Interpretive Spaces: Narratives of
Place and Space
Professor David Divine
Reclaiming Lost Childhoods-Seminar 1, 15th May 2013, Glasgow
Memory, Narrative and Identity: The Needs of Care Leavers
Insight Institute Scottish Care Archive Seminar Series
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Reclaiming Lost Childhoods:
Reclamation of our Citizenry
S Places and spaces which we as individuals inhabit, willingly, or are
forced to enter and and stay regardless of what we feel about it, are
often akin to flies trapped in wax: fixed, immovable, silent, waiting…
S Canon Charles Jupp (1830-1911), founder and first Warden of
Aberlour Orphanage, in the Highlands of Scotland, which operated
from 1875 to 1967, stated, rather radically for the time during the
Victorian era, that:
S ‘Every child has the ability and indeed the right, to grow up and
flourish in society, notwithstanding the origins of their birth.’
Reclaiming Lost Childhoods:
Reclamation of our Citizenry
S Part of the wax fixture relates to one’s position in society and that
once ‘positioned’, it is very difficult, indeed impossible at times, to
move from it.
S ‘Origins of birth,’ ‘life’s circumstances’, can force us into spaces and
places where our rights to citizenry are compromised, questioned and
indeed, at times, ‘removed’. Not explicitly; implicitly, by the may we
are communicated with by others, and treated.
S I would humbly suggest that in addition to the reclaiming of past (s)
and present (s), that we reclaim our citizenry, our rights to participate
in, contribute to, and benefit from, society as equals, regardless of our
origins of birth and life circumstances.
Reclaiming Lost Childhoods:
Reclamation of our Citizenry
S
One of the ingredients contributing to positioning in society, is
impoverishment, predisposing one to potential difficulties throughout one’s
life-course, including entering the care system. Many children from such
backgrounds avoid these difficulties but further research is needed as to how
this is accomplished argues Seccombe, 2002; Holmes and Kiernan, 2013.
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The focus however in research is largely on exploring resilience in terms of
‘individual disposition, family trait, or community phenomenon, and
relegating structural factors to an ‘incidental’, an add on.
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It is imperative however that structural deficiencies in society, and social
policies which families need in order to function ‘competently’, are addressed.
‘Poverty is a social problem not merely a personal one and solutions must be
structural in nature’.
Reclaiming Lost Childhoods:
Reclamation of our Citizenry
S In the absence of such structural solutions, I would like to
illustrate how many children and young people took the lead, in
spite of the system then in existence, in the 1930’s-early 1960’s,
not because of it, to transform themselves from within by the
power of narratives.
S When Canon Jupp was accused of sheltering the ‘scum of
humanity’ at the Orphanage, he responded:
S ‘yes, but remember the scum always rises to the top’ (John Gillam
White, 1868-1939, Elgin Courant, 14th March 1936).
Process of Becoming
S How can we, should we, do we, construct narratives, stories,
testimonies, about ourselves, creating meaning (s), senses of
‘belonging’, of ‘home’, as James Baldwin interpreted the term
‘home’ in Giovanni’s Room (1956), as ‘not a place but simply an
irrevocable condition’?
S How do such stories make sense to us as individuals who are in
care or who have been in care, and to others, of our past (s) and
present (s), which facilitate our on-going journeys in life where we
are active, positive, contributors, to the wider society and to
ourselves?
Process of Becoming
S According to Bruner (2002: X) ‘Issues of interpretation
(understanding) have now become pivotal to our understanding of
how we bring order and meaning to our lives.’
S ‘Telling stories about the past, our past, is a
key moment in the
making of our selves. To the extent that memory provides their raw
materials, such narratives of identity are shaped as much by what is
left out of the account-whether forgotten or repressed-as by what is
actually told…memory work has a great deal in common with forms
of inquiry which, like detective work and archaeology, say, -involving
working backwards-searching for clues-deciphering signs and traces,
making deductions, patching together reconstructions out of
fragments of evidence.’ (Kuhn, 2002:4-5)
Process of Becoming
S Part of this evidence, if available, are records, case files, social work
interpretations, understandings, other people’s versions of aspects of
our lives as children and young people in the care system, or those of
us who have left it-but never quite.
S Records are written narratives, stories, testimonies, about us who
passed through the care system, based on memories ‘at the centre
of a radiating web of associations, reflections and interpretations.
But if the memories are one individual’s, their associations extend
far beyond the personal. They spread into an extended network of
meanings that bring together the personal with the familial, the
cultural, the economic, the social, the historical.’ (Kuhn, 2002:5)
Process of Becoming
S ‘If in a way my memories belong to me, I am certainly not their
sole owner. All memory texts….constantly call to mind the
collective nature of the activity of remembering.’ (Kuhn, 2002:6)
S Memories and personal responses to data unearthed in the course
of what Kuhn calls ‘memory work’, can ‘‘stand on their own’ as
discoveries, or may feed into reflective, interpretive or analytical
phases of memory work, helping at times a movement beyond
‘the purely personal response’ towards wider meanings and the
responses it generates, relating to one’s ‘cultural and historical
embeddedness’; wax fixtures, where one is located in society and
how one is related to by others.
