Seminar 4 Family Cultures
The central questions that the seminar seeks to address include:
- How do family cultures influence learner identities?
- How are trajectories reproduced, reformed and resisted across generations?
- What is the role of class, ethnicity, gender and sexuality in this process?
The Women’s Library, 10.00am-3.00pm, Wednesday 15th February 2012
The seminar will be chaired by Dr Jayne Osgood (Reader in Education, London Metropolitan University)
Guest speakerswill include:
Dr Emma Parker (Senior Lecturer, School of English, University of Leicester)
‘Not a Black and White Issue: Valerie Mason-John, Transracial Adoption, and Identity’
Dr Helen Lucey (Senior Lecturer, Social Psychology, University of Bath)
‘Educational Identities and Identifications Across Time: The significance of psychic and social projects within and across generations’
In this presentation I will explore some of the push and pull of conscious and unconscious processes of identification and flows of affect across and between generations in families, and their place in the educational identifications of working-class girls in particular. Sociological work on girls’ experiences of schooling and the relationships between educational achievement and identity construction tends to concentrate on peer relationships or those between parents (most usually mothers) and children, and teachers and pupils. But what about the significance of siblings, fathers, aunts, uncles and grandparents? How might the psychic and social projects of previous generations ‘telescope’ (Faimberg 2004) into the present? For those who take seriously the idea that educational and learning identities are formed through psychic as much as social economies, then identifications (and dis-identifications) within and across generations hold much significance in girls’ unconscious and conscious alignments towards education. This challenges the notion of the psyche as individual and in opposition to the social, resistance in opposition to conformity.
Sue Mayo (Associate Artist, Magic Me) and Susan Langford (Director, Magic Me): Presentation and Exhibition
Panel Discussion:
Helen Donohoe (Action for Children);
Anne Page (Independent Family Policy & Research Consultant);
Professor Yvette Taylor (Head of the Weeks Centre, London South Bank University);
Mike Fortune-Wood (Founder, Home Education UK)
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