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.
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