Programme full

Friday 17 April 2015 09:00 - 10:30
ROUNDTABLE SESSIONS
The idea of a social unconscious (or, perhaps, many social unconsciouses) is surely one of the most beguiling for
psychoanalytic sociology. It is also probably the one that, potentially at least, offers most to the wider discipline. But
what is the social unconscious exactly? This paper offers a preliminary interrogation of the concept. It starts from
Lynne Layton's notion of normative unconscious processes – the ways in which social inequalities, anxieties and
distinctions get written into individual unconscious configurations – and, drawing partly on the systemic and processbased
ideas of S.H. Foulkes, Earl Hopper and others, moves on to ask if we can think of these apparently patterned
unconscious configurations as themselves dimensions of the social phenomena to which they seemingly respond. If it
is possible to think of individual unconscious configurations in these terms we may have an opportunity to shift from a
social psychological to a psychosocial analysis proper, in the processes opening up important sociological questions:
for example, about the relationship between unconscious fantasy and ideology or social 'imaginaries'; and between
unconscious group processes on one hand and social structure and system, on the other
Evaluating the Tottenham Thinking Space Project
Price, H., Sampson, A.
(University of East London)
This presentation draws on research data obtained during an evaluation of the Tottenham Community Therapy
Project, funded after the 2011 riots by Haringey Directorate of Public Health and the Tavistock and Portman NHS
Trust. Community therapy has been used to address social ills and personal dis-ease in favelas in the state of Ceara
in Brazil, using Adalberto Barreto's (2010) critical pedagogical approach, which re-values local knowledges and
increases local participation so as to '...move mental health out of a private space into a public citizen's space'. It has
also been used in the U.S., as in the psychoanalytically-informed Avalon Gardens project in South Central Los
Angeles, post the 1992 riots, with the explicit aim of providing an individual experience of empowering change '...from
the inside out' (Borg, 2004).
Interview data, monitoring and questionnaire data, and ethnographic process-recorded notes of meetings are
discussed to explore the experiences and responses of participants from diverse backgrounds and living in 'stressed
and fragmented neighbourhoods' (Price, Li and Sampson, 2013).
Lifecourse
ROUNDTABLE 9, CONFERENCE HALL, HAMISH WOOD BUILDING
The Established and the Newcomers
Carlin, E.
(Birkbeck College, University of London)
Drawing on my PHD fieldwork, including 26 semi-structured interviews with 26 young people in Pilton, a
disadvantaged neighbourhood of Edinburgh in 2012 and 2013, I will compare and contrast the attitudes and
behaviours towards newcomers in contemporary Edinburgh with those in Elias & Scotsman's classic text, 'The
Established and the Outsiders'(1994), which analysed the experiences of a working class community in 'Winston
Parva', Leicestershire at the end of the 1950s, including exploring how they stigmatised new arrivals in their
community. There are significant differences between Pilton and Winston Parva. I will argue that these relate to the
different levels of cohesion in the established communities, influenced in large part by the vastly changed labour
market context. In Winston Parva, there was full employment and prejudice against newcomers focussed on the
latters' perceived moral failings. For young people in Pilton, the impact of globalisation on the local labour market and
structural changes in the education system, combined with poverty and a stigmatised identity, combine to make the
move into adulthood, signified by a move into financial independence through getting a job, very difficult. They
describe diverse but challenging experiences in the labour market but rarely blame structural disadvantages for the
challenges they face, more often blaming other stigmatised minorities, most notably immigrants from Poland, as well
as their own perceived individual shortcomings.
235 BSA Annual Conference 2015
Glasgow Caledonian University