CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland

Unsettled Boundaries: Welfare and the Contested Construction of Subjects, States and Spaces.

Organiser: John Clarke

Carabine, Jean (The Open University, United Kingdom) UK TEENAGE PREGNANCY POLICY: REMORALISING WELFARE THROUGH CONSTITUTING KNOWING RESPONSIBLE CITIZENS?
In 1997 the UK government published the Social Exclusion Report on Teenage Pregnancy (SEU 1999). The Report reproblematises teenage pregnancy: whereas, previously teenage pregnancy was seen as a problem of sexual immorality and as a moral hazard, the SEU Report presents teenage pregnancy as the result of low expectations, ignorance and mixed messages which, in turn give rise to social exclusion. Within this discursive re-formulation is an acceptance that policy solutions lie in raising young peoples' expectations, improving sex and relationship education, and in improving access to contraception. Rather than, as was previously the case, restricting what teenagers learn about sex and teaching them to say 'no'.This paper will explain how in teenage pregnancy has been newly constituted in the UK and will explore the outcomes and reasons for this. It will be suggested that this reconstituting represents a shift from a sexual to a social moralising which emphasizes self-governance through the acquisition of knowledge. Key to the remoralising of teenagers, which is a central part of New Labour's teenage pregnancy strategy, is the construction of teenagers as self-regulating, knowing, responsible citizens. Three discursive strategies are key to New Labour's attempts to reconstitute teenage pregnancy and sexuality. These are, Risk Management through Knowledge Acquisition; Constituting Knowing Active Welfare Citizens; and Shifting Blame. It will be suggested that this recent teenage pregnancy strategy can be understood as a part of New Labour's Third Way project of Modernisation (through a modernising of the social) and of Remoralising Welfare (through welfare prevention and emphasizing individual self sufficiency).

Fink, Janet (The Open University, United Kingdom) UNSETTLING THE BOUNDARIES OF WHITENESS, CITIZENSHIP AND STATE WELFARE ­ THE CASE OF FORMER CHILD MIGRANTS
The migration of children to Britain's 'white' dominions during the 1940s and 1950s has been the subject of much polemical and emotive discussion in the media with books, documentaries and TV dramas invariably focusing upon the children and representing them as victims of an uncaring welfare state. Evidence presented by former child migrants to the Health Select Committee in 1997 drew upon and reinforced these narratives of victimhood and blame. This paper asks two key questions. First, why child migration schemes were an acceptable, if contested, form of child welfare in postwar Britain and, second, why the narratives of former child migrants were so influential upon the recommendations and conclusions of the Health Select Committee's Report. In seeking answers to the first question, the motives of the different agencies involved in the promotion of child migration are explored and the tensions between governments' concern for the welfare of children and a determination to preserve a British influence within the dominions are illustrated. And, to address the second question, emphasis is placed upon the shifting boundaries of whiteness, citizenship and sites of welfare over the past fifty years and the ways in which these shifts have been used by former child migrants to position themselves as marginalised and excluded subjects of both the nation and the welfare state.

Lewis, Gail (The Open University, United Kingdom) 'CULTURE AS PRACTICE, CULTURE AS SIGN': POSTCOLONIAL ANXIETY IN THE MIDST OF MULTICULTURALISM
This paper is framed by the theoretical distinction between culture as practices of the everyday and culture as signifying practice. It explores some of the ways in which everyday practices of minoritised groups within Britain are inflected through exclusionary discourses of nation and belonging. Such processes of signification are linked to postcolonial anxieties evoked by increasing ethnic diversity and attempts to foreclose on the claims to citizenship expressed by different constituencies.

Newman, Janet (The Open University, United Kingdom) UNSETTLING 'POLICY': GOVERNANCE AS CULTURAL PRACTICE
'Governance' is a term that registers a discursive space within which academic and policy debates about the unsettling of national and institutional boundaries are taking place. Theories of governance inform a burgeoning literature illuminating the reconfiguration of relations of power across multiple sites and levels of governing, and contemporaneous shifts in the modes and practices of welfare. Governance also helps illuminate some of the attempts to remake notions of 'citizenship' beyond the nation state, and highlights the difficulties faced by governments as they struggle to forge new political and social settlements in the face of disruptions to the imaginary unities of nation and people on which their legitimacy depends. This paper focuses on the difficulties of analysing 'policy' - both the policy process and the substance of policy - in the context of unsettled boundaries and the complexity of multi-level governance. It highlights the pivotal position of governance theory as a point of productive intersection between 'political' and 'social' perspectives on policy. But it goes on to argue that unless inflected with a cultural form of analysis this intersection cannot fully respond to the challenge of theorising policy in the context of shifting - and unstable - regimes of governance. In order to illustrate this proposition the paper draws on two pieces of current research: on the narratives of UK managers engaged in discursive negotiation, appropriation and contestation in the context of the 'modernising' reforms for public services. on the processes through which notions of 'the public' are constructed and enacted in the process of enlarging public participation in policy formation and service delivery in the UK. Together these highlight the importance of analysing 'policy' and 'governance' as the sites of cultural practice and contestation.

Clarke, John (The Open University, United Kingdom.) UNSETTLED BOUNDARIES: GLOBALISATION, NEO-LIBERALISM AND WELFARE STATES.
This paper examines the relationship between globalisation and welfare states through three key issues: (1) distinguishing neo-liberal globalisation from other global realignments; (2) understanding neo-liberalism as a strategy that is enacted differentially; (3) understanding globalisation as a process that takes place inside as well outside nation-states/welfare states.The conventional views of globalisation and welfare states both over-estimate and under-estimate the significance of globalisation. Apocalyptic accounts of globalisation bringing about the end of the welfare state (and the nation state) are countered by political-institutionalist views of adaptation. Such views treat globalisation as an external force, or pressure.  In the process, taken-for-granted meanings and boundaries of nation-state-welfare are destabilised.