Everybody views the world from their own point of view but there are some people whom we expect to take in all sides. Social scientists and journalists come to mind. I was reminded of this cartoon on reading Aditya Chakrabortty’s latest attack on sociology. As an economist he has accused the other social sciences of failing to predict the financial crisis and while this might be thought to reflect a failing in economics rather than sociology, in the process he has taken aggressive side swipes at sociology and political science in particular. I have written to him three times, with one letter printed in the online edition of the Guardian (with Howard Wollman), responding to the first diatribe.  He sees the financial crisis as an issue about the responsibility of social science; I agree. However, I see his reporting of it as an issue about the responsibility of financial journalists.  To assist in responsible reporting for his last piece (printed in the Guardian on 8 May) the BSA collated a lengthy document at short notice outlining some of the sociological work we were aware of on the financial crisis and its aftermath . This was ridiculed by him as work from the Journal of Niche Studies. I’ll leave it to you to judge whether the work should be so easily dismissed. But I was deeply disappointed at his claim that on our part we refused to engage with him. I repeat here the email I sent him to which I attached the document above. It was sent on the 4 May, well in advance of his deadline.

“I understand you have been wishing to contact me as President of the BSA. We have been unable to ascertain from you what it is specifically you wish to talk to me about, so I have tried to anticipate what it is you would like to know and we have compiled the attached document. This lists some of the work that sociologists have done in the area of the financial crisis over the past few years, including some work presented at our conference and in our journals. I’m afraid it lists only the things that come immediately to mind but I am sure it will be helpful to you. To give you a sense of the books being written now, the document also lists books on the topic awaiting review that have arrived in the BSA Office. We have put this document in the public domain ahead of your piece on Monday so that it is plain we have been trying to anticipate your requests. I am very shortly leaving for a family break in Donegal until Monday night. If you wish to let us know your specific questions, please email them to Judith Mudd, our Chief Executive, and/or Tony Trueman, our media officer, and they will try to help you. Their addresses are below: judith.mudd@britsoc.org.uk, tony.trueman@britsoc.org.uk. I have also copied them into this email. Best wishes.”

Again I’ll leave it to you to judge whether his accusation is fair. One of the casualties of the financial crisis has been the credibility of economics; another is the reputation of financial journalism.  This makes you realise just how far neoliberalism has penetrated financial journalism. It made me think also whether it is necessary for those who work in the public sphere to have an ego. Probably. But even so, it is impossible to work in the public sphere and believe one is always right and to always retain for oneself the last word. Not unless you want to be like the old lady from Punch and live in a world of your own. It is time for me, I think, to update my example when teaching interactionism from 19^th century eccentricism to 21^st century financial journalism.

John Brewer, BSA President

As a visiting scholar at US ‘premier public university’, the University of California, Berkeley¹ (2012), I see commonalities in the ‘happy, diverse student’ urgently engaged in disseminating value and distinction – their place is best, their choice correct. At Berkeley, even the ‘old’ history of activism, radicalism and institutional dis-engagement is re-invoked and made safe, or somewhat safer, in the name of variety, where everyone is present, and even the past is recast with future value.  The ‘first’, ‘best’ and ‘biggest’ would be words likely to be found elsewhere – as on my guided campus tour – and I wonder about the room for improvement, gaps, and ‘failure’ in these well defined university maps.

Cynical sentiment was displaced by the undergraduate Biology student leading a tour around Berkeley campus on a sunny March morning; she lead us on a hour and a half walking trip, complete with historical facts, key statistics and noteworthy venues on and off campus. She was adding to her CV, her future employability, just trying to get by and facing life-long future debts. She excelled as a university representative and her enthusiasm earned her resounding applause as she related her weekly timetable, extra-curricular activities, and exam success. In being duly impressed, I was joined by potential students, who were informed about the 25% admissions success, and eager parents keen to find out what their child should put in her or his personal statement – how to make the special child become part of the special institution, to secure that special future. While choice, of e.g. activities, eateries and societies was described, I wondered how this process of alignment already demarcates a ‘good fit’ for future students, institutional stories, and societal success.

