Tania Lewis

DIY selves?

Keywords: Beck, health habitus, nternet4 online health information, reflexive individualization, risk soczety, youth

In Ulrich Beck's writings on the 'risk society' he depicts contemporary western social identity as reflexive and ad hoc -shaped through calculative strategies of self-management rather than traditional social categories such as class. Beck's model of 'reflexive individualization' can be seen to be particularly pertinent to the realm of health today, which is increasingly marked by discourses of the DJIY' subject. This article uses the findings of a study of young people's use of online health information as a means of examining the utility of Beck's theories. Comparing the experiences of young people from different social backgrounds, the article complicates the assertion that social identity has broken free of its class affiliations. Adopting the term 'health habitus', the article suggests that one way of countering the problematic tendency in Beck's work to displace questions of social location is to ground the notion of reflexive individualization in Bourdieu's concept of habitus.

Introduction

Over the past decade the writings of the German social theorist Ulrich Beckin particular his book Risk Society, which was first published in Germany in 1986 and translated into English in 1992 -have played a pivotal role in shaping debates in the West over the nature of late modernity and contemporary social identity.' Beck's work has offered up nothing less than a new sociological vocabulary, one aimed at shedding light on the complex transitional processes that he sees western societies currently experiencing> In Risk Society, for example, he contends that there has been a 'break within modernity' whereby the modernization process has turned upon itself and become what he terms 'reflexive modernization' (Beck, 1992: 9). A key feature of reflexive modernization is the shift from ARTI CLE a preoccupation with managing wealth and its (unequal) distribution to a preoccupation with managing risk, here 'defined as a systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernization itself' (Beck, 1992: 21; emphasis in original).

Of central concern to this article is [START_REF] Beck | Democracy Without Enemies[END_REF] argument that the ex- perience of external risk and reflexivity is now a generalized experience that cuts across social divides and has been accompanied by a shift to a new, individualized form of social identity. By individualization Beck means 'first, the disembedding and, second, the re-embedding of industrial society ways of life by new ones, in which individuals must produce, stage and cobble together their biographies themselves' (1994: 13). In other words, people's personal biographies are becoming freed from their attachment to the fixed categories of social identity such as social class, family, gender or occupation that once marked modernity. This shift towards reflexive individualization means that choice becomes central to people's existence as their identities are formed increasingly through lifestyle-oriented decision-making. Accordingly, 'class biographies, which are somehow ascribed, become transformed into reflexive biographies which depend on the decisions of the actor' (Beck, 1992: 88).

One of the key areas where Beck's theories of risk, reflexivity and indi- vidualization are particularly relevant is in the realm of health. The past couple of decades of post-welfare, neo-liberal political 'reform' in countries such as Australia has seen a broad reconceptualization of citizens as self- managing, 'enterprising individuals' (Rose, 1996). In the arena of health this has been accompanied by a reframing of personal health management as a lifestyle choice. Thus health promotion discourse is concerned decreasingly with government responsibility for morbidity or mortality statistics, focusing instead on questions of individual responsibility [START_REF] Higgs | Risk, Governmentality and the Reconceptualisation of Citizenship[END_REF] and on the body as a central site where questions of personal ethics and the social good are played out (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002). This shift has seen population health strategies and policies shift increasingly from a more structural, macro-social approach to a model that emphasizes the need for individuals to engage directly with their own health status. The ideal enterprising citizen in this latter paradigm is one who actively monitors, regulates and manages their own health (with the help of appropriate expert advice and knowledge) as part of a broader project of rationalized lifestyle management.

A number of maj or studies over the past couple of years have shown that a significant proportion of people in developed nations now regularly access health information online, a development that could be seen as an archetypal act of self-management and a kind of democratization or universalization of the values of autonomy and self-care (Fox and Fallows, 2003; Rideout, 2001; Taylor, 2002). Beck's notion of reflexive individualization would appear to be a highly appropriate critical tool 462 for conceptualizing the way that many lay people increasingly are using new media technologies as a means of accessing health expertise and, in turn, managing their own health biographies.

The article that follows discusses the findings of a study into young people's use of the internet for health information, focusing in particular on young people's perceptions and use of medical expertise and their degree of investment in individualistic conceptions of health. The premise of the study was that within the broader population of health-oriented, do-it-yourself (DIY) citizens, young people are likely to be particularly reflexive consumers of online health information. As a group associated both with high rates of internet use and a tendency to avoid dealing with the 'mainstream' medical system, the internet would seem to offer a relatively easy way of anonymously accessing a wide range of lay and 'expert' health and medical information -information which in turn could be easily tailored to a young person's specific 'lifestyle needs' as an active health consumer.

At the same time, given the impact and wide acceptance of Beck's theor- ies of risk and reflexivity within the realm of health (Bunton et al., 1995; Lupton, 1995; Petersen and Bunton, 1997; Scambler and Higgs, 1998)), the study was concerned with critically assessing the claim that the shift to reflexive modes of selfhood has been accompanied by a decline in the relevance of traditional social categories. The study asks the question: to what extent and in what ways are we now reflexive subj ects? And is the call to reflexivity experienced differently by different social subjects? Beck's analysis of contemporary identity has been criticized for failing to take into account the ways in which social inequities are not only ongoing today, but are potentially intensified in a political and cultural environment that emphasizes freedom of choice and enterprising modes of selfhood over social-structural understandings of the social self (Skeggs, 2002). As Skeggs suggests, rather than representing the dissolution of social categories, the discourse of reflexivity in fact may disguise an intensification of processes of distinction marked by a growing gap between those 'who cannot access and utilize reflexivity as a cultural resource' and those for whom 'reflexivity is a tool by which the resourceful self is produced' (2002: 365).

Dovetailing with this critique, the findings of the study indicate that while the notion of reflexive individualization offers insights into con- ceptualizing the pressures on young people to be healthy self-managing citizens, reflexive identity is not necessarily experienced evenly or in the same manner across different social groups. Instead, the study suggests that the social dispositions or habitus associated with different social locations continue to play an important role in framing young people's perceptions and experiences of reflexive health consumption. Drawing upon an expanded conception of Bourdieu's notion of habitus -as an embodied cultural formation that is both structuring, in that it 'organizes practices and perceptions of practices', and is itself structured, 'as a product of internalization of the division into social classes' (1984: 170) -the article concludes by arguing that, in conceptualizing and managing themselves 463 as healthy and/or at-risk bodies, the young people in the study bring to bear a surprising range of different cultural frames or forms of 'health habitus' to the task of reflexive self-care. It is suggested that these varied experiences indicate a need to move away from a universalizing model of reflexivity, which is often reflective of a narrowly middle-class model of identity anrd cultural value, and instead to 'specify' the different experiences of reflexivity associated with different social locations.

Method

From mid-2003 to mid-2004, in-depth interviews were conducted with 19 young people aged between 17 and 25. In order to explore the way in which social location and habitus might be articulated to different modes and experiences of reflexive social identity and DIY models of health, half of the sample was drawn from the University of Melbourne undergraduate student population and the other half from a city branch of the Melbourne Citymission, a charitable organization which provides help through its 'Frontyard' youth service to young people aged between 12 and 25 years who are homeless or in need of support. The University of Melbourne is a prestigious 'sandstone' university located in inner urban Melbourne, which traditionally has drawn its student base from an educated middle class elite largely based in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. During recent years, this student demographic has shifted somewhat to incorporate full fee-paying international (particularly South-East Asian) students, although the maj ority of interviewees in the sample were from Anglo-European backgrounds. While the interviewees were not specifically asked questions about their social location or iden- tification, it was hypothesized that the University of Melbourne students were likely to come from middle-class backgrounds and would exhibit some shared assumptions and values in relation to questions of health and self-care.

