29 results in Public Engagement and Social Science
four - 1976 – the moral necessity of austerity
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Introduction
Debt reduction has become central to political discourse. Despite disagreements about the speed and scale required, there is a broad Westminster consensus that substantial economies are unavoidable. Those who question this paradigm are judged to have fallen into the ‘trap’ of believing another economic model than austerity is possible. Several years on from the tumultuous economic crash of 2007/08, the ‘new politics’ of coalitions necessarily committed to austerity measures, especially in the public sector, while living standards fall for the vast majority, have become a long-term reality that we are told will last at least a decade. Recent social upheavals across several European countries have resulted from the brutal results of these programmes, which have shaken many people's faith in mainstream political parties to govern in the interests of all, leading to the growth of ‘new publics’ on the extreme Left and Right who are prepared to defy market nostrums and question the necessity of austerity. Although, at the time of writing (late 2013), the UK economy has managed to halt some aspects of the decline for the last few months – with slightly improved growth and employment figures – many elements of the crisis remain.
This is not the first time that politicians have stared into the abyss of a financial crisis; one recent example was the 1976 International Monetary Fund (IMF) crisis. With hindsight, the necessity of spending cuts looks questionable: are there lessons to be learned from the last time that British government policy was dictated by international finance? What were the results of the British public choosing to accept that the crisis really meant that ‘there is no alternative’ to deindustrialisation and mass unemployment, with all the social consequences that followed over the next decade. Do today's public want to consider creating alternatives today, in the form of campaigning social movements encouraging resistance, or should we seek inspiration in more spontaneous outbreaks, such as the UK's 2011 ‘summer of discontent’ (Briggs, 2012)?
These are not merely academic or theoretical questions. Arguably, the acts of resistance to austerity in Europe have challenged the dominant mindset and slowed down the pace of a brutal economic reconstruction process that otherwise threatened to engender poverty and anomie on a scale that could melt down existing social relations.
five - The Occupy movement
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The Occupy movement is one of many new protest movements that emerged in the year 2011. The limits, borders and boundaries of its affiliation are fairly fluid and can include not only those captured under the narrative of ‘Occupy’ explicitly, but also those linked through solidarities with the ‘reclaim’, ‘decolonise’ (Schrager Lang and Lang/Levitsky, 2012) and ‘(un)Occupy’ (Davis, 2011) movements. Despite the difficulty in quantifying actual numbers of participants ‘on site’, there have been some efforts to capture estimate figures from various camps. Occupy Wall Street is perhaps the, albeit Western-centric, hub of the Occupy movement. Estimated numbers at Occupy Wall Street have ranged from 2,000 to 15,000 according to mainstream media outlet ABC News (2011). Speaking about his own experiences regarding the Occupy site at Zuccotti Park, New York, Neil Smith of City University New York highlighted that alongside the claim that Occupy had ‘captured the global imagination’, the Occupy movement was relatively ‘small’ in terms of the numbers of people physically occupying spaces. Smith (2012) estimated that Occupy Wall Street had around 21,000 protestors in total, a number that is comparatively small if taken in the context of other movements in the last decade, which have seen far more people physically take to the streets. For other Occupy camps, the reported numbers varied even more, but what is clear is that, comparatively speaking, for a movement that utilised the concept of the ‘99%’ to refer to widening income disparities between rich and poor, not even a mere fraction of that ‘99%’ turned out to occupy. For a protest movement that claims to represent the interests of the ‘99%’, these numbers are somewhat moderate.
In response to Warren Buffet's acknowledgement of a clear class war, which he claimed ‘the rich’ were winning, Harvey (2012, p 53) asks: ‘the only question is: When will the people start to wage class war back?’. Evidently, some of them have, albeit not entirely or explicitly through the means of class, but many still have not, at least in terms of contemporary understandings of political contestation and resistance. This lack of participation by vast swathes of the ‘99%’ poses a series of important questions.
eight - Restorative justice, community action and public protection
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Introduction
Public engagement is at the heart of not only criminology, but all social sciences. In recent years, criminology has developed a renewed interest in social engagement, with this professional–public dialogue being seen as essential to developing a rounded public interest in the discipline as well as related policies and practices (Loader and Sparks, 2010). This chapter will discuss the importance of having a rounded debate about criminological issues and why it is important that the public, or publics (Kitzinger, 2004), fully comprehend the reality of a range of offences, offenders, victims and state responses.