The sun was shining and it was hard not to ‘just believe’ as one banner, quoting words from a current smiling student invoked us to do. Our guide was believable, committed, determined. And isn’t that just what we would want from good students? On a sunny day, with an unobstructed view of the Golden Gate Bridge (this line of sight is university owned and protected), this all seems perfectly plausible.  But the tour also hinted at presences and absences beyond these lines of sight. We tried to find the university mascot, a Golden Bear, on the first university building (1873); I put my glasses on for the task, confident that I could master it and also achieve. The bear, so the story goes, is a guardian, a mother bear who is watching over her cubs: many parents smiled and the journey from home to university was made safe and familial. The emergency poles, promising a 1.5min response time from on-campus police, if the button is pushed, also reassured of a 24/7 presence. Campus is made safe, students are located, and futures are confirmed as familiar.

As with many UK campuses, a park-feel is maintained and I strolled over Strawberry Lake via a wooden bridge. Echoing many University Open Days, eager parents pushed to the front and asked their questions – this time about trees, wildlife and plants. Protection and security is naturalised, even as the construction of this pervades the architecture and ecology of campus, also present in evoking scenic sounds, taste and smells (Australian Eucalyptus trees, ‘International House’).  These scenes shifted as an all-in-pink team ran past declaring their search for a ‘Berkeley personality’; we were told of opportunities to join the cheerleading squad (and even imagine ourselves as having a ‘Berkeley Personality’). It’s enticing.

But just as you reach for that university personality, as I reached for the university door, we were told that all outside door handles have been removed after student protestors chained themselves to such handles not that long ago. The student of today has, perhaps, no choice but to align; to be un-obstructive to these directing pathways as ‘good guides’. My Berkeley guide does all this with good humour, intelligence and pride: she tells the story of Athena, Goddess of Wisdom, who, sitting above the arched entrance bestows knowledge on those entering the library. Because Athena is greedy, as well as knowledgeable, she takes this away as students make their exits. Universities have this knowing, yet greedy, potential and strategies to resist this – in times of abiding doors (without handles) – are vital.  Suspicious students, we are told, choose a different exit. But what would it mean for universities to choose another entrance?

‘A Smug Education’ (New York Times 9^th March 2012) responded to US Republican Presidential Candidate, Rick Santorum’s attack on American colleges as ‘indoctrination mills’, which we are advised not to enter: in his call, Barack Obama was named as a ‘snob’ for urging Americans to go to college, with universities cleverly placed as unknowing, out-of-touch and pretentious, and ‘reality’ and hard work situated elsewhere. It is vital that the hard work of students and staff is foregrounded on and off campus, where broader conceptualizations of learning may also exceed the numerical count of entrance and (employment) exits, only conferred in following specific, and often expensive, university routes.

Yvette Taylor, Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research, LSBU. Visiting Scholar, University of California, Berkeley (2012).

The LSE and Guardian’s ‘Reading the Riots’ project claims that 10% of those involved in the riots were female. But while the dominant images of rioters have been masked young men, one of the most striking features of the media coverage and policy responses to the riots has been the (hyper)visibility of women. Within this, two figures have emerged: ‘troubled’ mothers and ‘failed’ female rioters.

Indeed the historical positioning of working-class mothers as a locus of national concerns around morality and repository of middle-class fear was bought to the fore again. In the immediate public responses to the riots was a strident blaming of ‘poor parenting’ within poor communities, which spoke almost exclusively against mothers. A Guardian/ ICM poll found that 86% of the public cited poor parenting as the main cause of the riots. These debates were suffused with a long-standing narrative of troubled mothers, with single-mothers blamed for failing to bring up their children properly, fuelling public discourses of welfare dependency and the (un)deserving poor. Newspaper reports of mother and daughter Clarice and Chantelle Ali – photographed together looting shops in Hackney, East London – and readers’ saturated condemnations of the working-classes as lazy, irresponsible and immoral – had a specific gendered edge:

