‘Quiet activism’ in schools: conceptualising the relationships between the personal, the political and the Political in education

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a novel conceptualisation of the school context by examining the ‘personal’ (emotional wellbeing), the ‘political’ (everyday political actions and power relations) and the ‘Political’ (the Political system, including electoral politics and governmental policy) and how these interrelate. Informed by literatures from a range of disciplines, the authors use this conceptual lens to consider data from two projects which explored the impact of austerity on schools. In their qualitative analysis of data from interviews with 82 participants they illustrate connections between the personal, the political and the Political. They conceptualise the work schools are doing in response to the impacts of the Political as quiet political activism, which appears to have knock-on effects for staff wellbeing. They consider the implications of this, concluding that the ‘quiet politics’ occurring in schools may bring a sense of control and create opportunities for community activism, but also has potentially worrying consequences.

KEYWORDS:

• Austerity
• wellbeing
• quiet politics
• education

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all participants who took the time to be involved in these projects. Thanks also to Erica Burman, Anat Greenstein, Afroditi Kalambouka, Lauren McCoy and Kate Sapin who all worked on the Bedroom Tax Study along with the authors of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Although this policy has been referred to by multiple names, and the government’s official name was the ‘Removal of the Spare Room Subsidy’, both for ease of reference and because this was the term most commonly used in academic and public discourse we refer to it as the ‘bedroom tax’ (Gibb, 2015).

2. The policy was ended in Scotland in February 2014.