Process of Becoming
S Such memory work can be a tool of ‘concentisation:’ the awakening
of critical consciousness, through their own activities of reflection
and learning, among those who lack power: and the development of
a critical and questioning attitude towards their own lives and the
lives of those around them, is a possible, I would argue positive,
outcome of ‘memory work.’ Raising the Bar, CELCIS, 16th April,
‘Changes’, Debate Project (Scottish Throughcare and Aftercare
Forum), was a wonderful example of this.
S Such critical consciousness ‘embraces the heart as well as the
intellect, one that resonates, in feeling and thinking ways, across the
individual and the collective, the personal and the political.’
(Kuhn,2002:9)
Process of Becoming
S ‘Memory work is a method and a practice of unearthing and making
public untold stories, stories of ‘lives lived out on the borderlands,
lives for which the central interpretive device of the culture don’t
quite work.’
S ‘These are the lives of those whose ways of knowing and ways of
seeing the world are rarely acknowledged, let alone celebrated, in the
expression of a hegemonic culture’.
S ‘Practitioners of memory work may be concientised simply through
learning that they do indeed have stories to tell, and that their stories
have value and significance in the wider world.
Process of Becoming
S ‘At the same time, as an aid to radicalised remembering, memory
work can create new understandings of both past and present,
while yet refusing a nostalgia that embalms the past in a perfect,
irretrievable, moment’ (Kuhn,2002:10-11)
S According to Bruner (2002), a story ‘requires a cast of characters
who are free agents with minds of their own…These characters
have recognisable expectations about the ordinary state of the
world, the story’s world, though these expectations may be
somewhat enigmatic. The story begins with some breach in the
expected state of things…Something goes awry...
Process of Becoming
S ...otherwise there is nothing to tell about. The story concerns efforts
to cope, or come to terms with the breach and its consequences, and
finally there is an outcome, some sort of resolution... there needs to
be a narrator, a teller and there needs to be a listener, a told.’ (Bruner,
2002:17)
S ‘It is the conversion of private Trouble...into public plight that makes
well-wrought narrative so powerful, so comforting, so dangerous, so
culturally essential.’ (Bruner,2002:35)
S Dominelli (2008), coined the term ‘narratives of place and space’, to
illustrate how discourses, ‘authoritative written or spoken
communication, sets up people in particular locations in society…
Process of Becoming
S …intimately associated with the idea of ‘belonging’. ‘Narratives
elaborate themes about one’s individual and collective place in the
world and how people act in and upon it. Expressed as narratives of
place and space, these become narratives of inclusion and exclusion.
Inclusionary ones focus on belonging and acceptance; exclusionary
narratives on the reverse. Assumptions that underpin these narratives
can be explicit or implicit as taken for granted nostrums that do not
have to be articulated or justified.’ (Dominelli, 2008: 50-51)
S The European Union (EC, 2004), defined social exclusion as ‘a
process wherebye certain individuals are pushed to the edge of
society
Process of Becoming
S ...and prevented from participation fully by virtue of their poverty, or
lack of basic competencies and lifelong learning opportunities, or as a
result of discrimination. That distances them from jobs, income and
education and training opportunities, as well as social and
community networks and activities. They have little access to power
and decision making bodies and thus often feel powerless and unable
to take control over the decisions that affect their day to day lives.’
(Dominelli, 2012: 131)
S This EU definition links exclusion to marginalisation and highlights a
critical point which is disenfranchisement, based on structural factors
such as poverty, preventing individuals from exercising their rights to
participate in society’s decision making structures…
Process of Becoming
S ...and resource allocation systems. Such excluded individuals are
often seen as culpable for the position they find themselves in. ‘Class
discrimination-pathologizing poor people-is central in the lives of
working class people, especially those without paid employment.’
(Dominelli,2012: 130).
S Class discrimination is not specifically identified as an attribute of
discrimination that is outlawed in the UK.
S This brings me gently to the Children of the Poor, who we are usually
talking about, when we refer to Looked After children and Young
People. Allow me to return to my current research on Aberlour
Orphanage.
Aberlour Narratives of Success
S Hope, Faith, Optimism, Triumph, Renewal, Recycling, New
Growth
S Reflexivity, Interpretive spaces and Meaning Making
S Learning to be able to travel on one’s own in life
S Making opportunities and taking stock
S Taking Risks
S Building oneself, creating self (ves) step by step