I am 30 years old and live in Wiltshire. I’m a dual national immigrant – I was born in Tennessee and moved here when I was a child, and I am in the last year of my PhD research, which is on young people’s politics. In a nutshell, I hand out digital cameras to young people who participate in my research by taking pictures of the towns, cities and countryside in which they live. Then, we use their photos to build a conversation about their experiences of growing up as young citizens in the UK.
I started reading the Guardian when I was an undergraduate. I used to read whatever newspaper I picked up first, but then my mum started teaching me to do cryptic crosswords. I liked the Guardian crossword the best. Araucaria was our favourite setter.
After I left university I worked in a lot of jobs – factory work, website administration, call centres, bar work, basically anything I could get – and the Guardian crossword got me through a lot of lunch hours. Now I love what I do. It has been a great honour to work with young people and I hope to give their experiences and voices a bigger audience through my work, which I have already taken to Westminster, Brussels and Strasbourg. I spoke to a debate on the vote at 16 hosted by the European parliament last year, for example, with a pocketful of torn-out Guardian crosswords I carried to do during quiet moments.
The first section I read is always the sport. I like football and, when there’s a big competition on, the cycling too. The sport I do is rowing, but there’s not much coverage to be had in that. Next I read the editorials right in the centre of the paper and work outwards. I make sure to read the British politics. I have used the paper for my research, when I do discourse analysis of how young people’s politics gets talked about in the press. The Reading the Riots report was a tremendous piece of work. I would like to see more young voices, like opinion pieces, in print and online. It would make me happy to see more regional news. Regional football would be good too, but I guess I’ll have to wait until Bath City get into the league for that.
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