pericastalian

reports from the borders of academia

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Urban History Group Conference, 2017, Royal Holloway

This was the first year that I made it to the Urban History Group (UHG) annual conference, despite the fact that I have long thought of it as my ‘home’ conference. Having studied at the Centre for Urban History at the University of Leicester I know some of the leading lights of the discipline, and it was only work circumstances that had prevented me from attending in previous years. I always find it tricky to write-up conference thoughts - what to leave in? what to leave out? what do people really want to know? - but nonetheless I’m going to try to get down some of the things that most struck me about the event. As such, this is an entirely partial and subjective review, I’m not going to cover everything I saw, let alone everything that went on.

Format

UHG is a pretty close-knit community, and many of the people there attend every year and describe it as their favourite conference. The short format - 2pm Thursday to 2pm Friday - no doubt both reflects and encourages this, as many people were able to attend the whole event. Myself and other first-timers were welcomed in, and questions to speakers were thoughtful and constructive. My only personal regret is that as I was staying with my parents some distance away I was not able to stay late on Thursday evening.

Top panels

While all the papers that I saw were of exemplary quality, two of the panels really stood out for me. On Thursday evening, New Researchers and First Year PhD streams gave an opportunity to postgraduates and others with early-stage projects to share their ideas. I attended 3.3 ‘Municipal Regulation and the Creation of Boundaries’ which featured papers from Oenone Kubie (Oxford) on playground fencing in early twentieth-century America; Daniel Hood (Boston College) on the Calcutta Fire Brigade; and Alex Young Il Seo (Cambridge) on human habitation on the Korean border. The chair was Jenny Stewart (Leicester). This was among the best conference panels I have ever attended: all the speakers gave compelling accounts of their subjects, and the connections between them were at just that level of suprising yet rigorous that one would look for. Seo’s paper was supported with a stunning set of images, while Hood needed nothing more than a map to illustrate his own research. Kubie drew on a wonderful range of visual sources, including some great adverts. Discussions afterwards drew out questions of identity, place and space. The speakers are all towards the end of their PhDs, and I hope that we will be hearing much more from them in future years.

Friday morning opened with the panel I had been anticipating the most: 4.2 ‘Living on the Edge: The Precarious Nature of Urbanity on the Boundaries of Islamic Cities’, set up by the Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin. This topic speaks to my own research interest in North African and Middle Eastern cities, but focusing on the Ottoman dimension. Papers were by Ulrike Freitag on the wall of Jeddah; Nora Lafi on nineteenth century Tunis; and Florian Riedler on the Ottoman Balkans. Markian Prokopovych chaired.  All offered interesting readings of urban spaces, and showed some of the variety contained within the term Ottoman Empire. An interesting, to me at any rate, link between the papers was the role of water in the creation of cities, as we heard about two on coasts and one on a river. Discussion was satisfyingly rigorous and conceptual, and this set of case studies really moved us away from a UK focus, while revealing common issues in terms of power and authority.

Thoughts on Urban History

Richard Rodger (’the most relaxing voice in urban history’ James Greenhalgh*) had opened the conference with a keynote on mapping and comparing data sets as a mode of urban historical research. Searching across different sources and bringing them together for analysis has a particular importance in tracing the idea of boundaries (the conference theme) across time and space. The closing round table discussion opened with a passionate call from Markian Prokopovych for academics to show their support for the beleaguered Central European University, currently under attack from the Hungarian government. This chimed with Katy Layton-Jones’s concluding remarks on the importance of looking outside the discipline, to seek to influence the world. This prompted remarks on connections with other professions, the importance of academic citizenship, and the changing perceptions of urbanism from those outside the academy.

The other speakers on the plenary panel were Laura Vaughan and Tom Hulme. Vaughan remarked on the quality of the conference presentations and discussions, Hulme returned to the ideas of local government and identity raised in Rodger’s keynote and compared debates around expansive city councils in the early twentieth century to the relationship between cities and the EU in contemporary politics. He described this move himself as ‘somewhat spurious’, but it did raise questions about the layering and scale of identity and power.

