Introduction (read prior to delivering parts one and two of performance) 'University Challenge'

In declaring that 'I talk two languages' it may initially seem as though I am referring to the spoken word alone but this is not the case. In this work I am also referring to the behavioral language of the body which is expected to act [speak] in accordance with specific standards in specific spaces. For example our host environments for this conference; The Town Hall, The University of Leeds and, AHRB/Centre CATH at The University of Leeds, are all buildings that have expectancies as to how they want us to behave. As Mark Cousins has said 'they have been architecturally designed to coerce us in to acting in certain ways'1. There are dangers both (real and apparent) in stepping out of place in these buildings.

In part two of my presentation the private is made inappropriately public. My behaviour intervenes with expectations and therefore poses a challenge. But whose standards am I challenging? Whose values are being disrupted? They are the standards and values that have been set by the people who possess power in society.
While part one offers discussion on how class divisions are conflicting and contradictory and provides an example by way of political ideology and comparison, part two focuses upon success and failure in relation to the transitional aspects of class and demonstrates how issues relating to class are as relevant as ever with regards to the distribution of power despite the political claims of the New Labour government that contemporary Britain is a meritocratic society.

The contradictions that become apparent through these presentations arise not simply through the political ideology talked of in part one, nor the contradictions between behaviour and space as shown in part two. They also arise through the manner in which the two parts differ dramatically in their presentation. Part one is delivered as an academic text and part two is delivered through performative humour.
'University Challenge' refers both to the political challenges faced by universities today and also to the challenges existing within the university environment with regards to tolerance and acknowledgment in relation to the perceived threat of the other.
As Stuart Hall has said 'the everydayness of class is not talked about within discourses on class’2 and Valerie Walkerdine has pointed out that 'we can talk about class in relation to theory, but the moment you tangle with a direct class experience, the fireworks start'3.

It is because of this that I decided to use [bodily] humour as a mode for delivery in part two. First, as a means to distanciation that would second, enable me to reveal how issues of class, gender and the everyday are each infused with the other. These issues also directly relate to conflicts between public and private spaces, expectations and behavioral standards. For example, my behaviour in part two is 'most unladylike'. People do not expect to see such behaviour in the presence of an academic audience, but private functions are not the terror we have been told they are. Who wants to erase them and for what reasons do they wish to do so?
In part two of this presentation I refuse to recognise my place never mind observe its codes of conduct and humour will hopefully offer me a means to 'getting away with it'. Of course such action is anxiety ridden for all concerned yet humour can provide a way of releasing this anxiety without hurting self and others'. Humour and so-called 'black humour' may be steeped in melancholic displacement through loss, suffering and 'the ongoing humiliations of working-class everyday life'4 that Valerie Walkerdine described at a recent seminar, but simultaneously humour can also offer the opportunity to play with behavioral expectations and prompt further thought. However, those who are deemed 'brave or mad' enough to transgress the boundaries of class, space, and status through humour or other methods, must accept that risk and criticism are an inherent part of the process.
References
1. Mark Cousins, Leeds University/Centre CATH Lecture Series, 'Odysseus and Homecoming' 2001 - 2002, (3 December 2001).
2. Stuart Hall, Leeds University/Centre CATH seminar 2, Class: Processes, Social Relations and Impositions, (5 November 2002).
3. Valerie Walkerdine, Leeds University/Centre CATH Seminar 2, Class: Processes, Social Relations and Impositions, (5 November 2002).
4. Valerie Walkerdine, Leeds University/Centre CATH Seminar 2, Class: Processes, Social Relations and Impositions, (5 November 2002).


Script - Part One (Academic)

Panel 4 - Class Sites/Sights
‘University Challenge
I Talk Two Languages; Everyday and Academic’
(A performative presentation in two parts)
Part One - Academic [voice; professional]

In appearing before people I am already over-determined, inscribed as a sight or site of class conflict especially when I speak. So it seems appropriate that I should briefly clarify, how impossibly class, cross, culturally, complex, I am.

I could broadly be defined as being an English/Iraqi/Yorkshire person, who in all likelihood mimicked others by way of camouflage while growing up in working-class surroundings. In other words to avoid getting beaten up for being ‘different’. This desire to fit was unlike the desire of other members of my family who aspired towards belonging with the professional middle-classes and who could generally be deemed to ‘talk posh’. While I didn’t feel I belonged to the mining community (that I briefly lived in), I felt accepted by it. You did okay if you knew your place and stayed with it. Aspirations of any sort were best kept to yourself in this environment, but that does not mean that people did not aspire to anything. I’m going to recall an aspiration of mine from 1977 which offered me a strand of hope at a time of desolation...

‘Finishing my lunch, I looked up at the fluffy clouds in the clear blue sky. It was a hot day in midsummer and the double-glass doors that led out from the staff canteen on to the flat, tarmaced, roof of the supermarket were wide open to let in any passing breeze. I was feeling desperate. Another seven hours work in the meat department lay ahead of me and the thought of it made me wish I could be elsewhere, doing something exciting.
Working for a supermarket as an unskilled labourer was not easy. It was a harsh and often cruel environment for a confused young woman recently out of local authority care and it was in this space that I first learnt the value of grafting. Grafting was a way of earning respect and keeping your job. I knew the importance of both as I struggled to support myself. Seventeen years old at the time, I had been wrapping and displaying meat for around a year. Having left school with the label of being 'thick but good at art' and possessing no formal qualifications my career options were extremely limited. This made me feel somewhat trapped but I never lost hope in this unfortunate situation. My hopes lay with the enormous enthusiasm I had for making art.
As lunch drew to a close, I consoled myself with the knowledge that I would be able to leave the butcher’s department in two years’ time, (having discovered that if I lived alone and supported myself for three years I would be entitled to obtain a mandatory grant and would then be able to go to art college). Fortunately, formal qualifications were not essential at that time (if you were deemed to have a strong portfolio of work) and so with my tenacity acknowledged, I was accepted onto the same programme of study every year until finally, at the age of 19 I began a course and embarked upon my route to the future... job satisfaction and class mobility through education’1.

