Critical social science as a research methodology in universities in times of crisis
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2020
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Qualitative Research Journal Vol. 20, no. 4 (2020), p. 351-360
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- Description: Purpose: To consider what a criticalist qualitative research methodology might look like for universities in the context of the contemporary COVID-19 crisis. Design/methodology/approach: This polemical paper explores the rationale for a dramatic recasting of the approach needed in qualitative research methodology to address the challenges of the crisis-ridden times we live in. Broadly conceived of as an “evolving criticality”, to borrow from Kincheloe, the paper addresses the kind of disposition, orientation or state of mind required that provides the space and opportunities in universities within which this strategic methodological reinvention might occur. After explaining what a research methodology committed to the notion of “criticality” might look like, the paper argues that to enact this we need to start with the immediacy of our own academic work and then emanate to other public spheres. Findings: The polemical exchange engaged in by this paper presents the underpinnings of how critical social science might be deployed in both reconceiving how we understand the purpose of research in universities and changing the nature of academic work. Research limitations/implications: These exist only in so far as university academics are prepared to embrace what is being argued for to change the status quo. Practical implications: The broader critical social science methodology being argued for in this paper is using a wider framing to a form of critical ethnography that has the potential to enable academic workers to extricate themselves from the ruinous situation brought on by the neoliberal paradigm that has been so drastically exacerbated by COVID-19. Originality/value: While the paper rehearses some existing ideas of critical social science, the novelty of the papers lies in the way these are applied to the COVID-19 crisis within which universities have become embroiled. © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited.
Class, dispositions and radical politics -- A rejoinder
- Authors: Smyth, John , Simmons, Robin
- Date: 2018
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies Vol. 16, no. 3 (2018), p. 185-193
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- Description: This paper is a rejoinder to James Avis' paper: "A Note on Class, Dispositions and Radical Politics" which is, in turn, a critique of the opening chapter of the book "Education and Working-Class Youth: Reshaping the Politics of Inclusion," written by the authors of this article. Here we deal with each of the criticisms raised by Avis, including his accusation that our position is reductionist and fails to recognise the complex nature of social class in contemporary society. In doing this, we re-emphasise our relational perspective on education and social class.
'Power, regulation and physically active identities' : the experiences of rural and regional living adolescent girls
- Authors: Casey, Meghan , Mooney, Amanda , Smyth, John , Payne, Warren
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Gender and Education Vol. 28, no. 1 (2016), p. 108-127
- Relation: http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/LP0990206
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- Description: Drawing on interpretations of Foucault's techniques of power, we explored the discourses and power relations operative between groups of girls that appeared to influence their participation in Physical Education (PE) and outside of school in sport and physical activity (PA) in rural and regional communities. Interviews and focus groups were conducted in eight secondary schools with female students from Year 9 (n = 22) and 10 (n = 116). Dominant gendered and performance discourses were active in shaping girls' construction of what it means to be active or sporty', and these identity positions were normalised and valued. The perceived and real threat of their peer's gaze as a form of surveillance acted to further perpetuate the power of performance discourses; whereby girls measured and (self) regulated their participation. Community settings were normalised as being exclusively for skilled performers and girls self-regulated their non-participation according to judgements made about their own physical abilities. These findings raise questions about the ways in which power relations, as forged in broader sociocultural and institutional discourse-power relations, can infiltrate the level of the PE classroom to regulate and normalise practices in relation to their, and others, PA participation.
Affective topologies of rural youth embodiment
- Authors: Farrugia, David , Smyth, John , Harrison, Tim
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Sociologia Ruralis Vol. 56, no. 1 (2016), p. 116-132
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- Description: This article explores the affective, embodied dimensions of young rural people's relationship with space and place. Relationship with space and place has been recognised as a significant dimension of rural youths' subjectivities but it has been primarily understood through representational perspectives which focus on young people's perceptions, images, or discursive constructions of their local places. In contrast, this article draws on non-representational approaches to subjectivity and space to highlight the embodied, sensuous entanglements between young people's subjectivities and the spaces they have inhabited and experienced. Qualitative data gathered as part of a project exploring youths' subjectivities in regional Australia shows that young people's experience of their rural locale, as well as their relationship to the city, reflect an affective topology of relations of proximity and rhythmic tempo which emerges from the relationship between the space of their bodily hexis and the spaces and places they are situated within. These non-representational, embodied processes are intrinsic to rural youths' subjectivities and structure how young people approach and navigate their futures. © 2015 The Authors. Sociologia Ruralis © 2015 European Society for Rural Sociology.