In contrast, individuals from the Citymission hailed from relatively disadvantaged social backgrounds and were expected to bring a rather different set of social experiences and cultural values to the question of individual reflexivity around health issues.4 Given the issue of low internet access for the Citymission group, who were often either homeless or living in squats or transitional housing, people were specifically recruited to the study who were using a free internet service offered on weekdays by the Frontyard service. The internet service was offered on a drop-in, voluntary basis. Of the nine young people recruited through the Citymission, five of the participants were male and four were female. All were Australian-born from Anglo-European backgrounds. The University of Melbourne group consisted of six females and four males. While four people in the group were 464 born overseas (two were from Malaysia, one was Indonesian and one was born in Germany) they had all lived for significant periods in Australia.

The rest were Australian-born and of Anglo-European ethnicity.

All of the interviews were conducted individually. Interviews were semi-structured and focused aMound the following topics:

* health issues of concern to the participants; * whether they used the internet for health information and how they critically assessed that information; * their perceptions of the role and status of doctors and use of medical expertise; and * whether and in what ways they conceived of themselves as reflexive, self-managing health consumers.

In the process of encouraging the participants to talk about health issues, the establishment of a rigid definition of health or health infor- mation was avoided. Instead, the interest focused on what this group of young people included under these broad umbrella terms. The wide range of answers received indicated a variety of definitions, from more narrowly medical understandings to much broader 'lifestyle' approaches to health that focused on diet, exercise and general 'bodily maintenance.

The object of the study was to capture a sense of the major discourses that participants drew upon in narrativizing their approaches to health maintenance in their daily lives and whether or how questions of social location impinged upon the way in which they constructed their health biographies. Here it should be noted that in discussing questions of social difference in relation to the university students and the Citymission youth interviewed, the primary goal of the study was not to provide a general- izable, objectivist account of the relations between class, youth and the consumption of online health material. Rather, the study was concerned with gauging at a more qualitative level the major discourses framing individual ideas about personal health and how these discourses played out against people's actual life experiences and opportunities, their sense of potentialities and risks, and their feelings of control (or lack thereof) over their health and their own life paths.

Discussion

Online health consumption and the role and status of medical expertise A key aspect of Beck's thesis regarding risk anrd reflexivity is the crucial role played by scientific expertise. To be a healthy, responsible subject under reflexive modernity, one has to weigh up the risks and benefits of certain actions and behaviours: that is, to exhibit a kind of calculative rationality in relation to assessing what kind of lifestyle one is going to live. Crucial 465 to the process of making informed decisions about risk management and lifestyle choice is the mediating role of the expert. However, a central premise of Beck's notion of the risk society is that science, technology and 'progress' have become objects of extreme ambivalence so that that the status of the expert is now rather fraught. An awareness of the hazards and risks produced and often actively covered up by the scientific community in the name of industrial productivity is now a pervasive part of daily life in developed nations. Links between industrial pollution and insidious forms of illness are denied along scientific grounds while ordinary people are forced to become 'alternative experts in risks of modernization' in order to contest such claims (Beck, 1994: 61). As Anthony Giddens puts it, while science was once 'invested with the authority of a final court of appeal', in today's risk society it 'has lost a good deal of the aura of authority it once had ' (1994: 87). However, while there is a pervasive scepticism towards expertise, at the same time people are becoming increasingly reliant on the abstracted knowledge possessed by experts as life becomes defined by a growing sense of complexity and insecurity. Thus the contradictory position of scientific expertise, as Beck characterizes it, is that while science has contributed to creating the risks that mark everyday life in reflexive modernity, it also offers itself up as the means of understanding and therefore managing these same risks.

In this study one of the themes of particular interest for examination was the relationship between young people's perceptions of, and reliance on, doctors and medical expertise, their use of the web for health material and their sense of themselves as reflexive self-managing health consumers. International studies indicate that large numbers of people are taking their health management into their own hands and accessing health information directly via the internet. Two recent quantitative surveys indicate that up to half of all adults in the United States have used the web for health information [START_REF] Fox | Pew Internet and American Life Project: Internet Health Resources[END_REF][START_REF] Taylor | The Harris Poll #21: Cyberchondriacs Update[END_REF], while one of these surveys similarly found high rates of online health consumption in France, Germany and Japan (Taylor, 2002). In relation to youth as a subgroup of health consumers, a large study entitled Generation Tx.com (conducted by a philanthropic group in the US) found that out of 90 percent of young people who had gone online, more than two-thirds had accessed some health information while a quarter had sourced a lot of web-based health material (Rideout, 2001). In the present study, all of the participants were regular internet users and most had looked up health information on the internet at some point. Eight of the 19 young people accessed online health information on a reasonably regular basis, suggesting a highly active and reflexive approach to health management.

Only two people out of the 19 interviewed had never used the internet for health information and both of them were very internet-savvy. In the case of Paula, a 20-year-old arts student, this was not due to a lack of compared with face-to-face contact with a doctor. As Paula answered when asked if she looked up online health information:

No, not really, not for stuff like that [health information] 'cos sometimes I'm a little concerned that they're not ... legitimate.. . I think you will still need some kind of personal touch. I mean, I think you can get a lot of information off it and you can use that to your advantage, but personally I wouldn't feel comfortable with just that. I'd want that and a professional opinion as well.

Indeed, while most of the young people had accessed health informa- tion from the internet this activity definitely was not seen as a replacement for seeing a doctor, although it was used at times to supplement the infor- mation that their doctor had given them or to access information that they felt their doctor could not (or would not) tell them. As a number of larger quantitative studies have shown, rather than replacing contact with western medical practitioners, by and large people are using on- line health information to supplement their visits to the doctor (Fox and Fallows, 2003). However, while online health consumers are still using the mainstream medical system, the question that needs to be asked is whether the 'democratization' of medical knowledge via the web is having any impact on the role and status of medical practitioners. Accordingly, in this study the participants were asked how they perceived their doctors compared with how their parents might have seen them. While the doctor was once seen as the first port of call for health issues, what role did they see the doctor as having today? Were they j ust a service provider, like a hairdresser, or were they seen as offering something more?

The majority of study participants still perceived doctors as having relatively high status compared with other health service providers, with their authority being seen to be specifically linked to the long period of study that doctors undertake and their grounding in western science.

However, for these young people, the perceived high status of doctors was less about social standing and more about efficacy and the scientific legitimacy associated with a medical degree. This perception of efficacy alongside a continued faith in scientific knowledge meant that almost all of the interviewees saw doctors as the first port of call during an acute illness.

