Materializing Literacies in Communities: The Uses of Literacy Revisited 9780567469618, 9781474283458, 9781474232173, 9780567297440

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Materializing Literacies in Communities

Also available from Bloomsbury Education and Technology, Neil Selwyn Intercultural Contact, Language Learning and Migration, edited by Barbara Geraghty and Jean Conacher Language in Education, edited by Eita Elaine Silver and Soe Marlar Lwin Multilingualism, John Edwards Transforming Literacies and Language, edited by Caroline M. L. Ho, Kate T. Anderson and Alvin P. Leong

Materializing Literacies in Communities The Uses of Literacy Revisited Kate Pahl

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 Paperback edition first published 2016 © Kate Pahl 2014 Kate Pahl has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-0-5674-6961-8 PB: 978-1-4742-8345-8 ePDF: 978-0-5672-9744-0 ePub: 978-0-5675-9070-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pahl, Kate. Materializing literacies in communities: the uses of literacy revisited/Kate Pahl. pages cm ISBN 978-0-567-46961-8 (hardback) 1. Literacy. 2. Sociolinguistics. 3. Language and culture. 4. Written communication. 5. Language and education. I. Title. P40.5.L58P34 2014 306.44–dc23 2014025485

Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain

In memory of my father, Ray Pahl, sociologist 17 July 1935–3 June 2011

Contents Acknowledgements Copyright Acknowledgements 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Introduction Space Materiality Aesthetics Narrative Representation Futures Methodology

Notes References Index

viii x 1 29 51 81 103 131 155 179 193 194 205

Acknowledgements Thanks to Steve Pool, artist and Marcus Hurcombe, youth worker, in particular, who collaborated with me on most of the projects described in this book, but were generous enough to let me write the book on my own. I am grateful to Richard Steadman-Jones who helped develop the idea for this book. Thanks to Christl Kettle, Jackie Marsh and Bronwyn Williams who kindly read drafts of this book. Thanks to Steve Pool who took most of the photographs. I would like to thank everyone on the research teams I worked with, including Graham Crow, John Ball, Sarah Banks, Rebecca Birch, Tony Bowring, Deborah Bullivant, Steve Connelly, Martin Currie, Hugh Escott, Fay Hield, Abigail Hackett, Angie Hart, David Hyatt, William Gould, Helen Graham, Jane Hodson, Elizabeth Hoult, Bob Johnston, David Judge, Nancy Kerr, Christl Kettle, Andrew McMillan, Kimberley Marwood, Stuart Muirhead, Andrew Pollard, Irna Qureshi, Sam Rae, Zahir Rafiq, Johan Siebers, Laura Sillars, Ella Sprung, Richard Steadman-Jones, Kim Streets, Dave Vanderhoven, Natalie Walton and Paul Ward. Thank you also to Fay Hield, Nancy Kerr, Sam Sweeney and Rafiki Jazz for providing the soundtrack. Thanks to everyone on the teaching teams where some of these ideas were developed, especially to Julia Davies, Anita Franklin, Michele Moore, Jennifer Lavia, Lisa Procter and Dylan Yamada-Rice. Thanks to all the teachers, librarians, practitioners, youth workers, senior staff in Rotherham, Barnsley and Wakefield for their help, advice and support, including Jackie Abrams, Robin Bone, Alexander Barclay, Sally Bean, Alnaar Clayton, Miles Crompton, Elenore Fisher, Jenna Gladwin, Danuta Harrap, Libby Hicken, Jo Hinchcliffe, Khalida Luqman, Lynn Marr, Zanib Rasool, Jean Simmons, Dorothy Smith, Tahera Khanum, Joyce Thacker, Vicky Woodrow and Angela Wright. The following people helped shape the ideas in this book in various key ways: Geoff Bright, Vic Carrington, Barbara Comber, Catherine Compton-Lilly, Keri

Acknowledgements

ix

Facer, Ruth Finnegan, David Forrest, Erica Halverson, Mary Hamilton, Ray Hearne, Glynda Hull, Rachel Hurdley, Fred Inglis, Allison James, Kim Knott, Joanne Larson, Eric Lassiter, Bethan Marshall, Claudia Mitchell, Jon Nixon, Amanda Ravetz, Jennifer Rowsell, Brendan Stone, Brian Street, Shirin Teifouri and Lalitha Vasudevan. A big thanks to all the young people and families who shared their work with me, including Bonni Breeze, Dionne Towey, The Qaddar Family, the Khan family, Zanib Rasool, Ella, Chloe and Georgia, Robbie, Declan, Courtney and Aisha, The Manor Farm youth group and the Rawmarsh Youth Service, the young people of Mowbray Gardens library, and young people from Rawmarsh Secondary School, Thorogate Junior School, St Joseph’s Primary School, Rawmarsh, Gooseacre Primary School, Barnsley, High Greave Junior School, East Herringthorpe and the teaching teams who were so supportive in those schools. A profound thanks to the AHRC’s Connected Communities research programme for funding most of the work described in this book. This programme’s vision and radical agenda has made this work possible.

Copyright Acknowledgements Some of the chapters in this book draw on the following articles: Pahl, K. (2014), The Aesthetics of Everyday Literacies: home writing practices in a British Asian household. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 45 (Chapter 4). Burnett, C., Merchant, G., Pahl, K., and Rowsell, J. (2014), ‘The (im)materiality of literacy: the significance of subjectivity to new literacies research’. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 35(1): 90–103 (Chapters 3 and 7). Pahl, K. (2012), Time and Space as a Resource for Meaning-Making by Children and Young People in Home and Community Settings. Global Studies of Childhood 2(3): 201–16 (Chapter 7). Pahl, K. (2012), ‘A Reason to Write’ Exploring writing epistemologies in two contexts. Pedagogies: An International Journal 7(3): 209–28 (Chapter 3). Pahl, K. and Pool, S. (2011), ‘Living your life because it’s the only life you’ve got’: Participatory research as a site for discovery in a creative project in a primary school in Thurnscoe UK. Qualitative Research Journal 11(2): 17–37 (Chapters 4 and 7). Pahl, K. and Allan C. (2011), I don’t know what literacy is: Uncovering hidden literacies in a community library using ecological and participatory methodologies with children. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy 11(2): 190–213 (Chapter 2). Pahl, K with Pollard, A and Rafiq, Z. (2009), Changing Identities, Changing Spaces: The Ferham Families Exhibition in Rotherham. Moving Worlds 9(2): 80–103 (Chapter 3). Pahl, K. (2009), Interactions, intersections and improvisations: Studying the multimodal texts and classroom talk of six to seven year olds. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy 9(2): 188–210 (Chapter 6).

1

Introduction

As the area’s sirens wailed, two girls were seen sneaking out of the door. They went into the back garden and started playing, screaming, running, and laughing. Their matching red checkered dresses lifted up as they twirled around in the wind, and their hair was neatly arranged into two plaits, each ending with a red checkered ribbon at the ends, matching their dress. Their mum – who was young for a mum, and called Victoria – had plaited their hair just that morning, after their bath. But despite their beautiful dresses and hair, the girls weren’t rich. For ­starters, they didn’t have a jacket or any shoes on – they were playing out in just their white socks. And that bath had been the only (shared) bath they’d had that week – their mum couldn’t afford any more. They were lucky to have one every week, in their mum’s tiny tin bath, and sometimes they were cold. They shared everything because they were twins, identical but for one detail; one had a brown spot, in the shape of a love heart, on her cheek. They were called Doreen and Audrey. (Reunion by Chloe, Ella and Georgia) This story was orally composed by three 13-year-old girls in Rawmarsh in Rotherham and was set in Sheffield, United Kingdom. Rotherham is a town just outside the city of Sheffield, known for its steel mills and mining. It is where the studies in this book are set. Two young girls, twins, who were playing out run into an abandoned warehouse and get killed in a bombing raid. Their ghosts come back to haunt the warehouse, and they are found, 70 years later, by a young girl, Maria, who reunites them with their mother through the intervention of her Nanan (her grandmother). Reunion harks back to World War II when bombs fell on Sheffield, but also contains detail recognizable to

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the present day. The present-day heroine of the story, Maria, lives on benefits and is so poor she is looking for abandoned stuff in the warehouse when she meets the ghosts of the twins and helps them find their mother. The twins and their mother are reunited in the other world of death. In oral storytelling and writing, it is possible to script alternative spaces of resistance and to explore possible pasts as well as imagined futures. In Reunion Maria enabled the twins to be reunited with their mother through the help of her grandmother. Grandparents in the communities where they lived carried memories of the community – World War II and the mines that gave the community employment. Stories can become constructed in home and out-of-school contexts, orally and in the case of Reunion, jointly. They represent different worlds and realities from those visible in the mainstream media. They may be spaces on the side of the road (Stewart 1996) which are not ‘seen’ in contemporary culture. The forms and construction of the stories are also different from those found in schools. Reunion was told entirely as an oral story and was shaped over time in tellings and retellings. It echoed the oral nature of storying in that particular community (Finnegan 2007). In  school, stories are often nudged into writing. Here the story remained oral and contained within the community. It was illustrated by one of the authors, and copies were placed in the school library and given to family members. Literacy research into out-of-school contexts has referred to the concept of ‘literacy practices’. These are patterns or ways of doing literacy that are associated with different domains of life (Street 1993; Barton and Hamilton 1998). Heath’s Ways with Words (1983) encouraged ethnographic researchers to recognize literacy practices in homes and communities that were not following the patterns of mainstream middle-class urban life. These patterns were recorded through longitudinal ethnographic work in two communities – Trackton, an African American community and Roadville, a white workingclass community. Both communities held ways of doing literacy and language that were demonstrably different from those of the townspeople who Heath identified as middle class and urban, often teachers. Heath’s insight was that these ‘ways with words’ were also not taught or practiced within school cultures and this was a reason why the children of Trackton and Roadville sometimes struggled in school.

Introduction

3

Literacy as a social practice has been explored through the lens of anthropology, and in particular, using ethnography as a methodology (Street 1993a; Barton and Hamilton 1998). By contrast, ‘English’ and English literature have focused less on everyday writing and more on published written texts. A literary appreciation of the everyday can be found within the discipline of English, for example, within the work of Raymond Williams with his recognition that culture is ‘ordinary’ (1989 [1958]). Everyday meaning-making practices have been a subject of inquiry for cultural theorists, anthropologists, literary theorists and social linguists. In this book, a sociological perspective is brought together with a literary perspective to understand and value these everyday texts. This approach is one pioneered by Richard Hoggart and in particular, in his book The Uses of Literacy. He was writing in the 1950s about literacy, but describing, from his experience, a different kind of literacy, the world of mass reading and the cultural life of the working classes in Leeds, from his own personal perspective. The word ‘literacy’ in his book signified both cultural ‘stuff ’ and what people read, but also led to a wider discussion about home life, everyday life and the role of culture in people’s lives. The Uses of Literacy was written nearly 60 years ago. Hoggart wrote the book drawing on his own experience of growing up in Leeds in the 1930s. Hoggart’s book was concerned with culture and, in particular, the influences of popular culture on working-class life. It is an engaged inquiry. The book begins with the question, ‘Who are the Working Class’ and then provided, in the chapter, ‘Landscape with Figures’ a sense of the oral tradition, the heritage, of workingclass life, along with an affectionate portrait of cultural life in ‘The Rich Full Life’. Written as an elegy, it reads like a celebration. It can be read as a literary text upon which other lives and thoughts can be inscribed. The book speaks from a personal and felt sense of what it was like to grow up in a working-class household: The more we look at working-class life, the more we try to reach the core of working class attitudes, the more surely does it appear that the core is a sense of the personal, the concrete, the local: it is embodied in the idea of, first the family and second, the neighbourhood. (Hoggart 1957: 33)

‘Landscape with figures’, a chapter describing the patterns of working-class everyday life, was written with the eye of an ethnographer. However, it is also

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an autobiographical account of the experience of working-class life from the portraits of ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’ to a description of the strong oral traditions within families. Family sayings, everyday aphorisms and ways of knowing are described carefully and exactly. It is a portrait of a world that Hoggart thought was disappearing under the weight of popular culture. He called this the ‘candy floss world’ of the jukebox and tabloids. The book was written across disciplines, drawing on both the humanities and social sciences with a focus on cultural change and the relations between history and culture (Lee  2007:  16). The Uses of Literacy is an account of culture, lived and experienced, and it is partisan and nostalgic in that description. The power of the book lay, as the late Simon Hoggart, his son, reiterated, in his affectionate portrait of working-class life: His book The Uses Of Literacy was portrayed as a manifesto for the proletariat to take over the nation, whereas in fact it was a close, loving but critical examination of working class life and culture and the threats to its existence. (http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2013/oct/04/simon-hoggartweek-father-son)

Stuart Hall (2007) argued that Hoggart’s analysis brought a sociological imagi­ nation to an understanding of culture in action, and argued for this kind of writing, engaged, personal, empathetic, located: there was the methodological innovation evidenced in Hoggart’s adaptation of the literary-critical method of ‘close reading’ to the sociological task of interpreting the lived meanings of a culture. One says ‘sociological’, but clearly something more innovative than standard empirical sociological methods was required – nothing less than a kind of ‘social hermeneutics’ is implied in these interpretive procedures. (Hall 2007: 43)

Hoggart’s focus on the meanings of everyday culture and on a ‘close reading’ of that culture are for me a methodological touchstone. I read Hoggart not only as an anchoring perspective, but also as a jumping off point for looking at everyday literacy practices in Rotherham. It offered a form of engaged, materially situated scholarship that was both literary and sociologically informed. The book drew on the traditions of practical criticism but within lived experience. It provided a close attention to detail that became a kind of attentiveness, or a bearing witness to everyday life. If united with a concern for

Introduction

5

drawing on resources for community change and support, this approach can lever in possibilities for social action. Hoggart proposed a felt, embodied and sympathetic mode of understanding, located in the ordinary, everyday and mundane but reaching out to a much wider apprehension of what scholarship can and should be in the world. Inglis (2014) highlighted this as an aspect of Hoggart’s work in his biography of Hoggart, valuing, Hoggart’s ordinary vision of the evaluation of ordinary life, the cherishing and the sharp criticism of, in the master’s later title, ‘the way we live now’. (p. 129)

Inglis defended the discipline of cultural studies as set up and defined by Hoggart, but through the lens of The Uses of Literacy: Hoggart teaches by example how to shape and hold the defining practice of the human sciences and, when it is rightly done, its high and wide epiphany. In his great book, we see and feel how judicious objectivity and loving kindness become synonyms, and feel directly how keen moral sympathy dissolves into historical understanding. (p. 129)

This imaginative sensibility, which could be understood as a complex response to lived life and its potentialities and emergence, became a mode of enquiry for thinking about the uses of literacy in Rotherham. Hoggart’s contribution, as Inglis (2014) understood it, was in ‘making experience and text synonymous’ (p.  159). It was, however, grounded in a lived life, a way of being and knowing that was not entirely academic but drew from experience. This is the methodology I drew on to make sense of literacy in Rotherham. What are the contemporary uses of literacy in communities? Contemporary uses and practices in non-middle-class areas continue to be less visible within mainstream culture and schooling. Hoggart, writing about the urban working class in the 1950s, evoked a world of everyday sayings, of communal singing and popular literature. Here, I reference Hoggart, but work within a different paradigm. I do however echo his enterprise, which was to explore literacies, meanings and cultures within working-class northern communities. I base my explorations in Rotherham, a town outside Sheffield in South Yorkshire. I also draw on previous ethnographic work in Barnsley and the Dearne valley to situate my study within a landscape that carries traces and echoes of a past world of mining and industrialization. I link literacy to space and place, seeing

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Materializing Literacies in Communities

culture as experienced in the lived moment, and located within historically anchored lived experience. I understand literacy practices to be culturally and aesthetically shaped, grounded in the space within which they are constructed (Willis 2000). Culture is ordinary: that is where we must start. To grow up in that country was to see the shape of a culture, and its modes of change. (Williams 1958/89)

Raymond Williams, writing about the same time as Hoggart, located his own insights in his childhood and feelings and experience. He also understood the work that involved recognizing the ‘shape of a culture and its modes of change’. This work is not only ethnographic but also cultural and literary. While ethnographic research has looked at literacy practices in different communities (e.g. Barton and Hamilton 1998; Gregory and Williams 2000; Kenner 2004; Blackledge and Creese 2010), there has been less research that has focused on literacy practices in relation to aesthetic and literary theories. New Literacy Studies took from anthropology and sociology an interest in literacy as social and embedded in practice. This field did not engage so strongly with the arts and humanities. Literacy scholars tended to be found within faculties of education, social science and linguistics. In North America the fields of composition and rhetoric opened up literacy to a more aesthetic and literary analysis (e.g. Cieseilski 1998; Miller 2005). This approach suggested that an engagement with the world of everyday meaning making can be combined with more aesthetic understandings. Working in New York City, Hull and Nelson (2009) argued for the need to develop a theory informed by everyday aesthetics in order to understand youth media productions. They described how young people drew on the ‘stuff ’ of the everyday to articulate both an aesthetic judgement and a sense of other people’s experience, a process they described as ‘imaginative vigilance’ (p.  221). This process evoked the cosmopolitan space of the ‘other’ in the world, the experience of reaching out and imaginatively constructing a new space from which to compose. I see a material understanding of literacy contributing to a much broader lens with which to explore emergent meaning-making practices in communities. This lens not only acknowledges the everyday but also recognizes the

Introduction

7

literary and aesthetic. This way of seeing meaning making in communities makes sense of the lived complexity and power of these forms. Materiality accounts for the lived, the sensible, as well as for the sensory and embodied forms within the world. By bringing materiality within literacy, these forms become more visible. The work of Hoggart and Williams informs this perspective, as through cultural materialism an engaged scholarship can be found that unites a passion for the ordinary and the everyday with a literary appreciation of textual practice. I bring these perspectives to bear onto a number of different ethnographic projects that I conducted over a period of 9 years in a particular region. I draw on descriptions from these ethnographic studies to consider literacy, language and culture in working-class communities. The project not only revisits Hoggart’s commitment to his site and to the lived experience of the people he described, but also articulates the powerful meaning-making practices of young people in communities. Combining ethnographically informed understandings with a literary, almost hermeneutic sensibility relies on a process of going between sites and spaces, disciplines and traditions. The history of these areas is bound up with a wider story of capital and labour and the decline of heavy industry. Rotherham, originally a much smaller town surrounded by villages, expanded rapidly in response to the growth of the steel works that lay along the valley between Sheffield and Rotherham, called the Don valley. In the 1950s and 1960s jobs were plentiful and people came from a number of different countries, including the Kashmiri regions of Pakistan, to make their homes and jobs in Rotherham. Mining was found to be rich in the coalfields of the Dearne valley and pits sprang up in the outlining villages around Rotherham, one of them being Rawmarsh. In response to the need for labour, people came and settled in these areas and made their lives there. The miners’ strike of 1984–85 and the subsequent closure of the mines devastated these communities. Rotherham continues to struggle with the effects of de-industrialization and high unemployment. I began work in Rotherham in 2005. I was interested in thinking about cultural narratives and objects in homes and their translation into public settings such as museums, following from my original study of families, objects and stories (Pahl 2002). A small grant from the AHRC created the opportunity to develop a project with a group of families in Rotherham

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Materializing Literacies in Communities

reflecting the pride they had in their heritage and describing, through objects and stories, their family history. This project was ‘Ferham Families’. This exhibition was then developed into a website and became the impetus for a number of projects that celebrated family stories. At the same time, I continued to be interested in home literacy practices and began a series of studies that looked at home and community literacies, funded from both AHRC and Yorkshire Forward, a regional development agency. As I developed these studies, I also realized that as an ethnographer, I needed to work very much with communities to co-produce research and learnt to sit and write research proposals in community contexts with partners such as the youth service, schools and with artists. What became a small series of projects became one project, and that project, for this book, was researching the uses of literacy in Rotherham. Below I present a chart outlining the different studies described and drawn upon in this book (see Table 1.1). Many were funded through the AHRC’s Connected Communities programme, a unique programme of research that explicitly sought to link communities with arts and humanities disciplines, but with a focus on the co-production of knowledge across disciplines and with communities. In these projects, I built up links and relationships that were sustained over time, and enabled new concepts and ideas to emerge from the field as they became important. While many of the people involved in the projects remained the same, in other cases, new partnerships were created. The focus continued to be on the nature of young people’s heritage, culture and meaning making within community contexts, and most of the projects were in Rotherham. For the past 7 years, I have visited Rotherham at least once a week, from Sheffield, a large city 10 miles to the west of Rotherham. For me, the experience of driving to Rotherham is an experience of possibility and hope. I get in my car in Sheffield and drive alongside the steel works. I drive under the MI, a motorway that connects the North with the South and then turn into Rotherham. The centre of Rotherham is small, but the town is linked to a number of small villages, now grown larger through the mining industry. Public housing estates now occupy the spaces in between the villages, or industrial  sites.

Introduction

9

Table 1.1  Chart of the studies Year of study

Nature of study

Site

2005–06

An ethnographic study of one year 2 (children aged 6–7) classroom funded by Creative Partnerships based in a school in Barnsley with Heads Together, artists.

Barnsley, South Yorkshire

2006–07

The Ferham Families project. A study of British Asian family life, and in particular narratives of migration and artefacts of identity, funded by AHRC Diasporas Migration and Identities programme. With Zahir Rafiq, artist and Andrew Pollard, curator, and Rotherham cultural services and Clifton Park museum.

Ferham, central Rotherham

2008–09

Every object tells a story teaching pack and development of the website. With Sheffield family learning and Abigail Hackett, consultant.

Sheffield and Rotherham

2009–10

A Reason to Write. Study of the impact of a group of artists on a school in Thurnscoe, South Yorkshire funded by Cape UK. With Steve Pool, artist.

Thurnscoe, South Yorkshire

2009–11

Inspire Rotherham Evaluation. A study of literacy initiatives in one community. Funded by Yorkshire Forward. Directed by Deborah Bullivant. Included a specific project on the role of libraries in supporting literacy and the ‘Research Rebels’ project with Chloe Allan.

Rotherham, South Yorkshire

2010–11

A Space to Engage. Collaborative art project with The Hepworth Wakefield, the University of Sheffield and Wakefield Youth Service funded by the University of Sheffield. With Natalie Walton, Rebecca Birch, Victoria Boome and Abigail Hackett together with Rachel Howfield Massey and Tahera Khanum.

Wakefield, West Yorkshire

2011

Writing in the Home and in the Street. AHRC Connected Communities funded. Three artists (Steve Pool, Zahir Rafiq, Irna Qureshi) and three academics (William Gould, Kate Pahl, Richard Steadman-Jones) exploring everyday writing in Rotherham.

Rotherham, South Yorkshire

(Continued)

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Materializing Literacies in Communities

Table 1.1  (Continued) Year of study

Nature of study

Site

2011

Social Parks (SPARKS) AHRC Connected Communities funded. Cross-disciplinary with artists, town planners, contemporary scientists, ethnographers and youth service with Marcus Hurcombe, Youth worker and Steve Pool, artist.

Rawmarsh, South Yorkshire

2012

Language as Talisman. AHRC Connected Communities funded. Working with literary historians, sociolinguists and dialect specialists Jane Hodson, Hugh Escott, David Hyatt, Richard SteadmanJones together with Andrew McMillan, poet, Cassie Limb and Steve Pool, artists, and the youth service and Deborah Bullivant, Inspire Rotherham.

Rotherham, South Yorkshire

2012

Literacy Revisits. SSHRC Canada funded. Revisiting Ferham Families and thinking about literacy practices in homes.

Rotherham, South Yorkshire

2012–13

Making Meaning Differently. AHRC Connected Communities funded policy review for the Department of Communities and local government (DCLG). With the youth service in Rotherham together with Steve Connelly, Gordon Dabinett, Dave Vanderhoven, Stuart Muirhead, Steve Pool.

Rotherham, South Yorkshire (also Jordanthorpe, Batemoor and Low Edges and Troyeville, South Africa)

2013

Ways of Knowing AHRC Connected Communities funded project. With Helen Graham, Sarah Banks, Steve Pool, Michele Bastian, Tessa Holland, Katie Hill, Catherine Durose, Johan Siebers, Niamh Moore. Thinking about different ways of knowing across the arts and humanities. Working with visual artist, philosophers, sociologists, heritage specialists, activists and community workers.

Thinking space for the projects

2013

Communicating Wisdom: Fishing and Youth Work. AHRC Connected Communities funded. Working with a philosopher, Johan Siebers, literary historian Richard Steadman-Jones, Hugh Escott, cultural historian, poet Andrew McMillan, artist Steve Pool and the youth service together with an angling club.

Rotherham, South Yorkshire

Introduction

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Table 1.1  (Continued) Year of study

Nature of study

Site

2013

Transmitting Musical Heritage; AHRC Connected Communities funded. Working with Fay Hield, John Ball, David Judge, Music, together with music organizations Arts on the Run, Babel Songs and Soundpost.

Sheffield, South Yorkshire

2013

Portals to the Past. HLF All our Stories funded. Working with a school in Rawmarsh together with Ray Hearne, Steve Pool, Hugh Escott, Rebecca Hearne and Rebecca Fisher with Kimberley Marwood and the youth service together with the Archaeology department, University of Sheffield. Supported by an AHRC Connected Communities development grant.

Rawmarsh, South Yorkshire

2013

Community Arts Zone (CAZ) SSHRC Canada funded. Jennifer Rowsell (PI) working with Abigail Hackett, University of Sheffield and Steve Pool, artist.

Central Rotherham

2013–17

Imagine: Communities Connecting Research Consortium project with universities of Edinburgh, Durham and Brighton. Sheffield project focuses on the cultural making of civic engagement with The Hepworth Wakefield, Museums Sheffield, The Site Gallery, the youth service in Rotherham and community organizations with a link to the Isle of Sheppey.

Sheffield and Rotherham, South Yorkshire

Miles  Crompton, Head of Policy for Rotherham, provided me with the following description of Rotherham: Rotherham is one of four districts which together make up South Yorkshire, covering 109 square miles with a mixture of urban and rural areas. Rotherham developed as a major centre for coal mining and steel making, resulting in rapid population growth from 17,000 in 1801 to 120,000 in 1901. Rotherham has continued to grow, reaching a record 257,700 in 2011. Most people live either in the Rotherham urban area or in small towns such as Wath, Maltby and Dinnington, although some also live in suburban and rural villages. Rotherham has 49,400 children aged 0-15 (19.2%) and 28,300 young people aged 16-24 (11%). The population is ageing and the number of older people aged 60  was 61,800 (24%) in 2011. Black and Minority

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Materializing Literacies in Communities

Figure 1.1  M1 bisecting Rotherham and Sheffield. Photo by Steve Pool.

Ethnic (BME) groups make up 8.1% of the Borough population, with those of Pakistani or Kashmiri origin being the largest of these. Rotherham is ranked 53rd out of 326 districts in the Index of Multiple Deprivation 2010, so falls within the most deprived 20% of England. The deprivation themes which present the most serious challenges in Rotherham are Health, Education and Employment. (Email, January 2013)

In these statistics, Rotherham emerges as being towards the bottom of the indices of deprivation. However, in the areas where this study was carried out, the figures show that the areas were in the 5 per cent most deprived wards in the United Kingdom. Part of the task in this book is to explore the ‘cultural imaginary’ that is Rotherham. Simon Charlesworth was an ethnographer and sociologist who spent time in the boxing clubs of Rotherham in the 1990s. He painted a picture of a town in the grip of a recession, in the mid-1990s after the closure of the steel industry and the mines, where the only recreations included boxing and pit bull terrier fighting. Charlesworth vividly described the embodied and somatic-affective experience of living in Rotherham, in the shadow of the closures of the mines and the steel works, and articulated the way ‘all those everyday nuances of social experience that humans must live ignoring, [have] left a trace of sense, like the strains of rain upon a window’ (Charlesworth 2000: 53). While providing statistics for unemployment and deprivation, Charlesworth then moves on to a more personal account:

Introduction

13

But how is one to describe the sights of poverty and dispossession without stopping to the vernacular which carries the most immediate sense of the phenomenon of inequality and stigma: the wear in clothes, already out of date, the dirt in skin and cloth, faces prematurely aged, the look of ill health and the dispositions of abused bodies between hyper-sensitivity and an absolute hardness. (p. 48)

Charlesworth entered into the worlds of the people he is writing about and he focused on hardship. While Charlesworth attends to this somatic sensibility in a compassionate and far-reaching account of the lived experience of people  in Rotherham I felt he did not capture the powerful and positive energy of the young people of Rotherham, their ability to make meaning across a range of contexts, to articulate, record, write, document and make art. This book tries to create, from ethnographic experience, a vision for Rotherham that is more about hopeful futures and ways of knowing. This approach drew on a listening methodology that was both sociological and literary (Back 2007). The mainstream media has depicted Rotherham in often negative or derogatory ways. A documentary widely disseminated on the television and featuring the chef Jamie Oliver painted a picture of mothers feeding their children junk food through the gates of Rawmarsh Secondary School. More recently, the news has turned to the sexual predators within the community. Issues of racism and a concern for community cohesion continue to be a focus for the youth service and community cohesion teams. Baggini (2007), the philosopher, wrote a book on Rotherham. In this book, he evoked an ‘Everytown’ of white middle England, where people were living an ‘ordinary’ life, going on package holidays, whose social life revolved around the pub and the social clubs of Wickersley. His picture of Rotherham appeared restricted – he appeared not to engage with the British Asian community or communities such as East Herringthorpe, Dalton, Thrybergh, Rawmarsh or East Dene where the effects of de-industrialization were more pronounced. His main point of reference for a less wealthy community was nearby Maltby or Dinnington. Rotherham is rich in cultural life, linguistic resources and literary texts. Rawmarsh is the birthplace of author Arthur Eaglestone whose book From a Pitman’s Notebook (1925) vividly described, in dialect, the experience of coal mining. Ray Hearne, poet, brings alive the sounds and echoes of the

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Materializing Literacies in Communities

community through his poetry. Ray described how the chimneys of Parkgate were like voice boxes that spoke poetry. For our project on language in the community, called ‘Language as Talisman’, we listened to poems, precious words, stories, talismans and heard everyday sayings and dialogue within the communities we worked within. The folk heritage in Rotherham is strong, and the cultural space is vibrant with artists with a focus on diversity and inclusion. The central town library is a warm and welcoming place. Within schools, endless enthusiasm is our experience of project development. Projects such as ‘Language as Talisman’ and ‘Writing in the Home and in the Street’, and more recently ‘Fishing’, have become creative spaces that have engendered new and exciting ideas about language, culture, writing, the arts and humanities and co-production. Here, Rotherham is conceived and portrayed as a site of possibility, a place to imagine different communities and make them happen. It not only carries Bourdieu’s sadness, the ‘weight of the world’ (1999), from the abuses of contemporary capitalism that withdrew employment from the town when it closed the steel works and mines, but it also has a creative vein running through which continues to thrive and flourish. It is similar to other post-industrial landscapes, such as the Isle of Sheppey in Kent, or towns such as Rochdale and Burnley, in having a strong history of craft, making and material and industrial cultures. The British Asian communities within Rotherham, who migrated in the main from the Kashmiri regions in Pakistan to work in the town, contribute a

Figure 1.2  Chimneys at Parkgate. Photo by Steve Pool.

Introduction

15

c­ ultural heritage and vibrancy to the place. In our project ‘Every object tells a story’ (www.everyobjecttellsastory.org.uk), we recorded the special objects that family members had in their homes, and celebrated their stories of migration to ­Rotherham. The resulting exhibition celebrated the hard work the family members did to make a new life in this cold Northern town and their love of neighbour­ liness and of everyday cultural practices such as sewing, gardening, decorating, cooking and telling stories. This space is infused not only with ­material culture but also with the intangible cultures of stories carried from faraway places. Cultural practices such as fishing, gardening, textiles and decorating infuse stories. These stories are places of possibility and hope. Returning to Hoggart’s account of home practices in The Uses of Literacy, the experience – of seed buying and planting seeds, is part of that embedded and embodied family life. Below, I describe this through the eyes of one Rotherham family: Princess Saima and the Magic Seeds Once upon a time in a land far away there lived a princess called Saima. She was so pretty. Everybody loved her. One summers’ day she was picking flowers for her bigger sister Queen Lucy. ‘Oh Thank you Saima. They are pretty just like you. But remember not to pick any more as the villagers will get angry.’ ‘We hate you Saima’ The villagers said. Saima began crying. Lucy began crying. Everyone started crying. Minutes went by. ‘I know I’ll go to the magic shop to buy some seeds’ Saima said. (Excerpt from a story written by Lucy in 2012)

Here, the child, Saima, is comforted by an everyday practice, that of going to the shop to buy some seeds. The story was written by Lucy, 13, to tell to her younger sister Saima, then three, at a time of seed planting in the family. This hopeful future is evoked in a story told to a younger sister. Intergenerational practices such as sewing and decorating were seen as very important within the families who migrated to Rotherham in the 1960s. Here is Ravina talking about her intergenerational sewing practices in an interview I conducted for the ‘Ferham Families’ exhibition: Mum sewed herself. She used to make dresses for me and everything, she’d crochet, embroider and sew, learnt everything at school . . . she had a sewing machine. It is a Singer one and it was bought when my brother . . . when he was born dad bought mum the sewing machine as a present. We still have it somewhere. (Interview 2006)

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Materializing Literacies in Communities

These practices then infused stories and writing and became resources for resilience by younger family members who drew on family stories, poems and prayers for strength in the years to come. Aliya, who was originally involved in the Ferham Families project, recalled a prayer her grandmother shared with her to help her to sleep: I used to share a room with my grandmother before I moved here, and we used to bicker so she used to tell me stories to mellow me down a bit, she used to tell all sorts of stories, religious stories about my grandfather about relatives, and it would be like bedtime stories to get me asleep and she taught me a special prayer which I still read to this day three times so it protects the household, from any spirits or any things happening while  we  are sleeping, sleep peaceful, I was four years when I learned that, yeah so for the past thirteen years I have been reading that (laughs). (17 July 2012)

This world of the home, of everyday cultures, is like the domestic, embodied world that Hoggart also recalled and evoked in The Uses of Literacy. This space is full of sayings, practices, stories from the everyday, with oral cultures enmeshed with everyday practices and linked, through inscriptions, to writing. By seeing the space as constructed and a site of possibility, it is possible to imagine ­Rotherham as rich and alive with culture. It is this Rotherham I describe here, while recognizing that the period Rotherham was currently going through as I was writing this book was intensely challenging, as services were cut back and benefits withdrawn from families. But the traces and echoes within the landscape, sites of previous industrial activity and stories circulating within communities challenge contemporary conceptualizations of culture. Below I summarize the chapters of the book, as it moves through exploring space, materiality, narrative, aesthetics, representation and futures. These themes guide the book and are ways of seeing the material forms of everyday literacy in community contexts.

Space I have lived here 15 years. I have served my jail sentence. I shouldn’t. . . . I  don’t leave the house, you lose your parking space if you know what

Introduction

17

I mean, it’s affecting the girls, I am afraid for them to get off the bus and walk on their own they walk up this way, past the shop. (Audio transcript

22 November 2010) Here, a parent of three daughters, Anita, describes her fear for her daughters, growing up in a British Asian household in a predominately white area, where they were regularly taunted at in the street. Reay and Lucey (2000) explored the feelings of young people who lived on large council estates in North London. The young people said that while they did not want to live there, because of the drug taking, sense of violence and unsafe corridors and litter, they would not want to live anywhere else. This feeling was echoed within the stories I heard in Rotherham. A group of young people in Rawmarsh talked of the ‘smackheads’ who have invaded their estate, and the need for a safe space for them to meet that is warm and protected. Places are constructed. However, the people who inhabit these places often do not make the decisions about how it should be constructed. Place is also an imaginative space of culture, often one that is ignored or under-regarded. Stewart (1996) called this ‘The Space by the Side of the Road’, that is an imaginary space that is made through stories, told and retold within communities. Space is lived within and also is subject to change. Understanding the nature of ‘lived space’ from Lefebvre (1991) also means understanding the concept of

Figure 1.3  Terraced houses in Rotherham. Photo by Steve Pool.

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Materializing Literacies in Communities

space that the imagination seeks to change, that is space that could become something else. Making change in the places where you live might involve voting or contacting a local representative, which is not often accessible to young people under voting age. A sense of belonging can be invoked instead through arts representations including dance, music, storying and art. These spaces of representation can remain invisible from mainstream culture. Space can be walked through and recorded, visually, using video cameras, by children and young people or verbally in stories and inscriptions. Walking tours can become a heuristic for finding out about a place. The description and then construction of space within film to describe a neighbourhood became a way of marking and describing the space of culture for those who lived within it. In one of our projects we walked the park regularly to find special things within it, such as inscriptions, labyrinths and ancient sites. From this process came a new project, ‘Language as Talisman’. In Chapter 2, I make sense of walking methodologies through listening to the voices and recordings of children and young people who have written, or filmed areas we were exploring together. I consider space both as imaginary and as real. I describe projects where we tried to change lived space through meaningmaking practices and where literacy became the focus for this change.

Figure 1.4  Inscriptions on a tree in Rosehill Victoria Park, Rawmarsh. Photo by Kate Pahl.

