I had the feeling that my efforts to explain reflexivity in my last point were pretty ordinary – a lot of half-understood gobbledegook, so I have decided to revisit the topic after a little more reading, in an effort to see whether I have got the hang of it. Time will tell.
Okay, the first thing to explain is the notion of tradition, modern and hypercomplex worlds. Basically, this is the argument that society has fundamentally changed over time, such that we are no longer centered around one dominant cultural feature. For example, a traditional world might have had, as its centre, religion, which marginalized all other cultural features. This changed as we became modern, but crucially, there was still only a single centre. However, a key feature of hypercomplex worlds is that they have become poly-centric – that is to say, there is no common or agreed upon set of cultural values.
This has led to an increased level of choice and risk. People today, and especially young people, are continually being demanded to make choices about certain things – and there is never any guarantee that these are the correct choices to be making. These choices can be large or small – from their personal appearance to climate change, but crucially, there is no escape from the requirement to make these choices. According to Giddens, reflexivity is the continuous monitoring of actions which human beings display. Thus, by making these choices, based as they are on a level of social, self and contextual awareness, young people are engaging in what has become known as reflexive practice.
According to Scott Lash, reflexivity empowers those who engage in it. It provides them with agency to overcome structural domination. However, even Lash acknowledges that not all communities have the same level of reflexivity. This is where I think Threadgold was heading. Although many sociologists argue that, ostensibly, agency should free people from their structural domination, if reflexivity is like another ‘commodity’ that is unequally distributed, then of course, some people are going to be able to act more reflexively than others. Are more reflexive communities higher in cultural capital?
So what does this mean for my research? Well, can this be a lens through which I can examine the work that I did? Are my students, having been involved in Justice Citizens, more capable of reflexivity? If that was the case, where in the films and the interviews is such reflexivity shown or documented? What does it look like? Are there conscious decisions made about genre and production that show this?
Interesting.