Two questions framed the seminar series that formed the basis for this collection: How is success... more Two questions framed the seminar series that formed the basis for this collection: How is success experienced through the neoliberal life cycle? What accommodations are required in order to be successful, and what resistances are identified as necessary to sustain other ways of living well? Looking over the interdisciplinary range of papers presented in this volume reminds us that, just as neoliberalism is pervasive and tenacious, so must be the critique and the seeking of alternatives. Here we reflect on the opportunities to address Wendy Larner’s caution that focusing on a restricted conception of neoliberalism may result in a limited ability to envisage better alternatives that an interdisciplinary and inter-professional conversation offers.
This article examines the attitudes of state-school educated girls under contexts of neoliberal a... more This article examines the attitudes of state-school educated girls under contexts of neoliberal austerity at a moment when discourses surrounding inherited privilege and race intensified in popular culture. Using interviews with 50 girls aged 13–15 at the time of the wedding between Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, we examine attitudes to Meghan as a public figure, institutional royalty as a concept, and Meghan's symbolic ability to bridge tensions of progression and regression around the royals. In so doing, we shed light on how girls respond to and internalise ideas about power, work and inheritance. We offer new understandings of monarchy and celebrity; and girls' negotiations with popular discourses of meritocracy and privilege. We address a dearth of empirical analyses of public perceptions of royal celebrity, and provide insights into the mediation and reception of Meghan as a new member of the monarchy and the broader inter-penetrations of race, and gender she represen...
An absence of role models in girlhood is a popularly cited cause of the shortage of women in deci... more An absence of role models in girlhood is a popularly cited cause of the shortage of women in decision-making positions in adulthood. The power of leadership exists in a close relationship with public visibility, and this relationship is regularly foregrounded in adult interventions that seek to stimulate girls’ leadership aspirations through the public pedagogy of role models. We explore the problematic nature of such popular solutions through a framework suggested by feminist critique of the ‘fetishisation’ of representation, by their media effects foundations and by their alignment with neoliberal logics. Drawing on group interview workshops conducted in five English state schools, we find that role-model solutions offer an overly simplistic view of girls’ engagements with public figures, and that they recognise neither the contemporary conditions of women’s visibility nor how such conditions regulate girls’ imaginings of power along axes of ‘race’ and class as well as gender.
This paper examines data from our research into Girls, Leadership, and Women in the Public Eye wi... more This paper examines data from our research into Girls, Leadership, and Women in the Public Eye within a framework suggested by Janet Newman’s (2015) distinction between individual ‘aspiration’ and collective ‘hope’ in political contexts of austerity. The project responds to the contemporary turn to the agentic, aspiring girl as the solution to the gender leadership gap in the future. It explores ways in which girls are enjoined to imagine leadership via high-profile campaigns, and their own envisionings developed through their local experiences and their encounters with highly visible women across a range of media. Our data reveals differences between the aspirational, individualist leadership models promoted to girls and their own preferences for more collaborative leadership as a means of achieving wider social change. We suggest that the concept of ‘leadership’ presented to girls needs to be challenged in terms of its gendered individualism and its failure to capture ways in whic...
Particpations Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, 2020
This paper examines data from our research into Girls, Leadership, and Women in the Public Eye wi... more This paper examines data from our research into Girls, Leadership, and Women in the Public Eye within a framework suggested by Janet Newman’s (2015) distinction between individual ‘aspiration’ and collective ‘hope’ in political contexts of austerity. The project responds to the contemporary turn to the agentic, aspiring girl as the solution to the gender leadership gap in the future. It explores ways in which girls are enjoined to imagine leadership via high-profile campaigns, and their own envisionings developed through their local experiences and their encounters with highly visible women across a range of media. Our data reveals differences between the aspirational, individualist leadership models promoted to girls and their own preferences for more collaborative leadership as a means of achieving wider social change. We suggest that the concept of ‘leadership’ presented to girls needs to be challenged in terms of its gendered individualism and its failure to capture ways in which they desire to participate in decision making.
imaginary continues to trouble feminist educational researchers and practitioners. The tracing of... more imaginary continues to trouble feminist educational researchers and practitioners. The tracing of such myths and the categories they create through authoritative and elite discourses of the past suggests how they have functioned across different fields to preserve a hierarchised binary. Gendered myths seem to be lent authority by some of the more popular claims of contemporary neuroscience as they were by the nascent Victorian psychological sciences. Adopting Le Doeuff’s [2003. The Sex of Knowing. Translated by K. Hamer and L. Code. London: Routledge] heuristic of identifying which attributes are absorbed into masculine intellectual legacies and which ‘cast off’ to women allows for a focus on patterns of privileging of learning discourses across the humanities and sciences, and the ways these are constituted in historical and contemporary contexts
Created for wider public engagement, this document offers a brief context and details of seven ke... more Created for wider public engagement, this document offers a brief context and details of seven key themes emerging in the study conducted with 50 girls across the UK and via dedicated, closed social media groups
Girlhood, Schools, and Media: Popular Discourses of the Achieving Girl, 2017
This book explores the circulation and reception of popular discourses of the successful girl. It... more This book explores the circulation and reception of popular discourses of the successful girl. It examines the figure of the achieving girl within wider discourses of neoliberal self-management and post-feminist possibility, considering the tensions involved in being both successful and successfully feminine and the strategies and negotiations girls undertake to manage these tensions. The work is grounded in an understanding of media, educational, and peer contexts for the production of the successful girl. It traces narratives across school, television and online, in texts produced for and by girls, drawing on interviews with girls in schools, online forum participation (within the purpose-built site www.smartgirls.tv), and girls’ discussions of a range of teen dramas.
