Talking the Talk of Social Mobility: the political performance of a misguided agenda

Since 2010 the language of social mobility has been increasingly utilised by UK politicians from across the political spectrum to denote a commitment to 'fair access' to opportunity in both education and the professions. Within this policy discourse the default understanding of inequality is premised on a narrow notion of access to elite education and employment positions, where a deeper understanding of the politics of social reproduction and inequality, or any meaningful emphasis on redistribution, is absent. The social mobility agenda is axiomatically an equality of opportunity agenda where the focus is on ‘levelling up’ those who are considered to be falling behind. Its focus on opportunity to the detriment of outcome thus rules out considerations of structural solutions to inequalities. In this paper, we unpack the discourses of social mobility that are prevalent in recent UK government papers and political talk, with a specific focus on the Social Mobility Commission (SMC) in order to consider how these shape policy approaches to education and labour market participation. We argue that the presiding 'race to the top' mentality undermines the very equality that the social mobility agenda claims to be seeking to achieve, and in doing so we implicate the SMC in purveying contradictory understandings of mobility that compound and conceal existing inequalities. Through a focus on graduate employment we problematise the role of Higher Education in the promotion of social mobility. We consider the role of employers participating in the Social Mobility Employers’ Index, and expose the contradictions between the performance of social mobility and the reality of corporate practices that entrench social inequalities. Our work underscores the need for a new political conversation about social mobility, and a redirection of attendant education and employment policy to focus on dismantling rather than reinforcing social hierarchies

Beyond geopower: earthly and anthropic geopolitics in The Great Game by War Boutique

This article reconsiders the nature of art and geopolitics and their interrelations via a discussion of The Great Game, an artwork by War Boutique dealing with successive British military interventions in Afghanistan. As we discuss, The Great Game is richly suggestive in terms of the earthly materials and forces at work in geopolitics, as well as the roles played by objects and technology. The main goal of our discussion, however, is to show how pursuing such concerns leads us back towards a consideration of the ideational, the human and the representational and the roles they play in art and in geopolitics. We argue that framing art in terms of the earthly, the affective and the inhuman is suggestive but misses too much of what art is otherwise taken to be and to do, sometimes even within accounts framed in earthly terms. Because we are initially responding to the work rather than seeking to explicate it, we first provide an extended discussion of the The Great Game, in which we consider how it entangles earthly and anthropic dimensions of geopolitics. We then bring this discussion back to bear on academic work that rethinks geopolitics and art in earthly, inhuman, nonrepresentational and affective terms. Third, we discuss how our understanding of art and geopolitics is enhanced by reflection on what makes artistic engagements with geopolitics artistic, considering how The Great Game has moved through a series of artworlds. In conclusion, we underscore the extent to which art is suggestive as an onto-epistemological form of inquiry into geopolitics as well as an aesthetic-political practice with regard to it

Within school and beyond the gate:The complexities of being educationally successful and working class

Much educational research on working-class boys has focused on their failure and lack of aspiration. However, there has been little research on working-class boys’ experiences of success. The very idea of being educationally successful and working class is problematic, as success has been argued to be dependent on the abandonment of aspects of working-class background. This article highlights the difficulties that some working-class grammar school boys face in reconciling their identity with educational success. For these boys the issue of identity is complex and there is a conflict between their identity, based on their class background, and their identity as an aspiring student. Using Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, this article explores the complexities associated with identities that are developing in social fields different from those in which they originated, and discusses how this impacts emotionally on working-class boys

Private school entry to Oxbridge: how cultural capital counts in the making of elites

In this article we make an argument for the importance of embodied cultural capital in the generation of class advantage through private school students’ access to Oxbridge. Private schools in England continue to reproduce advantage (Variyan 2019), however, establishing exactly how students are advantaged through private schooling is not straightforward. Previous studies of educational advantage have drawn on the broad concept of cultural capital (e.g. Bathmaker, Ingram and Waller 2013; Reay, David and Ball 2005) to elucidate processes of inequality. We contend that within this space of Bourdieusian analysis of middle-class advantage there is a need for further thinking about embodied cultural capital as a specific and powerful form working at the symbolic level. By examining a bespoke intervention in a private school in England, we shed new light on how students are advantaged when applying to elite universities through processes that facilitate the cultivation of embodied cultural capital

Co-designing innovative cropping systems with stakeholders

Over the last decades, farmers have been subject to the impacts of a number of driving forces acting at the global level, which have substantially modified the structure and the organization of cropping systems [...]

Paired peers: Moving on up? Project Report

Paired Peers Phase 2 (August 2014 - July 2017)followed up Paired Peers: Class and the Student Experience, also funded by Leverhulme Trust, which ran from September 2010 to August 2013. This project followed a cohort of students from Bristol’s two universities through three years of their degree. The students were drawn from eleven different disciplines (which had to be taught at both universities) and were matched by class: for example, we recruited four Law students from each university, two we identified as working-class and two as middle-class

The Paired Peers project report

Paired Peers is three-year qualitative longitudinal project following a cohort of students drawn from two universities in the same English city, the University of Bristol (UoB) and the University of the West of England (UWE), through three years of their undergraduate degree (2010-2013. The overall aims of the project were to discover:1. How the experiences of students were differentiated by class2. What kind of capitals students brought into university with them (economic, social and cultural) and what capitals they acquired during their university years3. In this way, to begin to explore in what ways university might promote, or not promote, social mobility

Evaluating the Targeting Efficiency of Anti-EGFR Functionalised Nanoparticles to Head and Neck Cancer Cells for Use in NIR-II Optical Window

Gold nanoparticles have been indicated for use in a diagnostic and/or therapeutic role in several cancer types. The use of gold nanorods (AuNRs) with a surface plasmon resonance (SPR) in the second near-infrared II (NIR-II) optical window promises deeper anatomical penetration through increased maximum permissible exposure and lower optical attenuation. In this study, the targeting and therapeutic efficiency of anti-epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR)-antibody-functionalised AuNRs with an SPR at 1064 nm was evaluated in vitro. Four cell lines, KYSE-30, CAL-27, Hep-G2 and MCF-7, which either over- or under-expressed EGFR, were used once confirmed by flow cytometry and immunofluorescence. Optical microscopy demonstrated a significant difference (p 97%) in head and neck cancer cell line CAL-27 using tAuNRs but not uAuNRs, apoptosis being the major mechanism of cell death. This successful targeting and therapeutic outcome highlight the future use of tAuNRs for molecular photoacoustic imaging or tumour treatment through plasmonic photothermal therapy