Education and Working-Class Youth by Robin Simmons & John Smyth

Author:Robin Simmons & John Smyth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

This thread needs to be picked up again, as it is in that very sphere where promise resides, particularly if an additional place can be found for that politicized ‘tenderness’ of the men that might yet shepherd the boys beyond the limitations of their protest. Valerie Walkerdine ’s work recognizes this. Drawing on the psychoanalyst Bracha Ettinger, Walkerdine articulates a matrixial space of de-industrialised community, where the affective “mantle and burden” of pain and depression might be taken away from the women and, instead, shared by men and women together in “a shifting of the distance between femininity and masculinity ” (Wakerdine and Jiminez 2012, p. 176, my emphasis) This has to be a classed shift, though.

In an important 2011 article, Beverley Skeggs argues for a feminist “re-ligitimation of classed value practices” based “on reciprocity, care, shared understandings of injustice, and insecurity ” (p. 509) which allows us to re-theorise the potential of the coalfield gender question in a productive way that can hold a space for “a chance to talk like this” that answers not only the needs of the Cavs Lasses, but of ASBO Johnny-O and the other young men as well. In producing such value practices it is necessary to “establish which practices [are] just and with value”. Such classed gender work will routinely enter “different, nearly always local, circuits of value and generat[e] alternative values about ‘what/who matters’, ‘what/who counts’ and ‘what is just’” (Skeggs 2011, pp. 505–506). Time, energy and attention, too, will be given to such “a supportive sociality” in making the best of “limited circumstances in the present where the future seem[s] bleak and [the] best chance of value [is] moral and affective, not financial” (p. 504).

In a provision and funding landscape where the remaining public sector workers are “run ragged”, Christine, Liz, Maggie and Pat do often bemoan the fact that they are locked into a curriculum that is inappropriate in its ‘work readiness’ focus and which leaves young people (increasingly of both genders) being drawn towards low paid, zero hours affective labour (for which they are inadequately qualified) in a poorly regulated care sector. They also despair asThe girls lift up their heads, but as soon as they finish [the programme] they go into retreat, their posture changes, and they drift very quickly into care work. The boys revert to what they did before, hanging around the streets —Maggie

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