There are a number of different explanations for why people offend, including their biology, social relationships, psychology and personality; however, there is no one explanation, as all people, and therefore offenders, are heterogeneous (Towl and Crighton, 2010). The aetiology of offending behaviour is essential in understanding the heterogeneous nature of not only offending, but also how offenders can be rehabilitated and reintegrated. Offender management has increasingly become a community issue in recent years and this will only continue in the current era of the ‘Big Society’. It is important, therefore, for the public at large and communities in particular to understand offenders and their offending behaviour so that they can assist with their reintegration. In the UK, one approach to offender reintegration and management that has been steadily growing in popularity, contrary to the current climate of state-/community-sanctioned punitiveness, is restorative justice. This chapter will discuss restorative justice as a means of reintegrating offenders, particularly stigmatised offenders, back into communities and how this fits in with the current Coalition government's social and criminal justice policies. In order to give the chapter a sense of grounding, it will focus on two offender populations, youth offenders and sex offenders, as they are prominent in current criminal justice policy and are seen as problematic offender populations by the media and public at large.
Current approaches to offender punishment and management
The social construction and reflexive modernisation of ideas around crime and punishment have been directly influenced by government policy, with certain agendas being pushed at different stages (Alcock et al, 2008), often in knee-jerk fashion, in response to real or perceived public attitudes.
nine - Chew ’em up or throw ’em up? Disorganised responses to interpersonal(ity) disorder and social disease
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Introduction
In this chapter, we ask how we might open up and maintain the ‘Agora’ or ‘marketplace’ as a public and social space that might allow for more inclusive conversations about the deeply troubled, troubling and troublesome dynamics that are at the heart of our divided and fragmented communities. To achieve this requires necessary translation of the often obfuscating and obscurantist, exclusive academic languages in which such lines of enquiry are ‘researched’ and ‘disseminated’ into a more accessible public language. The Social Sciences in the City™ seminars in the Tart Café in Bristol; London's ‘pub philosophy’ Big Ideas (see: http://www.bigi.org.uk/); and The Station (see: http://www. thestation.uk.com), a forum that, with our colleague Dr Joanne Carlyle, we also offer in London – all are some examples of such attempts at such translation, alongside the very many other café scientifique (see: http://www.cafescientifique.org/) and open space discussions that are increasingly ‘happening’ across the world.
We are aware that in posing our question in these terms, we are also offering a challenge to the power and (self-)perceived elitism of the established order, within which ‘the academy’ is centrally embedded. In this sense, we are seeking to deface its currency and to invite greater outreach from these centres of learning to the general public, who are far too often the objects of study rather than co-producers of knowledge and understanding about themselves. On the other hand, we are also mindful of how the young and/or the disaffected organise themselves in hybrid spaces within emerging social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter and refute academic or journalistic attempts to ‘theorise’ or ‘philosophise’ them. The academy must not merely ‘outreach’; it must invite a renegotiation of its own terms of engagement. In the terms of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière (1991), it must practise ‘intellectual emancipation’.
Psychosocial dynamics of membership and refusal in public–private spaces
In this chapter, we rehearse and develop our previous writings in order to explore ideas about groupishness (Bion, 1961), membership and participation and to raise questions about how better to understand our social and collective apprehension about those who take up their membership of the world by refusing to join in (Scanlon and Adlam, 2008, 2011a, 2012).
fourteen - Talking about personal experience and its relationship to social inequality across the generations
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- By Amanda Radix
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Introduction
It is through interaction with other people that we learn more about ourselves. This has been a beneficial aspect of my work as a conflict worker in Bristol. I have been fortunate enough to accompany people as they embark on an intimate journey to make changes to their lives, in order to overcome difficulties of belonging, coping on limited resources or dealing with the anxieties that surface when inhabiting a new way of life. I have learnt much about myself as a direct result of my work. I could not have foreseen how much this would affect me and this would not have happened unless I was exposed to such varied facets of the human condition at such difficult times in people's lives. I also took insights from a Master's course, which drew on and encouraged the application of social-scientific knowledge in a community setting. This lent further support to my learning, observations and professional practice; I utilised new theories that I was previously unaware of, by implementing them in my work, by feeding my findings back to tutors as did others, creating a culture of active contribution through lively discussion, and an open acceptance of failure as part of success..