Introduction

19

Materiality Lucy: Here, I have made a purse And I can put my money and cards in it And I have put lots of stickers And three D stickers as well on And I have put all my favourite things on this side And I have put some things I hate and some things I like on this side I have got little gems and stars And little animals and food on And little signs that say keep out top secret. (Film 4 August 2010)

In this excerpt Lucy was recording, using a Flip camera, the process of making a purse. Writing was embedded in this description. These messages were used to warn people that the purse was secret. The purse making is precisely described. Literacy practices include these kinds of writing that can be found in homes. Writing can be realized within embroidery, stitched or stuck on purses, pieces of material or textiles. Lines of writing can become momentarily visible in the lines of an Etch A Sketch or caught inscribed on a gardening label. Literacy and language practices include oral language to written texts. These practices include oral recitation and everyday sayings as well as a written story, to be referred to for oral storytelling. Writing can be invisibly placed within objects such as toys, hidden under mattresses in the form of secret notes or written using invisible markers. Tim Ingold talks of the lines and traces that can be followed, including script, and also included knitting, walking, ropes and knots in his discussion (2007). By understanding that script is just one form of mark making in a symbolic space, it is possible to see literacy practices differently. These practices are connected to a web of symbolic meanings and echoes that link generations together. These practices are artefactual (Pahl and Rowsell 2010). Literacy can be materially situated, and stories can be linked to objects in ways that are important. This insight then provided a framework for seeing everyday literacy. This requires a process of articulating and making visible these oral and written texts, and how they intersect with material culture and representational practices. I trace the small embodiments and material realizations of the uses of literacy today. I consider everyday culture and

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Materializing Literacies in Communities

literacy in relation to the material world. By seeing literacy as material I can recognize the ways in which literacy practices are linked to other practices. Not only sewing and weaving, and gardening, but also speaking and talking can be material practices linked to literacy. By extending the lens of what is important, a much wider meshwork of symbolic practices come to the fore, instantiated within the material world.

Aesthetics Lucy: And it is about this blond girl and she thinks she is really pretty and everything. Looking in the mirror and she takes the mick out of people who aren’t as pretty as her and then a new girl comes to a private school because she is rich and then she is prettier and glammed as well and she invites the girl over, and pretends to be a ghost and the girl goes and they go horse ­riding dye their hair brown and cut your hair short like a bob and I am going to kill you. (Excerpt from beginning of an audio recording of Lucy’s oral story ‘How to Drown a Blondie’ 31 January 2011)

I am here concerned with literacy practices in one community, Rotherham. In the 1990s David Barton and Mary Hamilton mapped, through ethnographic research, the literacy lives of the people of Lancaster within a small local area and their book, Local Literacies, described this project (Barton and Hamilton 1998). They traced the making of allotment minutes, followed the history of the poll tax (now council tax) protests and set their analysis within the theoretical framework of the idea of ‘literacy events’ (events where literacy has a part) and ‘literacy practices’ (patterned practices, set within the context of the everyday) where literacy features. These ideas came from the work of Brian Street (1993a). They also drew on the idea of ‘domains’ and ‘sites’ of literacy, that is the idea that there were different literacies associated with different domains of life, home, school and community, and these could be identified and placed in some kind of order. This idea came from the work of Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole who conducted a community study of literacy practices in Liberia that looked at the link between domains of literacy and the way literacy was used and practiced (1981).

Introduction

21

Within Local Literacies certain key characters were strongly profiled  – Shirley, with a history of campaigning, Cliff who loved war stories, and certain events, an allotment meeting, a shared story, became the foci of discussions and chapters. Nested within these stories were the texts that the participants read. These included Citrine, a union manual, war stories, Kay’s catalogue and the Ladybird books. One question that became of interest was the aesthetic qualities of these texts, and how they might resonate within literacy practices. How did an aesthetic understanding of literacy change an understanding of how these books were read and interpreted?1 Aesthetic categories inform everyday literacy practices. In Chapter 4, I trace how texts such as ‘How to Drown a Blondie’ incorporate the aesthetics of ‘blond’ from the book Twilight (Meyer 2008) and draw on particular tropes such as ‘eyes raging with fire and jealousy’ that alter the readers’ experience of them. Literacy is not a set of practices but a set of evoked aesthetic worlds that spill beyond their assigned categories into other meanings, which are encountered through a sensory and embodied engagement with the world (Eagleton 1990). Aesthetic categories are forged out of cultural encounters with the everyday (Willis 2000). Their meanings and echoes are crafted within oral and written texts as well as visual art. Tracing the embodiments of these categories within homes and communities requires a commitment to see them as significant. Aesthetic categories could include Manga drawings, glitter and particular tropes such as ‘How to Drown a Blondie’. Included in this discussion also lies expressive language, forms such as music and dance that create resonances and echoes within the embodied experience of the meaning maker. A focus on the aesthetic profiles the combining of a concept of ‘beauty’ with a concept of ‘moral purpose’ or, in Hull and Nelson’s words, ‘imaginative vigilance’ (2009: 221). Aesthetic theory has been associated with both aspects. The literary and visual shaping of texts could be associated with these twin intentions. Eagleton (1990) identified aesthetics as a field that spilled outside or beyond ideological categories. This allowed a more sensuous and embodied engagement with the everyday. For example, the use of glitter in a home to write the name created a very different, special feel to a name. This is the lens in which I understood aesthetics. An aesthetic understanding of texts enabled a picture of the meaning makers’ choices to be created. This recognized the

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Materializing Literacies in Communities

processes and practices involved in the shaping and construction of texts within the everyday. Everyday aesthetics as a field has been explored in the work of Saito (2007) who looked at the lived experience of aesthetics drawing on her fieldwork in Japan. In Chapter 4, I link the work of Saito on everyday aesthetics (2007) to the lived experiences of the meaning makers in my study as inscribed into literacy practices.

Narrative It was seventy years later. 2012. The warehouse owners had abandoned their building after the war, and nobody had been inside in all that time. All that was left in the warehouse were loads and loads of old cardboard boxes, all floppy in really big piles, going rotted at the edges from the rain getting in, and Maria. She’d gone inside to have a look because she’d never seen this place before, and she thought it might be a fun place to be in. She thought she’d maybe be able to climb on all the cardboard boxes. She thought she might maybe find something valuable in there as well; Maria’s family weren’t very rich. Her mum was on benefits, and she didn’t have a dad, or brothers or sisters. If she found something, she might be able to sell it on and make a bit of money. (From Reunion an oral story told in Rawmarsh)

The feeling of experiencing hardship and poverty is here described within the story, using the character of Maria. This experience is less commonly articulated: It is what is lived-with, what is unsaid, the great morass that life is a struggle to break from. (Charlesworth 2000: 195)

However, the narrators of Reunion make this experience visible and alive. Maria thought she might find something valuable in the warehouse. This was why she was exploring it, as something did happen and the twins were reunited with their mother through Maria’s Nanan. In Chapter 5, I  explore the ways in which different kinds of experience shape different kinds of stories. I see stories as in place and linked to timescales including family time, and time that is linked to memory. I consider how stories are shaped over time and constructed in relation to lived experience. I look at

Introduction

23

stories as a space of practice where different identities and articulations can be made. The space of stories includes memory and heritage and family history. It also includes shared collective memories and histories. In this chapter, I look at the braiding of stories across time and space to articulate these histories. I am also interested in the processes of story-making and how stories surface and circulate within communities. I wonder at how stories create ways of knowing and understanding the world. They are sites of possibility and hope. They also reflect underlying concerns within communities facing devastation due to economic constraints. They endure beyond particular individuals and can be drawn upon in different ways at different times. They are also ways of fighting back and articulating what cannot be said in other domains of practice. I consider how stories present opportunities to young people to create resistant possible worlds for hope and celebration.

Representation Representation is a process. It can be about the way-marking of identity and belonging that young people engage within as they articulate their sense of belonging in the world. Kress (1997) described how young people employed particular modes, such as gesture, drawing, sound, as ‘stuff ’ in order to create ensembles of meaning making to represent particular things. This ‘stuff ’ came from the everyday, including tissue paper, boxes, pieces of things found in the home (Pahl 2002). Some modes carried more affordances and led to further meaning making. Other modes carried constraints and less could be expressed. Modes are culturally shaped and arise within specific contexts (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2001). The connection people have with modes is felt, embodied and shaped over time (Rowsell 2013). This links to the sensory and the intangible feelings people have when engaging with a mode (Pink 2007). This assembling of modes within texts and representations seeps outside the realm of the political into an embodied space of meaning making that engages with the everyday. Politicians do not regard this kind of ‘representation’ as linked to the concept of political representation, in which people vote for a candidate. Instead, they see the two as separate. However,

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Materializing Literacies in Communities

bringing the two concepts of representation together brings interesting conceptual frameworks. If dance, music, film, oral storying, drawing and visual art were linked to the political what would be the implications of this for government? In Chapter 6, I explore how representational practices are shaped and evolve with a focus on creating change within communities. Part of the challenge is for politicians and local government to hear the ‘noise’ (Connelly et al. 2013). These everyday representational practices involve a sense of belonging. This then brings a concept of listening to the process of representation. Local cultures could then become the site where articulations were made in ways that were not traditionally linked to community governance. Rather than call a meeting people could choreograph a dance, make a film or enact a community concern through theatre. This echoes the work of relational artists who bring small but significant shifts to local practice within communities to create social change through representational practices (Kester 2004).

Futures Futures can be imagined and conceived from experience and can be made sense of in many different ways. They are not set but become through processes of engagement. By looking closely at the process of meaning making, I could engage with cultural framings that were seen as important within these texts. They were governed by other principles and ways of knowing. For example, while writing is seen as important in school, the written was seen as less important in some contexts. Meaning-making practices such as skate park jumps, sewing, dancing and telling stories could be regarded as ephemeral within mainstream schooling, but often were sites of creativity, co-creation and possibility. The spaces of culture were infused with local and situated meanings that derived from the lived experience of those within those spaces. The different worlds of home, school and community were articulated within young people’s meaning-making practices. Melding these worlds is a task for the future, and this book offers some way-markings towards that path. In Chapter 7, I consider how meaning-making practices can be seen as glimpses of future spaces of belonging. By listening carefully to these

Introduction

25

a­ lternative spaces, futures can be mapped differently. These processes of imagination and creativity become the springboard for other kinds of imagin­ ings and other kinds of futures. Future imagining is an active engagement in making sense of the world differently (Facer 2011). I also consider ways in which digital futures either do or do not provide possibilities for different ways of seeing the world. While digital worlds might not provide a ‘better’ imagined future they can provide sites of possibility for future encounters with texts. The concept of future engages with creativity and critical literacies as young people come to look differently at what is, in order to find out what could be.

Methodology In Chapter 8, I describe the way I conducted the studies. This provides an exploration of literacy methodologies. My work was initially informed by the ethnographic approach taken in Local Literacies (Barton and Hamilton 1998) which was to map literacy events and practices within a community, focusing on particular communities and with a particular interest in mind. I was interested in home and community literacy practices in out-of-school contexts, with a particular focus on British Asian communities and white working-class communities. Ethnography here was a process involving inter­ views, logging documents and taking a holistic approach to literacy, that is, one that connected texts with historical events, local events and discussions with participants. I also used Brian Street’s work with Shirley Heath (2008) to trace patterns across texts and to look at the links between participants and repeated practices within the home, including cultural practices and everyday events. When I researched in homes, I often found that the people I worked with came up with ways of researching that I had not thought of, and therefore, I changed how I worked with particular groups. Drawing on an insight from John Law (2004) that methods, and even more their practices, construct the reality they purport to investigate, I began to unravel ‘methods’ in the places I was working, relying instead on intuitively situated ways of thinking and exploring, together with participants. In doing this I used literary theory, from Eagleton (1990) to explore how texts were related to each other and explored, with participants,

26

Materializing Literacies in Communities

the aesthetic and multimodal choices they made when assembling texts (Hull and Nelson 2009). Alongside intuitive, literacy and arts-based methodologies, I also drew on an ecological methodological framework, from Neuman and Celano (2001). They were interested in exploring a literacy initiative in Philadelphia that was concerned with the nature of literacy resources with neighbourhoods. They tracked and logged literacy practices holistically, taking in deprivation statistics and the flows of information across an area. They interviewed key participants and mapped these interviews against observations and visual maps. A similar study carried out by Rowsell in New Jersey, and Nixon, Rainbird and Nichols in South Australia, mapped the literacy resources available to parents in malls and health care centres (Nichols et al. 2012). This provided a portrait of a community that was active, based on walking methodologies, interviews with people in literacy hubs and a systematic logging of literacy resources. Drawing on actor network theory, which traces the relationship between people and things through interviews and mapping, this approach gave a picture of the lived realities of everyday literacies placed in context. It is this approach I use in Chapter 2 where I explore ecological approaches to literacy. I engaged with relational aesthetics, a form of situated arts practice (Kester 2004). A relational arts practice methodology might include walking around a community, making a film that then creates change that affects practice, co-curating an exhibition or having a group event or making, collaboratively or individually, something that is personal, affecting or special in some way. These methodologies might be seen as very different from social science methodologies in that they engage with the aesthetics of everyday life, with what is beautiful as well as what is moral. They also position people differently. This creates a different set of possibilities for action. It brings people away from being research subjects to create a co-authoring space. This might involve doing things a bit differently. For example, Steve Pool and I co-authored an article with a group of young people (Pahl and Pool 2011). I made a film with young people as a result of a provocation by Steve Pool on writing in the street. The concept of the ‘provocation’, an intervention that changes, by its nature, how people think about something is central to this approach. ‘Language as Talisman’ as a concept was a provocation used in a particular project to

Introduction

27

think about language in community contexts, as special and unusual as well as powerful and protective. At the core of the methodological practice that was used in our projects was a focus on collaborative and participatory methodologies. As Uprichard (2008) has described, children are in the process of being and becoming, and their involvement in methodologies is also a way of acknowledging this state of becoming. Children are active agents in their own lives (James 2013). Their lived experience requires a need to echo this through situated methodologies that create a shared epistemological space of practice, a ‘holding form’ (Witkin 1974) where the research team and young people work jointly together. I used participatory methodologies in different ways. I often would work with children and young people to brainstorm a focus for a project and to decide on a research question or problem. I would then ask them for advice about methods including discussions of different methodologies. We would then select a mode of inquiry and set up a research team. Children and young people would then be involved in creating questions for interviews or observation schedules for observations. They collected data through using digital cameras, storing images on class laptops and the reviewing and reflecting on them after they were collected. I would then spend several days co-analysing data with young people, developing a shared lens, as Campbell and Lassiter describe, a form of ‘reciprocal analysis’ (Campbell and Lassiter 2010). I would involve children and young people in presenting the data, either in an exhibition, film or written text. This process would often lead to a new project, which would be devised and constructed on site with the help of youth workers or adults working on the project. The work was also collaborative, situated in a shared space of practice with youth worker Marcus Hurcombe, artist Steve Pool and the young people, academics and community workers in the projects. It became a meshwork (Ingold 2011) that created a lens that enabled further projects to happen. The space of ‘unknowing’ is evoked in this book (Vasudevan 2011). This constitutes a reflective and listening space of practice that can hold together disparate groups. Stories are connected to listening practices. By not knowing what we were hearing and by listening, we could create a shared epistemological space of practice that was respectful. This holding form was constructed within the projects – between the youth service, the young people,

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Materializing Literacies in Communities

schools, university researchers and artists. It enabled us to create a community of practice (Hart and Wolff 2006) in which we could explore ideas, and try out new things, sometimes in conversation, and discussion. In doing so, we drew on the work of Sarah Banks in thinking about spaces of dialogue where community partners, young people, artists and researchers could all meet and work respectfully but acknowledge through interaction their different spaces of practice within that space (Armstrong and Banks 2011). The nature of meaning making in oral, written, visual or gestural modes is collaborative. The realization of modes is something that happens over time and is shaped by culture. Ethnographic, situated research uncovers these processes of realization and ties this to culture. Here, I explore the cultural shaping of literacies, oral, written, drawn, traced within community contexts. I make sense of the worlds of literacy from a situated, ethnographic perspective. In doing so, I hope to bring a fresh perspective to literacy, to cultural studies and to future planning for literacy and community education. This book is an invitation to participate within literacy, with people, and to trace, with them, the ways in which it is used in community contexts.

2

Space

On a cold night in January, I pick up Marcus, the youth worker, and drive from Dalton, in Thrybergh, to the Manor Farm estate in Rawmarsh. We park on a bend. When we get out, we notice the community building is lit up and men are there working. We settle our stuff and then go out. Marcus says that youth work is about walking the estates, hunting for young people. Detached youth work even more is about looking within and outside the spaces of the estate and finding out, almost by sensory methodologies, what is going on. He told a story I had heard before, because I asked him to, about a bag of clothes hung up on a tree and how this alerted him to problems with one particular family. We move into the small central precinct of the estate and go into the shop. Just outside the shop are several of the young people Marcus wanted to find hanging out. They greet him and say they will be along soon. We go into the shop and browse the shelves, finding snacks, sweets, crisps, hot chocolate. On the way back I ask Marcus to demonstrate his practice. He stops two younger teenagers, both girls and asks them if they are OK and they chat, with Marcus checking that they are safe and asking them what they want to do when they grow up. One wanted to be a teacher, the other didn’t know. He nodded and wished them good night. We traversed the snowy path that led onto the main road and to the community centre. (Field notes 7 January 2013)

Encountering a place Artists, poets, writers, ethnographers, geographers and flaneurs have approached places from outside through walking (Macfarlane 2012; Ingold and Vergunst 2008; De Certeau 1984). Their thoughts and ideas express, poetically,

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Materializing Literacies in Communities

this ­engagement with places as found objects. Places regarded as ordinary by inhabitants are treasured and appreciated differently when seen by a stranger. Writers and poets marvel at the historical traces within the landscape and evoke echoes of other landscapes and texts as they walk. Artists visually enact this experience by tracing lines on the land, and ethnographers write field notes to re-create the density of this experience. Some of these writers and artists and poets walk in beautiful, deserted or wild places, where an encounter with the ‘other’ is mediated through mountains and rocks and sea and sky and the journey is an epic or focused account of beauty, loss, despair or encounter with difficulty (Armitage 2012). The margins are a generative space of enquiry and discovery. Others walk in the dust of the industrial wastelands of urban Britain, evoking past echoes and finding fascination in strange abandoned ruins and ‘edgelands’ of the city (Farley and Symmonds Roberts 2011). Tim Edensor (2005) explored abandoned spaces and sites in the spirit of engagement with an ‘other’ kind of space, wild, untamed and messy. Richard Long used the practice of walking to explore the potential of place and to make tracks and trails that reflected on that

Figure 2.1  Walking in Rotherham. Photo by Steve Pool.

Space

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process and on people’s engagement with the earth (http://www.richardlong. org/). De Certeau’s descriptions of walking in the city opened up a methodology of discovery that was also about the imaginary (1984). The sensory engagement with the world that walking brings has been explored by anthropologists such as Tim Ingold and Jo Vergunst (Ingold and Vergunst 2008). They describe the sensations of moving through a landscape both in relation to the body and to the embodied knowledge that comes with it. These moments of awareness are linked to the concept of encounter with a ‘new’ space. The practice of ‘itinerate ethnography’ (Hall 2009) involves discovery through and in field spaces, bringing movement to a process of learning. Learning then is no longer something that is static and fixed. Rather than bring a table to a field site, the anthropologist brings a pair of walking boots and goes on a walk.

Belonging in a place A further type of walking is an encounter with a known, a remembered space. The anthropologist’s eye, coming from outside, is replaced by the situated eye of the resident who grew up in a place. Lynsey Hanley described walking around the place where she grew up: I have walked round and round this place for thirty years without ever making a lasting friend or wearing my home like a happy skin. I think back to Aunty Lil’s self created community around her open-plan flat, and realize that its probably me who’s the problem, too insular, too much of a daydreamer, too much of an only child. Why else would you walk around a council estate for fun? But there is something in its endless pattern that compels me. The walkways seem like fractals, each leading from one to the other is a self-generating whirl, first numbing then dulling the mind with their similarity. You could easily go mad here, if you didn’t have enough to do, if there were few opportunities to leave. I know of those who have. (Hanley 2012: 42)

This account has a much more situated feel, in that the writer acknow­ ledges that it is impossible to wear her home like a ‘happy skin’ but is still compelled to walk on by the fractal walkways of the Birmingham estate she

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is rediscovering. Here is Nana, talking about her memories of her estate in Rotherham: Nana: I would like to be back when I was six years old, I used to stay out till about half nine you could do ‘owt without getting charged without the coppers coming round. (Transcription 14 January 2012)

The remembered space is the one where she was happy, as the imaginary of ‘playing out’ created a space for exploration and discovery. The tacit and experiential knowledge that comes from living in a space also brings a knowledge of the limits of the space. The reality for Nana, 17, now was this: Nana: There’s only the park and we get kicked off of there because you’ve got to be under 16 or you’ve got to have a child with you. (Transcription 7 January 2013)

The space these young people inhabit is one where they get kicked off or done for inhabiting the space they want to be in. No longer children, they cannot meet in the place they want to go to. They want to be together, in the place where they grew up. They want to be together to share stories, talk and chat. They want to fill the place with words, like Shannon the storymaker. One youth club evening, Shannon took up a place looking at the group, settled herself and began to talk: Shannon: A year and a half ago Girl: Storytime! . . . was when I met all these strange people who were a pain in the backside. It was very good for me. It was a very good summer Young lad: ‘storymaker storymaker’ Shannon: About us all being good friends. (Field notes and Transcription 7 January 2013)

Belonging in a space also involves telling stories about a place. Stories of friendship, narratives of belonging and identity, fill spaces and make them lived and alive. The experience of living in a place is very different from the experience of walking through a space. The storied space of practice makes places come alive through remembered spaces. This ‘meshwork’ (Ingold 2011) of stories criss-crossing and interweaving is how I see the workings of literacy in a place. Telling stories is about the process of discovering the

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space anew through memory. This can involve a nostalgic recall, such as Shannon’s memory of a magic summer when everyone was friends. Alter­ natively it could be about collective memories such as the sight of the bombs dropping on Sheffield from the hill in Rawmarsh. Memories can be explored through stories (Fentress and Wickham 1992; Connerton 1989). Living by and through these stories can create myths about a place that circulate and surface in the everyday and become the currency of belonging (Samuel and Thompson 1990).

Living in a place The walking methods described above are the methods of the outsider. What about the experience of being ‘in place’? Reay and Lucey (2000) argued for an understanding of place that listens more attentively to the narratives and ideas of the people who live there. They suggest that these spaces contain powerful feelings that circulate around particular places (p. 412). Reay and Lucey articulated in their research with children a closer attentiveness to lived experience. They did this through exploring the experience of children on inner city council estates. They described a psychic experience of restriction and fear in relation to the outside spaces they felt unable to play in. These circulated as stories of gangs and danger. Spaces are relational and can be transformed in interaction. A place can become a space of hope, or despair in a conversation. Places are also sites of possibility and meaning making. Hugh Mathews saw the street as a site of identity where young people can hang out and experience ‘other’ identities (2003). The amount of time spent on the street formed an important part of their friendship and networking. He argued that ‘streets are places of affordance for young people, in that they offer settings where the can be together, seemingly away from the adult gaze’ (p. 105). However, it can get cold. Here is a young person talking about their experience of being outside on a cold night in Rawmarsh: But now, all the benches have gone, there’s no shelter and it’s more or less all collapsed, all the smoking shelter’s collapsed, so there’s nowhere to go to keep us warm or all that. (7 January transcription, youth club, Rawmarsh)

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The feel of a place, its grit underfoot, the walkways, walls, jennels, passages, camps, dens and hiding places can be mapped through repeated encounters. Edensor (2005) described the childhood excitement in encountering the forbidden or abandoned spaces: this liberated body is free to engage in pursuits that inscribe urban space as playground. Actions carried out for their pure kinaesthetic pleasure are enabled through the lack of any regulation and by the affordances of ruined structure. Crawling through dense undergrowth, scrambling over walls and under fences, leaping over hurdles and across gaps, kicking debris of various qualities along the floor, throwing rubble at chosen targets and dancing and sprinting across stretches of flooring generate a rekindled awareness of the jouissance of gymnastic, expressive movement. (Edensor 2005: 89–90)

These sites offer a potential space that can be used by storytellers. Below is a description, which was constructed orally, over time, of entering an abandoned warehouse narrated by a group of three girls in Rawmarsh: Eventually they stumbled upon an abandoned warehouse with loads of cardboard boxes inside. Nobody was inside because the owners had locked up, but the girls still got in; the door was crusted and broken, and smelled like burnt wood and clothes, or maybe even smelly socks. It looked like there’d been some kind of fire, or explosion? They went inside. (Reunion 2012)

This description vividly re-enacts the experience of entering the warehouse, the smell, ‘burnt wood and clothes, even smelly socks’ vividly brings to life the complex mix of stuff within ruins, that Edensor also describes walking through the ruined factory entails the breathing in of a ‘rich compound’ containing, the residue of plants decayed . . . the crumbling infrastructure of stone, brick, wood, plaster and rust, and also, in small part, the shed skin and hair of the thousands of workers of the factory, crumbs from their snacks and threads from their clothing. (2005:122)

This potential space also might contain things to reuse and to barter. In times of hardship abandoned spaces might be places of possibility: It was seventy years later. 2012. The warehouse owners had abandoned their building after the war, and nobody had been inside in all that time. All that was left in the warehouse were loads and loads of old cardboard boxes, all

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floppy in really big piles, going rotted at the edges from the rain getting in, and Maria. She’d gone inside to have a look because she’d never seen this place before, and she thought it might be a fun place to be in. She thought she’d maybe be able to climb on all the cardboard boxes. She thought she might maybe find  something valuable in there as well; Maria’s family weren’t very rich. Her mum was on benefits, and she didn’t have a dad, or brothers or sisters. If  she found something, she might be able to sell it on and make a bit of money. (Reunion 2012)

Here the warehouse becomes somewhere ‘fun’ and also a place of possibility in a time when no one had any money. The space that imagination seeks to change is one that Lefebvre called ‘lived space’ (1991). Space is ideologically and politically structured. Decisions such as where teenagers can go after dark or to create new play spaces are often made by people who are not themselves inhabitants of those spaces. Finding a way in which spaces can change can be achieved within governance structures. It is sometimes suggested that civic change can be achieved within political structures. This requires an engagement with local representative structures. Place is also generative for stories. Here I link place to representations within narrative, writing, oral stories and film.

Imagining a space Memories of place can structure how contemporary experiences are re-imagined and felt. This process of re-imagining involves both hope and despair. Bright (2012) described working with young people in an ex-coal mining area. He articulated through this work a ‘practice of concrete utopia’. This involved a re-visioning and re-imagining of ‘old’ spaces such a coal mining areas using a lens that explored ‘historical geographies of collectively transmitted affect’ (p. 318). Bright re-created the collective psycho-social impact of de-industrialization which is atmospherically passed on and is embodied and felt. He explored how memory works in post-industrial areas such as the ex-coal fields of Nottingham and South Yorkshire. He articulated the concept of ‘haunting’ in these areas. Haunting calls up embodied feelings rooted in those social, political and labour histories that continue to circulate

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through something like ‘structures of feeling’ (Bright 2012: 318). Stories were circulating that hinted at the ghosts that lie within the landscapes. This led to a telling of stories that often were not believed or remained unheard. The ghosts of hope in the past come back to haunt the present. Believing in ghosts is a risky process, as the authors of Reunion describe here: Little girls’ laughter. She opened up a box lid; the kind that open in two ways and make a bang. She’d seen people that nobody else had seen before, because those people were ghosts. She never told anybody this because she didn’t want people to think she was weird and everything, or not believe her. But looking in the boxes, she thought she might maybe see some more ghosts – if she carried on looking. Then she’d have proof and people would have to believe her. (Reunion 2012)

Avery Gordon, working at the interface between sociology and literary theory, understood how ghosts signalled a haunting, a sense of otherness in a place (Gordon 1997). For a ghost, is a case of haunting, – that special instance of the merging of the visible and the invisible the dead and the living, the past and the present – into the making of worldly relations and into the making of our accounts of the world. (Gordon 1997: 24)

Making sense of ghost stories involves understanding how memory has been produced. It is also about listening to the traces in the landscape. For a year, I worked with a small group of girls in Rawmarsh telling stories. We started with ghosts and never really left this topic. Sometimes we heard real ghost stories. A young man told the story of a child who died. A youth worker went up the stairs to the attic of the young centre and as she came down, she heard footsteps behind her. A young girl was often heard crying there, who was a servant in the time when the house was a grand home with servants. The girl was unhappy and cried every night and still haunted the house. A lab assistant in the local school who had died walked the corridors and could be glimpsed with his keys. When ‘real’ ghost stories were told, the children and young people asked me turn off the digital recorder. Telling ‘real’ ghost stories was a potentially dangerous thing to do as it might upset the ghosts. Stewart (1996), describing the wrecked landscapes of the Appalachian mountain villages, also heard ghost stories. The participants in her study re-entered their childhood spaces and found the ghosts in them. After one

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Figure 2.2  The ghostly house in Victoria-Rosehill Park, Rawmarsh. Photo by Steve Pool.

of her participants told a story about a flat tyre, another storyteller began her story: Then Maddie took up the conjured space on the side of the road in a story of a childhood experience ‘at the same place.’ She had been walking to the school bus pickup and got about a mile from her house when she felt a ghostly presence and could not pass. The sky darkened, the breeze disappeared, all ordinary sound and movement stopped. She stood for a very long time in a state of remembrance. (Stewart 1996: 36)

Literacy practices such as oral storytelling fill and change spaces. Below I argue for a meshing of the field of the literacies of space with these cultural imaginaries, these ‘other’ spaces that evoked within these narratives. These are aesthetically shaped and constructed bearing the traces of past lives and unheard stories. This tacit, experiential knowledge of place shapes how communities are understood. While stories shape places, places are also shaped by stories. The literacies of place as a lens provides a way of understanding the complex interrelationship between place and story.

The literacies of place Marg’s students take possession of their neighbourhood by walking around in it, by exploring its nooks and secret places, by finding favorite places. (Comber et al. 2001: 461)

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The term ‘literacies of place’ describes the way in which places shape the literacy practices lying within them and those literacies are also meshed within the landscape (Comber 2010). Scollon and Scollon (2003) recorded the discursive density of places – particularly in urban environments – and the words on the streets, street signs, shop signs, graffiti, notices, posters, adverts, directions, inscriptions, tracings and marks that make up an urban landscape. These inscriptions may be traces of previous signs and notice, left up or abandoned or new, urgent messages for drivers or walkers. They may be in different languages or different fonts, etched, drawn or printed. Literacy researchers have peopled communities with words. In their book Local Literacies Barton and Hamilton (1998) explored the reading and everyday literacies of people in a particular community in Lancaster, United Kingdom. Likewise in City Literacies Gregory and Williams (2000) mapped the streets of urban Tower Hamlets both historically and in the present day. The literacies of place came alive in memories, re-created within these ethnographic studies. These studies took the potentialities of place and made them come alive with an ethnographic and situated account of the literacies circulating within those places. The field of spatial literacies has led to studies that looked at the affordances of literacy within particular places. Neuman and Celano (2001) in their study of libraries in four different areas of Philadelphia were able to show how particular neighbourhoods had much less access to literacy, in the form of libraries, bookstores and other hubs than more affluent neighbourhoods.

Figure 2.3  Footpath in Rotherham. Photo by Steve Pool.

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These literacies of place offered or did not offer particular experiences of literacy. They focused their study on a local library and watched interactions and comings and goings within that space. Certain people, friendly librarians in particular, mediated literacy. The librarians offered a safe and welcoming space for children and young people to relax and share books (2006). These literacy mediators, much like Brandt’s literacy sponsors (2001), were critical for young people’s better literacy futures. Their methodology for this study was ecological, that is, a mapping of space and place through walking tours, systematic collection of literacy artefacts, interviews with literacy mediators, participant observation in key literacy sites and a dense mapping of this data against neighbourhood information and statistics. Nichols et al. (2012) further explored the potential for this methodology in looking at the way in which literacy hubs in communities constructed literacy in particular ways. For example, they explored parents’ experience of literacy in doctor’s waiting rooms, malls, community centres as well as libraries and schools. They documented the literacy artefacts in those sites, the people who mediated literacy, the experience of walking to the mall or the doctor’s waiting room. The neighbourhood as a site for literacy and as a methodological place of exploration was the focus of these studies.

My own exploration of place and space: A researcher journey In the past few years I have been working in particular communities to explore the literacies of place. This work has involved regular commitments to a site – a small community library, a school, a park, a pond. It has also involved regular commitments to a group of people in a site – children, young people, writers, artists, musicians, anglers, youth workers, community workers, teachers or librarians. Drawing on these collaborations, we explored literacy in the area together. By spending time in a site, meanings and constructions of the world became apparent over time. One of the complexities of being a university researcher is that understandings of time in an institution are different from understandings of time in community projects. I would miss a meeting in the university because what I regarded as the important things,

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for example, a trip fishing with a young person, a half-term ice skating treat, a coffee with a volunteer in the library, a visit to a bereaved person who was in one of my projects, came first. An understanding of why they came first was hard to articulate, except through the logic of place and commitment to a site. By making university time less important than community time, I was also implicitly questioning whose knowledge was important and why one place (the university) did not contain all of the knowledge. I had to be in the community to learn. The AHRC Connected Communities funding also supported this and made this possible. The studies also shared a focus on participatory and collaborative methodologies. I learnt to create a space for children to conduct their own explorations and investigations. They might construct the research and decide on its focus. I would not start with a research question, but might start with an idea from a young person. ‘Language as Talisman’ came about because of a story a young person told about a medal around his neck. We would then record what happened. Sometimes this would be done using hand-held video ­cameras, or interviews or group discussions. The emphasis was on the process of discovery rather than the product. The experience of doing the research was the research. This process, of mapping, walking and noticing, came from the children’s experience. They were explorers of their own area. Children’s lives are in place and their ways of noticing became the focus of the studies. This work has also involved a conceptualization of children and young people as active agents in their own lives, as both ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ (Uprichard 2008). Uprichard recognized the moving status of young people. The, ‘being’ child can be seen as a ‘social actor . . . who is actively constructing his or her own childhood . . . the becoming child is seen as an adult in the making. (Uprichard 2008: 304)

Uprichard’s point is while the ‘being’ child stresses the present, and the ‘becoming’ child accentuates the future, both are in interaction at any one moment. The ‘past’ child also has resonance with the ‘being’ child. When researching literacies in place children would articulate how the things they found related to their past, present and future selves. These ‘noticings’

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interacted with lives lived and terrains mapped. The process of walking and noticing is a visual one. It can also involve literacy, as young people read the world around them. They noticed graffiti, and signage, linked the street signs to their everyday walks to school. Reading the world is a visual process. Walking the streets conjures up imaginative visions within the noticings of the everyday. The research projects I write about in this book were created in response to a place. ‘Research Rebels’ was a project in which a group of children and young people met regularly in a community library to research what literacy meant to them and to explore the literacies of the area (Pahl and Allan 2011). This was followed by ‘Writing in the Home and in the Street’ in which a class of 10–11-year-old children explored writing in the street through a series of walks around their local area (Pahl and Rowsell 2012). I explored the literacies of the home and the street with a group of girls, which was then exhibited in a chest of drawers in an art gallery (Pahl 2012b). In these projects the children represented their situated experience in interaction and through the medium of film, audio and images. The projects were ethnographic in that they paid attention to the specificities of place and space. They were also literary explorations and artistic encounters (Pahl et al. 2013). When I conducted these studies I asked about the area, a community in the East of Rotherham. The council policy officer told me that on the official statistics, collected in 2010, which are called the Indices of Multiple Deprivation (IMD), out of 32,482 Super Output Areas (areas of deprivation) this area was number 230 from bottom, thus making it one of the top 5 per cent most deprived wards in the country. The education statistics revealed that the area was 72 from bottom in terms of the qualifications of adults. People’s income was 172 from bottom and unemployment was high. We pondered this for a while and then I wondered what the good things were. The good things were that the area had a relatively high score in terms of the quality of life. Roses grew around houses and many people had small gardens where they grew tomatoes. People fished and children played out. Crime was low. Statistics create narratives in themselves that can be challenged through the creation of a different kind of counting. What if we counted roses, tomatoes, grasslands, fish, stories and moments of play? Below I describe some of my own encounters with space and place, as a researcher.

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The swimming pool library Mowbray Gardens library was once a community swimming pool. Where crime fiction, local interest and healthy eating picks are now displayed, underwater worlds were explored. It became a brand new purpose-built library, with a children’s section, computers, hot chocolate machine and meeting room for community groups. It was a lively place after school. When I walked in one early September afternoon, some young people were playing on a Wii, parents were chatting and a community group was meeting by the hot chocolate machine. The librarian was helping some children get onto the computer. The community development worker and I met. She talked about the area, and how she had set up a young people’s advisory board, and supported community groups to engage with the library. The library could be what people wanted it to be, she said. A group of children regularly came to the library after school, and after some discussion with them, they agreed they would do a project with us on how they saw the library and how people used it. We also wanted to explore the literacies of the area. They called the group ‘Research Rebels’. We began an ecological survey of the library and its area, collecting leaflets, logging literacy hubs and noticing what resources the area had. We visited the school opposite and photographed the signs on the row of shops down the road. We began by taking photographs of the library. I was intrigued that many of these had a

Figure 2.4  The Library. Photo by Steve Pool.

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Figure 2.5  Underwater image. Photo taken by one of the children on my camera.

blurry, underwater quality. One girl, on roller skates, skated across the library and the images the children took caught her movement. Other images were of the computers and particular places where the children liked to be. They were images of comfort and safety. The spaces of the library were re-purposed for movement, play, comfort and noise. While this caused a difficulty of perception, it also made the library a different kind of space from the quiet hushed place that many libraries are supposed to be. One rainy afternoon, about fifteen children, the community development worker and a local councillor, met to walk the streets of the area. The area consisted of a large estate of council houses, on a hill. The library lay at the bottom of the hill across a busy road. The school lay across the school and then the houses climbed to the top, where there was cemetery. The children talked to the local councillor about their area: Local Councilor: Are you going to the park? What do you like about the park? Child: The park’s really good Councilor: We’re not near the park? Child: Its fun also my friend lives near it and I can call to my friend and she will probably say yes, but I don’t like playing out ‘cos its raining . . . if it was summer it would be cool Councilor: What’s interesting (about the library)? Child: the books, and the computers – do you like playing on the computers? (Interaction, recorded March 2010)

At the time, we were crossing a space of undeveloped wasteland. The child, however, saw it as a place of play, and she suggested it be turned into a park.