Conclusions

As can be seen from the above, I had a thoroughly good time at the conference and am now filled with enthusiasm for the next I’m attending, a themed event on Water from the Northern Nineteenth-Century Network. Were I to offer my own critique of the conference, I would wonder if we have yet resolved the tension between the local and the global scale of cities. Whether this is, in fact, something that can be resolved or will only remain fertile ground for cultivation is another question. There were examples of both highly specific and highly networked models of city research in evidence, and finding ways to bring these differing attitudes into conversation can only be productive for the discipline. I would also ask whether we have yet fully engaged with the relationship between built and ‘natural’ environments in the city. Given the increasing public interest in this issue - both demonstrated and spurred by things like Planet Earth II - this seems like an area ripe for public comment by historians, as well as offering rich scholarly opportunities.

*corrected from the earlier misattribution to Tosh Warwick

Image by Rwendland (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

Postscript

For my own records and possibly of wider interest, the full list of papers I attended:

Session 1: Plenary (introduced by Rebecca Madgin)

Richard Rodger (Edinburgh), ‘The Tyranny of the Border: Urban History at a Crossroads?’

2.3: Boundaries, Space and Traversing the City (chaired by Shane Ewen)

Hadewijch Masure (University of Antwerp), ‘The boundaries of urban solidarity communities in the Low Countries, 1300-1600′

Laura Harrison (University of the West of England), ‘The Boundaries of Social Space: youthful experience of space and place in early twentieth-century York’

Nathan Booth (University of Leeds), ‘Bounding Spaces of Improvement: the making of public parks in Victorian and Edwardian Leeds’

3.3 Municipal Regulation and the Creation of Boundaries (chaired by Jenny Stewart)

Oenone Kubie (Oxford), ‘“A Real Institution”: Playground fencing and the production of institutional space in early-twentieth century urban America’

Daniel W. T. Hood (Boston College), ‘Expanding Fire Protection: The Calcutta Fire Brigade, the Richards Report, and the Calcutta Improvement Trust, 1911-14′

Alex Young Il Seo (Cambridge), ‘Understanding the Korean border through human habitation’

4.2 Living on the Edge: The Precarious Nature of Urbanity on the Boundaries of Islamic Cities (chaired by Markian Prokopovych, all speakers from Zentrum Moderner Orient)

Ulrike Freitag, ‘Outside the Wall of Jeddah: The struggle for urbanity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’

Nora Lafi, ‘Inside/Outside the City Boundaries: Newcomers in twentieth-century Tunis and the question of urbanity’

Florian Riedler, ‘Regulating Urban Expansion in the Ottoman Balkans: Confessional and social boundaries in the nineteenth century’

5.2 Maintaining Jurisdictional Distinctions (chaired by Tosh Warwick)

Vidhya Raveendranathan (University of Gottingen), ‘Defining the Poramboke: Constituting the juridical limits of wastelands in nineteenth-century colonial Madras, India’

Anna Ross (Warwick), ‘Extension Planning in Global Perspective: The case of Tetouan, 1913-56′

David Ellis (independent scholar), ‘The Limits of Mobility: Controlling the car in urban Britain, c.1960-90′

6 Plenary session

Round table discussion: Laura Vaughan, Katy Layton-Jones, Tom Hulme and Markian Prokopovych

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Exploring Edinburgh, a first walk

Last week I said that this post would be the first in a series looking at Edinburgh libraries. While I still hope to pursue this idea, this particular post became a walk rather than an exploration of a particular building. Today was rather mild, at least by the standards of Scotland in November, and I’ve slowly been recovering from a pretty fierce cold. This led to me choosing a walk over spending a lot of time in my local library. I did, however, start there. This post is a collection of things I saw on my walk.

As you can see, Muirhouse Library is not the most prepossessing that one can find. It’s round the back of a row of shops, many of them closed. The whole area is shortly to be redeveloped, in fact. Inside, the library has a pleasing openness, with light being let in through the centre of the ceiling. The stock also seemed rather interesting, including a collection of Polish books and impressive graphic novel holdings. I may post more about this place as I come to use it, it’s rather intriguing. 

One of the interesting things about this area in the north-west of Edinburgh is the contrast between various different types of housing in close proximity. Here we see some of the newer developments one passes through on the walk to the sea. I’ve not researched this history, so will mostly be letting these buildings speak for themselves. Note the large puddle on the bridge pictured above, creating a extra reflection floating above the reflections in the pond.

Walking along the coast of the Firth of Forth, with another set of high-rise flats in the distance.

This building overlooks West Shore Road, strangled in undergrowth. I got some funny looks when I emerged back on to the pavement.

