Jill Robinson

Doctoral researcher

Birmingham School of Media

Email:: jill.robinson@mail.bcu.ac.uk

Jill's research is framed by knowledge and experiences gained over the course of a portfolio career including teaching, funding (ERDF and Lottery bids), policy development, transnational project management in European, cultural and urban affairs and parallel long-term involvement in the arts as performer, trustee, strategist and marketeer/fundraiser. Jill is a former singer and current Board member of Ex Cathedra and is involved in the wellbeing and education work of the company, with a special interest in singing and recovery from stroke and other neurological incidents.

Throughout Jill's career, she has been concerned by the life chances of disadvantaged young people and has been aware of, or involved in, initiatives aimed at helping overcome some of the barriers facing them.

This has also been shaped by her involvement as co-author/project manager of the EU FP7 funded project CITISPYCE which explored young people’s social innovations to overcome barriers to inclusion against the backdrop of ‘a redrawing of social inequalities’ and ‘excessively high levels of youth unemployment and threats to the social provision enjoyed by previous generations’ (CITISPYCE 2016). In this project, they were concerned with those affected by social inequalities at the local level and those who try to manage the consequences of it nationally (e.g. through governmental policies and actions) and locally (through municipal officials and other actors in civil society). This revealed a mismatch between these actors’ perceptions of the problems and actions required to tackle them and those of the young people themselves. This has led to increasing distance and lack of trust between disadvantaged young people and officials, as well as frustration at the neglect and withdrawal of services for young people in local neighbourhoods (Guentner et al. 2018).

Qualifications

Research

"My project is a collaborative one with a creative industries partner, Beatfreeks, which is based in Birmingham. We share an interest in the role of creativity in improving the life chances of young people, particularly in these times of political, social and economic uncertainty.

Thus, my research is set against the backdrop of a decade of austerity measures following the global economic crisis of 2007 and the technological advances in the volume, velocity and variety of data which can be gathered, analysed and used to inform decision-making, particularly by business, known as Big Data. The former has had a disproportionately adverse impact on young people through excessively high levels of youth unemployment compounded by the retrenchment of the welfare state. Whilst the latter has had a significant influence on public sector policymaking, as governmental and other public bodies seek to collect and exploit their own Big Data in order to address an increasingly wide range of societal challenges such as young people’s inequalities. These public bodies may, however, contribute to exacerbating such inequalities through their agency in the design, collection, interpretation and application of these data. At the same time, young people may be the unwitting subjects of such Big Data-driven policies which (re)produce inequalities.

Both policymakers and young people’s engagement with Big Data is likely to be complex whereby certain interactions may lead to a reinforcement of existing, or the development of, new social and cultural inequalities. Yet, there may be ways in which such inequalities might be mitigated through the creative collection and visualization of data (Big or Small) to generate counter-narratives and challenge the prevailing policy discourse.

A critical study of Big Data is needed, therefore, to explore their relationship to the social and cultural inequalities of young people, the agency of those who have power over Big Data and their communication and the role of social actors in developing new strategies to mitigate inequalities to which Big Data outputs may have contributed, including the involvement of creative practitioners in data collection and visualization."

Expected outcomes

"Youth inequalities are one of the most serious and apparently intractable problems in society. My investigations into Big and Small Data and their relationships to young people’s social and cultural inequalities in Birmingham will assist policymakers in major cities in UK and Europe by: i) providing them with insights into how their handling of Data might be reinforcing existing inequalities and/or creating new ones; and ii) enabling them to rethink their approaches to data selection and the ways in which they communicate their findings in order to reduce the distance and distrust between themselves and young people, both of which have been identified as contributing to young people’s social and cultural exclusion."