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Lyn Tett and Mary Hamilton (eds) (2019) Resisting Neoliberalism in Education: Local, National and Transnational Perspectives
Full text linkIn this edited collection from Tett and Hamilton, the authors explore the pervasive
nature of neoliberalism within a range of educational contexts, including compulsory,
adult and higher education. The need to resist dominant ideology, which puts profit
over people, is a key theme throughout. Part One provides food for thought on ways to
subvert dominant ideology within adult education. Chapter 1 (Thériault) examines the
demands on community-based organisations in Quebec to undertake ‘accountability
literacies’ (p.13) to prove their worth but highlights the resourcefulness of youth
workers, who practise everyday resistance. I was left with a desire to read even more
about the findings from this study, having personal experience of ‘conflictual
cooperation’ as a youth worker funded by the state whilst challenging state demands on
young people. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on adult education in England, examining adult
literacy practice and policy. Duckworth and Smith (Chapter 2) propose that a discourse
of transformation and hope constitutes natural resistance to the dominant expectations
of ‘performative curricula’ (p.38). Allatt and Tett (Chapter 3) describe the approaches
that adult literacy workers use to navigate ‘creative solutions’ (p.53) to meeting the
demands set out by the discourse of employability skills that permeates policy and
practice
\u27Slamdance the cosmopolis\u27: Political Discourses around Drugs and Alcohol
Full text linkMy name is John Player, like the cigarettes. Some readers won’t have heard of these odious cigarettes. My grandfather, also called John Player, died of lung cancer and is buried in a grave in Glasgow. His gravestone looks like the John Player Special (JPS) packet - gold lettering on a matte black background. He died of lung cancer at 55. This was, and remains, around the age that so many men die in Glasgow and the West of Scotland. I never met him, so this is personal.
The tobacco companies knew they were using the most addictive substance known to humankind to create one of the most successful capitalist commodities. They were also well aware, from the 1960s on, of the causality between smoking and early deaths due to lung cancer though this knowledge was suppressed for decades. In turns out that the tobacco companies were experts in semiotics: the study of signs deployed in advertising, for instance. The John Player Navy Cut signage of the dependable sailor was \u27interpellated\u27 (see Althusser 2001) in my grandfather\u27s consciousness. He was \u27hailed\u27 by the tobacco companies shouting \u27Hey, you there!\u27 My grandfather turned around answered the call! Like so many others, he became their addicted \u27subject\u27
Making Connections
Full text linkNot long into the first UK lockdown in 2020, Edinburgh Recovery Activities (ERA) decided to offer an online creative writing course. What emerged was Making Connections, a 6-week zoom programme run over June and July, with around 10 participants. The purpose was to give people the opportunity to express themselves, develop their writing and meet with others. Creative writing can be a means through which we examine our experience of ourselves, the world around us and the relationship between the two. From the beginning, the course did not make assumptions about whether people wrote already, or what they might want to write, but hoped to offer the opportunity to develop their writing, to explore different types of writing if that was of interest and, most importantly, to be creative and expressive.
 
More letters from lockdown...Creative responses to Covid-19
Full text linkCovid 19: Dilemmas for a Developing countryComing out of Dar es Salaam airport into a hot, humid night in October 2020, I was relieved to have taken off the mask I had compulsorily worn since I had left Edinburgh in the early hours of the morning. I had had my temperature checked when we landed and filled in a form to say where I would be staying. That was the end of any restrictions or checks, despite the fact that the world was in the middle of a pandemic which had claimed so many lives and destroyed livelihoods.
When I got back home to Edinburgh, people asked questions about Covid restrictions in Tanzania and were clearly surprised and even shocked to hear that there were none. Why would a country not protect its citizens from this disease? Why would its President encourage people to pray together in crowded churches? Why not impose lockdowns and restrictions for their safety
Community Building for Collective Power
Full text linkIn spring of 2020, as the coronavirus spread across the world and governments dithered over what to do, I began talking with my co-workers about unionising our office. We work as journalists at a New York-based media company, and the last time we faced a major global crisis, executives throughout our industry fired a record number of people to keep profits up. I believed they would likely do the same this time around (they did) and that we would be better protected if we organised.
Workers in the United States enjoy few protections. In most cases, we can be fired at will, which is a frightening prospect sharpened further by the fact that our ticket to modern medicine is usually through employer-provided health insurance. Practically speaking, if you lose your job in the allegedly freest country in the world, you lose your doctor. A frightening prospect in a pandemic.
I wanted to understand whether anyone else believed, as I did, that if we consolidated our individual power, we would better withstand the economic fallout of Covid-19. Through collective bargaining, we could potentially prevent mass layoffs, or at least codify stipulations for severance, and resolve the issues we’d faced at work prior to the pandemic, too.