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Her answer to the councillor is in relation to an imagined space where she calls to her friend and it is summer. Being outside is also about playing with friends and about friendship. Within the library, playing on the computers is what she likes to do. What is distinctive about this interchange is the enjoyment of the spaces in the area that the young girl had and the expansion of those spaces into stories, and interaction.

All my life I have lived there A year later, we went on another walk. This time, the children were in the year six (age 10–11) class of the local school, opposite the library. Together, we had brainstormed writing in the home, in the street and in school. Our purpose was to record the writing in the community, using flip cameras and still images. In the children’s playground, we came across obscene graffiti on the slide: Kate: I want to know what you think of the graffiti on this slide? Luke: It’s all rude! We should spray it. It’s not fair on young children

The children recorded the graffiti and made a film about the impact of the words on their younger siblings. The children imagined how their younger brothers and sisters would feel if they saw these words. They were able to imagine the world through the lens of a stroller or buggy, and saw the words ‘from the feet up’ (Mackey 2010). This understanding was enmeshed with words of action and change – Luke thought

Figure 2.6  Slide Graffiti. Photo taken by one of the children on my camera.

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we should spray the graffiti while Marianne’s granddad had to get the graffiti off her wall. Kate: When you see a nasty word do you think it is good or bad? Marianne: Bad. We have got it on our gates someone wrote it! When I first moved into my house there was graffiti all over the wall and they had had a paintball fight. You can still see it, it were black and it were white and it was hard to get off. Me granddad had to do that. (Discussion in the street recorded in June 2011)

In doing so, the children also decided to make changes. Concerned about the obscene graffiti they found in the playground, they reported it to the local community policy officer. They also presented a film about what they found to the school improvement service. This film included the image presented above, as it was thought to be important to present, honestly, what the children saw. On their walk, the children noticed changes. A local mini market had been closed down because of a rats’ infestation, and a young boy commented, ‘All my life I lived here but I never know that was there’. The way a place is ‘known’ is a process of discovery. My contention is that lives are led not inside places but through, around, to and from them, from and to places elsewhere. (Ingold 2011: 148)

Human existence, argues Ingold (2011), is not place bound but emergent. He used the expression place-binding, consisting of trails and at moments of intersection, intertwining of a knot. The walking is the place; there is no distinction between ‘place’ and ‘space’ but a trail that unfolds throughout the day.

Language as Talisman People know where they are from by the language they speak. When I meet someone whose language contains traces of the area I grew up in, a particular part of East Kent, I recognize the way the vowels are used and carried, and unconsciously feel more ‘at home’ with the person. Language signals place through dialect in a way that is not celebrated within schooling but more celebrated within poetry, literature and oral storytelling. Chris Montgomery is able to map dialects within Sheffield, using a combination of socio linguistics and geographers’ mapping tools. He calls his field ‘perceptual dialectology’

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(Montgomery and Beal 2011). Language is place based and is about the dialects we speak. These forms of recognition are accounted for within interaction. The concept of ‘accommodation theory’ has been used to describe how an awareness of accent signals a sense of belonging to particular groups or community (Coupland and Giles 1988). Language as Talisman came from the idea that words provide not only protection but also a sense of community. Stories we carry with us protect us from the world. We explored what a talisman was and how it was constituted. We mapped these languages and materialized them in the park where we collected the data. The team recognized everyday language through creating soundscapes, poems and stories that were celebrated within the project. Our work explored the links between language, dialect and place. We worked within schools to explore together its force and power. We saw language as a space of possibility for community to be celebrated (Pahl et al. 2013). Place creates language. Rawmarsh, a place, could become language, and that language, the specific dialect of the place, was talismanic. We could see not only how language could be physically materialized, turned into special words through sand, or displayed on a piece of bunting, but also how language itself had material qualities. In this way, the link between the material world and language could be traced across, entwined as they were with place and the history of growing up in a place (Pahl and Escott 2014). Deborah Bullivant, a

Figure 2.7  Guts for Garters. Photo taken by Steve Pool.

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member of the project team, made bunting out of everyday sayings and these were hung in the park as part of a tea party celebration. Everyday sayings, recorded by Hoggart in 1957 and embedded within families as something ‘passed down’ from parent to child, also encode place. Within the areas we worked in, where the mines had been, children told of coming in dirty from playing and being told, ‘you look like you’ve been down t’pit’. The memories of coal mining surfaced in the everyday sayings that continued to circulate long after the mines were closed. Within the Language as Talisman project, however, were concerns about the valuing of everyday language and dialect within the schools. External visitors who spoke London or Southern English judged the way the children spoke. Increasing divisions between the north of England and the south of England in terms of economic prosperity were also being reflected in the status of the dialect and way of life of the North. What was concerning about this was the way in which speakers of these dialects were positioned. Ofsted, the body that judges teaching quality in the United Kingdom, told the teachers in one of the schools where we worked that they did not model standard English properly. We said that the language of place was as ‘authentic’ as Southern English, but less powerful. The dynamics of place are that some people’s places signal different things to others. Accent is one way of signalling that difference. However, the power of particular places (Southern England) are also encoded in language and represented through language. Language is politically and socially positioned, and its connections to place are part of how people view and listen to that language. Thinking through space can offer different ways of understanding literacy practices and meaning making in communities. Edward Soja (2010) argued for a ‘spatial turn’ that informs the way social processes are understood. Soja’s argument is that, the spatiality of (in)justice . . . affects society and social life just as much as social processes shape the spatiality or specific geography of (in)justice. (Soja 2010: 5)

The way in which people’s lives are spatially constructed shapes much more than just their living space. Space shapes language, interaction, feelings, agency, identities and representational practices. By putting space first, ‘as the primary

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discursive and explanatory focus’ (2010: 17) Soja argued, different kinds of insights could be discovered about exclusionary practices. In the Language as Talisman project, the experience of walking around a place, the practice of mapping an area and reflecting on a life lived as well as insights from the storytellers and poets of the area where we were working, built up a rich sense of a place that was materialized in language, in stories, in scrapbooks, art work, film and poetry. Imagining new spaces is part of this process. Hamdi (2004) advocated for the importance of the imagined space. Telling stories of places created a conceptualization of community: the place people talked of had both physical and imagined boundaries. These imagined places seemed to liberate the mind, they helped build a collective meaning because they could be what the imagination conspires them to be rather than what planners say they ought to be. (Hamdi 2004: 59)

Stories are spaces of possibility where change happen. Representation is a space that imagination seeks to change, and people’s complex lives unfurl in stories: Complex personhood means that the stories people tell about themselves, about their troubles, about their social worlds, and about their society’s problems are entangled and weave between what is immediately available as a story and what their imaginations are reaching toward. (Gordon 1997: 4)

These small embodiments, everyday languages, dialects and scraps, constitute an important but unrecognized mass of stuff that needs to be heard within the crowded media worlds of national representational practices. The literacies of the local, the felt and the embodied world of the everyday, celebrated by Hoggart (1957), are often marginalized within media platforms that contain currency from different spaces. Ecologies of representational practice are laden with power. Those distant from power are told they cannot speak properly, or are denied legitimacy. The processes by which these things happen are then naturalized. This happens through denying status to local dialect, to not listening to ways of knowing that are sedimented within place, and through a lack of recognition of what those places bring as sources of knowledge and hope. By listening to these stories, things can change.

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Conclusion In this chapter, I have brought words together with geographies and placed arts practices such as walking, mapping, drawing and storying alongside everyday practice to think about how people’s experience of place is constructed within the everyday. Place is also threaded with literacy and language practices. This then shifts an understanding of how languages and literacies are understood, by re-positioning language in place and space. Dialect becomes the voice of place. It is then possible to articulate different things to say that speak back to those who try to develop a methodology for oppression through language. This re-positioning of language and literacy practices is in relation to a spatial analysis. Words, inscriptions, representational forms are all produced in space. These discourses actively produce space (Leander and Sheehy 2004). The discursive construction of place and space can be a space of improvisation, of play and of creativity. Representational forms such as dance, theatre, music, film and storying can construct spaces in different ways and these representational practices can carry currency beyond a particular place. These sites of improvisation can open up spaces for change. Through linguistic practices, imagination and hope can emerge.

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Materiality

When I enter a home, in this case, a family of British Asian heritage, in an industrial Northern town in the UK, these are the forms of writing I note. I drive my car up a narrow street of Victorian terraced houses. I get out of my car, and walk up to the front porch. Over the door to the house, itself a late-Victorian detached house, built about 1901, is the name of the house inscribed in plaster on the outside. This was written in the early years of the late twentieth century and is fixed, being inscribed in a stone-like substance. As I enter, there are framed, small, inscriptions over the doors, which are written in Arabic, as they relate to sections of the Quran and signify holy words. These inscriptions are also fixed. They were put up when they first came to the house, in December 2010. The family are British Asian ­Muslims. They therefore see the inscriptions as important to provide holy texts for their home. I walk into the back of the house, where there is a tiled fireplace, and a computer and two sofas to sit on. The family have three children; one aged two years of age, one of eight and one of twelve, all girls. When I walk in, the things on the floor and on the seating area vary. Sometimes there are toys and small books. There are to be found fragments of script within the toys and artifacts strewn about the floor of the back living room. For example a board book for the youngest was inscribed with Arabic letters. Most recently, I encountered an, ‘Etch-a-Sketch’ in which the youngest writes on. These objects are relatively fluid, in that they move about, and are sometimes visible, and sometimes are tidied away when the youngest is asleep and the mother does the housework. A computer is placed in the corner, on which the older girls do their homework and write stories and emails to me, and the mother sends orders for garden products.

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This computer is fixed. I can observe some fixed and settled forms of writing (writing on the house, inscription on the framed images, the computer with the sign of the maker) and some less fixed forms of writing including those that are solid but put away (toy lap top, books, drawing materials) and some that are never p­ ermanent (the lines made by the child in her Etch A Sketch). (Field notes May 2011) In this field note extract, describing a family home, script is found inscribed on the outside wall of the house. Within the house, script presented as art, framed, as poetic inscriptions on the walls. It is also present within the toys and momentarily framed by the Etch A Sketch on the floor. It not only drifts across the space of play on the floor of the household but also has special status as a Quranic inscription on the wall. Some of the letters crafted into toys are almost invisible. There are also other practices, such as tiling (the tiles were placed by one of the daughters and her father onto the fireplace) that, like writing, require precision. These tiles created shapes and meaning but are different in form and function. The home is a place where there are materially situated practices. These are linked to literacy. For example, I was able to explore how tiling, gardening and sewing became linked with writing and oral storytelling in unexpected and complex ways in a home setting. The ephemeral nature of home literacies can disturb a settled view of literacy as linked to a set of skills and competencies. In home settings, the concept of ‘writing’ dissolves into many things. It becomes material. Writing always requires a material infrastructure (Blommaert 2013) but in the home it becomes part of the ‘humility of things’ (Miller 1987: 85–108). Ceasing to be a focus for developmental trajectories (as it is within schooling) instead, writing becomes part of a different order of significance, a process of inscription that is enshrined in the everyday. Literacy as a materialized object requires a different kind of understanding. The materialized object becomes the provenance of archaeologists who look at script as traces of past cultures, or of anthropologists who see script and traces of talk as bearing cultural significance. These insights open up a space for literacy within the field of cultural studies – a linked to the everyday and to the ‘ordinary’ (Williams 1958/89). In this way literacy can be differently studied and understood.

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The world of school materializes a particular set of literacy artefacts, such as the register, the standardized test, the spelling book and the reading scheme. Literacy is located within the performance of particular tasks. The accomplishment of these tasks produces seemingly arbitrary scores. Literacy is brought to life momentarily in particular instances of practice. For example in the United Kingdom, writing can become materialized through ‘wow’ words, that is, particular words written on a white board and recited by a class or written in a book. Teachers draw on repertories of established practice, choreographing children to sit on a mat while listening to an oral story, or creating a daily time for spelling practice, accompanied by relevant books and bells. Practices such as oral storytelling are interrupted and stabilized in their flow by time, the availability of material artefacts and the need to account for writing and reading in standardized tests. Language is rendered artefactual through the materializations of the grammar book and the dictionary. Blommaert described the practice of encoding language into grammar books as a process of creating artefactual ideologies. This process moved the material qualities of language from the oral to something a bit distant, a material object or book that he called the semiotic artefact (Blommaert 2008). This sequence of materialization creates hierarchies. These quickly become naturalized and accepted as how language and literacy should be, and children are tested accordingly in relation to those particular forms of literacy. When literacy is in the everyday it looks different. Homes are places of stories. People tell stories about objects in the home, and these stories become materially inscribed and reanimated through telling and retelling. Hurdley (2006) found that people told different stories at different times about the same objects on their mantelpieces. These objects could be themselves accidental and inconsequential, placed for no clear reason within a home and displayed on a mantelpiece. The unplanned nature of home literacies unsettles the order and construction of curricula spaces. Time and space structure home literacies in ways that are intergenerational. Literacy practices are linked to the flow of activities in the home. These activities remain culturally significant and are embedded within a host of wider activity that Bourdieu has described as the ‘habitus’. These are the structuring structures within which life is lived (Bourdieu 1977, 1990). Writing, narrative and oral storytelling are the living out of the habitus. They also constitute the transformation of the habitus through

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the process of inscription and telling (Pahl 2008). This iterative, moving ‘flow’ of meaning making defies attempts to legitimize it within schooling. Instead, in the home, it might be rearranged, as people tidy up their messy drawings, or lose a story under a mattress. While some material used to make meaning is culturally salient (pens, paper, lap top, tablet), other forms are more marginal (tissue paper, collage, textiles, thread) but no less interesting. In the home, lived life seeps away from the panoptic gaze of education into a thread of practice, linked through previous generations to culturally significant ways of knowing and understanding the world. The apprehending of experience and inscribing of that experience into textual forms is located within the rhythms of family life. A story might be written for a child to hear at bedtime, or given to a cousin as reading for leisure. Writing, literary texts and stories fulfil different functions within home settings. Culture unfolds in the home space, as a ‘verb’ (Street 1993b). This making of culture is realized in material things, in an unceasing movement of things being folded, shaped, inscribed upon, lifted up, tidied away, read, watched, tapped, stroked, puzzled over, cut up, chopped, rearranged and displayed. These practices are not assessed but are part of a process of doing family life and unfold through the practice of home making.

Literacy and textiles Literacy in a home becomes linked to different kinds of practices. Tim Ingold’s book Lines invited an exploration of the links between writing and textiles. Practices such as weaving, stitching, sewing and knitting involve the gathering of lines into a surface (Ingold 2007). Writing also has a quality of bringing together individual lines into something different, a ‘meshwork’ in Ingold’s words (2007: 80). Homes and families inherit shaped patterns of meaning making. Everyday practices such as knitting, sewing and weaving, as well as tiling and arranging of stuff, could be linked to the practice of writing. Writing could be found inscribed within material forms and it also echoed material forms in significant ways. The family home described at the beginning of the chapter included three girls, Lucy, Tanya and Saima. Lucy (then eleven) spent one summer recording her writing practices for me on a ‘Flip’ camera. I had asked Lucy to record her

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Figure 3.1  Writing on a brick in Rotherham. Photo taken by Steve Pool.

meaning-making practices. She produced a video of her purse (described in Chapter 1) and an image of embroidery. She had been doing a craft class over the summer, and these practices came out of the classes. Lucy’s aunt had organized these classes and was passionate about craft. Her aunt wrote to me describing how she valued the everyday practices of textile making in her family: The textile side of our heritage comes from the women in the family. We have older relatives that do appliqué, crochet, embroidery, sewing and knitting (from the girl’s mother’s side their grandmothers sister and cousin and from their father side his two cousins who live close by). My younger sister loves craft type of activities and buys the girls a lot of resources to do sewing and fabric work especially on birthdays, Christmas and Eid. (Written text from the girls’ aunt, Email, August 2010)

Lucy does have textual messages inscribed within her purse. She put stickers on the purse and signs that say ‘keep out, top secret’. These sticker signs are forms of writing that were material. The signs also signified the importance of privacy for Lucy. Lucy also embroidered, and her sewn sampler was an example of material stuff as text (see figure 3.2). Writing and embroidery became one and the same activity in this way. The shape and appearance of this text was reminiscent of samplers written by girls in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain that often had a particular shape and featured the letters of the alphabet and sometimes a prayer or image.

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When writing is linked to textiles, either by being stitched within a sewn piece or placed within a text, the surface changes the material qualities of the text. This process of transformation then alters how writing is perceived. Lucy’s younger sister Tanya decorated her inscriptions. Gold and glitter were often added as here: Kate: Can you tell me a bit about this please? Tanya: I did it in my big sister’s bedroom called Lucy. I used watercolours and I wrote it in my name and I have done lots of stories. And I used some glitter and I wrote some crystals. (Field notes 4 October 2010) (see figure 3.3.)

Figure 3.2  Sampler. Photo taken by Lucy.

Figure 3.3  Super star. Photo taken by Tanya.

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Tanya makes a text that features her name and the words ‘Super star’. This then becomes embellished through glitter, watercolours and crystals. Like the detailed practices of embellishing that medieval monks used to decorate sacred texts, this process of decorating was integral to the making of texts in the home. Much of the girls’ texts included decorative written texts, as well as writing embedded within craft objects such as book marks, pencil cases and masks. These small pieces of writing could have been rendered invisible; however, their meanings were important. Bodily inscriptions also included writing. The girls told me about how they decorated their hands with henna and liked to devise particular designs for painted nails. These designs could be influenced by a number of different categories. For example, in a notebook, within a drawing describing different forms of ‘nail art’ could also be found the small inscription ‘say no to racism’ within an image of a fingernail (see figure 3.4). The different designs were placed within a scrapbook and shown to me one evening in the home. Messages inscribed on bodies, within pieces of material or on purses are important. The forms within which they are inscribed also are significant. While writing is a different kind of practice from embroidery, both come

Figure 3.4  Nail art. Photo taken by Lucy.

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together when someone embroiders a word on a piece of material. Both practices construct something meaningful from flowing lines. Placing stickers on something is, in turn, a slightly different kind of literacy practice. Here the placing of the written text on the material artefact shifts the meaning of the object. Travelling objects often hold meanings and are inscribed. For example, rucksacks and mobile phone cases sometimes carry letters and decorations on them. Beyond these inscribed texts, oral language flows and situates these settled inscriptions. Sometimes, there is a dialogue with these inscriptions and they perform a function, such as the ‘keep out, private’ stickers that Lucy employed on her purse. The travelling literacies of the school bag and mobile phone carry messages of identity and belonging, linked to other spaces, discourses and practices outside of school. They sometimes speak several languages and have a dialogical quality, carrying messages that intersect and interrelate but that are not spoken with one voice.

Literacy and multimodality In his book Before Writing (1997) Gunther Kress explored how the material world offered an opportunity for children to make meaning out of the everyday cultural stuff of life, ‘what is to hand’ (1997: 13). He described how young children move through the processes of cutting, sticking and making in ways that are often quite seamless: Cutting-out may offer the child one means of bridging a gap between two kinds of imaginative worlds; one in which the child ‘enters the page’ so to speak, and imaginatively enters into the life of objects in or on the page; and another in which represented objects come off the page and are brought into the life of physical objects here and now, which are then reanimated in the imaginative effort of the child. (Kress 1997: 27)

These forms of animation can bring texts alive and gave meaning makers a pathway through different materialities. Kress’s theory of multimodality provided a language of description for meaning making. He provided researchers with an understanding of how modal choices, that is a decision to move into a visual or oral or linguistic mode, were part of a much wider landscape of communication that young children encountered. Communicating meaning

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involved an engagement with the socially shaped ‘stuff ’ used by meaning makers in the process of creation. Kress called this stuff a ‘mode’. This ‘stuff ’ includes a range of phenomena including words, visuals, moving image media, textiles, movement and sound. Rowsell (2013) noticed that some modes were privileged over others in certain contexts. Language, and in particular, writing, had more salience in schooling. Many other modal choices and dispositions such as film and video games offer potential careers beyond schooling while being insufficiently focused on at school. Rowsell explored the subjectivities and dispositions of adults who were experts in their craft, and found that their engagement with these material forms rested on collaborative, situated material practices, that were embodied and engaged. In Rowsell’s work the material world meets the multimodal world of meaning making. She described how adult experts shaped meaning out of crafted ‘stuff ’. These deliberate choices carried the shaping of affordances, or modes, into new spaces of improvisation and creativity. The modal choices children and young people make in out-of-school contexts such as home and community centres are less trammelled by schooled restrictions. Making sense of these modal choices involves tracing back to the moments when the meaning maker decides or chooses a mode as a best fit or ‘most apt’ for the idea (Kress 1997). These choices then lie sedimented within the text (Rowsell and Pahl 2007). The nature of the ‘stuff ’ used to make meaning mattered in home contexts. Glitter was often used, conferring a sparkly, radiant feel to a text. The pale wash of water colours suffused a text with light. Collage built up a picture that was alive with previous experiences. Everyday items such as bus tickets and shop receipts were used to bring in outside worlds and build up texture. Bringing what was ‘to hand’ to meaning making infused everyday texts with the stuff of life (Kress 1997). Everyday ‘stuff ’ is built and shaped from the habitus, that is the everyday lived reality of people that structures lives and crosses generations (Bourdieu 1990). This material quality could sometimes be dismissed as ephemeral. However, when I researched in homes I found that the less focused-on moments of meaning making were important (Pahl 2002). The gathering together of modes in an ensemble of meaning making is critical as a process of engagement. These modes shift as stories are narrated, placed within a new mode, written drawn, stitched and remade within a text such as a mask or a play.

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Modes draw on cultural resources. Choices in relation to modes are culturally shaped. Some modal choices might involve textiles or woven material. In another context, collage can be used, while another modal choice might include domestic practices such as gardening or cooking. Material ‘stuff ’ is a culturally infused space of practice that shapes identities. It also draws on cultural experience of life. When Lucy assembled stickers, or drew the threads to make a word on a sample, or made masks with her cousin, she was engaging with modal choices that then shaped how she made meaning. By choosing to make masks different kinds of expressions were possible. The affordances of particular modes were stretched in different ways (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001). Particular objects used as meaning-making devices, such as the Etch A Sketch, the tablet, the mobile phone, had specific sorts of affordances for meaning makers. Objects previously used for one purpose (e.g. a toddler book) were repurposed for other reasons (a book for teenagers). An example of repurposing is described below. Objects can materialize and then  de-materialize as they pass through different sites and spaces. For example, a drawn object can become transmuted on a digital screen and uploaded to become a YouTube video. It can then return to the material world as it is discussed on screen and then redrawn once more on a tablet. The drawing can appear in a sketchbook. In this process, lines between the  material and immaterial world shimmer and are redrawn once more (Burnett et al. 2014). Repurposing and remaking can become an active process of meaning making. Here, I illustrate this through the work of two 13-year olds, Bonni and Dionne. I encountered Bonni and Dionne in a community library. They were interested in art and scrap books. They were sitting with me one afternoon in the library planning a forthcoming exhibition. We sat and talked and Bonni idly leafed through a ‘lift the flap’ book designed for young children as she talked. ‘We could make one of these for teenagers’, she said. Sitting on the table in front of her was paper, pen, card, paint and brushes. She took a paintbrush and began to paint over the words of the book. I was initially worried (it was a library book) but understood her intention. I managed to persuade the library to let us have the book, and it was repurposed. It was then displayed in our ‘Writing in the Home and in the Street’ exhibition as

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a teenagers’ book. Hidden within the flaps and placed in special places were questions, stories and poems. The book was displayed on a plinth in a local art gallery. Bonni and Dionne also placed a chest of drawers within the art gallery, which originally came from Bonni’s bedroom. This was furnished like a doll’s house and filled with tiny scraps of writing, pushed under beds and hidden from view. In that way, they materialized the nature of home writing practices. By rendering their home literacy practices both material and aesthetic, they provided a commentary on how they saw these practices. This process for them involved choices of colour, mode and an engagement with decisions about assembling that was a particular form of multimodal work. In homes and communities children, young people and adults have conversations about how to employ modes to make meaning. It could be simply about listening to some music and then choreographing a dance. Or it could be about selecting a space for that dance and involving particular people in a particular time to co-create the dance. Sometimes the decisions people make about modes and meaning making are naturalized within homes

Figure 3.5  Displayed book. Photo taken by Kate Pahl.

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Figure 3.6  Chest of drawers. Photo taken by Steve Pool.

and communities, and are rendered invisible. Listening to talk about these decisions and concerns about which sound, which story to tell surfaces these processes and renders them once more visible and important. Ethnography connects and unpacks these things. With the help of the young people, I could begin to trace back those choices. In that way the process of naturalization was disturbed through shared inquiry. When film makers, web designers, artists, writers, musicians or architects work with stuff, meaning making can be called ‘production’ and involves the design and shaping of the stuff (Rowsell 2013). In everyday contexts modal choice is more opaque, shaped as it is by habitual ways of being and knowing. It is difficult to see, as it is naturalized as ordinary. In the everyday, life becomes the current in which meaning is made.

Language and everyday practices When I visited Lucy’s home, she often would read aloud stories to me. These stories were originally intended for her younger sister Saima and were written as bedtime stories. She wrote them down only after she had told them, so that she could retell them to others. The relationship between the written

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and the oral has been extensively discussed (e.g. Finnegan 2007). However, the processes by which both are choreographed together are sometimes less visible. In Lucy’s case, oral storytelling as a process was then inscribed into the written. Her stories were also linked to material practices such as gardening or textiles. When she told the story, it was in one form, speech. When she wrote the story it became inscribed, using pen, onto A4 paper. The story was transformed by moving from one mode to another. This modal shift brought significant changes to how it was viewed. The process of meaning making involves bringing together an ensemble of semiotic resources. Children draw on a repertoire of these semiotic resources when they create texts. For example, they might employ dialect as part of that process together with multimodal forms to evoke meanings that are materially situated (Snell 2013). Language can call up knowledge in particular ways. Descriptive language can evoke an exact experience of an object. Here is Chloe, (aged 13) telling an oral story, constructed over time, talking about cardboard boxes: She opened up a box lid; the kind that open in two ways and make a bang. (From Reunion)

Here, an exact observation of the ways cardboard boxes open and sound is realized. It is done in a way that evokes the three-dimensional aspect of boxes. They open up in two ways, and then you often hear a bang. Language can index skill and everyday practice. For example, this can happen through a more procedural and precise account of one particular activity. Here is Billy in A Kestrel for a Knave talking about how he trained his kestrel: You take her out at night first and don’t go near anybody. I used to walk her round t’fields at t’back of our house at first, then as she got less nervous I started to bring her out in t’day and then take her near other folks, and dogs and cats and cars and things. You’ve have to be ever so careful when you’re outside thought, ‘cos hawks are right nervous and they’ve got fantastic eyesight, and things are ten times worse for them than they are for us. So you’ve got to be right patient, and all t’time you’re walking her you’ve got to talk to her, all soft like, like you do to a baby. He paused for breath. Mr Farthing nodded him on before he had time to become self conscious. (Hines 1969: 67)

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The technical language of falconry comes alive through the articulation of the skilful practices Billy describes. The precise language of experience is located within a set of emotions, feelings and skills, knitted together in language. Language can evoke feelings of emotion and embodied experience. Alan Sillitoe, writing in 1958, similarly described feelings through language. Arthur, the main character in Saturday Night Sunday Morning, described the experience of looking into a pond where he had often fished: He held her fast round the waist and was cast into sad reflection by staring at the water below, a rippleless surface where minnows swam gracefully in clam, transparent silence. White and blue sky made islands on it, so that the descent into its hollows seemed deep and fathomless, and fishes swam over enormous gulfs and chasms of cobalt blue. Arthur’s eyes were fixed into the beautiful earth-bowl of the depthless water, trying to explore each pool and shallow until, as well as an external silence there was a silence within himself that no particle of his mind of body wanted to break. (Sillitoe 1958/2008: 206)

The way in which language connects to particular emotions and sites is important. One term used to describe this linkage is indexicality. Blommaert and Rampton (2011) describe this term as being the process by which signification is signalled through a switch or move into a different style or register to indicate certain modes of belonging. The process of indexicality locates language in context and makes a link to particular experiences or identity narratives. Language indexes emotions, skill, experiences of the world. By engaging with literary texts I could appreciate how these processes occur in descriptive language. They happened as the language indexed particular ways of knowing, sites and spaces, the language of falconry, the experience of fishing. These are powerfully embodied experiences. The literary text, such as the novel, is a particularly shaped discoursal practice, with assumptions attached to how it is supposed to be arranged. These descriptions from the novels above revealed how literary language could evoke everyday experiences as well as particular skills, practices and embodied experiences. Within the everyday, people shape and reconstruct language and literacy practices. These are processes of continual improvisation and transformation. There are, however, crossovers between literary texts and

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everyday texts. It is possible to discern these crossover moments as everyday practices slip into literary language and vice versa. Sedimented within both everyday and literary texts can be found traces of social practice that can stretch back over generations (Rowsell and Pahl 2007).

Language as Talisman Talismans protect people and often are used to ward off evil. If language is seen as a talisman it becomes invested with special powers. The expression ‘Language as Talisman’ evoked an idea of language as material. The expression was used as a provocation. This then created a number of different materializations of the idea in a set of research projects across a team of artists, poets, writers, university researchers, teachers, youth workers, community members and young people.1 The project explored the way that language was both a source of resilience and protection in everyday life. The idea of language as talisman lifted  language  outside its context but then appreciated  the everyday in language. The project team worked in schools with children to develop special language such as poetry, words in sand, actual talismans in jam jars and films to create this web of protection and resilience (Pahl et al. 2013). I was particularly interested in the materialization of everyday language in literary texts. Working with a poet, Andrew McMillan, in a school, I watched how children materialized language in poetry in a way that acknowledged the everyday but made it special. One example was such this poem here: My Secret Den I went to my secret den And my friend Stephanie came And then it started to rain I didn’t know why she came But it didn’t matter My den was old But I also didn’t care

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I could see the clouds moving slowly But I felt gloomy I could smell the hot grass and sunny sun My den weren’t that good But I loved it (by Caitlin Schofield aged 10)

Caitlin’s initially told how she loved to visit her family’s caravan in the summer. Her poem grew from an embodied, sensory experience of sitting in her den watching the clouds move. Her mood was gloomy, but also she loved her den. This complex mix of emotions, smells, sights and feelings – a rainy day, remembering the sun, feeling pleased but also gloomy – is woven in this poem. Her language materializes an experience she had on holiday and makes it come alive. It is both special and ordinary at the same time. In the ‘Language as Talisman’ project we paid attention to the process of making meaning and how this meaning was materialized. I concentrated on one aspect of the project – oral storytelling. I was interested in the forming of narratives from life experiences. I met Chloe, Ella and Georgia through the youth club, and we began to tell stories about our lives. The girls had a particular interest in ghost stories. The girls came up with a collective story, that they called Reunion. This was made through the process of creating and shaping an oral story, which became materialized into a book. The story was orally narrated. It was a story fashioned not only from the everyday, but also from the ‘special’ and ‘other’ world of ghosts and the past. In the ‘Language as Talisman’ project, we particularly noticed materializations. For example, children and young people made their precious words come alive in a park by working with an artist who used luminous paint to write them on sand. At a community event, young people put loud speakers up to create a trail of sound and sayings. Deborah Bullivant encouraged community members to hang everyday sayings from trees in bunting. Young people materialized language in films, poetry and rap. These materializations then were projected onto the youth club building in the park or hung from trees. The web of language was spun in material forms around the place where the young people met and talked. This protective power of language and stories was significant to an understanding of the material properties of language.

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Figure 3.7  Projection in the park. Photo taken by Steve Pool.

Vignette One summer day I was in the park with Marcus. It was early evening. He led me to the bandstand in the park where you could sit comfortably with your back to a pillar. He invited a group of young people to come and sit with us. About five young people came and settled themselves with their backs to the pillars. Marcus said, ‘this is Kate, she is interested in objects and stories’. The young people were silent. Then one young woman talked of her friendship bracelets and what they meant to her. Marcus asked a young man what objects were precious to him. He said he didn’t really have any precious objects. There was a pause. Then he drew out a medal on a chain he had around his neck and said this belonged to his grandfather, who fought in the war. (Field notes Summer 2011)

By making language more material, and linked to something external, like a talisman, it could become something to be displayed and celebrated. The con­ cept of the talisman anchored the project in the special world of the everyday.

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The coupling of the special and the everyday was often realized within the material world where things were both extraordinary and ordinary at the same time.

Garden as text Materializations of ideas can be found in many modal forms, including film, visuals, theatre, dance and in the built environment. When I visited Lucy and Tanya’s home I was always impressed by the beauty of their front garden. Paved by their father, and planted with roses, colourful flowers and particularly beautiful in spring and summer, it lit up the street. I watched how the garden was created from nothing – when the family moved in it was a rubbish dump yet quickly it was assembled and spatially arranged. Tracing the garden-astext also involved a process of uncovering the way in which the ‘garden’ was contextualized. I interviewed the girls’ aunt about the practice of gardening within the household: Aunt: The vibrancy of the colour is definitely seen in the courtyard. Because he [the girls’ father] worked as a builder in Pakistan, the houses, that’s where he got it from, the houses. (Recorded discussion 5 September 2011)

The buying of seeds and the planting of plants, often using seeds carried from Pakistan, constituted an aesthetic transplantation of key concepts of heritage that evoked the colours, smells and shapes of ‘home (Tolia-Kelly 2004). The garden was a communicative multi-sensory text, which evoked the qualities of gardens in Pakistan. These seeds and flowers were then the basis for Lucy’s stories for her sister at bedtime. Lucy often told stories to her younger sister, Saima to send her to sleep. One of her favourite stories was ‘Princess Saima and the Magic Seeds’. This recording was made at the family’s kitchen table: Saima (aged 3): Once again far away . . . Anita (mother): Can you read to us please? Saima: Once upon a time, there lived a princess called Saima, once again there lived far away a princess called Saima who everybody loved her.

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One day she was picking flowers for Queen Lucy when the villagers cried Lucy (older sister aged 12): Why did they cry? Saima: Wa Wa! Lucy: Y  ou took all the flowers didn’t you? What did you do you went to the / Saima: /Shop to buy some seeds Anita: From her dad. Then what did you do with the seeds? Saima: Saw a cloud Anita: Magic Cloud. She bought some seeds. (Audio transcript 5 September 2011)

In the data example above, Saima, a 3-year old, is recounting a story that Lucy has written down and read aloud to her previously. Embedded within the story were references to particular intergenerational practices, previously observed in the home, including the purchasing of seeds (‘from her dad’) and the fairy tale genre of the princess which comes from stories read to the children in school and nursery settings. The family were then engaged in an extended period of planting that took place over time in the newly acquired front and back gardens, in which the front and back gardens of the family’s new home were planted with brightly coloured flowers. The middle daughter, Tanya, was particularly keen on this garden and had her own patch of soil. On 11 July 2011, I recorded this discussion: Lucy: Tanya also had her very own little green house and tubs where she had planted seeds. Daffodils and all them kinds of flowers KP: (to Tanya) How did you know which flowers to put? Tanya: We put them in flower pots, we put one there, we don’t know which seeds we planted, we put one there, some there, in there . . . we cleaned all the dead plants. (Audio recording 11 July 2011)

Lucy’s bedtime story to Saima also had its origins in the seed planting the family engaged in over the spring and summer of 2011. Here, writing and oral speech are intertwined within the cultural spaces of the home. However, the garden stories lead to storytelling. Finnegan queried the assumption that communication has to be conceived as centred on the word, instead arguing for a multi-sensory understanding of the world through which humans make meaning (Finnegan 2002). Lucy’s written story included many of the same

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Figure 3.8  Tanya’s garden. Photo taken by Kate Pahl.

discussions and intonations as the oral stories. When the story was written down and presented, was almost seen as an afterthought to the oral stories. These came first within the home. Her story, when written, was very similar: Princess Saima and the Magic Seeds Once upon a time in a land far away there lived a princess called Saima. She was so pretty. Everybody loved her. One summers’ day she was picking flowers for her bigger sister Queen Lucy. ‘Oh thank you Saima. They are pretty just like you. But remember not to pick any more as the villagers will get angry.’ ‘We hate you Saima’ The villagers said. Saima began crying. Lucy began crying. Everyone started crying. Minutes went by. ‘I know I’ll go to the magic shop to buy some seeds’ Saima said. (Excerpt from the story written by Lucy during 2011)

Here the oral story instantiates the garden-as-text. The story offered a potential space for meaning making. The story then becomes told and retold by family members, encoded in a fairy tale. These improvisations and transformations are material and index the everyday. Gardening is a process of making meaning from possible resources. Meaning making is about arrangement of an ensemble of representational resources (Kress 1997). In a similar way ­gardening can

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be understood as a practice of arranging parts, a material ­semiotic practice. Stories and written texts were linked to the garden, but concepts and ideas (of beauty, aesthetic categories) were also materialized within the garden. In that way, the garden became a text, materialized in flowers. Language represented the everyday, but the everyday also became special through language, story­ telling and writing.

