2/4 These are fields - media and cultural studies and cultural theory - that are increasingly being framed as problematic, both ideologically and instrumentally. Yet they have played an important role in challenging the elitist tendencies of the mainstream, including those surrounding #socialmobility. If only either Seddon or Rajan had attended one of these institutions instead of having the disadvantage of studying for an undergraduate degree at #Oxford and #cambridge.

Still, we shouldn’t be surprised. This is, after all, a conversation on the #BBC between two Oxbridge-educated figures – albeit one is from South London the other West Yorkshire – taking about how social mobility might be used to include more people from #workingclass backgrounds in the system as it currently exists. It’s a social and educational system that was constructed in advance, although not by working-class people themselves, of course. A system that has in fact historically exploited and marginalised them.

The sandpile metaphor matters because collapse often looks sudden from the outside.

But inside the system, pressure has been accumulating for a long time.

The crisis is not always the failure. Sometimes it is the correction.
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https://reviewsrantsandraves.substack.com/p/what-the-sandpile-knows-a-foreword

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