As Amy, a 19-year-old girl from the Citymission, put it when asked whether she had ever used alternative medicine: 'I probably wouldn't go to like a naturopath or anything like that ... I trust my western medicine.' However, while western medicine was seen as possessing continued authority, a number of the young people qualified their statements about the status of doctors by noting that the growing number of different types of health experts available made doctors seem less 'special'. Others observed that the availability of health information on the web meant that doctors no longer had sole control over medical knowledge. While both the university students and the Citymission group had access to free, on-site health services (and also often to a family doctor), they seemed 467 to have little investment in forming an ongoing relationship with a sole general practitioner (GP). Instead, most of them did not have a regular GP and either attended whatever medical service was available at the time or talked about the need to 'shop around' for a decent doctor. Overall there was a sense, particularly among the university students, of relying first on themselves to maintain their own health, with the doctor being seen as a back-up option. As Sarah, a 20-year-old female arts student, says: I don't think doctors are people you go to . . . for a broader sense of health. Like if you're sick you'll go to the doctor and find out about it, but to know how to maintain health I don't think doctors are the main source.

For the most part then, the study participants did display what might be described as a self-consciously calculative and strategic approach to the use of doctors. While doctors were seen as still having a privileged status as medical experts, the young people themselves often drove health decisions rather than relying solely on medical practitioners. In other words, there was a sense that doctors have a kind of technical rather than pastoral status for many of the young people. While a couple of the study participants had family GPs who they saw as central to both their own and their family's health decision-making, for many of the young people, doctors were perceived instead as useful strategic resources for managing their personal health.

While doctors tended to be their preferred source of medical information, as previously noted, many of the young people interviewed also accessed health information on the internet. For example, for the interviewees from the Citymission in particular, web-based health information on the side-effects of prescription medications was seen as a way of accessing more information than they might have got from their doctor. Two of the girls from the Citymission also talked of using online health information as a way of empowering themselves when dealing with their medical practitioners.

While most of the young people had looked up health information on the web, however, many were wary of much of the information available because it was seen as a medium where 'j ust anyone' could put up their opinions. While a couple of the young people expressed an interest in being able to access other people's accounts of their experiences with health and illness, most of the study participants expressed a preference for expert rather than lay forms of medical knowledge. The following comment was typical:

I think you have to be careful 'cos anyone can write stuff and put it on the internet and it'll come up in a search engine. So we would have to be careful what we read and what we take to heart and follow. (Rachel, 21, media studies student) Supporting Beck's argument that scientific expertise has become 468 essential to daily life at the same time as it is being relatively demystified, most of the young people in this study were active consumers of health information who, by and large, exhibited a degree of scepticism about the source and validity of this information, particularly in relation to the internet. However, Beck's claim that 'the power gradient' between 'modernity and tradition, experts and lay people' (1992: 165) is flattening out under reflexive modernity seems more problematic. For the most part, the participants expressed a strong preference for biomedical rather than alternative or lay forms of knowledge. In relation to choice of health practitioners, for example, surprisingly few of the participants had been to a 'natural' or 'alternative' therapist, with many of the young people expressing distrust in the efficacy of non-western medical approaches.

As previously noted, when asked about the credibility of health material on the web, most of the young people expressed a strong preference for, and trust in, expert rather than lay forms of knowledge. This perspective is reflected in much of the media coverage of the issue of online health information. Rather than embracing the web's potential to 'democratize' knowledge, newspaper coverage has tended to adopt a tone of panic in relation to lay people (or 'cyberchondriacs' as they were referred to in an article in the Independen4 Bee, 2004) accessing health information via the web. Often, concern is raised about the lack of regulation of the material available on the internet and the idea that people might be seeking medical information from the internet rather than going straight to their doctor.

In the context of this ongoing faith in biomedical expertise, Beck's claim that in reflexive modernity '[s]cience becomes indispensable and at the same time devoid of its original validity claims' (1992: 165) suggests an overreading of the public 'crisis' of science and rationality. Instead, the prevailing faith in biomedicine expressed by most of the young people in this study and their reliance on scientific modes of expertise suggests both an extension of scientific rationality into everyday life and a continued belief in its core principles. As Anthony Elliott succinctly puts it: 'the idea of "risk society" is thus bound up with the development of instrumental rational control, which the process of modernization promotes in all spheres of life' (2002: 295). However, as will be discussed in the next section, while most of the young people exhibited a concern with accessing health information and expertise as a means of managing their health, the participants did not all access the same kinds of expertise, neither did they make use of medical and health systems and sources of information in the same way. Arguably, this suggests that the pluralization of knowledge and expertise in the risk society involves not so much a relativization of rationality and thereby a weakening of its core claims, but instead the emergence of multiple rationalities attuned to different aspects of everyday life. As Simon Cottle points out, it is also important to recognize here the complex interchange between expert, scientific knowledge and 'cultural 469 and hermeneutic' forms of knowledge or 'social rationalities' (1998: 14-15); a dimension which, he points out, is underplayed in Beck's work. Thus, while the young people in this study generally professed a preference for 'scientific' forms of medical knowledge, the types of medical and health information they defined as fitting into the category of scientific rationality differed considerably depending on individual conceptions of what constitutes a 'health issue'. Furthermore, how they applied that knowledge in their daily lives -that is, what they considered to be a 'rational' or strategic approach to their own health care -was framed by rather different sets of cultural competencies, values or forms of what could be termed 'health habitus'. In other words, the young people exhibited more than one mode of rationality or reflexivity in relation to perceived imperatives to self-care and these modes tended to be broadly related to socio-economic (and gendered) forms of identity.' Specifying the reflexive health consumer Whether obtaining information from the internet or accessing it directly from a doctor, it could be said that for the most part the participants ex- hibited a remarkably reflexive approach to medical and health expertise, drawing strategically upon those forms of knowledge and professional help that were seen as relevant to, and useful for, their particular personal needs. As Frank, a 22-year-old from the Citymission commented in relation to searching for the latest information on treatments for hepatitis C: there's too much broad-ranging information for hep[atitis] C and it's too con- troversial .. you can read through an article on one website and then go to another website and it'll say the entirely opposite . . . I just go through and read things up and think, OK, this has got this and this from here and there, and this one's got some references to this site ... Comparing information and trials and stuff like that.

While Frank was one of the more enthusiastic web users in the study, the young people interviewed generally saw themselves as capable of weighing up and critically assessing different forms of medical and health information. At first glance, there was a sense that these young people felt they had a degree of agency in managing their own health and that they conceived of their bodies and themselves as 'projects' to be managed. A crucial aspect of conceiving one's life in terms of a 'reflexive biography', however, is the production and maintenance of oneself as a responsible healthy citizen. One of the central issues for examination here was the way in which the young people were aware of, and the degree to which they measured themselves against, a broader public ideal of the healthy reflexive citizen. Thus, in addition to asking the participants about their use of health information, they were asked what it means to be healthy today, what their regimes of health and bodily maintenance and self- 470 management entailed, whether they were aware of broader community imperatives around public and personal health maintenance and how this awareness had an impact on their own approaches to health.

In the discussion with the young people across both groups, many exhibited a strong awareness of discourses of health promotion and selfmanagement, linking their own personal health to broader community health issues such as the increasing rates of obesity in Australia (a topic that had received a large amount of recent media coverage). There was a pervasive sense of measuring oneself against a healthy ideal, to which many of the young people saw themselves as not matching up. When asked if she was healthy, Joanna, a 19-year-old female science student who described herself as looking up information on healthy eating and exercise on the internet once a week, reading regularly about health issues in magazines and newspapers and as a regular taker of vitamins, said: 'Um, I don't think I'm healthy, Pm not sure but I don't think Pm healthy.. . Maybe I may lack some nutrition ... my nutrition may be not balanced.'

