Jeremy Brent and Southmead

Representation, Power and Action

I will quote page numbers of the core text rather than citations, to make you go & read the book

The academic gaze

• “For years and years we have had people coming in from outside to find out what’s wrong with us, how we live, and what makes us so criminal”

• Southmead resident p11• “The strange visitor was coming to question

the usefulness of our insalubrious existence”

Ideas of community

• Fascists- folk community• Anarchists- community justice promoted by Class

War• Police- community relations• Commerce- business in the community

• Lack of community• Low community action• Lack of ‘leadership’

writers

Community:• Does exist (Alinski, Etizioni, Nancy)• Should exist (Marx, Engels, Taylor)• Does not or cannot exist (Bauman, Harvey, Peet & Thrift,

Zukin)• Exist in impossible ways (Castells)• Are false or dangerous (Touraine, Sennett)• Are necessary (Hall, hooks, West)• Pose dilemmas (Bhanba, Brown, Corlett etc)• Are modern inventions (Bauman)• Are outdated (Cooke)

The ‘community’

• One anecdote in the book.....p28-29• Community as shared history• A desire for and celebration of togetherness• Territory and difference ‘you’re not from round here’• Morality- ‘hero of the community’ or ‘no grassing’• Boundary enforcement –allowed to stay in’• Solidary social practice -face to face resolution of

problems• gendered• destructive

derrida

• It is something that one does not know, precisely, and one does not know if precisely it IS, if it exists, if it responds to a name or corresponds to an essence, p31

Writing as representation

• You will be writing about Lincoln Way• You will be close, but the data is distancing• You won’t be writing about Lincoln Way• You will be representing Lincoln Way• How is your writing representative of Lincoln

Way: its community, people, data?• Objects or subjects?

Henry Mayhew, Edwin Chadwick, Karl Marx, Freidrich Engels

• “Writers recreated the poor for the bourgeois study and drawing room as much for the urban council chamber” p36

• The labouring and dangerous classes would be transformed once they became visible

• Inculcation of politeness through the benign gaze of the bourgeoisie

Emotionally charged titles and dramatic covers

• Goliath: Britain's dangerous places (Campbell 1993)– joyriding in Oxford– question community

• Danziger’s Britain: a journey to the edge (Danziger 1997)– lost battle against drug bullies in Leeds– to share the despair

• Dark heart: the shocking truth about hidden Britain (Davies 1998)– depression in Leicester– call for action

“By constructing poverty and deprivation in this way, as rooted in the characteristics of specific people and places and as only found in a few ‘deviant’ communities, mainstream society is assumed to be functioning properly... Blame is centred on the victims of poverty, rather than on the conditions of wider society” p39-40

Blame the behaviour of the poor, their morality, rather thethe structural economics andInequity of their situation

Exact & objective documentation, p41

• Poverty in Bristol reports, 1985, 1988, 1994, 1996• Power & Tunstall 1995, 1997, Philo 1995• Anonymity of the writers-rhetoric of objectivity- poor are visible, writers

are invisible• Turn social practices of poverty into static, spatially bounded aberration• Authors are ‘possessors of truth’ about the poverty• Reduce social actors to statistical lists• Poverty portrayed as a local problem• Wealthy areas are not analysed• More poor people live outside the ‘poor areas’• Do not consider wider economic and social forces (like a recession)• Poverty is a static classification not a dynamic relationship with wealth (cf

the recent Spirit Level work on inequality)

Edward Said

• “Perhaps the most important fact of all would be...to ask how one can study [represent or act with] other cultures and peoples from a libertarian, or a non-repressive and non-manipulative perspective” p63

Would those being written aboutrecognise my account of them?{ }

The challenge/assignment

• To re:present Lincoln Way in a ‘community project report’

• To use data, statistics, evidence, image and story

• To create a narrative• That might be recognised by the community

about whom you are writing