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SLIDE 1

Hello everyone, my name’s Harriet Lloyd and I’m a PhD student here at Cardiff University. Today I’ll be talking about how a British charity television show reveals hidden groups within Britain. I’ll:

Give a quick overview of my PhD project Outline my argument Look at some ideas in the literature about the separation of

social groups within societies Discuss how my different sets of data converge on the idea of

a hidden reality within Britain Draw some tentative conclusions

SLIDE 2

My working title for my PhD is – ‘patriotism and pity: British Charitable Giving in 2011’

Data are:

CIN – a charity telethon, which mixes entertainment features, such as pop music / news presenters performing dance routines,with appeals for donations for ‘disadvantaged children’ in theUK.

I also have transcripts from 6 focus groups I carried out in the fortnight after the programme, with people with different relationships to charitable giving – Student Volunteers,

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Amnesty International group, Voluntary Bereavement Counsellors, Charity Workers, Council Workers, and Academics

Participants were asked to talk about ‘inequality’ and ‘disadvantage’ in general, rather than explicitly discussing the programme – I wanted to see whether there were similarities in how people discussed disadvantage and how it was represented in Children in Need

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SLIDE 3

Part of my framework for analysing this data is Boltanski’s ‘politics of pity’

Boltanski has a very specific understanding of this term – it is compared with other ways of relating to others who are suffering (compassion and justice)

According to Boltanski, our way of relating to others who are suffering primarily involves looking at them, indulging in emotionalresponses, and viewing them from a distance.

This aspect of distance was something I was interested in. Most academics who have taken up Boltanksi’s ideas in talking about charity communication have interpreted the word ‘distance’ as being on an international scale, where people in one country have donated to people who are suffering elsewhere. But Boltanski states that this distance can be something that happens within countries via theseparation of spaces that different social groups occupy.

So I thought it should still be applicable to a charity operating within one country.

SLIDE 4

The idea of British charity is interesting. Most charitable donations given in Britain are to charities that operate in

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Britain.  I wanted to know how charity can be seen as the best solution for an area that already has an administrative unit for theredistribution of resources (the state) and interaction between donors and receivers could be a more personal, face-to-face one, rather than using charities as a mediator between those who need help and those who give money. 

In Children in Need, there seemed to be a tension, between emphasising a sense of shared national identity (which has been proven to make viewers of campaigns more likely to give) and the need to separate some individuals out as worthy recipients that the other people, including the viewers, were there to help.

Today I’m going to focus on the groups that Children in Ned does identify as being different from the viewer, and worthy of help, andtherefore marks out as being separate in some way.

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SLIDE 5

So my main argument is that:

• While understanding distant suffering is reliant on media representations of that suffering, closer suffering (in this case, suffering within Britain) should be at least partly known or understood

• But spatial segregation of social groups in Britain means thatthis knowledge is limited

• Children in Need and other programmes present UK suffering as unknown to the audience

• This has the effect of making audiences mistrust both media representations of suffering and the unmediated suffering thatthey assume also lies beyond these representations

SLIDE 6

Groups who cannot interact are reliant on media representations for their knowledge of one another.

In the case of very distant suffering, our only knowledge source is the media, often in news programmes, and charity media.

There is evidence to suggest that those who have closer contact withmembers of other social groups are more able to critique media information about them using their own knowledge.

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For example Blommaert et al. carried out a study on attitudes towards refugee centres in Belgium and found that differences in opinions were related to their occupation of different places and the social networks attached to these places. Importantly, those closer to the centre were more able to critique trans-local media information about the centre than those who lived further away. Theywere able to use their own knowledge to assess the critical information given in the media. Those who lived further away were more likely to accept the media’s critical stance.

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SLIDE 7

So did spatial segregation (still) really exist in Britain in 2011?

We can address this question by looking at individual and community-level segregation.

In the 1960s, Foucault (1967:25) argued that people who deviatedfrom society’s norms were increasingly being confined ininstitutions that he dubbed ‘heterotopias of deviation’, such asprisons, psychiatric hospitals and rest homes.

But is this still the case? In 1983, the Care in the Communityprogramme was introduced in Britain as a means of reducing costs inthe care industry by caring for people in their own homes. This hasmeant that people who were once held in institutions such as carehomes and psychiatric hospitals have been reintroduced into theirlocal communities, and people are less commonly and permanentlyremoved from their homes. This has meant that people withdisabilities, for example, can be seen by and known to others.