Well done Clarice, you’ve ruined your child’s life! No doubt she will go on to destroy her child’s life and the cycle will continue indefinitely as we continue to fund this via the welfare state, effectively giving the green light to such appalling behaviour. 09/12/2011 12:02

What a pair of oxygen stealers. When they’re out don’t give them any benefits – they’ve had their chance, they were looked after by the state and taxpayers – and look  how they repaid us. Until we start getting tough, vermin like this will continue to stick their hands out and abuse the system whilst also draining the system even further and costing more money through criminal activity. 09/12/2011 11:36

Here, working-class families are positioned as sucking the life-blood out of community – and capacity – rendering the State’s ‘good tax-payers’ exhausted by their diseased criminality: these ‘vermin’ are seen to breed, decay and drain in their ‘appalling’ cycles of life-as-death. Respectable, regenerative lives, coded in the bodies of some youth, are replaced with only deathly potential, where the bad youth of today lacks life affirmation.  These public debates are illustrative of the centrality of class practices of distinction and distancing among the middle-classes – or ‘class making’ (Skeggs 2004) – as the middle-classes claim their position as ‘respectable’ and ‘defiant’ members of the community, wielding brooms as they go about cleaning up and repairing ‘Broken Britain’.

Public discourses of feral youth and failing families elide and mask questions of structural disadvantage, individualising inequality as the outcome of personal ‘ills’ rather than systematic material inequalities. David Cameron recently announced a ‘crackdown’ on ‘chaotic families’ as a response to the riots, dispatching ‘family troubleshooters’ to tackle a ‘responsibility deficit’ in problem communities which suggests an even greater hyper-surveillance of the working-classes. Re-configurations of family are re-done around the intersections of race, class, gender and sexuality: public discourses of ‘troubled families’ and poor parenting are not only easily and problematically collapsed into one of ‘failed mothering’.  These ‘riotous responses’ also operate to uphold the logics of heterosexuality as (re)productive, thus failing to recognise the complexity of contemporary family formations. 

Alongside the marginalisation of mothers has been an exceptional focus on the young female rioters, most notably 18 year old ex-Olympic ambassador Chelsea Ives who was jailed for two years after being found guilty of burglary and violent disorder. The public interest in Chelsea was undoubtedly informed by her status as a 2012 Olympic ambassador: as the ‘face of the city’. There is much to unpick here about how particular classed, racialised and gendered (young) bodies come to be (re)positioned and (re)inscribed within regenerated city-scapes. Urban ‘disadvantaged’ youth become objects of a particular luminosity, encoded as future-oriented, agentic subjects who stand for the city’s pride, hope, diversity and multiculturalism. But, with London Mayor Boris Johnson calling her ‘unfit’ to represent our country, Chelsea’s story shows us how fragile this positioning is, as her ‘exemplary’ status is used against her: she was the girl who threw away her – and the city’s – chances.

Chelsea’s media representation might also be said to speak to the shifts and repositionings of girlhood within this era of austerity and youth disenchantment. Coverage of young women’s participation in recent ‘organised’ protests such as the anti-tuition fees marches, the Occupy movement and ‘slut walks’ predominantly featured white and middle-class women – perhaps most strikingly embodied in the photo of female students peacefully linking hands around a police van in the midst of the student marches through London. These ‘riot girls’ – positioned as legitimate and respectable protesters and signs of renewed ‘feminist’ protest – sit in stark contrast to the construction of Chelsea’s ‘illegitimate’, and so-called ‘greed-driven’ rioting.

The play ‘The Riots’, performed most recently in Tottenham – where the riots began – includes first-hand testimonies from individuals involved in last summer’s events. Excerpts from Chelsea’s letter to the play’s writer, Gillian Slovo, are included, standing out amidst a sea of male voices. In her letter, penned from Holloway Prison, she apologised for her actions and challenged the media’s image of her as ‘council estate scum’:

The public seem to automatically place me in an unnamed category for thick, low-lifed [sic] individuals which is not me at all. I haven’t even had the chance to speak for myself … The public just need to know I’m only accountable for my actions and not everyone else’s and I’m sorry.

