There are growing concerns in the UK that celebrity is impacting negatively on young people's aspirations. Politicians and teacher unions have spoken out on the 'dangerous effects' of celebrity, expressing fears that young people just want fame (as footballers' wives or Reality TV stars) rather than achievement based on hard work and skill. This study builds on recent research suggesting that celebrity informs young people's educational and career aspirations in complex ways. It will explore how accounts of aspiration within celebrity (e.g. stories of success, talent and self-realisation) shape young people's imagined futures. The research questions are: - What discourses (powerful and conflicting social stories) of aspiration circulate in celebrity representations? - How do young people take-up these discourses in talking about their own aspirations? - How do discourses of aspiration in celebrity and young people's take-up of these relate to social class and gender? We will focus on social class and gender because a large body of research shows that these are central to young people's educational and career aspirations and choices. This youth-centred study will combine individual and group interviews with online forums and celebrity case studies. We will work with 144 young people in six English comprehensive schools that cater for students from a range of class and ethnic backgrounds (two schools in each of: London, a rural area in Southern England and a city in Northern England). At the start of the school year, we will access 24 participants per school, half in Year 10 (aged 14-15) and half in Year 12 (aged 16-17). Just prior to Years 10 and 12 students make key option choices about their futures (pre- and post-GCSE), and these age groups are highly engaged with celebrity as well as being the focus of public debates on celebrity. We will conduct four group interviews in each school with six participants in each. These will explore how young people talk about their own and other people's aspirations and how celebrity features in their life. We will return at the end of the school year to conduct individual interviews with 48 selected participants (eight per school). These interviews will look closely at how individual students' educational and career aspirations relate to celebrity and to their social class and gender. Between school visits, we will invite participants to join an online forum (one per school). We will use these to generate topical discussions about celebrity and aspiration, e.g. asking who should win X Factor and why. We hope participants will also initiate discussions. During this time we will also conduct case studies of 12 celebrities, including those who generate positive and negative reactions from participants. We will select men and women from a range of class backgrounds and fields (e.g. sport, music, Reality TV). We will analyse discourses of aspiration in each celebrity's coverage in three media outlets over six months and selected other material (e.g. Twitter feed, autobiographies). This will be the first UK-based empirical study to examine celebrity's significance in the construction of young people's aspirations. It will have theoretical significance for scholars in education, sociology and media and cultural studies. It will have practical significance for the new Careers Education, Information, Advice and Guidance services, policymakers concerned with young people's aspirations, media educators and youth media commissioners. We will engage users through: conference presentations, academic and practitioner journal articles, an accessible project website and social networking strategy, an advisory group of representatives from key fields, communication events, a practical Toolkit for careers advisors and educators, active engagement with the media including via a press release, and Research Briefings summarising the findings and their implications for policymakers.

China is already the world's most deeply integrated and technologically advanced society. The citizen's identity and agency are coded about a singular government-issued ID. This then ties to everything from one's bank account and social credit score to one's messaging and social media profiles and so reconfigures the boundary of what we might consider the 'person'. In the purest sense, this is the definition of 'metaverse': a virtual realm mapped onto quotidian reality, from which 'legitimate operators' can move seamlessly back and forth. Continuing my masters research into the Chinese metaverse with those at its limits in Hong Kong and Taiwan, I plan to show how the unique perspective of the Tujia minority provides an ideal delimitation within which to chart the boundaries of the cybernetic human in China today, and so present one possible future for the internet globally. The Tujia are greatly understudied. Millions live within the vicinity of Chongqing, arguably China's largest, leastwesternised, and yet most technologically advanced megacity. There has been no community ethnography of the Tujia in Chongqing, and no studies into how they have been affected by rapid sociotechnological changes, such as the recent roll-out of 5G, soon to be felt everywhere. Given the rising tides of nationalism in the PRC and their intersection with rapid urbanisation, new media, and the deethnicisation of public discourse, I ask how does Tujia ethnicity modulate the interface of selfhood with the state? Given the prime role played by AI and algorithmic logic in China's technocracy, how do new technologies further mediate this process? Using online and offline participant observation, semi-structured interviews, network-mapping, and linguistic GIS data, I will build upon the theoretical concept of 'cybernesis' that I have developed through my previous research to explain how sociotechnological evolution reconfigures the boundaries of self and state.

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