1. Jeremy Brent and Southmead
Representation, Power and Action
I will quote page numbers of the core text rather than citations, to make you go & read the book

2. The academic gaze
• “For years and years we have had people
coming in from outside to find out what’s
wrong with us, how we live, and what makes
us so criminal”
• Southmead resident p11
• “The strange visitor was coming to question
the usefulness of our insalubrious existence”

3. Ideas of community
• Fascists- folk community
• Anarchists- community justice promoted by Class
War
• Police- community relations
• Commerce- business in the community
• Lack of community
• Low community action
• Lack of ‘leadership’

4. writers
Community:
• Does exist (Alinski, Etizioni, Nancy)
• Should exist (Marx, Engels, Taylor)
• Does not or cannot exist (Bauman, Harvey, Peet &
Thrift, Zukin)
• Exist in impossible ways (Castells)
• Are false or dangerous (Touraine, Sennett)
• Are necessary (Hall, hooks, West)
• Pose dilemmas (Bhanba, Brown, Corlett etc)
• Are modern inventions (Bauman)
• Are outdated (Cooke)

5. The ‘community’
• One anecdote in the book.....p28-29
• Community as shared history
• A desire for and celebration of togetherness
• Territory and difference ‘you’re not from round here’
• Morality- ‘hero of the community’ or ‘no grassing’
• Boundary enforcement –allowed to stay in’
• Solidary social practice -face to face resolution of
problems
• gendered
• destructive

6. derrida
• It is something that one does not know,
precisely, and one does not know if precisely it
IS, if it exists, if it responds to a name or
corresponds to an essence, p31

7. Writing as representation
• You will be writing about Lincoln Way
• You will be close, but the data is distancing
• You won’t be writing about Lincoln Way
• You will be representing Lincoln Way
• How is your writing representative of Lincoln
Way: its community, people, data?
• Objects or subjects?

8. Henry Mayhew, Edwin Chadwick, Karl
Marx, Freidrich Engels
• “Writers recreated the poor for the bourgeois
study and drawing room as much for the
urban council chamber” p36
• The labouring and dangerous classes would be
transformed once they became visible
• Inculcation of politeness through the benign
gaze of the bourgeoisie

9. Emotionally charged titles and
dramatic covers
• Goliath: Britain's dangerous places (Campbell 1993)
– joyriding in Oxford
– question community
• Danziger’s Britain: a journey to the edge (Danziger
1997)
– lost battle against drug bullies in Leeds
– to share the despair
• Dark heart: the shocking truth about hidden Britain
(Davies 1998)
– depression in Leicester
– call for action

10. Blame the behaviour of the poor, their morality, rather the
the structural economics and
Inequity of their situation
“By constructing poverty and deprivation in this way, as
rooted in the characteristics of specific people and places
and as only found in a few ‘deviant’ communities,
mainstream society is assumed to be functioning properly...
Blame is centred on the victims of poverty, rather than on
the conditions of wider society” p39-40

11. Exact & objective documentation, p41
• Poverty in Bristol reports, 1985, 1988, 1994, 1996
• Power & Tunstall 1995, 1997, Philo 1995
• Anonymity of the writers-rhetoric of objectivity- poor are visible,
writers are invisible
• Turn social practices of poverty into static, spatially bounded
aberration
• Authors are ‘possessors of truth’ about the poverty
• Reduce social actors to statistical lists
• Poverty portrayed as a local problem
• Wealthy areas are not analysed
• More poor people live outside the ‘poor areas’
• Do not consider wider economic and social forces (like a recession)
• Poverty is a static classification not a dynamic relationship with
wealth (cf the recent Spirit Level work on inequality)

12. Edward Said
• “Perhaps the most important fact
of all would be...to ask how one
can study [represent or act with]
other cultures and peoples from a
libertarian, or a non-repressive
and non-manipulative
perspective” p63
Would those being written about
{ recognise my account of them? }

13. The challenge/assignment
• To re:present Lincoln Way in a ‘community
project report’
• To use data, statistics, evidence, image and
story
• To create a narrative
• That might be recognised by the community
about whom you are writing