In assessing the degree to which they measured up to more idealized conceptions of the 'healthy subject', it was here that clear distinctions started to form between the two groups of young people in relation to their values and perceptions of health norms and what they considered to be 'rational' health behaviour. Like Joanna, most of the university students talked about health maintenance in terms of monitoring their exercise regimes and dietary intake. Keeping slim and fit was not merely seen in terms of body image -although that was a major driver -it was also seen as an investment in one's health biography as this comment from Diane, a, 20-year-old arts student, illustrates:

I think it's important to eat well and exercise ... I've got a friend who doesn't do anything, doesn't do exercise. She's not overweight or anything so it's not a big issue now, but I was reading in a magazine or a newspaper article or something that not doing exercise can equate to the same as having cancer in terms of how bad it is for your body.

The youth at the Citymission also were generally conscious of public discourses around health maintenance and preventative health, and often talked of the problems associated with junk food and the need to keep fit. However, when questioned more closely about what they defined as a healthy diet or what it means to be 'fit', their constructions of a healthy lifestyle often clashed with more normative community ideals of reflexive risk minimization. For example, many described themselves as being 'fit and healthy' at the same time as they admitted to being regular smokers (one young woman who was an overweight smoker described herself as a 'health freak').

In a discussion of risk and reflexivity, Giddens (I 9 19) argues that people who indulge in risky behaviours despite knowing the risks often are living out the notion of 'lifestyle' as a package of risks. For these people, risky behaviour is tolerable within an overall lifestyle choice; according 471

to Giddens, such risk behaviour is underpinned by a reflexive awareness that they are refusing to adapt to the risk-reduction lifestyle. However, such a construction of reflexivity and risk tends to assume that individuals are fully conscious and in control of their decision-making processes; reflexivity here is seen as a process of considered reflection where an array of life choices are weighed up against each other. Furthermore, both

Giddens' and Beck's model of reflexivity assumes that risks are external and objective rather than being individually or culturally defined or influenced by social context. The findings in this study suggest that while many of the young people constructed their health biographies according to a language of lifestyle and self-care, for many of the Citymission youth there was often a lack of fit between these public discourses of autonomy and choice and their cultural values and life circumstances. These narratives of responsible, healthy selfhood often sat rather uncomfortably with life narratives that were marked by a sense of unmanageable risk and lack of control over both oneself and one's environment. A classic example came from Joe, an 18-year-old at the Citymission who had developed an eating disorder brought on by the stress of living in a very chaotic home situation. In describing his problems with eating, Joe tended to use the language of self-actualization both to narrativize and take control of his situation:

After my 17th birthday, I mean only a year and a bit ago, I sat down and thought to myself: this isn't going to be easy, but I have to do something. I'm not happy with my . . . emotional or physical self, I've got to do something. So I did a chart: this is what I eat, this is what I don't eat, this is how much I eat.

For Joe, attempting to frame himself within the model of the self- monitoring healthy subject seemed to offer a way of managing the chaos of his life. However, in reality, Joe found himself increasingly losing control over his weight as he oscillated between bouts of overeating and periods of anorexia. Rather than empowering him to deal with a rather dire social situation, the ideal of reflexive identity contributed to an inter- nalization of his broader social and family problems, here manifested as a pathological obsession with food intake. When translated into the individualized, psychologized terms of reflexivity, Joe is cast as a failed reflexive agent. Here we see the gap between the life experiences of the middle-class educated subject -the specific form of habitus privileged in the idealized model of reflexive individualization -and those of other social groups for whom the 'choices' associated with the notion of 'reflexivity' are framed by a rather different set of social, cultural and material contexts and constraints.

This sense of the way in which different life experiences and forms of health habitus produce distinct modes of reflexivity was highlighted 472 particularly by the manner in which the participants discussed their management of risk. While most participants discussed the need to manage external health risks, a sense of risk and insecurity around personal health was particularly marked among the young people from the Citymission. The university students at times discussed potential risks to their health. However, they framed these largely in terms of preventable factors in- ternal to their own lifestyles, e.g. diet and exercise. Thus while they went to doctors when they were sick, they talked about health largely in preventive non-medical terms, as something intrinsic to their broader lifestyles and therefore primarily self-managed. A good example of this was Derek, a 21-year-old education student, who described how he used the web to access the exercise regime of his favourite Australian Rules football team:

Well, actually [my concept of health] .. it's more again about fitness. I've looked up ... I follow Essendon in the footy and I looked up their website and they actually put up, their fitness coach puts up their pre-season, everything that they do. So I've actually printed that out to sort of look at it and try to do some of that ... it was interesting to know the amount of stuff they do but also see how much I could do.

By contrast, the young people from the Citymission spoke of risk in more externalized terms; the fear of diseases, particularly infectious diseases such as hepatitis C, the effects of drug use and developing diseases that were in the family' such as diabetes, featured strongly in their health narratives. For example, this quote from Jane, a 17-year-old, reflects a health habitus oriented towards potential disease risk: Yeah, I always use the internet 'cos, like, I've lost a few of my mates . . . like a lot of my mates did stupid things and ended up getting ... unwanted things.

Like one of my mates ended up with AIDS and died ... a few of my mates also have hep[atitis] B, so we were, like, curious, so we hopped on the net on the library and looked up all stuff on that and found out a lot of stuff 'cos the doctor wouldn't explain to us.

The largely medical focus of their health concerns means that attempts to 'take control' of one's health tend to translate into a heavy reliance on doctors and other experts and support provided through state institu- tions. Paul, a 21-year-old at the Citymission, described his regime of bodily maintenance as follows:

I go for check-ups every few months ... Just make sure everything's all right ... I generally go to the hospital, wait for a few hours . . . Just standard blood tests, skin tests, dental check-ups . . . should I need it.

Another example of this tendency to perceive (and experience) risk in external terms was the fact that, even though all of the Citymission young people were smokers (compared to none of the university students), smoking was never discussed as a health risk. While they were aware of anti- smoking health promotion discourse, most of the Citymission interviewees 473 seemed to see their own smoking as an inevitable part of life rather than as something that could or should be managed or controlled.

This mode of health self-management is certainly very different from that of the middle-class university student proactively monitoring their diet and exercise regime. Both of course can be described as moments of reflexive individualization, but here we see a classic example of the way in which this umbrella term tends to gloss over the ongoing contribution played by social identity in framing the boundaries of any one individual's reflexive biography. For example, the mode of reflexivity exhibited by the Citymission youth was one marked by a strong sense of uncontrollable external threats combined with a certain degree of fatalism and/or habitu- ation in relation to issues such as smoking and drug use. In contrast, the university students experienced themselves by and large as being 'in control' of both their health and their broader life biographies. Seldom referring to external risks, they largely saw health reflexivity in terms of individual self-management -although it should be noted that, in some cases, this translated into an element of anxiety that they might fail to match up to broader health ideals, while for others in the group, self-care was seen as an issue that could be put on hold for now and managed at some later date when they were older and it became more of a concern. In all, these findings both support and greatly complicate Beck's claims that social life today is driven by processes of reflexive individualization where 'the standard biography becomes a chosen biography or "do-ityourself biography"' (1994: 15). Certainly, in relation to medical and health expertise, whether accessed via a doctor or the internet, the participants tended to use expert forms of knowledge in a pragmatic and strategic manner. This strategic approach to expertise fitted in with a broader conception of health and health maintenance as an issue to be managed by the individual rather than the broader community. Whether framed in terms of exercise and nutrition or the management or prevention of par- ticular diseases, on the surface these young people's reflexive awareness and continual self-monitoring of potential health risks seemed to affirm Beck's depiction of today's society as a world of calculable risks and self- managed biographies.