What I was not expecting was to find new words to describe old feelings, transitory existences between states of mind. To learn why my experiences, which were often quite similar to those of the people I worked with (although sometimes 30 years apart), were influenced not just by the human condition, but by the external physical environments and social systems and processes we had been exposed to and, in our different ways and to different degrees, shared. The application of social-scientific insights gained from my Master's also assisted me in gaining new insight into dilemmas surrounding strategies of self-protection and personal interest, and the preservation of collective interests and values. These are the very topics that were governing both my personal story and my everyday working life. This enabled me to highlight my observations on the impacts of difference through the experiences of ‘established’ and ‘newcomer’ immigrant communities and root them in theory. Articulating the indescribable is what my study meant to me.
Introduction to Part Three
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In the concluding part of the book, we address the different ways in which social science engages with publics beyond the confines of the academy. What does social science represent for those in community and youth work or for individuals facing the challenge of teaching and learning in an inner city school? What, finally, have our own students learnt from the direct experience of undertaking social science in the community?
The first contribution, ‘Social science and severely troubled children – working in partnership, working in and on relationship’, by Cummins and Thomas, outlines a public engagement initiative involving social scientists at the University of the West of England and the Mulberry Bush School in Oxfordshire, which works with highly disturbed children. While focusing on the practical, collaborative character of their work with the school, the authors also emphasise the distinctive intellectual traditions in British sociology and Northern and Central European approaches to social pedagogy, which they drew upon in their work. As with other contributors in this volume, the authors propose a broadly psychosocial understanding of individual and collective behaviour. In this perspective, the role of attachments to others and the inner world of the individual are foregrounded. While registering this broad orientation to the social as a psychically invested space, Cummins and Thomas note a shift in their work from a publicly engaged sociology towards policy implementation, as the practical impacts of their particular interventions were formalised and consolidated within a specific institutional setting.
Another example of public engagement relating to education with school children is provided in the chapter by Tansy Clark, ‘The professional impact of Social Science in the City’. This is a first-hand, biographical account from a teacher working in a school in an economically and socially deprived part of Bristol. Tansy explores some of the insights and collaborative approaches to research gained from attending the Social Science Café. She links this with the experience of her work with school children living in one of the most deprived areas in Bristol. Overall, this has resulted in a revised approach to her teaching in the discipline of sociology, where she now acts as a ‘coinquirer’ with her students.
Introduction
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The rationale of the book
The main aim of this edited collection is to critically investigate the different ways in which the theory and practice of public engagement can be applied to the social sciences. More specifically, it is based upon a series of café shop talks entitled Social Science in the City™ that have been taking place in Bristol since 2010. The term ‘public engagement’ in its broadest sense refers to a participatory model of consultation and policy implementation that, although relatively recent (the language of public engagement only became widespread in the late 1990s), can be seen as part of the broader process of disseminated governance that took hold in the 1970s, above all, in relation to public sector restructuring. By way of exploring the value of public engagement from a broader social-scientific perspective, a range of substantive topics affecting people in everyday life have been presented to the public. The aim has been to generate debate and to encourage individuals to think about critical social issues encountered in their everyday life, either as professionals or as citizens concerned about the world around them.
The structure of the book
Part One of the book, The meaning of public engagement, is a general introduction both to the conceptual issues around public engagement and to the social science café. The introduction sets out the political and social context for taking social science out of the university campus and into a café environment and aims to contextualise the opportunities and challenges of a project based upon the principles of public engagement. Reference is also made in this context to the broader café scientifique movement and its application to the social sciences. The involvement of the different actors in the Social Science in the City project, café owner, academics and participants is outlined. The concept of public engagement as this applies to statutory services, social movements and higher education is outlined and contrasted. What is distinctive about public engagement in higher education as a form of participation and what changes in higher education have prompted the use of public engagement as an institutional strategy at a time of rapid policy change? The introduction also outlines the key concepts of public sociology and engaged research.
