Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies

Benjamin Bowman 30/09/2011

UNIVERSITY OF BATH

Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies

RIOTERS AND PROTESTERS, HOODIES AND CHILDREN:

ANALYSING NEWSPAPER REPRESENTATIONS

OF YOUNG PEOPLE DURING THE RIOTS.

Benjamin Bowman

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for

the MA in International Politics degree

Contents

Title page 1

Abstract 5

Acknowledgements 6

Introduction 7

1. Theoretical background 10

Research methodology: Critical discourse analysis and grounded theory 10

Critical discourse analysis 10

Grounded theory 13

Theoretical context: Young people in British politics 15

Engaged and disengaged perspectives on young people in Britain 15

Citizenship, or antisocial behaviour? Representing young people’s engagement 17

2. Tribal youth and the urban politics of belonging 20

Constructing tribal youth in discourse 20

The hooded youth 21

Youth tribal communication and digital nativity 26

Metaphors of urban nativity and power 30

Us vs. them: a critical assessment of tribal youth, its boundaries and deviance 32

3. Enforcement discourse: the passive child 37

Role reversal: Powerful police, vulnerable boys 38

Police violence, knee-jerk government and the passive child 39

4. Young people as an economic underclass 46

Youth underclass: tribal rioters and “posh” students shoulder to shoulder 47

“The riots weren’t political. But they were a protest…” 49

5. Conclusion 57

6. References 61

Newspaper articles cited 61

Academic references 63

Attention is drawn to the fact that copyright of this thesis rests with its author. This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognize that its copyright rests with its author and that no quotation from the thesis and no information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author.

This thesis may be made available for consultation within the University Library and may be photocopied or lent to other libraries for the purpose of consultation.

Signed:

Benjamin Bowman

MA International Politics, University of Bath

email:

Abstract

This dissertation analyses the ways young people are represented by discourse in one newspaper’s coverage of the riots in the UK, in August 2011. A theoretical background provides this investigation its location within the broader academic literature. The investigation also extends the author’s existing research concerning young people’s identity and belonging in the UK, which will be the subject of the author’s ESRC-funded PhD research beginning this October, 2011. A two-part methodology based on grounded theory and critical discourse analysis is used to investigate the ways young people are represented by writers in the Guardian – a left-of-centre broadsheet newspaper – selected for the depth of its coverage and the variety of different representations of young people encountered therein[1]. Three dominant representations are identified: young people as ‘tribal youth’, young people as vulnerable children and young people as an economic underclass. The investigation analyses each representation with illustrative examples from the discourse, and considers them with a critical eye on how they reproduce ideologies related to young people and their engagement or disengagement in British society.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my appreciation of the support and advice given to me by my supervisor, Dr. Marion Demossier, whose effort and enthusiasm I couldn’t have done without. I sincerely hope that we will have the opportunity to work together again. I also want to thank the administrative staff at the Graduate School for the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, not least Sophie Martin, Elise Merker and Ann Burge, who are always ready to help far beyond what is necessary. My gratitude, also, for the Student Money Service who provided me support and advice that were vital throughout my undergraduate degree and this MA programme.

I could not have completed this course without the constant care, consideration and support provided to me by the management and staff at The Raven of Bath, especially Tim Perry, who accommodated my chaotic schedule, and me and my bicycle overnight when I was working evening shifts.

My work I dedicate to my mother, Lisa Bowman, who meets my worries and my happiness with the same endless love.

And my heart entire to Phoebe Wales. Here’s to us, together and adventurously.

Introduction

This dissertation looks at how the Guardian represented young people during and after the August riots, with excerpts from the corpus provided for deeper analysis. The theoretical framework for the investigation is presented by explaining its research methodology and outlining the academic theory in which the research is located. By isolating the riots and their coverage in one newspaper, this dissertation endeavours to produce a snapshot of discourse concerning young people in the UK within very strict boundaries, examined to fine detail.

This topic was chosen to complement the author’s continuing research into young people in the UK and how they construct and reproduce political identities and belonging, which will be the topic of an MRes/PhD course through the next four years, with the support and funding of the Economic and Social Research Council. The context of my continuing research provides this investigation with a broader thematic context focussing on young people’s identity, and on debates concerning their activity and engagement with – or passivity and disengagement from – British politics. With this in mind, the theoretical background for this investigation

The investigation discovered several ways to represent young people that were common in the riot coverage discourse. There appeared to be a partially, but not entirely, chronological progression in the construction and reproduction of these representations.

At first, during a phase of riot narratives, young people were represented as powerful tribal youths. Their tribes resembled the tribes of Maffesoli’s neo-tribal theory (explained in detail below), and their rioting was represented as a collective tribal rite enjoyed by the youths, who belonged to this tribal community and not to the more legitimate category “local residents”. During the riots tribal youth were represented deriving power from their nativity to the urban jungle and to cyberspace. Meanwhile, journalists tended to work as “deviance defining elites” (Ericson, Baranek et al. 1987, 3), denying them certain roles. For example, they were pointedly not represented as self-determining young students. From this representation this dissertation concluded that young people were represented as tribal youth to lend urgency and threat to the riot coverage, possibly to better depict the fear that local residents appeared to feel during the riots. The representation, it is concluded, was not accurate, and examples were given to show that young people were both unrealistically and romantically empowered – as the folk devil “hooded youth” was demonstrated to be – and discursively robbed of power – empowered, for example, to speak about massed rioting but not about their own individual educational goals.