However, where the findings begin to complicate this picture is in point- ing to the ways in which people's actual material experiences of risk and reflexivity as well as their perceptions and practices of self-management are often markedly different. This article will conclude with a discussion of the limitations of Beck's conception of social identity as post-traditional and the need to link the notion of reflexivity more strongly to questions of social position and cultural value.

Conclusion: habitus and reflexivity

an essentially rational, calculative self (Petersen and Bunton, 1997). And certainly, Beck (in a book on individualization co-written with Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim) sums up the new post-traditional social order as a place where '[i]ndividuals become actors, builders, jugglers, stage managers of their own biographies and identities and also of their social links and networks' (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002: 23). In other words, in contrast to the fragmented subject of postmodernity, the reflexive self aims to map out a coherent consistent narrative of identity through constantly weighing up and assessing one's lifestyle choices. Such a construction of the self does seem to support a rather instrumentalist and voluntarist model of social identity. However, while it is true that Beck's work often lapses into a kind of instrumental-rationalist mode, it is important to acknowledge his consistent attempts to counter these tendencies. Thus, for example, in his essay in Reflexive Modernization, Beck is at pains to point out that the process of individualization is not free-floating, cut away from its ties to the social, rather it represents a new form of sociality that is not voluntarist but socially prescribed and institutionalized. As he neatly sums it up, '[i]ndividualization is a compulsion' (Beck, 1994: 14).

As has been emphasized in this article, however, a crucial (but less examined) problem with Beck's work is its tendency to universalize the experience of one particular mode of reflexive individualization. While reflexive modernization may be marked by a compulsion to map out one's path as an autonomous individual, surely (as the findings here would suggest) such forces are experienced unevenly and responded to in very different ways across social space. The question becomes one of whose kind of experience of the social world is best captured by the notion of the re- flexive subject, as it is played out in Beck's work. In an interview published in 2001, Beck was asked to comment on the relevance of 'cosmopolitanism' to sociology today. Noting the rise of globalization and the need for soci- ology to shift its focus away from the nation-state, he remarked rather glibly that '[p]eople now work internationally, they love internationally, they marry internationally, they bring up children internationally' (Boyne and Beck, 2001: 47). The flexible, mobile cosmopolitan subject assumed here is the same reflexive subject around which much of Beck's work on risk and reflexivity tends to revolve -that is, a rather privileged one. Beck's throwaway line marks a broader tendency in his work to generalize the experiences of this group of bourgeois cosmopolitans. This is not to suggest that Beck's writings are devoid of any discussions of issues of social inequality. As he notes in relation to reflexive individu- alization, '[i]ndividualization has never meant the dissolution of social inequality, but so far always its intensfication' (Beck, 1998: 35; emphasis in original). Such statements indicate a degree of recognition by Beck that, even in what he sees as a 'post-class' setting, the notion of reflexive indi- vidualization does need to be grounded in an analysis of social hierarchy and power. However, Beck does not carry these insights through into the 475 totality of his work in any systematic way. Instead, the default mode of his work is to talk about risk and reflexivity in a rather undifferentiated fashion. All of this is not to discount his useful thesis concerning the centrality of reflexive individualization, but rather to suggest that his picture of social identity today is a profoundly partial one. A systematic reworking of Beck's account to address questions of power and domination is beyond the scope of this article. However, one way in which it has tried to suggest that Beck's account might be usefully supplemented and strengthened is through combining his notion of reflexive individualization with Bourdieu's concept of habitus.

Scott Lash has pointed already to the utility of Bourdieu's reflexive sociology for conceptualizing the relationship between class and what he terms the 'aesthetic' or cultural aspect of reflexivity. In his essay in Reflexive Modernization on 'Reflexivity and its Doubles', Lash (1994) argues that what tends to be left out of discussions of reflexive modernization is the role played by everyday or ordinary culture. He contends that while class and community may be ascribed no longer in a structural sense, they continue to shape social identity through shared sets of cultural values. Thus the use of the term 'health habitus' in this article has represented an attempt to foreground the continuing role played by issues of cultural value and social hierarchy in shaping experiences of embodied, reflexive selfhood. This translates into internalized socio-economic differences in both health perceptions and practices as well as different levels of cultural capital or 'competence in cultural codes' (Frow, 1995: 31), in terms of matching up to the ideal of the healthy self-managing citizen.

A model of reflexivity grounded in the notion of habitus captures the way in which individual experiences of health and illness are structured by an individual's life biography, material circumstances, cultural values, habits and practices as well as by broader institutional and social contexts. Issues of power and domination enter the picture through the ways in which certain forms of cultural capital are valued over others in health discourse. As previously noted, for example, in the realm of public health there has been a shift towards privileging middle-class cultural values of individualism and rationality as a kind of normative ideal towards which we should all strive. As Skeggs (2005) has argued, the working classes face the double bind of being constructed as incapable of 'playing the game' while their responses to their own material experiences often are dismissed or seen as pathological. However, the young people from the Citymission (most of whom could be characterized as members of a working class or underclass) demonstrated modes of reflexivity that both negotiated and challenged middle-class norms. That is, they showed an ability to both play the game (albeit with limited resources) and demonstrated that there were other games with other rules. Managing health, for example, was often as much about community support and family networks as it was 476 about more individualized models of self-care. This is not to romanticize the experiences of a group of young people who were clearly disadvantaged at a number of levels, but to foreground the limitations of the narrow model of reflexivity circulating within Beck's work and within much reflexivity discourse.

To sum up, Beck's (2002) argument that sociology must stop holding onto 'zombie categories' such as class is fundamentally flawed in its failure to recognize that while social identity today is strongly marked by dis- courses of individualization, class and other social differences continue to structure people's experiences within reflexive modernity in elemental ways. Indeed, as individuals experience growing pressure to transform themselves into entrepreneurial, DIY subjects, the links between the possession of certain forms of socially-valued cultural capital and social hierarchy are heightened rather than diminished. Beck's dismissal of class as an organizing principle is not only premature but demonstrates a failure to recognize his own role in legitimating a specific set of middle- class experiences as somehow broadly representative of the community at large. In the process he fails to identify the degree to which his own account of reflexive individualization dovetails with neo-liberal discourses of individual self-management and empowerment; discourses that work to efface ongoing systematic inequalities in the name of competitive indi- vidualism. While Beck's risk paradigm is surely crucial in that it points to the growing centrality of the role of individualization today in processes of governmentality, without a fundamental analysis of power and social inequality in the global risk society, the reflexive modernization thesis is incomplete both as a piece of descriptive political sociology and as 'a new and optimistic model of our times ' (1999: 152).

