The Pleasures of Being a Student at the University of Sheffield
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The pleasures of being a student at the University of Sheffield M J Cheeseman A thesis submitted in November 2010 for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. National Centre for English Cultural Tradition Quality of life is sure to decrease significantly: accept this fact and prepare. You will not be able to justify buying gratuitous fancy dress costumes for those [oh so indispensable, those legendary, those so difficult to get out of] novelty bar crawls: you may have to lower your expectations as to those compliments your costume will invite in flaming, acrid bars - where pub crawls venture too far from their source and motivation - and you will no longer be able to resemble your favourite characters from childhood shows, (those ones you had forgotten until arriving in Freshers' Week and discovering the resurrected interests, the mass hysteria to bond groups with nothing in common but their accident of age); from bemused charity shops, or cynical, colourful, fancy dress shops (that multiply like bacteria populations throughout student areas), as you only abandoned them before ten o'clock on the floor of a pub covered with body paint and sick. -Toby Hobbs I said, Hey stu-dent! Hey stu-dent! Hey stu-dent! You're gonna get it through the head, I said. -The Fall Well the modern world is not so bad Not like the students say In fact I'd be in heaven If you'd share the modern world with me With me in love with the USA now With me in love with the modern world now Put down the cigarette And share the modern world with me. -The Modern Lovers All folklore books are performances for certain markets. -Jere my Hardy In the life of the Hall the small intolerances that divide specialist scholars are rubbed away; the literary man realises by experience that the technologist is not the barbarian he might be thought; the medical student finds that the classics make a contribution to general culture that he can ill afford to despise, and men can test their opinions in frank and easy discussion with those of a different outlook. -A.W. Chapman ii Alumni expect anecdotes - narratives of student pranks and recounting of incidents involving students outwitting their mentors. Cultural and social historians assume full treatment of the relation of the college or university to the society in which it flourished. -Glenn Weaver [I]t is impossible to write sympathetically about subjects such as divination, magic and witchcraft in modern history without automatically taking sides in at least one major, and often bitter, cultural debate. -Ronald Hutton Everything in Sheffield gets turned into student accommodation. -Jarvis Cocker You have no idea how the place runs when you are a student. -Rosie Valerio We've a world of our own and they can't enter there. -Sheffield student song Help! I own two very comfortable pure woollen jumpers, both of which are dear to me. However, not heeding my mother's (and the label's) advice, I washed them both by machine and they shrank, so they're not really comfortable any more (sob). I live in rented student accommodation where it's very cold so I need my jumpers! Can you suggest any method by which I could re-stretch my jumpers, which doesn't involve wearing a bin-liner and using my own body to stretch them while wet? Oh dear. You students with your anarchic approach to life, questioning a garment label's authority, flying in the face of your own mother's advice. I wish there were a magic solution, but there isn't. Your fault was, I hazard a guess, not just in putting your adored jumpers in the machine, but putting them through a non-woollen cycle, because, as previously discussed in this column, you generally can wash jumpers in the machine in a specialist woollen wash. This is a rite of passage thing, Peter. Look on the bright side; cold aids concentration, so you'll do better in your exams and get a well-paid job so you can afford a different Connelly cashmere jumper every day (the creme de la creme of cashmere jumpers, put one on your Christmas list now). -The Guardian iii Abstract This thesis investigates the distinctive means by which undergraduate students identify as a group outside the official university agenda of learning and teaching. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2005 and 2008 at the University of Sheffield and is thus an exploration of largely mobile, traditional students at an elite university in a time marked by 'Chicago-school' economic policies, global and post-industrial social change and pervasive technological mediation. Its findings are situated in three contextual narratives: the postwar development of a youth consumer culture, the expansion of Higher Education in the United Kingdom and the intensification of its night-time economy. Student identity is seen to be actuated within the latter, specifically the regular, ritualised activity of 'going out' which is understood, in a student context, as having developed from traditional, carnivalesque behaviours over three definite periods of student culture. The monetisation of these behaviours in the night-time economy is interpreted as having wrought significant temporal and spatial transformations on student life, the University and the city of Sheffield. Going out is seen as both performance and social process, one acting on and enacted by a small group of friends typically formed in student accommodation. Through this dual articulation going out is demonstrated as both propagating and being propagated by the pressures of mediated representation, especially those of the social-networking site Facebook. Going out, and especially the binge drinking that accompanies it, is ultimately understood, via Berardi (2009), as a raw, psychoactive medicine for the very pressures of objectification enshrined in mediated youth culture. Theoretically the research connects Noyes' (1995) formulation of group identity enacted in performance to Paglia's (1991) dichotomy of objectification and dissolution. In turn this is mapped onto Bourdieu's (1984; 1990) writing on sociology, Measham and Brain (2005) and Winlow and Hall's (2006) writing on the night-time economy and Allen and Ainley on Higher Education (2010). The thesis concludes with several recommendations: firstly a minimum price per unit accompanied by enforced social responsibility standards in the night-time economy, secondly the incorporation of the undergraduate first year into degree classification, thirdly a more practical emphasis on community and corporate life in both academic departments and residences and fourthly the pedagogic engagement of students in issues of pleasure, consumerism and culture. iv Acknowledgements I would like to thank Malcolm Jones who began supervising this thesis with verve and Joan Beal who ended it with grace. I would also like to thank Joan for the supportive atmosphere she created in the final years of NATCECT, to which Catherine Bannister, Trish Bater, Fay Hield, Jane Lowe, Jonathan Roper and Gideon Thomas all contributed. In a wider sense, the School of English provided a good base by awarding me a research bursary. James Grayson, Paul Cowdell and Caroline Oates have been particularly helpful at The Folklore Society, who awarded me their ever first Post-graduate Research Bursary in 2008. Terry Gunnell has been encouraging, as have members of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF), especially Susanne Osterlund-Potzsch. The Society for Research into Higher Education has also been supportive, and I am extremely grateful to have met Patrick Ainley through its Student Experience Network. Margarete Parrish at the University of Gloucestershire has continued to be a good friend while The Hunters' Club have supported my research with fidelity and faith. I would like to thank all the staff of the University of Sheffield, particularly those in ACS and especially Resident Support, without whom this thesis would have disappeared into mystic crystals. There are many others at the University and Union of Students who deserve thanks: Dermot Gleeson, Ruth Gunstone, Jacky Hodgson, Roger Hall, Alex Hunt, Barbara Jackson, Jennifer King, Helen Mathers, Kathleen O'Donovan, Robert Petrulis, and Matthew Zawadzki to name but a few. Philippa Levy at CILASS and now the School of Information Studies has been especially supportive, as has Jayne Tulip, without whom I would not have found the time. Peter and Alison Slater generously donated their time and papers, whilst the porters, cleaners and security staff provided invaluable perspectives and memories. Vixi Newton deserves special thanks for introducing me to the Sheffield Sabrecats. Some of my participants have become friends, some have graduated and some have disappeared. All have been indispensable. For reasons of confidentiality, I have not named any here. This thesis is a result of their generosity, and those of students in general, everywhere. I would like to thank Rebecca and her family, all my friends and my whole, entire family, especially my mother, grandmothers, sister and brother for supporting me through the five years it has taken to produce this text. Finally, I'd like to dedicate this thesis to my father, who loves learning. v Table of contents Abstract ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________ iv Acknowledgements ______________________________________ _________________________________________________ y Table of contents vi Abbreviations __________________________________________________________________________________________________