While segregation in institutions has somewhat reduced for individuals, segregation on a community scale has also changed across much of Britain. Lifestyle changes such as access to technologies that allow communication across locations and opportunities for more people to travel have meant that most people are less spatially confined than they were (average Briton has travelled to 7 countries in lifetime).

As well as the ability to transcend space, the differences betweenareas within Britain have also been lessening in two ways. Firstly,the well-documented expansion of supermarket and other chains ofstores have reduced variation in local townscapes. Secondly, theBritish government, under the Labour party, responded to the idea of

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ghettoization by introducing locality-based development schemes. Inparticular, the ‘Communities First’ programme (2001) was institutedin Wales, with the specific aim of ‘narrowing the education/skills,economic and health gaps between [the] most deprived and moreaffluent areas’ (Welsh Government 2013), and the ‘Sure Start’programme, which was aimed at giving children from disadvantagedbackgrounds a better start in life by a variety of education andcommunity-based initiatives, used census information to identify thedemographic structure of areas, and based its funding allocation onthese areas, rather than assessing individuals’ incomes, forexample. This has meant that differences between socioeconomicfeatures of areas within Wales at least should have decreased.

But the argument that spatial differentiation along socio-economiclines has actually increased in a number of areas across the worldof late has been made by researchers such as Monica Heller and DavidHarvey. Harvey sees the capitalist system as creating specializedareas of consumption and production, so that resources and jobsagglomerate in certain areas of cities, countries, and the world,whereas others become ghettoized.

Within my own data, participants explicitly discussed patterns ofspatial segregation, for example brought about by a lack of housingin London and a lack of jobs elsewhere.

But different focus group participants also reported havingdifferent levels of contact with the people they identified asdisadvantaged within Britain.

The Cardiff Council workers group identified people that they sawaround their office in a relatively poor ward in Cardiff asdisadvantaged.

The charity workers presented themselves as having in-depthknowledge of issues of disadvantaged based on close professional,but not personal, relationships.

The academics, however, often used reports from other people thatthey knew to talk about the subject.

This suggests that viewers of Children in Need might feel somewhatseparated from members of other social groups.

But, as the following clip should demonstrate, the situations in Children in Need are often also presented as if they are unknown to

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viewers. Viewers are also addressed as if they do not belong to thevulnerable groups themselves. The programme often does this by using examples of specific children that are unknown to most viewers. It also uses contrasts in visual modalization - from the fantastical imagery of the studio to the gritty realism of beneficiaries’ settings - to present these situations as markedly ‘real’.

SLIDE 8

PLAY CLIP (2 mins)

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SLIDE 9

So here, Melissa, and her situation, is introduced as something thatis likely to surprise viewers because it is unknown to them. In other words, it is close, but invisible.

The celebrity who introduces her describes her situation as a ‘harshreality’

Multimodally, there is also a stark difference between the way that Melissa’s situation is represented, which has very high modality / is very naturalistic in its presentation and the studio, in which ismore fantastical

These features combine to give the impression of a set of gritty realities that are beyond the experience of the viewer.

SLIDE 10

In the focus groups, participants draw a distinction between suffering that they have seen via media representations and those that go unreported.

Significantly, whereas previous studies have explored the mistrust of media representations, here, participants’ sense of doubt seems to have expanded beyond this to what other suffering has been missedout in the representations.

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This example is from the academics group, where two of the participants are discussing representations of suffering, for example in the first Live Aid broadcast for Africa in 1985.

READ DATA

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SLIDE 11

Both Joe and Jess here make distinctions between ‘hidden’ suffering and ‘visible’ suffering. Whereas mediated images even of faraway places form part of the ‘visible’ suffering, places of suffering within Britain become ‘invisible’ though being unreported in mass media.

The presences of ‘images’ (line 108) which seems to perform this change.

A number of Extreme Case Formulations are used here – the pockets ofsuffering are ‘all around you’, ‘on our doorsteps’ and are places that ‘nobody really goes to’, whereas suffering elsewhere is ‘very visible’.

This is presented as a ‘more reflective’ understanding (line 99 / 100)

So in this instance, traditional understandings of distance and knowledge are subverted, so that the distant becomes known, and the physically close becomes unknown.

Whereas Jess recounts knowledge gained through her social network, she presents this as being ‘hidden’ from others.

SLIDE 12

So, returning to my argument,

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• Knowledge of closer suffering is limited by spatial segregation

• Children in Need presents UK suffering and sufferers as unknown

• Audiences mistrust both media representations of suffering andthe unmediated suffering that they assume also lies beyond these representations

• But this is particularly the case of British suffering, which is seen as under-reported, whereas the suffering of social groups elsewhere is assumed to be more comprehensively reported.