Season 8, Episode 1, Craig Johnston on Stigma & Alternative Provision

We explore how stigma sticks to children when they are moved out of mainstream schooling and into alternative provision and how that shift can turn a young person into a visible “case” for the system to manage. We connect Goffman’s stigma theory with liminality, class and digital life, asking what it means to be a student when the ideal pupil is the only one the system truly recognises.

• What alternative provision means and how it differs from PRUs
• How exclusion creates a liminal identity between being and becoming
• Why AP is politically contested as either opportunity or segregation
• How stigma becomes visible and fixed through labels and paperwork
• The role of disciplinary language such as ‘at risk’ and ‘hard to reach’
• How blame often lands on the child and the mother
• Why critical theory still matters for understanding structures
• Whose voices are missing in AP research and practice
• Working class boys and the stereotype of the ‘angry’ young man
• Class as rational decision-making under risk and limited opportunity
• The digital space as a new frontier for stigma and cultural capital

You can find Craig on LinkedIn and at UWE (University of the West of England) Bristol.

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Transcript

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Welcome And Why Stigma Matters

SPEAKER_02 0:03

This is the Trauma Resonance Resilience Podcast. This is for you if you are interested in compassion, connection, and relationships and how we can all work together creating services that do not add to harm but rather seek to support recovery from it. I'm your host, Lisa Cherry, and this is your time to sit back and listen in on conversations that make a difference. Welcome to a new series, and this series is going to be looking at stigma. And I hope you've had a chance to listen to the other series that we've had. We've had the series on liminality, a series on the uh resisting the dilution of trauma informed practice. But I wanted to think about stigma. It's something that I was very inspired by Imogen Tyler's work around stigma. It came up in my research. So I thought it'd be really, really good to spend a bit of time thinking about stigmatisation. And with that in mind, I have a wonderful guest today who is going to talk to us about stigma and alternative provision in the main. Hello, Dr. Craig Johnston.

SPEAKER_00 1:13

Hello, lovely to uh speak to you and glad to be here. Would you like me to introduce myself briefly or Oh, please, yeah, who are you? I'm all right. I don't have uh too much to say for myself, really. But well, first of all, I don't describe myself as an academic. I was a practitioner for 25 years, quarter of a century, working with the very young people that we're likely to touch uh talk about today, and other reasons why I don't consider myself an academic. But if I'm going to describe myself as an academic, I would say I sit within education, criminology, um, and sociology. So I'm sort of in that space where looking at structure, looking at the impact of structures on individuals and how individuals are constructed within policy practice and all sorts of stuff. And alternative

What Alternative Provision Actually Is

SPEAKER_00 2:00

provision, for those who don't know what alternative vision is, currently is any sort of space or place or educational dimension outside of a mainstream classroom. So that could be the classic pupil referral unit where somebody gets excluded from school. If you think of examples of the movie Scum or more recently, Steve on Netflix, right down to forest schools to home education as well. So in amongst that mix is young people, around 4-5% of the school population get educated on alternative provision.

SPEAKER_02 2:33

And alternative provision and pupil referral units, PRUs, people might have heard of, they tend to differ, don't they?

SPEAKER_00 2:41

They do, but the type and I mean there's lots of different reasons that they differ. Prues are more historically situated within the system. They have a closer connection to state funded facilities, where alternative divisions tend to be more oriented towards the learners, so they're cut loose a little bit from the curriculum, and that allows them to do different things. Where proves are more situated as schools that are much more regulated, which causes sort of tensions in terms of accountability, but also you know gives people freedom to work with young people in a particular way, which quite a lot of staff enjoy within alternative division. So um it is definitely a contested space. But yeah, proves are state-funded predominantly.

SPEAKER_02 3:28

So something I know that you're quite interested in liminality as well. That's something that I've seen show up in your work. And as I mentioned earlier, we've had the series on liminality and uh the liminal space. Um I'm curious about, because we're looking at stigma. Where do you think the relationship might be between stigma and liminality? Is there a relationship?

