This activity encourages students to reflect on discrimination and how it can touch upon everyone through implicit or explicit processes. In this activity students first discuss their own experiences of discriminatory practices in their own environment and elsewhere. Then, through the series of tasks, they are gradually guided to analyse discourses of discrimination in the media (TV news and the Internet) by deconstructing images of otherness, which are often conveyed by specific language choices. The ultimate objective is to enable students to apply what has been presented and discussed within the study circle of the class to their own explorations of discriminatory events/texts/images in their own lives and communities, and in the context of their future study abroad.

Observing the 1980s brings together ‘voices’ from both the Mass Observation Project and the British Library Oral History Collection. This material offers a unique and inspiring insight into the lives and opinions of British people from a range of social classes and regions during the 1980s. Additional context for these materials comes from a collection of ephemera from the same period, consisting of a range of publications dealing with contemporary issues such as the Poll Tax, AIDS and the Falklands Conflict. The materials were selected for their relevance to themes addressed in the undergraduate history course ‘1984: Thatcher’s Britain’ at the University of Sussex. These digitised resources are available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-alike licence . This means that you may download and re-use the resources for non-commercial purposes but you must credit the author and make available any re-purposed versions under the same Creative Commons licence terms. Access to the British Library oral history interviews is via the British Library Sound Archive Oral History Collections.