Stephen is Co-Investigator on the Speaking Citizens Project and Professor of Political Communication at the University of Leeds
The strand of the Speaking Citizens research project that I am leading explores the communicative challenges faced by contemporary young people in four specific contexts:
- Young people going through the justice system
- Young trade unionists engaged in workplace recruitment
- Young nurses working within the NHS
- Young creative artists producing performances about social justice
Each of these groups face daily challenges to express themselves confidently; interpret the meanings of messages from diverse sources; engage with unfamiliar modes of speech; and translate between private feelings and public language. The starting assumption of my research is that finding the right ways to communicate is hard work. It is not a matter of acquiring communication competencies (McCroskey, 1982; Shah et al, 2009; Engleberg et al, 2017) or conforming to sanctioned speech codes (Cameron, 2005; Curzan, 2014), but of developing creative and confident expressive habits that enable young people to negotiate everyday struggles to understand and be understood.
Through a primarily ethnographic lens, my research objective will be to observe communication in real-time, regarding it as a social practice that is both learned and improvised. I am expecting that the challenges of communication will differ significantly between contexts, but that there will also be cross-contextual communicative barriers and opportunities indicative of a cultural pattern. Observation will be in online as well as offline contexts, acknowledging that lives are lived across both domains, often imperceptibly.
The aims of this research are relevant to current debates about how best to teach oracy skills to young people, but they differ in important ways. Rather than exploring how young people can be ‘taught’ to express themselves confidently, we are interested in how young people devise their own creative ways of communicating and develop the expressive resources needed to sustain such creativity. Rather than looking to schools or colleges as institutional sites of communicative learning, we are interested in the practices that emerge in real-world situations such as workplaces, the criminal justice system, and performance spaces. And rather than focusing solely upon communication as an employability skill or characteristic of personal resilience, we are particularly interested in tracking young people’s expressive capabilities in the context of democratic, civic agency. To be effective, democratic citizenship depends upon equality of voice. The normative starting point for this research is that inequalities of expressive confidence and capability diminish civic agency and undermine democracy (see Coleman, 2020 for a developed version of this argument).
I expect there to be three significant outcomes from this research (although the nature of all good research is that it often generates quite unexpected outcomes). The first will be a record of communication in practice. The form that this record takes will be innovative insofar as we shall aim not merely to reflect upon communicative practices but to capture them as a lyrical account of lived experience. Secondly, we shall work with research participants to compile resources and strategies that might be used by other people seeking to develop their confidence as citizens. Thirdly, we shall reflect critically and imaginatively upon what it means to be a democratic citizen at this moment in history. This is not about developing a definitive account of citizenship but opening ourselves up to pluralistic range of civic norms and a diverse variety of communicative practices.
REFERENCES
Cameron, D., 2005. Verbal hygiene. Routledge.
Coleman, S. 2020. How People Talk About Politics: Brexit and After. Bloomsbury Press.
Curzan, A., 2014. Fixing English: Prescriptivism and language history. Cambridge University Press.
Engleberg, I.N., Ward, S.M., Disbrow, L.M., Katt, J.A., Myers, S.A. and O'Keefe, P., 2017. The development of a set of core communication competencies for introductory communication courses. Communication Education, 66(1), pp.1-18
McCroskey, J.C., 1982. Communication competence and performance: A research and pedagogical perspective. Communication education, 31(1), pp.1-7
Shah, D.V., McLeod, J.M. and Lee, N.J., 2009. Communication competence as a foundation for civic competence: Processes of socialization into citizenship. Political Communication, 26(1), pp.102-117.