Liminal Students And The Ideal Pupil

SPEAKER_00 3:58

Stigma is one of those concepts from Goffman, which I was drawn to many years ago with an article, simply because it's still relevant. And that worries me a little bit, that we can still use the terminology, things like master status, when we apply it to people with disabilities, for example. Um so when you ground it in a particular field, if we consider AP to be a particular field, then I think liminality comes in its own. Because what are you if you're excluded from school or can't go to school? Are you really a student anymore? Are you a young person? Are you a label? Are you in full-time education? Or what is full-time education? So as soon as you're moved from a mainstream school setting, you instantly become this liminal, potentially heavily stigmatized individual, part of structure, part of a system that perhaps was never designed for you in the first place. So if we take an example, 80% of actually roughly about 79% of young people who access alternative vision do have a defined label, whether that be free school meals, disability, send, whatever. So instantly that gives you a sense of you're something different. There's something different that needs to be managed or changed in a particular way. Added to school exclusion being a particular problem in certain locations where if a child's excluded from school, they may be out of school for years. So you've got this sense where you're no longer a student in a traditional sense. You now become something different in a different space, which means different needs, different professionals, different ways of thinking about you. But also you might be removed from the very settings that ground you in being a student, the experience, the social side of things, the cultural side of things, the access to the youth knowledge that makes you kind of cool or uncool, or the social tensions and things like that. So I think school inclusion and AP are exactly what liminality was about. Is you're no longer an ideal student. If you construct the ideal student along the lines of GCSEs, five GCSEs, potentially white, middle class, etc. Um, so you become something different. And I think that's the area where I'm interested in what actually is an AP student. What does that look like in terms of practices, policies, progress? So I think that encapsulates not only stigma with all its labels attached to the self, but also as you're part of a system that is potentially not made for you. So therefore you are the system. And that worries me greatly, particularly at the age of 16 when children disappear from that system.

SPEAKER_02 6:43

And the the whole thing, just staying with Lim and Nancy for just a moment longer, the whole aspect of that is you're somewhere in between who you once were, which you've described as the ideal student, and to who you're becoming. But actually, is there a becoming once you've been excluded and you're in that setting? What does that becoming look like? And I guess that's where stigma really starts to take hold in if we think about it like that.

SPEAKER_00 7:12

Yeah, absolutely.

Opportunity Or Segregation In AP

SPEAKER_00 7:13

So again, this is the tension point, I think, with fields. Again, if we consider AP to be a field in itself, because there's two sort of different competing narratives around AP which ebb and flow politically. So up until 2019, AP was predominantly seen or ignored as forgotten children. I mean, there was policy papers, but Ofsted were aware of this in 2011. All of the labels were negative. So AP is a bad space. We don't want the kids going there. And then in 2019, with when it became apparent that it was being used as a behavioural setting, probably, it became popular. So ever since 2019, we've had a tension between is AP a good thing and a bad thing? You know, is it to be celebrated, this space with flexibility? So therefore, is it a space of opportunity for young people and pedagogy and teaching and learning and interventions, or is it instinctively still a bad space? Now, I have a social justice orientation, and again, to share personal, I went to an alternative vision after being excluded from school. In my experience, sort of pushes me towards the if they don't have access to the same level of resources, etc., then is that potentially segregation? So again, I I just wrote a book about that sort of sort of idea. So yeah, in between there is a whole contested space about well, what actually what is a being? So what is a being in an AP and what's the potential of them becoming? Um, and that is fraught with resources and experiences and exclusions and isolation. So within that is a whole host of labels that stigma can attach itself to, particularly structurally, if we look at who's more likely to access alternative reading, which is overwhelmingly male, working class kids with disabilities.

