Wednesday, March 01, 2006

PostGrad Café Report – 22nd February

February’s PostGrad Café heard presentations from Karen Chalk and Andrew McKechnie, both CPLAN PhD students. The Café was well attended, with representatives from the Schools of Social Sciences, City and Regional Planning and Psychology.

Karen, in the second year of her research, discussed the ACORN (A Classification of Residential Neighbourhoods) categories of consumer classification. These divide the population into fifty-seven types, seventeen groups and five categories. The five categories are labelled; Wealthy Achievers, Urban Prosperity, Comfortably Off, Moderate Means and Hard-Pressed. Karen presented the Café with an analysis of the text and images that accompany the ACORN user-guide, describing how the rich description that accompanies the first three categories sits in contrast to the functional descriptions of the last two. A similar pattern can be found in the visual representations which order the categories into a hierarchy. The three categories arranged at the top (in descending order; Wealthy Achievers, Urban Prosperity and Comfortably Off) all present male-female relationships engaged in smiling face-to-face exchange, accompanied by visual symbols of wealth. The pictures representing the bottom two categories – the Moderate Means and the Hard-Pressed – show groups of older women accompanied by images of tower blocks and terraced housing.

Karen asked if the kind of consumer categorisation and classification offered by ACORN would resulting in the ‘sorting out’ of problematic areas, not by solving the problems but by filtering the dataset to exclude these neighbourhoods from awareness of those making decisions. At the moment only a very small number of public bodies use ACORN, but increased public sector use is a business aim of the company that produces ACORN. If nothing else, the invitation that ACORN extends to ‘read up on your neighbours’ is an e-updating of class anxieties; digital curtain twitching.

Andrew, in the final year of his research, gave the Café a rich account of his research investigating the relationship that people with physical difficulties have with their dwellings. He uses the word ‘dwelling’ in preference to house, which stresses physical characteristics, and home, which stresses emotional features. By using ‘dwelling’ Andrew attempts to incorporate both ways of looking at the living space. Arguing that much work on disability and the home is ‘wheelchair reductive’, Andrew’s research participants had a wider range of major physical difficulties.

Andrew discussed the problems of gaining access, the difficulties in conducting life-history interviews with people living with major physical disabilities, and the ethical issues involved in conducting in depth interviews on emotionally important subjects. Andrew’s research is designed to build an understanding of the experience of the dwelling from the point of view of the individual. In this, it is a counterbalance to the prevailing design reductionism which seeks to solve the dwelling problems of the disabled by altering their houses to accommodate their physical problems.

The next PostGrad Café, on the topic of relativism in the social sciences, will be in a special format of two parts. The first part will be a presentation and discussion with a senior academic to be held on Wednesday the 15th March. The second part will be a series of student presentations on the subject of relativism to be held on Wednesday 29th March. If you would like to present a short, informal paper on the subject of relativism, please contact any of the PostGrad Café Team. Further details coming soon.

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