Crisis of youth or youth in crisis? Education, employment and legitimation crisis
- Authors: Simmons, Robin , Smyth, John
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: International Journal of Lifelong Education Vol. 35, no. 2 (2016), p. 136-152
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- Description: This paper uses the Habermasian concept of legitimation crisis to critique the relationship between post-compulsory education and training and the chronic levels of youth unemployment and under-employment which now characterise post-industrial Western economies, such as the UK. It draws on data from an ethnographic study of the lives of young people classified as NEET (not in education, employment or training), or at risk of becoming so to challenge dominant discourses about youth unemployment and the supposed relationship between worklessness, skills deficits and young people’s lack of ‘work-readiness’. The central argument of the paper is that the labour market insecurity experienced by many young people in the UK and elsewhere derives not from some supposed crisis of youth but is symptomatic of the inherent contradictions contained within capitalist modes of production which, it is argued, are exacerbated under neo-liberal policy regimes. The paper contends that various government-led initiatives which purport to prepare young people for the workplace, create links between the individual and the labour market, or force the unemployed into the labour market are, in Habermasian terms, part of an attempt to resolve the crisis of legitimation associated with contemporary capitalist societies. © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Moral distinctions and structural inequality : homeless youth salvaging the self
- Authors: Farrugia, David , Smyth, John , Harrison, Tim
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Sociological Review Vol. 64, no. 2 (2016), p. 238-255
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- Description: This paper explores the construction and contestation of moral distinctions as a dimension of contemporary structural inequality through a focus on the subjectivities constructed by young people who have experienced homelessness. Empirical material from two research projects shows that in young people's narratives of homelessness, material insecurity intertwines with the moral economies at work in neoliberal capitalist societies to construct homelessness as a state of moral disgrace, in which an ungovernable experience is experienced as a moral failure. When young people gain access to secure housing, the increasing stability and security of their lives is narrated in terms of a moral adherence to personal responsibility and disciplined conduct. Overall the paper describes an economy of worth organized around distinctions between order and chaos, self-governance and unruliness, morality and disgrace, which structures the experience of homelessness. As young people's position in relation to these moral ideals reflects the material conditions of their lives, their experiences demonstrate the way that moral hierarchies contribute to the existence and experience of structural inequalities in neoliberal capitalist societies. © 2016 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review.
'Give me air not shelter': critical tales of a policy case of student re-engagement from beyond school
- Authors: Smyth, John , Robinson, Janean
- Date: 2015
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Education Policy Vol. 30, no. 2 (2015), p. 220-236
- Relation: http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/LP100100045
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- Description: This paper tackles what is arguably one of the most pressing and intractable educational issues confronting western democracies and the disengagement and disconnection from schooling of alarming numbers of young people. The paper looks at the policy response in Victoria, Australia, and through ethnographic interviews with a small number of young people; it finds a significant mismatch between the policy intent of re-engagement programmes, and the experiences of young people themselves. It seems that this is an instance of what might be termed policy deafness, a situation that will likely produce devastating consequences unless corrected.
- Description: This paper tackles what is arguably one of the most pressing and intractable educational issues confronting western democracies – the disengagement and disconnection from schooling of alarming numbers of young people. The paper looks at the policy response in Victoria, Australia, and through ethnographic interviews with a small number of young people; it finds a significant mismatch between the policy intent of re-engagement programmes, and the experiences of young people themselves. It seems that this is an instance of what might be termed policy deafness, a situation that will likely produce devastating consequences unless corrected.