SPEAKER_02 9:02

And of course, children in care. Because of course I was in alternative provisions as well. One of which um was on-site on a residential home, which I don't think they really have so much of that anymore, but that was very much of the 80s. And then another, I couldn't tell you anything about it, other than I remember sitting in a room with one other person, some sort of very old idea of a computer and and no supervision. I mean, you know, it was that was much as you describe, really, and it was just a case of getting me to legal school age. And I and I could feel that at the time. It was just do that right thing of getting me to that age where I was then at legal school age. And of course, at that point then, you leave that setting with nothing.

unknown 9:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:56

So you've you've just described it. I mean, I worked for 16 years within children's services, a lot with children in care. And I think children care fits the description of liminality in between our being and becoming you know, are they truly a young person in the sense of a young person or are they part of a system and structure? And those tension points start to appear when, for example, a foster family wants to take a child overseas. That causes whole sorts of ramifications. Or if a child is moving home, do they you know, how dare they, you know, have black sacks with their clothes rather than suitcases? And I think that's exactly what we'll turn on my vision, because it's kind of that mix of what is truly a student. And I think you're always going to be looking up, unfortunately, the word up to this ideal status of this ideal student who sits in a classroom and does exactly what they're supposed to do, or at least the system is telling them what to do. No, five G C SEs, A-levels, higher education, all that sorts of stuff. And you've got a whole section of children who resist that. And they know that, and they're they're actively voting with their feet.

SPEAKER_02 11:05

So, how do you see stigma operating differently once that child is in AP compared with when they're in mainstream?

When Labels Become Visible And Fixed

SPEAKER_02 11:13

Because, of course, that particular child that you have just described in mainstream is going to be experiencing stigma to the max. What's going to be different for that child, if anything, once they then head into alternative provision?

SPEAKER_00 11:29

Well, it's made visible. The fact that you are in an alternative provision makes you visible to the system. It becomes fixed. You instinctively, when you're in an alternative vision or referred to an alternative vision or placed in an alternative provision, often with very little choice, there is a reason that you're put into an alternative provision. So it could be that that child has been part of the system for quite some time, being part of a school, you know, exclusion boards and whatever else. But effectively, by being in alternative vision, it becomes visible and fixed. A label has to be attached, so therefore we can do something about it. And if we can do something about it, we can manage it. And the net being the young person and the child. But I think that encapsulates what Goffman had talked about is the master status, is that is your status within alternative vision. And from that status, it's implied loads of deficits, assumptions, predominantly psychological, around what who's to blame. And instinctively, and in most policy, the child is to blame, if not the family, for that child's behaviour. Predominantly the mum will be blamed for that behaviour. So by being on television, stigma works by make big by becoming visible, by becoming fixed to that child. And of course, we then create documents around it and decide what's needed and charts and graphs and value for money and all sorts of stuff. So it is very much part of that. But outside of that would be the structure of self, is the structure creating these spaces for those children. You know, I'll be segregating based on this ideal status of the student.

SPEAKER_02 13:07

Yeah, because I I work across all the sectors, which really is a very interesting lens. But one of the things that you pick up very quickly is that language that is used across all the sectors problematizes the person. Yeah. It's designed to make the person the problem, it's designed to make the child the problem. And you've just described that so beautifully, but also you've brought into play that blaming and shaming of the mother in that dynamic.

unknown 13:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:38

So do you see that as you talk about structure? My first my first degree is in sociology, so I'm a big fan of thinking structurally, but do you see that? How do you, how would you describe that in terms of thinking about that as a structure? And also when we're talking about stigma, what is it that we mean? What is it that that you mean? What's your understanding of stigma?

SPEAKER_00 14:04

I'll

What Stigma Means In Practice

SPEAKER_00 14:05

see if I could plate off a little bit of that. Well, look, I think first and foremost, again, I as I say, I'll go back to saying I'm a practitioner. And the reason that I completed a PhD part-time, you know, I was working full-time, was I was seeing the same children doing the same things for decades, and it was the same processes. And I was like, well, look, I've got brilliant relationships with these children, thousands of children, young people I've worked with. And we talk a lot about relationships now as the being the key, the answer, and whatever else, but that's nothing new. But the frustration for me is very much, well, relationships can only take you so far. A good relationship is brilliant, but actually, you as a professional, your job is to not have good relationships, if that makes sense, because the child should be set free from that relationship, shouldn't be, it shouldn't feel like they're uncomfortable. So for me, it's disciplinary. It's that disciplinary power over young people that I think is key to a lot of this. So if you look at the terminology around the young people we're talking about, you will hear consistently at risk, vulnerable, deprived, you know, hard to reach, lacking aspiration.

