. Haylett (2001), for example, in her analysis of the political rhetoric of welfare reform in the UK, suggests that the white working class is represented as embodying ‘a poverty of identity based on outdated ways of thinking and being’ (p352), and as such forms an obstacle to the development of the modern nation.

“[A] representative middle class is positioned at the vanguard of ‘the modern’ which becomes a moral category referring to liberal, cosmopolitan, work and consumption based lifestyles and values, and ‘the unmodern’ on which this category depends is the white working class ‘other’, emblematically a throwback to other times and places. This middle class dependency on working-class ‘backwardness’ for its own claim to modern multicultural citizenship is an unspoken interest within the discourse of illegitimacy around the white working-class poor” (pp364-5)

While there is a focus here on the gains for middle class identities, there is no expression of concern with the implications for working class identities. This includes the implications of a focus – demonstrated by the media, but also echoed in academic studies – on the white working class as a distinct identity separate from the working class in general. In fact, there is a danger that in defending ‘white working class culture’ it is illegitimately reified as an oppressed ethnic grouping; that an apparent defence of working class people may work to undermine the specificity of the category of working class as representing underlying commonality of interest between groups of workers.

This danger has been highlighted in the recent series of television programmes which have taken the theme of the marginalized white working class and given it a distinct slant which is arguably open to Far-Right political appropriation (Evans, 2008). BBC2’s White Season series screened in March 2008, and carrying the subtitle ‘Is white working class Britain becoming invisible?’, presented a pessimistic picture of the post-industrial white working class as forming a hermetically sealed cultural unit under siege in a multicultural Britain. It was portrayed as resenting the loss of its identity and rights to its own cultural space to non-white immigrant communities in the competition for social welfare, and as banished to a voiceless wilderness of disenfranchisement and disorientation. This was the predominant framing of the series as a whole even though it was particularly three out of the series of five programmes which were most representative of this line: Last Orders is about a Working Men’s Club in Bradford; Rivers of Blood considers the fortune of Enoch Powell’s dire warning in 1968 about the social consequences of immigration and multiculturalism to Britain; and The Poles are Coming is about the tensions which are claimed to have been generated by recent immigration of East European labourers into Peterborough.

Richard Klein, who as the BBC’s commissioner for documentaries commissioned the White Season series, explains his motivation in an article entitled: ‘White and working class: the one ethnic group the BBC has ignored’. Here he argues that in the midst of the debate over the consequences of the changes in Britain over the last two decades wrought by globalisation, mass migration and economic upheaval, ‘one voice has been largely absent: that of the white working class’. He notes a common perception of the white working class as ‘reactionary or backward’ whereas once they ‘were seen as an integral and respected part of our national life’. The TV series is presented as a factual vehicle by which the white working class express their perception of themselves as what an interviewee in one documentary called ‘the forgotten people’. Klein wished to convey the ‘complexity of working class attitudes’, for ‘it is far too easy for the middle classes, who benefit from cheap labour – whether it be from a Polish plumber or a Ukrainian nanny – to fail to understand the difficulties facing the white working class’.

“In part as a consequence [of] multiculturalism, the irony is that many of the white working class see themselves as an oppressed ethnic minority too, and lower down the ladder than other ethnic groups on the hierarchy of victimhood. They complain of double standards and hypocrisy, pointing out that the media revel in telling stories [about] Asian and African immigrants, but ignores tales from the white working class. Every other culture, they argue, is revered except that of the indigenous population… they feel abandoned. I am in no way a spokesman for the white working class. But I think the message from the White Season is a troubling one. In the modern world’s rush to embrace diversity and globalisation, we cannot afford to ignore the voices of any section of society which feels bewildered by the pace of change. If we don’t give everyone a voice, it may only lead to further social division.” (Klein, 2008)

In contrast to the concerns of radical film makers who have sought to give voice to excluded sections of the working class by highlighting the injustices and material and social fetters of class society as a whole (Bromley, 2000; Rowbotham, 2001), the issue is now transformed into one concerning competition within the working class for resources and recognition.

This view of the white working class as an oppressed ethnicity seeking recognition is also found in another journalistic intervention which can be seen as part of the same tendency. Michael Collins’ book entitled The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class (2004), based on his Channel 4 television documentary The British Working Class, is presented as partly inspired by the growing ‘demonisation of the white working class’, especially ‘by middle class progressives who had traditionally come out fighting these underdogs’ corner, or reporting their condition as missionaries or journalists’ (p8).

Collins argues that the contemptuous portrayal of the white working class led him to write his book because ‘it ignored both the detailed experience and the wider history of the white working class, and simply reduced them to a caricature similar to that in which they were cast centuries before’ (p8). As against this he offers a history of the ‘white working class that dominated the area [of Southwark, in South East London] for so long [and] … the inside story of a tribe on a particular reservation and during a particular period, as told by an erstwhile native son’ (p11). On the website for the Channel 4 documentary Collins complains that ‘whites were not allowed the status of an ethnic group, and in the urban areas with which the white working class were synonymous, anything that identified them with a culture, a history, and a singular experience was omitted from any dialogue or literature that took multiculturalism as its theme’.

What results is an exercise in essentializing white working class culture such that the rich historical processes of ongoing reconstitution of the working class through successive waves of immigration (Winder, 2005) disappear from view. This includes, for example, the key role of Irish (not to mention also Jewish) labour in the area discussed by Collins, and the central function of the Labour movement – especially during periods of heightened economic conflict – in breaking down ethnic separatism and encouraging class-based forms of occupational identification to come to the forefront (Davis, 2000; see also Virdee, 2000). Collins instead provides a deeply nostalgic and romanticized image which relies on very minimal coverage of the realities and struggles of workplace life. In this way, it ‘flies in the face of historical-geographical processes of place and community construction and ignores the fact that cultures are just as relationally (“and dialogically”) constructed as individuals, and a good deal more porous’. Consequently, what results is ‘the building of a ‘”particularist theory of justice” with respect to cultures as embodied things‘, thus advocating ‘a politics that would effectively freeze geographical structures of place for evermore’ (Harvey, 1996, p342).

It can be seen as simply one of the many historical examples of ‘ethnic’ divisions being invented arbitrarily through any range of different characteristics being inflated into an imaginary and determining essence called ‘ethnicity’. One witnesses in particular varieties of the appeal which seem uncomfortably close to the rhetorical tropes of what Balibar (1991) terms ‘neo-racism’. That is to say

“a racism whose dominant theme is not biological heredity but the insurmountability of cultural differences, a racism which, at first sight, does not postulate the superiority of certain groups or peoples in relation to others but ‘only’ the harmfulness of abolishing frontiers, the incompatibility of life-styles and traditions; in short, it is… a differentialist racism.” (p21; italics in original)

Here then is a discourse which illustrates how ‘culture can also function like nature’, as a ‘way of locking individuals and groups a priori into a genealogy, into a determination that is immutable and intangible in origin’ (p22). Furthermore, this discourse also proposes to explain racism as resulting from what is pilloried as ‘abstract’ anti-racism. Attempts to go against human proclivity to maintain our ‘natural’ cultural difference and particularity, will, it is claimed, inevitably result in eruptions of collective elemental aggressiveness.

The pertinent nature of these observations for grasping the underlying pessimistic assumptions of claims around the white working class is exemplified in a final study by Robson (2000) looking at Millwall Football Club. Here one can see the possible dangers of trying to defend what is said to be aspects of ‘authentic’ white working class culture against middle class hegemony. The study highlights the moral and cultural forms expressed by Millwall fans, including the ‘rather menacing sense of carnival’ (p228), traditional masculinities, and racist taunts, underpinned by the values of ‘physical and personal inviolability, contempt for pretension, volatile emotionality and ruthless gallows humour’ (p227). He suggests that this represents a working class identity which has resisted attempts by middle class ‘outsiders’ to introduce their own sets of values and standards. He argues that prevalent media characterisations of Millwall as a racist subculture manages to ‘obscure the complex realities of relationships between Millwallism, identity and race’ (p225). And he suggests that fans’ resistance to anti-racist initiatives can be explained in the context of defending ‘particular working-class identities and traditions’:

“The central perspectives of Millwallism are implacably opposed to liberal culture. Anti-fascist ’stances’ are associated with leftist local authorities and liberal progressivism in general. If, as I have argued, Millwallism is best understood as an expression of defensive but culturally entrenched opposition to bourgeois cultural hegemony, then a certain reluctance to embrace ‘politically correct’ moral perspectives is one of its central perspectives…” (p227)

Robson adopts a discourse of the rights of white working class Millwall fans to their own specific cultural traditions, traditions which middle class activists derogate for their backwardness, thus risking ‘driving underground… white claims to pride in cultural identity’ with the effect that ‘new forms of aggressive nativism’ (p229) may be consolidated.

“This highlights the complex ways in which Millwall is kept Millwall less out of white nativism pure and simple than a demand for the right to the kind of cultural particularism which is perceived as acceptable when practised by other groups than the white working class, and positively encouraged among them by the liberal/leftist culture of municipal anti-racism in inner London.” (p230)

Rather than pointing to the potential for a progressive transformation of ‘white working class’ identity into ‘working class’ identity, and exposing the political factors which hold it back, the projected future is solely one of a struggle for recognition by eternally competing frozen cultural particularisms. There is little analysis in Robson’s work of the wider context of economic decline and restructuring, nor of the role of external political forces, in forming an environment in which ‘tribalist’ divisions within the working class thrive (and often attract disproportionate media attention). This is despite the function of such factors in working in the interest of the very middle class hegemony which Robson is supposed to be targeting.

Furthermore, it is interesting that collective expressions of racism are explained by means of a particular version of crowd psychology which reintroduces assumptions about the immutability of working class consciousness. Thus the issue is one of provocation (by anti-racism) of people’s aggressive instincts for maintaining cultural distinctness: ‘The masses are presented with an explanation of their own “spontaneity” and at the same time they are implicitly disparaged as a “primitive” crowd’ (Balibar, 1991, p23).

There have been attempts to transfer similar notions of the white working class into educational contexts – for example, the idea that one fights racism by affirming the particularity of culturally sealed collective units, as when it is argued that white working class youth should be provided with a reconstructed white identity (Fekete, 1998). By contrast, an alternative pedagogic approach to identity involves an attempt to take account of historical struggles to overcome conditions of economic and social degradation and of cultural segregation in the locality to which the school is tied (Fekete, 1998). The latter approach would then form a basis for understanding the origin of anti-immigrant themes which represent the corruption of the progressive traditions.

Consistent anti-racism involves both an emphasis on black and white unity, and an acknowledgement of the class relations at work, thus reasserting the importance of space for affirming independent working class identity. This issue of class simply can no longer be ducked. And against recent attempts to counter-pose the needs of Black and white working class pupils in a context of scarce resources (Mahamdallie, 2005), it is necessary to emphasise their common interest in well resourced education protected from the logic of market competition and associated managerial standardization. One of the challenges here is the way that segregating practices in which, for example, Black pupils are more likely to be put in bottom sets, reinforces stereotypes, including amongst students themselves, that they are the ‘under-achievers’ (Bennett, 2005).

All of these points would also require improvement in the shallow and tokenistic multiculturalism which has been previously offered: ‘Traditional culture was frozen and dynamic fusions were overlooked. More than this, multicultural education often stopped short of challenging racism’ (Wrigley, 2005, p130; see also Ajegbo, 2007).

Conclusion: some future trends

The future direction in which representations of the working class may tend is tied to wider economic and political developments. On one hand, it is possible that continuing increase in inequalities and social polarisation, together with a growing authoritarian emphasis on criminalizing working class youth, and demonising welfare recipients, will find its corresponding supportive images in the media. In addition, various historical reference points indicate how, in response to growing popular discontent around the effects of economic recession, there is a strong probability of increasingly racialised representations, scapegoating the most vulnerable sections of the working class, and so functioning to weaken potential for building unity.

