Connect2Aspire: Cultural engagements and young people's professional aspirations

This Fellowship will examine and promote the value of communication ecologies to afford new ways of seeing, examining and engaging with complex social challenges that cannot be dealt with through silo or monodisciplinary approaches.
A programme of RESEARCH will address a priority area in the UK government's 2017 Industrial Strategy Green Paper - Pillar 3: Developing skills, which emphasises the precariousness of the future job market and the need for future workers to upskill and reskill and engage in lifelong learning. Connect2Aspire will use communicative ecologies as a holistic framework to afford new ways to look at skills development and preparing youth for lifelong learning, shifting the focus from the triangle school-youth-employer to concentrate on young people, their information and communication practices and the interest-driven pursuit of learning opportunities distributed across the home, community, school, peer groups and cultural spaces.
My Fellowship builds on a research line on communicative ecologies, social networks and aspirations, which I have been pursuing for the past five years and which indicates the key role of aspirations for providing young people with drive, direction, informed choice and responsibility in pursuing life and career pathways. Building on the work of Indian anthropologist and sociologist Arjun Appadurai and economist Debraj Ray, I define aspirations as cultural capacities, which are formed, shaped and evolve in close connection to an individual's socio-cultural milieu, nurtured through meaningful social connections, and powerful drivers of behaviour and motivation.
Three research questions guide this study, dealing with understanding needs and gaps, scoping opportunities, and envisaging avenues for change:
(1) How do young people access and make sense of information to shape their professional aspirations and choose initial career directions?
(2) How can engagements in the cultural sector be leveraged to support young people in their professional aspirations and choices?
(3) What new structures, connections and cooperation pathways among local educational, community and cultural institutions can support young people to shape and pursue their professional aspirations and choices?
Working in collaboration with a cultural sector, an academic and two non-profit partners, I will design and conduct a community ethnography in Coventry and a study on cultural engagements in cultural sites and museums. Findings will shed light on how young people's aspirations and initial professional choices are shaped by the cultural and communicative practices and networks they are engaged in, and how these are embedded in broader socio-economic structures. On this basis, I will provide recommendations on new structures that connect among the educational, community and cultural sectors in a locality, aligned to young people's interests, needs and their information seeking practices.
A LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT programme will enable me to establish intellectual leadership in ecological approaches to communication studies, apply them to address sectoral needs in the UK, and shape new research agendas that bring communication and media studies in dialogue with other disciplines for socially engaged and policy relevant research. Leadership capabilities will be honed through a combination of mentorship, training, and opportunities to demonstrate leadership in the organisation of events addressing academic, practice and public audiences.
Outputs include 3 sector-targeted reports, a methodological toolkit for mapping young people's cultural and communication practices and aspiration pathways, 3 journal articles, a monograph, and 2 policy-informing briefings. Findings will be disseminated towards academic, practice, local community and policy audiences through a seminar at the Victoria and Albert Museum, 3 conference presentations, two postgraduate research workshops, and a final symposium in Coventry.

This Fellowship addresses five categories of beneficiaries, reached through a combination of events, publications, web communication, and stakeholder engagement in knowledge exchanges:
(1) The UK cultural sector and museums in particular will deepen understanding of how cultural and creative engagements can shape young people's aspirations and inform their professional choices; and how they can strengthen cooperation with community and educational actors to create new support structures for young people's skills development and career orientation. Relevant outputs include 2 reports on the role of cultural and community engagements for shaping young people's professional aspirations. These reports will be published on the project website with updates on social media, disseminated by the V&A partner museum, sent in direct communications to my network of contacts in the cultural and museum sector, and findings shared in a dissemination seminar at the V&A. I will also disseminate findings in a national and international conference addressing museum practitioner and academic audiences.
(2) Local stakeholders in Coventry include Coventry youth, local communities, museums, cultural, and educational institutions and the Coventry City Council. Collaboration with these groups is built in the research design. Two participatory workshops will be organised to discuss findings and policy implications for Coventry. The second workshop will be relevant especially for local cultural professionals, and will engage them to shed light on new connections between the school, the community and the cultural sector to better support and orient Coventry youth. A tailored report on Coventry, 'Culture, communication and the professional aspirations of Coventry's young people' will be made available through the project website, disseminated through social media and through e-newsletters by partner organisations, and a printed summary distributed at the final Symposium on findings and implications. The Symposium will be organised in Coventry's iconic St. Mary's Guildhall, where partners and local stakeholders will be invited, as well as being open to the general public.
(3) Policy makers are addressed at local and national level. Findings will be interpreted to shed light on entry points and new approaches for youth support structures that mobilise local community, cultural and educational actors and resources. A local policy briefing will be delivered to the Coventry City Council; a briefing of national scope will be developed following
training for policy engagement, addressing DCMS and UKCES.
(4) Postgraduate researchers in media, communication, cultural studies and education will be addressed through two workshops on visual methods for youth engagement in research, the first involving Doctorate of Education (DoE) professional students at Bournemouth University and the second PGRs in Media and Creative Industries at Loughborough University London. This is expected to contribute to innovating research methodology in their respective fields of study and encourage openness to inter and cross-disciplinary approaches. The DoE students are professional teachers; the workshop and a seminar delivered during their residential practice will contribute as well to disseminate the findings of this project in professional educator circles, and strengthen awareness of the value of out of school cultural engagements for skills building and career orientation.
(5) General public. This Fellowship will inform public views on the value of cultural engagements for skills building and informing career trajectories, and shape attitudes favourable to lifelong learning. Public dissemination activities include regular communication on outcomes through the project website and social media, a public dissemination event in Coventry, and one article submitted to The Conversation.