SPEAKER_02 15:18

Don't forget inspiration.

SPEAKER_00 15:20

As if, you know, working class kids in particular just sit there and don't think about the future. What working class kids do very well is think of make decisions based on what they know, as we all do. And that pretty much here and now. You know, through that's why the importance of community resources and access to people in schools who are the crazy art teacher or the music teacher, the people who you would assume would be bad role models for these kids, actually the ones that these kids should have access to, because those are the ones that are unlikely to me in alternative vision. But I mean, I ask people all the time, what's your favourite teacher? And it's guaranteed to be some other person than you imagine them to be around. But for me, it's disciplinary power. It's very much that you know, we're setting in stone terminology and words around these children that create the spaces and places that restrict who they think they are and who they potentially could be in the future. So I think that is really quite powerful. But stigma itself, for me, has two particular things in relation to AP. So I'm writing a paper at the moment called The Borstal Spot. And the Borstal Spot is the classic golfman sticking a label on a child because they've attended an auto-vision. And the boastal spot comes from um a tattoo that young people, or this myth of a tattoo that young person would get if they attended the youth offending institute, for example. And that kind of carries on throughout throughout their life. So that's very much stuck to themselves. But I've written a lot about the structures around children, again, go back to that sort of ideal status of in comparison to this ideal status in the school, in a classroom, where does that young person sit? And that's inherently about gender, it's about class, it's about disability, it's about how we understand the word needs. What is a need? Is it the needs of the system or the needs of the child? You know, and that gets played out in the classroom, gets played out in individual learning plans and things like that. So for me, stigma is very much Goffman-based in terms of labels stuck to the stuck to the individual, but also there is obviously more recent work with Tyler, etc., who talked more about structural. So it's that self and social, which I think Goffman hinted at many, many times, but of course it's been taken forward, which is good. But I still think it's scary, they were still using the word stigma. Incredible stuff.

SPEAKER_02 17:48

Ah, well, we'll get into that. I was just thinking about tattoos because Imogen Tyler talks a lot about that. That's her entry into talking about stigma. And Lisa Morrison did a beautiful piece of work that was uh very much about mothers' tattoos that they had chosen for themselves. There's something about, you know, the tattoos that we choose for ourselves rather than the ones that are being given, which is what you're describing in the bore spot, which I think is a great title, although lots of people won't remember what a bore still even is. So that's going to be uh an interesting jaunt into history for some people. Um tell me more about your views on the word stigma.

SPEAKER_00 18:27

For me, stigma comes with and I think it's becoming even more important now than perhaps it was when Goffman originally came off of the idea around people with disabilities in particular in institutions, although it plays it out very well. Because of the changes, let's just say, politically, that is happening now, based on certain assumptions about certain people and certain ways of being and existing, I think the idea of stigma is still drawn to shame, blame, hate, discrimination. So those sorts of key concepts within the idea of stigma theory are getting played out in different ways in relation to race and to class and to disability. So they're still attached to social differences. But how they're embedded within the structures of society and how we understand people's existences and lives and education and welfare and stuff, I think again it still draws me back to the self and the social. But I think the two work on operate together and can't operate without each other. But in a very simplistic term, it's still very much about shame, blame, abuse, discrimination, stereotypes.

SPEAKER_02 19:38

Rather than thinking about the structures around the person, a bit like resilience. It's a bit like the word resilience, which is very much about resources, the resources we have available to us, but it still locates itself in the individual as if the individual is lacking.

