CCPS warmly invites you to our final research seminar of this year.

On Wednesday 1st March at 5pm-6.30pm in G50 of Millburn House Dr. Delyth Edwards from Liverpool Hope University will be presenting a paper entitled

'Facilitated Participation and Everyday Participation: Enabling the Agency of young people in care'

Abstract and bio below.

Light refreshments will be provided. Please e-mail Paula Watkins on p.watkins@warwick.ac.uk to reserve a place

Abstract

Facilitated Participation and Everyday Participation: Enabling the Agency of young people in care

Lisanne Gibson and Delyth Edwards

Since the mid-nineteenth century cultural practice and its management has been attached to a discourse that constructs participation, in particular kinds of cultural activity, as beneficial to individuals on the basis that these beneficial effects have resonance beyond the cultural sphere. More recently ‘leading edge’ cultural practice and programmes have been based on the notion that benefit from such participation occurs via the facilitation of the active agency of participants; that is the making of their own meanings through co-curation and co-creation. Enlistment and involvement in, what we have termed ‘facilitated participation’, is, in Nikolas Rose’s terms, a tool typical of ‘advanced liberalism’ whereby the governance of individuals operates on the basis of the governance of their ‘freedom’, through making them self-governing subjects (Rose, 1993 and 1999). We have found that for children and young people living in care the facilitation of their agency through cultural programmes is limited by an assumption that such groups’ everyday cultural choices lack value. Through a discussion of research undertaken with young people in care which sought to understand the ways in which they valued their everyday participation in relation to the facilitated participation activities in which they took part, this presentation will explore how these different domains of participation are understood by both the facilitators and the facilitated. The presentation will conclude with a discussion of how this understanding could contribute to the development of cultural practice which reveals, recognises and, perhaps, interrogates and challenges, the relations that inform participant’s autonomy or agency, as well as the relations that inform the roles of the facilitators themselves.

Bio

I was recently appointed as lecturer in the Sociology of Childhood and Youth at Liverpool Hope University. Prior to this I was a postdoctoral research associate in the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, where I was working on the Understanding Everyday Participation - Articulating Cultural Values project. I’m a sociologist, ethnographer and biographical researcher with an interest in the sociology of everyday life, childhood and youth, care experiences and participation.