3. The concept of risk in particular has come to play an important role in both academic debates within health sociology and the formulation of health promotion and public health policy strategies.

4. While there were, for the most part, clear distinctions between the socio- economic status and education levels of the youths in the two groups, obviously it would be problematic to read these two groups as mirroring some simple middle/working class dichotomy. My use of the term 'social location' here is less concerned with a rigid notion of 'class belonging' than with capturing a broader sense of social identity as relational and contested and as encompassing a range of forms of social identity. Thus, although this article focuses largely on the way in which reflexivity is framed by questions of socioeconomic background, more broadly in the study, habitus is seen as being articulated not only to 'class' but also to gender and cultural background. 5. I found that gender played a significant role in shaping the health habitus of these young people. However, due to space limitations, the primary focus in this article is on social position as it relates to class (while recognizing as a matter of course the complex ways in which class experience is articulated to gender).

It has been suggested that part of the problem with Beck's model of re-

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Rachel Hughes, Fran Martin, Lisa Palmer, Rachel Weaver and the two anonymous reviewers for their feedback on this article. The research

for this article was undertaken while the author was based at the Centre for Health and Society, University of Melbourne. Notes 1. Beck's account of risk has struck a chord not only with academics working across a large range of disciplines (with risk and its various social and cultural manifestations becoming a major field of research in its own right) but also with a broader public that includes policymakers (Alexander, 1996). 2. It should be noted here that Beck's writings on risk and reflexivity have developed in concert with the work of other theorists of reflexive modernization, particularly Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash. While the scope of this article does not allow me to discuss the work of either theorist in any great depth, it is important to acknowledge the significant contribution that both writers have made to the broader debates on risk, reflexivity and post-traditionalism.


The feeling of proximity to interaction and altercation sits appropriately with the policeman's view from the street. Yet, if in method Sullivan is a latter-day Mayhew combining the skills of ethnographer, historian and sketch-artisthis profession rendering him less of an outsider than the fiuneur -his perspective is necessarily partial. While we might expect realist imagery to include domestic interiors, his is the vantage point of the beat -plenty of public house brawls, but no homely scenes in private parlours. This only emphasizes the maleness of his gaze, where 'women appear as prostitutes or wives or girlfriends or waitresses' (p. 17). Elsewhere, the very absence from his oeuvre of key contemporary concerns such as crace mixing' indicate a wilful, imaginary resolution (a la Macheray) of real social conflict. His storytelling rescues vanishing traces of memory, but selectively rather than collectively.

Following Barthes, Jordan recounts the mixed emotional response conjured up by photographs that evoke both recognition and loss. He celebrates a positive memorializing of the way it was, while lamenting its erasure by 'a "concrete jungle" of council houses, maisonettes and tower blocks' (p. 12). Similarly, the final image in Tramp Steamers shows seamen on shore leave gazing at high-rise flats. The title of Sullivan's painting is 'Where's Tiger Bay Gone, Shipmates?', and the last lines of Harry Cooke's accompanying poem: 'Nostalgia grows as night follows day,/for the vanished mystique that was old Tiger Bay.' The spectre of painters, poets and cultural theorists stepping into the heritage trap must haunt those living and working in today's mean streets, although the message (should it be heard) is that they have much to learn, if less to gain, from the past. Unlike studies of urban communities in transition, some of which employ photographs extensively (Foster, 1999), Jordan embraces the impulse of both Hardy and Sullivan to give people back their history. Yet he is right to stress the difficulty of getting at where that history might lie, beyond the vivid but fictional appeal of realism. To paraphrase, Raymond Williams, a Welshman with a lively interest in these matters, the problem of knowable communities is to a degree that of language; and Butetown is dense with dialects: Arabic, Somali, West African, West Indian, Greek, Welsh, English, Marxist, humanist, post-structuralist and The French gourmand Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin claimed in 1825 that 'the destiny of nations depends on how they nourish themselves'.

Nearly two centuries later, the question one might ask is: what will be the destiny of a nation that fails to 'nourish' itself at all? What happens to a people who overwhelmingly ingest foods of minimal nutritious value? What is to be the fate of a nation that thinks nothing of nourishing its young by providing access to a steady stream of carbonated beverages? What happens in a nation where huge food conglomerates control the very definition of 'nourish' and 'health'?

These are the questions at the heart of Marion Nestle's chilling study of American food culture, Food Politics, recently released in paperback.

Nestle, an American food industry 'insider' (having worked for 25 years as a nutrition educator and employee of the Public Health Service) exposes the ways 'in which food companies use the political processes -entirely conventional and always legal -to obtain government and professional support for the sales of their products' (p. 1). Nestle demonstrates that these products and the companies that produce, market and distribute them play a key role in promoting a diet that leads to an increasingly overfed and yet poorly nourished American public. What will be the destiny of the American 'Fast Food Nation' where stockholders' profits trump public health concerns? Nestle's book offers a richly detailed glimpse at the contemporary American political scene where US companies and major food lobbying groups, such as the National Cattlemen's Association, oppose even the most innocuous recommendations on diet. This is because dietary advice could affect sales. Historically, the American food industry has suffered from oversupply. The cost of food is low. Profits depend upon stimulating demandgetting people to eat more -in a nation where there are more than enough calories for the population. Quantity is one way to stimulate profits; creating 'quality' techno-foods (whose benefits are highly suspect) that command high prices from health-conscious Americans is another. Anyone with even a superficial exposure to American culture can attest to the ubiquitous presence of massive quantities of foods and beverages with little nutritional value and the plethora of techno-foods -low-fat cookies, zinc-fortified cereals, vitamin-supplemented candy -making claims to improve health. Nestle reveals that this state of affairs is by design.

Food Politics chronicles a number of techniques used by the food industry to promote an 'eat more' culture. One obvious example of this promotion 522 is the ballooning of package and restaurant serving sizes. One 'large' soft drink in a US cinema, for example, can contain up to 800 calories if not diluted with ice (just a few hundred calories short of the total recommended calorie intake by an adult female). This large portion commands a slightly higher price from consumers who are attracted to the idea that they are getting a 'better buy'. The gargantuan 'super size' costs the industry very little while the increased price is pure profit. As Americans eat more ready-to-serve food and meals outside of the home, these serving sizes have had a dramatic effect on the American waistline.

The 'eat more' tactics that Nestle chronicles are often subtle, designed to divert criticism and convince consumers that the food industry's products are healthy or, at worst, harmless. One disturbing example of the 'eat more' tactic involves the saturation of American public schools with soft-drink vending machines under the guise of providing students with real-world choices and sharing profits with schools. Cash-strapped state schools sign exclusive 'pouring rights' contracts with large soft drink providers in exchange for funds to purchase much-needed equipment (although the preference for purchasing athletic scoreboards brings into question the 'needs' of state schools). Politicians and corporate chief executives tout these contracts as signs of successful cooperation between the private and public sectors in modern America. The financial benefits to state schools, as Nestle demonstrates, are questionable; the financial benefits to the food industry are beyond doubt. Corporate America gains from these contracts not only profit but also an exclusive opportunity to expand its base of consumers by targeting young people. Promoting soft drinks in schools as well as other foods of poor nutritional quality erodes children's health and corrupts the American educational process. Yet, as other chapters in Nestle's book reveal, food companies do not have to wait until children reach state schools to begin target marketing. Nestle demonstrates that the food industry can reach even younger children in developed countries through television and infants in developing countries through public relations campaigns that promote formula feeding as preferable over breast milk.