SPEAKER_00 19:53

No,

Where Critical Theory Went Missing

SPEAKER_00 19:54

100%. And and as I say, I I think, and I worry, and worry quite a lot based on because I'm a socios per trade, but the fact that it's not we're losing an appetite for those discussions. So I what I've noticed, and I don't know if other people have noticed this, but we had a sort of really good run of critical theorists, probably, you know, from late 80s into the 2005s and 67s. And then there seems to be a sort of collective amnesia around what went before. And I I worry that we're losing that criticality, or the critical art has been taken out of the system to some extent by looking for simplistic explanations of things like stigma. So attaching it to stereotypes as and description, you know, rather than looking at it as part of a wider system. So I worry that ideas of stigma are being reinvented, but reinvented without the historical grounding of why stigma was, you know, a key concept and an idea back then. So we're not and we can see that, I think, quite a lot. And I know you've talked about this a lot in the belonging. Yeah, belonging is not new. You know, we were talking about this 30 years ago, but I think it's incumbent on people like yourself to kind of remind people that actually belonging is not all rosy and shiny and warm. It can actually mean something quite different, and that plays out in different ways, particularly in segregated set spaces that AP can be. Belonging is lovely, it's great, it's a nice, cozy word, but what does that actually mean on the ground if it's only reinforcing the shame, the blame, the stereotypes and things like that that are getting played out?

SPEAKER_02 21:33

Well, I think that's why for me, and this is how you know I've I wrote a blog post called, you know, the rise and rise of mattering. That's why for me, thinking about belonging and mattering together and then adding in liminality into a framework of thinking, I think is so important because the whole purpose of being in a liminal space is it was felt that you needed ceremony masters, which is very old terminology, anthropological terminology. But actually, what it says is that someone has to hold you through that liminal space, you know, and if they don't, because of our need to belong and to matter, we're going to be invited into all sorts of spaces. And I think we can see that, and I digress slightly because I want to get back to critical theory, but we can see politically how that's happening, how certain politicians and certain political narratives really hone in on people in those liminal spaces and target them very deliberately. But just to just to move back to critical theory, I think you're absolutely right, but you might be familiar with Louise. I think her surname's Munchin. I never get past her surname because she just likes, she goes boom, she's straight on there. She's she's very young, she's in front of everything at the moment, and she's a critical theorist. She's doing her PhD, she's absolutely fantastic, and she is on it. She basically says, you know, it's an emergency, you know, like you've got to get into critical theory because it's an emergency. That's her strapline. And she's really hitting into all sorts of different media spaces. So I think maybe with what is happening, maybe that is a backlash, if you like, to have those critical theorist voices start to come back into play. I mean, we're recording this uh the day after local elections, which are going to tell a story all of their own, uh, that we can't explore today because we you know, it's uh we don't know yet what's going to happen. But that opens up all sorts of conversations and spaces, who gets stigmatized, who gets access to services, who, you know, who belongs in this country. I mean, that very fundamental question.

SPEAKER_00 23:45

That master status, you know, who is the what is that master status? What's the ideal citizen? What does that look like? And I can play down different tensions, you know, as I drive around and see various things, you know, as a Scots, you know, as a Scotsman in England, for example, there's certain tensions that potentially exist. And you would think, well, Craig, you know, you're very much, you know, a British citizen, but am I in the eyes of of other people? So I have a liminal status if I'm outside of where I belong in other people's eyes. So it's interesting in terms of how that player. But stigma and liminality are absolutely core to all of this, but we do need to go back to the original ideas to unpick some of those.

Missing Voices And Overlooked Strengths

SPEAKER_02 24:30

So I guess what I want to move into thinking about what the impact of this is and thinking about what strengths for those young people who find themselves in alternative provision are are routinely overlooked in, well, in criminological or educational discourse, but also in the lived experience of being in an alternative provision. What strengths, strengths that they bring are just missing?