This could unfold in a direction indicated by the White Season documentary The Poles are Coming, which painted quite a dark portrait of apparently inevitable division and conflict between recently arrived immigrant labour and the host labour force. In this way, the extensive current examples of mixed workplace cultures and trade union efforts to recruit Eastern European workers as members and as full-time union organisers, remained out of view. We have also witnessed other attempts by influential social commentators to explicitly respond to economic recession by reasserting the role of the white working class as the ‘true losers’ who should be targeted with ’special measures’ to make them ‘more competitive’ and prevent a seemingly natural resentment being targeted at East European or non-white beneficiaries of jobs and welfare services (Travis, 2008).

On the other hand, depending on the wider political balance of forces, not least an increased likelihood of a more co-ordinated trade union response to recession-related cuts in people’s jobs, pay, and conditions (Harman, 2008), there is a fertile ground in which more class-conscious representations could flourish, marked by a greater historical awareness. This potential unity also finds its roots in the high levels of racial integration relative to the European average as measured at the levels of geographical neighbourhoods, workplaces, and the family, and the already deep commonalities in the lives of working class people of different nationalities and cultural backgrounds (Simpson, 2008). The role of the anti-war movement in building unprecedented political unity between Muslims and non-Muslims could also be a significant building block here.

Earlier on we saw how technology of various kinds – whether the TV studio, or the internet – provided means for reinforcing derogatory representations, whether directly in their role as dissemination hubs, or indirectly through predisposing participants to behave in ways which would seem to justify particular stereotypes. Despite the existence of such examples, one can predict that ongoing triumphantist claims for technology as itself beckoning a more egalitarian or classless future will continue largely unabated.

Some additional remarks can be made concerning the prospects for both the propagation of derogatory stereotypes by internet forum participants, and for online efforts to challenge them. Despite early claims for the openness of online newsgroup technology as an alleged guarantor against the seclusion and uninterrupted self-confirmation of the worldview of groups fostering hate speech (Zickmund, 1997), this has been proven very over-optimistic. The reason largely relates to limitations of the Usernet and bulletin board format more generally in terms of fostering open political discussion. The lack of a moderating role, of accountability, and of engagement with those holding differing viewpoints, mean that provision of rational argument and supporting evidence can be simply bypassed by many users, and self-reinforcement dominate over interaction and exchange (Davis, 2005). Thus the prevailing tendency for personal attacks and harangues has often been commented on. Furthermore, online talk ’segregates participants into a multitude of narrowly specialised discussion groups… The internet, generally, produces severe audience fragmentation’, and even ‘when participants do interact, they often talk past each other without enough listening to others, particularly those with whom they disagree’ (Davis, 2005, p123).

In cases where online reinforcement of shared stereotypes can grow in a symbiotic relationship with popular TV entertainment – such as the invented characters populating certain comedy programmes (Tyler, 2007) – then constantly evolving opportunities for apparently pleasurable dehumanisation flourish. Indeed, nourished by the heightened versatility of internet multimedia technology, and a social setting characterised by geographically disparate, isolated individuals, novel manifestations of the fetishistic fascination with the Other characterising colonial anthropology are made possible. Opportunities for resistance will depend on the relative resources of the demonised groups which, as, for example, in the case of working class poor, remain very limited. However, it is possible to envisage more hopeful scenarios, albeit ones which again are largely dependent on the trajectory of the wider working class movement. Nevertheless, it seems wise not to foreclose the possibility of such demonised groups following, in unpredictable ways, the example of stigmatised groups such as gays for whom internet forum participation may have contributed to a situation whereby identity ‘demarginalisation’ can take place and stereotypes debunked (McKenna and Bargh, 1998).

If there is a role for education here it may be partly signalled in the evolving pan-European co-operative development of more radical programmes of critical literacy skills. Such skills could be brought to bear on students’ understandings of media images and the different interests at stake (Wrigley, 2006). And this could also beckon a greater willingness to embrace controversies and contradictions as part of the official teaching curriculum.

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See: www.chavscum-resurrection.co.uk

See: www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=chavscum

See www.bbc.co.uk/white/

See also the study produced by the Young Foundation entitled The New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict (Dench, Gavron and Young, 2006) for a good illustration of this tendency.

See: www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/R/racedebate/talkingpoint/feature/michael-collins.html

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

Young people in Britain today are faced with multiple challenges, experiencing the effects of constantly changing political regimes and economic systems of a wider society characterised by information society, knowledge economy, globalisation and internationalisation (Olssen 2004). These locally and globally experienced effects have a positive impact on the way young people learn in schools and enjoy life with family and friends both in proximity and in distant places, in particular through the use of ICT in school and at home. However, there are some alarming consequences, which are manifested as youth disaffection, lack of civic participation (Younis 2005) and social exclusion (Newburn, Shiner et al, 2005) and decline of community. In recent years young people in Britain have been seen as a problematic subject. The youth is attributed to anti-social behaviour, drugs and alcoholism, teenage pregnancy and is often demonised. There is a sense of crisis invoked in public discourse such as media and political debate about young people and their role and place in the society.

However, sceptics have called the crisis into question as to what extent we should believe stories about the crisis. Although many would be in favour of initiatives, they would argue that occasionally crises are used to justify initiatives, thus a composed approach to thinking and planning the initiatives is necessary. Sears and Hyslop-Margison (2007) have argued that “much of the discourse and reform in the area of citizenship education presently reflects a cult mentality that fails to consider the nuances of reasoned educational reform” (p43). Of approaches widely known to tackle youth disaffection and disengagement are the setting up of the Social Exclusion Unit and government policy such as “Every Child Matters” concerning social inclusion and wellbeing of young people (Hayton and Hodgson 1999). These policy and task forces are targeted to a group of disaffected young people who were, or were at risk of becoming, socially excluded (Hallam, Rogers et al 2006). Disaffection and disengagement is not a problem confined to those at-risk young people. There is a general tendency that young people and children in Western countries do not seem to be engaged in the learning experiences that the school offers (Hayton and Hodgson 1999; Riley, Ellis et al 2006).

Young people’s disaffection has been widely researched (eg Craig and Coles 2002). It is argued that the debate on social exclusion has paid little attention as to how schools and teachers might rethink and devise more inclusive policies and practices for teaching and learning (Riley and Docking 2004), although guidelines on creating ‘inclusive’ schools have been published (eg Ofsted 2002). Mentoring is one of the most talked about forms of intervention aimed at reducing youth disaffection (Piper and Piper 2000; Newburn, Shiner et al 2005; O’Donnell, Bielby et al 2007; Rose and Jones 2007). Research suggests that in mentoring disaffected young people many relationships did not progress beyond basic ‘mundane’ social interaction (Newburn, Shiner et al 2005). Furthermore, regarding the risk of NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training), research addresses that projects should give them a sense of ownership and offer an alternative learning environment from school, and looking at individuals in a holistic way (Spielhofer, White et al2005) and developing what Cote (1996, in Bynner and Parsons 2002) describes as “identity capital” comprising educational, social and psychological resources.

Findings and conclusions of the research seem to suggest the importance of offering opportunities of recognising young people’s achievements, interagency collaboration and support of young people in their transitions into other education, training or employment options (Britten et al 2005). Especially research into the nature of engagement and how relationships are built in learning environments (in schools, homes and other spaces of socialisation) is imperative. Beside mentoring and promoting interagency collaboration for supporting young people, the understanding of pupils voice (learner voice) is crucial in supporting disaffected and disadvantaged pupils (Riley, Ellis et al 2006). Riley and Docking argue that although recent government initiatives have drawn attention to the importance of listening to young people, there are scarce attempts to pay attention to their views about their education experience (2004). Drawing on two studies (see Riley and Rustique-Forrester, 2002) of disaffected and disadvantaged pupils they analysed what can be learned when taking their views into account (Riley and Docking, 2004).

All these initiatives and projects mentioned may have offered a short-term solution and indeed may have made an impact, but the challenge lies in ensuring the sustainable support and special provision and taking a holistic approach to working with young people. Provided that the rapidly changing society has constantly changing demands on individuals, groups and their environment, it is important that educators, carers, and those who work with young people evaluate continuously and consider as to what would be the appropriate and best provision and support for young people.

Constructing identities

The core of the problem of youth disaffection and disengagement seems to reside in the way that young people are perceived and therefore perceive themselves in positive terms, or rather lack of it. Several decades ago, our conceputalisation of identity drew on the psychological concept of identity (Erikson 1963). Other sibling psychological terms such as self-concept, self-efficacy (Bandura 1997), or self-esteem have constituted orthodoxy and are largely focused on the individual as a centre of investigation. Within the last few decades, this view has been challenged as it tends to view identity as socially constructed, fluid, multiple, relational, and dialogic and open for re-description (Brubaker and Cooper 2000). Against an essentialist view, Hall insists that identities are never unified and, in late modern times, increasingly fragmented and fractured; they are never singular but multiply constructed across different discourses, practices and positions (1996).

History in person: identity from a sociocultural perspective

If we were to understand how young people build relations with social others and make connections with community and the wider world, the concept of identity should incorporate a historical, developmental and sociocultural view. Holland and Lachicote present a review on the new sociocultual studies of identity” (2007, p101) in association with the legacy of Vygotsky and Mead. They argue that “Vygotskian developmental concepts help us to understand how people come to be able to organize themselves in the name of an identity” (2007, p134). This view is highly relevant to understand the way in which young people not only re-author their personal narrative, but also transform the context. It would help us understand the way in which young people develop different and alternative trajectories and envision life chances through reflecting on the individual history together with peers, teachers, and parents and how they themselves see their worth and significance in the collective history in relation to the school and its wider community.

In studies of youth culture (eg Epstein 1998), identity development involves an exploration of alternative futures (eg Grotevant 1997). Hundeide (2004) draws on Giddens’ notion of late modernity’s sense-making as “personal meaninglessness – the life that has nothing worthwhile to offer” (Giddens 1991, p9). She coins a term “identity alternative” in examining new counterculture of youth movements (2004). Perhaps it may be fair to say that the youth’s disengagement and disaffection from education and learning can be viewed in the way in which young people turn to alternative identity and lifestyle to cope with late modernity’s personal meaninglessness. Countercultural groups are said to offer a feeling of belonging to a community, strong identification and emotional attachment to a charismatic leader, a new identity with which young people commit themselves to new goals and activities and a place that has new order and new reality. If these are to be the key to keeping young people involved in learning for skills and development of personality, would there be a role of education and learning in and out of schools? How can teachers and carers work with them?

The role of education – how to approach the issue of “identity crisis”

Our orthodox, conventional and commonsense certainly tells us that we teachers and other carers including family members have got to work together to support and nurture a positive learning environment. In the testing and exam culture, young people know from an early age whether they will be successes or failures in the education system. Many of those disaffected youth have broken families and working parents who do not get the kind of support needed outside work. An additional factor is overcrowded schools with teachers overloaded by work who cannot simply cope with those personal and pastoral needs of the youth to nurture their potential and provide the context and support for unlocking their talent and creativity. Furthermore, in addressing the role of education, I ask how it is possible to make the classroom activities and lessons meaningful and relevant to young people as sustained engagement with young people in education (and training). This should be applied to not only the disaffected youth but also to all young people and children

How do we capture young people’s imagination and interests? One possible way forward is to help them develop new identities and afford them to author/narrate possible selves (Markus and Nurius 1986) for finding a trajectory and connections with their own family, community and a wider world. Hassan’s point about history is relevant here: “any learning a child encounters in school has a previous history. It seems… that this history favours children differently in today’s industrialized pluralistic societies” (2002, p124). A task for educators and those around young people might be to provide opportunities to explore and gain awareness of history and the sense of connectedness to the community and the world beyond as well as a sense of historical change in terms of the past, present and future. In other words, the focus of the learning should be geared toward creating learning activities where young people can author (and re-author) narratives of self that recognise individual uniqueness, whilst maintaining a sense of historical continuity and cultural cohesion to the community in which they are based. It is this reflection that is essential for forming, developing and transforming to a positive, forward-looking identity.