I’ll return to this story in part two of my presentation. First I’d like to raise two comments from the text and to compare them in relation to contemporary practices in the art education sector today.

The first comment that I’d like to pick up on is that ‘formal qualifications were not essential at that time’. While acknowledging that I was joining further education (which is identified as being a lesser within educational hierarchies), the fact that in 1979 it was possible to be accepted onto a programme of study without qualifications, indicates that things have changed. The New Labour government would have it that things have indeed changed and that the contemporary education sector is an unqualified success in terms of historical comparisons. I would agree that while things have radically altered they are not improved but rather have skidded from extreme to extreme.

As a ‘dysfunctional adolescent’ who hated everything in life (except art) there is no way I would have attended the numeracy and literacy classes that are compulsory today. If we shift my circumstances then to the contemporary education sector, I would be unable to gain acceptance at college as it would not be possible for me to qualify without attending catch-up classes in numeracy and literacy (due to funding purposes). The second comment I’d like to highlight is that ‘I’d be entitled to obtain a mandatory grant and would be able to go to art college’. Well, we probably all recognise the blatant differences here between then, (when student grants were attainable in England) and now, (when they are not). There are even less opportunities for non-privileged people to access education today despite government rhetoric that declares otherwise. For example, this government has for some time focused upon setting targets with the aim of ‘widening participation in colleges and universities’, primarily for economic purposes. But practical difficulties such as the introduction of tuition fees, the withdrawing of student grants, poor resourcing (e.g. schools in England allocate [on average] only £1.29 a year to art equipment, for each 7 to 11 year old child), together with ever decreasing funding for universities, can get in the way of these targets being achieved. Targets then become a stick with which to beat the universities, because if targets are not met further funding is withheld.

In the current competitive climate which has engulfed the education sector and other public services, Margaret Hodge (the minister for lifelong learning) says, ‘Expansion is necessary if we want to tackle our productivity agenda and work to maintain and enhance our competitiveness. Our target is ambitious. Achieving it will be tough. But it’s not unrealistic. We need to increase participation by 1% per annum over the next 10 years. That means better schools, more children getting better qualifications and higher aspirations, especially among working-class children. This is not irrational ideology. It is both economically sensible and socially just. So stop whinging and help us to get on with the job’2. This is an example of the contradictions that contribute towards class divisions, the contradictions between political rhetoric and social action. Target setting in relation to economic out-comes is altogether different to the target of having people coming-out of universities, empowered as human beings having gained knowledge and understanding through educative processes. ‘Blairite modernisation stops short of any aspiration to promote intellectual, still less cultural, revolution. Its social inclusion agenda is driven primarily by the need to integrate under-achievers into a modern labour market and only secondarily, if at all, by a raw desire to dispense social justice to the dispossessed. Of course, social inclusion is a noble ambition. But it is hardly a radical project, its aim being to incorporate “them” into “our” society’3.
References
1. Sue M. Wilks, ‘This Time Next Year We’ll Be Farting Through Silk’, in Work, Craft and Labour, Griselda Pollock and Valerie Mainz (ed.), (England: Ashgate Publishing, 2001), pp.193.
2. Margaret Hodge, ‘Elitism never made a nation rich’, Guardian Education (6 November 2001), p.13.
3. Peter Scott, ‘No less than desire for cultural revolution should fuel the drive to expand higher education’, Guardian Education (4 December 2001), p.13.



Script - Part Two (Everyday)

Part Two - Everyday [voice; as at home, manner; unscripted/chatty, actions written in brackets]

[Put chair out close to audience, put dressing gown and slippers on, put bobble in hair, sit down and roll a fag to have with ‘cuppa’]
‘Hiya!
Going back to the story I told you in part one, did I manage to translate my class through education?. I wonder what you think? [Roll fag] Well things went well for some time after I left college. I eventually became a lecturer and was later promoted to curriculum leader for art and design. But this is life and so my story does not end happily at this point.

Further education was incorporated under central government control and I was no longer satisfied in my work. Why not? Because the professional codes and standards that were introduced into the work place in 1996 (when deregulation took a firm hold in the further ed. sector) damaged both me, my students and my colleagues. [Take tablets] Teaching is said to be a middle-class occupation and certain values were handed to me when I entered education as a lecturer. The photographer and artist Jo Spence has said of middle-class values...

[Pose with quote stix] ‘I neither come from the middle-class, nor have I experienced any of its wealth and power, nor do I work as a professional, or manifest managerial skills to control others. Professionalism encourages the use of codes of conduct, [Alter Pose] and standards of excellence, which are not seen by the participants as being political. In the main these are not perpetuated by coercion, but by professional consent, and can become more extreme according to the political climate’1.[End pose]

[Sit down] When I started teaching my work may have been called professional, yet procedures were slack and we were desperate for resources. [Paint nails] As workers though there was access to our subjectivity and substance to our efforts. [Blow nails] The lack of control, trust, and independence given to workers in the ‘knowledge industry’ of today does not allow for any such idealistic notions. [Shuffle about]
[Try to scrat arse] The outcome of this experience has been my early retirement from teaching through ill health caused by stress, but my story has not yet ended and I’m now being educated further through the Ph.D. process. [Scrat arse on chair corner] Working-class should not be assumed to be a static position, for it alters along with the people who adopt, translate and impose it.
Reference
1.Jo Spence, Cultural Sniping: The Art of Transgression, (London: Routledge, 1997), pp.40.