Citizenship education has been a compulsory feature of the curriculum in secondary schools in England since 2002. However, its future may be uncertain amid inter-party disputes over the utility of such teaching. Moreover, there are substantial concerns over the breadth, aims and reach of the Citizenship curriculum. There is a lack of clarity over whether good citizenship can be taught and dispute over whether it can or should go beyond bolstering civil engagement (volunteering) and improving civic (political) activity. This article assesses the motivations for the introduction of Citizenship and the extent to which it has become a politicised panacea to a range of emerging policy challenges. Then, using survey data gathered for the Youth Citizenship Commission, established under the previous government to encourage community and democratic participation by young people, the article tests whether citizenship education is making a difference to the engagement of young people in the civil and political spheres. It assesses which categories of young people have been most influenced by -and which remain impervious tocitizenship education.

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This article critically engages with Savage et al.’s conceptualisation of ‘elective belonging’. Drawing on research in a case study site in central Salford, it argues that historical processes of deindustrialisation, slum clearance and social housing residualisation have been compounded by the subsequent strategies of gentrification and impact upon the forms of ‘belonging’ that can be constructed by marginal working-class people. Correcting for the predominance of research on belonging from the perspective of middle-class incomers, findings are organised around the themes ‘the local/incomer distinction’, ‘perceptions of and orientations to the neighbourhood’, ‘the power of economic capital’, ‘social others and social distance’ and ‘tectonic communities’. It is argued that the privileging of attracting inward investment into such locales necessarily entails that the elective belonging of the privileged is secured at the expense of the prescribed belonging of the marginal.

This article explores attitudes and barriers to work and the impact of punitive welfare reform in the city of Salford (Greater Manchester). Contextualising our discussion in relation to the contemporary landscape of inequality and social class in the UK, we draw attention to the trends towards the expansion of low paid work, precarity and stigmatisation, and highlight the need for more qualitative, geographically sensitive, studies of how these phenomena are being played out. Describing the economic context of the City of Salford and the current state of its labour market, we then present the findings from qualitative interviews with a sample of low income, mostly workingclass participants, who describe their orientations towards employment, perceptions of the labour market, barriers to employment and interactions with punitive welfare reform. Ultimately, we conclude by noting that both strategies of neoliberal statecraft aimed at the reduction of the charitable state described by Wacquant are at play in Salford and that their result is a discouragement from claiming welfare and a recommodification of labour.

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