Chelsea’s need to repent, to dis-identify from the pathologised working-class and prove her ‘respectability’, can draw parallels with Jade Goody – another working-class girl who had to show her desire to improve and who was publicly persecuted for her ‘failings’ in the most extreme way. Working-class femininities are always-already failing and must be repudiated, corrected and left behind in order to become intelligible neoliberal subjects. 

Writing on femininities under the New Labour govermment, Angela McRobbie argued that those on the periphery of idealised models of autonomous, individualised and ambitious young womanhood were ‘more emphatically condemned for their lack of status and other failings than would have been the case in the past’ (2008: 7). The troubled mothers and failing riot girls of last summer’s events embody this condemnation of young working-class women but in a new context. The gendering of the riots tells us many things, but perhaps most importantly that classed and racialised distinctions and boundaries of failed and ideal femininities are becoming more accentuated under the coalition government and its austerity policies. 

In a recent post, McRobbie suggests that there has been a further narrowing of the models of ‘success’ available to young women, with a celebration of a ‘normatively middle-class idea of achievement, ambition and professionalism’ presented by white, upper-middle class MPs such as Louise Mensch or the Prime Minister’s wife, Samantha Cameron.  While New Labour’s meritocracy project was deeply flawed, there was a narrative of aspiration available to young working-class women. This seems to have been lost under the coalition – after all it was David Willets MP who blamed aspirational women – and feminism – for the lack of jobs available to working-class men. Recent cuts to youth services, a dramatic hike in university fees, the withdrawl of the Educational Maintenance Allowance (EMA), cuts to Sure Start and rising unemployment, seem to send a simple message to working-class young women: ‘don’t even bother’.

So what is there left to dream of and aspire to for girls like Chelsea who are (increasingly) excluded from the material and cultural resources which are valued? We shouldn’t be surprised at women’s participation in the riots, nor their participation in (likely) future forms of unrest: it is these very cultures and contexts of education, family, community and employment, foregrounded in the below seminars, that may well produce rather than prevent ‘riots’.

Kimberly Allen, Institute for Policy Studies in Education, London Metropolitan University, London
Yvette Taylor, Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research, London Southbank University, London

London Metropolitan University and Plymouth University are holding a seminar on ‘Family Cultures’ on the 15^th February 2012 at the Women’s Library, London. This is the fourth seminar in the ESRC seminar series ‘New Perspectives in Education and Culture’. For more details on the seminar and to book a place, please visit the website: http://educationandculture.wordpress.com/

The Weeks Centre is hosting a British Sociological Association one-day seminar, titled ‘Intersecting Family Lives, Labours, Locales’ on the 3^rd February 2012. For more details and to book a place, please visit the website: http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/ahs/news/191211.shtml

Tent City University

The Occupy London camp outside St Pauls fired up the political agenda throughout 2011. It brought attention to a range of problems associated with global capital, and the wealth and power inequalities that flow from what has been characterised as the elite 1% .    There are two observations I’ll make here after a day visit to the camp late last year.  Firstly, the actual space in which the camp sits outside St Pauls in The City of London.  The troubling idiosyncrasies of which have been charted by George Monbiot, but sociologically The City provides a case study par excellence of Lefebvre’s ideas of how capital represents and produces urban space to meet its own ends.  This is not the London that most people know, presented in Eastenders or countless popular songs, but a space apart from the rest of London, plugged into the global financial flows as a generator of capital, as Sassens has discussed at length, and which operates on a different set  of rules from  other parts of the UK.  It is, however, the second point about Occupy London that I want to bring to the fore. 

Richard Wilkinson and his trademark graphs.