The discourse then changed tack, and in a second phase here called enforcement discourse, it represented young people as vulnerable children. They were set in contrast to powerful police officers and judicial elites. In this representation the investigation discovered that young people were mobilized as a political metaphor by discourse that was critical of the way the government enforced laws during and after the riots, particularly police methods that were considered both violent and gleefully brutal. Effectively, young people were not represented as actors at all by this discourse, which instead reproduced an ideology calling for young people to be protected by adults from a dangerous world. This dissertation concluded that such a discursive representation served a rhetorical purpose, allowing the paper to more effectively criticize police actions and government policy. Young people were, therefore, harnessed as a rhetorical tool, not considered as political or social actors.

Finally, as the riots ended, the investigation discovered that both earlier representations disappeared and were replaced by a representation of young people as an economic underclass that developed gradually. At first this representation was strongly linked to young people in certain geographical regions, but it soon became central to the representation that “poor kids” from these deprived postcodes and “posh kids”, especially students, were being brought together by shared wrath at culpable elites for their poor economic and social prospects. The investigation concludes that this youth underclass representation rested especially on challenging the British class system as an ideology. Poor kids and posh kids were represented coming together in a collective underclass, with the poor providing the brawn (the anger, the rioting and the swearing) and the posh providing the brains (the political awareness, the protesting and the lucid speech). Before the riot coverage ended, these young people were set in contrast to elites, who were represented as incompetent misbehaving plutocrats. This representation of young people gave them the most legitimacy as citizens, since it constructed young people as politically active and engaged. It also implied that their political activity resembled youthful antipolitics, a form of activity best described as ideologically neutral resistance against everyone else who is holding them down, which might be mistaken for apolitics because young people, suggests the discourse, do not always express themselves in standard political terms.

NB. Many news articles are cited, and some of these articles are written by the same author and/or on the same days. For this reason articles are cited in their own format using a numeric system. A separate references page is provided with full referencing information, drawn from the Nexis UK online database, for all the articles. All other citations and references follow the standard format.

1. Theoretical background

Research methodology: Critical discourse analysis and grounded theory

Critical discourse analysis

The method selected for this investigation was critical discourse analysis (CDA), a branch of discourse analysis that aims not just to describe discourse but to attempt an explanation as to how and why it was produced (Fairclough 1992; van Dijk 1997; Fairclough 2006; van Dijk 2007). CDA extends from critical linguistics (as used by Fowler, Hodge et al. 1979) as a way to explore how discourse is related to social processes and structures, both by simply reflecting them, and by consolidating and reproducing existing social structures (Fairclough 1992). At its heart CDA draws from social theory with roots in Marxism, as well as scholars like Gramsci (1971) and Habermas (1997), for whom today’s societies are constructed and reproduced by complex, abstract, socio-political ideologies. CDA considers language to be the primary means by which cornerstone modern ideologies function (Teo 2000). CDA as applied by scholars like Fairclough (2006), Van Dijk (1997, 2007) and others, attempt to use the method to explore what ideologies are encoded within discourse, and by thorough investigation, better understand these ideologies, their construction and reproduction, and their effects. In this investigation, CDA allows an in depth analysis of the language used to represent young people, while exploring how these representations consolidate and reproduce the existing social structures and socio-political ideologies that determine the shape of the society young people inhabit. Discourse analysis is a useful tool for examining young people’s engagement for the way it considers the truth to be socially constructed: in other words, the way different social actors construct ‘the truth’ about young people in different ways. It does not consider there to be an objective truth about young people’s engagement that can be extracted from the data. Rather, an understanding can be formed by research of the data about how different actors construct and understand young people’s engagement. In methodological terms this investigation is aware of Erica Burman’s warning (1992) that discourse analysis has become synonymous with critical research, and this investigation remains aware that using CDA may afford preferential treatment towards research that is critical of the government and society, due to bias that may be inherent in the discourse analysis method itself.

Because this investigation surveys newspaper articles, journalist writing the discourse is considered to play an important role in selecting which ideologies are reproduced in his or her writing. These ideologies are most likely to be derived from “primary definers” (Hall, Critcher et al. 1978), “those in powerful and privileged positions” like political and institutional elites, to whom the media have inequitably high access and who are considered both authoritative and able to represent – i.e. speak on behalf of – less powerful people (Hall, Critcher et al. 1978, 58). These primary definers are considered by the media to hold more authority, and systemically have more access to the media, and thus set the debate. On the other hand, Hall has been criticized by scholars like Schlesinger (1990), who believe the British press’ relationship with “primary definers” has changed since Hall’s work was done, especially because the press can carry out critical scrutiny of political and institutional elites by “[taking] the initiative in the definitional process by challenging the so called primary definers (Schlesinger and Tumber 1994, 19). Thus, this investigation considers the role of elites in constructing and reproducing the core ideologies at hand to be in flux. Critical discourse analysis is used to investigate not just what the journalist has to say, but also from which primary definers this might have been drawn, particularly questioning whether discourse works to criticize elites as primary definers, as Schlesinger suggests they do. The journalist is also considered active in the construction and reproduction of ideology. Particular attention is drawn to research by Ericson et al., who theorized that journalists are “deviance defining elites” (Ericson, Baranek et al. 1987, 3) operating as political actors who are able to draw and maintain boundaries around different categories with discourse, a process related to the politics of belonging which is dealt with in more detail below. While the main focus of this dissertation is young people and how they are represented, it is important to also consider why, by analysing the ways journalists appear to construct their own political actorness relative to young people. During the first phase of “tribal youth” discourse journalists were considered to have taken a narrative function, explaining riots as newsworthy events, which suggests that criticizing elites may have taken a back seat and following Hall (Hall, Critcher et al. 1978) we might expect authoritative elites to have functioned as primary definers. During the second and third phases, “enforcement discourse” and “youth underclass discourse”, journalists were extremely critical of government elites and authorities like the police, which suggests they would challenge the erstwhile primary definers as they set their own terms for debate, after the theories of Schlesinger (1990).