Technological, information society and its impact on the formation of identity (or identities)

Beyond the quick fix of making policy, acting with initiatives and projects, it is important to step back and look at this issue as a question of identity and ask how the changes in society impact on individuals, groups and communities. The crisis about young people mentioned earlier seems to address the question of identity formation. It is possible to analyse the breakdown of community and understand socialisation of young people in terms of the use of technology and its impact on identity formation. Acharya (2007) questions “how the wide-ranging uses young people are now making of new information and communication technologies and global media may possess the potential to transform their cultural identity and how educational institutions should understand and respond to this evolving cultural reality” (p340). She seems to suggest that there is a sense in which we are undergoing an identity crisis (2007). With the rapid innovations in information and communication technology (ICT) we go through in the global, postmodern and information era, it is important to examine how identity construction has become increasingly complicated. Appadurai (1996) and Castells (1996) propose that we look at the modern network society dynamically, in terms of disjunctive, networks of flow of things, people, ideas and finance that get transformed and organized. These features of the society seem to have bearing on the late-modern meaninglessness with which young people find difficult in coping when it comes to identity formation.

It is in this sense that the question of how ICT is involved in the transformation of cultural identities, or any notion of identity markings inscribed in individuals in the era of changing patterns of global and local image, and information spaces, has implications for learning in the 21^st century (Wells and Claxton 2002). Wells and Claxton, in their edited book titled Learning for Life in the 21^st century, present a forum in which social scientists and educational researchers have sought to gain inspiration from sociocultural perspectives. Among the new ideas, approaches and potentials to the future of education, the role of technology (ICT in education) and narratives are most important issues as they have transformative capacities of human mind, society and the environment. The radical and rapid changes have made a profound impact in the way we understand early childhood education, human development, the nature of participation and language as mediational means.

Problem of social participation

Other review papers in the project have focused on the issue of citizenship and democracy and discussed the implications of technology for identity construction. Also the Ajegbo report (DFES 2007) has documented challenges and implications for diversity and citizenship education. Therefore, I shall not replicate the discussions of new forms of participation in the society. Beyond the notorious labelling of youth as the ill of the society, the problem of youth disaffection and disengagement in education and training has far-reaching consequences. Research has shown that disaffection and disengagement with learning is closely related to the problem of social participation, disintegration of the traditional sense of community bound by place, nation, race, ethnicity and other social categories. Lamenting over a demise of close-knit community, some scholars seek an alternative to characterise the current condition. Termed as ‘thin communitarianism’, Olssen (2004) argues for a version of cosmopolitan democracy. If survival and security are to be possible, then strategies that “preserve the openness of power structures, based on dialogical communication are necessary as a way of keeping the conversation going” (Olssen 2004, p231). Is it possible such conversations have been taking place? Nick Couldry (2008) argues that digital storytelling is one way of keeping the conversation going.

In extending the notion of identity argued in this paper, I turn to a specific practice called digital storytelling, which has become increasingly popular in empowering youth and engaging those marginalised and disaffected from the mainstream.

Digital storytelling

Storytelling is primary and fundamental to human society. It can function as a cornerstone of the society passing on wisdom and can share enduring values and expectations for the youth to deal with the life that is not yet imagined (Farmer 2004). In recent years, a storytelling (or narrative) approach has been popular in the tackling of problems in development of literacy and other cognitive skills and children’s librarianship (Farmer, 2004). In the digital age, when adding audio and visual features to this ancient human practice, digital storytelling has been practiced in solving problems of education in various settings. One of the pioneers in the practice of digital storytelling is James Lambert (2002), who established the Center for Digital Storytelling in the U.S. The center evolved out of the community arts practices, helping people make art for civic engagement, and the media explosion of the late 1980s and 1990s. It assists people in making short media pieces that combine a spoken narrative, still images, and design elements using digital photo manipulation and digital video editing tools. The visual culture is being used to bring people back into language and the written word. In the last few years, digital storytelling has emerged as a powerful teaching and learning tool that engages both teachers and their students (Robin 2008). It allows computer users to become creative storytellers through the traditional processes of selecting a topic, conducting some research, writing a script, and developing an interesting story (Robin, 2008). The claim with digital storytelling is that it can be used to engage and motivate both teachers and students, but the current ICT lesson remains mainly to enhance technical (computer operational) skills without much consideration to wider issues such as enhancing the knowledge in the subject matter and the real world needs of today’s classrooms (Robin, 2008). Hicks suggests that the current use demands a challenging task for developing the ability to think about and use technology in critical, creative, and responsible ways (2006). I would like to show here that technology in the classroom, in particular in digital storytelling plays an important role apart from enhancing the student’s motivation for learning. In other words, it would help create a space for collaborative thinking and opportunity to reflect critically the student’s sense of self in relation to others.

Some recent research suggests that education can help bridge in-school and out-of school literacy practices by encouraging students to engage in hybrid texts that draw on multiple modes of representation. Research in the US by Ware and Warshcauer (2005) concerns ‘the digital disconnect’ between the diverse ways that students use the internet at home and the narrower ways that they use it at school to discuss the concept of hybridity as a way to bridge it. The analysis is focused on the students’ hybrid texts and practices in a digital storytelling project.

Apart from the visible features of collaborative capturing, interpreting and sharing of experiences both in and out of classroom settings, digital storytelling possibly offers an innovative way of dealing with the problem of young people’s disengagement and disaffection. I consider three principal characteristics of digital storytelling which contribute to the nurturing and fostering of identities. Firstly, digital storytelling employs multimodal representation. It tends to appeal to those students who have poor literacy skills or under-achieve academically and those who have learning difficulties. Unlike a traditional sense of storytelling taught in the formal subject lesson, which emphasises a particular, often one-directional, sequential, rigid structure and content of stories, what is powerful about digital storytelling are digital multimodal texts (Hull and Nelson 2005), in particular, the powerful roles that digital multimodal texts play in real-world contexts, revealing semiotic relationships between and among different, co-present modes. It is in these relationships, as Hull and Nelson argue, that the expressive power of multimodality resides. It is possible that through digital storytelling young people with less academic confidence and cognitive skills can overcome difficulties in telling experiences and make sense of them.

New social space – a new form of engagement

Secondly, digital storytelling offers new performative social space for young people. Advancement of technology has made us rethink the notion of space when it comes to social space (Lefebvre 1991 (1974)). For Lefebvre, understanding the importance of space is linked to the reproduction of social relations. With virtual space made possible by internet technology, new forms of social relations and practice of communication such as social networking have emerged. Drawing on new social space and social relations, a new form of engagement with non-traditional students was explored beyond the traditional notion of literacy in a space called “the Third Space” (Gutiérrez 2008). In her case study of the Migrant Student Leadership Institute, a collective Third Space is interactionally constituted, in which traditional concepts of academic literacy and instruction for students from non-dominant communities are contested and replaced with forms of literacy that privilege and are contingent upon students’ socio-historical lives, both proximally and distally. What is reported in her study includes hybrid language practices; the conscious use of social theory, play, and imagination; and historicising literacy practices linking the past, the present, and an imagined future (Gutiérrez, 2008). They are akin to the benefits and advantages, which the proponent of digital storytelling claim. Clearly, “the Third Space” is an alternative learning space where young people can explore their identities and imagine alternative futures. With the open-endedness of storytelling, digital storytelling makes it possible for dialectical transformations of young people in relation to others as well as possible selves which they envision. Digital storytelling is open-ended, transformative and critically reflective and dialogic. Therefore, the digital disconnect (between school and outside school) would provide young people liminal space (ie in between), offering a site for them to explore a new sense of creativity.

Furthermore, the alternative space that digital storytelling offers for learning and exploring their creativity can be used as a resource for critical reflection. Through the creative process of digital storytelling, it produces aesthetically appealing, multimodal expression of selves in relation to social others. It then creates a dialogic opportunity and space, beyond physical space in which students’ collaborations with peers and teachers and active engagement in making sense of their own experiences and the world around them can be facilitated and encouraged.

Mediation

Couldry argues that digital storytelling makes possible the open-ended dialectical social transformations (Couldry 2008, p374). Digital storytelling represents a novel distribution of a scarce resource. A key concept underlying digital storytelling is the concept of “mediation” in a complementary, partner (and dialectic) concept ‘mediatization’. Of relevance to the current discussion of the social consequence of digital storytelling is a transformation of societies. According to Couldry, we approach digital storytelling as mediation. Beyond the term used in the media research, which is the act of transmitting something through media, mediation is referred to as “the intervening role that the process of communication plays in the making of meaning” (p379). Drawing on Silverstone’s definition, Couldry emphasises a non-linear aspect of mediation, describing it as the dialectical process and suggests that understanding how processes of communication change the social and cultural environments that support them as well as the relationships that individuals and institutions have to that environment and to each other (Couldry, p380). In line with the Vygostkian concept of mediation (Vygotsky 1982), digital storytelling can be viewed as a meaning-making process and it can be used as this paper’s main focus for the way in which technology-mediated storytelling contributes to transformation of the individual (or identity) as well as transformation of the social and cultural environment.

With respect to a claim to re-engage community and a potential contribution to democracy, Bennett examined the way in which young people participate in online communities and the relationship between online action and civic and political engagement (2007). Observing a social anxiety arising from youth disaffection with politics, Loader and other scholars explore alternative approaches for engaging and understanding young people’s political activity with a particular focus on the adoption of information and ICT. They consider ICT as a means to facilitate the active engagement of young people in democratic societies (Loader 2007). Likewise, Couldry suggests that the digital storytelling “represents a correction of those latter hidden injuries since it provides the means to distribute more widely the capacity to tell important stories about oneself… as potentially political agent… in the public domain” (2008, p386).

Digital storytelling as a social practice of remembering

Lastly, as in any storytelling and narrative, digital storytelling and its outputs can be a resource for making inter-generational links between the youth and their parents and older generations. Researchers involved in the large international have reported that the experience of making of digital stories has a profound effect on human collective and personal memory. “Recorded experience becomes a life memory, and, as a communication medium, is sharable with others to enhance our sense of community” (Mase, Sumi et al2007, p213).

A group of Finnish researchers present an analysis of the organization of experience-related activities in the mass event focuses on the active role of technology-mediated memories in constructing experiences. Continuity, reflexivity with regard to the self and the group, maintaining and re-creating group identity, protagonism and active spectatorship were important social aspects of the experience and were directly reflected in how multimedia was used. Particularly, they witnessed multimedia-mediated forms of expression, such as staging, competition, storytelling, joking, communicating presence, and portraying others; and the motivation for these stemmed from the engaging and shared nature of experience. Moreover, they observed how temporality and spatiality provided a platform for constructing experiences. The analysis advocates applications that not only store or capture human experience for sharing or later use but also actively participates in the very construction of experience and support a view that digital storytelling helps nurture, constructing identities in interaction with others by being involved in activities (Jacucci, Oulasvirta et al, 2007).

Caveat for use of technology in education

My argument on technology so far may imply that technology provides solutions to problems. However, it is rather contrary. There is a danger of over-reliance on technology, MacKenzie and Wajcman (1999) remind us of the danger of technology as a blanket solution to education and any other social problems. MacKenzie and Wajcman (1999)They emphasise that the popular way of thinking about technology is still technological determinism that acknowledges a one-way relationship between technology and society in which technology causes social change and impacts on people.

In line with MacKenzie and Waicman, Acharya highlights a dynamic relation between technology and people and society. Technology does not just bring about change and transformation of the individual, institution and society, but “[it] is also a driving force behind the process of internationalization and globalization of the economy, science and culture; indeed, they have mutually reinforced each other” (2007, p344). The decentralizing and liberating nature of information and computer technologies encourages individuals to participate in a ‘global village’ (McLuhan 1967) or ‘network society’ (Castells, 1996), a condition characterized by the interconnectedness of economic, social, political and cultural activities as well as regions, cities and individuals. Such a condition is profound because it fundamentally challenges the diverse locality and traditional values, reduces the sense of social and cultural distance between communities, and affects our relationship to time and space, the fundamental coordinates of experiential reality” (Giddens 1994 cited in Archrya, p344).

