Gillian Evans
Email: astanga66@btopenworld.com
Gillian studied social anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies before completing her Master's and PhD degree in the Social Anthropology of Children and Child Development in the Centre for Child-Focused Anthropological Research (CFAR) at Brunel University. Beginning with a Temporary Lectureship at the University of Manchester in 2006, Gillian now holds a Research Council Fellowship here from 2007-2012 in the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC).
Current research project
Common Knowledge: Class Culture. What does it mean to be British in the 21st Century?
Against the background of public pronouncements about a crisis in childhood; the death of class; the end of multiculturalism and renewed calls for a focus on British-ness, Gillian’s research examines changing ideas of the person and child in 21st Century Britain.
The rationale for the research, arising out of her recently published book - Educational Failure and Working Class White Children in Britain - is as follows:
Black and Asian young people in Britain are typically classified, for example in statistics and reports about education, in terms of their race, religion, ethnicity (understood in terms of place of origin of immigration in Africa, Asia or the Caribbean) and cultural background. White young people, in contrast, are usually described in terms of their social class position. This means, by default, that young white people in Britain appear to have no ethnicity or culture except in so far as they are not non-white immigrants from the Commonwealth and the class position of black and Asian young people is rendered irrelevant.
Whilst socio-economic factors remain the most important determinants of young people's life-chances, these are usually not the terms in which the differences between kinds of British people are thought of on the ground. With classificatory confusion like this prevailing it is easy to imagine that the idea of what it means to be a person in Britain is becoming increasingly racially divided. In some working class neighbourhoods, for example, where sources of industrial and manufacturing employment have declined and class-based political movements have become less significant, the commonalities between black, white and Asian people appear to be receding in significance. Meanwhile, in the case of urban regeneration projects, the struggle for available resources appears to be fought on the basis of an explicit determination to meet the competing needs of ethnically defined minority communities. In these cases the economic and political commonalities of people living in conditions of relative poverty are eclipsed whilst the religious, ethnic, cultural and racial distinctiveness of people living in poor areas is highlighted. This can leave white working class people feeling doubly disadvantaged and having now to fight to also define their idea of community in terms of an explicit ethnic and cultural identity. With the 2012 London Olympics on the horizon, an Olympics sold under the promise of a multicultural utopia and which is taking place in an area of London famous for its history of in-migration and cosmopolitanism, public attention is keenly focused on the question of whether or not London is 'fit for the Olympics'. Examining the development of the London Olympic Games over the next five years, Gillian’s new research will explore the question of what, in a transforming global city, ‘community cohesion’ actually means in practice.