Adrian Saker

Working class-ness has been negatively rebranded and stigmatised over the last 30 years under successive conservative and new labour governments, such that being a resident of a council estate in the UK in the 21st century has a very different meaning compared to the previous century. Psychological, rhetorical and political forces compound to institutionalise and repudiate the social position of working-class communities. These forces yield a disenfranchised social and political status that demands attention. The narrative of the project "RIP Danny P", explores the psychosocial and political limitations of suburban characters in relation to the imaginary and socially constructed boundaries defining self and other. This opens up new liminal boundary spaces to contest the institutional forces that marginalise the position of working class communities and highlights the presence or absence of opportunities for social subversion, escape from social structures, and the exercising of choice. The neglected and marginalised areas around Birmingham become the backdrop for projected assumptions, which cast shadows on a shattered present reality. Here we experience a sense of anxiety and witness a number of fault-lines running through suburban culture, suggesting that contemporary Britishness is merely a continual process of reinvention and renewal.