This paper engages with the subjective experience of ‘doing’ aspiration, teasing out the psychic and social costs that accompany this as a classed process. It draws on a qualitative study of young women located in further education and contemplating their futures under New Labour, locating how the political rhetoric of aspiration gets institutionalized within school practices; how it intersects with maternal expectations and practices of involvement; and how these are lived and managed by subjects located in different positions in class-inflected social space. In attending to the tangled web of institutional, intergenerational and affective practices which shape young women's aspirations, the paper seeks to interrupt the celebratory and simplistic rhetoric of aspiration that characterizes the contemporary socio-political register of neoliberalism. As these ideals become further entrenched by the current Coalition government, there is an even greater urgency for such sociological enquiries.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
AhmedS., (2010), The Promise of Happiness, London: Duke University Press.
2.
AllenK. and HollingworthS., (2013), ‘Social class, place and urban young people's aspirations for work in the knowledge economy: “sticky subjects” or “cosmopolitan creative”?’Urban Studies, 50 (3): 499–517.
3.
AllenK. and MendickH., (2012), ‘Young people's uses of celebrity: class, gender and “improper” celebrity’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 34 (1): 77–93.
4.
AllenK. and MendickH., (2013), ‘Keeping it real? Social class, young people and authenticity in Reality TV’, Sociology, 47 (3): 460–476.
5.
AllenK.QuinnJ.HollingworthS. and RoseA., (2012), ‘Doing diversity and evading equality: the case of student work placements in the creative sector’, in TaylorY. (ed.), Educational Diversity: The Subject of Difference and Different Subjects, 180–200, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
6.
AllenK.QuinnJ.HollingworthS. and RoseA., (2013), ‘Becoming employable students and “ideal” creative workers: exclusion and inequality in higher education work placements’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 34 (3): 431–452.
7.
BallS., (2003), Class Strategies and the Education Market: The Middle Classes and Social Advantage, London: Routledge Falmer.
8.
BallS. and VincentC., (2001), ‘New class relations in education: the strategies of the “fearful” middle-classes’, in DemaineJ. (ed.), Sociology of Education Today, London: Palgrave.
9.
BlairT., (1999), ‘Foreword’ in National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education, All our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education, London: DCMS.
10.
BourdieuP., (1977), Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
11.
BourdieuP., (1986), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, London: Routledge.
12.
BourdieuP., (1993), Sociology in Question, London: Sage.
13.
BourdieuP., (2004), ‘Forms of capital’, in BallS. (ed.), The Routledge Falmer Reader in Sociology of Education, London: Routledge Falmer.
Department for Culture Media and Sport, (2001). Culture and Creativity: The Next Ten Years (Green Paper), London: The Stationery Office.
19.
Department for Culture Media and Sport and Department for Education and Skills, (2006), Government Response to Paul Roberts Report ‘Nurturing Creativity in Young People’, London: DCMS/DfES.
20.
Department for Work and Pensions and Department for Education, (2011), A New Approach to Child Poverty, London: The Stationery Office.
21.
DevineF., (2004), Class Practices. How Parents Help their Children Get Good Jobs, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
22.
DevineF.SavageM.CromptonR. and ScottJ. (eds), (2004), Rethinking Class: Identities, Cultures and Lifestyles, London: Palgrave.
23.
DumaisS.A., (2002), ‘Cultural Capital, Gender, and School Success: The Role of Habitus’, Sociology of Education, 75 (1): 44–68.
24.
FlemmenM., (2013), ‘Putting Bourdieu to work for class analysis: reflections on some recent contributions’, The British Journal of Sociology, 64 (2): 325–343.
GewirtzS., (2001), ‘Cloning the Blairs: New Labour's programme for the re- socialization of working-class parents’, Journal of Education Policy, 16 (4): 365–378.
27.
GilliesV., (2005), ‘Raising the “meritocracy” parenting and the individualization of social class’, Sociology, 39 (5): 835–853.
JonesO., (2011), Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, London: Verso.
36.
JowellT., (2005), ‘Tackling poverty of aspiration through rebuilding the public realm’, a speech for Demos at Toynbee Hall, London, 12 April.