Artefactual literacies Literacy can be seen as a material object and can be a powerful talisman to ward off evil. Literacy can have protective forces. This particular lens was useful as a way of understanding the role of literacy within three generations of women in a British Asian family. I first interviewed Aliya in 2006 as part of the Ferham Families project. I was interested in exploring the artefacts of identity and narratives of migration of British Asian Families from Pakistan who migrated to the United Kingdom in the 1950s and 1960s and came to Rotherham (Pahl and Pollard 2008, 2010; Pahl et al. 2009; Pahl 2012a). We wanted to celebrate the heritage of families in Rotherham and consider their achievements. We called the project ‘Ferham Families’ to celebrate that community. The project resulted in a museum exhibition and a website called Every object tells a story (www.everyobjecttellsastory.org.uk). The focus of the project was the relationship between objects and stories in the home. As part of the project, the artist and web designer Zahir Rafiq worked with the children of the family who were involved. He co-curated a section of the website in which they placed their favourite objects in their bedrooms and talked about them. Zahir said that his inspiration came from the ‘Barbie’ website, which his own daughter (then four) loved. Zahir wanted to explore the children’s special objects with them. In this website, one of the children, Aliya Khan (then aged 10), described how she loved to read Harry Potter and also how she loved a pair of gold earrings given to her by her grandmother. Aliya’s family came from the Pathan regions of Pakistan and included her grandfather (now passed away) and her grandmother, still alive, her mother, father and uncles and cousins, all of whom contributed to the ‘Every object tells a story’ website and exhibition. One of the aspects we

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wrote about was the way in which some objects, such as gold, held family values and ideals and were intangibly passed across generations (Pahl and Pollard 2008). In discussions with Aliya it became clear that the literacies within her family, including stories, poems and prayers, were for Aliya artefacts of resilience, ways of surviving and becoming strong. Aliya (then aged 10) described her childhood spent listening to her grandmother, who told her oral stories: Aliya: She used to tell me stories about when she was at Pakistan to get me to sleep with her and it takes me a long time to get to sleep because I’m not obviously sleeping so she used to tell me stories about when she was in Pakistan, the way she used to come to England and stuff and I used to fall asleep with that. (12 September 2006)

I re-interviewed Aliya when she was seventeen. Aliya recalled her earlier 10-year-old self and also traced a path from that self to her current self. In her more recent interview, she remembered hearing these oral stories and how they calmed her down. Writing and reading were material spaces of possibility for Aliya and her family. Literacy artefacts, such as poems, stories and prayers as well as literature had huge importance as material objects that offered the hope of a better future. One book that offered this special protective feeling was Harry Potter: Harry Potter it was like something you could escape to but also something you could relate to like we discussed it was this new world and everything was exciting and it made you feel you were in there with them, I have always been fascinated by supernatural things and things like that. (Aliya 17 July 2012)

Aliya, like many young people, ‘grew up’ on Harry Potter, but also, there was an element, within the story, that she related to, the idea of this ‘other world’. Harry Potter experienced adversity, but overcomes it, and is someone specially selected to be a wizard. This narrative of identity offered an important promise of hope to relate to. Aliya owed her love of reading to her mother: All because of my mum she’s the one who got me into literature, reading and things, when I was a child she used to read stories to me (17 July 2012)

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This love of reading was then linked to her passion for stories and literature. Aliya also loved to create stories and poems. Aliya carried with her a prayer she used to tell. This was the original prayer from her grandmother: she taught me a special prayer which I still read to this day three times so it protects the household, from any spirits or any things happening while we are sleeping, sleep peaceful, I was four years when I learned that, yeah so for the past thirteen years I have been reading that (laughs). (Interview 17 July 2012)

Here the special prayer had ‘talismanic’ qualities, which protected Aliya from harm. What is powerfully present in Aliya’s interview is the sense of language as enduring over time. The prayer was taught to her when she was very young, but continued to be recited over thirteen years. The poem was also materialized as a picture on the wall in Aliya’s aunt’s house. The prayer was carried across generations, to be told and retold but was also materialized in a picture. Tangible cultural objects, such as gold, carried across

Figure 3.9  Special prayer. Photo taken by Kate Pahl.

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generations. Gold also became temporally intangible, as the gold is melted down for each generation to re-fashion as they pleased: Aliya’s mother: You pass it down, my gold I don’t wear it you pass it down, sentimental value Aliya: Her grandmother melted hers down Aliya’s mother: New designs last time, when Thatcher was in, it was a very difficult time. (17 July 2012)

Here, Aliya’s mother describes the previous ‘time’, felt very deeply in the areas where I was conducting the research, of Mrs Thatcher. In the United Kingdom her government closed many of the mines and steel works that provided employment for the local people in Rotherham, where this study was sited. Gold has both an enduring power and is associated with intangible values of family and continuity. Here, I associate it with resilience in the face of migration and the need to hold on to core values (Pahl and Pollard 2008). Gold as a concept was also an ‘artefact of resilience’ like Aliya’s prayer. Aliya recalled writing poetry as a way of protecting herself and as a special process of world making: I remember in primary school I used to write a lot of poetry, rather embarrassingly looking back (laughs) I remember this one poem that I had, I am not sure if it is upstairs actually or whether I threw it away as I was embarrassed about it, it is called ‘A Candle for My Thoughts’, and I wrote it with a learning mentor. (Aliya 17 July 2012)

Here, Aliya describes a past literate identity, which is the self that wrote poetry. She attributed her ideas for the poem to her habit of going into different worlds: a train of thought would just come and like you said about going into another world, I would be in Aliya’s world and Aliya’s world could have anything it wanted to have in it absolutely anything, that’s obviously changed now as I have got older I have got less imagination (laughs). (17 July 2012)

Like her love for Harry Potter, Aliya identified her literate life as a form of ‘world making’ that created opportunities for her to go into a space where anything could happen, a space of imagination. Aliya’s poem that she wrote was about the candle: A candle of my thoughts, how the wax melts the smell the feel, everyone my family around . . .

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She here articulated how the wax, like the gold in her family, melts, but that intangible melting also signifies the family, the core values that lie beyond the material world. These ‘other worlds’ provide links across the generations. Aliya’s world making is grounded in the female values she has inherited, in the gold that is melted and transformed, the candle wax that burns to signify family values and the poems and stories that travel with her as artefacts of resilience over time. What is striking about Aliya’s discussion are the strong links between material objects, stories and inner strength and resilience, as well as handed down values and ideals. Together, we came up with the idea of calling these literacy objects ‘artefacts of resilience’. The candle poem, the prayer, the stories her grandmother told her, all became objects that she could carry with her through life. Literacy as an artefact of resilience is then constructed across the threads and enduring bonds of generations. Tracing material culture in relation to the feelings of strength Aliya got from the poem, the prayer, the stories and her reading practices brings alive this understanding. In our joint work we explored how these artefacts could provide resilience (Pahl and Khan, in press). Seeing them as resilient artefacts helped us understand them as enduring, intergenerational and productive of a better future.

Literacy and (Im)materiality Material culture moves across time and space. Literacy also moves between generations and across family members. Literacy is in process, and its movement can be seen as a kind of ‘flow’ in time and space (Csikszentimihalyi and Rochberg-Halton 1981). Literacy has been associated with different ‘domains’ of life; home, school and community. These ‘situated’ conceptualizations of literacy guided the way people did research and framed their studies (Barton and Hamilton 1998). However, in home settings, literacies can be seen as being constantly on the move. Children and young people travel between home and school and literacies travel with them. They can appear and disappear according to context and how they are regarded. At school, some, less sanctioned, literacies can remain ‘under the desk’ (Maybin 2007). Literacy practices can be materialized many different spaces. These complex articulations play out in particular moments. Burnett (Burnett et al. 2014) described the way in which ‘Street View’ by Google was explored by a group of children in a classroom.

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As they watched their streets unfold on the whiteboard screen in the classroom, they remembered their everyday experiences of running through a Jennel (passageway) in the terrace houses of Sheffield. Although they wanted to run down the Jennel in the online space, they could not. Street View as a tool was restricted to adult (street) versions of their landscape. The children recognized that ‘Street View’ was online but related to it as an actual embodied experience, entering the space in an ‘as if ’ imagined world. In this way, the material worlds and the immaterial worlds blended, then came apart again, as the children realized they could not do the same things in the immaterial world as in the material world. Literacy is both material and immaterial and these (im)materialities are linked. Children and young people go across these spaces as they travel between school and home. Their movement across these sites creates more materializations of literacy. Inscribed on rucksacks, hidden in secret notes, scrumpled sheets of paper and tiny doodles, these travelling objects are strewn across the spaces of home and school. Bonni and Dionne collected bus tickets and placed them in their scrap books to record the experience of travelling to school by bus. Adults often do not notice these in-between places, as they sit on within one site (home) or the other (school). Literacies, however, are constantly on the move. Literacy practices not only relate to space, but also produce space, and the production of space through literacy practices is a layered, fluid process (Leander and Sheehy 2004). Conceptual framings of ‘lligital’ literacies’ or ‘new’ literacies dissolve within the complexity of children and young people’s meaning-making practices. The ‘stuff ’ of their meaning making is also on the move, from textiles to poetry to Harry Potter to Eminem. This ‘stuff ’ becomes re-categorized and re-appropriated for different uses and purposes. Bronwyn Williams described the reworking of cultural stuff as ‘remix’ to indicate the process of making, and remaking with culture to create new meanings (Williams 2009). Writing is a particular repertoire that people draw on to make meaning, alongside other forms such as cutting and sticking, film making, stitching and drawing. These different forms access modes and materialities that work together to form an ensemble of meaning making, sometimes also linked to oral stories. In homes and communities writing might surface on a toy, or a

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Figure 3.10  Bus tickets in a scrap book. Photo taken by Kate Pahl.

Figure 3.11  Manga images drawn in a scrap book. Photo taken by Kate Pahl.

sticker. Literacy is tied to the process of searching, finding, discovering. In the library scrap book project Dionne cut out an image of the ‘Google’ search engine to indicate Manga as a search term. She drew a Manga shape beside the ‘Google’ search engine to indicate how she searched the internet for Manga images.

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Here, Dionne has made the connection between online and offline literacies through indicating how the connections are made, through the ‘Google’ search engine. By materializing this everyday practice, she articulated the relationship between the act of searching and the process of drawing on what is found. Materializing literacies involves those acts of recovery, finding the trails and traces to the objects that carry meaning.

Conclusion In this chapter I have argued for an enlarged understanding of literacy as linked to language, material objects and multimodal choices. Taking a much broader understanding of the process of making meaning involves recognizing the complex interrelationships between writing, speech, material communication and material objects. Writing, argued Blommaert (2013) when taken together with speech, forms ‘one normative complex’ (p.  443) reliant on a material infrastructure for its realization and constructed through graphic forms that are multi-semiotic, including the use of font, shape, colour and line arrangement. Writing is inherently material, but also, it is fundamentally linked to material culture. Outside of school, in less regulated environments, these links are created anew within texts that are also gardens, samplers, collages, works of art and pieces of embroidery. Material culture, as Miller observed, has a ‘humility’ and invisibility that makes it studied more as a set of phenomena than as a set of rules to be discovered and codified (Miller 1987: 85–108). This world of writing is both immaterial and material, special and yet also everyday, in that the choices and deliberations about meaning making often take unexpected and improvisatory turns and twists. Magically creating a text on writing from a chest of drawers, or repurposing a library book for teenagers, Bonni and Dionne played with genres and expected materializations of literacy. They recorded literacies that were small and humble, such as bus tickets. Particular tropes and ideas common in literacy forms were shifted and rearranged in both material and material forms in home and community settings. These improvisations were materially and aesthetically shaped, drawing from aesthetical categories that were fluid and transient (Manga, Twilight) as well as settled and intergenerational (textiles, gardening). It is these aesthetic choices

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that make materiality come alive within literacy practices. Recognizing these practices is an important task for those who wish to engage with meaning making in educational settings. However, they are often discarded in favour of a mono modal world. It is no longer possible, however, to make sense of literacy without material culture.

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Yesterday I went to Ravina’s house. Ravina was in the Ferham Families project and I had interviewed her about her special objects – in particular a pair of gold sprayed elephants. They were made of polystyrene and she sprayed them gold to match the candlesticks in her mantelpiece. They were still there along with the gold swan. Her house is a particular aesthetic – all gold. Gold is interesting in that it is both valuable and also not valuable, it is a signifier of family values. She told me a detailed story about swagged ­curtains but I was too tired to listen and said I would come back another day. When I first interviewed Ravina it was around 2006 and I was still commuting to Sheffield from London. She was amazed I now had my own car, she used to pick me up from Meadowhall. I asked her, have I changed since then and she said, not at all. (Field notes November 2013) Decisions about meaning making in the everyday are shaped within culture. Children and young people create stories, poems, writing and other forms such as dance and moving image media productions out of the available ‘stuff ’ to hand (Kress 1997). In that process, decisions are made about which kinds of material to use. This mixing, borrowing and shifting about of cultural material from other sources has been described as a form of creativity, or cultural improvisation (Hallam and Ingold 2007). These processes of ‘symbolic creativity’ in the everyday can remain at the level of the mundane conversation. However, even within that context poetic language can drift into everyday speech and light it up momentarily (Willis 2000). Telling a story more than once begins to create a sense of narrative structure. Stories can begin as a ‘small story’, which might be an allusion to a part of a story, then be told and  retold over time (Georgakopoulou 2007). The story can then become longer, a recited story

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that is formed within a person’s mind and shared among friends till it becomes a tale told by others, to be shared (Hymes 1996). When I visited young people in homes or sat with them in youth clubs, they would assemble bits of stuff to improvise upon. This included songs, words, stories and sayings that they would use and reuse to create meanings. The decisions about what kind of stuff to use were connected to previous cultural experiences of songs, visual, print and digital media. Decisions also meshed with identity narratives that were ongoing and important within the space. The everyday is strewn with artefacts. These are objects that call up passions, identities, other memories and places (Pahl and Rowsell 2010). Everyday meaning making is also embedded within the ‘flow’ of culture across screens and within digital devices such as mobile phones. Everyday meaning making is then melded with individual passions, embodied experiences and histories to form new texts and cultural artefacts. Young people bring together previous experiences with the cultural stuff they engage with to create new texts. For example, Lucy was experiencing bullying at school when she started telling me the story that she called ‘How to Drown a Blondie’, described below. She was also reading the vampire story Twilight (Meyer 2008). Echoing within her story jostled memories of fairy stories such as Snow White as well as the Jacqueline Wilson books she read when she was younger. These stories often featured a girl heroine who experienced hardship and difficulty. These jostlings appeared in her text but were crafted anew to create a different kind of story. Lucy’s story was subsequently written out and given to a cousin down the road to read. I read it, and commented upon it, and we had several conversations about it. It became an object of study between us and subject to discussion and analysis. When does the ordinary become extraordinary? The everyday, the ordinary is also cultural and where the making of culture happens (Williams 1958; Street 1993b). The ordinary is itself aesthetic and imbued with aesthetic categories and choices that are shaped and constructed by lived experiences and practices (Saito 2007; Bourdieu 1990). The shaping of choices to make meaning within the everyday appears a smooth process, but as I explored Lucy’s choices, and talked to Lucy about them, we found layers within her experiences that shaped her text. Here, I explore the implications of taking

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an approach drawing on cultural studies as well as aesthetics to understand everyday meaning making. The New Literacy Studies presented the concept that literacy is a set of practices, and these can be divided into literacy events and literacy practices. This approach focused on the uses of literacy in a more instrumental sense, that is, how people engaged with literacy and the way print had become naturalized within everyday life (e.g. Barton and Hamilton 1998). The New Literacy Studies took a sociological view of literacy, that is, the field as a whole explored how literacy practices are themselves part of societal structures. However, the weighting of these practices and their aesthetic qualities were less often considered within that frame. The relationship between everyday literacies and literary texts in everyday settings continues to remain complex and opaque. Ways in which the literary inform the everyday have been described in terms of genre theory or through an interest in ‘everyday creativity’ (Willis 2000). The intersections and complexities of people’s responses to literary texts and their own perceptions of them in the everyday call up a version of events that is less about use and practical application and more about affect, emotion and perception (Steadman-Jones and Pahl 2014). Poetic, literary and artistic texts are part of a landscape of out-of-school literacies. Thinking about everyday literacies in relation to their aesthetic categories involves needing to understand the relational nature of text-making and the feelings and emotions that process evokes. There is also an aspect of aesthetics that includes necessity, urgency and survival. By making aesthetic choices, young people could articulate emotions, feelings and concerns that might not be represented within mainstream cultural processes. When looking at ordinary stuff, the echoes and traces behind the stuff, past experience and practices, are shaped not only by the ‘meshwork’ that is the everyday, but also by the embodied experience of living. Eagleton (1990) explored the way in which the field of aesthetics was linked to a particular moment in modern European thought – the rise of the mercantile class in the eighteenth century in England. By placing social power within the ‘sensuous immediacies of empirical life’ (p. 34) and linking it to a moral purpose, the grounded everyday reality of the mercantile class could appear to have been lifted to a higher purpose. Politics and aesthetics were intertwined, with a focus on beauty and truth in society (p. 35). Power defined aesthetic categories. The

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concept of ‘everyday aesthetics’ is therefore something of a tautology, as the ‘high’ concept of aesthetics and its link to exterior forms and moral purpose defined the original shaping and idea of the aesthetic. Why then use the concept of aesthetics? Aesthetics as a field needs to be reclaimed from the grip of ‘high culture’ as it illuminates everyday meaning making. This journey takes us beyond the comfortable confines of cultural studies. While cultural studies happily engages with the everyday, the more mundane the better, aesthetics engages with high art. However, between the two, and outside of literary theory, everyday texts are more than just functional literacy practices. By exploring aesthetic categories within everyday texts, it is possible to have an understanding of the precise history of those categories. Lucy’s text (described below) combined an interest in metaphor and descriptive language with an underlying concern with racism. She was able to combine ‘beauty’ with ‘moral purpose’, as Hull and Nelson (2009) suggested in their discussion of young people’s digital storytelling practices. Arguing that young people had turned to the aesthetic as a way of articulating both resistance and creativity, their discussion is about the pleasure of these processes: Through language, visual arts, dance, music, or a multimodal combination of these . . . youth express themselves through performance, the production of artifacts and the stylization of their bodies. The aesthetic activities of youth . . . join palpably the pleasures of making meaning with the pleasures of constructing and enacting a self. (Hull and Nelson 2009: 207)

The young people I worked with inhabited the space of improvisation as a site for pleasure and production of self. They engaged with the stuff of the everyday, and then combined it to create special aesthetic effects, that lifted these experiences out of the everyday into something different. Saito (2007) explored the everyday as a ‘treasure trove of materials for investigation’ (p. 11) beyond the schemas of Western fine arts and argued for a broadening of aesthetic categories. Saito was concerned that the traditional model of art as the focus of the aesthetic object discounted the pleasure people get from beautiful everyday objects. However, there is less agreement on what these aesthetic experiences are when they are perceived within everyday life and are, in other respects, ‘ordinary’. Many everyday objects and practices are

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also collaboratively produced. This takes away the concept of the single artist creating a piece of art. Everyday objects also are often subject to decay and change according to seasons and time. They are also felt differently – a knife might be handled and appreciated as an aesthetic object or just as a tool to eat with. Saito described such events as the Japanese tea ceremony as events in which boundaries are blurred between the everyday and the aesthetic, and celebrates the impermanence within the everyday. Saito encouraged a celebration of an aesthetic experience of the world, watching, looking and appreciating the fabric of everyday life. When working with children and young people, I not only observed the process of meaning making with an aesthetic eye but also looked, as an ethnographer, at instances when the young people appreciated the aesthetic qualities of the texts they produced. This process could be described as a spiral of aesthetic meaning making (see Diagram 4.1). Here, the process begins with the concept of the everyday and then moves on to improvisation, which is where the everyday becomes shaped into something cultural, a possibility that could become aesthetic. Multimodal meaning making is a site for this process. Everyday language can become something special or other, through the practice of drawing on aesthetic categories while creating new meanings. This can then be reflected upon. The spiral loops back to the everyday and the circle begins again. This provides a way of thinking about aesthetics as embedded in a process of everyday meaning making that is improvised.

everyday stuff

reflection

aesthetic shaping

Diagram 4.1  Aesthetic spiral.

improvisation

creating cultural stuff

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Creativity and aesthetics Everyday moments of cultural stuff, worked on in the moment, in a space of practice, can become aesthetically shaped into more formed cultural texts. However, this process also spirals back in on itself and can be revisited. When cultural stuff is shaped into genres, tropes or recognizable forms, it can also get worked on in a different way. For example, artists, poets or other creative people working with young people can powerfully shape their ideas into artistic texts through creative interventions. However, what young people made of these interventions – how do the spaces of creativity feel to young people? On a project called ‘A Reason to Write’ a group of artists, including a photographer, a musician and a visual artist, worked with young people to encourage them not only to work creatively but also to find reasons to write. I researched this process with the young people. The school was in an ex-mining area of South Yorkshire and watched the impact the artists had on the children’s learning. Working with Steve Pool, artist, we decided to give up on our own not very clever ideas about meaning making and find out what the children thought of the process (Pahl and Pool 2011). For one year, we researched the effect of this project on children’s learning. Four young people aged between 10 and 11, Courtney, Robbie, Declan and Aisha, helped us do the research. When we started out, we discussed what we planned to do: Group discussion Kate: there are six of you and I have got four bits of equipment and I am going to ask you to be researchers for the next few Mondays, I have decided that you are going to be researchers, and that means that for the whole day you have a piece of equipment or a notebook and you observe what is happening. You can join in and you can be a participant observer Courtney: Is it when someone’s talking, like you write down little notes, like a journalist? Kate: Exactly. I have done that on my notes. yes two of you do that and the other four use the equipment Robbie: With us, I have got this spider pig thing in me coat and its got a notebook and I have got a a pen and a bit away from us doing that note thing I think I can write things down.

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Kate: Next Monday we are going to swap Robbie: Courtney and Aisha is going to do one. Kate: I find it easier Courtney: It’s like a piece of music, you have to sit there, play, then you have to write it down then stop then you have to play again. Do you want us to get us notes? You have to work out the word sometimes you can’t recognize the word in the music. (From recorded and transcribed group discussion 1 February 2010)

The children explored the process of doing the research in a discussion that was both metaphorical and literal. Courtney began by asking whether writing notes about practice was like being a journalist. Robbie remembered his ‘spider pig thing in me coat’ and thinks he can write things down – later on he discusses how this activity helped him to become like a detective. However, Courtney then developed her theme – drawing on the word ‘notes’ she thinks about the process of inscription ‘it is like a piece of music, you have to sit there, play, then you have to write it down then stop then you have to play again’. Here, the conflating of music and inscription brings the two practices closer together. Many aesthetic practices have this quality of sliding from one mode (words) into another mode (music) and this translation or ‘transduction’ as Kress calls it (2010) makes meaning not only visible but also aesthetically shaped. The experience of discovery also created new affordances. Robbie, in a further discussion, described his experience of research as about broadening where he could go in the school: K: Why is being a researcher like being a detective? R: Its like doing Cluedo and finding things out – like when we were with Jonathon we had to run round and take pictures of summat red and it were like a mystery and we had to find them and we were allowed anywhere in the school grounds and that were good because we could go anywhere and usually we are not allowed up infants and we are not allowed on the grass C: Its still work though. (Discussion June 2010)

This discussion reflects the moments in which research happens and the moments of discovery within a process which itself is much wider. Through this experience, the young people came to reflect on the impact of creative practices on their lives. Towards the end of the project, we sat in a middle room in the

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school sifting through the many pictures and movies the children had taken. After much discussion, the young people chose one picture, a picture of Declan dancing. In the picture, the arrangement of the child in the space was chosen partly because, as Robbie said below, ‘it is a nice picture’ (see Figure 4.1). The image captured Declan dancing in the school hall, in between a lesson, with the message ‘achievement’ captured above him. Robbie took the picture. In an analytic discussion towards the end of the project, the young people reflected on this process: Kate: What is important about the picture of Declan dancing? Courtney: It is children learning to not fight, put all the stuff together and make one nice picture Kate: Thank you Courtney: It’s not about being good all the time at school its about spending your life in school because it is the only chance you’ve got Kate: You said something else about drama and in between . . . Courtney: When you are in drama you can act out but you can also act out in school its about spending your life, and it is not just about drama you can just live your life Kate: Across the school day Courtney: yeah

Figure 4.1  Declan dancing.1 Photo taken by Robbie and digitally altered by Steve Pool.

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Courtney reflected on the experience of school both as a given, ‘the only chance you’ve’ got’, and as a space of practice. In drama ‘acting out’ was allowed but in school it is not. Declan dancing was an image of ‘messing about’ but in a way that was creative and aesthetic. When I asked Robbie why he liked doing the project, he said, Robbie: She said we could be like messing about a bit and show who we really are for the cameras not like, we weren’t to pretend who somebody were not, we had to show who we are. (Group discussion 13 July 2010)

I asked him again at the end of the project, on a visit to the university, why he liked the picture of Declan dancing: Robbie: Before it, Declan he said, let me video you, he said no, I went to take picture, Declan danced like that, I took a picture, it went all blurring so we deleted that one, we were going to do loads so we could like just place finger and make it into a video Steve Pool: animation Aisha: We were all like messing about Declan started dancing Robbie: It’s a good picture though I like the picture. (Transcription of group discussion 13 July 2010)

Robbie located the picture within the everyday, in the ordinary space of practice which is ‘messing about’. He did however offer an aesthetic judge­ ment, ‘it’s a good picture though I like the picture’. The picture, framed by a wall hanging of the word ‘achievement’, seemed to offer an implied critique as Declan strikes a pose, dancing next to a music station where Aisha had a music club on a Mondays. However, the image also created a positive improvisational space of practice, celebrating the creative in the everyday. At the end, of the project, the group gave a presentation about their work. Courtney reflected in her presentation on drumming as an experience: ●●

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Drumming, is an experience of life and music. It’s the beat, of a heart. It’s the beat that takes off first. Drum is the BEST of music.

Courtney recognized in her presentation the way in which drumming was linked to the heartbeat and to the ‘stuff ’ of life, the everyday experience of

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living, but was also something more, a creative possibility. This insight made sense of cultural improvisation. Out of the ‘mess’ of everyday life, a discovery might happen which led you on a different journey. The loop of practice not only takes from the everyday (the beat of a heart) but also moves into an embodied experience (experience of life and music), but then, in a moment of time, ‘takes off first’ and becomes an aesthetic experience (the best of music). Here the creative process is described and explored by Courtney. Exploring aesthetics not only involves making sense both of the choices young people are making but also involves recognizing, from their perspective, what these textual choices make them feel. This process of apprehending the embodied experience of texts, music, art (the beat of a heart) involves a wider lens. This lens is not just concerned with how texts are used within everyday life, but also, how they are felt and experienced. This requires an appreciation of tacit and embodied ways of knowing in everyday creative processes.

The literary and the aesthetic Aesthetics emerged as a field from a particular moment in European history, when the building of a nation state was in process as a product of an expanding merchant class (Eagleton 1990). This valorized and confirmed embodied and felt responses to art and literature. Felt responses to art and literature were linked to the field of aesthetics. However, more recently, challenges to the field have emerged. These include the need to relate aesthetics more to the everyday and lived experience once more (Saito 2007; Hull and Nelson 2009). They also extend to a postcolonial critique of aesthetics as a hegemonic field of practice, denying expressions outside the normative Western eye (Mignolo 2000). Walter Mignolo described a space that lies in the ‘border lands’ between literary theory and sociological knowledge. In that space, questions of identity, difference and articulations of otherness can be found. He argued that literature itself created theoretical knowledge that was generative. Literature created in the borders had its own capacity to generate knowledge that at the same time draws on aesthetic categories. This literature can unsettle or disturb familiar tropes that represent reality. Here, I bring postcolonial literary theory together with aesthetics. I engage

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with the lived experience and written texts of a British Asian girl, (Lucy). I argue that in order to apprehend these texts, particular cultural framings and understandings need to be brought to bear. Lucy’s family lived in a quiet street in the centre of the town. Previously she had lived in a street where she felt unsafe, and was taunted at outside but she was relieved to move into her new house where her family lived. At the same time, she started secondary school, one of the only non-white pupils at a school called West Secondary (pseudonym). In a discussion with me, Lucy described this experience: When I started West Secondary I realized there were hardly any Asians or black people here, only me and my cousin, we were the only black people and another girl but she was popular as she hung out with the blond girls. I wanted to be blond and white and pale. When I was young I was obsessed with vampires and I wanted to be really pale and [have] purple eyes. (Discussion 20 September 2012)

Lucy’s comment is both about the everyday (‘we were the only black people’) and racism and also describes an aesthetic observation that was a response to this (‘I wanted to be blond and white and pale’). She reflected upon this in her story, ‘How to Drown a Blondie’ where the attributes of blondness became attributes of evil. Lucy’s experience was very much bound up with a hidden experience of racism, in which comments were made under the radar of educators’ eyes: I didn’t like it at first. When I first started at West Secondary most people were racist. The people didn’t want their children to go to a mixed school. When I got into year 8 they were top set people, when I realized that I was in the top set they only said comments that I could understand and the teachers didn’t understand it. But they made sly comments. (Discussion 20 September 2012)

Lucy was particularly badly bullied by a girl who turned other girls against her who became, for a while, a very upsetting part of her everyday experience in school. In year 7 my first mate, she was quite nice to me but when I started talking to other people she got jealous, made up things about people calling me [racist terms] and she made up a load of lies. I didn’t realize she was bullying

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my cousin at the same time as me. In year 8 she spread rumours about me. (Discussion 20 September 2012)

In the second term at the new school, Lucy wrote ‘How to Drown a Blondie’, a story which she introduced to me in a discussion recorded on 31 January, telling me, Lucy: And it is about this blond girl and she thinks she is really pretty and everything. Looking in the mirror and she takes the mick out of people who aren’t as pretty as her. (Excerpt from beginning of an audio recording of Lucy’s oral story 31 January 2011)

The language here echoed the ‘everyday’ language of teasing in school (‘takes the mick out of ’) as well as describing the language of ‘pretend’ friendship. This oral version of Lucy’s story was extended in her written piece. This story focused on looking and seeing as critical to the experience of inequality. Lucy’s oral account of her story turned on the concept of ‘looking’ and changing her looks, or, if not, if she stays the same, she dies. In Lucy’s own experience, as described above, she was threatened on the street and then later bullied for the colour of her skin in her school, Lucy recontextualized the experience of racism into a different genre, that of the revenge fairy tale. This response also had aesthetic elements, which include a focus on colour (‘indigo blue eyes’) and expressive terms (‘fire and jealousy’). Here is the opening of her writtenout story: How to drown a Blondie! Right let’s get this straight. I am writing a story about a selfish, evil, coldhearted girl whose life I took away. Everything in this story is the truth. 100% I guarantee you. The girl’s name was Lauren. She had beautiful hair. It was blond and shoulder length with beautiful eyes which were indigo blue. But if you looked closer you could see her eyes were raging with fire and jealousy if she met someone more beautiful than her. Her dad was a very rich man, a billionaire who not only loved his daughter but was scared of her as well. As she was demanding and can turn anyone around her little finger with a click (but not me) as you couldn’t be sure of what she was capable of doing. I’m not even going to tell you what she did. Because it is too evil. (Excerpt from the beginning of the written text ‘How to drown a Blondie’ undated, 2011 by Lucy)

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I began the analysis of the story by asking Lucy where she got the idea of ‘How to Drown a Blondie’ from. She responded that she had drawn on a section of Breaking Dawn (Meyer 2008) from the Twilight series where Jacob retorts to the narcissistic Rosalie: ‘You know how you drown a blonde, Rosalie?’ I asked without stopping or turning to look at her, ‘Glue a mirror to the bottom of a pool.’ (Meyer 2008: 271)

This quote draws on the genre of the ‘blond’ jokes that circulated in British schools (sexist in tone and nature) but, using aesthetic categories of blondness and blue eyes, transforms this in a written fable of revenge. Meyer’s text resonates with powerful descriptions of aesthetically beautiful white girls who are also other-worldly and deadly: My first reaction was an unthinking pleasure. The alien creature in the glass was indisputably beautiful, every bit as beautiful as Alice or Esme. She was fluid even in stillness, and her flawless face was pale as the moon against the frame of her dark, heavy hair. Her limbs were smooth and strong, skin glistening subtly, luminous as a pearl. My second reaction was horror. (Meyer 2008: 403)

The use of descriptive language here is written to create a powerful effect on the reader, creating a visual image of the character. Likewise, Lucy used vivid imagery such as ‘indigo blue’ and ‘eyes raging with fire and jealousy’ to construct her character. Lucy evoked a reversed world where the powerful were laid low and come to a terrible end. This drew the reader into her version of the universe, bringing a powerful counter narrative to conventional valorizations of the blue-eyed girl as a form of ‘imaginative vigilance’ (Hull and Nelson 2009). The concept of ‘imaginative vigilance’ is a key factor in understanding the ‘other’ in texts. Lucy’s narratives critiqued the valorization of the blond and blue-eyed girl within Western fairy-tale narratives. When I was first making sense of Lucy’s texts, I turned to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye as a similarly powerful tale of reversal as well as trauma. In The Bluest Eye (1970) a vulnerable young Black girl, Pecola Breedlove, under the watchful eyes of two other, more protected Black girls, Claudia and Frieda, yearns for blue eyes. The story challenged the reader to imagine, through the

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image of the blue-eyed girl, the experience of these three girls. While very different in terms of context and style, the themes were powerful and linked to Lucy’s message. In this story the lead character watches the destroying of Pecola by the community. This narrator is a black girl. Her vision was, like Lucy’s, one of revenge: I destroyed white baby dolls. But the truly horrifying thing was the transference of the same impulses to little white girls. The indifference with which I would have axed them was shaken only by my desire to do so. To discover what eluded me: the secret of the magic they weaved on others. What made people look at them and say ‘Awwww,’ but not for me? The eye slide of black women as they approached them on the street, and the possessive gentleness of their touch as they handled them. If I pinched them, their eyes – unlike the crazed glint of the baby doll’s eyes  – would fold in pain, and their cry would not be the sound of an icebox door, but a fascinating cry of pain. (Morrison 1970, this edition 1979: 24–5)

Similar themes, of the uncanny or reversal of the order of things, emerge in this passage. The heroine not only destroyed white baby dolls but also observed the way in which these girls in real life were valorized and loved. Her response was to want to destroy them too, and her account of the pain they would suffer echoes the satisfaction of Lucy’s heroine at the evil Lauren’s death. By making this link, I could also recognize the aesthetic work Lucy had done to lift her account of racism into fiction. By identifying ‘blondness’ with a particular set of characteristics, Lucy could transform an experience of hurt and shame into something that is vivid and alive, just as Toni Morrison did with The Bluest Eye. As Hull and Nelson (2009) argued, meaning making must be recognized as being ethically constituted and understood in relation to a philosophy of ‘engaged cosmopolitanism’ that values difference and imagined better futures (p. 220). Lucy has lifted her experience of racism in the street and in her school to an aesthetic level, which then transcended ordinary language and experience. Lucy’s writing drew on familiar ‘tropes’ such as ‘How to Drown a Blondie’ as well as employing powerful language of revenge and anger. Her work challenged

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particular concepts, powerful within Western epistemologies, of how white girls are positioned and viewed within cultures of beauty and success. Instead, she reversed this powerful trope and explored at it from the point of view of a revenge story. Lucy’s writing occupied a ‘border space’ (Mignolo 2000), between the hugely successful book series Twilight and its attendant spin offs into film and other media, and her own experience of racism, which fuelled a different interpretative and epistemic space from which to write a story. In her story, Lucy explored the way in which the aesthetics surrounding growing up as a girl constructed ideas of beauty: Lauren was a big poser. Always on front covers of, magazines, newspapers, and even books. She had this habit of looking at her reflection in mirrors nearly every minute. But what I say, she is not pretty as she was when she was a baby or as she thinks she were.

Lauren then murdered her friend (Samantha) and her father is blamed for the murder. However, her murdered friend comes back as a ghost, and this is the result: It was the 4th of December. Lauren’s 15th birthday. So this was the perfect day for the plan to unroll. Whilst Lauren put her party gear on she went into the bathroom where Samantha’s blood lay on the door. All dried up. I came out as my real self. ‘What! It can’t be. No it isn’t!’ ‘Oh but it is’ I said With a click of a finger Lauren’s hair disappeared. ‘No! You evil monkey what you done that for?’ ‘Silence! Look. Over there in the bath is a mirror. Look into it. If you dive in to get it, it is yours forever. See how you look with your hair back?’ ‘Yes! Give it to me now.’ That was the last word she said.

The blond girl loses her hair and the story ends with her drowning in the pond in an attempt to get her hair back: ‘Dive in and get it. It is a magical mirror. Which you tell how you want to look and everyone will see you like that. So what do you want? What you waiting for? Dive in and get it.’ That was the last word I said to her.

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Lauren dived in. SPLASH! That was the last anyone saw her, or heard from her. But what I will tell you is that the person who has told you this story is me. SAMANTHA HURST. (Ending of ‘How to Drown a Blondie’ by Lucy)

Lauren then does, indeed, drown in the pond and loses her hair. Entwined in this revenge narrative were stories from Snow White, from Twilight and yet, through reversing the story, the blond girl, not the raven headed woman, comes to a bad end. The ghost triumphed.