SPEAKER_00 24:59

I mean, I've been researching AP. I'd done a PhD on it, and I worked in an AP, etc., for you know, I started researching it probably in debt in 2001 when I done my master's on it. But I was working at an AP from sort of 1995, and of course, as I mentioned, I was a student too. But I always with, and this is not just applied to alternative revision, but I think always with under-resourced children, their voices are missing. And when they do appear, it is nice to have those voices, but they don't resonate and ebb and flow in the way that other powerful social groups do. I mean, and it's no surprise to me at all that those voices, whilst they're there, have very little impact. And I see that consistently throughout all sort of literature when it comes to disadvantage. That it's almost a sort of nod to those voices. But within that is, you know, huge exploration in terms of criticality around class, gender, and all that stuff. But you're absolutely right, it has been under-researched, it's been underlooked at, but maybe again that's part of the system, maybe that's you know the reason. Another reason that alternative vision has been under research, it's very difficult to access to those sites. The young people are not attending in the routine ways. And then almost you can cherry pick children who go to AP in the very voices you're going to hear. And that's why I I purposely done a paper on children who are intending not to access AP but were referred to AP, though it was called other lives. So, because I actually think I think that's the core of AP, is children who are not regularly attending those settings. Um, so it's fraught with tension, but I don't think the lack of voices in that space is just applied to AP. You can find that consistently across the spectrum when it comes to uh young people out on the margins of of society, really.

Working Class Boys And Moral Panic

SPEAKER_02 26:54

And you talk a lot about working class boys in your work, don't you?

unknown 26:59

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 27:00

Um and you've mentioned already um in terms of their um overrepresentation in alternative provision. I mean, let can we speak to that for a moment, first of all, thinking about what is the stigmatisation of that particular group and what the strengths are that that group brings that are routinely ignored.

SPEAKER_00 27:21

Going back to what we're saying about disadvantage and things like that and overlooked, here's a perfect example of the panic, the you know, uh the idea of morality that comes out of thinking about what a a young man should be, um, young working class should be, young man with disabilities should be. So those are all fraught with tensions and identity. But when it comes to social class, as soon as you say I'm working class or whatever else, that sets up a whole series of discussions. Well, I'm working class, I'm more working class than you, and all sorts of stuff. But another area that I sort of look at quite a lot, as you mentioned, was social class. Now I don't write a lot about class, I just feel because I'm a working class academic, that that is a tension point in itself. That how can you be an academic and working class? So that's why I sort of co-founded the sort of working class academics to give the voice to those particular spaces, which resonates quite a lot, I think. But there's a huge amount of assumptions about working class young men, and there always has been. There's a sense of fear, shame, blame, all those stigma attached to it. But actually, young men are just exactly the same social group as young women. I've worked with young thousands of young women. I've young, you know, every social group has their own tension points. But we tend to sort of label or attach certain hysterical psychological aspects to young working class men. Adolescence being a perfect example of that on Netflix. Brilliantly done, really good show, but all the time I'm watching this, I'm in horror as a practitioner of what was unfolding in that space. So I would blame the practitioner for that rather than the young person reacting in that way, albeit that if that young person, which certainly appears to be the case, did commit that crime.

SPEAKER_02 29:16

What was the what was the let's just stay with adolescence because I think that's such a good um example. There was um one aspect of that that was just not explored at all that really troubled me. What was the one aspect for you that came up in that that really troubled you? I mean, I'm sure there were lots, but what's the one thing that stays in your mind?

SPEAKER_00 29:37

Well, as an academic, it was the way that I mean, I think the class was portrayed very well in relation to, you know, tradey, Sunday in a van, you know, the the the masculinity that I want to do something about it, but I can't do anything about it, ideal of masculinity, which I thought was portrayed very well. I think on a practitioner level, I was horrified, and this is me just thinking of one example, I was horrified that that practitioner went into that room and did not tell that child that there's only going to be four sessions, or that they raised their voice. The moment that practitioner raised their voice, I'm thinking, you just you've just lost the war there. So, in terms of bad practice, you're actually instigating that behavior from the young person, which reinforces the stereotype of angry young working class man. Um so for me, the lack of accountability towards that practitioner was shocking because surely that's the first thing you say to the young person, like, I'm here to help you, but I'm only here to help you for uh you're setting the boundaries.

SPEAKER_02 30:40

Yes. Yes. I I was more kind of uh I mean, yeah, that that whole scene just didn't smack real to me anyway. I just didn't I just didn't buy that. But I was really what I was really kind of concerned about, I think, was just how little exploration there was about the dynamic the family dynamics. Yeah, they just felt very unexplored to me. But you know, God, this must have been so much analysis about adolescence.

