This paper provides a critical examination of inclusion as a pedagogic principle through a practicebased interrogation of contemporary 'good practice' strategies for encouraging inclusion in smallgroup teaching. The analysis emerges from our experiences of delivering four classroom exercises that are frequently proposed as strategies for increasing inclusion, and borrows insight from critical intersectional feminist pedagogy to interrogate normative discourses of inclusion in HE. We argue that both the terms of inclusion, and the assumption that (verbal) participation is itself a straightforward sign of improving inclusion in classroom spaces, require interrogation. This article thus responds to the proliferation of inclusion discourses in contemporary UK HE, by identifying some of the potential pitfalls of viewing inclusion through the limited lens of participation.
The notion of ‘cultural poverty’ has a long history in the United Kingdom. The argument that there is something culturally distinct about poor, working-class, and/or benefit recipient populations that sets them apart from the rest of society, and moreover, that these cultures are self-perpetuating, has tended to be deployed in the service of a politics that blames the cultures of the poor for poverty and economic disadvantage. The most recent resurgence of such arguments can be found in the austerity and anti-welfare agendas of the Coalition Government (2010–2015) and the post-Coalition Conservative Government(s) (2015–present). This article examines the 2017 Department for Work and Pensions policy paper ‘Improving Lives: Helping Workless Families’ that sets out the Government’s vision for tackling poverty and engrained disadvantage and argues, first, that the policy paper reproduces the cultural poverty argument. Second, I argue that the paper positions the family as the location in which the cultures of the poor and disadvantaged are reproduced, and consequently also as the proper site for government action to interrupt the cycle of reproduction, highlighting familial gender dynamics, reproductive arrangements, and parenting practices as key aspects of the discursive framing of poverty within austerity and anti-welfare politics.
In this article we engage with the cultural moment of "heteropessimism" through the specific case of Fleabag (2016, 2019), with the show acting as the lens through which we illuminate the psychic and affective life of heterosexuality's cultural production. Our queer reading of Fleabag suggests that while the heteropessimist sensibility of the show critiques the neoliberal and gendered constraints of heterosexuality, it at the same time creates a renewed, if pessimistic, investment in heteronormativity and repudiates alternative feminist and queer attachments. Overall, our analysis of Fleabag's failed attempts to detach from heterosexual fantasies of the "good life" highlights the centrality of heteronormativity to contemporary imaginaries of feminism. As such, we suggest that heteropessimism might be best understood as the latest stage of postfeminism and argue that a critique of the cultural prominence and affective structure of heteropessimism is crucial for invigorating queer and feminist politics today.
This article offers a reading of Ken Loach’s 2016 film I, Daniel Blake, a fictionalised account of experiences of the UK welfare system in conditions of austerity. We consider, firstly, the significant challenge the film poses to dominant figurations of welfare recipients under austerity, through a focus on vulnerability to state processes. We follow with a reading of some of the film’s interventions in relation to reciprocity, drawing on the important trajectories of care, community and resistance that the film renders visible through the collective stories of the major characters. Finally, we conclude with reflections on citizenship, subject narratives and alternative imaginaries of ‘deservingness’. Our article offers an ‘against the grain’ reading (hooks, 1996; Wearing, 2013) of the film, highlighting some of the radical possibilities of the more minor moments, character arcs and subject positionalities within the film’s central narrative of Daniel’s experiences in the shadow of the steadily crumbling welfare state.
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