Aesthetics at the borders Ghosts often surfaced in the stories I heard, particularly from adolescent girls. Ghosts hold liminal qualities; lying between the dead and the living, they could become a medium for questioning epistemologies of knowledge and certainties (Smith 2010: 3). Smith (2010) described how this process of becoming a ghost leads to a liminality and border narrative that troubles contemporary discourses: By transforming the self into the liminal form of the ghost the fragility of the self (as a social and cultural construct) is made apparent. In this respect the ghost story addresses the ‘abstract contexts’ of social narratives relating to class, gender and national identity. (p. 4)

The agency of ghosts in killing humans or making changes in life that are profound featured as a theme in Lucy’s stories. Lucy reversed the ordering of fairy stories, making the blond girl into the villain. She watched, through the friend Samantha’s eyes, Lauren’s untimely end in a pool, falling in as a result of her narcissism. Lucy mimicked the language of Twilight and Snow White, but reversed the hierarchy of what happened in these texts, creating in Bhabha’s words, a ‘double articulation’ (1994: 86) which both engaged with power but placed it in a different space to that expected by the dominant culture. Lucy’s revenge narrative unsettled and destabilized normative stories through her use

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of the Blond trope. The story had gothic qualities with heightened sense of horror and emotion. Several people including Samantha and Lauren’s mother were brutally stabbed by Lauren. The stories created by Lucy occupied a border space where she was reversing the experience of herself as the ‘other’ that was the reality of the white mainstream school she attended. Instead she was creating an, ‘as if ’ realm of imagined horror. Writing from a particular epistemological space, her work challenged White foundations of beauty and truth. Fine et al. (2004) argue thus: Whiteness has come to be more than itself, embodying objectivity, normality, truth, knowledge, merit, motivation, achievement, and trustworthiness; it accumulates invisible and unrecognized supports that contribute to the already accumulated and bolstered capital of whiteness. Rarely, however, is it acknowledged that whiteness demands and constitutes hierarchy, exclusion and deprivation. (p. viii)

Lucy’s recognition of the relationship between whiteness and exclusion required a different aesthetic repertoire. She drew on familiar fairy tales and novels as well as the ‘Blond’ jokes circulating in British schools; however, she reversed these and made them into her own narrative. The concept of ‘The Uncanny’ or ‘Unheimlich’ from Freud’s essay on the Uncanny describes this world of strangeness. The concept, undoubtedly belongs to all that is terrible – to all that arouses dread and creeping horror; it is equally certain, too, that the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with whatever excites dread. (From Freud, The Uncanny 1919, p. 1)

Lucy’s evoked world is one of ‘dread and creeping horror’. She moved her narrative out of the familiar world of sleepovers and into another world. She referred to everyday experiences and events and embedded them within her narrative: As Lauren’s plan came more closer and closer she decided to invite Samantha for a sleepover. They were both 14, and very immature. They drank, smoked and even tried some magic mushrooms. But Lauren didn’t do anything to Samantha. (Extract from ‘How to Drown a Blondie’)

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Lucy described observed adolescent practices – the sleepover, as well as transgressive experiments with drugs and alcohol. These everyday practices are then inscribed into an experience of horror: Whilst Lauren put her party gear on she went into the bathroom where Samantha’s blood lay on the door. All dried up. I came out as my real self. (Extract from ‘How to Drown a Blondie’)

The narrator only becomes the ‘I’ in the story when she is a ghost – the ghost of the murdered girl. The wresting of narrative control within the story echoes the reversal process that happens and the power struggle between Samantha and Lauren. Lucy’s story describes a power struggle between two girls – one popular, blond and rich, and the other the dupe of the popular girl, an experience she had herself at school. She used the stuff available to her to make this story come alive. But the aesthetic categories she draws upon also question hegemonic conceptualizations of beauty. Lucy’s language is aesthetically charged but it also signalled the perception of the ‘other’ in a world where white people construct the discourses. This is a form of cultural representation that can be understood within the frame of post-colonial literary theory and post-colonial aesthetics, crossing the borders between aesthetic languages (Mignolo 2000; Bhabha 1994). Lucy moves the reader from a state of being ‘at home’ to a sense of unheimlich, or ‘unhomed’, from Freud’s concept of ‘unheimlich’. Bhabha described this feeling: To be unhomed is not to be homeless, nor can the ‘unhomely’ be easily accommodated in that familiar division of social life into private and public spheres. The unhomely moment creeps up on you stealthily as your own shadow and suddenly you find yourself with Henry James’ Isabel Archer, in The Portrait of the Lady, taking the measure of your dwelling in a state of ‘incredulous terror’. (Bhabha 1994: 9)

Lucy’s story was written from the position of someone who is not white. This moment where the signifier used (blondness) became something strange and uncanny created a different linguistic space. Homi Bhabha described the third space as, a challenge to the limits of the self in the act of reaching out to what is liminal in the historic experience and in the cultural representation, of other peoples, times, languages, texts’. (2009: xiii)

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This process is a kind of cultural mapping outside the confines of everyday discourse, practices and normative cultural tropes. Language is the site of this transformation (Ashcroft 2009: 120). Aesthetics, however, goes beyond language into the visual and sensory realm. Lucy’s aesthetic categories include colour, ‘beautiful eyes which were indigo blue’. She also signalled the word ‘blond’ as a source of not only beauty but also evil. Deep sensate relations of colour were present within this text, and colour was an aesthetic category she used to make meaning. Inhabiting Lucy’s text was an unsettling experience, but inhabiting it enabled a different vision to surface and be heard.

Decorative aesthetics Drawing on aesthetic categories can also provide sites for reflection, revisiting and rethinking particular categories in relation to new experiences. When revisiting the Ferham Families project, I talked to one of the younger members of the family, Aliya, when she was ten and then returned to talk to her when she was seventeen. Aliya described the special poems and memories that she associated with writing. Aesthetic categories relate to deeper more embodied feelings, involving the re-enchantment of the everyday into something new and strange. This specialness can come from ordinary moments of meaning making. At the beginning of this chapter, I describe my return to Ravina, Aliya’s aunt’s house and her decorative schemas. ­Aliya’s aunt ­decorated her house using gold, and cream colouring to create a strongly aesthetic effect. Interviewing Aliya’s aunt, about her gold-sprayed elephants, she told me, I always have gold spray in the house and I decided to spray the elephants because they were just cream and they didn’t match my candlesticks and I decided to spray them gold, (laughs). (Interview November 2006) (See Figure 4.2)

The ‘always’ nature of gold spray also reveals her aesthetic habitus, a set of taken-for-granted schemas or dispositions or ways of responding to objects and material culture (Bourdieu 1990). When I revisited Ravina’s house 6 years later, she had redecorated her house completely, although the gold elephants were still there in the mantelpiece. When I talked to her, she described

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Figure 4.2  Gold elephant. Photo taken by Steve Wright.

her aesthetic schema in relation to her love of travel and different perspectives and cultures: R: I like east and west pictures they fascinated me, this wall paper this design I like it, it was off the internet – I got that (moulding) off the internet because it is Islamic, it is in the Alhambra. (Interview October 2013)

Aesthetic choices can signal both belonging and an engagement with different cultural spaces. These are spaces of transformation, change and improvisation. Tangible cultural objects, such as gold, which is carried across generations, also become intangible, as the gold is melted down for each generation to re-fashion as they please. The aesthetic properties of gold are intertwined with time, and history and the heritage of the family whereby gold is passed from mother to daughter. Within those passings, however, traumatic events punctuate these passings down. The new designs are part of the process of re-fashioning, to reflect the changing aesthetics of the time. By focusing on the aesthetic qualities of gold, the experience of making and remaking, and of

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decorating, could become a fluid, complex space that became revisioned for new times. Here, colour and the fashioning of stuff in the home are linked to more enduring patterns of value, culture and aesthetic categories as a form of resilience across generations.

Conclusion Aesthetic categories lie both in the everyday and in the fashioned and shaped world of cultural production. They cross between the two but their presence is significant. Like languages, some aesthetic categories are perceived as ‘other’ from a perspective of a particular cultural norm. Reversing or shifting the settled nature of these categories (Blond = good for example) involves a dialogic process that involves recognizing other perspectives and values and requires a project of re-situating and othering Whiteness (Fine et al. 2004). Tracing the movement of aesthetic categories in meaning making in home settings within British Asian homes involved an attention to the role of nostalgia, memory and stories building up in those households (Tolia-Kelly 2004). While particular tropes and generic structures continue to pass on cultural identities in settled ways, ‘How to Drown a Blondie’ was the beginning of a different kind of discursive process. Aesthetics involves a process of giving attention to the forms of creativity. In the case of writing by young people like Lucy what matters is a form of attentiveness to the ‘other’ in culture. Hull et al. (2010) described this process as ‘engaged cosmopolitanism’. This recognizes how moral positions can be taken up by diverse cultures and in diverse modalities. Hull et al. (2010) take the idea of cosmopolitanism from Appiah (2006) but apply this concept to the engaged practices of youth who communicate diverse perspectives in multimodal texts. The process of making texts that incorporate other perspectives is itself significant and requires attention. Stornaiuolo (2014) described how, cosmopolitan literacies can function as key building blocks in worldmaking, intertwining the multimodal and the creative with the ethical as people imagine themselves in relation to others and the world.

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This function of cosmopolitanism included an engagement with the outside world as well as an aesthetic and moral purpose. It is this understanding that Hull and Nelson (2009) bring to their definition of aesthetics as a moral as well as literary category. This complex listening is needed to make sense of Lucy’s story. As Homi Bhabha wrote, ‘The cave of making can be a dark and desperate place’ (2009: ix). But Lucy, in her case, had no choice in the matter. Making Lucy’s aesthetic choices significant also signals a process of reversal within the hierarchies of literary texts. While the literary tends to be associated with published work, here a story produced by a 12-year old can become significant through analysis and interpretation. These processes of reversal map a new language of aesthetics, not only of the everyday, but also of the politically and morally charged.

5

Narrative

Stories are valuable. On Thursday I went to Rawmarsh youth centre, in Rosehill Park to plan a session with my youth worker friend Marcus. We sat in the office, which we thought was probably haunted as a ghost had banged on the ceiling the week before. Marcus asked us to tell a story. At the beginning we knew nothing about the story we were going to tell. We didn’t know if the person was a girl or boy, how old the person was, who the person’s friend was and so on. By the end, the person had a life, a friend, and they breathed life into our world in the youth centre. (From, ‘Valuing Stories: the space of unknowing’, on Storying Sheffield www.storyingsheffield.com) I began my research career as an ethnographer in homes. Once every other week, I would visit a home, where I would be made welcome as a visitor. I was interested in the home literacy practices of children and families. As I built up the visits over time, I began to hear stories, of a grandfather who built the trains in India, of chickens that the 5-year old would chase when he visited his grandparents in Turkey, of particular heroes or stories of the past. These stories were often linked to particular objects – a model engine, a tissue paper bird or a model of a super hero (Pahl 2004). I was interested in how the objects somehow ‘held’ the stories and kept them within the home space, to be told and retold until they could be, in Hymes’ words, ‘a tale told by others’ that could be handed down (1996: 118). I became interested in everyday objects and stories in homes and how they could potentially be used within museum exhibitions. Working with a curator, Andrew Pollard and an artist, Zahir Rafiq, we collaborated with a group of families to co-curate an exhibition from their home objects which was then turned into a website. The exhibition described the experiences of the families

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through objects and stories. The exhibition related tales of migration and experiences found in British Asian family life, and was divided into key themes that emerged through long discussions and interviews with family members: gold, textiles, travel, toys, life in Rotherham, weddings. The stories and project can be seen here: http://www.everyobjecttellsastory.org.uk (see also Pahl and Pollard 2010; Pahl et al. 2009). The family members brought their objects to the exhibition and placed them in glass cabinets, representing their conceptions of what mattered to them and the things that were important to them. What struck me about that exhibition was that the objects the family members wanted to put in the exhibition were in the most part, not worth anything in monetary value – a brass peacock picked up at a school fair or a pair of goldsprayed elephants. These elephants were polystyrene and essentially worthless but they meant a lot as they came with a story about gold and its enduring value (Pahl and Rowsell 2010). The story, not the object was valuable. The person telling the story has the knowledge and the understanding of what they are telling and why. They own the knowledge about the story. Vasudevan (2011) writes that when we listen to a story, which is a work of art, it can change us, and it is in that process of change that we experience unknowing, which for the purpose of listening to stories is the best space to be in. The space of unknowing is filled with people’s stories. Stories are both linked to identities and individual experience but also are part of collective identities, linking us to wider, ‘communally shared, practices of sense-making and interpretation’ (Bamberg 2007: 3). The crafted intertwining of individual stories with communities is a very particular kind of storytelling. It is co-produced but woven with the skein of individual identities, trajectories and passions. The story becomes like a fabric, or ‘cloth woven with stories told’ – a quotation from the Storying Sheffield website (http://www.storyingsheffield.com/). This practice of weaving can create unusual patterns as well as disjunctures across time and space that then lead to new kinds of knowledge and understanding. I explored the intersections between individual storytellers, community histories and the process of telling a story from young people’s perspectives. This required a vision that understood narrative both as closely connected to place and intergenerational history and transformed in the moment of telling by the individual. I therefore conceptualized narrative as something larger in which stories nestle as a smaller, more shaped practice of telling. A narrative

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approach to life means paying attention to stories as they emerge in everyday contexts. Narratives signal belonging and ground people in local spaces (Shuman 2007). Stories are spatially located and are located ‘on the side of the road’ which is a ‘dense discursive language of encounter’ (Stewart 1996: 32). I also understand narrative to be multimodal and consider that it is no longer possible to see oral storytelling, when taken together with writing, gesture and drawing, as separate, but rather, as an organized ensemble of representational resources (Blommaert 2013; Maybin 2013). By recognizing that narrative is part of a much broader process of meaning making, its links to the world through illustrations, expressions, gesture and the experience of telling can be unfolded. Narratives are relational structures that sit within wider conceptual framings and spaces. Stories come alive through communicative processes. These stories are always embodied within communicative practices that are multimodal, that is, gestural, visual, or oral as well as written (Langellier and Peterson 2007). Stories can be told and retold and passed around as artefacts to be called upon in different circumstances (Hymes 1996). Narratives organize lived experience into something that makes it possible to share. Narrative offers a way of seeing life through others’ perspectives and it is both a human way of understanding the world and a space to learn. ‘In short, it’s good to think in stories too’ (Bloch 2006 [1969]: 6). Stories offer chinks of light, spaces of hope. Stories illuminate and reconfigure the world in new ways. They are also always in process and are shaped by social practice (Bansel 2013). Narratives are handed round and crafted across time and space and between people. They are woven and co-constructed, between people, in a process of layering and weaving individual and shared experience. By exploring story-making as a process it becomes possible to perceive the layered threads that make up a story, representing collective identities in time and space. Multimodal semiotic resources are drawn upon to create stories. Telling a story involves gesture and intonation. I explore shared stories, those that intertwine and are co-constructed within talk. This kind of patterning becomes a form of orchestration which then choreographs the talk (Davies 2005). The experience of co-producing research in communities also lies in the process of telling stories and the shared memories and imagined futures that come together in the moment. Everyday language is shaped through tellings and retellings into stories that move from small to longer stretches of narrative, and these are shaped in interaction

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(Georgakopoulou 2007). Linguistic repertoires that include everyday language, dialect and multimodal semiotic resources are drawn upon to make meaning in storytelling practices (Snell 2013). The orchestration of these repertoires becomes layered and sedimented over time (Rowsell and Pahl 2007). These sedimentation processes are recursive and spiral back so that a familiar story might return and be remembered after many years (Ricoeur 1980). Stories can become visions of a better imagined future, or they can exclude and deny people authoring and agency. In the last chapter, the story told by Lucy was one of exclusion, as the chilly fate of the blond girl is described through the eyes of her revengeful best friend. Love stories or fairy stories construct women as evil, the other or revengeful. Helen Cixous saw stories as spaces of exclusion as well as potential: And once again upon a time, it is the same story repeating woman’s destiny in love across the centuries with the cruel hoax of its plot. And each story, each myth says to her: ‘There is no place for your desire in our affairs of State’ Love is a threshold business. (Cixous and Clement 1986 [1975]: 67)

The space of stories becomes re-visioned and re-claimed by Cixous as she tells her own story: I have gone back and forth in vain through the ages and through the stories within my reach, yet find no woman into whom I can slip. (p. 77)

While stories give life to spaces, they can also deny agency and cut people off from their storying process. Cixous’s solution was to embrace the Other in stories, the complexity of experience, and it is through the telling of the story, and in writing, that she finds her voice. The experience of telling and of writing is the process of de-censorship, of making the body heard. I focus particularly on girls’ writing, storytelling and interactions, as in that process, narratives emerge that can begin to challenge dominant discourses of identity and the self. I follow the storying practices of Savannah, Taylor, Coral, Chloe, Ella, Georgia, Lucy and Tanya, all girls. Embodied experience, which is lived within routines, between parents, grandparents, everyday practices and domestic spaces, could then breathe life into stories. These stories transformed everyday practice and made new possible pathways for everyday living. Girls live in marginal spaces. Their narratives are shaped by popular cultural constructions of desire and success. The stories discussed here confronted the

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way in which life is not only about finding a place in the world (the focus of the ‘Dolphin School’ Story) but also about creating an alternative world for reconciliation across the divides of life and death (as in Reunion). Loss and imaginary spaces such as the world evoked in Finding Nemo (implicitly referred to in the Dolphin School Story) can become repurposed and placed in the live imaginary that is the everyday. The stories can then become points of departure for imagining other scenarios. Like the heroines in Twilight, explored by Lucy in the previous chapter, these stories can provide powerful sites for possible reversal of gender positions. Instead, they placed these girls in the position of the ethnographer, the explorer or the agent in the narrative (Anatol 2011). They became sites for hope, providing tiny chinks of light, just as in the dolphin school the dolphins peeped through the hill where they slept, then woke up and lined up for school. The stories were layered within material objects in shoe boxes, in the case of the Dolphin School and images were used, in the case of Reunion, to visualize the story. The process of braiding meaning was not only contested but also led to a different kind of story, one that included experience that was both shared and individual. The contestations between the girls were often heated. Discussion and debate accompanied some sections of their narratives. The girls not only brought in their own history, but also engaged with cultures overheard, encountered, remade and co-constructed (Finders 1997). The making of the story involved an active making of culture. This concept of culture ‘as a verb’ (Street 1993b) made the girls agentive. It was then possible to understand how their stories remade culture and engaged with particular discourses and cultural narratives. Many of their stories focused on the domestic lives of girls and women. The crafting of the narratives also became a discussion about whose versions of these cultural narratives would dominate. Underlying these processes of contestation lay the complex history of the girls’ friendship with each other. The story-making process required them to provide information but dispute parts of the story they did not agree with. The language used to frame the thread of the story was also a source of debate. For example, Chloe inserted a more ‘everyday’ discourse into Reunion, of the physical mechanics of cardboard boxes, of women cleaning out the house, whereas the other two girls used more literary tropes such as ‘red checkered dresses’. In the Dolphin Story, while one girl thought the story was about

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home, and babies, another transposed the story to the world of school and made the mother the teacher. These contested narratives addressed issues of whose culture mattered and why. They engaged with articulations of class and identity in narrative talk. While some of the girls used the story to evoke particular worlds of schools and specific images (red checkered dresses), others inserted narratives from home (cleaning out the house, the daddy’s died). These narratives also conferred respectability on particular characters in the stories over others, signalling the girls’ interest in conforming and upholding ideal tropes of beauty (Skeggs 2004). The research space was storied and embodied. I experienced walking through the spaces where the stories were told. In Rawmarsh, I stared down from the hill where people watched the bombs being dropped on Sheffield in World War II (see Figure 5.1). In Barnsley I sat with the children and listened to their stories of animals and daily life. This embodied knowledge of a space (Mauthner and Doucet 2008) was experienced and then storied. It was recorded in oral talk, in my field notes and within discussions I later had with the youth workers and teachers I worked with. These stories fed our discussions and provided a shared epistemological space of practice. Through the shared narratives of the storytellers, narrative was woven and co-constructed, between young people, through shared and differing experiences.

Figure 5.1  View from Rawmarsh Hill of Sheffield. Photo by Steve Pool.

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Shared stories I spent 2 years (from 2006 to 2007) in a Year 2 classroom in a school in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, watching children make stuff using shoeboxes. The children were between 6 and 7 years old. The teacher was interested in collaborative talk and everyday creativity. I was particularly interested in the intersection between storytelling and multimodality and the materialization of talk into created objects (Pahl 2009, 2011). This process involved the telling of stories. I explored the sedimentations of those stories into multimodal artefacts (Rowsell and Pahl 2007). The project was funded by a UK-wide programme called Creative Partnerships which at that time supported arts activities in schools. A group of artists, called Heads Together, had worked in the school for 2 years previously and the initial research was about finding out what had happened within the school and what the teachers thought of the projects. I was also interested in the children’s perspectives and how they experienced the project. The focus of the research was on ways in which creativity could be fostered in the classroom and how the teacher could support collaborative talk. Together, the teacher and I explored this question, recording children’s talk and observing the ways in which they interacted with activities. The teacher set up an activity in which the children would choose different environments

Figure 5.2  Sitting with the children. Photo by one of the children with my camera.

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from the natural world, such as the desert, the ocean or the forest, and from researching these environments, create their own environments, using shoe boxes. They would work in small groups of three over a period of several weeks to produce an environment, such as the desert, the ocean or the jungle, peopled with animals. I watched this happen over 2 years. In the first year we focused on the activity as a site for collaboration, and in the second year we reflected on the activity as a site for creativity and storytelling. Three girls, Savannah, Taylor and Coral, worked on a box which they decorated and filled with sea creatures, supposed to represent the ocean. This environment was peopled with these creatures. The making of the box precipitated a discussion of the relationship between these sea creatures and their ‘home’. As it took shape, the creatures within it became animated by the children. In the dialogue below the process can be heard in the discussions. Savannah and Taylor were working out where the dolphins would go in their box environment. They were building up a hill in the corner of the box, using masking tape, and painting over it. The discussions became focused on the purpose of the box for different activities. At one point in the narrative, Savannah insists that the dolphins sleep in the little corner: Savannah: We could put the dolphins we could put the dolphins. Taylor: we could put the light in there because it makes it light Savannah: Because the fish will swim into there anyway (higher pitch) Taylor: no they could swim, the dolphins could be peeping through there couldn’t they (pause). Its gonna have to be ripped a bit like that, Savannah: No the dolphins sleep there, Taylor, it can’t be like that, Taylor: Yes that’s where the dolphins sleep. (Recorded interaction 13. 03. 07)

The hill was transformed into a place where the fish can swim into, a bit like an aquarium. The rip in the hill enabled a discussion about the possibility for the hill to act as a bedroom, out of which the dolphins could be peeping through. After some discussion with Savannah who was keen to make the hill a bedroom for the dolphins, Taylor conceded the point, while describing the dolphins as ‘peeping through’ much as girls peep through curtains when they wake up in the morning. As the vision emerges in the taped discussion, aspects of the box came alive. Here Savannah and Taylor are talking about how they have transformed the box into a school:

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Figure 5.3  Finished box. Photo taken by Kate Pahl.

Taylor: and we have made a bit of a school up haven’t we? Savannah: yeah well the school we should have made it up by now but we are going to make it now we are going to make it up over there. (Tape 13.03.07)

The talk between the girls began to emerge in relation to the final box, as a place of play, where the dolphins slept and also, a school. At the end of the project, I invited the girls to discuss the box with me. This discussion took place in a quiet moment during break time. Most of the information was volunteered, with a very small amount of initial questioning from me. The girls began a story that then described the complexities of the meanings within the box environment. All three were present at this discussion  – whereas the earlier discussions had involved just Taylor and Savannah, being in the middle stages of the project, Coral had been ill, but was now back, and her words often echoed the narrative from Savannah and Taylor: Kate: Are you the ones that had a dolphin school? Girls: yeah! A dolphin school Coral: Because the mummy is going to take the baby to school Kate: I love this

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Taylor: Yes, that’s right, its really close. Because it only lives down here. (pause) We did the jellyfish, er one’s the sister, one’s the brother, one’s the baby and one’s the mum Coral: that’s the baby, Taylor: yeah and that’s the sister and that’s the brother and that’s the other big sister. (Recorded discussion 17. 04. 07 opening section lines 21–48)

This opening discussion referred to a family, including a sister, a brother, a baby and a mum, all described as residing in the box. The girls were prepared to view the dolphin school in relation to the different sea creatures that were within the box: Taylor: Because the dolphins are going first and then they are all going different ways Savannah: and then the jellyfish, then, Taylor: then the starfish Savannah: No then, jellyfish, oct . . . er sea turtle, jell . . . er starfish

But these creatures also have human characteristics and traumas: Coral: We did ‘em all in different places so then one can be wi’ each baby Kate: I love this. This is just brilliant. What I love is that you have got these children. And these families you have got the starfish family and the dolphins Savannah: the daddy’s died (Taped discussion 17.04.07 discussion lines 65–76)

Savannah’s comment that the daddy’s died (this held echoes of the film Finding Nemo which also involves an absent parent and a trauma of loss) comes in at the end of a long discussion as to which animal pairs off with which offspring. Each of the animals is to go in line, and each has its own offspring attached. Savannah was uncertain as to which of the animals goes first. The children spent a lot time considering the way in which the animals were to be ordered. The key determinate for the girls’ decision to make their box environment a dolphin school was the material quality of the hill, here described as a rock, that enabled the action to take place: Taylor: We did the school because um we just wanted to make, well we decided that we wanted it to be a rock, but then we changed us mind to put it to a school because there’s a door (Recorded discussion 17.04.07 lines 107–110)

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The decision to make the rock into a door for the dolphins to emerge from then created the imaginary space of the dolphin school. The box remained stable as an ocean environment, but then had affordances for possible and actual stories to be told. It was described both as a home, where the dolphins sleep and the daddy dies, and as a school. The box was an instantiation of collaborative storytelling in which a number of possibilities were present. The box was a home, where you can sleep, and at the same time, the box was a school and the children described a world where the dolphins go to school and learn to read and write: Taylor: Um the big shells are for writing on and the little ones are for the pencils Kate: Oh for the pencils? Coral: 24 shells on there (starts counting 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13) Sound of coughing. Coral has been off sick. Coral: 1234 (counting) Savannah: /They don’t all go to school Taylor: Yeah? Savannah: The babies don’t. (Taped discussion 17.04.08 lines 93–101)

Here, the stories were threaded through with different ideas of what the focus is. While Taylor pursued the school idea, Savannah, whose initial vision involved the dolphins sleeping in the hill, continued to pursue the home theme of the babies, who obviously cannot go to school. Taylor provided the idea of shells used for paper and pencils and Savannah suggested an account of the family at home. Coral thought that the baby’s mummy was the teacher, thus linking both home and school. Their voices mingle in the co-created multimodal text. The box then carried both home and school meanings within it. The girls described their scenario to me while at the same time arguing about it: Savannah: That’s the playground you come in/ Coral: /One jellyfish is the teacher Savannah: no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, the dolphin is the teacher Coral: Yeah and that’s the baby’s mummy was the teacher (pause) because she weren’t. Taylor: Because she weren’t last Coral: I know

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Taylor: She was born first and then that then that then that then that then that then that then that then that then . . . that that that! (Taped discussion 17. 04. 07 lines 111–118) Conventions / indicates overlapping talk    indicates emphasis.

This final discussion, which came at the end of the dolphin school discussion, was a source of great pleasure for the girls, who listened to it over and over again, laughing at the interchange about whose turn it was to go first above. This piece of transcript also reflexively enacted the conundrum of shared storytelling; it addressed in a material form the problem of whose story and whose language becomes ‘the story’ within a group of three girls. The Dolphin School illustrated the potentialities of materiality for storytelling. The rip in the hill created a space for the girls to consider the dolphins sleeping within the hill, and from there a home narrative emerged. The intersections between material culture and story were complex, as the girls ripped a tiny piece of masking tape to create a chink to peep through, or lined up imagined animals in the playground, while placing them in their box in a different order. These complexities also recreated the way in which stories jostle in everyday spaces – not fully formed, but linked to place, space and material objects. In studying stories in everyday life, these jostlings can sometimes become invisible. Seeing stories as ‘in process’ creates opportunities to explore the ‘tellings, deferrals of tellings and refusals to tell’ that make up the bigger stories (Georgakopoulou 2007: 146). This lens can offer insights into the processes of telling, the allusions and contestations that make up a ‘meshwork’ (Ingold 2011) of practice. Stories give life to spaces, but they are also variegated and shifting, a mosaic of patterns that intersect with material culture and made objects.

Making stories from the everyday A few years later, I worked with another, older group of three girls, aged between 12 and 13, through a youth project that aimed to support young

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people’s confidence. I met regularly with the girls and worked with them over a period of 6 months. In this project, the girls began by telling me some ghost stories and then slowly over about 4 months, told a story about two twins, caught in the bombing in World War II in Sheffield. The story, called Reunion, was created with three girls, Ella, Chloe and Georgia, named as authors of the story, and a fourth girl, Dina (pseudonym), who only came on the first day, together with myself, Marcus Hurcombe, a youth worker, Steve Pool, an artist and Sam Rae who worked with me to transcribe and analyse the stories. Sam was a 2nd-year student in the English department at the University of Sheffield who worked on this project. I met weekly with the girls and we told stories. Some were recorded, some not. The girls wanted to tell ghost stories. However, real ghost stories were problematic and could not be recorded. The recorded stories were fictional, while the non-recorded stories were true stories of ghosts that had scared them in real life. Sometimes other people dropped in and told their ghost stories – a youth worker, Rachel, told stories of how her grandfather saw the ghosts standing between the people who were alive and a young father told the story of his baby’s death. Jenna, another youth worker, told stories of real ghosts she had experienced. One particular story became told and retold over the time of the project, and this became the story that was called Reunion by the girls. The story concerned the experience of 5-year-old girl twins, brought up in Sheffield in World War II, who loved to play outside. One day, during a bombing raid, they wandered into an abandoned warehouse. The bombs fell on the warehouse and the twins were killed. In the story, the twins continue to live inside cardboard boxes in this warehouse as ghosts. A young girl, Maria, who was interested in seeing what was inside the warehouse, finds them 50 years later. She is scared, but intrigued. The twins tell her their story and ask to be reunited with their mother. With the help of Maria’s Nanan (her grandmother) and an Ouija board, this happens and the twins and their mother are reunited in the spirit world. The story was first told in April, with myself, Marcus, Chloe, Ella, Georgia and a fourth girl, Dina, present. At that very first meeting the salient aspects of the story, the warehouse, World War II, the girls and their death, and the character of Maria came together within the group. The girls then retold this

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story to Steve Pool and myself. This was a month later. Here Georgia begins to tell the story to me: Georgia: As the area’s sirens . . . as the area’s sirens wailed, two girls were seen sneaking out of the door. They went into the back garden and started playing, screaming, running and laughing. Kate: What were they wearing? And what did they look like? Georgia: Their red checkered – their matching red checkered dresses um, lifted up as they twirled around in the wind, but their hair went – their hair was neatly plaited into two plaits with red checkered ribbon at the ends matching their dress. They didn’t have a jacket or any shoes on. (Transcription May 2012)

The process of making the story happen was co-produced. The three girls discussed, argued and shaped the story through interaction. By transcribing the recordings of the girls telling the story, Sam Rae, research assistant, was able to link specific aspects of the story with particular individuals as he transcribed the storytelling as it unfolded. Over a period of time the story emerged. Some aspects of the story came later, while some were developed early on. At the end of the process, Chloe illustrated the story. Here, I consider storytelling as a process of orchestration – of oral, visual and collaboratively constructed semiotic resources. The girls’ co-construction of the story required constant collaboration. Some of this involved disputation and discussion. The process involved a large amount of negotiation, which happened as the narrative was emerging. Sometimes, this was resolved, sometimes not. The world of the story became the text-world where the girls negotiated these processes of reconciliation as well as argument. The girls constructed the text-world both as individuals and as collaborators.1 There were instances of ‘full’ collaboration: Steve: When did they plait it? Ella: Before they went out to play. Georgia: That morning. Chloe: After the bath. (Transcription May 2012)

There were also many individual contributions. The member of the group who contributed story details the most often was Georgia, who used her turns in the performance to create detail. Georgia was an avid reader and

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many of her expressions drew on her reading (‘As the area’s sirens wailed, two girls were seen sneaking out the door’). Georgia contributed the detail of the twins’ appearance, as well as much of the wartime scene and milieu. Ella’s contributions were also included in the story but slightly less dramatically than Georgia’s. She primarily added smaller details and overtly approved Georgia’s contributions while sometimes questioning Chloe’s. Chloe typically disputed the details provided by Ella and Georgia, either by contributing ‘joke’ details, such as naming the twins’ pig ‘Porky’, or by directly questioning some of the narrative logics established by Ella and Georgia, as here: Ella: It was the first time the siren went off. Chloe: Yeah if it had been the first time the woman, the air raid woman, would have gone round and warned everyone, and then their mum would’ve stayed up. Ella: Not really. ... Chloe: To make sure – it could be halfway through the war, when everyone like knows what they’re supposed to do when the air raid shelter –

Sam Rae described in his analysis how the girls demonstrated here a concern for historical accuracy that, because none were expert historians, was based mainly on their relationships with each other. They argued between each other about what the ‘logic’ of World War II was, with Chloe providing a vivid depiction of the air raid women going round to warn people and then grounding this in a specific time to make sense of her narrative. The discussions and disputes between the girls also led to the co-constructions of the story as it unfolded. The details selected by the girls demonstrated an adherence to received literary expressions that related not only to ghost stories but also to a feminine beauty ideal and ‘childish innocence’. Georgia selected for the wartime twins to wear ‘matching red checkered dresses’ with ‘hair neatly plaited into two plaits with red checkered ribbon at the ends matching their dress’. The twins were only differentiated by ‘a brown spot which like a love heart shape’ on one’s cheek. This level of neatness and ‘perfection’ was contrasted with the twins’ poverty; they ‘were lucky to have one [bath] every week’. They had no shoes. This focus on ‘perfection’ could be read as connoting a sense of structure and ‘kept-togetherness’ in a difficult environment, in this case the harsh

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environment of World War II when Sheffield was badly bombed. The girls used specific linguistic markers in order to create resilience in this context. The characters possessed a standard that does not slip, in the story, they act as they ‘should’. The twins were not materially well off, sharing a tin bath and were sometimes cold: And that bath had been the only (shared) bath they’d had that week – their mum couldn’t afford any more. They were lucky to have one every week, in their mum’s tiny tin bath, and sometimes they were cold. (Reunion, opening lines)

Chloe often supplied particular linguistic details that signalled particular kinds of language. Here is her description of the twin’s relationship early on in the story: Steve: Were they the best of friends? Chloe: Sometimes. Ella: They were skipping round holding hands. Chloe: Bezzies (laughs). (From transcript May 2012)

Chloe’s use of the colloquial ‘bezzies’ contrasts with Ella’s more poetic expression, ‘skipping round holding hands’. Chloe located her descriptions within a closely observed everyday. When a young girl, Maria, meets the twins, in an abandoned warehouse, Chloe demonstrated a capacity for imaginative, specific description: Chloe: She hears laughter, like little girl laughter. And she like went up box lid just like one- when they open like two ways, like that, one of em’s short and made like a bang, but um she’d been able to like, she’d seen people (laughs at something the other girls said) she’d seen people that nobody else had seen before because they were ghosts, but she never told anybody cos she didn’t want like people to think that she were weird and everything, so she thought that she might see some more ghosts if she carried on looking. (Transcription May 2012)

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Figure 5.4  Cardboard boxes drawn by Chloe.

Chloe here described the cardboard boxes within which the girls hid. She also evoked the exact sensation, both the sounds and the physical experience, of opening a cardboard box. This was the most specific piece of everyday visual imagery in the entire group narrative. Chloe’s images, drawn to accompany the story, were similarly specific. The drawn image, portrayed above, pays attention to the lids that go with cardboard boxes and portray them resting one on top of the other. The box flaps are shown in this image, with the ghost twins sitting inside one of the boxes. Here the multimodal semiotic resources amplify the original description given by Chloe. As her words accompanied the image, this made the depiction more powerful. When Sam analysed Chloe’s contributions, he found that these were more ‘everyday’ elements of the story that made it grounded in contemporary realities. For example, here is Chloe, ending the story: Chloe: And then Maria went to- uh- she saw her Nanan, like when she were cleaning out- well her gran, when she were cleaning out the house. She saw her gran and her gran told her that where the girls’ mum were, Ella: Because if she said everything were okay Chloe (overlapping): And she told her that everything were alright and everything, and that she were with- she were reunited with her husband, and so Maria told the girls where their mum were, and she saw the- and

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she heard like the, um, door, the warehouse doors opening and then slam shut, and she was left alone in the darkness in the girls were never heard of again. (Transcription May 2012)

Chloe’s ‘real’ contributions at the end of the story contained several ‘present’ elements that were located within the everyday, such as calling the girls’ grandmother ‘Nanan’, and an awareness of everyday tasks (‘cleaning out the house’). In Chloe’s illustrations the Nanan in the story is shown first lying down on a couch, while Maria tells her mother the story of the twins, and then an empty bed signified her death. ‘Nanan’ was a very specific word for grandmother that was particularly associated with the area. When I visited the local school, the deputy head teacher, herself a Rawmarsh girl, burst into tears when she read that word. She said it located the story within the space of Rawmarsh and it was her word for her grandmother. While I also heard the word in Sheffield, it had resonances and echoes within the space where it was used. The story, as it was finally agreed upon, relied upon the detail of the Nanan finding the twins’ mother through the aid of an Ouija board and then placing the clue to where their mother was in a drawer, which Maria found once her Nanan had died. The Ouija board was a detail supplied by the fourth member of

Figure 5.5  Empty bed. Image drawn by Chloe.

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the group, Dina, who worked out how to bring the girls together with their mother: Dina: They went to a psychic to find out the name of the girls were. So they decided to go to the place to do a Ouija with some of their friends. She had been looking for them for the last 49 years because she got killed in a bomb herself the year after and she can’t rest in peace until she finds them. (Transcription April 2012)

Chloe remembered this and used this detail to tell the last part of the story. In this way, Chloe let real ghosts into her story as well as fictional ones. Georgia and Ella were more cautious about this. I observed that Georgia

Figure 5.6  Ouija board. Image drawn by Chloe.