Critical voices from adolescent shape shifters- accessing portraits in 'Becoming Educated'
- Authors: Smyth, John , Hewitson, Robyn
- Date: 2015
- Type: Journal article
- Relation: Children's geographies. Vol. 13 . No. 6 (2015) p.692-707
- Relation: http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DP110102619
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- Description: What young people have to say about schooling can be most revealing, particularly when they expose and challenge the injustices and logic of school policies and practices. This paper captures voices from secondary school students from a school in Victoria, Australia, as part of a research project called Becoming Educated. The paper explores a particular geography of youth around the notion of 'shape shifter' as it relates to young people's education in two ways: first, in understanding the changing roles and identities of students as observers of, and participants in, education policies and practices; and second, as a way of interpreting the intent of those who 'shape' new ideas and policies to create a kind of 'temporary alteration of outside appearances for the purpose of deception' [Merchant, B. 1995. "Current Educational Reform: 'Shape-shifting' or Genuine Improvements in the Quality of Teaching and Learning?" Educational Theory 45 (2, Spring): 251-268]. The latter has a particularly significant impact on the former, and this paradox is not one that goes unnoticed by young people. © 2014 Taylor & Francis.
The ‘hidden transcripts’ of digital natives in the peri-urban jungle : Young people making sense of their use of social/digital media
- Authors: Smyth, John , Harrison, Tim
- Date: 2015
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Educational Practice and Theory Vol. 37, no. 1 (2015), p. 5-17
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- Description: The way young people engage with and make sense of digital/social media is not quite what it seems. In this paper we present two quite different versions, drawing on the work of political scientist James C. Scott. On the one hand, there is the ‘public’ or official transcript or rendition, which comprises the way adults conceive of this usage, and in which young people acquiesce with. On the other hand, in order to subvert the former, what is going on concurrently, is a hidden transcript which is opaque to outsiders and is revealed only to other young ‘insiders’. Acquiescing with the former, in a sense, provides young people with the space in which to construct a much more resistant version of their usage of digital media. © 2015 James Nicholas Publishers.
Thinking Past Educational Disadvantage, and Theories of Reproduction
- Authors: Hattam, Robert , Smyth, John
- Date: 2015
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Sociology Vol. 49, no. 2 (2015), p. 270-286
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- Description: This article proposes a critique of critical sociology of education as a means of thinking past theories of reproduction which are the doxa for our field. The article problematizes key words such as 'disadvantage' and pursues a critique of reproduction theory, drawing on Rancière’s foregrounding of equality as an axiom rather than an outcome. The article goes some way towards showing how we might practically think past theories of reproduction by offering an alternative version of educational equality. © The Author(s) 2014
What it means to be studying against the grain of neoliberalism in a community-based university programme in a 'disadvantaged area'
- Authors: Smyth, John , Harrison, Tim
- Date: 2015
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Educational Administration and History Vol. 47, no. 2 (2015), p. 155-173
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- Description: Australia is indicative of a country that is deeply confused and conflicted around a policy discourse of inclusion that is sutured within an existential context heavily committed to the tenets of neoliberalism. Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of higher education, in which the proportion of young people from backgrounds of 'disadvantage' has remained implacably stuck at around 15% for several decades. The research from which this paper comes is an innovative community-based university-provided programme for young people for whom university education was never a realistic possibility - because of family histories, interruption to their lives, of having undertaken forms of secondary education that prevented them from gaining university entrance qualification, or who had terminated their education before completing the secondary years of schooling. This paper explores the story of one young person in his first year in a university programme, as he struggled with obstacles and impediments of a higher education system and set of neoliberal policy discourses that remain deeply sceptical and antagonistic to his trajectory. © 2015 Taylor & Francis.
'I want to get a piece of paper that says I can do stuff': youth narratives of educational opportunities and constraints in low socio-economic neighbourhoods
- Authors: McInerney, Peter , Smyth, John
- Date: 2014
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Ethnography and Education Vol. 9, no. 3 (September 2014), p. 239-252
- Relation: http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DP110102619
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- Description: The persistent failure of contemporary policies to improve school retention rates and close the achievement gap between students from low and high socio-economic (SES) backgrounds should be a matter of grave concern. In this article, we set out to show what it means to be educated in a context of disadvantage from the perspectives of young people attending a senior secondary public school in regional Australia. Acknowledging that youth are experts in their own lives, we draw extensively on student narratives of the funds of knowledge and opportunity structures that support and/or constrain education and employment opportunities in low-income neighbourhoods. Although young peoples' stories of hope and agency go some way to undermining the deficit thinking about these students and their families, we argue that the realisation of their aspirations requires institutional support and policies that address the systemic causes of educational disadvantage.