Part Two - Public engagement in practice
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Acknowledgements
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Part One - The meaning of public engagement
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ten - Resilience
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- By Paul Hoggett
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My personal interest in the subject
Why is it that some people can endure incredible hardships over a long period of time and yet still retain their spirit and optimism? And why is it that some individuals and groups can ‘bounce back’ from sudden crises whereas others collapse, go into decline or enter a malaise? The answers to these kinds of questions took me to the study of resilience – the ability of individuals, groups and perhaps whole communities to adapt to adversity and, in some ways, continue to flourish. In this chapter, I will draw upon research on resilient individuals and resilient systems to offer some thoughts about the psychological and social factors that appear to contribute to our capacity to withstand poverty, violence, family breakdown and other hardships.
As an academic, I have worked in the area of social policy for many years and have been particularly interested in the relation between class, poverty and community. Resilience was an idea that appealed to me because it drew attention to what poor people have, not to what they lack, so it offered an alternative to all those dominant accounts, supported by all main political parties in the UK, that demonise people who need to draw upon the support of the state for being inadequate, idle, feckless and irresponsible. Besides being an academic, I am also an experienced psychoanalytic psychotherapist working intensively with individuals on a one-to-one basis, sometimes over several years. This gives me enormously privileged insights into the struggles of individuals to move on in their lives and the nature of human strengths, but also some of the ways in which we can be our own worst enemies. This has helped me to appreciate that there are internal factors that can make us vulnerable and undermine our capacity to behave resiliently. Putting these two roles together – academic and psychotherapist – I have been able to use my interest in resilience research in a number of ways. For example, the resilience of workers operating in stressful environments became an important theme in a research project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council on the dilemmas facing front-line public service professionals (Hoggett et al, 2006).
one - Café scientifique and the art of engaging publics
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Introduction
The Bristol-based Social Science in the City initiative (see: http://hls.uwe.ac.uk/research/ssc.aspx), around which this book is based, is a variation on the model of the café scientifique. The origins of café scientifique can be traced to the café philosophique movement that developed in France in the early 1990s. Café scientifique refers to a grassroots public science initiative that, according to the café scientifique website (see: http://www.cafescientifique.org/), is currently running across 42 cities in the UK and cities in other countries. It typically consists of one monthly meeting in which one or several scientists talk about their work. These meetings are pitched at an informal level and are believed to improve the image of science and scientists. According to its proponents, café scientifique is not a place so much as an idea based around the informal and discursive ambience of the café. It is now a global phenomenon with national variations, and is closely linked to the growth of internet technology and the globalisation of media technologies.
More generally, the background rationale for café scientifique can be located in the gap between expert knowledge and an increasingly fragmented public sphere. In Risk society, Beck (1986) argued for the growing importance of expert knowledge and a polity based upon the management of risk. The risk society reflects public scepticism about the role of science in relation to contentious public issues, such as nuclear power, genetically modified (GM) crops and the environment. At a political and policy level, there is a perceived need to get publics ‘on side’ in relation to scientific innovation. The science café is therefore implicated in a broader set of policy and political issues than the image of the café as ‘meeting place’ immediately suggests.
Science and society: from communication to deliberation
As the authors of the Scientists on Public Engagement (ScoPE) report (Burchell et al, 2009) note, a ‘sea change’ has occurred over the last three decades in professional scientific culture towards an endorsement of public engagement as an integral part of the production of scientific knowledge. Public engagement is understood here as a means of addressing publicly defined priorities, improving scientific practice and helping to define the questions that scientists might address. Lay publics are included in this model as citizen partners.