SPEAKER_00 31:11

We don't, we don't I only watched them once, and I've got this because things like adolescence cross the boundary between me and practitioner academia, I tend to switch off from that. Like I like to come home and not watch it because it's too much like what. Yeah. But I had to watch it simply because uh obviously like people will talk about it and you know, carry on. But I think you're touching on family, you're touching on class. I think that's exactly a key point because there's lots of assumptions about what happens in working class homes, and I think those assumptions dominate the idea of what class actually is. And that, of course, is either good or bad. It's either a good thing, as in you know, working class people are good people, you know, salt of the earth, or they're very much troubled people who, you know, are grew up in poverty and all sorts of stuff and structural barriers, and we need to be thinking. So all of these assumptions are played out quite a lot in relation to class. Now, again, I grew up in the tenements, so the family above me, you know, were on benefits, the family above them valued education, the family above them, you know, we're both working, you know, five kids or whatever. So the assumption that the working class is a one monolithic being is just ridiculous. Um, you know, so stigma plays out in those communities too. But class is consistently overlooked, and that worries me greatly within a lot of research.

SPEAKER_02 32:37

And there's the appropriation of class as well, which is quite fascinating, which you see in students a lot, don't you? I mean, when I was a student a very, very long time ago, we might be a similar age, so you you might remember, but something that came in at the time, it was kind of called grunge, I think. It was all very grungy, but it was all about, you know, really quite privileged people dressing down, you know, being really scruffy, and you know, it had a very particular look, and it's that kind of appropriation of poverty, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 33:06

Yeah.

Class Identity Risk And Rational Choices

SPEAKER_00 33:07

I think there's a certain freedom in being working class, and and particularly if you've got to academia, because you don't belong there, you know, you how the hell did you find yourself here? A lot of people talk about luck, but also luck and risk, because you know, I worked in factories and whatever else, so I understand what that labour is, so I might have to go back and do that. There's always that fear in the back of your head that it's all going to fall apart very quickly, regardless of what you do. But I I do think that understanding what class is and relating that and also portraying it in a way that it's not cultural appropriation. Everybody should celebrate their class, and class is very important to everything. But I do worry that because it's not a protected status, as others are, that they are likely to incorporate that into particular culture. Glaston beer Glastonbury being a perfect example of that. You know, it's only cool if it's middle class, you know, that type of idea. But in reality, it was cool a long, long time before that. So I think there's a good thing about being working class in the sense that there's a freedom of identity that you can express yourself in particular ways if you feel confident enough. But there's also huge constraints about what you can be. So for me, if I get animated, I become, I fall into the trap of being an angry working class man. And therefore, you know, that has connotations. So there's only certain identities I can take up in certain spaces without upsetting people and going, yeah, well, that's just because you've got a chip on your shoulder. Of course I've got a chip on my shoulder. I've got no shoulder left at this point, you know. So I'm supposed to shut up and say nothing. But those things are really quite important to explore, I think, with young people as well, because they're making life's decisions based on their what they're experiencing. Again, I go back to what I was saying about, and I I just wrote in a paper about this too, about the here and now, that you can only make decisions realistically on what you know and what's around you. And I consistently see this in the literature, and I get worried that people overlook this. That there is no complexity to be a working class male. Uh people are kind of making this thing. We're literally just shoved and pushed and conjoiled into the trades. You know, all you need to really look at is go, right, the stereotypical working-class male, we're going to use that, is a pair of treaty trousers. That's the aspiration because that's what makes sense. That's what the status is. Anything outside of that is a potential risk because you don't know. And why would you pay 80 grand for a university education when you can buy two flats in Dundee for that? I mean, that's the type of assumptions and rational choices these young people are making. If you grew up in a community like Grimsby, for example, I'm not dismissing Grimsby, I've never been, but I was in the news recently. I mean, what's the opportunities in Grimsby? Why wouldn't you just leave school at 14 and get a job? How is another couple of GCSEs going to help you if you even get that? So there are rational choices being made along along the way for young working class mate.

SPEAKER_02 36:05

Well, that leads us neatly into my final question, really, which is what do we need to know about stigma? What questions about stigma are needed next by researchers, policy makers, practitioners that will help us move into future practice, but help us move into 21st century living?