Furthermore, what is relevant here in conceptualising identity in the technological age is identity that is placeless and non-linear. As Morley and Robins (1995) suggest, referring to simulation, virtuality and hyper-reality:

“What is being created is a new electronic cultural space, a ‘placeless’ geography of image and simulation… a world in which space and time horizons have become collapsed… a world of instantaneous and depthless communication… that is profoundly transforming our apprehension of the world: it is provoking a new sense of placed and placeless identity and a challenge of elaborating a new self-interpretation.” (cited in Acharya, 2007, p345)

Therefore, it is possible to utilise this concept of identity in digital storytelling and explore how it would help young people re-imagine the future.

Re-imaging the future

Another important feature of digital storytelling is its possible use for making inter-generational links overcoming hierarchical and age differences. It would help create a space where the teachers and students and friends and family participate in joint remembering in and across the horizontal (peer) relation as well as in the vertical (teacher-student, parent-children) relation. It is a site of communication where new meanings of friendship, family relations and other issues of socialisation and personality development are explored together with others (in the learning environment). This would nurture a strong sense of belongingness (a lay hallmark of identity inscription) and historical continuity. Every practice of learning involves history (of practices, such as schooling and subject lessons, but not in the sense of history lessons as subject taught in school) (Hassan 2002). It is a larger sense of history, in Vygotskian terms, phylogenic and ontogenetic development observed in the practice of digital storytelling.

Implications for identity formation in technology-mediated education mediated by technology

In the 21^st century it is clear and almost inevitable that we will have to learn to live with constantly changing and advancing technologies in the educational settings. Learning and education are inseparable from technology, making use of and inventing a new technology that would facilitate and bypass the complicated mechanism and concept behind our everyday ideas and practices. Digital storytelling is technology-based and mediated, but the heart of the storytelling, as in any storytelling practice, is dedicated to emotional and moral engagement, critical reflection and inward gaze to oneself and others and the world around. The activities and experience of digital storytelling is a tool (technology)-mediated meaning-making practice that affords personal and social transformations.

First of all, instead of a positivistic and optimistic approach to technology use in education, which looks for a technological fix to educational problems, the emphasis should be on solving educational problems by not advocating computers or other technological tools for the sake of technology, but by questioning their proper role in educational settings and reflecting on how technology may cause both positive and unintended negative results in social environments.

With properly guided teaching and scaffolding tasks, digital storytelling would help create a new space where the teachers and students (and friends and family) participate in jointly remembering. It is a site of open communication where new meaning of friendship, family relations and other issues of socialisation and personality development are explored together with others (in the learning environment). This would nurture a strong sense of belongingness (a lay hallmark of identity inscription).

It is important that educators, especially classroom teachers, ensure a “fair use of other people’s material without infringing on their protections under copyright” (Ohler 2008, p192). Teachers and adult others involved in the digital storytelling project should be aware of the legal and ethical issues such as copyright protection, child protection, confidentiality and anonymity if the stories will be made available in the public domain. The teacher could teach the rule of respecting other people’s work and make the student aware how they want their work to be used and credited. This is not just to commodify the stories created and limit the ownership of the stories, but to acknowledge and respect the joint effort put into the work of digital storytelling.

This paper highlighted the importance and challenge of dealing with a new form of socialisation and a new concept of performative space for young people. Taking an account of individual and personal history and centrality of meaningful learning activity, a new form of engagement with the concept of identity from a sociocultural perspective is deemed relevant and offers a theoretical framework for the empirical work to continue. Young people will be given and exposed to a means to explore and re-imagine the future and the sense of self that they feel they can aspire to gain. A caveat for over-reliance of technology is indeed an imminent danger of technology as a blanket solution to education and any other social problems (MacKenzie and Wajcman 1999). For this reason, the role of the teacher who can plan, set and organise learning tasks in the practice of digital storytelling is key to successful implementation of digital storytelling.

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation. References

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This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

Over the last 70 years, the English education system has been twice remade – first in 1944, and then in 1988. These episodes introduced important institutional change, but they went further than this. In each case, they configured new relationships between education and other kinds of social arrangement, both economic and cultural. The 1944 Education Act established education as key to economic growth, and made school for the first time central to the experience of working-class teenagers; the changes brought about by the Education Reform Act (1988) connected education to an emerging knowledge economy, and laid the basis for a culture of attainment and competition, in school and beyond. In each case, educational reform was driven by powerful forces of social and political change: broadly social democratic in the first instance, Conservative – that is to say, market-orientated – in the second. In each case, too, a political revolution was involved, in which some social actors came to the fore, while others faded from the scene. Thus 1944 promoted local education authorities and teachers’ organisations to a position of power, while 1988 saw these actors largely replaced by the rising influence of school managements, and, later, private providers.

The educational energies set in motion by ‘1988′ carried through into the New Labour years, and in many ways were strengthened and systematised then (Ball, 2008). This review seeks to take the measure of their impact. But it also addresses wider issues. ‘1988′ was part of a larger programme of transformation, often called ‘neo-liberal’ (Harvey, 2005) and to make sense of issues of knowledge, identity, culture and community, means that the interaction of education with the other elements of this programme needs to be addressed. It is by taking the measure of these combined transformations that the review tries to think its way into the future. Will the period 2010-2025 see such a profound re-shaping of the education system as those of 1944 and 1988? Will it accelerate, or divert, the cultural and social energies set in motion in the 1980s? Will the social and occupational arrangements associated with the famously uneven patterns of wealth distribution created through neo-liberalism harden into permanent structures? We can start to answer such questions by looking at what social research is telling us about the present.

Grounded, differentiated cultures

Social theory, Majima and Savage (2006) point out, is prone to make the claim that some time in the late 20th century, a transformation of the human personality occurred, that can be described in terms of ‘individualisation’ (Beck and Beck-Gersheim, 2001), detraditionalisation (Giddens, 1994) or an accommodation of ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman, 2000). These accounts depict a world in which people have become increasingly ‘reflexive’ about their lifestyle choices and their values; they rely less on traditional modes of thinking, and are, compared with earlier generations, less influenced by the cultures to which they belong. Majima and Savage are sceptical; they regard these claims as being ‘empirically ungrounded’. For them, values and meanings are in a strong sense culturally located. They grow out of mundane experience, and are more susceptible to immediate material pressures than to long waves of cultural change. Specifically, ‘attitudes and values’ arise from the processes through which people seek to differentiate themselves from some social groups and claim affinity with others. (2007, p297). These processes occur in a ‘politically charged environment’; they are products of ‘wars of manoeuvres’ between social groups and positions (2007, p312). If we want to understand culture, therefore, we need to understand it in terms of social location, of difference and of contestation.

These arguments direct us towards two kinds of understanding. The first prioritises the material position of young people, in terms of the influence upon them of the job market, of education, and of their communities. The second emphasises cultural difference. In both cases, the intention is not to construct ‘youth’ or ‘young people’ as unified categories, but to look at patterns of change from a perspective concerned with their varied impacts on the young. French researchers, reflecting on the youth uprisings against police violence and economic insecurity in 2005-6, have written of the need to think in terms of ‘deux jeunesses’, those of the banlieues and those outside, whose conditions and prospects differ widely, though over both there hangs the shadow of ‘precarity’ (Mauger, 2006). A similar emphasis runs through this paper.

Knowledge

Knowledge is increasingly understood in terms of its economic value. One of the main tenets underlying education policy is that ‘information and knowledge are replacing capital and energy as the primary wealth-creating assets’. (Ball, 2008, p19) This claim is sometimes linked to an expectation that the workforce of the future will be increasingly knowledgeable and more highly skilled. From this stems the ‘promise’ that underlies policy exhortations to young people, that they should seek higher levels of qualification, and longer periods in education, in return for rewarding jobs. However, the nature and extent of the knowledge economy have been called into question by many researchers in ways that suggest a very different configuration of knowledge from that sketched by policy. At stake in this questioning are issues of qualification, skill, quality of experience and reward. These issues, of course, are played out among the adult workforce, but their backwash effect in education, training and the social positioning of young people is considerable.

According to Castells (1998), knowledge economies are, in terms of their social relations, divided economies, with the categories of ’symbolic analyst’ and ‘generic labour’ standing on opposite sides of a social divide. Other writers elaborate this point. Nolan (2004) writes of an ‘hour-glass economy’, in which the occupational structure is polarised between relatively secure high-skilled work, and a mass of lower-skilled, lower-paid and insecure employment. Brown (2003) and Brown and Hesketh (2004) tell a similar story, in which, while management, professional and technical jobs are expanding, so too are routine service jobs. Ewart Keep points out that these projections of polarisation are of crucial importance for education ‘because the assumption is that a knowledge-driven economy and an associated labour market demand for ever higher skills is just around the corner is implicitly seen as one of the main means by which expansion of all phases and forms of post-compulsory learning can be justified and learners motivated’ (Keep, 2005, p548). If this assumption is incorrect, then the motivating promise of ‘good jobs for all’ is unlikely to be believed. Lebaron (2006) writes in this context about the ‘devalorisation’ of educational qualifications: levels of educational attainment have risen, and expectations have been heightened, yet access to secure jobs, to housing and to an ‘autonomous’ adult life is harder to come by. In such a situation, education, for a sizeable section of the youth population, loses legitimacy (Bendit 2006).

So far, we have discussed knowledge in terms of training and qualifications – issues which cover only part of the field. Another set of arguments, running much wider than the ’skills’ debate, concerns the relationship to the economy of the whole body of knowledge generated by populations – some of it certified and explicit, some of it ‘tacit’ and informal. This is the context in which some theorists have developed the idea of ‘mass intelligence’ or the ‘general intellect’ (Dyer-Witheford, 1999; Virno, 2004; Dowling, 2006). Knowledge is now the ‘principal productive force’ (Virno, 2004, p100); and ‘immaterial labour’ the defining form of work. Immaterial labour is an elastic concept that includes both the kind of knowledge work associated with ‘mental’ labour, and what Michael Hardt’s calls’the affective labour of human contact and interaction’ which through ‘the creation and manipulation of effects’ can bring into being ‘a feeling of ease, well being, satisfaction, excitement, passion – even a sense of connectedness or community’ (Hardt, n.d.). Whatever type of immaterial labour is emphasized, the tendency is to argue that it is produced in the course of the ‘ordinary’ exchanges of daily life, as well as through more specialized training. To understand the contemporary workforce and its capacities, one thus needs to think outside the workplace, and outside the educational institutions which have traditionally served it. Dowling explains that the ability to manage affect that was the basis of her waitressing work depended on social skills acquired outside the restaurant. Dyer-Witheford claims that the new communicational capacities and technological competencies developed through young people’s media practices are both ‘the premises of everyday life’ and an economic resource that employers can exploit. Constantly on-line, immersed in a continuous, electronically mediated communicability, young people acquire the know-how required to perform immaterial labour. But this ‘know-how’ has a complicated relationship with business requirements. It may well be the case that management seeks to make ‘the worker’s personality and subjectivity susceptible to organisation and command’ (Lazzarato, 1996, quoted in Dowling, 2006), but in practice, subjectivity also contains a surplus of ‘excessive’ human capacity, underemployed in the contemporary workplace.

These understandings complement, in a different theoretical idiom, the recent findings of sociologists of work, who identify a gap between the capacities of worker and the requirements of the enterprise in which they work. Pursuing this argument, Warhurst and Thompson (2006) develop a number of themes. They are sceptical about claims for upskilling, suggesting that firms’ investment in ICT tends more to routinise than to make complex the demands of work; and following the Canadian research of Livingstone and Schottz (2006), they suggest that ‘current labour processes’ are not effective in ‘utilising the existing skills of workers’. Higher education may have created a ‘mass of potential knowledge workers’ (2006, p788) but for an important section of the workforce, what is required of them by the work process is much less than their education and experience have rendered them capable of. Moreover, any upskilling that may be required ‘appears to be complemented by deteriorations in other work aspects, namely autonomy and discretion’ (2006, p790). The ‘knowledge gap’, in this case, has less to do with the deficiencies of school-leavers, than with the unfulfilling aspects of work. It is for reasons connected to the cultural surveillance and control that are exercised in the workplace, argues Willis (2003), that working-class energies have directed themselves away from production, and towards consumption, as a source of fulfilment and a resource for the construction of identity.