Introduction to Part One
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We write this book in a period of dramatic change in the policy and goals of higher education. There has been a fundamental shift in the ways in which higher education is now conceptualised: it is to be treated no longer as a public good, articulated through educational judgement and publicly financed, but as driven by students in their primary role as consumers. Within this context, the meaning of public engagement in higher education appears particularly problematic. Chapter One asks what public engagement means within this revised and shifting framework. Debates around the meaning of public engagement are connected to broader discourses of participation and deliberative democracy, which have been significant influences in the policy field in the last three decades. While reviewing these issues, Chapter One also questions the meaning of the public sphere and the diverse conceptions of how publics are mobilised, represented and developed. Chapter One concludes by outlining Burawoy's conception of public sociology, which then forms a thread that is developed throughout the book.
In relation to higher education, the withdrawal of block grants and the substitution of student fees as the main source of income – other than in the case of science and medicine, which still receive state support – is the major innovation introduced by the Coalition government (Freedman, 2011). This is part of a more long-term process of restructuring in higher education going back to the introduction of regulation in the 1980s and the Research Assessment Exercise in the late 1980s, when the University Grants Committee (UGC) was replaced by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) (Collini, 2010). The period from 1981 to 1999 was characterised by an expansion of student numbers in addition to a reduction in funding per student. Other milestones in this period include the Dearing Report (Dearing, 1997) and the introduction of student fees under New Labour with the Education Act 2004, when fees were set at £3,000, with some grant provision and retention of the block grant.
The Browne Report (Browne, 2010) explicitly articulated the new market model of higher education. It proposed the abolition of the block grant, with the main channel for funding through raised student fees.
three - ‘Grab and go’: some sociological musings on the 2011 ‘disturbances’
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- By Steve Hunt
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In this chapter, I provide an overview of a topic that is close to my heart. The reasons for this will quickly become apparent. Any publicly engaged social scientist will be concerned with one of the core questions in the social sciences, namely, why do sociologists research and write on particular themes if they are not personally touched, often in indirect ways, by the issues they raise? Posing the question in this way is a reminder that social scientists are simultaneously academic analysts and commentators on the one hand, and social actors on the other. This, of course, raises further issues around subjectivity and empirical scholarly analysis, with its focus on causal factors and relationships – not least of all, where does one begin and the other end?
It is with these observations in mind that I address the subject of the 2011 ‘disturbances’. I am acutely aware that sociology should be relevant and speak to an informed audience that can become part of an ongoing conversation and offer positive feedback. This chapter began life as a presentation given to my students as part of their degree programme and their comments were incorporated into an early draft. I am also aware of the need to address a wider audience. Earlier talks that I gave to the Social Science in the City™ initiative held in Bristol were on the subject of Latin American migrants in the city and the broader area of religious and sexual rights. Feedback from these audiences enhanced subsequent publications and work undertaken in public engagement with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual groups and my work with Amnesty International. It is with such public impacts in mind, and the requisite for sociology to have practical significance, that I address the theme of the 2011 ‘disturbances’.
In the second week of August 2011, I, like millions of others, switched on the television to witness that many cities and major towns in the UK (or, more precisely, in England, but interestingly not in Wales or Scotland; see Lloyd, 2011) were subject to arson attacks, looting of shop centres and other major incidents of urban unrest. To my bemusement, I watched the images of several buildings burning in my home town of Croydon, including a large furniture store that was once a local landmark.
twelve - The professional impact of Social Science in the City™
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- By Tansy Clark
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Introduction
This chapter explores the impact of Social Science in the City on my insights and practice as a teacher in a city school and as a postgraduate student pursuing research on the experience and meaning of poverty in a part of the inner city. My attendance at the Social Science in the City seminars, prior to registering for a PhD, provided me with social contact with others interested in and involved in social research. I shall reflect upon and discuss in-depth the value of such public engagement initiatives for my own professional practice, in particular, the importance of being informed about a range of critical social issues, backed up by academic research – topics that have ranged from thinking about the way we might deal with an increasingly ageing population to the insights gained from presentations focused on managing community conflict, including facts about urban realities and tensions on the ground that affect the students in the catchment area in which I work and the pressures they encounter outside the school gates. I shall also discuss the relevance of these talks for my own interest in pursuing social research in the inner city.