Nestle argues that the nutrition advice from corporate America promotes an 'eat more' approach and labels all foods-no matter how laden with sugar, salt and fat -as part of a 'healthy diet'. She also shows how scientists and nutrition experts not on the corporate payroll have proven that some foods are better for health than others and that eating less in modern America is necessary. Despite the current mantra of deregulation and consumer 'choice', governments, she argues, do have an interest in how their people are fed. However, the problem for American consumers is that federal agencies and officials, not to mention American nutrition experts, have become so co-opted by commercial interests that US consumers can no longer rely on them to provide obj ective nutritional guidelines. Elected officials prove themselves more willing to subsidize than regulate the food industry. And Americans pay the price.

  Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and HeaIth. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002. xii + 457 pp. ISBN 0-520-22465-5 (hbk) $29.95; ISBN 0-520-24067-7 (pbk) $15.95 DOI: 10.1 177/1367549406069119


Erin Bell

Televising history

The past(s) on the small screen

medium's inability to do 'proper' history. For example, the historian Jeremy Black's recent book Using History (2005), on the use of the past outside the academy, provides an extremely interesting and nuanced analysis of the 'private sector' of filmmakers and history TV programming alongside museums and popular history books. However, his comments often relate to the extent to which such representations are 'ahistorical' and rely greatly upon fictionalized or otherwise misrepresented individuals, groups or encounters. Perhaps, then, this reflects the 20th-century Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm's concern that the historian's role as 'myth-slayer' should not be compromised by what Richard Johnson describes as 'the postmodern designation of History as "fiction"' (Black, 2005: 29; Hobsbawm cited in Johnson, 2001: 28 1). EDITOR

XS INTRODUCrION

A recent edited collection which goes beyond debates about 'good' and 'bad' TV history is Graham Roberts' and Philip M. Taylor's The Hitorian, Television and Television History (2001) which is described as part of a 'multi-disciplinary historical study of television' (Roberts, 2001: 2). However, the contributions to the volume were written mainly by historians and media producers, resulting in an emphasis on television production and evaluation of individual programmes. Similarly, David Cannadine's History and the Media (2004) includes contributors involved in the industry, whether from media production or history. Only a tiny proportion of the contributions to either book come from scholars representing other disciplines, such as film studies, television studies and cultural studies, or from other 'critical outsiders'. Some of these alternative viewpoints are represented in this special issue, allowing consideration of the role of television in producing and disseminating knowledge about the past. In addition, several recent works have discussed the representation of the past outside the academy alongside other historiographical developments. These include the Lambert and Schofield collection Making History ( 2004), in which the (historian) editors divide their colleagues into those who have been prepared to work with filmmakers, and those not inclined to do so, suggesting that these are the only factors determining which historians, and which histories, appear on screen. More recently still, the presenter/historian Tristram Hunt has suggested that social historians should marshal public interest in the past, using 'engaging and relevant formats' such as television, which again infers straightforward access to the television screen (Hunt, 2006: 844)> This issue suggests some alternative interpretations.

The edited collection Television Histories: Shaping Collective Memory in the MediaAge by Gary R. Edgerton and Peter C. Rollins, also published in 2001, does draw its contributors from history, film, communication and television studies as well as media practitioners. The goal of the collection is 'to better understand television as a popular art form, an evolving tech- nology, a business and industry, and a social force of international pro- portions' (Edgerton, 2001: 10). However, with few exceptions, the focus is on the US, which this issue aims to balance by considering contemporary television programming in Europe and the role played by TV in creating and maintaining collective memory and identity. The same can also be said of the 'Television as Historian' special issues of the US-based journal Film and History, published in 2000, which include scholars from a range of disciplines, but almost all are based in North America and their contributions focus almost entirely upon US programming.

Despite these absences from much published material, it has become apparent that an international and interdisciplinary field of study into history on television is emerging, especially in Europe. As Richard Johnson commented when considering what cultural studies might 6 want from history, different disciplines 'come to share a cultural agenda, but pursue it in their own ways' (2001: 278). Thus it seems particularly appropriate that a cultural studies journal should publish the work of scholars analysing history on TV from a range of disciplinary perspectives including history in a period when, as Johnson suggests, there is 'increasing practical rapprochement between history and cultural studies' (2001: 278).? Furthermore, many of those working in the field are new scholars, and this too is reflected in this issue which, refreshingly, has allowed us to publish the work of recent doctoral graduates alongside that of eminent scholars. Through an analysis of television, form, aesthetics and production, questions of memory, national and public commemoration and identity, such scholars bring new perspectives to television studies from a range of fields, opening new avenues and methods of research into television.

Johnson asserts that 'all disciplinary specialisms include knowledges and perspectives that ought to be available outside the narrower band of practitioners' (2001: 278), and individual specialisms also benefit from external perspectives. The range of scholars contributing to this collection allows comparison of the use of the past on television to depict national identity across several European nations. Some of the articles were given originally as conference papers at the 'Televising History: the Past(s) on the Small Screen' symposium held in July 2005 at the University of Lincoln. This interdisciplinary and inter- national conference, part of the University of Lincoln's 'Televising History' project, founded in 2004 by Ann Gray and funded from 2006 to 2010 by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, examines in various ways the production and consumption of history on television, including the relationship between this form of public history and academic history, and the role of the 'professional' historian and of producer/directors as mediators of historical material and interpretation. The symposium allowed scholars from a range of backgrounds and nationalities to discuss the representation and implications of history on TV in their respective countries. Key themes which emerged, and which are also apparent in the articles published in this issue, include national and regional identity, narrative and national memory. The development of scholarship around narrative forms an interest- ing parallel to scholarship on TV history. Although, as Margaret Somers points out, in the 1960s and 1970s many historians rejected narrative as a representational form, and many continue to criticize television history programmes for what they perceive to be an over-reliance on narrative rather than social process,4 scholars in other disciplines sought to reconfigure the concept in radical ways, allowing it to be used to understand the social world (Somers, 1994). As with TV history scholarship, it blossomed in the late 1970s and the work of eminent scholars such as the historian Hayden White, as well as that of others influential in the field of cultural studies, spans both fields. In 1981, White's work on narrativity in the representation of reality was published in the collection On Narrative alongside that of Paul Ticoeur and Jacques Derrida (Mitchell, 1981).)

His discussion of the 'Modernist Event' and its particular challenges to traditional historiographic narrative was included later in the Sobchack collection The Persistence of History (1996b; see White, 1996). Clearly, narrative theory has benefited greatly from the influence of historians, philosophers and film theorists, among others, and itself has influenced scholars in a range of fields. As the programmes discussed by contributors to this issue tend to follow narratives around identity and memory, White's work, among others, has enabled contributors (although perhaps not all commentators) to think of historiography, whether traditional or tele- visual, as being 'about arranging and telling stories, not about delivering obj ective truth', closely associated with 'the formal pathway by which the historian's or author's agency, including political and moral values, enter the narrative' (Sobchack, 1996a: 4; Johnson, 2001: 281).