Digital Life And The Next Questions

SPEAKER_00 36:24

I think I have to say, and this is showing my age, which is a good thing because I'm a big believer in youth culture and development, and but the digital world is a space that is so unexplored by academics because most of the academics are of my vintage who kind of still dismiss the power of those communities. So I do think the stigma will play out quite dramatically online, if not already. You know, I I'm only on things like TikTok and Instagram and stuff purely because of my nieces and nephews, and I need to know like what is the friggin' trend now that I'm seeing or getting sent or whatever else. Makes no sense to me, but I can see the danger of sort of scrolling through for five, six hours. But what impact does that have on young working class people, the image of themselves, the identity within themselves? How do they recognize themselves in those spaces and also in the communities that we're making available to them? So I think recognition of young people in that space, not only the opportunities but the barriers as well. And also what opportunities are being redistributed within those spaces. So if we are to go down the line of digital communities, etc., how is redistribution being played out in those particular spaces? Like, are they are they having access to the same capitals, the same resources as others? It's a classic sort of BEC discussion, isn't it, that we're supposed to be set free by from class and all these sorts of stuff. But actually, I think it's getting played out even more on those types of spaces. So I think the future and alternative vision very much fits into that type of space of restriction, is what does that mean in terms of who they are in those spaces and what types of resources are available to them?

SPEAKER_02 38:06

I hope that there is somebody listening who wants to do a PhD who's thinking, what could I do a PhD on? And they could look at stigma and digital communities using Borgia's cultural capital as a way of entry into that. I think that would make fantastic. And you would make a great supervisor for that person.

SPEAKER_00 38:30

Well, thank you. Very open to, you know, I'm very fortunate to have some really good doctoral students in, you know, several on alternative vision. Um I I think we can't ignore the digital space. We just can't. I I think there's a reluctance on part of most academics who gain funding because you know there are of a certain age where we still believe in this streetlight analogy. You go in and you know when the streetlights come on. But I do think it's a very important space, and I think alternative vision, because one of the definitions of alternative vision is obviously the online experience. And within the online experience, of course, is mm you know marketization of children and their education and things like that, which is quite important. Yeah, so as I say, I just done a book on Capital, Purdue, and alternative provision, and I steered clear of the digital space because I didn't feel comfortable without the evidence and the data, although I did talk about WhatsApp groups and all sorts of stuff. So I do think there is space there to develop that as a area. Well, there is an area, there is a field of that already, but I think within alternative provision in particular, it's quite an interesting space because as we know, education can't decide your future.

SPEAKER_02 39:39

That's wonderful. And um, yeah, just to kind of finish, I think the digital space as well is a liminal space, but I do think there is some research in that area. Um when I spoke to Bjorn Thomason in in part one of the liminality series, he starts to touch upon that. So that might be something to also inspire people to think more about

Final Thoughts And How To Help

SPEAKER_02 40:04

that. And I knew that today was going to be a really interesting conversation. So thank you so much for joining me and coming on the podcast.

SPEAKER_00 40:11

No, it's absolutely welcome. And I'm gonna happy to have conversations. I'm fairly easy to find on social media, which goes against my sort of working class background, but I'm getting paid to be an academic, and that's the platform that we have to sort of put ourselves out in. But I'm very happy to have conversations with anybody around this. Um, obviously, my orientation towards things like alternative revision stigma is social justice oriented, which might differ, and that I think is a great explanation as well. If people have different opinions about that, because I think we've all got a voice in children's future. We shouldn't deny that. But um, yeah, that will be interesting to see how everything plays out in the next two or three years. But I do suspect there'll be significant changes, which stigma and liminality will play absolutely key into all of that.

SPEAKER_02 40:57

Wonderful. Thank you so much. You've been listening to the Trauma Resonance Resilience podcast with me, your host, Lisa Cherry. Brought to you straight from the heart of the knowledge that high-quality relationships are the cornerstone of learning, healing, and growing. If you've enjoyed this episode, please consider sharing or reviewing. Until next time.