Transcript

John Clarke

I think that sense of layers and their…and the bricklaying imagery is really quite helpful, and of course I'm immediately going to spoil it by trying to pick odd layers or odd bricks out of the structure, but it seems to me that I mean in a sense I want to encourage everybody to rewind the tape and listen again to that sequence, cos it seems to me that…that playing through that sequence is a really important one, and it gives me a sense of how D218 works, that that's quite sharp and clear.

So, for everybody's sake I'm just going to repeat it very quickly which is, you know, layer one is the question of the labelling or naming or defining of things. Layer two is that the world is then categorised into different groups so that distinction between bogus and genuine, the deserving and undeserving. Then I thought that question about how we value the different categories and that they become ordered in some way, some more valued, more cherished, more loved, and even more supported by welfare policies than others, which we don't like, which we disapprove of, which we didn't want to happen, which should not be supported by welfare policies.

And so that…that connection then, a value, and in a sense that welfare policies add to, or reinforce those values, that… then that question through power to those challenges to what we think we value, seems to me to be really important because it says, why do we think, why do we take for granted that welfare policies should support this way of living rather than that way of living, and it seems to me that if D218 opens up that question of why do we think welfare policies should work that way to reinforce those things, to strengthen those values, that opens up what a proper approach to social policy ought to be, and so I mean having said that I'd pull bricks out of the structure I haven't, but I want to take that question of value and value being contested as absolutely important, because it seems to me one of the things welfare policies do is to sort of naturalise that, is to make it obvious that that's what we ought to be doing and, of course welfare policies ought to support the family.

And then you unpack what is meant by the family and it turns out to mean what sort of family, and if you invest in supporting that sort of family it means you don't support other forms of family which might be perfectly adequate, satisfactory, happy forms of living lives. And then, I mean once you begin to see that that's contestable that can be challenged; it opens up welfare policy to proper social science analysis. I love the construction, and I love bricklaying and I think it's really exciting and I want to ask Esther if she's got another metaphor or a rather different view of how that approach to social construction and social constructionism holds D218 together.

Esther Saraga

I think it does link the course in particular sorts of ways and I think it's a really useful, whether it's from the tape and you write it down or where something very similar is written in the course guide, that you have it next to you and I think in Book 1, it'll be easier to go through it and to see with the particular case studies that are used there on disability of issues to do with race and ethnicity and on sexuality, to actually very systematically see how one can go through those stages.

As you go further on through the course I think people may find that it's not spelt out in the same way, but you can do it for yourself, and I think for example when you get into Book 2 and we go back historically to see that the social constructions, the meanings, the values, which people take for granted today haven't always been there and they have a history that we can trace, they're not arbitrary.

You might want to ask some of those same questions again to see how they've changed, you know how the categories have changed, names and labels have changed, the categories have changed, the values have changed, and power and contestation have changed.

I think you can do that with your own life as well, I mean depending on how old you are but, you know I certainly, those of us you know who grew up in the immediate post-war welfare state, have lived through a lot of these changes and lived through a lot of the changes in meaning in the sense in which we grew up thinking benefits were an entitlement, which were a good thing to have, and into a world in which you're much more likely to be seen as a scrounger or undeserving and in a sense you have to prove it isn't an entitlement, but you have to prove that it's something that you really need.

Listening to what Gail said and you've said John, there was one point that seemed really important also to add, which is that, what D218 is not about is saying, what is the right answer and what are the right values. We may all have our own ideas and students will have their own ideas about what kind of family or living arrangements they value, and what the course isn't doing is saying the dominant views that are around at the moment are the wrong ones, and any particular alternative set of views are the right ones.

That's something that students will make up their own minds about, they may already have ideas about it, their ideas may change as a result of studying D218, but I think the important thing is it's saying that whatever social constructions one's dealing with, whatever names and labels and then following it through the categories and the values and the hierarchies and so on, all of these can be analysed, and they are different ways of constructing the world and they have very different consequences for social policy interventions, and for peoples lives. But, I think sometimes students can get the idea that in deconstructing the kind of dominant ideas, that what we're trying to do is put an alternative set in their place, and it's quite important to see that that's not what the course is trying to do.

John Clarke

That seems to me to be an important point cos my sense of D218 is that what it says is all perspectives, approaches, angles into these things, are social constructions, and that what we encounter in the world are, as it were, competing social constructions. None of them, in social science terms, can be privileged over others. I mean social science might say some are more powerful than others, but it can't possibly say some are more right than others.

In that sense the question about scepticism is actually to make the question of, as it were moral or political choice harder, cos it says you need to look at all of these as social constructions, you cannot simply assume that one of them is right, and…and so it…it forces a space between you as a individual, and any particular set of social constructions, it pulls you away from that a bit.

That seems to me to be extremely important, that working through er of the idea of things being socially constructed and the fact that what we deal with in studying social policy in this way, is a field of social constructions, is important. In the same way I want to pick up one little phrase that Esther used, which is when she was talking about Book 1 she said, ‘and the case studies that are in Book 1’, and I think I want to insist that all…in a sense all of D218 is case studies, that actually there's an approach, and what we've done is try to pick a range of things that can be illuminated by that approach, explored with it and that what social constructionism as an approach does, is allow you to take hold of particular areas, whether it's particular social conditions, whether it's particular social groups, whether it's particular welfare organisations, whether it's particular social policies, take any of those and say, what is going on, what is being socially constructed in and around these things. And I'd want to hold on to that sense of all of D218 being case studies, that puts the particular bits in their proper place, they are things to be explored using the approach and actually what I hope students will come out at the end of the course with, is a sense of how important and powerful the approach is, and then how many things it can illuminate in practice.

I'd like to thank you both very much for illuminating social construction and social constructionism. I hope other people find it as exciting as I have.