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and Ella, in particular, were nervous of real ghosts. The girls wove their different embodied experiences together where possible, but these differences sometimes created disjunctions. These disjunctions manifested themselves in disputes between the girls, as well as collaborations. Ghost stories are often manifest at times of acute economic crisis when banking systems went awry and finance was found to be spectral, argued Smith (2010). Their manifestation also is linked to the traces of previous industrial realities, in this case the hidden mining industry in Rawmarsh (Bright 2012). Bright writes about very similar landscapes in Derbyshire where hope had retreated in the face of the closure of the mines: Post-industrial locations by this account are sites ‘in which the visible and the invisible, the material and the immaterial, intersect’, where ‘ghosts often barely present in the traces they left, stimulate the construction and transmission of stories which are not merely inarticulate but are suffused with affect’ (Edensor 2005: 163). In such places, traces remain of  ‘things [that] might be otherwise . . . elements of the past [that] might have conspired to forge an alternative present’ (Edensor 2005: 141, my emphasis). They are haunted, that is, by what Bloch called spuren [traces] of hope. (Bloch 1969; Bright 2012: 319)

The girls’ story combined different historical periods including World War II, as well as the contemporary experience of living on benefits. For example, details such as needing to survive on benefits were used. Marcus, the youth worker, supplied this part of the story back in April: Marcus: Fifty years later on a cool cold night a young girl noticed a light in the warehouse. She was late home for tea. Her name was Maria. She peeped in, it was full of boxes. She thought she might find something as Maria didn’t have much money. She walked in to look around because Maria didn’t have much money. She looked in, a grey shadowy figure slowly slipped across the walls. (Transcription April 2012)

Marcus described a world of sadness that echoed a similar time of fear in World War II when the girls in the story were bombed. The people of Rawmarsh, where the girls lived, would have watched the devastating bombs as they fell upon Sheffield over 60 years ago. Chloe mentioned previously that her grandmother had written about this experience in a book that was shared with

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Figure 5.7  Warehouse drawn by Chloe.

her family. Marcus was drawing on his personal experience of the community we worked in. At the time of writing he was dealing with increased poverty as benefits were withdrawn and work was scarce in that community. The use of everyday language by Chloe provided a link to intergenerational stories and practices. We observed that these details, together with the word ‘Nanan’, the Ouija board and the specific everyday details provided in the main by Chloe, imbued this story with embodied experiences and intergenerational resonance. Not only is Reunion both about remembering and nostalgia but it is also a chink of light, hope for a reunion in another world. The girls wove together intergenerational narratives with contemporary realities. The process of listening and being in a ‘space of unknowing’ (Vasudevan 2011) to hear these texts encouraged a ‘safe space’ from which to explore difficult and perplexing issues such as poverty, fear, ghosts and death. Shared stories were spaces of complex contestation over how life, as a source of narrative, could be brought in to illuminate that story. In Carolyn Steadman’s book The Tidy House, three girls, Carla, Melissa and Lindie, write a story about the lives of two couples and their children (1982). The story, like Coral, Taylor and Savannah’s story described above, was concerned with domestic life, the complexity of babies who grew up and domestic experience. Like Coral, Taylor and Savannah, and Chloe, Ella and

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Taylor, the three narrators were girls whose lives were constructed within a specific, boundaried, domestic space, and also, all of them explored these spaces within the narratives. In these narratives, women cleaned out the house, babies stayed at home, and grandparents, parents and teachers provided structure and shape to domestic lives, particularly women. In these stories, these girls were narrating the self within narrative (Skeggs 2004; Steadman 1982). There were many connecting threads across the stories I collected in the South Yorkshire area between 2006 and 2012. Many of the stories concerned animals. In the first year of the Barnsley research, I was struck by the way animals, particularly rabbits, featured in stories. Here I was talking to two girls about a project where they took photographs of their favourite toys and animals and turned them into pictures: Kate: Oh you have remembered now! What were your favourite toys and animals? Karen: Mine were, I have got two rabbits, and I took one of when my dad was in hospital because he went to have an operation on his back, and I took one of me mum and dad, and (unclear) took one of me rabbits.

These animals often died: Karen: I did not have my actual rabbits, but one of rabbits’ valentines day, they died Kate: Was it a long time ago? Karen: No this valentines day. Kate: Oh no I am sorry. Oh dear. Karen: We buried it in the garden and stuff he was an elf rabbit and the other one was a giant rabbit he was about that big. (Discussion recorded March 2006)

These stories became narratives of loss, of the traces of things in the past and of intergenerational mysteries and experiences. Inanimate objects were imbued with magical powers. Here is a story Georgia told one day in the park to Marcus, Chloe and Ella: There was once a stool and it was a very hard stool and it had lots of gold engraved in it and like, swirly patterns and there were a man called Henry and every morning he put his pajamas on the stool and then he went to work all day and then when he got back he had stripy pajamas the stripes always

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changed colour when he got back from work. One day he had a robbery in his house and they smashed the stool and took his pajamas and he died the next day as the stool was giving him power to live. He was 103 years old. (Story recording May 2012)

Georgia’s story evoked a process of making magic. She was able to evoke the re-enchantment of the everyday. The everyday (going to work, stripy pajamas) intersects with the ‘bad’ everyday (robbery) but then a magical property, the magic stool creates a new layer to the story. The stool is aesthetically resonant with swirly patterns and gold. The man turns out to be able to live for ever, but then dies as a result of the loss of the stool. Georgia’s story once again turns on death, loss and transformation. Like Reunion it plays with what happens when you die and tries to wrest control of death into the hands of the storyteller. In her story, the stool defeats death, while in Reunion the Nanan creates a space in the ‘other’ world for the twins to be reunited with their Mother. Ghost stories in particular create connections between abstract spaces and real life. They intersect between the ‘other’ and the self, but also are places to think about identity and change in communities (Smith 2010). The poetics of Georgia’s story shows how ‘identities seem to grow immanent in things’ (Stewart 1996: 44). Objects as well as ghosts create echoes and traces in the landscape. Abandoned warehouses, as well as mines, and steelworks tell of past ruins within the coalfields (Edensor 2005). Ghost stories call up not only the past but also the resonances and traces within communities. Bright (2012) describes how the hauntings of past experiences, in the case of Rawmarsh, the mining heritage that is now closed down, echo in communities. When listening to ghost stories in Rawmarsh I was sometimes aware that the landscape leaked ghosts. Ghosts could be found in abandoned warehouses, behind doors or in a shelter. The story below builds up a ghostly atmosphere through the swinging door of the caravan and then describes an actual sound of footsteps that call up ghosts. Georgia’s real ghost story My real one is I went to the field There is like two parts of And on the top part we ride him and everything And all the horses were there

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And next to this is this massive garden and There is this caravan in it I saw a caravan door shut I looked over and it shut and then it shut again And I saw it shut again in a split second I thought it was probably nothing And then when it opened it makes a creaking noise Because it was quite an old caravan and I looked over again And it were creaking open And so I went to the bottom of the field And my mum and my sister were in the tack room getting the food ready This was a warehouse thing like a shelter And you can’t go in it or anything like that It was all tied up so you can’t get in And I heard footsteps And it scared me. (Story tapes May 2012)

Georgia’s story re-enacts the fear in the everyday that lies alongside ‘life’ as lived. When working as an ethnographer in Rawmarsh, the presence of ghosts was tangible. Ghosts connect you to a different world. The girls also differentiated between ‘real’ ghost stories and those made up. The ‘real’ stories were told with a different timbre, soft and somehow authoritative. These stories continued to circulate long after the first telling. One day, outside the house where the youth centre was housed, on Marcus’s prompting, Jenna told this story to the girls: Jenna: I used to work on a Saturday doing a Saturday club and we used to keep all us resources up in the attic and me and me friend Lynsey used to run the club and I walked up the stairs wi’ all the stuff and she were locking doors and meeting me up there and I heard some footsteps coming upstairs and I turned round and I said thanks can you just help me with this and there was nobody there and so I went – quickly ran downstairs she was still downstairs locking up looking for my friend Lynsey and I said ‘did you just come into the attic’ and she said ‘no’ we searched the building and there was nobody else inside. (Recording October 2012)

The ghost was supposed to be a servant girl who lived in the attic when the house was a grant house in the park. This story was told and retold and became

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part of the fabric of the building. One quiet afternoon, we heard a bang on the ceiling where the ghost was supposed to be while we were talking in the office downstairs. Life, stories and the narrative of the ghost all intersected. In the Rawmarsh stories, ghosts became agents of disruption and change. This meant that people had to take account of 13-year-old girls and Nanan’s had power in the community. People tell stories, says Stewart to ‘leave a trace’ even when the traces leads to a ghost (Stewart 1996: 58).

Conclusion In this chapter I have discussed narratives by girls. They have been concerned with domestic life and lining up, the re-enchantment of the everyday, ghosts, the past, grandparents, animals and fear. Many of the stories refer to presences that are there but invisible to others. Most of the girls came from backgrounds that would have identified as being from the skilled working class, being grandchildren of miners, steel workers – trained and skilled people. Many of their jobs went in the 1980s due to the closures of the mines and steel industry. Angela McRobbie talked about working-class girls as ‘present but invisible’ (2000: 14). I observed that at the time of doing the ethnography within Rawmarsh there was a slow leakage of women from public spaces. The Cameron government’s cuts had started to get worse and teaching assistants, playworkers, nursery nurses, casual youth workers and public sector workers were being made redundant very fast. At one point (May 2011) I walked through a floor of the council offices and thought everyone was at lunch. The room had normally been full of women, working. I was told all of the women on that floor had lost their jobs. The areas where I was doing the fieldwork carried the echoes and traces of the mines that had been closed down in the mid-1980s. Structures that had kept communities stable and safe were receding. One of the aspects of growing up in these communities was not feeling safe. On a number of occasions when meeting Chloe, Ella and Taylor I got a phone call to say the girls were in the park but too scared to go into the youth centre as there were menacing boys outside. Working with young girls in a nearby youth centre revealed that safety was their key concern. At the end of the project, the youth centre in the park was closed down because of the cuts.

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The academic literature on girls addresses this landscape of silences and dissonances. McRobbie (2000) suggested that working-class women’s cultures remain an unexplored area within contemporary accounts of sub culture. Walkerdine et al. (2001) critiqued the neo-liberal discourses that suggest that working-class girls are somehow to blame for their inability to move out of their class position into further and higher education. Skeggs (2004) described how class is produced through cultural tropes and forms, and also the extremely limiting tropes that accompany media accounts of working-class girls, such as the ‘Essex girl’ stereotype. Steadman (1982) argued that working-class girls’ writing was rarely made visible. Her argument was a small piece of evidence, an example of how, people can, without the benefit of theory of the expectations of others, critically confront the way things are, and dimly imagine, out of those circumstances, the way they might be. (1982: 157)

Stories create representational spaces that both enact and produce narratives of class and identification. They are situated in time and space but also produce meanings that are both stable and open to change (Bansel 2013). Returning to the themes outlined at the beginning of the chapter, stories are produced in a shared collective space of practice. They can spark a process of imagining better futures, in an, ‘as if ’ space of practice. They can also refer to hidden pasts, where things might have been, but now were not. For girls, stories can provide an opportunity to create scripts of what might have been and what is ‘not yet’ as well as re-imagine the present. Stories are imbued with emotion and longing. In the story of Reunion, the twins longed to be with their mother. The babies in the Dolphin School stayed at home, but looked to a future of lining up and going to school. The process of growing up is echoed in these stories. The stories are also oppositional and could develop alternative positions from which to view the world. They included moments of resistance as well as resilience. The Nanan helped the girls reunite the twins with their mother in another world. The Dolphin School mother was a single parent, as the daddy died. In these narratives women and girls were resourceful and able to create active spaces of creative resistance and resilience. I noticed as I was collecting the data that these girls were in the main, invisible within mainstream cultural spaces. They were ‘othered’ within particular contexts, including television and

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magazines, but rarely heard seriously. Their emphasis on ghostly traces and life beyond death signalled an awareness of their invisibility within the landscapes where they grew up. Agency lay in the Ouija board, in the discovery of an abandoned warehouse by Maria, in the domestic arrangements of the mother who became a teacher in the Dolphin School. Ghosts were a pivotal space to describe this agency. The story of the little servant girl, of a similar age to Chloe, Ella and Georgia, and told by Jenna, came to haunt us. At the end of the project, when we were talking about ghosts with Marcus, she banged on the ceiling to tell us that she was there.

6

Representation

I walk into the community centre. A plaque on the wall acknowledges the support of the coal fields trust as this is in an ex-mining area. One room has long tables around the edge, the other is stacked with chairs. A sound system is in one corner of the room. Through a door, and past a locked room, two toilets and a back room, unused at the moment, is a further empty room and a small kitchen. The place is regularly used by people playing bingo and local clubs, the caretaker tells us. His parents ran the place and were devoted to it and he opens it up for love. A plaque on another wall commemorates them. The youth service rent it on a Monday night. Marcus (the young worker) and I set out some snacks. Marcus is not sure anyone will come. ‘We will go and find the young people’ he says. Leaving a third youth worker behind, we go out through the winding alleyways to the estate and talk through a small central square, encircled by shops and find a group of young people huddled by the only open shop. They say they will come and we cheerfully say we are looking forward to seeing them. We walk around the estate and Marcus points out an area full of broken glass and rubbish behind the shop. This is where the young people meet when the youth club is closed. Back at the community centre, a few young people have arrived and are sitting chatting. Finally, Nana and her friends arrive. They talk to us about our project, but after we have talked, they move to the music centre. Nana starts up the music and the girls get in a line and start to dance, in a choreographed formation dance of her own making. At the same time, the young people change the lighting in the room and drew across a partition to make the room smaller and the lighting dimmer. They clustered around and the girls took up a central position in the room, with some of the boys sitting chatting on the outside. (Field notes February 2013)

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Literary texts, journalism, artistic practice and everyday communication are all ways of seeing and understanding the world. Representational practices frame the world in particular ways. They are ‘social imaginaries’ that construct and legitimize discourses in certain ways and these are storied (Taylor 2004). People also resist these discourses, and in lots of myriad complex ways, create narratives that run against them. These forms of resistance range from small, everyday stories of value and importance, to literature, film and music that create different kinds of representational spaces and alternative stories. The politics of representation shapes the way in which literacies are understood and recognized (Hamilton 2012). Many nuances of language, literacy and communicative practices remain unheard in a wider societal frame. Shirley Brice Heath (1983) recognized that there were different language and literacy practices associated with different communities. She conducted an ethnographic study of language and literacy practices in three different communities in the Carolina’s, in the United States. These communities included Trackton, an African American community, Roadville, a white working-class community and Maintown, a community of teachers’ families who lived in the town. Only the language and literacy practices of the Maintown children fitted within school and therefore those children did achieve within schooling, while the Trackton and Roadville children met unfamiliar literacy and language practices and did not do as well. Particular forms of literacy (picture books, print-based literacies) continued to be valorized over others. Many other kinds of literacy, such as those based on oral cultures, in different languages, multimodal and digital literacies and ephemeral literacies in homes and communities, are less recognized within ‘schooled’ spaces (Street and Street 1991). Home literacies can be diverse, multilingual, multimodal and linked to oral stories, poems, prayers, popular culture or religious and community forms of literacy. Eve Gregory explored how multilingual children come to mainstream schooling with a wealth of complex literacy experiences to share and blend with mainstream literacies (Gregory 2008). The literacies of the mosque were understood as being embodied and performed within Andrey Rosowsky’s study (Rosowsky 2008). Learning classical Arabic was embedded in a plethora of complex practices that included gesture and sensory modalities. In these studies, as with many others, the process of doing ethnography, of asking ‘what is going on here’, helped these practices become visible to

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educators. Ethnography as a methodology enabled a process of listening. It is then possible to hear about practices that are not inscribed into schooling. Instead, a plethora of complex literacy and language practices can be explored. This requires, however, often being able to read and speak different languages (Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi, Turkish, Somali) and a perceptual shift of what ‘counts’ as language and literacy with a move into multimodal as well as multilingual literacies. These studies engage with shifting the recognition of literacy within schooling. They argue that literacy practices are much wider and more diverse than those contained within the curriculum. To make sense of representation, I argue for an engaged process of listening. This could be described as ‘hearing the noise’. This was a phrase that we used for a report on communities and representation which explored community governance structures from an arts and humanities perspective (Connelly et al. 2013). In our study of youth work in a community centre we looked at the relationship between meaning-making practices and political representation. This required moving outside the construct of literacy studies into a discussion of the politics of representation. Representation is a cultural process involving the making and remaking of ‘stuff ’. Understanding representation requires looking at the way in which literacies are shaped. To make sense of this shaping, it is important to consider embodied, tacit and sensory modes of representation. Below, I explore representation in relation to place, to culture, as an aesthetic process, as a craft, as a form of embodiment. In doing so, I consider literary texts as well as everyday processes. Representational practice is not only anchored but also constantly moving and in process.

Representation and place Rotherham is a place of hope, poetry, language and story, where people do exciting and innovative projects. It is a town where artists, writers, poets and musicians live and work. The young people I encountered from 2006 to 2013 were meaning makers. As a space of play, improvisation and creativity, Rotherham was a site of potentialities, of meaning making and significance. Experiencing literacies in a bodily and sensory way means living them from the ‘feet up’ (Mackey 2010). Embodied literacies involve walking the area,

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from toddler age onwards, hearing stories from grandparents and parents, constructing texts in different contexts, on mobile phones, in parks on a skateboard, recognizing tattoos and different patterns and forms of inscription. Margaret Somerville talks about living ‘through country’ and hearing and living and breathing the literacies of the land (2013). Sensory literacies can escape the gaze of schooling in they are woven with lived life. Inscribed into everyday life are interests and passions that are inhabited and experienced from the inside. Sam, aged 9, telling me about his childhood, said this: I’ve always been changing my subject. When I was a baby I liked wheels, then I liked Thomas the Tank Engine, then I liked Robots, I liked Space then I liked Pokémon through seven and a little bit of eight, then I’m into Warhammer now I’ve moved on from the rest of my – I was getting bigger all those eight life years. (Interview, 20 November 2001)

Growing up involves engaging with the ‘ruling passions’ (Barton and Hamilton 1998) of childhood. It also means engaging with the everyday, which itself is storied (Langellier and Peterson 2004). Hearing stories from babyhood brings language into a mesh of entwined practices. These include travelling, listening, encountering and then reproducing stories and talk in other contexts. Representations shape how language and literacy is framed and encountered. Affordances that offer opportunities to represent discourses, identities and practices in particular ways become important in creating possibilities for young people to play with language. The possibility of modal choice, the options for young people to draw, narrate, gesture, choreograph or score through music their world, brings a wider repertoire of practices into meaning making. Social art takes people out of the everyday but also engages more forcefully with the everyday as a site of resistance and possibility. It is in this space of resistance, feeling and creative play that young people’s voices are articulated. The challenge is to ‘hear the noise’ of representational practices that might not be familiar. These practices can then be articulated within the cultural spaces of education. Meaning making involves engaging with the representational practices that define or shaped place. Here I discuss two contrasting books about Rotherham by two very different writers, one a philosopher, the other a

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sociologist, who have provided their perspectives on Rotherham. Julian Baggini, a philosopher, attempted to experience and represent Rotherham as ‘Everytown’ in his book Welcome to Everytown (2007). His view of the town came from his particular location – he rented a house in Bramley, a suburb of Rotherham and his perception was of a semi-rural ordinary space: If you’re not convinced that Rotherham reflects the full range of English life, then take part in the annual round walk; a 25 miles circuit of the town. I just managed to do it on the hottest day of the year, soon after I moved up. Rotherham, like England, is much less urban than you might think. Around 70% of the town is rural, compared to 79% of the country as a whole. The round walk takes you from the neglected, often spectral town centre, past allotments, along industrial canals, through comfortable but indistinguished housing estates of red brick semis and terraces, and then into the grounds of Wentworth House, with the widest frontage (600 feet) of any stately home in Britain. (2007: 9)

Here, the description is one that focuses on the mix of housing estates, postindustrial Edgelands and rural areas that characterizes Rotherham. Baggini’s account of Rotherham, however, rests very much on where his house was located and to the people he met. His encounter with the British Asian communities and other villages around Rotherham, such as Rawmarsh, was limited. Simon Charlesworth (2000), writing in the 1990s, paints a very different picture of Rotherham: The industry that remains, is dotted about, its scars remain, but its impact as a place of work, of filth and grime and death, has steadily receded. . . . In Rotherham, then, the presence of industry is felt more in its effect upon the space, in the density of the housing, in the type of housing and in its obviously being the housing of industrial workers.  .  .  . At night one still hears the banging of the steelworks and the diesel engines out of the railway shunting around what is not moved by road; and driving any way out of Rotherham one is confronted with the devastated remains of its decaying past. (2000: 49)

Charlesworth’s account of Rotherham focused on the ‘scars’ and ‘filth and grime’ of the ravaged post-industrial landscape. The sadness within these descriptions fills the book, and the witnessing Charlesworth does of that

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poverty is intensely felt, but at the same time, in a different way from Baggiani, misses something. When I conducted my research studies over a period of 6 years, what came alive for me were the language and literacy practices within Rotherham, the stories, sayings, poetry, songs, material cultural and creative practices I found all around me. This is the Rotherham I celebrate in this book. Recognizing these practices could also begin to shift the representation of Rotherham. By shifting the framing of representations it is possible to understand different ways of recognizing, knowing and understanding that can then be built up and understood. These then can provide young people with hope and a sense of possibility.

Representation and culture Representation is part of cultural practice. According to Stuart Hall, ‘representation is an essential part of the process by which meaning is produced and exchanged by members of a culture’ (Hall 1997: 15). The practices of representation involve complex choices that are shaped by culture. Kress and van Leeuwen (2001) understood these choices to be linked to modes, that is sound, gesture, visuals and language, and described the way these modes could be used as affordances. These affordances were culturally shaped. What can be done with one affordance (e.g. sound) differs culturally. The cultural shaping of modes is connected to people’s everyday aesthetics and their dispositions, interests and collective identities. Some modal choices are worn smooth, settled into patterns that are familiar and recognizable. It is possible through literary and linguistic analysis to identify normative ‘tropes’ of discourse, interactions that weave the fabric of everyday life. These patterns of language and interaction are shaped by ways of being that Gee called ‘cultural models’. These are existing patterns of interaction that inform linguistic and modal choices (1999). Social class, ethnicity, gender, local identities, among other things, inform these choices. These are collectively and individually realized, always connected to practice. Places are signalled within texts in different ways. For example, people employ dialect and shape their texts using local markers and signifiers. A word to describe this process of linking communicative utterances and semiotic representations to identities within linguistic utterances is ‘indexicality’.

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This word, coming from socio linguistics, describes the processes by which representations, including spoken language, signal particular allegiances to broader, collective identities (Blommaert and Rampton 2011). The process of creating indexical makers is anchored to biographical trajectories and requires a repertoire of representational resources in order to realize these semiotic choices. This theory suggests that representation is a process of assembling meaning making which is culturally laden and linked to wider contexts and processes. When making meaning, people make aesthetic as well as modal choices to shape their representations. A modal choice can be understood as the form or mode in which an individual or a group of individuals chooses to express themselves (Rowsell 2013). Young people who are not traditionally heard in communities, such as girls from the British Asian communities, might employ particular aesthetic choices and use these to make representations about racism and lived experience in new ways (Hull and Nelson 2009). Art is part of everyday practice. Rather than see ‘art’ as a separate category, I see art as an immanent category within representation. This requires a process of recognizing what is aesthetic within everyday meaning making. This creates a continuum between arts practice and everyday cultural stuff that is a space of generative thought and action. The space of generative thought can include political statements, as well as reflections, comments, ways of knowing, being and acting. I therefore argue for a valuing of the everyday as an aesthetic category that shapes representation. By making visible the invisible, political landscapes can be shifted. Art theorists such as Rancière (2010) warn of the dangers of dismissing ‘the vast majority to shadowy silence or inchoate noise’ (Corcoran 2010: 7). Instead, ‘art may create a new scenery of the visible and a new dramaturgy of the ­intelligible’ (Corcoran 2010: 19). This valuing of the unseen also requires listening to the world of common experience to re-frame political engagement. The through line from art to politics is thus articulated, for Rancière, within the everyday and often within the visual mode. The process of ­creating ­meaning is ideologically situated and derives its power from the collective identities of participants. Processes of engagement then become vital in ­communities as a way of challenging the normative tropes of ­representational practice.

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Representation as aesthetic Below, I discuss a film that was made by a group of young people with an artist, Steve Pool, a film-maker, Martin Currie and a youth worker, Marcus Hurcombe. The film was made as part of a project commissioned by the Arts and Humanities Research Council for the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG) (Connelly et al. 2013). The project was concerned with the relationship between ordinary people and local government. It was considered within government that young people were not engaging with local processes of government. They were not voting or interacting with local community governance structures, such as public consultations, meetings and local initiatives. We were asked to consider ways in which young people could be involved in these structures. Our argument was that the arts, and particularly the visual arts, might offer a broader mode of engagement than linguistic representational structures like meetings. Building on this approach the team looked at visual, artistic and sensory ways of representing the young people’s ideas to government. We worked with young people in Rawmarsh, in Rotherham. Marcus Hurcombe, who worked in youth services, was keen to work with a group of young people he had identified as needing a framework of support. Every Monday for 8 weeks, the research team came to see them in a community centre (described at the beginning of this chapter). The team sat around the table with a group of about fifteen young people and we began to talk. The aims of the project were to produce something to show to government at the end of the project that would capture the young people’s voices and, in particular, their sense of being very distant from government. At the beginning of the meeting, I outlined our brief: to provide a message to government about our local community. We began with a long discussion about the government, power and ethics and what we would like to do. One of the young people said, ‘I can’t speak posh words’. They agreed their accent would not enable their message to be listened to. The discussion quickly moved on to the modal choices we would use to get our message across. One young person suggested we use shadow puppets. Another said she would like to do drama. A few wanted to go to London to meet the government. All agreed that they didn’t feel at all linked

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to government and that they felt they had very little engagement with politics. Then they moved into the next room and began to dance. We continued to meet weekly, and over time, Steve Pool, the artist, filmed aspects of their representational practices. The girls had choreographed a dance, which Steve filmed. A number of different representational activities happened over the few weeks. Nana, one of the young people, who was very clear that she didn’t feel at all close to government or politics, instead danced her dance. This was a choreographed dance with the girls in the group, devised to the music ‘Stamp on the Ground’ by the Italo Brothers. Steve bought in some shadow puppets. The young people cut out shapes using cardboard and made characters. With the youth workers, the young people told stories about their lives. One story stood out, a story of being scared and at knifepoint and being moved on by the police despite needing their support. Therefore, the young people scripted a small play about being at knifepoint and being scared and their feeling about being moved on by the police. They used the shadow puppets to tell the story. Finally, the film was put together and young people were asked to write on flip charts to provide messages to government. One evening, they sat and wrote their messages down, and these were placed on top of the film (see Figure 6.1). I watched the process of shaping the film over time and broke this down as in Table 6.1. What this chart leaves out are the young people’s words and the ‘space of unknowing’ that was created between the young people and Steve, Marcus and myself where the film got made (Vasudevan 2011). This was an emergent space where the representational practices were fluid and in process. This space was begun by one of the young people saying that ‘I can’t speak posh words’ together with a discussion about using shadow puppets that opened up an improvisatory space, where things could emerge and be experimented with. Because the young people refused to draw on their own dialect, because they thought that they would not be listened to and could not speak posh words, we helped them to construct a different kind of representational space. This was created using the available ‘stuff ’ of the dance, the shadow puppets, the flip chart messages and the music belonging to Nana. Much of what was filmed was in the moment and made up of gesture, movement and small moments of interaction.

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Table 6.1  Process of creating the Shadow Film with young people Young people

Adults

Week 1

Discussion about politics and shaping of stuff. Decision to express ideas using shadow puppets

Kate, Steve and Marcus were there to listen to the young people and discuss with them

Week 2

Nana danced the dance

Kate recorded it in ethnographic field notes. Steve recorded it on film

Week 3

Discussion of the neighbourhood. Decision to make a film about the neighbourhood showing how few places the young people have to meet

Kate and Marcus went on a series of walks

Week 4

Film making of area (young people did not show up but the neighbourhood was captured)

Steve made the film, led by Marcus

Week 5

Scripting of shadow puppet story using flip charts

Young people did this with Marcus’s support

Week 6

Shadow puppet story enacted by young people

Steve recorded this on film

Week 7

Week 8

Steve and Martin edited the film, suggested putting words over the top Showing of film with no words on to the young people – they wrote messages to government on flip charts

Week 9

Steve and Martin edited the film again. The words were on the wrong paper which made them difficult to use

Week 10

Showing of film to government

Week 11

Showing of film to young people

The aesthetic shaping of this film came from listening to the everyday realities of the young people. However, it also came from Steve Pool’s own artistic practice: I was interested in seeing film other people had scratched on so it was really it was about inscribing, making a film that was abstract images of unconnected stuff with their story in it. (Steve Pool [Interview] 15 March 2013)

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Figure 6.1  Image of shadows. Screenshot from film by Steve Pool and Martin Currie.

Within the making of the film, the decisions as to what to create were co-produced, between the young people, Steve and the everyday ‘stuff ’ used to make the dance and tell the story. These modal choices coalesced within a film. This included an image of a pit head made with cardboard and placed within the film. This was then moved by the young people to make way for their scripted story. There were moments in the dance or when they were doing shadow puppets when the young people improvised, and told small stories around bits of everyday life and these small stories also were captured within the film. Small embodiments, such as a dance move, began moments of improvisation, so in the film, the dance became a kind of play fight, which accompanied the young people’s slogans to say that they did not feel safe. Nana’s dance enacted a sense of belonging, where she could create an inclusive space of practice. This was also aesthetic in its form, as the specific moves and the choreographed line-up of her friends created a particular effect for the viewer. Her use of particular moves and foot work to move to the music created an improvisatory space that was hers. In the youth centre, cultural practices, such as the dance, storytelling and listening to music, were part of the everyday. The film was an example of the bumpiness of the process of representation, the twists and turns by which things were made and remade in different cultural

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spaces, moving in and out of language, dance, scripts, theatre and movement. By seeing representation as process, and shaped through moment-by-moment decisions, infused with cultural practice and aesthetic histories, it becomes alive with possibility.

Representation as recognition Representation is also a process of ‘hearing the noise’ that might be lost in the murmur of the everyday. Lalitha Vasudevan understood young people’s multimodal embodied practices in relation to the concept of ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’ (2014). Drawing on the work of Appiah (2006) Vasudevan recognized these multimodal practices to be cosmopolitan in their reaching out to the ‘other’ within communities. She outlined a lens that recognized this more fluid kind of meaning making: Present in moments of the young people’s interactions are gestures, memories, connections, interpretations, questions, as well as recognitions  – glimpses of something familiar in the texts, practices and language of ­someone altogether different. (Vasudevan 2014: 53)

The messy spaces of everyday cosmopolitanism were sites of improvisation, enquiry and an embodied mode of participation that encompassed different modes of expression and spaces of belonging. In the ‘Shadow Dance’ film, the young people created a shared space from which to make meaning. Young people’s complex cultural practices enacted scripts of belonging. Nana and her friends were improvisers who made cultural stuff out of what was available to them. Improvisation is a site of creativity and space of production within cultural studies (Hallam and Ingold 2007). Improvisation requires attending to others and engaging with what is coming from the situation rather than imposing upon it. The construction of the improvised space can require a ‘holding form’ (Witkin 1974). This can be as simple as a room in a youth centre or a song. It is a collaborative space of practice. What is important about improvisation is that it might start by being an embedded practice that might not be visible to outsiders, like Nana’s dancing, but moves, sometimes imperceptibly, into shaped practice. This might require an intervention by

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a more skilled practitioner. Artists and musicians situate their work within practice of this kind and create opportunities for young people to enter that space of improvisation. This is a space of unknowing (Vasudevan 2011) where practitioners, artists and meaning makers are following an idea, and this becomes realized in different forms. Working with people in community groups to create representational forms that challenge mainstream concepts and framings requires both commitment to the young people and their artistic vision. Creating exhibitions, websites, films and artistic work is a collaborative process. Meaning making is collectively shared and perceived. Representation as a process is stretched across a range of modal choices. While in some settings this might involve discussing, drafting, writing and submitting a final draft for an exam (school) in other settings it might involve observing, sketching, re-creating and painting (art school). In out-of-school settings it is possible not only to draw on these models of representation but also to employ other modes, including film and visual media. Some trails of representation are worn, and accepted, becoming ‘tropes’ that are recognized in everyday culture. Others are new and unexpected, bringing a sensory engagement with the world into a different space. Arts practice, with its focus on dialogue, critique and disturbance can do this. Disciplinary boundaries, for example, in academia, that lead to divisions between arts and humanities, social science, the sciences or fine art can limit the scope of what is possible. While multimodality draws from social semiotics and linguistics as its underlying structure of thinking, art practice draws on a very different heritage. This can include not only a perspective coming from aesthetics but also the more situated and process-oriented modes of art such as relational arts practice (Kester 2004). Bringing those two fields together is not easy. The challenge of representation is to find a language to encompass it, beyond the visual, that acknowledges the craft in embodied, gestural and sensory modes of communication.

Crafting representation When constructing representations with young people, the question emerged as  to how to improve practice. What did getting better at representational

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practice look like? If young people are often not given the opportunities to express their thoughts and ideas in the modal choices that most work for them, and their artistic visions are curtailed by limited access to resources and vision, how can they be supported to find the language to make their ideas understood? The narratives young people carry with them constitute a repertoire of social semiotic resources that can be drawn upon in different situations (Snell 2013). These semiotic repertoires are shaped by interaction and experiences. I found it useful to look at young people’s narratives and how these changed over time. Narratives can expand the repertoire of meaning making available to young people. This conversation below came out of a project with an art gallery, The Hepworth Wakefield, in Yorkshire. The project team included the learning team from The Hepworth, a group of young people, the youth service in Wakefield and artists, Rebecca Birch and Rachel Howfield Massey together with myself and Abigail Hackett, ethnographer. The project was collaborative, with artists, youth workers, gallery educators and researchers all working with the young people. The artists supported the young people to make art. Here is a young person, talking with the artist in a youth centre, telling stories and responding to an artist’s discussion of change in landscapes, with his own story: There is a place called Manley town, you go by train, it is the last stop before you get off the cable car, it goes into a drop and you walk down these stairs and there is a big mountain and that is where railway goes and when got there train was just leaving and it drops 5 or 6 hundred metres down. There was a waterfall and the sun was in the right place and there was a bit rainbow that randomly appeared and its . . . put it this way it was quite a nice view. (From A Space to Engage May 2013)

Here the visual and aesthetic aspects of the story were embedded in a situated description. The group then discussed the idea of the sublime, and how, within this description, there were elements of the sublime. The speaker not only leaves the story with a bathetic ending ‘put it this way it was quite a nice view’ undercutting the beauty of the previous description but also plays with representational tropes and conventions. I was interested not only in the narratives the young people brought to the art process, but also in the tools they used to make art. These included cameras, audio equipment and specific ideas provided by the artists on the project. As the

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young people engaged with these tools including cameras, video equipment, sound equipment coloured lenses, and other specific ways of expanding arts ideas, they began to experiment, using stop motion animation to make films about the art gallery and create impressionistic images that captured some of these ideas of colour, light, the sublime and beauty. The process of creating art was one I tracked and described in the project with my co-researcher Abigail Hackett. This was mediated by conversations with the young people. We found out about what was important to the young people by spending time with them. We observed them playing with equipment – cameras, shadow puppets, sound, music. This time to play created an improvisatory space of practice where things could happen. The concept of the curated conversation comes from relational arts practice (Kester 2004) but it situates art in the everyday, in the way meaning is made and in the contingent places of discussion and analysis. Here, meaning can be remade and can become alive with discussion and debate. Allowing conflict can be generative, and opportunities for listening and talking can be curated that let in people’s ideas and thoughts. Some young people express themselves more fully using non-linguistic forms. A very quiet young person on the Art Gallery project expressed her thoughts through colour. She used her insights to create an art work about the dark nature of the outside of the gallery to make bunting to go round the gallery and shape it differently. This kind of rethinking through art is a way of expressing alternative visions of place, space and aesthetic forms. In this project the artist, Rebecca Birch, created a space where young people walked with her and engaged with her practice to become artists themselves. Her way of working was to invite them into a space of hospitality where she curated tea and refreshments, walked with the young people and engaged them with new ways of doing things. Her opening session involved storytelling and this then invited the young people in. Her way of working was tacit and not explicit, drawing the young people into a mode of being and expression. When I analysed the field notes we took of these sessions, when the artist told a lot of stories, the young people responded by telling their own stories. As the artist brought more equipment into the project, the young people were able to take on the tools and extend their narratives through using the tools more and more. This process of stretching tools and narratives became the site for learning in the project (A Space to Engage 2013).