'Ordinary kids' navigating geographies of educational opportunity in the context of an Australian 'place-based intervention'
- Authors: Smyth, John , McInerney, Peter
- Date: 2014
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Education Policy Vol. 29, no. 3 (May 2014), p. 285-301
- Relation: http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DP110102619
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- Description: This paper addresses the vexed educational policy aspects of area-based interventions (ABIs) in neighbourhoods designated as 'disadvantaged' in an Australian context. We find that the way in which the policy of ABIs is supposed to operate and impact education is highly problematic. What we present instead in this paper is a much more complex process by which aspirations are formed, sustained, contested and maintained by young people who regard themselves as 'ordinary' and as being engaged instead in a process of navigating educational opportunities on the basis of resources available to them.
Education reform makes no sense without social class
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2014
- Type: Text , Journal article , Review
- Relation: British Journal of Sociology of Education Vol. 35, no. 6 (2014), p. 953-962
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- Description: In enlightened and civilised societies we like to think that the blatantly racist eugenics movement that involved social selection based upon genetic traits is a disgraceful notion relegated to the past; but it seems not, it has just re-emerged in another form through the back door. It is an interesting question as to why social class continues to remain such a verboten topic, and to understand why we need to get inside what is going on. I can get to the essence of my argument quickly through an example from a university colleague: ‘This is bullshit,’ the student muttered under her breath. The tutorial topic assigned for that week was class. I’d kicked things off by asking whether class existed in modern Australia, or whether it was a relic of nineteenth century Europe. Struck by the student’s response, I asked her to elaborate. She did: Look, I went to private school and my Dad’s a CEO and most of his friends are business people. So I guess that’s supposed to make me upper class? But class has nothing to do with it. Going to a private school was my parents’ decision. And my Dad’s friends are just his friends. I suggested that the choice of school – not to mention the capacity to affordthe fees – and her father’s friendship network might have been heavily shaped by their class position. That wasn’t to say there was anything wrong with it, but it did show how our lives are shaped by larger social and economic forces we don’t control. The student was having none of it. It was clear that she’d encountered the notion of class before and found it singularly unconvincing. In her world, everything was simply a matter of individual choice – choices that were unconstrained … [and while] she didn’t actually say it, … class seemed to be an excuse for people who made the wrong choices in life. (Scanlon 2014)
Emplacing young people in an Australian rural community : An extraverted sense of place in times of change
- Authors: Farrugia, David , Smyth, John , Harrison, Tim
- Date: 2014
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Youth Studies Vol. 17, no. 9 (2014), p. 1152-1167
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- Description: This paper explores the identities of young people in an Australian rural town in relation to contemporary discussions of place and social change. The paper responds to dominant narratives in youth studies which position individualised, reflexive subjectivities at the centre of a homogeneous, placeless modernity with an emplaced analysis of contemporary youth identities. Young people's narratives reveal an attachment to place created in community activities and day to day farm life, articulated in the language of the ‘rural idyll’. Narratives about imagined future lives articulate classed and gendered competencies and dispositions acquired in and through place, reflexively mobilised in life planning practices. Therefore, whilst substantial social changes are reshaping youth identities across rural places, young people's responses to these changes are forged in the way that identities are emplaced, as well as articulated in reflexive orientations towards their future lives. © 2014, © 2014 Taylor & Francis.
Improving schools in poor areas: It's not about the organisation, structures and privatisation, stupid!
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2014
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Improving Schools Vol. 17, no. 3 (2014), p. 231-240
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- Description: In this article, the author presents a review of his extended research engagement with disadvantaged young people and their education. He challenges the dominant neoliberal model of school reform based on business values and the ‘managerial school’ as alien to educational values. He introduces various stages of research he and his colleagues have undertaken over the past two decades, showing the importance of an authentic engagement with young people’s lives, the characteristics of schools which reach out to disadvantaged students and the importance of transformative pedagogy and community involvement.
