Voices blog

“Listen to the building” is one of many messages inscribed onto the interior surfaces of 19 Princelet Street. This unassuming address off Brick Lane houses the Museum of Immigration and Diversity that is holding rare public openings for the upcoming Refugee Week, 13^th – 20^th June.

So what are the stories contained in its walls that compel us to listen? The building is a listed heritage site that was once a Huguenot silk merchant’s home and a hidden Victorian synagogue. It is an architectural documentation of the layers of immigration to Spitalfields and the rest of country.

But it isn’t just the walls that tell us the stories of waves of French Protestants, Irish Catholics, Eastern European Jews, Bengali Muslims, and many more that settled in the area. It is the creative capacity of primary school children that is drawn upon to help us imagine what it is like to uproot one’s self and make a new home.

Perhaps the reason children are so good at narrating this country’s migration history is their ability to empathise. And perhaps it is also because childhood can be a metaphor for the experience of migration– a period of both wonderment and strangeness in which to sort out those complex issues of citizenship, identity and belonging.

As the museum reminds us: everyone is a migrant, it just depends how far back you go. You might say the same for the childlike imagination in all of us.

Josh Scott, 19,  is part of The Youth of Today apprenticeship. His apprenticeship is in youth work, of which he spends a day working with the Citizenship Foundation, 3 days at a youth work placement and a day of college (I like to think his favourite day is at the Citizenship Foundation with me of course!)

He is working closely with our Youth Leadership Team at the Foundation, which ensures we have young people steering the direction of The Youth of Today. Below he has summarised how he found the first session in May . He will be blogging after each meeting so everyone can read how he is finding delivering sessions to a group of young people, but also to see how our youth leadership team is developing as young leaders at the Foundation.  Enjoy!

Nicola

“Despite a turnout of 3 out of a possible 6, the first youth leadership team (YLT) session went really well. It was a great chance to bond and meet new people, and get a small taster for the capabilities and achievements to come from the YLT. I was rather excited at the potential in these young people, and believe that they could help steer CF into more relevance for The Youth of Today! The young people were friendly, outgoing and great people to work with.

The team building exercises were fun and helpful, in getting to know each other better. Also, Nicola pitched the CF’s position and plan for the YLT; it was pretty interesting and informative… After this, together, we devised a contract and pledged to keep to this as best as we could.

Overall, the first session was a great success, and I really enjoyed my first time at delievering a session to the team. Oh and I nearly forgot to mention the obvious highlight - Pizza Express for lunch which was naturally amazing but also gave us a another great opportunity to bond as a group. Bring on the next meeting!

Josh”

For the last two years the Foundation has been working with The British Council to launch a new international programme called ‘Active Citizens’.

This got going in earnest towards the end last year. Xenia Davis and I travelled to Bangladesh and Pakistan to help train the first set of trainers there: around 35 in each country.

I discovered today that since last November when we went there the training has been cascaded down to nearly six thousand people! There are now around 350 new social action programmes beginning all over those two countries - in busy urban to remote rural settings.

The programme uses simple principles developed over the years at the Citizenship Foundation. It helps people connect their experience of growing up in a particular culture with the issues that they would like to change. They then consider the decision-making structures in their area, and what they might do to raise awareness of the problem. Through their own collective action and through talking to policy makers they work towards a solution.

Participants in countries around the world will use the basis of this social action project to develop dialogue with each other.

In June I am going to Croatia to help to establish the European element of the programme, which is already alive in Southern Africa as well as Central Asia. Something like 15 European countries are expected to attend and start using the methods we have helped devise for the British Council.

On a personal level I’m still adjusting to the fact that 6,000 people across Asia have been using session ideas that I dreamt up to stimulate local and global citizen actions. Modesty aside, I’m told people love them! After 35 years of writing songs, I’ve finally had a hit…

I was struck by the clear distinction between these two terms in the article by Zygmunt Bauman in the new Demos / V publication ‘An Anatomy of Youth’.

In his article ‘Belonging in the age of networks’ he differentiates the essence of these two terms. In short, he suggests that a community is more normally a group that you have membership of regardless of personal choice, and that you can’t easily drop out of… e.g. the locality that you grew up in, or your extended family etc. Such communities are often crucial in your identity-formation - often because you didn’t get the chance to avoid them: you were formed in the crucible of their personal and cultural forces whether you liked it or not. By contrast ‘networks’ are nearly always opted into for personal benefit of some sort. Their subject or identity appeals to you, and your choice to affiliate will more likely relate to your ‘chosen’ identity than the one that you developed like it or not.

So ‘social networks’ and ‘communities’ are not then synonymous. The former can be lightly entered into, tested, adopted to various degrees as suits you, and opted out of again. The choices remain your own, and by inference, their ability to ‘form’ you is slight as you can resist their force and take your avatar and mouse elsewhere if you don’t like the way it’s going.

By contrast ‘communities’ can’t be avoided. You have to stay with them, learn to negotiate and manage your way through them. Communities have politics where networks have cultures. I use those phrases carefully. Of course, communities have cultures as well as politics, but the words I want to stress here are ‘negotiate’ and ‘manage’. These two words are at the heart of politics. Politics is the activity of negotiating and managing the social order into the preferred version of members of an organised community (my definition). We need politics precisely because we can’t opt out. But we can opt out of networks.

What’s critical here is that we recognise the role of social networks in politics. They are not communities of the same order and they are not the place to learn politics through simply being a member. By contrast, school is. You can’t avoid school, and it is indeed a crucible of personal and social formation, not just a place of education.

Social networks can be a place for amplifying preferred choices into a consolidated force for action in the way that members choose. In this way they can be a great force for political intervention. But we shouldn’t revere then as an equivalent of ‘real’ communities. Young people in social networks are not learning politics by virtue of being members. Perhaps it’s time to be uncool and mention that…