Tucked-in amid the various tents and shelters there is the Tent City University (TCU).  As a venue it has hosted a variety of talks, lectures and workshops given by a variety of people, academics and activists.  When I visited the camp at the tale end of last year, Richard Wilkinson was in full flow illustrating his ideas on inequality with his trademark graphs.  The actual talk was not much different from the one he gave at the BSA Equality lecture, where he outlined his thesis on the relationships between income inequality and various social problems, but both the context and reception were very different.  It was all much more immediate and alive. The various institutions, for instance, that lie behind the growth in income inequality that Wilkinson has charted were situated literally metres away.  But it was also how the talk was received that was interesting, despite squatting on the hard stone cobbles and loose remnants of carpet.  There was a buzz of interest and keen debate that often can be lacking in the more formal settings of academia; perhaps a situation close to how Fromm describes learning and education in the ‘being’ mode of his ‘being/ having’ schema, where for students ‘listening is an alive process’ and where ‘new questions, new ideas, new perspectives arise in their minds’.

As with much of what LSX is trying to achieve by raising questions and pointing to new possibilities, the existence of the TCU can help us reflect on the state of contemporary education and university life.  Critiques of the neo-liberal incursion into the academy are multiple and I won’t repeat them here, but what the TCU gave me on that day was a very brief but fleeting glimpse of  how the experience of education could be; where the textures of learning were not wrapped up in second-hand business models, where active students are not reduced into passive consumers and where the learning was about ideas and thinking. 

Chris Yuill, Robert Gordon University

Where there is a generalised uncertainly about the future of universities, it seems that these vulnerabilities re-cast certain viabilities, as the ‘top universities’ are seen to be able to come forward as resilient, able to deal with the blows.  In doing so, certain claims may be cemented, where the ‘shake-up’ – the ‘rise to the top’ and the ‘fall to the bottom’ – implies a natural order of the good and the bad university: the talented student, like the talented university, is often seen to be able to chose a path through precariousness, to carve out a new, even more deserving position. They can cope, the resilient and enterprising worker, the able university – a simple ‘scientific fact’ of league tables. 

In much recent press, different post-1992 institutions have again been called upon as deficit,  placed and evidenced as the ‘worst institutions’ in the UK, where the snapshot headlines conveys an inevitable and even welcome ‘death’. Institutions which have always been diverse and leading the way for enabling widening participation are now seen as deadly. In the National Scholarship Programme, bursaries are seen to stimulate participation from ‘disadvantaged’ groups. Universities are required to provide outreach work as part of their institutional widening participation strategies but post-1992 universities are more vulnerable in this respect, lacking funding, despite their success in securing diverse university cohorts: in contrast ‘elite’ universities may well be marketing themselves as ‘diverse’ and ‘inclusive’ via NSP on the back of rather tokenistic measures which do not alter their still middle-class, white compositions. We witness this on the now happy ‘included’ ‘diverse’ student on certain university webpages, which, like a Benetton advert, seemingly represents institutional success at ‘doing’ diversity (Ahmed, 2008): this is impossible for many post-1992 universities to do precisely because there is no singular measure or embodiment of diversity. Instead ‘diversity’ is a lived-in reality, a sound and sense in and around campus rather than something which can be captured and displayed for use.  The border between ‘diversity’ and ‘death’ is a dangerous one, where different academic spaces highlight rather than heal these wounds.

While there has been much sociological critique of educational inequalities and the positioning of some places and populations as ‘sink’, ‘bog standard’ and wasted-wasteful (Reay and Lucey, 2002) less is said about how this feels and how this shapes everyday encounters with colleagues in-between different institutions. Is it a shared anxiety, when the colleague from a ‘safe’ ‘good’ university turns and asks you how insecure, how unsafe, how risky and impermanent you are? How your presence may soon become an absence and how you may be ‘shaken up’ and fall out in a moment of reinventing academic hierarchies? And how then should you respond to the institutional and personalised implication in the mis-position between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ universities, between capable and culpable staff and students? In ‘swimming’ rather than ‘sinking’ the anxious academic has to become rational, unemotional and enterprising, to work on developing her own thick skin as her institution – and perhaps herself – is positioned as timelessly ‘new’; the ‘post-1992’ as always unable to move past that date.