This is not the whole picture, though. More innovative enterprises, write Warhurst and Thompson, are keen to ‘identify and utilise’ the knowledgeability of their workforces, wanting to ‘introduce organisational structures and practices that facilitate initiative and innovation in the form of creativity and continuous improvement’ on the part of workers, whether routine or expert (2006, p794). Hartley, in a review of contemporary educational discourse, adds that it is not just at the top end of the labour market that such capacities capacities are thought to be required. There are sections of the economy – personal services, for instance – which are ‘high touch’ more than they are high tech and in which emotional intelligence is an asset which management needs to tap (Hartley, 2003). (Here Hartley echoes some of the argument of Hardt, above.) This reading of economic need validates new educational approaches, to which issues of ‘creativity’ are central. In Anna Craft’s words, the ‘economic imperative to foster creativity in business has helped to raise the profile and credentials of creativity in education more generally’ (1999, p11). This, in terms of educational history, is creativity of a new type, going well beyond the traditional arts-based model – an approach exemplified in some of the work sponsored between 2002 and 2009 by Creative Partnerships. The key point that educationalists must absorb is that adapting to new social and economic complexities is not something that can be learned systematically, as a set of rules but rather requires attentiveness to what James Scott (1998) terms ‘metis’, practical knowledge, that stems from the subject’s ability to draw from the entire range of their experience, to articulate that which in other circumstances would remain tacit, and in doing so to respond productively – creatively – to new challenges. Creativity is not only a set of skills, but a modality of life.

The pattern of argument here is a complex one, in which the possibilities of a fuller development of the personality, of the sort at which educationalists have traditionally aimed, is mixed up with more instrumental ideas of what it means to be creative. As the French sociologists Boltanski and Chiapello put it, work has become ’simultaneously more autonomous and more constrained’ (2005, p430), and a similar tension is likely to run through schooling, so that ‘creativity’ comes to mean both the promise of a new and more liberated way of ‘doing education’, and a preparation for a working life in which to be ‘creative’ is to be an economic asset as much as a free individual.

Social influences on the cultural

Michael Rustin (2008) makes a distinction between policy norms and what, following Lockwood (1964), he calls systemic conflict. Since the late nineties, he suggests, English society may well have experienced consensus at the level of policy, with few disagreeing with ‘Third Way’ approaches to problems of economic and social change; but this should not cause us to overlook the continued existence of deep-rooted systemic tensions. He specifies two kinds of tension in particular. The first is ‘current levels of social inequality’, which mean among other things that ‘educational outcomes and therefore employment prospects for the lowest third of the population remain obstinately poor’ (2008, p278). Rustin is doing no more here than confirming a wealth of research data, which attests not only to continuing inequality but to rates of social mobility that were lower at the end of the 20th century than during the post-war decades of educational reform and occupational change (Sutton Trust, 2005). Cultural patterns and senses of individual and collective identity are, and will be, profoundly affected by the closure and exclusion involved in this impasse. Indeed, Gayo-Cal, Savage and Warde (2006), in their attempt to draw ‘a cultural map of the United Kingdom’, refer to ‘entrenched cultural divisions within the social body’, identifying patterns not just of cultural diversity, but of antagonism, ‘Young, poorly educated males’ are deeply at odds with the cultural attachments of wealthier groups, without, according to the researchers, having alternative, positive preferences of their own (2006, p219, p226). Thus here too the concept of ‘deux jeunesses’- two stratified kinds of youth experience – is salient.

The second tension identified by Rustin has to do with social solidarity, with the norms and collective practices which, for classical sociology, contribute to social cohesion. Again what are at issue are enduring tendencies, rather than episodic quirks. Referring to work by Layard (2005) and Offer (2006), and adopting arguments similar to those of Wilkinson (1997) and Oliver James (2007), Rustin suggests that ‘improvements in living standards seem to be accompanied by no increases in self-reported happiness’ (2008, p278). On the contrary, inequalities and ’social epidemics’ of family breakdown, of depression and addiction produce effects of ‘ill-being’. As others (for instance, Buckingham, 2000) have pointed out, young people and children are strongly affected by such tensions. Economically and culturally, they have benefited from the growth of the youth market for consumer goods: as Willis (1990) showed, commercialised, ‘commodified’ products provide vital symbolic resources for the creation of youth identities. But such commercialised engagement is also seen to put children in moral and sometimes physical danger (Buckingham. 2000). Socially, children and young people are the focus of considerable anxiety, both as victims (’stranger danger’) and as threats (‘feral youth’). Educationally, the pressures of a performance culture seem to contribute to low levels of happiness (UNESCO. 2007). It seems right to understand these various tensions as long-lasting, as inter-connected, and as powerful shapers of culture and identity.

However, this is not the only way in which the social and cultural positioning of young people is described. Majima and Savage (2007) in their longitudinal study of cultural attitudes in the period 1981-1999 claim to detect a shift towards ‘more rebellious and conscientious’ attitudes. Cunningham and Lavalette, in a study of school-student participation in the anti-war movement of 2003, identified similar attitudes (2004). It seems reasonable to predict that, among a section of children and young people, the environmental and social crises that one can envisage for 2025 will provoke similar responses. Solidarity, lost in one area, may be regained in another.

Ethnicity

The growing demographic importance of ethnic communities, and of mixed heritage populations, is generally recognised (Finney and Simpson, 2008). The kinds of inter-community relations which are connected to these trends are much more disputed, as are the associated issues of identity.

Broadly, there are three positions in the identity debate. None of them is simply a commentary on cultural trends; each seeks to shape the reality they describe in a desired direction. The character of ‘identity’, both individual and collective, will be strongly affected by which model(s) emerge from the contest as dominant.

The first model is based on a theory of communities divided primarily on lines of ethnicity and leading ‘parallel lives’. (Cantle, 2005). Meaningful interaction is here ‘virtually non-existent’ (Burnett, 2007), and communities develop their own separate identities and belief systems. This diagnosis has been politically influential and has supported a drive to consolidate a general sense of Britishness, ‘a political identity (created) through active membership of the nation state, which regulates individual behaviour and provides for collective action’ (Cantle, quoted in Burnett, 2007, p117.) A second, alternative model, supported by recent social research (Wetherell, 2008), emphasises less the separateness of communities than the interaction between them. In the process of interaction, ‘new, complex, hybrid forms of identity are emerging among second and subsequent generations of migrants as part of the normal process of identity change over time’ (Wetherell, 2008, p780). These identities, it is argued, in the great majority of cases, include a strong British component. Not all identities are hybridised, of course: some groups, including white British working-class people, ‘try to hang on to older cultural forms and senses of belonging’. And, in all cases, ethnically-based identities are articulated, in different ways, with social class.

A third model accepts much of what is said about hybridisation, but is much less certain that it necessarily creates what Gilroy celebrates as ‘a convivial mode of interaction where differences have to be negotiated’ (Gilroy, 2005, p438, cited in Wetherell, 2008). Yousuf notes that ‘growing numbers’ of people have ‘dual or multiple loyalties’ that cross national boundaries: ‘globalisation of communications allows people to align themselves with any social, cultural or political group anywhere in the world’ (2007, p362). Her account is different from that of others who write about hybridity, however, because she accentuates the element of potential conflict between such loyalties. In globalised times, to separate the ‘inside’ of the national state from the ‘outside’ is not possible. At particular moments, where the relationship between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ is one of tension, then potential conflicts are activated, and the attachment of some groups of citizens to what they customarily see as ‘their’ state becomes strained: ‘loyalties can be recalcitrant and unpredictable’ (2007, p363). Evidence collected by Liz Fekete (2008) develops the point further. In a world where there is no ‘over there’ – no international space entirely separate from that of the national state – the response of states to perceived threats to their security adds to internal tensions, with particular consequences for some minority groups. In the wake of the London bombings of 2005, and what Muslim communities experienced as a backlash, Fekete described a process of cultural and social withdrawal, ‘a kind of counter-culture, a refusal to participate, on the basis of “I don’t want what I can’t get.”

Thus, while the salience of ethnicity to culture and identity is beyond question, the modes through which it will be experienced – convivial, defensive – are harder to predict.

Education: differentiated expansion

Education is, of course, shaped by forces that have their origins elsewhere, in the economy, or in wider patterns of social change. But it is also a force in its own right, constructing knowledge, allocating social positions, shaping identities. Making sense of trends in education is therefore vital to understanding the future patterning of knowledge, culture, communities and identities.

We can begin this work of making sense by noting two long-term, interlinked tendencies, summed up in the phrase ‘differentiated expansion’. Education has vastly expanded, in ways that affect all social groups. Expansion has occurred along several axes: ‘vertically’, one can speak of the development of under-5 and post-16 education; further steps towards the massification of higher education; the demands of lifelong learning. ‘Horizontally’, the formal curricular work of the school is increasingly accompanied by pre-school and after-school provision. As the summer rituals surrounding examination results show, the majority of the school population has been drawn into processes of certification and has a strong emotional investment in them. As we shall see, whether one looks at the span of a day or the course of a lifetime, education occupies an ever-larger and personally important part of it, so that Bernstein’s diagnosis of a ‘pedagogisation’ of society (2001) looks more and more accurate. Yet this rich landscape of education is highly differentiated: access, attainment, quality, resources and occupational destination are all strongly conditioned by gender, ethnicity and social class. Understandings of ‘knowledge’, ‘identity’ and ‘culture’ have therefore to grasp both general patterns of experience in a pedagogised world, and specific, differentiated situations.

A disarticulated system

Ball (2008) describes the current school system as ‘disarticulated’, based increasingly on diversity of provision. Diversity has allowed opportunities for the exercise of parental choice, with ’skilled chooser’ parents, mainly middle-class, able to secure advantage for their children (Gewirtz et al, 1995). This is a competitive system, in which those who can afford it have developed the habit of buying resources to support their children, over and above what is offered by the school. Buckingham and Scanlon (2003) describe parents’ investment in home-based ICT; Ball (2007, 2008) shows the ways in which parents make use of the growing market in private provision (home tutoring, for instance) in an attempt to ensure success. Competition, also, is not just a matter of securing access to ‘good’ primary and secondary schools. It extends upwards to university level, with a growing status distinction between groups of universities, and with assessment systems that increasingly register the small differences in exam performance that make a difference to university admission. Here, too, individuals need to develop the skills of choice and calculation, so that, according to some researchers (Brown 2003), education is more than ever seen as a ‘positional’ rather than an ‘absolute’ good.

Are there any reasons to think that these strong tendencies, which have been in motion for nearly two decades, will lessen in their effects over the next 15 years? To answer the question, several possibilities need to be taken into account. One is that government investment in early years education and in targeted programmes of student support will lessen some of the effects of social disadvantage, and weaken the effects of middle-class advantage. Another is that the habits of ’skilled choosing’ will be learned by working-class parents and students. A third is that the cultures of schools – because they need to motivate rather than disengage students – will make a turn away from ‘performativity’ towards an agenda that emphasises other needs. We have already seen how this might occur under the banner of ‘creativity’. It is conceivable that ‘personalisation’ might also support such a change. Leadbeater (2008) thinks that a personalised agenda based on mentoring, family support, individualised timetables and a meaningful curriculum would transform the school experience of large numbers of working-class students, and claims to see the beginnings of such an agenda already, in some schools, taking shape. A pre-condition of success, he argues, is that schools should be capable of acts of ‘cultural recognition’, which understand and positively evaluate the meaning-making capacities of students, and of the communities they come from. Extending Leadbeater’s argument, one might envisage schools recognising, too, their students’ investment in popular culture.