Overview
My professional career path has taken a significant change in the last year and a half. When I started attending Social Science in the City seminars, I was a sociology teacher at an inner city school and now, sometime later, I have a multiple identity as a teacher, voluntary youth worker and PhD student researching youth transitions/poverty in my school catchment area. I would like to chart this transition and acknowledge how Social Science in the City has supported and inspired this development and diversification of my career path. As a result of my attendance, I have been able to improve my insights in the discipline of social science, enrich my teaching and reflect deeply upon the deprivation issues facing my students. Consequently, I have begun my doctoral research with confidence and the support of other experienced scholars in the local academic arena.
Beginnings of an inner city teaching career
I began my teaching career four and a half years ago. I completed my professional training at Exeter University, which placed me in a private school for my teaching practice. During this time, I experienced the contrast between my own state schooling and the highly privileged surroundings in the minor public school in Somerset.
List of contributors
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Conclusions: Managing public engagement
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Summary
In the Conclusion, we revisit some of the key issues raised in the Introduction and developed throughout the book. In Part One, we outlined how changes within higher education had problematised the idea of the university as a public good, while noting how, at the same time, there are mounting pressures for universities to be more accountable to their putative publics. Public engagement, sifted through a variety of managerialist and top-down approaches, is now a central part of the university's contemporary mission. Social Science in the City™ pre-dated these developments and developed from a commitment to providing critical spaces for reflection, initially in the context of drastic cuts to public spending as part of austerity politics. In the light of an acceleration of demands on universities to produce impact-relevant research as proof of their economic value to society, we must balance a number of sometimes conflicting demands and priorities. And yet, as we have discussed, and as various chapters in this book convey, there are multiple ways in which universities can be engaged, depending upon people's values, skills and concerns. We have argued at different points in the book for the importance of encouraging critical reflection about pressing social, political and economic matters, wherever we can. That includes those people occupying strategic management positions as much as those from the most hard-pressed estates.
While the origins of Social Science in the City resonate with the classic emancipatory role of public sociology, as outlined by Burawoy – one which includes ‘publics beyond the academy in dialogue about matters of political and moral concern’ (Burawoy, 2004, p 1607) – we must also respond pragmatically to the neoliberal-inflected agendas within higher education that emphasise impact. The reason we believe that this is important is because we believe in the dynamic quality of social life and the creativity and sometimes counter-hegemonic imaginaries of those who bring their own questions, experiences and issues into publically engaged events.
Public engagement itself reflects conflicting demands, interests and agendas, both for the increased dissemination of scientific innovation to publics based upon processes of dialogue and empowerment, on the one hand, but also towards methods of control and increased surveillance, on the other.
six - ‘Brave new world’: how will the government respond to the social care challenge of an ageing population?
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- By Robin Means
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Introduction
This chapter is based upon the author's Social Science in the City™ talk at the Tart Café on 14 October 2010 but has been updated in the light of evolving government policies and reactions against the negative consequences of these for many older people. It starts by exploring what we mean by ‘old age’ but goes on to focus down on social care policies towards older people in terms of both what is driving them and their likely impacts. The final section of the chapter focuses down on the key messages for future public engagement activity, as well as some reflections on the different mechanisms available for having an impact.
On a personal note, the initial talk was given six weeks before by 60th birthday, when still an Associate Dean for Research and Knowledge Exchange in a large Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, which covered a huge range of subjects, from plant sciences to social work. As such, I had a broad responsibility to support public engagement in the faculty, with one of my contributions being the provision of a small financial allocation to support the Social Science in the City initiative.
Public engagement and understanding old age
Social care for older people has a high profile in England and Wales at the moment. There is wide recognition that the ageing of the so-called ‘baby boom’ generation will place high pressures on public and private pensions systems and, subsequently, as they age further, on health and welfare budgets. There is great disquiet among older people and their relatives about how they might have to use the equity in their homes to help pay for a care home place. Local authorities are struggling to meet their statutory responsibilities under adult social care legislation.