Interrogating the Neoliberal Lifecyle: The Limits of Success
In this chapter I consider a totemic figure of the early 21st century – the successful girl— in t... more In this chapter I consider a totemic figure of the early 21st century – the successful girl— in the context of the legacy of UK New Labour's ‘Gifted and Talented’ policies, and of girls’ success as a defining trope of the period. Highly achieving girls have been a focus of discourses of choice, of self-improvement, and of post-feminist optimism; I explore ways in which such girls engage with neoliberal success narratives as they encounter them in schools, as formally-identified successful subjects. While for some, meritocratic accounts of self-management and hard work provide satisfactory explanations for their success, others seek to evade restrictions, reconcile contradictions, and to find spaces for thinking differently about competition and success in the gaps and cracks created by neoliberalism’s paradoxes and elisions.
Interrogating the Neoliberal Lifcycle: The Limits of Success, 2019
In this timely collection, contributors from a number of disciplines discuss neoliberal visions o... more In this timely collection, contributors from a number of disciplines discuss neoliberal visions of success, and the subsequent effects they have on the construction of the lifecycle. Frequently mentioned in popular political discourse, the notion of neoliberalism is often deployed as shorthand for the consensus that austerity is necessary and the hard-working individual can survive it. This volume unpicks and interrogates the term by engaging with the interface between the political ubiquity of neoliberal forms and its lived experience in neoliberal societies, cutting across a multiplicity of factors including gender, age, and access to education. Impressive in its wide scope and analysis, Interrogating the Neoliberal Lifecycle presents an informed discussion not only of the limits of the neoliberal paradigm but also of possible alternatives.
Two questions framed the seminar series that formed the basis for this collection: How is success... more Two questions framed the seminar series that formed the basis for this collection: How is success experienced through the neoliberal life cycle? What accommodations are required in order to be successful, and what resistances are identified as necessary to sustain other ways of living well? Looking over the interdisciplinary range of papers presented in this volume reminds us that, just as neoliberalism is pervasive and tenacious, so must be the critique and the seeking of alternatives. Here we reflect on the opportunities to address Wendy Larner’s caution that focusing on a restricted conception of neoliberalism may result in a limited ability to envisage better alternatives that an interdisciplinary and inter-professional conversation offers.
This article examines the attitudes of state-school educated girls under contexts of neoliberal a... more This article examines the attitudes of state-school educated girls under contexts of neoliberal austerity at a moment when discourses surrounding inherited privilege and race intensified in popular culture. Using interviews with 50 girls aged 13–15 at the time of the wedding between Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, we examine attitudes to Meghan as a public figure, institutional royalty as a concept, and Meghan's symbolic ability to bridge tensions of progression and regression around the royals. In so doing, we shed light on how girls respond to and internalise ideas about power, work and inheritance. We offer new understandings of monarchy and celebrity; and girls' negotiations with popular discourses of meritocracy and privilege. We address a dearth of empirical analyses of public perceptions of royal celebrity, and provide insights into the mediation and reception of Meghan as a new member of the monarchy and the broader inter-penetrations of race, and gender she represen...
An absence of role models in girlhood is a popularly cited cause of the shortage of women in deci... more An absence of role models in girlhood is a popularly cited cause of the shortage of women in decision-making positions in adulthood. The power of leadership exists in a close relationship with public visibility, and this relationship is regularly foregrounded in adult interventions that seek to stimulate girls’ leadership aspirations through the public pedagogy of role models. We explore the problematic nature of such popular solutions through a framework suggested by feminist critique of the ‘fetishisation’ of representation, by their media effects foundations and by their alignment with neoliberal logics. Drawing on group interview workshops conducted in five English state schools, we find that role-model solutions offer an overly simplistic view of girls’ engagements with public figures, and that they recognise neither the contemporary conditions of women’s visibility nor how such conditions regulate girls’ imaginings of power along axes of ‘race’ and class as well as gender.
This paper examines data from our research into Girls, Leadership, and Women in the Public Eye wi... more This paper examines data from our research into Girls, Leadership, and Women in the Public Eye within a framework suggested by Janet Newman’s (2015) distinction between individual ‘aspiration’ and collective ‘hope’ in political contexts of austerity. The project responds to the contemporary turn to the agentic, aspiring girl as the solution to the gender leadership gap in the future. It explores ways in which girls are enjoined to imagine leadership via high-profile campaigns, and their own envisionings developed through their local experiences and their encounters with highly visible women across a range of media. Our data reveals differences between the aspirational, individualist leadership models promoted to girls and their own preferences for more collaborative leadership as a means of achieving wider social change. We suggest that the concept of ‘leadership’ presented to girls needs to be challenged in terms of its gendered individualism and its failure to capture ways in whic...
