So the project officially ended last week. This means that the money stops flowing. This also means that Aisha, our wonderful researcher, has left Brunel – though we hope to have her back for a month in the autumn to do some writing. Aisha was only on the project for three months but in that time she presented with us in London and Chicago, tweeted and blogged @CelebYouthUK, designed a fabulous pull up banner, watched and made notes on videos of Prince Harry, Nicki Minaj, Katie Price and Mario Balotelli, and coded these and the rest of the case study dataset.  Most recently she helped Heather direct a series of short films based on our data (coming to a YouTube channel near you soon). You can see the multi-talented Aisha in her comedy debut below.

Aisha is an avid footballer and has been capped three times for the British Muslim women’s football team.  Aisha is CEO and founder of an inter-faith sports charity All Sports Women.  The charity was established to encourage cross-cultural dialogue through sports participation, with the hope of using sport as a means to bridge the gap between different faith groups and cultures.  Aisha continues to challenge stereotypical notions of the ‘Asian woman’ through her academic research and community involvement.  In this post Aisha tells us a little bit more about her research.

Jon Rainford is a Teacher of Art in a large Secondary School in Buckinghamshire. He came across the work of the Celeb Youth through their twitter account and through happy coincidence was at a digital sociology study day where some of the early findings were being discussed. This sparked an interest in finding out if these ideas resonated with the young people he works with in a pastoral role. In this blog post he describes what happens when he asked his teenage tutor group about celebrity culture…

One of the many pleasures of this year’s British Educational Research Association Conference was collaborating on the Aspiration Nation? Symposium not just with Kim and Laura, my CelebYouth colleagues, but also with the wonderful Louise Archer from the Aspires Project, Graham Crow from the Living and Working on Sheppey Project and Becky Francis. Graham’s research involves asking young people to write essays in the voice of their older selves looking back on their lives, replicating an earlier study by Ray Pahl in the 1970s. In exploring the archived 1970s essays, Graham was surprised to find that Pahl had scribbled ‘Total Fantasy’ on some. This remark from Graham provoked me to reflect on how we judge young people’s aspirations. How do some come to appear realistic and some fantastic, and with what consequences?