Dr Matt Finn
Senior Lecturer in Human Geography

Abstract:
Atmospheres of progress in a data-based school

In this article, I seek to extend the geographies of education, youth and young people by offering an account of the significant shifts taking place in contemporary English state education around the production and use of data. I present material from pupils, for whom the changes are putatively made, whose voices are absent in existing educational and sociological literature on data in schools. I do this through an exploration of one specific feature of school datascapes: the use of data to create and maintain a sense of ‘progress’. This is not progress solely as developmental fact, logic, ideology or discourse but as felt. This article draws attention to profound changes to cultures of education that are evinced in relation to contemporary proliferations of data, contributes to theorisations of affective atmospheres in geography and how they come to be known (as a question of both experience and method), and it advances a novel theorisation of progress ‘after the affective turn’.

Abstract:
Left in the Waiting Room of History?: Provincializing the European Child

This paper highlights an important lacuna within critiques of infantilizing (neo-)colonial European discourses: the failure to question whom or what was the ‘child’ against which non-Europeans were gauged. The premise is that the unacknowledged figure at the heart of these critiques is in fact the figure of the universalised, European child. Not only is this paradoxical, it also opens the potential for taking these critiques further, and for shifting the analytical lens away from the racialized, infantilized Other in order to challenge the assumed universality of European notions of childhood against which the Other was, and sometimes remains, positioned. We develop this critique through a sympathetic engagement with broader postcolonial writings on the subject of infantilization and, specifically, with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (2000). The paper reveals the paradoxical presence of the figure of the European child within Chakrabarty’s critique of Eurocentrism, arguing that this figure is present even as Chakrabarty seeks to provincialize Europe. The paper explores examples of the work that the figure of the universal European child continues to perform and concludes with some reflections on what it might mean to provincialize the European child, both for postcolonial theory and for the broader ethical issues this raises.

Abstract:
Productive tensions - engaging geography students in participatory action research with communities

This study discusses the benefits and challenges of an undergraduate module on participatory geographies, involving students in co-producing research with community partners. The module challenges the knowledge production model predominant in Geography curricula. We argue that it develops students' skills and understanding through engaging them intellectually, socially and emotionally outside the university. As a student, two community partners and a professor, we offer our perspectives on the opportunities and conflicts that arose. We do not gloss over tensions in achieving the module's diverse aims, but suggest that these are productive for teaching, learning, research and the needs of community organizations.

Abstract:
Atmospheres of progress in a data-based school

In this article, I seek to extend the geographies of education, youth and young people by offering an account of the significant shifts taking place in contemporary English state education around the production and use of data. I present material from pupils, for whom the changes are putatively made, whose voices are absent in existing educational and sociological literature on data in schools. I do this through an exploration of one specific feature of school datascapes: the use of data to create and maintain a sense of ‘progress’. This is not progress solely as developmental fact, logic, ideology or discourse but as felt. This article draws attention to profound changes to cultures of education that are evinced in relation to contemporary proliferations of data, contributes to theorisations of affective atmospheres in geography and how they come to be known (as a question of both experience and method), and it advances a novel theorisation of progress ‘after the affective turn’.

Abstract:
Education, Data and Futurity: a data-based school in the North East of England

Abstract

An emerging and now highly significant way by which futures are being imagined and enacted in schools is through the increased production and use of data. This thesis explores the life of data and experiences of data-based living through a deeply-textured account from one school in North-East England. Based on a multi-method qualitative study it seeks, with pupils and teachers in the school, to understand how the proliferation of data is negotiated in detail, in place and in practice. From the school, and with its members, I consider what might constitute an ethic of care in the context of data.

The thesis offers a detailed exploration of the roles that data are playing in the process of education and the production of futures. I draw on and contribute to education studies, the sociology of education, data studies and the geographies of education, childhood, youth and young people, futurity and data. I argue that data work to bundle and bind. Data bundle together different spaces and times as ‘the school’, knowable in the present, comparable with recorded ‘pasts’ and enabling the imagining and realising of futures. This bundling of spaces, times and knowledges – both within and beyond the school – renders them amenable to judgment, decision and intervention. Data also act to bind people and their futures together where pupils and teachers become coresponsible for securing each other’s futures and so also the future of the school and the nation. The ‘pupil multiple’ is produced and pupils’ digital personae circulate with many sources of data assembled, sorted and sifted. However, the relationship between bodies and bytes, and different sources of data, shifts between coherence, divergence and blurring and becomes both a source of conflict and underpins an ‘atmosphere of progress’.

Abstract:
Left in the Waiting Room of History?: Provincializing the European Child

This paper highlights an important lacuna within critiques of infantilizing (neo-)colonial European discourses: the failure to question whom or what was the ‘child’ against which non-Europeans were gauged. The premise is that the unacknowledged figure at the heart of these critiques is in fact the figure of the universalised, European child. Not only is this paradoxical, it also opens the potential for taking these critiques further, and for shifting the analytical lens away from the racialized, infantilized Other in order to challenge the assumed universality of European notions of childhood against which the Other was, and sometimes remains, positioned. We develop this critique through a sympathetic engagement with broader postcolonial writings on the subject of infantilization and, specifically, with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (2000). The paper reveals the paradoxical presence of the figure of the European child within Chakrabarty’s critique of Eurocentrism, arguing that this figure is present even as Chakrabarty seeks to provincialize Europe. The paper explores examples of the work that the figure of the universal European child continues to perform and concludes with some reflections on what it might mean to provincialize the European child, both for postcolonial theory and for the broader ethical issues this raises.

Abstract:
Productive tensions - engaging geography students in participatory action research with communities

This study discusses the benefits and challenges of an undergraduate module on participatory geographies, involving students in co-producing research with community partners. The module challenges the knowledge production model predominant in Geography curricula. We argue that it develops students' skills and understanding through engaging them intellectually, socially and emotionally outside the university. As a student, two community partners and a professor, we offer our perspectives on the opportunities and conflicts that arose. We do not gloss over tensions in achieving the module's diverse aims, but suggest that these are productive for teaching, learning, research and the needs of community organizations.