What follows describes and reflects on the process I took with my co-workers to unionise our office, which I believe serves as an example of how community building intersects with trade unionisation, because both rely on one-to-one relationships between individuals. My hope is that it contributes to the demystification of the unionisation process and offers one potential starting point for others who want to unionise their workplaces. I believe that’s an urgent need for our modern era, in which a new billionaire is minted more frequently than daily , while the rest of us get scraps
Linsey, McGoey, (2019) The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World
Full text linkI met Linsey McGoey in Dublin in the spring of 2019, where she was presenting a very informed and compelling account of the way in which philanthropy benefits the super-rich, with a particular lens on the Gates Foundation. Her interest then, as in this book, was the way in which the optics of familiar \u27truths\u27 are in fact deliberately distorted to suggest the opposite of what is actually the truth. For example, it is not just a happy accident for the super-rich that most people don\u27t see through the official narrative of \u27philanthropy\u27, but a predictable outcome of the way in which knowledge is managed to hide the real truth. This concern with what she calls \u27strategic ignorance\u27 is developed more fully in this book. The Unknowers is a stimulating and provocative read which offers challenging insights for work with communities
A Chatter That Matters: A Conversation About Severe and Multiple Disadvantage
Full text linkHealth Opportunities Team (HOT) are a community-based charity committed to improving the health and wellbeing of young people (aged 12-25). HOT received funding by Lankelly Chase to facilitate a conversation about severe and multiple disadvantage. This came following a report by Hard Edges Scotland which highlighted the complexity of the lives of people facing severe and multiple disadvantage in Scotland, and how this impacts public and voluntary services. Severe and multiple disadvantage can be described as any person with two or more of the following issues: homelessness, offending, substance misuse, mental health issues and poverty (Fisher, 2015). In 2019 HOT facilitated an after-school workshop where young people from the local areas of Craigmillar, Portobello, Liberton and Gilmerton shared their experiences and views on severe and multiple disadvantage, specifically around health and poverty. The aim of this was to explore how young people feel severe and multiple disadvantage impacts upon their lives and families, especially in relation to health and wellbeing, and to explore how organisations like the Health Opportunities Team can develop services that mitigate the impacts of severe and multiple disadvantage
There\u27s a cupboard full of pasta! Beyond sustenance: reflections on youth work and commensality: Youth Work
Full text linkCommensality is an area of inquiry concerned with practices of eating and, in particular, eating at a shared table, often explored through ethnographic studies of ritual and culture (Fischler, 2011). This article seeks to reflect on youth work in relation to commensality. Youth work is a practice of open access, informal education with young people that generally takes place in youth clubs or in detached or street-based settings, where young people interact with youth workers by choice. We consider practices of food sharing observed in youth work settings, their meaning, and their value beyond sustenance. When viewed through the lens of commensality, practices of food sharing in youth work settings can be articulated as a conscious method of practice, we argue, in need of further discussion. We explore this aspect of practice in youth work settings based on informal learning, social development, and abundance; considering the tensions youth workers face against a backdrop of austerity, child poverty and the neoliberal impact of the reduction of youth services. Despite this we contend that there is value in identifying, locating, and articulating the relationship between commensality and youth work. Drawing on research across eight different youth work settings in England, this article positions youth work as a site of commensal experience for young people and youth workers, extending the discourse around youth work and creating links with other areas of inquiry such as anthropology, sociology, informal education, and community development
Beyond Sectoral Values: Radical Organisational Responses to Human Need
Full text linkIn this time of successive crises of austerity, poverty, and the Covid-19 Coronavirus, this article offers a critical reflection on community-based practice, professionalisation of the community development sector, and the limitations imposed on radically-inclined organisations and activists who become entwined with funding criteria and imposed outcomes. Anarchist literature from Graeber (2011) and Kinna (2021) form a central theoretical lens from which to approach the topic, whilst Beck and Purcell (2020) support a critical assessment of the complicated cycles many community collectives or organisations go through as they become more intimately connected with the state. Three Edinburgh-based informal groups - Autonomous Centre Edinburgh (A.C.E.), Edinburgh Helping Hands (E.H.H.), and Mutual Aid Trans Edinburgh (M.A.T.E.) - serve as brief case studies of radical practices, whilst the author’s own employer, the Tollcross Community Action Network (T.C.A.N.) is assessed in terms of anarchistic influence on practice when viewed in relation to state-imposed practice outcomes.  
The Scran Academy
Full text linkIntroduction
This report outlines the effects of COVID-19 on the youth work and young people of Scran Academy. This report provides an insight into how our provision shifted to ensure we maintained safe spaces and positive adult contact for young people during the lockdown period