Against these possibilities might be placed the stratifying influence of labour markets, an influence whose pressure on the school it is hard to see diminishing. Also relevant is the capacity of more privileged groups, demonstrated frequently in educational history, to keep ahead of the game (Crouch, 1998), or to turn to their advantage policies which were drawn up with equal opportunity in mind. From this point of view, it is possible to see how, when making an informed choice of secondary school has become a capability within the reach of all parents, the skills of choice are replayed at a higher and more complex level, in relation to A level pathways and to higher education. Likewise, ‘personalisation’ might become an effective means of providing for the privileged, as much as it served the needs of less privileged groups; while the content acquired by the ‘creativity’ agenda could quite feasibly vary according to class and status. Finally, as the Ajegbo Report on cultural diversity (2007, p34) pointed out, the capacities of schools to respond to the cultures of non-privileged students have often been limited: it is one thing to set out a policy of personalisation, another thing to construct a school that can deliver it. While one line of policy may offer support to the development of students’ voice, another may endorse practices of exclusion from school, or strong forms of surveillance and discipline, that tend to discourage it (Monk, 2005). It may be, too, that although schools have acquired many new capacities, especially in the area of ‘effectiveness’, there have also been significant losses along the way. Between 1970, say, and 1990, attentiveness to the languages, dialects and cultures of school-students was well-developed in some curriculum areas (Burgess and Martin, 1990) and was linked to an often-productive questioning of the relationship between the formal knowledge of the school and the everyday experience of its students. Arguably, since 1988, this interest has been pushed to the margins of a teacher consciousness shaped by the requirements of national curricula and literacy frameworks.

Identity issues

Schools are places where attempts occur to realise the designs of policy – to produce responsible citizens, capable workers and so on. But if we limit ourselves to such topics, we do not fully capture the ‘identity work’ that occurs in schools – work which involves the responses of the school population as much as it does the intentions of policy-makers. Ethnographic research in schools has, since the 1960s, uncovered various and localised patterns of sub-culture that are often resistant to the official culture of the school, and that are important sites for the formation of student identity. Willis (1990) showed the extent to which such identity formation made use of commercial culture – clothes, music, pub culture – partly because of its lack of connection to formal education. Phoenix (2005) presented evidence to suggest that this identity work was significantly differentiated by class. Others, more recently, have researched the affordances for identity formation that electronic media provide (Pahl and Rowsell, 2005). One important and consistent finding of research is that the identities that some groups of students make for themselves are both resources from which they can achieve a sense of self-worth and group solidarity, and, at the same time, a route to educational exclusion. This was the conclusion of Paul Willis’s classic work ‘Learning to Labour’ (1977), and it has been reiterated by other researchers since. Most recently, Louise Archer and her colleagues (2003, 2007) have shown the processes through which students construct identities that equip them well for aspects of urban life, while disqualifying themselves from prospects of educational success. The problems that arise from such choices are all the more difficult because the identities which students construct are plainly seen by them as a valuable resource, rather than the result of a mistaken choice. It is reasonable to predict, that if inequality continues to be a feature of the social life of young people, then so, also, for some groups, will be what Willis calls the ‘desperate work’ of (counter-cultural) identity formation.

Elsewhere, in a disarticulated school system, other kinds of identity will be constructed, whose cultural markers will be different. Still salient here are the distinctions between high and low culture which framed discourses about culture and education in the post-war period (Jones, 2009, forthcoming). A complete polarisation of these terms is unfeasible, since the vast growth of the culture industries has blurred the distinction between the two spheres, and high culture itself, now more thoroughly exposed to commodification, has incorporated popular forms. (Anderson, 1998); even the most culturally privileged of students will have a knowledge of popular media culture. Nevertheless, markers of cultural difference, arranged along an axis of ‘high’ and ‘low’, facilitate the processes of ‘distinction’ that is vital to class and group identities (Bourdieu, 1986) and high culture continues to supply elite groups with cultural capital.

Conjecturing the Future

What can these sketches of the present tell us about the future? One set of possibilities insistently presents itself: 2010-2025 will not see a profound rearrangement of the education system. The main reason for thinking this is that the social and political energies that are needed to bring about transformative change are lacking. A decade before 1944, it was obvious that there existed a powerful demand for ’secondary education for all’. Likewise, in the decade leading up to 1988, the existence of a Conservative project, capable of addressing the social and economic tensions of the 1970s, was plain to see. Nothing comparable exists now, and for this reason it is plausible to construct a future based on the projection of current tendencies, rather than the emergence of a radically new scenario. And what applies to education applies, a fortiori, to the wider tendencies that shape knowledge identities, cultures and communities.

On such a basis, one might construct a scenario like the following:

Conflict beyond British borders catches Britain in its flames. A narrow and embattled national identity is reinforced. Race and religion become conduits through which global tensions flow. Environmental issues likewise become a battleground: climate change,

global shortages of food and natural resources, provoke a competition for survival.

Economic and social polarisation continues. For large sections of the population, precarity – intermittent and partial access to the labour market – becomes a way of life. In the absence of social housing, the dependency of younger on older generations grows. Education remains a field in which processes of differentiation are intense, and where the pressure to perform is the basic principle that regulates institutional life.

The problems of youth are at the heart of the country’s social conflicts. The promise that educational achievement will enable security and fulfilment is seen as a rotten one. One response – following the model of France in 2005/6 and Italy in 2008 – is spectacular outbreaks of protest. Another is the everyday ‘refusal’ of the school by large sections of its population.

There develops also a culture of refusal and defiant marginality. In an effort to re-engage their students, schools attempt to relate to it – under a variety of banners, from ‘creativity’ to ‘thinking skills’ to ‘emotional intelligence’. But the pressures of performativity, the difficulties faced by teachers trained to work with a fixed and orthodox curriculum, the intensity of students’ refusal and the overwhelming effects on the school of social breakdown, make this attempt, in many urban schools, a failure. Aspirations to ‘cohesion’ are still voiced by policy-makers, but increasingly ring hollow. Private sector education, meanwhile, continues to guarantee future security, and in those schools (academies, trust schools, well-located church schools) that form large enclaves of relative privilege within the public sector, another kind of education is evolving. Though performance-focused, it sees the necessity of creativity in a knowledge economy, as well as the advantages it can confer. It is here teaching and learning mutate away from the mould in which they were fixed by the national curriculum and by testing. Authentic reform occurs, but is, as always, limited by social situations.

Yet, were other sorts of social energy to be released, culture and education might be configured in very different ways.

Accepting their relative decline, governments of the West withdraw from conflicts whose blowback has heightened domestic tensions. Responding to public clamour, governments co-operate to mitigate the effects of climate change and to apportion the planet’s resources equitably. Strong environmental movements monitor what they do, and make the fate of the earth the central issue in political and social life.

Economic production is reshaped on environmentalist principles. Public investment and redistributive taxation diminish inequalities, and in this new context, the employment and housing prospects of young people improve. As the occupational structure comes to resemble less an hour-glass than a broad-based, low-angled pyramid, so students become more attached to an educational system whose promises they can see as reliable.

The lessening of economic insecurity lifts pressure from the school. Education is less likely to be seen as a positional good, possession of which is only valuable if it confers advantage. Equity becomes a stronger working principle in education, while differentiation diminishes. A new assertiveness among teachers means that they play a greater role in innovation, and can respond without anxiety to cultural change and the tensions that accompany it. Students find that their symbolic creativity is recognised and valued, and that the school has become a place where they can experiment, refine and develop the creativity of home and community.

Argument, debate and protest become ordinary features of the life of schools and communities, which engage continually with the ‘real life’ issues. They contribute to the common stock of intellectual resources that is needed to devise responses to social and environmental problems that exist on a planetary scale. They provide a context and a resource for cultural production.

Neither of these scenarios will come to pass, but they at least measure out the spectrum of possibilities that is open to education and culture. One end of that spectrum, darker in its colours, is closer to realisation than the other. But,as ever, what will happen is not written in the stars, nor even in the best efforts of policy-makers. Identities, knowledges, cultures – even schools – are less ductible than policy sometimes imagines, and there are surprises in store for us, beyond current horizons.

References

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This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

The starting point for this review is the assumption of a globalised world characterised by interdependent network spaces, the diminished importance of distance, and the existence of multiple spatialities of organisation and practice, as well as the availability of multiple geographies of belonging (Amin, 2002). From a theoretical perspective, Bourdieu’s (1990, 1999) work on fields and the concept of habitus recurs due to an increased sociological research emphasis on and interest in embodied practices in a world characterised by fluidity and flexibility. This fluidity has also been recognised by Cliff, O’Malley and Taylor (2008: 18) who argue that:

“…the blurring of distinctions between boundaries, at multiple levels: blurring between the personal/private and the public; between the individual identity and group identity, and therefore between individual output and group output; between what is part of the digital landscape and what is “reality”; between formal and informal learning; between work, play and education…”

will be key issues in the future. The flexibility of residence and increasing mobility is present in contemporary society in the form of migration and the fact that today’s societies are both emigrant and immigrant societies. The new kind of migration characterised by extra-territoriality and anchors instead of roots for identification then “casts a question mark upon the bond between identity and citizenship, individual and place, neighbourhood and belonging” (Bauman, 2008). Another trend which has been recognised by academic and policy circles alike is the decline in formal political engagement (Cornwall, 2008) and therefore “alternative ways of ensuring that voices are heard are required” (National Consumer Council, 2004: 10 quoted in Clarke and Newman, 2007).

Argument: locality, place and territories matter through virtual and material boundaries

Although globalisation processes are characterised by a diminished importance of space, they are also evident in a “transformation of practice and experience which is felt actually within localities” (Tomlinson, 1999, p9, emphasis in original). While there is an argument for the blurring between public and private spheres, there is also a debate about the growing diversification of social fields (Fowler, 1997). As people occupy multiple relationships and multiple subject positions, there are two opposing trends: a striving for belonging (feeling similar) and a striving for distinction (feeling separate).

Conceptions of citizenship and belonging need to be rethought as the nation-state as the preferred scale of political involvement has been de-centred. This means including practices such as social action, volunteering (Lister et al, 2002) and other than nominally formal political practices in the community (both real and virtual) in the notion of citizenship as well as allowing belonging to multiple communities (cf. Pell, 2008; Purcell, 2003). This leads to the evolution of different political practices in emerging public spheres – sites of emergent democratic citizenship.

Citizenship is an embodied practice and can be seen as a consequence of dispositions acquired in the private sphere. In this sense, the boundaries between public and private are indistinct and thus the personal is political and the political personal. Technology facilitates and exacerbates this blurring and thus opens avenues for direct democracy and widened access but unevenly distributed access can also reproduce existing hierarchies of power (cf. Cass, Shove and Urry, 2005).

Accessibility then becomes the main concern. Penetration of digital technologies has increased over the years but access to technology remains linked to patterns of social exclusion, with the most socially disadvantaged being the least likely to have or use access to digital technology. Barriers to access are then not only determined by inappropriate market provision and affordability but also by lack of confidence, skills and support. With the lack of digital technology skills becoming the new illiteracy stigma (OPM, 2008), the digital and social divide amplify each other.

Studies and data

1. Communities and place

The concept of community

There is an extensive sociological and anthropological literature on the changing meanings of community (Davies and Jones, 2003; Pahl, 2005; Philipson and Thompson, 2008) paying attention to the questions of disembedding and de-territorialisation of social relations in modernity which seem to have become accepted trends in the field (starting with Bell and Newby, 1971 and continued in Giddens, 1990; Tomlinson, 1999). Diminishing importance of space has also been claimed by Castells (1998, 2001), with special reference to the influence of ICT and the internet as appropriate medium of communication for the type of society and social relationships that he envisaged. Despite the ubiquity of the disembedding and de-territorialisation claims, local identifications, ie “communities-on-the-ground” (Pahl, 2005; Savage, Bagnall and Longhurst, 2005) and attachment to place have remained salient.