It's our turn - young people 'tilting' the neoliberal turn
- Authors: Smyth, John , Robinson, Janean , McInerney, Peter
- Date: 2014
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Youth Studies Vol. 17, no. 4 (2014), p. 492-509
- Relation: http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/LP100100045
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- Description: Education is an important and defining element in young people's lives. When conceived properly, it has the potential to transform opportunities and life chances. It hardly comes as news that in recent times the authors have witnessed the inappropriate intrusion into education of notions of school reform that while they might arguably be in the national economic interest, are highly questionable from the vantage point of young people. In this paper, the authors present some counter-narratives from a group of young Australians who have 'disengaged' or been 'shoved' out of school and who resumed learning under a very different set of conditions to those that exiled them. Through the comments from young people, the authors construct an account of how they came to be categorised as 'at-risk' in the first place, what this pathologising meant to them, and how an alternative approach that invested them with power enabled a more positive identity formation to occur. Notwithstanding its altruistic intent and more humane approach, the authors remain unconvinced on the larger question of 're-engagement to where?' for these young people, and whether the fundamentals have been sufficiently unsettled to enable them a different trajectory.© 2013 Taylor & Francis. Funding: ARC
Rural young people in late modernity : Place, globalisation and the spatial contours of identity
- Authors: Farrugia, David , Smyth, John , Harrison, Tim
- Date: 2014
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Current Sociology Vol. 62, no. 7 (2014), p. 1036-1054
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- Description: This article draws together arguments for an interdisciplinary ‘spatial turn’ within sociology to analyse the subjectivities and biographical imaginings of Australian rural youth. It draws on a theoretical dialogue between theories of social change, and developments in socio-spatial theory in order to analyse the spatial contours of young people’s narratives, making a case for the significance of an ‘extraverted’ and porous sense of place for understanding rural youth identity. After a theoretical argument about the contemporary meaning of place for theories of globalisation and individualisation, the article presents two theoretically driven sets of case studies. The first discusses rural youth whose identities speak to the importance of place and ‘the local’ as resources for identity, while the second describes young people whose identities are ‘stretched’ across multiple spaces and locales. The analysis speaks to the importance of place for understanding the forms of reflexivity that rural youth mobilise in constructing their place in the world, and speaks to new ways in which to re-embed sociological analyses of youth within the spatially complex social landscapes of a globalised world.
Where has class gone? The pervasiveness of class in girls' physical activity in a rural town
- Authors: Smyth, John , Mooney, Amanda , Casey, Meghan
- Date: 2014
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Sport, Education and Society Vol. 19, no. 1 (January 2014 2014), p. 1-18
- Relation: http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/LP0990206
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- Description: This paper seeks to animate discussion around how social class operates with adolescent girls from low socio-economic status backgrounds to shape and inform their decisions about participation in physical activity (PA) inside and outside of school. Examining the instance of girls in a single secondary school in an Australian regional town, the paper questions the impact of class and how the girls experience the obstacles, impediments and interferences to participation in PA. These girls are portrayed as living multiple, complex and embodied subjectivities that shape and are informed by the relational geographies in which they are located, as they interact ‘with’, ‘to’ and ‘between’ the social, emotional and classed hierarchies that require them to access familial and other resources in making decisions about participation in PA.
Blurring the boundaries : From relational learning towards a critical pedagogy of engagement for disengaged disadvantaged young people
- Authors: Smyth, John , McInerney, Peter , Fish, Tim
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Pedagogy, Culture and Society Vol. 21, no. 2 (2013), p. 299-320
- Relation: http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/LP100100045
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- Description: This paper tackles what is arguably the most pervasive and pressing educational issue confronting affluent Western countries - the disengagement, disconnection and tragic displacement from schooling of increasing numbers of young people, mostly those from backgrounds of disadvantage. Despite enormous policy efforts, this 'problem' is proving impossible to dislodge from within the existing educational policy paradigm that appears to be exacerbating the problem. This paper explores theoretically and practically what alternative attempts might look like that start from within the lives and experiences of those most affected, young people as well as their teachers, and it explores what some research 'portraits' look like from 'inside' the existential realities of these complexities. Employing the heuristics of 'new mobilities', the paper looks at some alternative ways of locating 'new social spaces' from which to re-engage and re-connect these young people with learning, and with some effect. The paper is sanguine about the extensive work yet to be done, and in this regard it proffers some thoughts on the unfinished business of what it terms a 'critical pedagogy of engagement'. © 2013 Copyright Pedagogy, Culture & Society.
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