Particpations Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, 2020
This paper examines data from our research into Girls, Leadership, and Women in the Public Eye wi... more This paper examines data from our research into Girls, Leadership, and Women in the Public Eye within a framework suggested by Janet Newman’s (2015) distinction between individual ‘aspiration’ and collective ‘hope’ in political contexts of austerity. The project responds to the contemporary turn to the agentic, aspiring girl as the solution to the gender leadership gap in the future. It explores ways in which girls are enjoined to imagine leadership via high-profile campaigns, and their own envisionings developed through their local experiences and their encounters with highly visible women across a range of media. Our data reveals differences between the aspirational, individualist leadership models promoted to girls and their own preferences for more collaborative leadership as a means of achieving wider social change. We suggest that the concept of ‘leadership’ presented to girls needs to be challenged in terms of its gendered individualism and its failure to capture ways in which they desire to participate in decision making.
imaginary continues to trouble feminist educational researchers and practitioners. The tracing of... more imaginary continues to trouble feminist educational researchers and practitioners. The tracing of such myths and the categories they create through authoritative and elite discourses of the past suggests how they have functioned across different fields to preserve a hierarchised binary. Gendered myths seem to be lent authority by some of the more popular claims of contemporary neuroscience as they were by the nascent Victorian psychological sciences. Adopting Le Doeuff’s [2003. The Sex of Knowing. Translated by K. Hamer and L. Code. London: Routledge] heuristic of identifying which attributes are absorbed into masculine intellectual legacies and which ‘cast off’ to women allows for a focus on patterns of privileging of learning discourses across the humanities and sciences, and the ways these are constituted in historical and contemporary contexts
Created for wider public engagement, this document offers a brief context and details of seven ke... more Created for wider public engagement, this document offers a brief context and details of seven key themes emerging in the study conducted with 50 girls across the UK and via dedicated, closed social media groups
Girlhood, Schools, and Media: Popular Discourses of the Achieving Girl, 2017
This book explores the circulation and reception of popular discourses of the successful girl. It... more This book explores the circulation and reception of popular discourses of the successful girl. It examines the figure of the achieving girl within wider discourses of neoliberal self-management and post-feminist possibility, considering the tensions involved in being both successful and successfully feminine and the strategies and negotiations girls undertake to manage these tensions. The work is grounded in an understanding of media, educational, and peer contexts for the production of the successful girl. It traces narratives across school, television and online, in texts produced for and by girls, drawing on interviews with girls in schools, online forum participation (within the purpose-built site www.smartgirls.tv), and girls’ discussions of a range of teen dramas.
Interrogating the Neoliberal Lifecyle: The Limits of Success
In this chapter I consider a totemic figure of the early 21st century – the successful girl— in t... more In this chapter I consider a totemic figure of the early 21st century – the successful girl— in the context of the legacy of UK New Labour's ‘Gifted and Talented’ policies, and of girls’ success as a defining trope of the period. Highly achieving girls have been a focus of discourses of choice, of self-improvement, and of post-feminist optimism; I explore ways in which such girls engage with neoliberal success narratives as they encounter them in schools, as formally-identified successful subjects. While for some, meritocratic accounts of self-management and hard work provide satisfactory explanations for their success, others seek to evade restrictions, reconcile contradictions, and to find spaces for thinking differently about competition and success in the gaps and cracks created by neoliberalism’s paradoxes and elisions.
Interrogating the Neoliberal Lifcycle: The Limits of Success, 2019
In this timely collection, contributors from a number of disciplines discuss neoliberal visions o... more In this timely collection, contributors from a number of disciplines discuss neoliberal visions of success, and the subsequent effects they have on the construction of the lifecycle. Frequently mentioned in popular political discourse, the notion of neoliberalism is often deployed as shorthand for the consensus that austerity is necessary and the hard-working individual can survive it. This volume unpicks and interrogates the term by engaging with the interface between the political ubiquity of neoliberal forms and its lived experience in neoliberal societies, cutting across a multiplicity of factors including gender, age, and access to education. Impressive in its wide scope and analysis, Interrogating the Neoliberal Lifecycle presents an informed discussion not only of the limits of the neoliberal paradigm but also of possible alternatives.
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The work is grounded in an understanding of media, educational, and peer contexts for the production of the successful girl. It traces narratives across school, television and online, in texts produced for and by girls, drawing on interviews with girls in schools, online forum participation (within the purpose-built site www.smartgirls.tv), and girls’ discussions of a range of teen dramas.
The work is grounded in an understanding of media, educational, and peer contexts for the production of the successful girl. It traces narratives across school, television and online, in texts produced for and by girls, drawing on interviews with girls in schools, online forum participation (within the purpose-built site www.smartgirls.tv), and girls’ discussions of a range of teen dramas.