These questions have also been examined in the context of socio-economic transformation and regeneration where place identity and the forms it takes through community engagement have been considered central issues. Such studies have covered deprived neighbourhoods especially in old industrial regions (eg the author’s own research; Bennett, Beynon and Hudson, 2000; Harding, 1997; Waddington, 2003) and dynamic city centres (e.g. O’Connor and Wynne, 1996, Binnie and Skeggs, 2004) as well as (middle-class) residential areas (Savage, Bagnall and Longhurst, 2005).

A particularly promising attempt seems to be an approach which links networks, ie people’s interconnectedness, class and place as suggested by Blokland and Savage (2001). Liepins (2000) examines different approaches to the concept with particular reference to rural communities, and highlights the move away from community as a “fixed object” to a scale of inquiry, a symbolic construction (eg Cohen, 1985) or investigations of power where the politics of contrasting voices, spaces and actions can be considered. Neal and Walters (2008) also deal with the contentious nature of community, stressing the need to explain it rather than seeing it as the explanation (Alleyne, 2002). They highlight the importance of the material aspect of community, ie the actual social relations and groupings in addition to the symbolic aspects of community as repository of meaning. Community remains both a discourse and a practice; it operates on the symbolic and the personal (and therefore physical) level. This means that places continue to matter as the basis of shared socio-spatial practices.

There seem to be two trends concerning the challenge of the meaning of place and space for individual and collective identities and their expression in “communities”: a re-definition of the local and the development of cosmopolitan identities.

Redefining local identity and belonging – ‘elective belonging’

In a society characterised by flexibility, mobility and fluidity the construction of local identity has become more precarious – less inherited and based on a shared past, but more practised and performed. The argument is that the emergence of mobile fields and the disjunctures between a growing number of fields has led to a heightened importance of “ordinariness”, a heightened importance of the commonality of shared positions. Belonging is fluid and contingent. This provides for a community of strangers, according to Simmel, those who come today and stay tomorrow. It also, however, presupposes agency and choice. Choice is here seen as a value, a sign of achievement – mobility is the norm (cf. Beck, 2000), staying in the place you were born and brought up in is deviant:

“[a]ll of us are , willy-nilly, by design or by default, on the move. We are on the move even if, physically we stay put: immobility is not a realistic option in a world of permanent change. And yet the effects of that new condition are radically unequal. Some of us become fully and truly ‘global’; some are fixed in their ‘locality’ – a predicament neither pleasurable nor endurable in the world in which the ‘globals’ set the tone and compose the rules of the life-game.” (Bauman, 1998, p2)

In tune with the idea of the “elective biography” (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002), local identity, too, has become a choice – “elective belonging” (Savage et al, 2005). This starts from the fact that (social and geographical) mobility has increased and thus life-long connections with one place to establish a particular “fixed” local identity and sense of belonging are becoming less likely. Referring to a study of middle-class residential areas in Manchester (Savage et al, 2005) Savage (2008) argues that “the actual lived history of the place in which they [interviewees] lived was less important as the way in which they could define the place as belonging to them through their conscious choice to move and settle in it” (p.152). For the “mobile classes” place then remains important as manifestation of their “lifestyle” or consumer choice. The element of choice is essential in this identification and understanding of place because according to Savage (2008: 153) for those who do not possess the necessary resources, “nostalgia becomes the counterpart to elective belonging.”

To juxtapose this story of nostalgia, a look at post-industrial, formerly “traditional” working-class communities is necessary. Valerie Walkerdine’s research on communities in the South Wales valleys and my research on mining communities in Kent has shown that individuals do not stay in these places out of a longing for an idealised past but due to the persistence of social networks linking family, friends and (former) work-places (see also Strangleman, 2001; Parry, 2003). Research participants explained how the social infrastructure which used to be supported by the economic infrastructure (ie the colliery or the local steel plant) is now predominantly linked to the particular village and individual residents’ commitment – and in this sense to a notion of local citizenship. There are opportunities and threats in this very local notion of belonging. On the one hand, this should strengthen the need for all local residents’ involvement in local affairs, including children and young people. On the other hand, in my study, this facilitated a sense of insularity and lack of awareness of similar issues and experiences in other places. Here, digital technologies can help to bridge gaps and facilitate links between “local citizens” within and between localities.

In Savage et al’s (2005) study individuals are assumed to be free in their choices – to move or to stay. This does not take into account economic or social necessities. It is presupposed that moving socially requires moving geographically while staying put equals displacement. Constraints posed by power hierarchies are neglected. Mobility and the capacity for mobile/multiple identities, however, are dependent on resources. In their study of East German youth, Hörschelmann and Schäfer (2007) conclude that young people’s desire to travel, to become “cosmopolitan/global”, was shaped by different motivations and expectations, which in turn were influenced by education, parental influence and material opportunity, or, in other words, social, economic and cultural relations of power. Mobility has a class dimension. DIY biographies and mobile selves are accessible to those with the necessary economic, social and cultural capital – and this is true for the offline and the online world, as those most socially disadvantaged are also those most likely to be digitally excluded.

Cosmopolitan identities

Szerszynski and Urry (2002, 2006) argue for the emergence of a spatially dispersed culture of cosmopolitanism which involves awareness and knowledge of other places, cultures and people. It combines abilities and dispositions, eg a willingness to take risks, curiosity about other places, as well as an ability to read different images (Szerszynski and Urry, 2006). Such cosmopolitan ways of thinking need to be incorporated into people’s identities, everyday practices, rituals and dispositions to become an effective force in the world (Beck and Sznaider, 2006). As with the concept of elective belonging, spatial mobility and spatial awareness become paramount to the knowledge and understanding of a particular place’s history/histories. Being part of a cosmopolitan community is not dependent on a shared and collectively remembered past but on the experience and appreciation of similar socio-spatial practices and rituals. From a negative perspective, this can take on the semblance of tolerance when this actually means tolerance of a similarly “open” lifestyle, eg similar political, ethical, consumption choices. Thus, the internationally mobile professional can feel at home anywhere suitably cosmopolitan, eg New York, London, Berlin or Sydney, among other suitably cosmopolitan professionals. They might, however, face difficulties in participating in the leisure and work patterns of small rural hamlets.

The aims of education then become instilling a disposition towards, an acceptance of, and an ability to deal with, mobility – intellectually, physically, virtually. Education needs to prepare for flexibility and the possibility of multiple trajectories and ideally counteract the fact that the access to choice is still “heavily circumscribed by social, cultural, and economic relations of power” (Hörschelmann and Schäfer, 2007, p1869). As much as the global is increasingly present in the local and in young people’s daily experience, this experience is also structured by existing power hierarchies where choice is easily turned into necessity and the tourist turns into the migrant or vice versa (cf Bauman, 1998).

2. Questions of citizenship

“The common conception of citizenship is that of belonging to a political community, with the ensuing rights and responsibilities of membership.” (Pell, 2008, p143)

Citizenship is a political project as much as it is a sociological concept. It is inextricably bound up with the powers that be at any point in time. Therefore, future projections of the meaning of citizenship are particularly difficult. It can be assumed, however, that “traditional” notions of citizenship have become problematic. There are different ways in which citizenship is currently being reconfigured:

• (a) A (passive) notion of citizenship which is based solely on citizenship activities which are predetermined and contained in the institutions of the state (Pell, 2008), eg voting rights and participation in the electoral process, has become obsolete.
• (b) Membership of traditional collective organisations such as parties and trade unions has been replaced by alternative forms of engagement, eg social movements, issue-based politics and the politics of the everyday.
• (c) Citizenship is being rescaled, re-territorialised and re-oriented away from the nation-state as the predominant political community (Purcell, 2003).

Following on from the argument above, ie that place retains meaning both as a basis of a particularly local as well as a cosmopolitan community, this has implications for citizenship. As belonging to place is performed and thus contingent, so is citizenship. It is no longer solely defined by the nation-state but by other forms of engaging with state power, which opens up opportunities for multiple belongings and thus multiple citizenships.

As the role of the state shifts and as more complex and ‘messy’ governance mechanisms evolve (Woods and Goodwin, 2003), future forms of citizenship might be based on mundane, proto-political forms of engagement and community-making, especially as a manifestation of belonging. While Bauman’s (2008) analysis stresses the diversity of lifestyles and options, ie the fact that territorially determined citizenship turns into the right to remain different, Savage et al (2005) see this as the basis for solidarity and potential for collective action. Bauman emphasises the precarity and ephemeral nature of such bonds as “it is a moot question whether it is fit to conceive group solidarity in any other form than that of the fickle and fray, predominantly virtual ‘networks’, galvanised and continually re-modelled by the interplay of individual connecting and disconnecting, making calls and declining to reply [to] them.” For Savage et al (2005) the potential for collective action lies in the fact that a lack of feeling at home all the time increases the importance of feeling at home some of the time. This would motivate individuals to opt into shared practices. Place thus becomes valuable to the individual even if they are no longer part of a community rooted in place, the community is rooted in practice.

Place and residence becomes the basis for civic engagement (cf. Purcell, 2003). Pahl (2005) argues that common awareness of a social situation is required for any community to act as collectivity. Such common awareness, if it is no longer provided by a shared past, can only be drawn from a shared present, the co-presence in the everyday which is manifest in local social capital. This is evident in community participation, especially in local planning and governance processes, which has been seen as indicative of a combination of local identification and social cohesion. Another example is parental involvement in schools which can also be redefined as proto-political, civic engagement (cf. Savage et al, 2005). These practices are not place-specific but place-bound in that they have to be enacted in a particular place and thus provide the basis for “community” in contrast to “local” involvement. Sociological literature has dealt with the concept of active citizenship in the context of mechanisms of governmentality (Marinetto, 2003).

This is often linked to ideas of the state enabling and empowering citizens but the notion of empowerment through engagement has been heavily criticised and contested. In this conceptualisation the state confers the status of citizenship onto the individual, which highlights the passivity assigned to citizenship. New forms of engagement, however, are more creative and proactive and are linked to individuals creating their own political spaces, their own emergent public spheres, virtual or material. An example of this is the trend towards the citizen-consumer. Here citizenship is found in life-politics (eg Giddens, 1991) and the everyday act of consumption is a site for individuals’ political involvement. The supermarket becomes a political space. Digital technologies and especially the internet then provide access to a greater consumer choice and information which will enhance the (political) power of the consumer (Scammell, 2000).

Part of the drive for active citizens has been the emphasis on inclusive and accountable networks for citizens, ie the manifestation of different practices of citizenship. Davies (2007) describes this as the current network ‘orthodoxy’ in UK policy studies. The citizen-consumer as envisaged by New Labour, ie the individual exercising choice in pursuit of individual wants (Clarke et al, 2006), can be motivated to be involved in the institutions providing public services. Recent research has therefore focused on the partnership approach as one form of democratic inclusion/deliberative democracy (Ball and Maginn, 2005; Perrons and Skyers, 2003). Davies (2007) and the author’s own research showed that “community” knowledge and understanding of partnerships or the regeneration/planning process can contrast dramatically with policy understanding and knowledge. Residents in a former mining community in Kent who were included in the local regeneration forum still felt excluded from the actual decision-making process. Their idea of involvement also meant ownership of the regeneration outcome, the regenerated space (in this case through heritage displays, ie a performance of a shared past). As their plans were not incorporated for a number of economic/political reasons, the residents felt powerless rather than empowered and thus ultimately disadvantaged.

Thus particular forms of community participation reproduce existing power inequalities rather than empower the residents. The problem arises because the gap between the cultural capital needed to participate in “legitimate” nominally participatory structures, and the cultural capital available in those groups which are supposedly most able to benefit from those structures is not acknowledged or articulated (cf Davies, 2007). Questioning the empowerment effects of particular governance mechanisms then leads to questioning the neo-liberal idea of “active citizenship”. Active citizenship might not be achieved within the constraints of state institutions but requires the creation of political and public places which resonate with the social and cultural capital of the affected communities. Here, access to and use of digital public spaces might be particularly helpful as a recent community campaign in Kent (www.save-wye.org) has shown.