As a result, there is already a great deal of public engagement occurring in this area. However, the key message of this chapter is that this debate needs to be underpinned by a much more nuanced and positive understanding of the diversity of later life than is the case at the present. The importance of this can be illustrated by the simple question of ‘When does old age begin?’, since the answer given to this is often narrow and limiting.
Introduction to Part Two
- Edited by Stella Maile, University of the West of England, David Griffiths, The Open University
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- Book:
- Public Engagement and Social Science
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 04 March 2022
- Print publication:
- 21 May 2014, pp 47-52
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Summary
As we argued in the Introduction to the book, there are different conceptualisations of public engagement and participation, which reflect shifting policy, political and social agendas. Public engagement in higher education has tended to be framed in largely managerial terms as a question of increased transparency and accountability, involving ‘the public’ in dialogue and promoting participation and knowledge transfer. In this model of public engagement, promoting access to universities’ facilities and academic knowledge and fostering student and faculty engagement are part of an ongoing process of widening participation. In this perspective, the broader structural and policy framework affecting higher education and the effects of power upon the types of knowledge produced within universities have tended to fly well below the radar.
What the contributors in this part of the book have in common is a critical approach, both to substantive issues and to their specific area of expertise. While they all have a background in social science, a wide variety of disciplines is covered, from social policy and sociology to criminology and divergent psychotherapeutic approaches. Clearly, social-scientific research is not uniform, but informed by a variety of research agendas, interests, theories and methodologies. Provisionally extending Burawoy's concept of a public sociology to the other disciplines, we suggest that each of these contributors is concerned with moral and political concerns that reach beyond the university. The chapters in this part of the book reflect the different contexts for the application of social-scientific research; they also represent different audiences beyond the café environment, audiences and participants either as teachers and researchers, as activists, or as policymakers and practitioners.
In the first three chapters, Hunt, Clement and Fletcher address the 2011 riots, the politics of austerity and the Occupy movement, and the limits to participation. Steve Hunt, in ‘“Grab and go”: some sociological musings on the 2011 “disturbances”’, provides an overview of interpretations of the 2011 riots that were in common currency at the time and also applies the insights of classical sociology, in particular, the work of Durkheim. Does the limitless desire promoted by the consumer society result in a state of anomie? Ranging over a number of authors from Sennett to Bauman the ‘cult of individualism’ is located at the root of the problem.
eleven - Social science and severely troubled children – working in partnership, working in and on relationship
- Edited by Stella Maile, University of the West of England, David Griffiths, The Open University
-
- Book:
- Public Engagement and Social Science
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 04 March 2022
- Print publication:
- 21 May 2014, pp 179-192
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Summary
This chapter explores the role of publically engaged social science in the development of a new Foundation Degree in Therapeutic Child Care. This initiative was jointly developed by psychosocially informed social scientists at the University of the West of England (UWE) and the Mulberry Bush School (MBS) in Oxfordshire, a residential educational facility for some of the UK's most disturbed 5–13 year olds. We discuss the development of the collaboration, the animating social-scientific ideas that informed it, the impact of the Foundation Degree on the school and its work, and the lessons that can be drawn about publically engaged partnership between the social sciences and the world of residential and therapeutic child care.
The collaboration and its background
Residential child care in the UK, much like residential care in general, is uneven in quality and does not have uniformly high standards of training and qualification (College of Social Work, 2012). This is very unlike the situation in many parts of Europe, where training to graduate or postgraduate level in ‘Social Pedagogy’ is a recognised minimum qualification. We discuss what is meant by social pedagogy in more detail later. For now, suffice it to say, ideas about the need for residential care to address the whole child and for staff to engage in sustained professional reflection are not a large part of thinking of either existing training or management thinking, and, as a result, most staff are not well supported in their work.
Only the most troubled of the UK's 67,050 looked-after children end up in residential facilities (DfE, 2012). Often, there have been multiple failures in their care – both familial and statutory – before they arrive in residential facilities. While there are minimum national standards to which care staff must be trained, as a rule, it is rare to find organisations that ‘go the extra mile’. The ‘extra mile’, in our view, delivers training that is based on a profound understanding of what such children have experienced and need, and a profound understanding of what staff working with such children might experience and need in order to do this work and do it well.