37.
LareauA., (2003), Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
38.
LareauA., (2011), Unequal Childhoods. Class, Race and Family Life. 2nd edition, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
39.
LawlerS., (1999), ‘Getting out and getting away: women's narratives of class mobility’, Feminist Review, 63: 3–24.
40.
LawlerS., (2000), Mothering the Self: Mothers, Daughters, Subjects, London: Routledge.
41.
McRobbieA., (2000), Feminism and Youth Culture, London: Macmillan.
42.
McRobbieA. and GarberJ., (1975), ‘Girls and subcultures: an exploration’, in HallS. and JeffersonT. (eds), Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, London: Routledge.
43.
National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education, (1999), All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education, London: DCMS.
44.
ReayD., (1998a), ‘Engendering social reproduction: mothers in the educational marketplace’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 19 (2): 195–209.
45.
ReayD., (1998b), Class Work: Mother's Involvement in their Children's Primary Schooling, London: UCL Press.
46.
ReayD., (2004a), ‘“It's all becoming a habitus”: beyond the habitual use of habitus in educational research’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 25 (4): 431–444.
47.
ReayD., (2004b), ‘Gendering Bourdieu's concepts of capitals? Emotional capital, women and social class’, The Sociological Review, 52: 57–74.
48.
ReayD., (2005a), ‘Doing the dirty work of social class? Mothers' work in support of their children's schooling’, The Sociological Review, 53: 104–116.
49.
ReayD., (2005b), ‘Beyond consciousness? The psychic landscape of social class’, Sociology, 39 (5): 911–928.
50.
ReayD.DavidM. and BallS., (2005), Degrees of Choice: Social Class, Race and Gender in Higher Education, Stoke On Trent: Trentham Books.
51.
RobertsP., (2006), Nurturing Creativity in Young People: A Report to Government to Inform Future Policy, London: DCMS and DfES.
52.
RobertsS. and EvansS., (2012), ‘ “Aspirations” and imagined futures: the im/possibilities for Britain's young working class’. in AtkinsonW.RobertsS. and SavageM. (eds), Class Inequality in Austerity Britain, 70–89, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
53.
ShildrickT.MacDonaldR.WebsterC. and GarthwaiteK., (2012), Poverty and Insecurity: Life in Low-pay, No-pay Britain, Bristol: Policy Press.
54.
ShildrickT. and MacDonaldR., (2013), ‘Poverty talk: how people experiencing poverty deny their poverty and why they blame “the poor”’, The Sociological Review, 61: 285–303.
55.
SkeggsB., (1997), Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable, London: Sage.
SkeggsB., (2005), ‘The making of class and gender through visualizing moral subject formation’, Sociology, 39 (5): 965–982.
58.
SkeggsB. and LovedayV., (2012), ‘Struggles for value: value practices, injustice, judgment, affect and the idea of class’, British Journal of Sociology, 63 (3): 472–490.
59.
SlaterT., (2013), ‘The myth of “Broken Britain”: welfare reform and the production of ignorance’, Antipode45 (early view).
60.
SteedmanC., (1986), Landscape for a Good Woman, London: Virago.
61.
TomlinsonS., (2004), ‘The rise of the meritocracy? New Labour and education in the second term’, Social Policy Review, 16.
62.
TylerI., (2013), Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain, London: Zed.
63.
VincentC., (2001), ‘Social class and parental agency’, Journal of Education Policy, 16 (4): 347–364.
64.
WalkerdineV., (1997), Daddy's Girl: Young Girls and Popular Culture, London: Macmillan.
65.
WalkerdineV., (2003), ‘Reclassifying upward mobility: femininity and the neo-liberal subject’, Gender and Education, 15 (3): 237–248.
66.
WalkerdineV., (2006), ‘Workers in the new economy: subjectivity as border crossing’, Ethos, Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, 34: 10–41.
67.
WalkerdineV.LuceyH. and MelodyJ., (2001), Growing Up Girl: Psychosocial Explorations of Gender and Class, Basingstoke: Palgrave.