As residence and the politics of the everyday take on more prominence in the constitution of citizenship, the question of permanence and sustainability arises. Amit and Rappaport (2002) emphasise the short-lived nature of circumstantial associations such as with neighbours, work colleagues, club members and also fellow parents at parents’ associations. The importance and feeling of belonging of such consociate relationships depends on the continued involvement in the contexts in which they were formed. This is of particular importance in communities undergoing major socio-economic transformation where the traditional forms of association (trade unions, working-men’s clubs) lose their centrality. In these cases a focus for the maintenance of community becomes essential. Neal and Walters (2008) argue that the material relationships are enhanced through the dual belonging to a material place and an imagined community, in their case the rural community (cf.also Anderson, 1983).

In my research, this is similarly true, as the notion of the (symbolic) mining community was regularly mobilised and referred to in the description of everyday life in the village. The symbolic community is then constructed through campaigns for statues representing the preferred image of the village, village carnivals or newsletters. These place-making activities also need to allow space for young people as citizens and competent actors within the community, so that they can make their own communities as part of (or even in spite of) the local everyday spaces of (adult) community (cf. Panelli et al, 2002). As Weller (2003, p164) describes, “local boundaries shape the everyday spaces of citizenship and belonging for the teenagers (…) [so that] in the immediate future citizenship will be acted out at the local level.”

In conclusion then, citizenship is increasingly linked to the local and local, everyday practices. So the emphasis is then placed on recognition of citizenship practice rather than the bestowal of citizenship rights and it could be argued that this citizenship practice is undergoing transformation in the light of technological advances. Community-making practices encompass both community responsibility and care, and social pleasure and conviviality. The line between a citizen and someone practising community then becomes blurred as the proto-political, small-scale activities as a result of convivial practices make the social and political capital of social organisations visible. This means that social organisations can wield power and influence in local governance processes despite being nominally outside of the political process which illustrates the idea of the emergent public sphere. Although Neal and Walters (2008) discuss this in the rural context they also draw parallels to Thrift’s (2005) analysis of “lighter touch urban politics”.

The common denominator in studies of participation and citizenship seems to have become the importance of everyday activities and the resonance of the everyday in the political sphere and vice versa (cf Macnaughten, 2003). The argument is especially important when coupled with the recommendation by FreshMinds (2008) which highlights the importance of meaningful benefits of digital technologies in mundane activities for non-users to integrate them into their daily life. If, therefore, small-scale activities which lead to a feeling of belonging and an affective connection with place- or non-place-based social groups can be enhanced by digital technologies this can facilitate their uptake and prohibit a deepening of the digital divide.

Conclusions and directions

“Technology alone does not transform government, but government cannot transform to meet modern citizens’ expectations without it … The vision … is also about making government transformational through the use of technology…” (Cabinet Office, 2005)

As I discussed above, the role of the state in the construction of community and citizenship is changing. Digital technologies can drive this process forward and the integration of ICTs into the mechanisms of government has been described as a goal for transformational government. Enhanced ICTs can have particularly beneficial effects for organisations, institutions and for individual citizens, employees or social groups in the form of access to new opportunities and capabilities (CIOC, 2006). An important potential benefit is the integration of “direct democracy”, ie citizen engagement and polling, with the existing form of representative democracy where decisions are made via elected representatives. Commentators on the Obama campaign emphasised the successful engagement of the grass roots through digital technologies. Citizenship education, therefore, will mean making visible all the different routes to political participation with digitally enhanced ways of community-making and political action providing particularly fruitful opportunities for the creation of new public spheres.

Digital inclusion is linked to social inclusion. FreshMinds (2008, p5) argue that digital equality can mitigate “social inequalities derived from low incomes, poor health, limited skills or disabilities.” There could therefore be a virtuous circle: digital inclusion can enhance social inclusion and thus community engagement and social cohesion. Digital inclusion does not only mean the provision of ICT skills, it also means building up of trust among disadvantaged groups – in the public service providers as well as ICTs (DIT, 2007) so that the danger of a reproduction of offline exclusion in the online world can be addressed, and the potential of virtual communities as providing open, accessible, more democratic, alternative and safe spaces (Evans 2004) can be achieved.

Active citizenship does not only require cultural capital in the sense of openness and awareness of spaces for creative engagement but also digital literacy. This is becoming necessary to participate in contemporary and future society as lack of ICT skills is perceived to “greatly restrict” what adults can do privately and professionally (FreshMinds, 2008, p34). This suggests a particular subjectivity to participate fully:

“Access is still not enough: nearly two fifths of non-users fail to see the need or benefit of using the internet and other ICTs or feel that they are not the right kind of person to use them. The greatest share of the population who hold this view is the elderly and those on low incomes. These groups were also the most likely to not use the internet – even if they had a connection at home.” (2008: 37, my emphasis).

This means that attitudes towards technology are as important as affordability: both cultural and economic capital are required to deal with the information society. Here it is possible to refer to the discussion of “Digital Natives” by Prensky (2001) and Ellen Helsper in the context of this project. It could be argued that the 65+ generation of 2030 will have been socialised into the use of digital technologies and therefore the problem of lack of motivation and perceived need might not arise. This, however, does not address the lack of motivation and perceived need for those on low incomes – the digital divide is deepening for those who are not included and are not using digital technologies and thus are at risk at being left behind even further (FreshMinds, 2008, OPM, 2008). There remains a spatial element to social inclusion, however. As long as affordability of access rather than motivation to access is an issue, rural areas miss out on the availability of cheaper technology which is based on residential clusters. If these inequalities can be reduced then motivation becomes the main factor in digital inclusion.

Trends, surprises, predictions

“Attention to continuity is important for a number of reasons, among which is the capacity of social arrangements to persist despite expectations to the contrary.” (Crow, 2005, p3.2)

Trends

Places, territories and boundaries – both symbolically and materially – will continue to matter in everyday practices

In the discussion above, socio-spatial practices matter for the performance of citizenship has been regularly highlighted. The notion of the nation-state based citizenship is becoming obsolete as a result of the parallel tendencies towards localised and cosmopolitan identities. Residence becomes the basis for the political community (cf. Purcell, 2003). At the same time, the political is being redefined to include everyday and so-called “proto-political” activities. With regard to the interplay of belonging and technology, Savage et al (2005, p207) illustrate that fields of practice vary in their spatial extension, while some fields (eg cinema, music) “deploy IT to permit considerable spatial extension, yet other fields, notably that of residence, do not.” Following from this, then, it is possible to say that locality and boundaries remain important for identification. This can be translated into the digital world and efforts to construct and conceptualise digital territories are evidence for this: “without digital boundaries, the fundamental notion of privacy or the feeling of being at home will not take place” (Beslay and Hakkala, 2007, p69, emphasis in original). Beslay and Hakkala (2007) therefore suggest the concept of a virtual residence to tackle concerns about privacy, security and identity.

Belonging, whether offline or online, is performed through everyday practices. Therefore notions of citizenship need to be linked to the everyday, the individualised, embodied experience of social/political issues. Citizenship is thus no longer a status that is granted but a practice that is performed. Top-down-initiated participatory regimes will falter as more and more “community” activists will chose an exit-action strategy (Davies, 2007) and build their own stages and public spheres – both offline and online – for engagement and action.

Accessibility matters – social and cultural capital becomes digital capital and vice versa

Communities and engagement are both based on sharing of, and access to, information. Future technological developments open up a range of avenues, eg the ubiquitous access to information via ambient intelligent systems. The question remains, however, whether the fact that access can be limited to certain groups of people on the basis of their membership of the information-”owning” (producing) institution or their access to the technology is qualitatively different to mechanisms of distinction and exclusion available and practised now. FreshMinds (2008) argue that the digital divide between those who are confident and motivated to use digital technologies and those who are not is deepened despite being narrowed. Although there are fewer people who are excluded, those who are, are so on a deeper level. This also applies to the idea that communities can become the basis of participation. Therefore, engagement is based on information and the access to information. “In the future, people will be able to leave virtual yellow post-it stickers where they want to. The only difference is in the visibility; they may be seen by everybody or only those who are allowed or only those who are able to see them” (Beslay and Hakkala, 2007, p75). This highlights the importance of equal access to technology and the necessary skills and confidence.

Surprises

Discussions of residence as the basis of citizenship and political engagement have neglected the class dimension. Little has been said about the geometries of power and social, economic and cultural constraints in building multiple identities and citizenships, especially for young people. There is a need to bring this dimension into any discussion of belonging and paths to citizen engagement. Class remains one of the determining factors of the embodied experience of the everyday and especially manifest in the places we live in. It therefore also remains a determining factor in the social relationships and communities that individuals form.

Predictions: possible – plausible – preferable futures

In the future, digital technologies will be part of everyday life, more so than now. From a dystopian perspective then, if the current importance of consumption as dominant mode of expression is combined with the proliferation of citizenships which are based locally but can also be exercised through digital technologies, then there could be a market for online political engagement and expression. Multiple identities and citizenships can then also mean a proliferation of interest groups which cater for ever more extremist tastes and interests. A more positive view would see a growth in political awareness and literacy through a sense of global citizenship. This would lead to mass grassroots mobilisation for global issues such as the environment, poverty, and human rights as digital technologies make the actual embodied experience of these issues accessible for everyone, even the privileged middle class in Western democracies.

Access to digital technologies is dependent on confidence, skill and dispositions. It is therefore plausible that cultural capital will become “digital capital.” Skill refers here not only to digital literacy but also to the ability to live in a globalised world and deal with mobility and flexibility. Digital technologies will enable multiple identities as several places “happen” at the same time and several time periods can “happen” at the same time with information about past, present and future on constant display.

Access to the past provides a basis for a shared awareness of one place and thus “community”, awareness of the relevance of everyday actions for a potential future can mobilise social action, and combining this sense of shared issues and their impact on a shared future can enhance the sense of the “global imagined community.” The response can be in self-reflective individuals building their own DIY biographies (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002) which are expressed in socio-spatial practices characterised by mobility and thus enabling openness and creating opportunities to deal with the o/Other rather than constructing imaginary boundaries, be that virtually or materially. Technology can help prepare for change and movement but can also provide a much needed anchor in a de-territorialised world and biography. The availability of multiple citizenships and the increased engagement through everyday practices and experiences facilitated through technology then also means a greater sense of ownership in more and more personalised campaigns around social issues.

Before such a normalisation of ICTs in everyday practices is achieved, however, it is of utmost importance to close the digital divide and motivate non-users to engage with digital technologies and promote transcending the offline/online dichotomy. Only when those who are perceived to be excluded and who perceive themselves to be excluded from the digitised world can be motivated and access for them can be facilitated can digital technologies contribute to dealing with social inequalities. Without the necessary (state-led) support to develop skills and confidence to deal with the opportunities and the threats of the risk society, then young people might “stay put” which will pose significant risks for personal biographies in locations where work and training opportunities are scarce (cf Hörschelmann and Schäfer, 2005).

The role of education is then the provision of skills and abilities to deal with plurality, ambiguity and the adaptability to change (Springate, 2004). This means training for collaborative environments, understanding of complex systems and the encouragement of creativity. Society is faced with the consequences of complex political-economic systems and everyone, not only young people, needs to be prepared to be willing to learn about, understand and engage with them to enable change. The citizens of the future need to be able to navigate fluid material and virtual worlds and therefore need to be adaptable, familiar with complex systems and creative in their creation of engaging and engaged places.

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

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Another interesting point here is an issue around ownership: while Andrew Harrison in his submission to Futurelab argued that ownership of property is becoming less and less important, it is interesting to note as Angus Cameron (2008) does that even virtual universes such as Second Life are based on land ownership principled copied from the politico-economic system of the “real” world.

The scenario painted by them is very much reminiscent of Marge Piercy’s He, She, It (1991).

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.