(Re)sourcing the Character and Resilience Manifesto: Suppressions and Slippages of (Re)presentation and Selective Affectivities

Abstract

This article offers a critical discursive reading of the 2014 Character and Resilience Manifesto (hereafter the Manifesto), focusing on the sources and legitimation strategies supporting its claims. As an All Party Parliamentary Group on Social Mobility document, the Manifesto traces both old and new discursive tropes framing policy strategy on education and social care, extending into current political agendas around mental health and well-being and even child safeguarding and securitisation. While the Manifesto’s supposed evidence-based claims draw extensively on a specifically commissioned literature review undertaken by Gutman and Schoon, problems are identified with how this is represented in the Manifesto, including significant omissions and slippages within Gutman and Schoon’s text and between this and the Manifesto. Analysis highlights exaggerations of the claims made in Gutman and Schoon’s review in the Manifesto while important conceptual clarifications (between resilience and coping and the non-generalisability of resilience) are overlooked. Commentators’ cautions over the evaluation and comparability of current programmes also fail to appear. Beyond such asymmetries, a common narrative identified across both texts reformulates emotions away from their ‘soft’, culturally feminised, associations to become ‘hard and tough’, and abstracted from relationship and (sociopolitical) context. Clearly, such gendering of emotions can be situated in relation to wider discourses of feminisation, alongside others de-emphasising classed and racialised inequalities. Overall, the Manifesto performs its own rhetoric, manifesting its own buoyancy to resist critical engagement and further the contemporary moral doctrine of inciting voluntarist optimistic subjects, devoid of attention to class, gender or racialised inequalities.

‘Push on through’: Children’s perspectives on the narratives of resilience in schools identified for intensive mental health promotion

“…Children in our study were critical of how resilience was taught, seeing it as a performative measure. In line with concerns raised by critical commentators (Brown & Carr, 2018;Burman, 2018), the 'push-on-through' narrative of 'resilience' was perceived as reflecting an individual attitude towards learning and academic achievement, with little focus on the wider environment. While this was experienced as partially empowering by a few, the majority felt that it lowered their motivation to study; being used by adults to castigate or blame individuals for experiencing difficulties.…”

“…It was also notable how narratives of resilience were understood by children. It has been argued that resilience narratives within UK policy have shifted away from a focus on contexts and environment, towards a focus on individuals and families (Burman, ). Children in our study were critical of how resilience was taught, seeing it as a performative measure.…”

“…It has been argued that the framing of resilience as an object of schooling reflects a form of individual acquiescence, as opposed to resistance (Burman, , p. 24) in undermining the protest and political debate necessary to incite collective action to challenge the state apparatus that contributes to the very problems it purports to address. We fear that the neglect of structural in place of agentic mechanisms for change will inevitably dampen appetite to address the former, or worse still (noting an emergent discourse within the psychological sciences) the message received by children in this study that ‘resilience is evidenced because of the challenging environment, not in spite of it’ (Hooper, , p. 19 our emphasis) as leverage to justify a continued austerity approach to public policymaking.…”

“…Policy critics have questioned the utility of a resilience narrative as a developmental aim for children (O'Brien, ; Henderson & Denny, ; Burman, ). While findings from this study may support such caution, nevertheless the potential indicated in the alternative constructions raised by young people gives sway to the possibility to reconstruct the key definitional terms underpinning school mental health‐promotion strategies.…”

Following Policy: A Network Ethnography of the UK Character Education Policy Community

“…In the UK, Duckworth's research is frequently cited in policy texts on character, including those published by the Government's Behavioural Insights Team (formally known as the 'Nudge Unit') (Gandy et al, 2016), the All Party Parliamentary Group on Social Mobility's report (Paterson et al, 2014), and evidence reviews funded by government (e.g. Gutman and Schoon 2013) (see Burman, 2018, for a critique of how this evidence is used).…”