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Representation as embodiment The process of representation involves drawing on the everyday ‘stuff ’ of life to make meaning. This also led to an engagement with an audience. This might lead to the creation of a new site of creation to move into within the representational process. This is akin to a collage – a process by which people collectively shape and craft stuff into different modal forms and creating an assemblage (Rowsell 2013). It is located in material forms, in the body and in the ‘stuff ’ of making. It is also situated in place. Margaret Somerville (2013) argued that ‘Language and people are mutually constituted in place’ (p. 11). Somerville used the concept of story to embrace the creative expressions of visual artists, film-makers and performance artists. She also used a methodology which she described as ‘postmodern emergence’ to describe the ‘emergent nature of knowledge production’ (p. 14): In postmodern emergence I emphasize the importance of a stance of unknowing and the irrational, messy, embodied and unfolding nature of our participation as bodies in the ‘flesh of the world.’ (p. 14)

Embedded within the research was an iterative process of representation and reflection. By seeing representation as alive, that is, as enmeshed in everyday life and emergent, it is also possible to locate where it is in the world. In literacy studies, these concepts of emergence and embodiment are being explored. For example, Leander and Boldt (2013) argued for a more embodied understanding of meaning making, also resting on the concept of emergence, to allow for a quality of indeterminacy within representational thought. This mode of thinking centres on the body and flows of movement and messy trails of meaning coming from that process. Working through the politics of representation requires paying attention to situated, embodied and site-specific meanings. These meanings are located in spatial memories and specific knowledge (Somerville 2013). These forms of knowledge might not look like academic knowledge but might be based on different kinds of skill, that are tacit, embodied, non-linguistic and inherited through practice. In the ethnographic work in Rotherham I began to make sense of particular themes such as ghosts, fishing, keeping animals, carpentry and domestic skills such as tiling, decorating and gardening. I developed my ideas about ghosts through visiting sites over time and listening for people’s recurring stories. I then

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watched how young people drew on these resources to tell new stories. These themes often were handed down from grandparents and told and retold over time (Hymes 1996). Much of what was talked about was anchored in everyday practices as well as intergenerational knowledge. These practices then become sites of aesthetic ideas and ways of doing and being. The ‘Every Object Tells a Story’ project focused on family life, which is threaded through with objects and stories. When I interviewed Ravina about her special objects for the project in 2006, her descriptions of family life were woven in with accounts of her domestic skills practices. Gradually I realized that these practices were ways of representing and being in the world. They were narratives of culture. They structured ideas and narratives of the self and identity: Dad loved to decorate so I got that from him. First memory I have as a teenager is dad and myself growing tomatoes, we were so proud of these tomato plants, as they had big red cherry tomatoes all over them, we had them growing all over the windows all over the house [the] following year we had a greenhouse because we decided it was making a mess. . . . I do love gardening and I love plants, every year I spend so much on my outdoors, on my pots because I love them but I do honestly believe it came from him. (Interview, Ruksana 2006)

The passing down of skills such as gardening became entwined with stories of the past, of heritage and of previous generations. In Rotherham and Barnsley the everyday practice of building a rabbit hutch, going fishing or handed down stories of steel work or coal mining could be found within everyday meaning making in complex ways. The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart gave a powerful account of lived experience across generations. This way of looking at language and literacy as embodied and situated becomes one of the most striking aspects of the book. One of the confusing things about reading this book for the first time from a literacy educator’s perspective is that does not appear to be about literacy. It becomes apparent that the book is describing everyday life in South Leeds where Hoggart lived with his grandmother. In his ‘Landscape with Figures’ chapter, Hoggart begins by giving an account of, the degree to which working-people still draw, in speech and in the assump­ tions to which speech is a guide, on oral and local tradition. (p. 27)

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Hoggart provided a vivid account of the talk of mothers in a doctors’ waiting room: These examples were all collected in a deliberately short period, the first from a bright, pastel-shade distempered and tubular furnished waiting room of a children’s clinic. A handful of drab and untidy mothers were waiting with their children, and the conversation dribbled on aimlessly but easily about their habits. In three minutes two women used these phrases: ‘e shows well for it anyway’ (of a well-nourished child) ‘If its not there y’ can’t put it here’ (p. 27)

Hoggart’s language is precise. His eye is that of an ethnographer, watching everyday linguistic practices. Hoggart is also the subject of his account as well as the object – growing up in a similar environment himself in South Leeds. He described how ‘the aphorisms are drawn on as a kind of comfort’ (p. 29). Hoggart writes vividly, and from the inside, about experience, ‘the world of experience is mapped at every point’ (p. 29). Hoggart moves in and out of language and sensory accounts of experience as he describes home life, arguing that ‘the core is a sense of the personal, the concrete, the local’ (p. 33). Within Hoggart’s evoked world, this core begins at home and starts with a detailed description of the everyday and of home life. Hoggart presents his account of the home and his observations of everyday life through the prism of his own experience, but in doing so becomes the subject of the study, the defined as well as the definer. In her study of home, materiality and belonging, Rachel Hurdley wrote about belonging and a sense of place (2013). Like Hoggart, she brings us back to the home: Culture is not something that posh people do, while everyone else watches the soccer and gets drunk. As the backdrop to so many photographs and paintings, the mantelpiece provides a shorthand reference to the status of an individual or family in its grandeur or simplicity . . . the mantelpiece is a way into understanding how remembering and forgetting, belonging and exclusion work in the everyday making of culture. (p. 7)

Hurdley’s work explored the memorialization of home. Curating practices were a representational force within homes, and a way of remaking cultures

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of nostalgia and memory. In the work I was doing in Rotherham I watched how young people drew on lived experience and tacit and embodied understandings of the world to create meanings. Thinking through the past means thinking through material stuff. In Rawmarsh, looking at the history of the area, a young boy aged 11 said that ‘coal is in my blood’. He was thinking through coal. The children were involved in a project called ‘Portals to the Past’ where they were discovering different versions of their past. They worked with archaeologists and conducted a dig. They dug up their school playground and found remnants of the past – clay pipes, pottery and lots of coal. Their embodied experience of the ground was echoed in the poems and literature they read. They appreciated listening to Hugh Escott’s work about the writing of Arthur Eaglestone, who worked down a pit and wrote up his experiences in his book From a Pitman’s Notebook (1925) (Escott 2014). The children thought through the experience of the dig, through coal and through the embodied experience of living in Rawmarsh. In Somerville’s book, her research collaborators describe the process of thinking through water: Water constantly moves, shaping the contours of the land and the nature of knowledge. (2013: 76)

Somerville proposed an ontological stance in which the experience of place flowing through the body is a site of culture and the making of culture. This then questions the body/mind split and the divide between people and Country. Stewart talks of the ‘space on the side of the road’, which begins and ends in the eruption of the local and particular; it emerges in imagination when ‘things happen’ to interrupt the expected and naturalized, and people find themselves surrounded by a place and caught in a haunting doubled epistemology of being in the midst of things and impacted by them and yet making something of things. . . . It is a space that marks the power of stories to re-member things and give them form. (1996: 4)

Representation as process is an ontological and epistemological stance  that disrupts particular settled ways of understanding meaning making in comm­ unities. Instead it asks us to look in a deeper way at lived experience, over time and make sense of it from a perspective by which the people who make

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the meaning become the subject. This process of reversal is at the heart of the argument of this book. Arts practice and ethnography as methodologies begin to make sense of how this process might happen.

Representation, the literary and the everyday He sat by the canal fishing on a Sunday morning in spring, at an elbow where alders dipped over the water like old men on their last legs, pushed by young sturdy oaks from behind. He straightened his back, his fingers freeing nylon line from an empty catch-net, his bicycle, and two tins of worms dug from the plot of garden at home before setting out. Sun was breaking through clouds, releasing a smell of earth to heaven. Birds sang. A soundless and miniscular explosion of water caught his eye. He moved nearer the edge, stood up and with a vigourous sweep of his arm, cast out the line. . . Whenever you caught a fish, the fish caught you, in a way of speaking. (Sillitoe Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, p. 216)

Everyday language is also poetic and full of meanings. The quotation above is from Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning published in 1958. Below, in some field notes I wrote when fishing, I write about the experience of fishing: I felt like the evening went on for a long time. Jean got hungry for her tea. Steve, Dylan and the others sat still and caught fish while I watched moorhens and gulls. The water plopped with flies and fish and glittered in the evening sun. The fishermen brought tea to drink in a thermos and drank it. Sometimes we got cold and put on our jackets but in the sun it was lovely. It was like nobody could drag themselves away from the bank. Dylan was in an amazing rhythm of catching fish. Martin smiled and told me of his early morning fish that day. Jean told me about her worries about her job. I told her I wanted to be a river board man when I grew up. We became a group of figures in a landscape. Jean said the young boys had become totally different through this project, still and absorbed, self confident. (Fishing field notes 4 June 2013)

Here, we became ‘landscape with figures’, as we dissolved into the landscape, and our identities merged and became still through the process of catching

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fish. Ethnography as a process can trigger the movement between the self and the outside world. It can call up the relationship between the observer and the observed and momentarily dissolve those boundaries. To return to Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy was unusual in that Hoggart himself became the subject of his study. Hoggart writes from his own space of home: On one occasion my mother, fresh from drawing her money, bought herself a small treat, something which must have been a reminder of earlier pleasures – a slice or two of boiled ham or a few shrimps. We watched her like sparrows and besieged her all through tea-time until she shocked us by bursting out in real rage. (p. 48)

Hoggart described the internal feelings of hunger, and this space was the wellspring of language: When my grandmother spoke of someone ‘taking the bread from her mouth’ she was not being dramatic or merely figurative; she was speaking from an unbroken and still relevant tradition, and her speech at such times had something of the elemental quality of Anglo Saxon poetry. (p. 49)

Hoggart’s achievement was to write expressively about working-class life ‘from the feet up’ (Mackey 2010) and describe it within a text that then questioned the way representation shaped everyday life. Raymond Williams (1961) argued that, we have to think, rather of human experience as both objective and subjective, in one inseparable process. (p. 36)

Williams’ description of, this felt sense of the quality of life at a particular place and time: a sense of the ways in which the particular activities combined into a way of thinking and living. (p. 63)

was then translated into the concept of ‘the social character – a valued system of behaviour and attitudes’ leading to a ‘pattern of culture’. Williams then argued further: Possibly, however, we can gain the sense of a further common element, which is neither the character nor the pattern, but as it were the actual

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experience through which these were lived. This is potentiality of very great importance . . . the term I would suggest to describe it is structure of feeling. (p. 64)

The concept of ‘structure of feeling’ could possibly be mapped onto Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as a set of perceptual schemas from which to form ways of being and doing in the world. However there is also a crucial difference here. Williams was concerned with cultural stuff, with language, and how people relate to each other in everyday life. Bourdieu’s concept of habitus does not focus so much on the process of making meaning from the everyday, but rather on lived practice (1990). Williams, by contrast, was interested in the everyday as a place of culture, which is, in his words ‘ordinary’ (1989). Everyday language can create and evoke an imaginative space of practice that brings ‘otherness’ into the conversation while resting on local experience and embodied knowledge. Because the everyday crosses boundaries and draws on multilingual linguistic resources and different dialects, modes and ways of knowing, it can become a rich site for meaning making and representational practice.

Conclusion Making meaning requires becoming attentive to the process of recognition: Each time we perceive, and as our conceptions become alternatively sedimented and fluid, what – norms, cultural practices, social inclusions and exclusions, assumptions about meaning, stories (of migration, education, justice, incarceration . . .) – are we cultivating and nurturing into and out of existence? What is to become of what we do not see? That we are unable to see? Unwilling or unprepared to see? That we do not want to see? As we strive to see, what do we allow ourselves to recognize? As we find comfort in the familiar, how might we see in the unfamiliar a glimmer of recognition? (Vasudevan 2011: 1158)

The process of listening and perceiving is political. Different kinds of listening can create different kinds of representational spaces. They can then provide a footing for unexpected ideas to flourish. Hierarchies can be questioned and values shifted and ceded. Listening within the everyday becomes a practice of

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‘everyday cosmopolitanism’, a process of engaging with the ‘other’ in the world (Hull et al. 2010). This also recognizes the complexities and unique nature of everyday local practice. This process of coming to know and ‘emergence’ within representational space also involves ‘unknowing’ (Vasudevan 2011). Young people within communities have to then engage with complex issues of whose voices count. They also can begin to work out which modal choice, painting, film, drawing, language, works for particular messages. Powerful, non-rationale and intuitive modes of understanding come into play here as modes of engagement. Messages of hope and imagination can also be sites of contestation and discussion. But as I describe in Chapter 7, this can lead to visions of better futures and better communities. When I watched the making of cultural stuff in youth centres, schools, homes, libraries and other community settings, the process of its becoming alive was located within an embodied experience of the world. This surfaced in different ways, both abstractly, in definitions and analysis, and within detail, small stories, and particular ways of expression or turns of phrase. Locating cultural stuff within communicational practice becomes a process of listening (Back 2007). This requires an attention to collective identities, to collaboration and communities of practice (Rowsell 2013). Meaning making is situated; it derives from conversations (Kester 2004) and it is co-curated from stuff found in the everyday. Meaning making can be artful and intentional or it can be accidental. It can involve crafting words within a conversation that can become special and unusual, surfacing the creative within the everyday (Carter 2004). Studying representation also involves a process of reversal. Making meaning is about hearing the ‘noise’ that is non-linguistic, messy, spontaneous. This also demands a process of re-framing the way things are presented and situated. Beginning to do that might require taking on wider ideological debates and pressures, for example considering how girls are represented in the media, or the way social class is presented in television. People can be skilled and proficient in some modes of representation, but other modes can be more distant and less available to them (Kress 1997). Film making for example has become a more accessible mode with the coming of hand-held video cameras. Writing is part of a wider assemblage of meaning-making practices scattered across a representational landscape (Kress 2010). What is possible in representational terms is also a question for arts practice, where representations

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are stretched and questioned ideologically and visually. Making meaning within communities involves a process of becoming. This means moving away from a situation where other people create an account of a place or a story created in a place, to a moment when the story is co-created by people in that place. This means collectively realizing these visions through film, authoring, scribing and telling so that things can be differently understood and realized. This then provides a different script of possibility and site for things to happen. It is a way of re-imagining the future.

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Futures

I decided to sit on the bank and watch Dylan. Dylan sat very still. He dropped his line very low in the water. He watched and did not do anything else, speak or chat or move. Every so often he would catch a fish and he would bring it in, carefully, inspect it, take the hook and throw it back in. Once or twice he needed the landing net. When he caught a fish he drew it in quietly and gently. He did not boast or show other people. It was part of the process of fishing. (Field notes 04.06.2013) To make sense of futures involves a profound noticing of the everyday, of what is going on in the here and now. To make this future thinking equitable requires being guided by ways of knowing and seeing that encompass more diverse, extended and wider perspectives than our own. Ethnography, particularly collaborative ethnography, can provide one way of noticing and listening as well as recording these frameworks (Lassiter 2005). Possible futures exist within the present. These imagined futures are guided by how that present is framed and understood. The process of futures imagining can become an exercise in predicting through existing frameworks. If these frameworks come from outside everyday experience, they can shape a different vision of the future. The re-framing process necessitates a process of attentiveness to other people’s meanings, framings and experience. These ways of knowing can include stories, joint meaning making, together with collective and situated activities. These activities can include different kind of representational practices, some of which can be described as art. The practice of doing art as well as ethnography can be a way of making things strange and finding out about ‘other’ realities and identities.

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How could the future be imagined within the present? These questions have been discussed within education (Facer 2011), social science (Adams and Groves 2007) and philosophy (Levitas 1997). There is a branch of future studies that includes the consideration of future worlds, or utopias. This thinking has also been linked to arts practice as a space of possibility (Bishop 2012). Ways of imagining different possibilities has been described as an ingredient of creativity (Craft 2005). This process of thinking through what ‘could be’ also involves a process of othering and listening that has been associated with concepts of cosmopolitanism (Hull et al. 2010; Vasudevan 2011). Moments of hope, such as the experience of catching a fish, like Dylan on the river bank above, involve the imagination. This imaginative process can also be found within children’s text making as children come to make sense of the world and consider alternative possibilities. This process of imagining can be found sedimented in the meaning-making practices of children and young people. Thoughts and ideas make their way into scraps of drawing, writing and collective expressions. These are often done on the edges of education or in out-of-school spaces. Imagining a collective future requires the creation of spaces for this to happen with young people. This process can bring these apparently ephemeral practices into the centre. Co-creating futures together through supporting activities in the present can help young people to think differently. Education can be one space where this happens (Facer 2011), and art another (Rancière 2006). Re-imagining the future involves collectivities of thinking across disciplines, hierarchies and organizational structures. Ways of re-visioning might be articulated using particular modal choices (Rowsell 2013). Visions from below, from the bottom up, sometimes can become elided out by more powerful voices. However, they are urgently needed in order to re-frame concepts and ideas within the everyday. These ideas can also become important within the political sphere. This might involve politicians and government officials listening to alternative forms of representation or, ‘hearing the noise’, that is, paying attention to representations that are seen as less important and thus categorized as background noise (Connelly et al. 2013). This requires a noticing of activity that could open up different possibilities and questions. Anna Craft has explored the idea of ‘possibility thinking’ in creative endeavours (2013) which is when an, ‘as if ’ idea is expanded upon,

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often in unexpected ways. This can be a collective set of activities. Recognizing this moment of possibility thinking also requires attentiveness. The process of re-imagining is about making sense of something in a different way. This requires a precision of vision. When children and young people make meaning, they can produce an alternative reality in their texts. Artists can mediate the process of meaning making by working alongside children and young people to draw out these possibilities. One of the ways artists can do this is by noticing what happens in the everyday and then making these ephemeral moments meaningful. Small moments of meaning making can uncover much broader and expansive possibilities. Young people can be supported to create spaces of belonging and ‘other’ ways of knowing in a number of different ways inside and outside of education. Hull et al. (2010), for example, worked with young people using digital storytelling to communicate across continents. The project involved working with young people in out-of-school contexts with digital technologies and engaging with global as well as local sites of education. The team created spaces of invitation and hospitality and opened up possibilities for meaning making to invite glimpses of imagined better futures. Young people made digital stories about their lives to show to each other. Thinking about the future and what could be in the present creates a space of unknowing (Vasudevan 2011). Watching young people make meaning evokes glimpses of possibility that are different and risky in the here and now. These sites of possibility can involve playful ways of understanding whereby young people draw on both online and offline spaces to make meaning (Vasudevan and Dejaynes 2013). The creation of ‘other’ discourses and ways of expressing ideas from existing ones is always risky and can involve dissolving boundaries. Creating spaces for possibility thinking involves working across a wide range of sites and spaces – making lateral networks rather than working vertically to draw in people to create those sites for possibility. Working with the youth service alongside poets and artists, with philosophers, literary theorists, educators, ethnographers and fishermen, teachers, librarians and young people, was a way to dissolve the existing boundaries around how knowledge was created. In doing so, we were hoping to make spaces where young people could do significant work and create new kinds of textual practices. Part of the process of creating hope was to offer children

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and young people alternative imagined possibilities of how things could be. This evoked the possibility of imagining existing structures differently. The vertical structures of schooling can dissolve temporarily when children and young people create their own spaces where things can happen. Often this might involve artists, musicians and writers who brought a sense of difference and otherness to a site such as a classroom and then created a temporary sense of purpose where everyone worked on something together. Imaginative and risky work, which draws on a wide range of partners to make sense of things differently, is valuable for opening up alternative futures. Creative Partnerships, an initiative in the United Kingdom whereby artists and creative practitioners were funded to work in educational settings was such an initiative where different things could happen (Pahl 2012b). The effect of artists, musicians, theatre practitioners and creative practitioners working in schools was to create different hierarchies of knowledge and ways of knowing. Another emergent space is the Connected Communities programme, run by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, where community partners, artists and academics are working across boundaries to create new kinds of knowledge with and for communities. (http://www.connected-communities. org/). These programmes offer ways of knowing and doing things that can challenge conventional conceptual boundaries. Creating the conditions for hope is not easy, particularly in countries experiencing austerity, but as I watched these initiatives, as an ethnographer, I was conscious of different kinds of things happening, and new possibilities emerging. Below I consider the role of improvisation, hope and possibility thinking in meaning-making practices. Then I move to thinking about stories, the imagination and digital literacies in order to consider better imagined futures. Glimpses of hope are located in the material world, in the here and now and are tied to materiality and everyday practices.

What could be: Sites of memory When they heard the siren, they felt excited, like running away. They’d never heard it before; the year was 1939. Their mum didn’t like to explain too much to them about things like gas masks or sirens, because she didn’t want them

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to get frightened. So the siren’s ringing was just an intriguing noise to them. An intriguing noise, but an eerie one as well, because they had no clue what it was. The night was dark and cloudy, so they hadn’t seen the searchlight. They’d seen a plane fly over a couple of times. Eventually they stumbled upon an abandoned warehouse with loads of cardboard boxes inside. Nobody was inside because the owners had locked up, but the girls still got in; the door was crusted and broken, and smelled like burnt wood and clothes, or maybe even smelly socks. It looked like there’d been some kind of fire, or explosion? They went inside. (Reunion)

When three 13-year-old girls, Chloe, Ella and Georgia, evoked Sheffield in World War II, they were drawing on a repository of knowledge partly learnt from school and also, in Chloe’s case, what was passed down to her from her grandmother who wrote a story about memories of World War II in Sheffield. When I was working in a school, a young boy recalled how his grandfather remembered the grassing over of a bomb shelter in the school grounds. These memories of World War II were grounded in an embodied sense of place, and an unbroken chain of memory that linked the bombs dropping on Sheffield and Rotherham to the present. These memories then surfaced in text making, talk and stories. The past became a site of potential for creating stories. This is located within intergenerational relationships as well as place. Remembering, argues Connerton, ‘depends essentially upon a stable system of places’ (2009: 5). Connerton suggested that these processes of remembering can be ruptured by the dislocation of social life from locality: What is being forgotten in modernity is profound, the human-scale-ness of life, the experience of living and working in a world of social relationships that are known. There is some kind of deep transformation in what might be described as the meaning of life based on shared memories, and that meaning is eroded by a structural transformation in the life-spaces of modernity. (2009: 5)

Connerton’s argument rests on an assumption that places and people living in places are somehow ruptured and transformed by modernity. But when I worked with children in the Dearne valley and Rotherham, the coal mines, closed in the mid-1980s, quickly surfaced in the children’s talk. Children from a primary school in Rawmarsh talked of Mrs Thatcher closing the pits as if

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it were yesterday. The ex-coalfields were haunted by memories that, in some cases, created a time warp within which communities still lived (Bright 2012). However, the surfacing of memory is an uncertain process. People’s rela­ tionship to memory changes over time. Sometimes, working in Rotherham, I felt that the Partition of India (1947) and the Miners’ Strike (1984–85) were such significant events it felt that they had happened only yesterday, so vivid were people’s memories. Inscribed into poems, songs, stories, and felt deeply and profoundly within communities, both events cast long shadows over people’s experiences of the everyday. The making of culture happens in conversation with memory. Some memories and narratives have more power than others. The silencing of difficult memories can have serious consequences for communities. Forgetting can create deep trauma as memories go under­ ground, and, insubordinate community histories – particularly those imagining a radical reconstitution of society – can come to be silenced and their situation rendered literally ‘unspeakable’ when a collective psycho-social space once redolent with hope becomes a space of ruin. (Bright 2012: 316)

Figure 7.1  Shadow coal mine. Photograph taken by Steve Pool from the Shadow Dance film.

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The effect on communities like Rawmarsh, with long histories of coal mining, buried beneath the detritus of late capitalism including call centres and supermarkets, is to create, in Bright’s descriptions, a kind of ‘haunting’. I have described previously the surfacing of ghost stories in Rawmarsh, as a way of remembering and witnessing the past. However, remembering is also a social act and one that involves representation. ‘When we remember, we represent ourselves to ourselves and to those around us’ (Fentress and Wickham 1992: 7). Remembering always involves a process of representation. This requires making meaning from the everyday. These practices are always in some way transformative. Woven into these processes of making meaning are family memories, practices and discourses, the ways of knowing and doing that make up family life. Collective memories are threaded through the process of coming to know in a place, through interactions with family members, across generations and across the ‘scales of time’ (Lemke 2000). Compton-Lilly (2010) has described how particular timescales are linked to different domains of practice. However, family time and school time do not always align in neat ways. The lived experience of time within families and how time is felt and perceived within households can feel very different from institutional time. This can become clear at points of disruption, for example, the demarcations between primary, junior and secondary school. Sometimes young people mark their ages through particular experiences such as moving house or the death of a family pet. Between 2009 and 2012 I visited a British Asian family in Rotherham in order to explore their literacy practices. The family included Anita, the mother, eldest daughter Lucy, (12) Tanya (8) and Saima (2). When I first visited the family, they lived in a terraced house in a small street in a mainly white area of Rotherham. One day, they announced that they were moving house, back to the street where Anita grew up as a child. The new house, which felt like a point of return, recalled childhood memories: Anita: My dad was just exactly the same – its shocking I was her age [referring to her daughter Tanya] all eight of us, we had the bathroom outside, my dad used to bath us, me mum and dad used to bath us, all eight of us, in a steel bath and then my dad bought a house in     street when I was her age. (Recording 22. 11. 2010)

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The memory of the tin bath recurred many times in stories told in Rotherham. Women who had lived there in the 1960s recalled the hard work of filling the bath and what it felt like to get into the bath after everyone else. This chain of memory was then passed on to Anita’s daughter, Tanya, who described the street she was about to move into. As she did so, she got up from where she was sitting, turned to face us and pointed her hand, pointing out the houses one by one as she spoke: (She stands up and faces the settee. She stretches out her right arm and as she says this she points, her finger moving from left to right. At each point she describes a relative/neighbour) I am going to see my grandad’s house, my grandma’s there and then there is next door neighbour and next door neighbour and next door neighbour and then its our house it’s a blue one and its all ruined. (Audio recording 22.11.2010)

In these accounts, memory spiralled between the present, the past and the future. Ricoeur described this process in relation to narrative: Memory, therefore, is no longer the narrative of external adventures stretching along episodic time. It is itself the spiral movement that, through anecdotes and episodes, brings us back to the almost motionless constellation of potentialities that the narrative retrieves. (1980: 186)

When conducting ethnography in homes, this spiralling of memory was ­evident in the way that events were recalled from childhood that then shaped the present. These memories then constructed a potential future. These trajec­tories lie outside a modernist conception of time as linear and orderly but describe a much more layered, enfolded conception of time as experienced slowly or much more quickly. Experience of time varied from ‘clock time’ to time stretching across generations. Time in families was recursive and spiralling in and out through the process of remembering (Ricoeur 1980). Narratives structured these different ways of being in time and place. Within these descriptions, place could become a site of possibility. When we were discussing the new house, Tanya was keen to see it. There were two ways of doing this: Kate: Where is the new house? Anita: J---- street

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Tanya: You can see on the computer! Kate: Street View Anita: J------ street Tanya: We can go and see it mummy! I want to go! We could go on Street View Anita: you can have a drive round Kate: is it the other side of the motorway? (Discussion 22.11.2010)

Here the discussion rests on the possibility that Street View could be used to ‘see’ the house, or the alternative idea of driving round to see the house. Both ideas were possible. Time and space are constructed in relation to the potentialities of everyday practices, whether it is going on Street View or making a trip round in the car. These potentialities are evoked and retrieved within narrative. Making sense of space means understanding and recognizing how it is lived and experienced. The process of experiencing space intersects with time and likewise spirals, as it is re-encountered moment by moment, hour by hour, day by day. The potentials of lived space to create affordances for meaning making open up possibilities for exploration and discovery.

What could be: Sites of improvisation Sites of improvisation are ‘as if ’ spaces where messing about and creative practices are possible. ‘Research Rebels’ was a project involving a group of young people in a community library. Bonni and Dionne, age 12 at the time, were involved in this project (Pahl and Allan 2011). After we finished the project, I continued to visit the library and asked Bonni and Dionne what they would like to do next. As part of the previous project, they had documented their literacy practices in scrapbooks. They decided to set up a scrapbook club as a result of the original project. Making the scrap books became an imaginative activity that they turned to when they were bored at school: Dionne: In the library, we started sticking our pictures in and we got bored in Spanish, so we messed about with Tippex and started writing stuff, and then we started sticking pictures in. (Audio recording, transcribed with Bonni and Dionne, July 2010)

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In the scrapbooks, the messy layers of home meaning-making practices were reconstructed. Dionne described the layers of ‘stuff ’ that they drew on to make their scrapbooks: Kate: Where did you get the ideas to put the different things in like colour? Dionne: Bonni had this blue folder and it was full of cut-up pictures, and Bonni just went through it, put them in piles. (Audio recording, transcribed July 2010)

Bonni and Dionne used their scrapbooks to recall the writing practices of their past selves. They recursively returned to these selves and were interested in the different forms of writing they produced at different moments in time. Kate: This is a good page as well. Dionne: That’s one of Bonni. Kate: Is that one of your drawings when you were little? Bonni and Dionne: Yeah. Dionne: She did a little note saying to mum: ‘this is just a note to tell you how much I love you’ (that’s embarrassing, by the way). Kate: I love it. Dionne: She used to write backwards! (Audio recording, transcribed July 2010)

Figure 7.2  Home writing. Photograph taken by Kate Pahl.

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Bonni’s inscription of her previous writing selves in her scrapbook, including her note to her mother and her habit of ‘writing backwards’ evokes a childhood self of writing. Here, family time is evoked through a semiotic mode (writing backwards), while the everyday time of school is evoked in the discussion of getting bored (in Spanish). The location of these meaning-making practices was constructed in time and space. Bonni and Dionne expressed their ideas within a number of multimodal artefacts. One afternoon in the summer of 2011, I met the girls and was working with them to plan the art exhibition (described in Chapter 3). They had the book out and suggested to me that toddler books should be made for teenagers, with ‘lift the flaps’ but with themes and ideas aimed at teenagers. Using craft materials I provided, they proceeded to cover up the book and make it as a new art object, using the form of a board book with tabs and flaps. The project became an elaborate process of design. The girls followed the original design with specific colours for each of their personal  pages and designs that reflected their interests and identities. The themes in the book were accompanied by vivid coloured-in drawings. For example, a fish tank covered one flap and written underneath were the words: This is steve my pet fish. He’s a telescoped fish. I did have a lionhead fish called Charlie but he died. He has a tank and sits or floats in it next to my window!

Many of the children in the studies I have conducted described the death of their pets as central to their lives and emotional landscape (Pahl and Pool 2011). The girls also considered their possible imagined selves, using a questionnaire format. In a page on the role of consumer culture and money in the girls’ lives, Bonni and Dionne provided a collage of the different things they spent their money on. The girls stuck in bus tickets and loyalty cards, providing a representational collage of the experience of shopping. I went on a shopping expedition with them one day, and we weighed up the cost of buying things. The girls’

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Figure 7.3  Fish. Photograph taken by Kate Pahl.

concluded that most of what was on offer was too expensive. They provided a commentary on this process in their book: Money!! Does money make you happy or sad? Now’s the time to decide Yes or No Please tick one Box

The landscape of the girls’ lives was strewn with textual ‘stuff ’ (Kress 1997). It was displayed on this page as a collage of found objects, with bus tickets, rail tickets, shop stickers and bar codes. Past, future and present selves jostled in the book. The girls invited comments within their book (the final page had a feedback form) and created a tapestry of experiences that were both remembered and evoked. Their ways of knowing and imagining were tied up with the experience of toddler board books, as well as Facebook pages and girls’ magazines, using quiz and collage formats. The book included an appreciation of glitter, colour and included stickers and stick-on charms. The meaningmaking choices the girls drew on included ‘stuff ’ from their everyday lives, such as bus tickets, as well as more specific genres such as Hello Kitty. These

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Figure 7.4  Money. Photograph taken by Kate Pahl.

choices signalled particular imagined selves within the text, and the resulting juxtaposition referenced these jostling everyday identities. The past, the present and the future were represented through the choice of image and text. The future (does money make you happy or sad?) became instantiated within a quiz that included a question mark and squares to put your reply. The book made sense of different textual possibilities across the scales of time (Lemke 2000). Some choices made certain kinds of meaning more visible. For example, the quiz genre extended the questioning of whether money made you happy or sad. Decoration became part of the process of creating ‘as if ’ scenarios within the text. Different scenarios were evoked through aesthetic choices that then lifted the text into a new contextual space. The book referenced a toddler book, but was redesigned

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for teenagers. The act of taking the book out of the library, re-purposing it and then placing it in an exhibition space also re-framed the process and turned it into an art object.

What could be: Sites of hope The concept of the ‘not yet’ implies an immanent recovery of hope in the everyday. Ideas of hope can be found in the work of Ernst Bloch, where the ‘not yet’ describes the sense of immanent possibility in the present, that can emerge within the blink of an eye (Daniel and Moylan 1997). What ‘could be’ is also framed by what ‘is’ and the recognition of what was possible. Young people have to consider how their future lives can be reconciled with schooling as well as the realities of the future job market. In Chapter 4 I described the research work of Courtney, Robbie, Aisha and Declan in considering what artists brought to their experience of school. The team of young people chose an image of Declan dancing to sum up their findings. When I asked why this image was important, this was Courtney’s response: Courtney: Its not about being good all the time at school its about spend­ ing your life in school because it is the only chance you’ve got. (Pahl and Pool 2011)

Life, according to Courtney, is lived across the school day. As a child living in an ex-mining region where jobs were scarce, school life was also ‘the only chance you’ve got’. School is a site for future possibilities. But it is also where you spend your life. Bonni and Dionne were bored at school, Courtney juggles the potential of being good in school with the potential of acting. She muses on how these different potential identities interact with schooling. We asked Courtney to come to the University of Sheffield together with Robbie who was the co-author of the article and they told us their futures: Courtney: I am going to be a hair and nail technician Steve Pool: What should be your future job Robbie? Robbie: I am going to be a motorbike rider Steve Pool: Speedway?

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Robbie: Bike riding Steve Pool: Scrambling? Robbie: All sorts. (Transcription discussion University visit 13 July 2010)

Courtney articulated her possible future of being a hair and nail technician, while Robbie want to do a more exciting job but this was less about earning money. Thinking about the future, here also was a process of potential imagining. This moved from Courtney’s specific account of a particular career path to Robbie’s more hopeful concept of being a motorbike rider. What is ‘not yet’ is also a space of practice, the moment when Declan danced, and in between space in the school day. In our original discussion, recorded in the school, the children talked about what was important. Here, I asked Robbie why the image of Declan dancing was important to him: Kate: Robbie, say why it is an important photograph for you, because this is me and Steve’s article – they are going to co-write it with us by the way Robbie: Its just, its just, its weird, its funny, he’s me best mate Steve: Come on tell us then Robbie: He’s like Alvin off the Chipmunks Steve: (laughs) Right Kate: It’s the key bit of data Robbie: Yeah Kate: The other bit is the playground bit that I showed you Steve: So where do you fit fun in when you try to have fun at school? Robbie: Choice time and we find fun between lessons because we get together and do different things. (Transcription 19 May)

Robbie here finds an emergent space of practice ‘between lessons’ when it is possible to do ‘different things’. These spaces of possibility echo the idea, from Ernst Bloch’s work, of a ‘concrete utopia’ which can be found in material cultural productions and is something that is always in a state of becoming (Giroux and McLaren 1997: 146). The latent power of Robbie’s image of Declan dancing (see Chapter 4) is that he was dancing in an in between space, between lessons, and his determination to evade schooling is also given an interesting framing by the words ‘achievement’ above his head. This was also

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a moment where dreams and other ways of being and doing were highlighted. As Giroux and McLaren write, To find meaning in life and to find life in meaning can never result in utopia without first listening loudly and intently to the whispers of our dreams. (1997: 158)

The space of the day dream is one that philosopher Ernst Bloch saw as important, where things could be re-configured in an ‘as if ’ world (Daniel and Moylan 1997). The practice of ‘messing about’ could be recognized as this kind of space within educational spaces. This practice happens away from the panoptic eye of the classroom teacher. ‘Messing about’ can become an ‘as if ’ realm of practice to experiment with different ways of being and different futures. By recognizing these ‘ordinary’ everyday spaces as space of critique and of questioning, and seeing their potential for the ‘not yet’ these temporary spaces of liberation become important sites of possibility.

What could be: Stories and timescales Attention to the everyday also involves a consideration of the intersections between different timescales, including family time, institutional time and community time. These are also located within material practices. These intersections between timescales produce different kinds of stories and interactions (Compton-Lilly 2010). These timescales are recursive and loop back rather than march in a modernist movement slowly onwards (Ricoeur 1980). Within families, stories surface and re-surface and are told again and again. In 2006 I carried out an ethnographic study of a group of families’ special objects and stories, to produce an exhibition and a website (http://www. everyobjecttellsastory.org). The family, the Khans, originally came from the Pathan regions of Pakistan, and their stories included transmigratory tales of survival across many continents including America, Indo-China and the United Kingdom. These stories were told and re-told many times. One key figure in the family stories was the grown-up children’s father, now passed away, and his father’s visit to New York to make money. I interviewed four members of the same family, now adults, and found that one story, the story of

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a pair of shoes, and hiding gold in a pair of shoes was told over and over again (Pahl and Pollard 2008, 2010). The story goes that he put the money in his shoes, he had little shoes built where he could hide the gold because people would steal from you when you slept on the boat, or the train, you know, it was great difficulty, and carrying cash on you, I mean it’s difficult now but in them days, he brought whatever he had back, he came all the way back to Pakistan, India, and looked after his family there. (Ravina interview November 2006)

The families told me this study as an account of resilience and survival. I learnt to listen out for recurring stories within the family and their meanings. Recently I returned to the families after 5 years and discussed the research with Aliya, who was 10 at the time of the original project, and she told me how it felt to return to the stories: It was incredibly – shocking – to go back on it after so long, and hear your voice and how you have changed, and although those things remain the same, I am still dedicated to my family and my grandparents and I still love Harry Potter, like I said, on there, people are always changing and like I said people part with one another which is why my nursery school photo was still there. (17 July 2012)

Aliya was 17 when I visited her again and working on her A levels. Her story focused on the women in her family and their struggle for education. Her mother told me this: Aliya’s mother: I was one of the lucky ones my father believed in education my father let me drive and go to university I fulfilled his dream I didn’t want to go University but it was his dream. I had to do that I am like my father I believe in education, it is what I do now. (17 July 2012)

The concept of being ‘lucky’ is an intangible one; embodied within a trajectory of resistance it is also contingent upon local practice. It is also dependent on the concept of having a ‘dream’ and going into a new world. This process of becoming also involves an openness to change: Becoming is necessarily tied to the new and to the future, to the novelty that is involved in transformation and to the openness and uncertainty that this produces. (Coleman 2008: 89)

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This helped me make sense of Aliya’s future trajectories as they opened out in her discussions with me. I was able to see her present experience in relation to her past experiences as she and I discussed the exhibition in 2007 and her own self in 2013. These stories were mediated through narrative encounters with her mother and grandmother’s own stories. Aliya described how she would listen to her grandmother’s stories and how these stories and prayers became resilient artefacts that carried her through her childhood. Aliya found her strength through these stories and connected her identity to her mother and grandmother. Aliya acknowledged the, inexorable links of rights and responsibilities that connect past to present (and future) generations. (Cwerner 2000: 388)

Aliya also had a dialogue with those generations. This dialogue was productive in that she was able to recall the self who was 10, and in a more elaborated way, at 17. In this project, by returning to the original people involved in the project 5 years later, I could see how enduring values continued across time, but also how they could develop into new strands and ideas.