In responding, elite degrees from elsewhere may be shored up, to credentialise the academic as properly so, to highlight their own travelling in and through the post-92 institution as merely temporary (‘I’m on the look out to move on’) or even a potential mistake, as not indicative of their true place but rather as evidence of the poor state of play. Again, the value and ‘goodness’ of these places – lived in everyday encounters with colleagues and students within your institution – can suddenly be lost in these outside encounters, evacuated in the defence to prove our own value or ‘potential’ and to try to rise, individually, to the top and away from the waste.  Displaying you credentials, your institution and the place of staff and students on demand, can foster a defensive and immediate ‘I’m as good as you’ reaction. Elite institutions are also being measured, made to prove their worth and products – but are they being made to prove themselves, to feel the panic of under-funding as personalised failure, or to reject the ‘worst university in the UK’ as a headline seemingly embodied – and to be displaced – in academic encounters? Again, the shame of being ‘elite’ seems not to attach but to travel, while the embarrassment of ‘failure’ fixes, exposes and becomes you.

So, who will you ‘become’ in these academic inhabitations, will you turn to your colleague and feel relieved that you are not in her place? Will the story of meritocracy carry you to a safe place? If none of us are safe, not all of us are seen as ‘sinking’: sociologists seem well placed to research and challenge the encounters, emotions and esteeming of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as a process beyond ourselves.

Yvette Taylor, Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research and Kimberly Allen, Institute for Policy Studies in Education, London Metropolitan University London

In the face of the Coalition Government’s proposals to increase student fees to a level unprecedented in OECD countries, and to open up the sector to for-profit providers, the document sets out nine propositions about the benefits of public higher education:

1. Higher education serves public benefits as well as private ones. These require financial support if these benefits are to continue to be provided.
2. Public universities are necessary to build and maintain confidence in public debate.
3. Public universities have a social mission, contributing to the amelioration of social inequality, which is the corollary of the promotion of social mobility.
4. Public higher education is part of a generational contract in which an older generation invests in the wellbeing of future generations that will support them in turn.
5. Public institutions providing similar programmes of study should be funded at a similar level.
6. Education cannot be treated as a simple consumer good; consumer sovereignty is an inappropriate means of placing students at the heart of the system.
7. Training in skills is not the same as a university education. While the first is valuable in its own terms, a university education provides more than technical training. This should be clearly recognised in the title of a university.
8. The university is a community made up of diverse disciplines as well as different activities of teaching, research and external collaboration. These activities are maintained by academics, managers, administrators and a range of support staff, all of whom contribute to what is distinctive about the university as a community.
9. Universities are not only global institutions. They also serve their local and regional communities and their different traditions and contexts are important.

To add your name to the list of signatories, email altwhitepaper[AT]live.co.uk.

• Behind the riots: what young people think about the 2011 summer unrest
• Behind the Salford riots: ‘the kids are angry’
• Behind the Wood Green riots: ‘a chance to stick two fingers up at the police’
• Behind the Brixton riots: ‘a sense of injustice and lack of entitlement’
• Behind the Manchester riots: ‘they are saying we have nothing’
• Behind the Birmingham riots: ‘the ultimate sacrifice for peace’
• Behind the Clapham riots: ‘the police are the enemy’
• Behind the Hackney riots: ‘Nobody seems to listen to us’
• Behind the Lewisham riots: ‘it was all about money’

Thus we have the widespread calls for cuts in benefits to those involved in the rioting and calls to evict the families of rioters from council housing. In the case of the former, nearly 200,000 people as of 14th August have signed up to the e-petition on the DirectGov website to demand that “Any persons convicted of criminal acts during the current London riots should have all financial benefits removed.” In the case of the latter, The Guardian reports that Wandsworth Council has already started eviction proceedings against a woman whose son has been charged (but not convicted) in connection with the rioting in Clapham (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/12/london-riots-wandsworth-council-eviction?INTCMP=SRCH). A number of other London Councils are reported to be considering similar measures.