However, it is important to remember that social narratives, which may include television history programmes, cannot be made at will. As Somers suggests, 'there is only a limited repertoire of available representations and stories'. Perhaps even more significantly for this collection of articles, the kinds of narratives that predominate are 'contested politically and will depend in large part on the distribution of power'. The extent of the possible repertoire available to an individual or group 'is always historically and culturally specific'. Female subjectivity and social class are particularly 'limited' narratives in this respect (Somers, 1994: 629-30). The research conducted by Ann Gray and myself, discussed in this issue, has suggested that this can mean that female historians are less likely to feel that they are being treated fairly by programme makers; it may also mean that women are under-represented as national storytellers, as black and Asian scholars may be also.

On a national level, both James Chapman's and Tobias Ebbrecht's articles consider the stories and memories in a nation's repertoire, told as part of a developing genre in history programming, the drama-documentary. Ebbrecht, writing from a German perspective, considers the VE Day 60th anniversary in Germany and elsewhere, with its 'ensemble of social activities that re-dramatized the historic event', describing this as 'historical event television'. He suggests that televised accounts have become part of collective memory, and questions the ethical and political implications of the way that such stories and histories have changed over time, and the ways in which, for example, footage has been used seamlessly alongside dramatic reconstructions. Asking what sort of idea of Nazi Germany is presented to the German television audience, he cites Anton Kaes' work to consider how this TV history and its audience relates to a changing German collective memory.' Chapman, too, notes the extent to which history programmes offer a revisionist perspective on the British historical experience of the 8 Second World War, and suggests that the ideological and commercial needs of co-production partners 'determine to some extent the content and nature of the final product'. Similarly, he sees some programmes as 'impos[ing], through the didactic method of a voiceover commentary, a preferred meaning onto the events', possibly reflecting public opinion of recent political events in the UK and US. Evidently, the narrative available is also limited to the intentions of programme makers.

Although dealing with representations of different historical periods, and writing from the perspectives of different nations, both Sonja de Leeuw and Emma Hanna consider issues of representation, memory and national identity in their contributions. Addressing the representation of key aspects of Dutch history during the Second World War, de Leeuw considers the ways in which documentary film as a site of memory has constructed the memory of the Shoah in the Netherlands 'by rewriting history through representations' and in so doing has reshaped collective memory. She notes that since the late iPSOs there has been 'a renewed interest in telling stories about the past and the Shoah in particular'. By analysing the narrative strategies of several Dutch documentary films produced between the late 1 98Os and late 1 990s which refer to the Shoah, de Leeuw contends that this provides an opportunity to question 'representational strategies', particularly historical representation, while also demonstrating the role of the Shoah in shaping collective, national memory and history, over time. Hanna also considers collective and national memory in her analysis of the impact of the first modern documentary series about 1914-18, The Great TWar (1964). Considering how British television has remembered the First World War, and how its audience responded to this remembrance, she asserts that although much research has focused on the study of commemorative sites and rituals, the memory of both world wars has occupied a central position in television. By considering a television programme first broadcast more than 40 years ago to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the start of the Great War, she provides an extremely useful analysis, contrasting the motivations and responses of programme makers and audiences with their present-day counterparts, a subject also discussed by Ebbrecht and Chapman.

Like Hanna, Alexander Dhoest's contribution allows comparison of Flemish television programmes made in the 1950s and 1960s with those of later periods. He considers the response of the audience to the broadcast material. While Hanrna uses archived letters from the 1960s, Dhoest relies upon the memories of the audience. His is also the only article to consider solely television drama but despite the difference in genre, the issue of identity, both national and regional, is again apparent. Noting the com mon assumption that European television fiction is connected strongly to national identities, he suggests that, instead, television fiction may be seen to produce images of an imagined national community. Seeking to locate this in viewing processes, Dhoest asks whether viewers use domestic drama to reflect on or form a (sub)national identity, and if TV images form or confirm cultural self-images. Using oral history research with audience members, he seeks to analyse the discursive creation of memories and communities both within and outside the interviews, and asserts that although some critics have viewed such historical dramas as highly selective, demonstrating the values of the social elite, such reception research may offer insights into the actual meanings of this kind of drama for 'ordinary' viewers, whose perception of it may differ greatly. However, although viewers may be more than capable of interpreting what they see to fit their own worldview, it may still be the case that what appears on screen in the first place is limited by a number of possible factors: technological, financial and cultural. In our contribution about British TV history, Ann Gray and I consider such limitations, as aside from the articles published here, little is known about the processes whereby representations of the past are mediated, shaped and transformed through television, also raising pertinent questions about how narratives about national and other pasts are constructed, distributed and marketed. Using oral history techniques, we sought to gain insights from historians involved in history programming to elucidate the ways in which such scholars interpret their various experiences. From this rich seam of information we focused on two themes: the interviewees' own representation on camera as historians, and their views on the style and modes of address of TV historian presenters. This is analysed with reference to notions of charismatic television personalities and dominant narrative structures, and we suggest that these modes of address and televisual forms offer the viewer particular relationships to knowledge and ways of knowing.

The issue is concluded by Professor John Corner, who acted as keynote speaker at the July 2005 symposium and whose suggestions and insights were invaluable to all who attended. Hermes, Joanne Hollows, Richard Kilborn, Juliette Pattinson, Michael Pickering and Brian Winston, and also that of the editors of the journal, particularly Ann Gray, who originated the idea of a Televising History' symposium, and provided a great deal of support and advice while compiling this special issue. Notes 1. See Knopp and Quandt (1988), which includes contributions by British and French scholars including the TV historian David Starkey, and the Reimers and Friedrich (1982) bilingual collection which includes contributions from both British and German scholars. See also [START_REF] Feil | Zeitgeschichte im Deutschen Fernsehen[END_REF], an early example of 10 German TV history scholarship.

2. [START_REF] Hunt | Reality, Identity and Empathy: The Changing Face of Social History Television[END_REF] does, however, acknowledge very briefly the lack of female presenters, and the paucity of programmes dealing with women's history.

3. See [START_REF] Johnson | Historical Returns: Transdisciplinarity, Cultural Studies and History[END_REF] for further details of the strained relationship between cultural studies and history during the early decades of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. 4. Ongoing research with historians involved in TV history programmes highlighted this as a particular area of contention; they often called for a less rigid alternative to the 'beginning-middle-end' structure (see Bell and Gray, this issue). Other historians, including Jeremy Black (2005), assert that this is understandable when most of the audience are not scholars, adding that not all programmes or historical films leave out social process. 5. See Johnson (2001) for further elaboration of the influence of Ricoeur on cultural studies since the 1980s (see, for example, Ricoeur, 1991). 6. Ebbrecht's article provides an interesting parallel to that of Mark A. Wolfgram (2006), who recently suggested that the growth in represen- tations of the Holocaust in German and other TV and film during the 1980s opened a 'narrative space' for those discussing their experiences of national socialism and led to a significant national reinterpretation of the Third Reich.

Acknowledgements

This research is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Ann and I are very grateful to John Corner for agreeing to be involved in the 'Televising History' research project as a whole, and for acting as a reviewer and providing the epilogue to this issue, in particular. I would like to acknowledge our reviewers' invaluable help and hard work: John Corner, Patrick Finney, Simon Gunn, Joke