What could be: Digital literacies and the ‘not yet’ Research on digital literacies, particularly in the field of education, has framed the possibilities of the digital in hopeful and sometimes utopian language. Futures and the digital have been tied together in many contexts including education and industry. Selwyn (2011) explored the ways in which the deterministic logic of digital technologies has permeated thinking about futures in education. He suggested that it is important to uncouple the relationship between better imagined futures and the increase in digital stuff in schools. Instead, he urges educators to consider how digital technologies are actually used in schools more carefully. He warned: Anyone who is studying education and technology therefore needs to steer clear of assuming that any digital technology has the ability to change things for the better. (2011: 33)

Facer (2011) similarly cautioned against technological determinism and asked that educators consider the way in which digital futures are shaped:

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Scientific communities are shaped by personal priorities that participants bring into the community and by expectations about ‘what counts’ as valuable knowledge and development in their field. (2011: 6)

Equally, ways in which technologies are shaped and developed are not always then used in the ways that they were intended. The shaping of new technologies can become a site of contestation. New technologies created for one particular purpose sometimes may lead to different and unexpected outcomes. Here I consider the extent to which the digital can be said to offer a site of possibility. The New Literacy Studies as a field of study understood literacy to be a set of practices shaped within the everyday (Street 1993a; Barton and Hamilton 1998). It is possible to observe how apparently new ways of writing online quickly become literacy practices. They become regular and settled. Assumptions about writing can change as the affordances and possibilities open to meaning makers shift. Kress (2010) described how the affordances of online spaces can shift the ways in which meaning is made. In online spaces, meaning making includes image, text and sound. This process opens up more fluid, transitory and visually loaded communicational spaces. The New Literacy Studies relied upon an account of literacy that was situated in everyday practices and located within particular domains of practice (Street 1993a; Barton and Hamilton 1998). A materialist view of literacy recognizes literacy practices to be situated within culture as lived and enacted through practices (Pahl and Rowsell 2010). Bringing the New Literacy Studies into a discussion of digital futures troubles this situated and materialist view of literacy. Literacy becomes unsituated and de-materialized (Burnett et al. 2014). This has led to some generative work on how digital literacies are used and understood in classroom settings (Davies and Merchant 2009). This work has explored the possibilities of social networking sites, twitter, blogs, wikis, virtual worlds, video games and online communicative practices for extending how meanings are made and understood. The ‘stuff ’ of digital literacies is materialized in smart phones, screens, tablets and other complex digital artefacts that spill into the ‘stuff ’ of everyday life (Miller 2010). Meaning-making practices are shifting as a result of these ‘shimmering literacies’ (Williams 2009), with an enhanced focus on layout, visuals and the process of embedding video and audio within text (Kress 2010).

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The material world intersects within the immaterial world in ways that are apparently seamless and constructed in the moment of making. Materiality is shifting and complex. As, Davies observed, of young women narrating their lives on Facebook: The very materiality of the young women’s lives was drawn into and reflected within digital spaces. (Davies 2014)

These ways in which meaning-making practices flow online and offline can be mapped and understood through studies of engagement with these practices over time (Burnett et al. 2014). Many of these practices flow between spaces, moving between a situated, everyday context and the shimmering world of the smartphone or the tablet. As these literacies move on and offline they might become transmuted into visual or moving image media, before being translated back into language. A mono modal view of the world is therefore no longer possible in a digital world (Maybin 2013). Understanding digital literacy practices requires recognizing different ways of framing and understanding how literacy should be understood, taught and perceived. Abrams and Merchant (2013) saw digital literacies as important in creating participatory and diverse textual practices that expanded what meaning making is and could be. Their argument hinged on the need to recognize, the participatory culture and empowerment that seem to be important elements in the development of student interaction and social identities across virtual and real contexts. (p. 328)

Their argument is that digital practices shifted student agency and perceptions of self in spaces of learning. Increasingly recognition of these digital literacy practices has led to work that addresses these shifts and concerns (Lankshear and Knobel 2013). Exploring the way young people use digital literacies to create expressive and aesthetic forms to shift, unsettle and play with multimodal forms pays attention to these practices as emergent, in process and congruent with everyday cultures (Vasudevan et al. 2013). In this context, education becomes a site of possibility where different and unexpected outcomes are placed alongside each other, and what happens becomes emergent, practice led and spontaneous.

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There is a fine line between understanding the digital as a site of ­possibility and a concern that the digital can become too readily associated with positive possible futures without thinking through the implications of this stance. Facer (2011) directly questioned the deterministic logic of the digital. She suggested that people should grasp the agency to determine futures. Her argument is this: When we seek to reclaim the right to think about the future in and for education, then, we need to recognize that its purpose is less to do with producing a set of predictions, and more to do with challenging assumptions and supporting action in the present; less to do with ‘divining the future’ and more to do with making visible the materials, – ideas, aspirations, emerging developments and historical conditions – from which better futures might be built. (Facer 2011: 5)

Taking a materialist view of the world means paying attention to the cultural stuff that people draw on to make meaning. This cultural stuff is patterned through practices that endure and shape such meaning making. Watching people interact with stuff in the everyday makes visible the cultural framing around the stuff. Miller (2010) described how mobile phones in a Trinidadian context became customized in particular ways that were culturally significant within Trinidad, so they shifted meaning and context as objects. Watching young people in homes reveals a complex ‘flow’ between the offline and online spaces. Rather than see the digital as a deterministic world where outside agents shape the structures and spaces of meaning making, recent research shows how these process of shaping are culturally and spatially located (Davies 2014). Facer (2011) described the interaction between technologies and the people who reshape them as being a process of, ‘co-production’ between the potential capabilities of the technologies and the ways in which they are perceived and taken up in the social context. (Facer 2011: 7)

This process is socially and culturally determined in ways that seep outside the particular visions of past computer programmers. A strong element of futures discussion in relation to digital literacies emphasized the way in which digital spaces elide hierarchies (Alvermann 2006), break down communicative boundaries and change the nature of meaning

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making (Kress 2010). Many digital technologies emphasize collaboration and the collapse of boundaries within online spaces (Erstad et al. 2009). These hopeful futures are also tied to a postmodern dream of fluidity, as, Digital learning worlds dismantle the shackles of time and space constraints, enabling communication and exchange between individuals and groups that otherwise could not possibly learn together or form an ongoing community of practice. (Chisholm 2013: 74)

A focus on the digital tends to lead to utopian discourses whereby ‘shackles’ are broken and dismantled to create new, harmonious spaces of practice. Young people can enter these spaces on more equal terms with teachers, mentors or other adults, and different kinds of communities of practice can develop, through participation and creative improvisation. Learning then re-situates the learner as expert, not novice, partly due to the often greater experience young people have of digital practices, but also because these practices are forming and re-forming in the everyday and have not become codified knowledge systems. Much of this discourse appears unrealistic and out of touch with current restrictions within schooling, much of it imposed from above. These utopian visions do come with concerns and cautions. The companies or individuals who shape and construct digital learning spaces are often hidden. Facer (2011) warns against entwining technological innovation, particularly digital technologies with the ‘new’. Instead she asks for a radical reshaping of cultural frames and ways of knowing. This could involve a focus on the democratization of research and sharing of sociotechnical knowledge within schooling and beyond. Neil Selwyn (2011) has argued that the inherent positivity of much research on technological change in schooling has stifled informed debate within research circles. He suggested that technology does not necessarily involve a change for the better but that technology is embedded within messy social contexts that are resistant to change. Both Facer (2011) and Selwyn (2011) uncouple the determinism implicit in technology to urge readers to re-imagine the futures from more radical framings than those given or found within existing sociopolitical schemas. Concerned about inequalities of schooling and technological determinism, they both insist on this process as a mode of practice to counter

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this tendency. Within digital literacies as a field, sites of possibility and imagination can be imagined. However, these sites rest on spaces where play and emergent meaning making are valued and recognized. Concerns about the digital as necessarily good rest on a stance which questions whether the digital is shaped for young people in ways that do create spaces of agency and transformation. The shaping of digital stuff is entwined with complex interests, and these interests, often corporate and tied to making a profit, are not necessarily always benign. Ways of knowing and understanding are creative sites that move inside and outside digital spaces. These can become places of possibility or sites of concern.

Conclusion The articulation of the ‘not yet’ comes from our dreams, memory, objects and ideas. This is enshrined within meaning-making practices, and also comes from traces of existing stories and ideas. It is important to pay attention to the cultural understandings of these meaning-making practices. Making sense of them offers ways of articulating the present and then the future. What ‘could be’ is located in space as well as within timescales. Small articulations of change within everyday life are moments where an alternative future is briefly glimpsed within an existing situation. Recognizing and supporting that process requires a particular kind of engaged practice. This unites a commitment to sites and people with a focus on the meaning-making opportunities that slide beyond the possible. Narratives of change often emerge in the process of thinking up new projects. When working in community contexts, I often would set up a meeting in which the germ of an idea would emerge. Sometimes the ideas would go nowhere and nothing would happen. At other times, a chance remark (we should go fishing, talismans, make portals) would generate activity that then led to a project developing and taking shape. These pieces of stuff could be threaded through everyday conversations. Sometimes they were suggested as part of a brainstorming discussion. Often the ideas were located in places, in a park, a disused library, a community centre or an angling pond. From these places, people could dream and re-imagine the future.

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Working in the ex-coalfields and out-of-school spaces of Rotherham, I began to notice how events became placed up against each other, defying the sequential march of time. World War II and the miners’ strike could inhabit people’s thoughts and ideas as present ghosts. These echoes and traces were insistent that these things could not die in people’s memories. Life as it is lived as opposed to the life that is shaped by institutions such as schooling could be experienced against the modernist logic of time. This different logic presented possibilities that were made real through meaning-making practices. In this process of listening and making real the ghosts of the past and the possibilities of the present, I could discern, out of the corner of my eye, a moment where something different could be glimpsed. This then translated into sites for meaning making and belonging for young people to inhabit in different ways. These glimpses of possibility were there immanent within the everyday. Articulating, recognizing and mobilizing these glimpses with a focus on young people is now an urgent task. Re-imagining the future drawing on resources of hope from the present is work that involves a methodology of listening. In the final chapter, I turn to methodology and explore ways of listening to these possible futures.

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Methodology

Marcus and I met at the Carnegie library in Rawmarsh, with two young people (Marcus always asks young people to co-production meetings). One of them was an artist with a five-year-old daughter and seemed very young. We went round the blue and white beautiful building and Marcus envisioned the future, with young people projecting their work, lighting up the building. I immediately in my mind sketched out the beginnings of research bid and had practically written the bid by the time we were finished. The young woman imagined painting a sea scape on the domed ceiling and noticed starfish and special designs in the plaster decorations. The radiators were in gold echoing the patterns. Then Marcus and I drifted off to the local antiques centre where we went round spotting 60s’ Swedish furniture (Marcus) and old English oak (me). Marcus took a picture of me by a monster. Then we drove to Clifton Park museum where we had lunch in the cafe. This was the same cafe where Andy Pollard and I met Zahir and we three together co-produced the Ferham Families project which was really successful in terms of outputs. Marcus outlined his plans for the Imagine project which was to have very focused collaborations with young people about their identity narratives – to mind map and work with stories, using images of vessels, journeys, ships and then work with elders to co-produce joint stories. This would then move into visions of better imagined futures. The project would be reflective and involve the white community, the British Asian community and the Roma community. Then we went round the museum and looked for Steve’s paddle and I told him about that project. Then we went into the Rotherham Archives and did some Portal work. Marcus threads through his projects, he weaves them

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together like a master craftsman. One day we did this exercise of mapping our strategic priorities against each others’ and working out how they fitted together. We did this on a flip chart and then put them up in each other’s offices. I don’t know what Marcus did with mine but his is stuck up in my office along with Steve’s drawing of my brain. (Blog post Friday 26 March 2013) Writing this book has been a process of engagement, with projects, with people and with ideas. This engagement is necessarily collaborative. Collaborative ethnography as a methodology is about community members doing the research they think is important. Elizabeth Campbell and Eric Lassiter constructed a project, which became The Other Side of Middletown (Lassiter et al. 2004) in which a community in Muncie, Indiana, framed, constructed, researched and wrote up their own ethnography. The community requested that they work with them to create a document about their everyday lives. Robert and Helen Lynd, anthropologists, conducted an original study of Middletown in Indiana in 1929, commonly referred to as the ‘Middletown’ study. The African American community was not represented in the study. To redress this, the community did their own study with the help of the university. Together with students and members of the university and guided and advised by the community, research questions were devised, framed

Figure 8.1  The antiques centre. Photograph by Steve Pool.

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and developed and an interview schedule and historical evidence collection process were created. A book, which became The Other Side of Middletown, was co-written together with community advisers and partners. This was collaborative ethnography in action.

Ethnography Ethnography is a methodology that ‘makes the familiar strange’ (Agar 1996). As a method it was originally conceived through long-term encounters with ‘other’ people, most notably through the work of Malinowski (1979 [1922]), who immersed himself in the lives of the Trobiand Islanders while stranded there during World War I. Ethnography is characterized by a commitment to a site together with a focus on cultural patterns and taken for granted practices. In the field of literacy Brian Street, under the tutelage of Evans-Pritchard, went to the villages of Iran and watched everyday practices within the communities where he lived. Observing that agencies often described people in village communities as having ‘no literacy’ he was interested to record a plethora of literacy practices that could be identified with different sites and domains. For example, ‘Maktab’ literacies were associated with the literacies of the market traders, while ‘school’ literacies were associated with the literacy used in the schools. In religious contexts, Quranic literacies, which employed the Arabic script, were to be observed. These literacy practices were prevalent within the village communities but not necessarily recognized by the officials in charge, with the possible exception of the ‘school’ literacies (Street 1993a; Street and Street 1991; Heath and Street 2008). The salience of particular types of literacy and not others was further explored by Shirley Brice Heath in her book, Ways with Words (1983) where she tracked, also using ethnography, the literacy practices of three communities, Trackton, an African American Community, Roadville, a white working-class community, and Maintown, a middle-class community located in the town. Her insight lay in recognizing that each of these communities held specific language and literacy practices, but only one, Maintown, held practices that were recognized within schooling. Ethnography pays attention to everyday practices and habits and involves repeated, regular time in the field, observing, gathering data and listening to

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the voices and ideas of participants. Eric Lassiter (2005) in his study of the African American community in Muncie, Indiana, further developed this methodology by involving the community he worked with in the ethnographic process itself. Collaborative ethnography, as described above, paid attention to shared moments of interpretation and analysis, in a reciprocal process (Campbell and Lassiter 2010). With the people I worked with, I used this method of ‘reciprocal analysis’ and co-created shared interpretations to explore key themes, ideas and contexts. This has led to many projects carrying joint ideas, schemas, thoughts and visions as a way forward and as a research practice.

Collaborative ethnography as a way of being Ethnography as a practice has an opaque quality. When I go out into the field, I will get into my car, in Sheffield and drive through the industrial Don valley, under Sheffield Forgemasters and the M1, to Rotherham. I will sometimes, but less often, get lost, but mostly I will know where I am going. The experience of going to Rotherham is rich in friendships, partnerships, experiences. I will exchange my books at a library or sit in a youth centre. Meetings will be on the sites of the projects and not in the university. Community partners will interrogate the research from their perspective and ask me to focus on what matters to them. Young people will ask me to look at their coursework and find out about how you get to university. I will sometimes be asked to work on ethics, organize an exhibition, review a project, make a film, create a link between a school and a community project and help someone get a grant. I will often be useful as a member of a university, not necessarily as someone doing ethnography. I will also be asked to come over when there is a crisis. If someone has died I will pay my respects to the grieving person. If there is a family trauma or something to celebrate I will also be asked over. Sometimes, however, we can co-produce research together. Zahir Rafiq, visual artist and web designer, was the advisor and designer for the Ferham Families project (http://www.everyobjecttellsastory,org). At the end of the project, he reflected with me about the process of doing the work:

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Figure 8.2  In Rotherham. Photograph by Steve Pool.

Zahir: I always want to gain new skills and learn different things, also as artists we have to adapt and change, and like academics interpret things, as artists you also have to interpret the world, which is more fun. What I have learned is the importance of representing Asian families – and now I want to do this through portraits of contemporary Asian people that represent this new reality. For example, I saw a young British Asian lad the other day holding two pit bull terriers. I liked that. There were old fashioned British things when I was growing up – like riding bikes and dogs – that would never have been something young British Asian people do but now they do and it’s a normal part of life in Rotherham. That to me will be one of my goals as an artist is to represent that. If it wasn’t for projects like Ferham Families, that kind of thing wouldn’t happen and be part of public art work (Pahl et al. 2009)

Zahir and I stayed in touch. I was developing a co-produced project with community partners in Rotherham. As part of the process of getting the bid, we had to go to London to showcase our ideas. I invited Zahir to London and

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on the train home, we co-developed ideas for the new projects. At the heart of the project would be Zahir’s images of British Asian family life. This process of thinking about what would come next was intuitive, as Zahir talked of his father’s work in the steel industry and his mother’s material shop and how these two themes, Silk and Steel, were important to follow with young people. The idea of the portraits was also concerned with imagining better futures and came out of the earlier project. It was part of a process of trust, following a thread that Zahir had set up. The project, ‘Imagine’ (ES/K002686/), got funded. Doing this kind of work is messy. It does not keep office hours. You end up going to a lot of weddings and funerals, as Campbell and Lassiter (2014) observed. University time can get pushed aside in my hierarchies of commitment. It might become important to drive to Rotherham to discuss an issue with someone rather than attend a university meeting. Social occasions are important too. I have invited families I do research with to my house and they have met my children. These are not relationships structured by the contingencies of ‘professional identities’ but are real and created from the field. These relationships then create the research process. The structures that hold these relationships together are also opaque. The history of the relationship is important as to what emerges, and that process of working with people takes time and energy. This way of working also is not visible to academics within the university. Often I might work with a colleague, sometimes with students, but very often I am on my own, or with Steve Pool or Marcus. There is no trace of the meetings other than the research diary, which is often kept private. The anchor for this practice is the research diary, or field notes, that leave a trace of the process inscribed in writing (Sanjek 1990). Field notes can be shared, with research partners writing field notes and sharing them on a blog, or commenting on my field notes. Field relationships are real, situated and contingent on ways of knowing and being that are developed together in informal settings. Much of this shared understanding happens over time, in parks, through walking, talking, listening, becoming embedded in a shared space of practice. When Marcus and I were interviewed about what our shared partnership was, we thought for a while and both said ‘runes’. This alluded to a shared interest in the power of language and heritage in young people’s lives. The process of engagement can begin with a provocation or challenge. Zahir Rafiq, describing why he decided to do the ‘Every Object Tells a Story’

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project said that it was because he not only wants to show that British Asian families were ‘ordinary’, but also wants to challenge the racist national party was campaigning at his children’s school gates (Pahl et al. 2009). Many of the projects began with a community’s determination to develop a language, a history and a narrative of who they were and to represent that to the outside world. Constructing a project can come from a meeting of young people or an instinct that something needs doing. Projects can be developed together with young people, who in some cases know the prices of things and what we need. The ‘Communicating Wisdom: Fishing and Youth Work’ project was costed by a group of young boys who I met in a youth centre. When I said I needed help costing fishing tackle they sat with me and worked the budget through.

Intuitive methods When thinking about research methods, I began by considering an insight I found useful from John Law (2004) that methods, and even more methods’ practices, tend to construct the world which we purport to research. The concept of the ‘interview’ and the ‘questionnaire’ makes research into a practice which people can find alienating. Oral history and life story are closer to people’s lived experience and their own perceptions of how the world works. When I started as an ethnographer in homes, I assumed it would be self-evident what I was doing when I visited a family every other week, sat and drank their cups of tea and watched and interacted with the family. The families became my friends and I enjoyed learning from them. However, ethnography as a way of doing research is very opaque. People do not necessarily know that when you go home you write field notes and this becomes ‘data’. As I became more confident as an ethnographer, I also let some of the practices of my discipline slip. I made visits just for the sake of the visit and did not write it up. I did write field notes but often in joint blogs, with Steve Pool, who shared much of the work of the projects, or in discussions with Marcus, co-researcher and youth worker. I began to recognize the importance of the people I worked with making decisions alongside me about what I should research and why. As I developed a way of working I realized that the most important thing to do was to be there, to visit the sites and spaces of engagement and not sit in

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the university waiting for people to come and visit me. I also had to engage with what my research participants thought of me, and accept my failings as someone with too little time and energy to be always able to visit for chats, but who wanted to learn in different ways from what people were doing. The blog post below describes some of these dilemmas: Research diary post I read Rabinow on holiday. I really liked it as he is a terrible ethnographer, he just relies on his friends and then they let him down and he learns nothing really. I felt like a terrible ethnographer today. I went to see Zahir and I got lost as I had forgotten how to do Rotherham and I went to Bawtry by mistake. I turned up at Zahir’s and he was very nice he is re-doing the website. Then I went to see Deborah in her story shop and she was very nice. Then I went to see another community partner, who manages a women’s organisation and sat around being nice to her and suddenly she got quite fierce and said look Kate we all love you but that long document (the ‘Imagine’ Case for Support) was useless and we all think you are a bit useless as you obviously care but you go around telling us it is up to us what we do on the projects but really it is not, and we do not mind that, we like structure, just give me a structure and I will be fine, also you are spending too much time on the projects, you need to be grown up and delegate. Then I cheered up and realised I was a terrible manager of projects as I am so obsessed with the ethnographic logic of everything as it is unfolding and forget to manage things. So now I will do a timeline and set of outputs for everyone, put it in their contracts and make sure they deliver. They will be relieved I think. (August 2013)

In this reflection I was brought up against the perception of my community co-researcher that my messages to her were difficult to decipher and vague. After that meeting, I went away and thought but realized I still had to ask her to construct the research, but that I needed to provide structures to do it. So I constructed an ethical review process by which we together worked through what she would do and wrote her proposal and contract and timeline. In the process I learnt that I was both absent and present within the field, trying to shape things but not too much. Ethnography as a methodology opens up possibilities to be attentive to the world beyond the researcher’s own epistemological stance (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). As a practice, it creates opportunities for unknowing as

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much as knowing. An ethnographer always wants to know ‘what is going on here’. The research is always in a state of the ‘not yet’ and this opens up a space of knowledge creation. Doing collaborative ethnography can involve planning meetings, field visits, co-research with community partners, creating spaces of inquiry, shared framings and inscription practices as well as co-analysis and the creation of poly-vocal multilayered documents (Campbell and Lassiter 2010). This requires giving up of an authored academic practice such as the one I am employing in this book. Often a community partner will suggest more practical outputs than co-authored articles, such as translated leaflets, a toolkit, resources for teachers, an exhibition in a library, a book or a film made by young people. This leads to considering the relationship between universities and communities, as Lassiter (2012) here states: I am much more interested in how collaborative research and action can move our communities and universities forward in positive ways (even in small academic units such as mine) than I am, frankly, in reifying centres of knowledge and power that, unsurprisingly, have little interest in collaborative ethnography and similar modes of research. (Lassiter 2012: 433)

It requires recognizing that knowledge creation does not necessarily happen within the universities. The role of the university is to listen attentively to that wider process of knowledge creation. Learning from the field also involves unknowing (Vasudevan 2011). Knowledge creation becomes something that cannot be predicted. Moving to social action has to be accompanied by a realization that what is ‘known’ is contingent and shifting within contexts. Those contexts change constantly, particularly in situations of budget cuts and austerity discourses.

Art practice and the ethnographic imagination When I started working with a visual artist, I thought that this would involve an interesting process by which I would add something to my practice. However, I was not sure what this would be. I slowly realized that the logics and ways of knowing of this practice were as opaque as ethnography but carried a different set of meanings. Instead of the processes of watching, noticing and recording

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‘what is going on here’, an artist might intervene to start a conversation, suggest a new kind of perspective or create a disturbance. Artistic practices are different from ethnographic practices, but they share some characteristics. Grant Kester’s work has opened up the idea, from Bourriard, of relational aesthetics as a practice that is useful in the world, which can bring people together in different ways (Kester 2004; Bishop 2012). Ethical concerns become much more important than aesthetic decisions in this kind of work. Artists can become mediators, between community partners and universities, in a process of shared discovery. Their practice is not located within particular forms, such as painting, sculpture or drawing, but is instead located within ways of knowing and seeing that might bring different insights into the space, drawing on embodied knowledge and lived experience. This kind of knowing is also, like ethnography, opaque and complex. Below, I wrote about my encounter with Steve Pool, artist: There is a FLIP camera image of Steve, looking worried, in a viewfinder, circa 2011, in which he is seen setting the camera (invisible) onto a coffee table in my room at the University. In this he is caught looking concerned, much as Gregory Bateson looked pre-occupied when typing up his Fieldnotes on the front cover of his book Fieldnotes, (1990) as he sat opposite Margaret Mead after a hard days participant observation. The image for me typifies a response that Steve is exploring in his work, which is to turn the tables back on the academic gaze, but it is in itself a problematic process. (Extract from number 1 2012, http://www.poly-technic.co.uk/)

This approach, of turning the gaze back on itself, can be linked to the idea of relational aesthetics from Bourriard (2002). This approach recognizes that perceptions of art lie in the world, and that socially engaged arts practice can make a difference through engaging in a dialogue with the world (Bishop 2012). Rather than see art as instrumental, a form of facilitation, art and works of art can critique or antagonize society, providing a participatory commentary or an aesthetic statement on the question, from ethnography, of ‘what is going on here’. It is therefore necessary to not only offer opportunities for meaning making that are equitable but also challenge perceptions or representations of the world. These perceptual framings can come from art practice, or from

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ethnography, but are also congruent with everyday scepticism and cultural processes. Ethnography and art practice can be methodologies for lifting things out of the everyday, in order for different possibilities to be created. Bringing arts practice and ethnography together is about creating the opportunities for cultural re-framing and rethinking. Both practices are concerned with looking carefully at practice in ways that then able to question or probe established realities. Examining literacy practices through these lenses offers these possibilities. In this book much of the field work and ways of knowing that created insights about literacy practices in communities came from a shared inquiry with the artist Steve Pool. It also came from a long history of working in the field. Doing literacy research in this way requires not only a close attentiveness to the everyday but also a willingness to create actions or interventions that people would want. Sometimes this means the research becomes a different thing altogether as communities, not universities, decide what is going on here and what is going to happen.

Co-production Co-production as a methodology has been associated with different ways of delivering public services. However, it can be used in more profound ways to describe different processes of knowledge creation within communities. Recently, it has been used by the AHRC’s Connected Communities programme in order to encourage university academics to work in a more engaged way with communities to co-create research projects and ideas. This involves a commitment to spending time with groups of people, for example, young people, youth workers, or artists, listening to their visions of what they would want to do. These visions are often located within particular concerns or problems. These might include young people not having anywhere to meet, for example, or the need for a particular community to be valued and listened to. Co-production is never easy as different values and frames of reference come to the fore. What it involves is a commitment to retaining the visions and strategic priorities of partners within the process of knowledge creation. Rather than bringing particular frames from academic practice, this process asks us to notice what forms of knowledge matter in particular contexts or communities

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and make those the focus of the project. In many of the projects described in this book the imperatives of the youth workers came to the fore. These included the need for young people to be listened to, to have calm and contemplative spaces, to create and discover their own past and to have a safe space to meet. These visions were articulated and worked through in the projects. Doing co-production is time consuming. It requires concentrating on what matters within the projects that are being constructed. It also requires a focus on creating a shared space of practice, much like an artists’ studio space, where things can be done together. This is a way of recognizing the different skills each person brings. In order for the project to work some of the skills have to be entwined. One way to do this would be to identify what brings the different partners together. This could be described as a ‘holding form’ (Pahl et al. 2013). This is a sensate form where problems or questions could be worked through. For example, on ‘Language as Talisman’ the holding form was the concept of language as talisman. For the ‘SPARKS’ project the holding form was the park, as the focus was on parks as social spaces. Ways of knowing together also require an adherence and congruence with the practices of the people we work with. Working with musicians such as Sam Sweeney and Nancy Kerr on a project called Transmitting Musical Heritage, I learnt that the space of the performance, of the rehearsal, of the interval bar chat, of the session in the bar where musicians played together was where we could learn together and work on the project together as much as the university site. University structures, such as seminars, conferences and academic papers, are not necessarily the best places for co-production to happen. A walk through an estate, an Awayday involving food, a community forum or event, became places where co-inquiry could take place. I will be at a meeting with Marcus Hurcombe, the youth worker I work with and wonder why there are so many young people present and also, I wonder when they are going to go away so we can started. Then I realize, they are the meeting and the people we need to work with.

Conclusion Methodologies for research are not separate from the research. They are ways of knowing and sensing the world that can become very complicated but can

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also be co-owned and co-created. Some methodologies, such as statistics and GIS mapping, can helpfully be combined with more everyday methodologies to look at issues such as spatial justice, rubbish collection, poverty and inequality. Other methodologies, concerned more with meaning-making practices, require a kind of imaginative engagement with the world, in Willis’ words, ‘an ethnographic imagination’ (2000). Here, the process is more like a process of coming to know. It has affinities with literary criticism, but it is not so much hermeneutic but engaged. Richard Hoggart’s interest in the meanings of everyday culture became the inspiration for this book. Inglis (2014) located Hoggart as a cultural anthropologist, albeit without the baggage of theory that accompanied anthropology: The anthropology of meaning has done much this past half-century to return intellectual life to its roots in daily sustenance and domestic conduct. Hoggart has been, in his theoretically untheoretic way, a leading contributor to the cultural turn taken by social thought. (p. 33)

Inglis here was recognizing that sometimes a different kind of scholarship is required to make sense of the everyday. This scholarship is lived, close and engaged. By drawing on the traditions of practical criticism but working within lived experience, a close attention to detail becomes a kind of attentiveness, or a bearing witness. If united with a concern for drawing on resources for community change and support, this can lever in possibilities for social action. Raymond Williams saw culture as a set of meanings embedded in a way of life. This required an ethnographic attention to lived experience. The late Stuart Hall articulated this practice: The legacy of culture as the interpretive study of meanings embedded in ‘ways of life’ is to be found in the many studies that deployed ethnographic, participant observation and other anthropological techniques of what Geertz called ‘thick description’, and beyond that, to the language of ‘signifying practices’. (Hall 2007: 44)

Ethnography here, like practical criticism, involves coming to know a culture. It requires an attention to detail and close reading that is about culture in process as much as about literary texts. This process can also be collaborative and involve a number of other people who might decide what it is we are

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coming to know, why we need to know it and what we have to do to find out about it. This is a version of research described by Elizabeth Campbell and Eric Lassiter in The Other Side of Middletown (2004). The other implication of this kind of work is a different kind of teaching. For many years I have taught students in the university, and while these students have brought the experience of working in communities to their studies, I have not asked students to do their academic work in the community. This year, I began to change how I worked and started to develop modules where students worked alongside community partners to do their research together. The shift in practice meant that the community became more visible and more important to the university, but, more important, the way knowledge was framed and understood became more visible. It became a way of knowing that included embodied, reflective and situated knowledge. Making situated and embodied knowledge visible is also a practice that involves a process of listening to the meanings and ways of knowing that lie in different contexts. This way of listening is active, situated and involves a commitment to the sites and spaces of everyday life. While universities offer a way of being that is constructed around the production of knowledge, much of knowledge is produced elsewhere. In these processes new cultural framings emerge and grow. Listening to ways of knowing and cultural framings outside university spaces is an urgent task for people who think and write in the spaces of the academy. To do that, however, it is necessary to leave those spaces and abandon many of the disciplinary constructs, habits and ways of knowing they offer. This might require a re-situating of knowledge. It also requires a radical unknowing and de-centring of academic practice. This is perhaps the challenge for engaged research practice within contemporary cultures. It might require a giving up of the theoretical apparatus of contemporary scholarship and returning to the emotionally honest and lived engagement with the world as presented in The Uses of Literacy.

Notes Chapter 1 1 See Steadman-Jones and Pahl 2014. Many thanks to Richard Steadman-Jones for this insight.

Chapter 3 1 Language as Talisman was an AHRC-funded project (AH/J011959/1) that ran from February to November 2012. The project team included Richard Steadman-Jones, Jane Hodson, David Hyatt, Hugh Escott, Steve Pool, Deborah Buillivant and Marcus Hurcombe. More information on this project can be found here (Pahl et al. 2013).

Chapter 4 1 For ethical reasons, Declan’s face has been masked.

Chapter 5 1 I am grateful to Sam Rae for this part of the analysis.

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Index accommodation theory  46 aesthetics/aesthetic  20, 83 categories  21, 83, 98 decorative  99 everyday  84 postcolonial  90, 98 artefacts of resilience  74–5 artefactual literacies  71 practices  19 artists  188 arts representation using  18 Baggini, J.  135 beauty  21 Bhabha, H.  98, 102 Birch, R.  144–5 Bloch, E.  169–70 Blommaert, J.  78 The Bluest Eye  93–4 bodily inscriptions  57 Bright, G.  35, 122, 125, 160 Burnett, C.  75 Campbell, E.  180 Charlesworth, S.  12, 135 collaboration  27, 116 collaborative ethnography  180 talk  109 collective identities  104–5 memories  23, 161 community of practice  28 concrete utopia, practice of  35, 169 Connected Communities  158, 189 Connerton, P.  159 co-production  189 of knowledge  8

cosmopolitanism  101 engaged  101 everyday  142, 153 Creative Partnerships  158 creativity  25, 81 and aesthetics  86 everyday  83 cultural models  136 resources  60 studies  52 culture in material forms  54 as a verb  54, 107 cutting-out  58 dialect  45–6, 48 digital storytelling  157 worlds  25 domains of life  2 Eaglestone, A.  13, 149 Eagleton, T.  83 ecological approaches  39 methodologies  26 Edgelands  30 emergent practice  146 Escott, H.  149 ethnography collaborative  180 connecting things  62 as a methodology  3, 133, 181 as a process  151 everyday aesthetics  21 sayings  47 stuff  59 ‘Every Object Tells a Story’  15, 71, 147, 170, 182 Facer, K.  172, 175–6 ‘Ferham Families’  8, 99 Finnegan, R.  69

206 futures  24 possible  155 garden as text  68 ghosts  36, 96, 122–6 gold  73–4, 99 graffiti  44–5 grandparents  2, 73 habitus  53, 59, 152 Hackett, A.  144–5 Hall, S.  136, 191 Hanley, L.  31 Harry Potter  72, 99–100 Heads Together  109 Hearne, R.  13 Heath, S. B.  132, 181 The Hepworth Wakefield  144 heritage  68 holding form  27 home literacies  52 hope  8, 105, 107, 156 Hull, G.  157 Hurcombe, M.  115, 138 Hurdley, R.  148 imagination  156 imagined futures  2, 157 imagined space  48 improvisation  85, 90, 158 indexicality  64, 136 inscriptions  38 intergenerational practices  146 sewing  15 Kester, G.  188 Kress, G.  23, 58, 173 language of experience  64 materialized  66 as a space of possibility  46 ‘Language as Talisman’  18, 26, 40, 45, 47–8, 65, 67 Lassiter, E.  180, 182, 187 libraries  38–9, 41–3, 163 listening to traces  36

Index literacy/literacies as an artefact of resilience  74 artefacts  38, 72 events  20, 83 in the everyday  53 home  132 as material  20 methodologies  25 multilingual  132 and multimodality  58 of place  37 school  53 sensory  134 spatial  38 and textiles  54 travelling  58, 75–6 literacy practices  2, 20, 83 as aesthetic  5, 21 in the home  53 literary texts  64 Local Literacies  21, 38 material culture  19 stuff  60 materiality  7, 19, 51, 114 meaning making ensemble  59 practices  24 memory/memories  33 haunting  35 of place  35 messing about  89 methodology/methodologies participatory  40 researcher journey  39, 182 Mignolo W.  90 Miller, D.  58, 175 modal choices  59–60, 137, 141 mode  59 and creativity  59 multimodality Kress’s theory of  58 meaning making  85 narrative/narratives  22, 105 of belonging  32 New Literacy Studies  83, 173

Index oral storytelling  37, 66 Pakistan  71 participation/participatory methodologies  27, 184–5 Partition of India  160 Pool, S.  86, 115, 138, 188, 189 prayer  16, 73 production  62 provocation as a methodology  26 Rae, S.  115 Rafiq, Z.  182–4 Rawmarsh  138 becoming language  46 history of  122, 161 language of  120 mines  122, 125, 149 reading the world  41 ‘A Reason to Write’  86 relational aesthetics  26 arts practice  145 representation and embodiment  146 and place  133 politics of  132–3 as a process  23 ‘Research Rebels’  41, 163 resilience  16 Ricoeur, P.  162 Rotherham alive with culture  16, 133–6 description of  7 heritage of  71, 146 hope  13 miners’ strike  7, 74, 160 narratives about  41 Rowsell, J.  59 ‘ruling passions’  134 Saito, Y.  84–5 script on walls  52 Selwyn, N.  172, 176 semiotic repertoires  144 resources  63

Sheffield  115, 118 Skeggs, B.  128 Smith, A.  96, 122 socially engaged arts practice  188 Somerville, M.  134, 146, 149 space/ spaces  16 belonging in  31 of dialogue  28 of the imagination  18, 35 as imagined  44 lived  17, 35 as relational  33 shaping language  47 by the side of the road  17 as sites of possibility  33 Steadman, C.  123, 128 stories  2 braided  23, 27 and gender  107 ghost  125 intergenerational  15 joint  2 and objects  71 oral  2 in place  22 shared  32, 109 as sites of hope  15 small  81, 114, 141 as a space of practice  23 timescales of  170 told and re-told  70 as ways of knowing  23 ‘Storying Sheffield’  104 storytelling  69 Street, B.  181 ‘structure of feeling’  152 textiles  55 transduction  87 Twilight  82, 93, 96 ‘The Uncanny’  97 unknowing  27, 104, 123, 187 space of  139, 143 The Uses of Literacy  3, 15, 16, 147, 151 Vasudevan, L.  104, 139, 152

207

208 walking  18, 29 sensory engagement with  31 Williams, B.  76, 173 Williams, R.  151, 191

Index writing  19 home writing practices  62 as material  52 as a meshwork  54 as a repertoire  76