Transcript

John Clarke

This is D218: Getting to grips with social construction and social constructionism.

John Clarke

Hello. I'm John Clarke and I'm a member of the D218 course team. I'm joined today by Esther Saraga and Gail Lewis, who are both members of the course team, and who’ve been tutors on the course. We're here to talk about the course's approach to studying social policy.

So let me turn first of all to Esther. Esther, what do you think are the core elements of the course's approach to social policy?

Esther Saraga

Yes I think the most important word that you've used John is approach, and that's the key thing to get hold of with D218, that it's about a particular way of studying social policy.

So it isn't about learning lots of facts and figures or about a range of policies and procedures or the way society's organised, the structural arrangements among welfare organisations, that obviously is included in the course.

There's a series of topics, important topics, which are to do with welfare, but they're all used to illustrate a particular way of looking at the world in which we live and in particular the ways in which welfare is organised.

And so the starting point is a very questioning one, that as part of this approach one needs to not take things for granted, to be as sceptical stranger, to ask lots of questions and to step back and say well, people say this about welfare or they make these statements about who needs welfare and who's deserving but let's just always step back and say, who says that, why do they say it, in whose interests is it said and so on. So there are two main ideas, which are really important and they'll take a while to get used to but these two main ideas are social construction and social constructionism. And that distinction's important, social construction and social constructionism.

John Clarke

Okay so that's the starting point. It's a way of looking at society and the place and organisation of social welfare within it, which requires us as people studying it to step back from what we might think we know to start with. And the key ideas are: social construction, and social constructionism so let me turn to Gail. What does social construction mean in the context of D218.

Gail Lewis

Yeah I think Esther's already hinted at it really when she talks about, you know, who says what about X, and I suppose the second part then if we're studying 218 is to say, do I know what they mean when they say X.

There's an assumption that if a policy maker or a member of government stands up and talks about poverty or homelessness, that we all know what's meant, this kind of commonsense understanding, and what 218 does is says let's stop and think about what it is that's assumed that we all understand.

So that's in some sense is already carried by the idea of social construction, social in the sense of shared by many. And I suppose the key thing is what we're trying to get at in that notion is to try and think about the ways in which certain things are made to mean something, the way in which poverty is made to mean something, the way in which homelessness is made to mean something, the way in which race is made to mean something, or disability. And what we do by asking that question is immediately to suggest that there is indeed a question, we can question ‘do we really understand what's meant by those words’?

Now one of the difficulties I think for 218 students is the word construction is an everyday word, we see it all the time, building construction etc., and in some ways to start there can be useful, the idea of build-up, make up, to literally bring into being, construct a building it comes from nothing apparently and it comes up into something. But on the other hand that might be a problematic way to start, you can kind of say oh yeah it's about making up, but we'd need to do something else then and say, meanings aren't like buildings you can't necessarily go and touch them, and yet they guide us to action.

So when we're talking about social construction in 218 terms, the key thing to hold on to all of the time is to say that we're talking about processes of definition, the ways in which certain behaviours, characteristics of groups, conditions of life, are made to mean something, and that then those understandings are embedded in social policies. And what we do on 218 is to begin to say let's explore both what those meanings are, and their implications for the shape of policies and how they're then implemented.

John Clarke

There's something about that question about saying what things mean. And there's a sort of easy version of that which is just a sort of quibble thing like it depends what you mean by, or it's a sort of technical matter of how you define homelessness as a condition, but it seems to me that what you've been talking about is something much grander and more significant than that.

It is about how we collectively might understand an issue, a problem, a condition, and that that's a rather larger sense of something being socially constructed. But isn't it also the case that something like poverty or homelessness will have more than one construction that might be in play around it so that actually you can see that there are different perspectives or approaches or thoughts or concepts being mobilised, organised around what poverty means and therefore what you do about it, is that a reasonable conclusion to draw.

Gail Lewis

Absolutely. Let's think about an example from now. It's July 2001, and there's been a whole series of disturbances in West Yorkshire and Lancashire towns and most recently, and perhaps the most violent have been the ones in Bradford. And if we listen in detail to some of the news and current affairs programmes about that or read the newspapers about how these things are being interpreted when people are trying to sift through trying to get to the causes, one of the things that we notice is constantly a shift between British Asians, so the naming or labelling of a group of youths who are very much involved in these disturbances as British Asians on the one hand, and on the other hand as Asians or Pakistanis.

Now those names apparently talk about the same groups of people. In 218 terms we'd say actually the effects of those names, positions, those groups of peoples in very different ways in the context of Britain in 2001, and in the context of those disturbances.

To say British Asian suggests a heritage of South Asian origin, but British places them as much a part of the population as the white youths because the other group that are talked about are white youths without any ethnicity, but they're equally British. There's white youths and there's British Asians. To talk about them as Asians or Pakistanis suggests that these are young people who've migrated in, that their origins are somewhere else in terms of where they're born, and all of their understandings, all of their kind of interpretations of the world, are of Pakistan.

The consequences of that, for thinking about the issues that are put on the tape was the result of these disturbances, issues of policing, issues of education have come to the foreground and issues of unemployment suggest very different things. If you're talking about the indigenous population, whether that's of Welsh, Scottish, English or South Asian heritage, then you might move in a particular way in terms of the policy in comparison to if you're talking about groups of people who are migrant into the country.

And that's the ways in which there's contestations there's a struggle over how you define the groups of people who are involved in those disturbances, but those struggles over the…how you define will have implications for the policies. And that in a sense is what 218 is about over and over and over again.