There are several issues that might be considered in relation to these responses. One is that of double punishment. If arrest and court procedures are the means by which lawbreaking is dealt with in society, does the imposition of additional sanctions not actually weaken the criminal justice processes. Should magistrates and judges be trying to anticipate, in their own sentencing policies, the likely additional sanctions that might be imposed through eviction and benefit cuts? And why, uniquely should conviction (or even being charged) over riot related offences produce such sanctions when murder, rape, armed robbery, or phone hacking should not?

The eviction of council tenants who cause substantial upset to their neighbours through their antisocial behaviour in the locality is at least a policy where there is a clear relationship between offence and sanction and is one that provides a measure of protection for those who have been affected by their behaviour. The collective punishment of the family of participants in a riot does no such thing and inevitably contributes to the further marginalisation and impoverishment of those young people and their families.

As for the suggestion that all welfare benefits should be removed from those convicted of criminal acts, one wonders if this should be for all time? Would this apply to child benefit if those convicted have children or were to have children in the future? Would it, in the fullness of time, extend to the provision – or rather non-provision – of state pension? Without reducing explanation of the riots to issues of social exclusion, unemployment, poor education and lack of opportunity, it would be strange if none of these factors played some part in the events of last week. How much would cutting benefits contribute to resolving any of these issues and reducing the chances of further rioting. If a class of law breaker with nothing at all to lose is created by such measures, surely this must inevitably lead to more criminality. Indeed with no money for subsistence, let alone the consumer goods so clearly in demand in the looting, how could it not lead to more theft, more burglary and probably more rioting?

In ‘The Guardian’ Martin Kettle (11th August) called for the Prime Minister to “commission a proper sociological analysis of the rioters and what they did to our country this week” http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/11/talk-rioters-not-turn-back-on-them). If ever there was a week that demonstrated the ongoing need for well conducted sociological research that can lead to greater public understanding and inform policy, then this was it. Then we wouldn’t have to listen to so many proposed measures that are not only unjust but would inevitably make our problems worse not better.

Howard Wollman, BSA Vice Chair

The government were quick, and probably incorrect, to label the recent riots as gang related. This is a commonplace political and media response towards many issues which involve young working class men and it shows deep misunderstandings, as well as being indicative of the longstanding tendency to negatively label working class youth. The government seem ready to admit that they are badly in need of education around gang related issues (above and beyond the recent riots) but serious questions have been asked – including by some senior British police officers -  as to whether employing the services of a US gang expert is the best way forward.  There is some fascinating and groundbreaking work being undertaken by leading sociologists in UK universities, looking at gang related issues in our own cities and this important, home grown research ought to be to the forefront of any such conversations.

When David Cameron posits that ‘there are pockets of our society who are not just broken, but frankly sick’ (Cameron 2011) he perpetuates a moral smokescreen that obscures the real causes of the recent events and feeds pernicious myths about the causes of poverty and worklessness. As politicians seek to connect the riots to poverty which is supposedly self-inflicted and further with any multitude of problems all too frequently associated with ‘the poor’, such as ‘children without fathers’, ‘poor parenting’ and ‘widespread moral collapse’, sociologists should seek to redress the balance with robust critique and powerful evidence, of which there is plenty.

The UK is deeply economically divided and severe and entrenched poverty exists in many areas with real and damaging consequences for those who experience it.  The youth phase remains powerfully divided by social class with those at the very bottom facing multiple barriers which are not easily overcome. Most poverty is not caused by (or driven by, to use the current preferred policy speak) issues such as individual fecklessness, idleness or irresponsible consumption habits: poverty is primarily caused by low pay and inadequate benefits. Politicians of all persuasions have tried hard to divorce the riots from any discussion about the current spending cuts.  The problems of poverty did not go away under the previous government, but things were slowly improving for those on the lowest incomes. Much of this progress is now in danger of being swept away as those at the bottom face the greatest threat from the cuts instigated by those at the top. Research shows that relative poverty is set to rise over the coming period, making those already poor very vulnerable indeed. Welfare reform is targeting many of the most vulnerable in society, including those on sickness benefits. Cuts in public services are likely to affect the poorest most as they often have little choice but to rely on these services.

