Chanting Students
Dr. Matthew Cheeseman
I began researching and collecting examples of student chanting in 2005 and have found them a stimulating way of thinking about students and their experience of higher education. Far from simple, chants are both verbal forms and performances, full of contradictory meanings and creadings. In this paper I look at how they are received by others and how they operate as expressions of student identity and enactments of 'lad culture'. Using data collected following an ethnographic methodology, I attempt to situate chanting within larger and no less contradictory performances (such as being a student) and explain its relationship to a language that has become a totemic within the United Kingdom: banter.Rather than assume that "creadings" was a typo for "readings", I supposed that it must be a new word coined in academia. (I have no idea what "a totemic" is either, but that's beside the point). I assumed that a "creading" would be something like a cross between a reading and a creed. It would be a way of analysing that involved reading whatever you were reading while looking for evidence that it might be connected to some kind of belief system. It sounds logical to me.
I looked it up in the OED and, naturally, it wasn't there. It isn't a word that crops up in a Google search either. It is, after all, a typo.