Young people are already facing dramatically high rates of unemployment but for the poorest young people their difficulties look likely to get even worse.  Cuts to support for the poorest in terms of Education Maintenance Allowance will further damage those already struggling to remain in education. The proposed Future Jobs Fund was heralded by the TUC as the most progressive employment programme for a generation which would have greatly assisted the young unemployed into meaningful employment. This has now gone, abandoned by the coalition government in an attempt to save money, with nothing in its place other than rapidly rising youth unemployment, and far too many people chasing every notified vacancy.  If the options for our poorest young people were limited under Labour they stand to be further seriously curtailed under the current coalition government. Numerous projects aimed at supporting those in the most difficult circumstances, particularly the young unemployed, are now closing, with many of the people previously charged with assisting the workless now joining the swelling ranks of the unemployed themselves.

The cuts and their implications for those who are poorest and economically marginal are a key part of the debate about the recent riots and cannot be ignored. In a deeply unequal society where those at the bottom face blocked opportunities and bleak prospects – regardless of how hard they work to escape – frustration is bound to fester. Yet riots of the sort witnessed recently are very rare and neither are they simply the preserve of the poorest in society. Nonetheless, given the stark nature of the economic inequalities that we face – and the real prospect of their exacerbation rather than their diminution in the coming period – it might be more apposite to ask why we have not seen more of this sort of overt discontent. Of course, we may well do so in the coming months and years. 

Tracy Shildrick, Youth Research Unit (Director), Teesside University

Unsurprisingly, they are the words most commonly employed to describe young people even in the absence of rioting. When the people I interview want to blame someone for society’s problems they tend to turn to one of three trusted foes: young people, racialised others, or bad mothers. This week, we had all three bundled into one neat, simple package.

The reasons for this bad behaviour are also simple and threefold: lack of moral training, too much commercialised, celebrity-focused TV, and the crumbling of authority. Social scientists like me who study people and their beliefs collect and share startlingly similar stories told in similar tones by older people about young people whether in the US, the UK, or Australia.

They run like this: ‘when I was young, we would give up our seats on buses to older people/never talk back/say please and thank you/and if we got into trouble picking apples from a tree in the village the local policeman would haul us by the ear home where our fathers would give us a good hiding’.  And what’s needed now, we are told, is: jail/military service/uniforms/the death penalty/more police on the streets.   In anthropology, we call these shared explanations ‘tropes’: they are the myths, the nostalgic legends, passed on through generations of how life apparently was and, more importantly, how it should be.

What we need to do now is stop circulating those myths through simple headlines and start listening to the people involved.  Of course what they did was wrong, of course they know better and of course they should be held accountable – but many of them are children and a disproportionate number are young adults. Sending them to jail will ruin their lives.

If what underpins their actions is disrespect for authority, we need to start asking: what are they angry about and who, precisely, don’t they respect? In my research, I have never found cases of young people disrespecting authority for its own sake: they have favourite teachers, youth workers, faith leaders, family members. They believe that some forms of authority are more legitimate than others. Young people have values and strong beliefs: they believe in people with whom they feel they belong – people with whom they have emotional, respectful, trusting relationships. That’s usually not going to be a father who beats them or a policeman who cuffs them around the ear, or a politician who jails them or cuts their EMAs or chances at college or university, or a banker who laughs all the way to the bank. 

Kicking off and grabbing loot is perhaps not a politically mature form of protest, but it may be the only way those involved felt they could act out and communicate  their disrespect and anger. That form of articulation needs to be deciphered and understood with time, empathy and, yes, respect. Fortunately, there are many well-qualified researchers in many disciplines, including anthropology, theology, geography, sociology, political science, and psychology who will be doing just that.

Dr Abby Day, Research Fellow, University of Sussex