Just a little further down the road, this wall appears to me to be of similar age, and so perhaps marks the boundary of the same property on which that building stood.

Heading back inland, this family of statues stands outside a recent development on Saltire Street.

A short step over the road is this rather gloriously abandoned industrial building.

I leave you with another abandoned building, which seems to be owned by a gas company. It glowers across the road at a supermarket, perhaps itself destined to one day stand unused.

[pericastalian-blog]

Return to Castalia

This is another welcome back to the blog, and another set of updates about what I'm up to and what might be appearing here in the coming months. I write this from Edinburgh, having moved up last week to commence a PhD in Architecture under the supervision of Alex Bremner, looking at British Imperial Architecture in the Nile Valley. Originally, I was going to be doing this part-time while continuing my work in Technology Enhanced Learning for St Mary's University. This was exciting in itself, and a plan that had much to recommend it, but I am pleased to be able to announce now that I will be studying full-time, with funding from the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain.

I must say it feels somewhat strange to have, over quite a short period of months, gone from assuming I would not be starting a PhD any time soon to having a funded position with an excellent supervisor at a top institution. Edinburgh also happens to be one of my favourite cities, although not one I have ever had the chance to explore as much as I would have liked. Until now.

This change of course means busy times ahead: I will still be working for St Mary's until the end of November, I am joining the editorial board of Pubs and Publications (which you should definitely be reading for the latest from the coalface of graduate study), and I'm also going to be attempting to get back on the sort of time line a full-time student would be on. These next few months will set the tone for how I go about constructing my thesis, and I'm keen to get into good habits early. I've learnt a lot about organisation and managing a project from my time at St Mary's, and hopefully this puts me in a stronger position than I would have been. Also, I have done a lot of reading over the last year that can be fed into the project.

As well as occasionally covering these goings on, I have a specific side project that will be the main focus of this blog for a while: my explorations of the exciting city around me. As I begin to make a home here, I'm going to share weekly updates. Many of these will concern libraries: Edinburgh (supposedly) has more per capita than any other city, and so they seem a natural route into understanding the city.

Next week I'll be posting about Muirhouse Library and my first impressions of life in Scotland's capital. Assuming, of course, that we still have blogs in our post-US election apocalypse. Damn, I was trying not to do politics...

[pericastalian-blog]

Working for the algorithms

As I leave the library, I reflect on the experience of working as part of a computerised system.

In my last day working for the library service,* the pressure was on to finish one of the regular administrative processes designed to ensure that the service’s stock of books is put to best use. This consisted of fetching a list of ‘dead’ stock, which is to say books that hadn’t been borrowed for a while. These copies needed to be looked at, and a decision made on whether they should be kept. Within each stock category, as well as a list of the books to be looked at, there was also a minimum and maximum number to be removed. In general, the minimum number was zero. Our stock management system has a similar process for identifying potentially ‘grubby’ stock for staff to investigate and consider removing. The ultimate decision always rests with the staff, and most removed stock is cycled back through the central stock team to libraries where it might be better used.

Dull though the above description is, this process got me thinking about the place of people in the modern working system. The algorithms driving our library management system have a pretty clear idea of what ought to happen in each library, and in theory the staff have a fairly mechanistic role of assessing the physical quality of the book and whether there is any reason to keep it in branch. Other than this, the only need for humans is that, as things stand, they are the best technology for taking things off shelves. This is especially the case in public areas like libraries, where other humans (i.e. borrowers) might disrupt automated shelf pickers. The actual role played by the staff, however, is not what one might imagine from a formal description of this mechanism. Rather than implementation of an algorithm, I would argue that our main role in this process was correction of the system.

To a library management system, all books are simply products to be judged by their figures. A history of the local village can be compared to the latest thriller or high profile celebrity bio, by the number of times they have each been checked out. Within each category the tolerances for number of borrowings can be adjusted, it’s true, so that it is not expected that the village history actually achieves the same number of issues as the thriller. But within a category the system will identify those books that are least loaned, and assume that these are the least important to the service. The role of staff consists largely in ignoring this simplistic judgement. I will start with the most dramatic example of this and then speak to its broader relevance.

The library I worked in has a large local history section, and every couple of weeks the local history society provide volunteers so that members of the community can drop by and ask questions about the area. A classic use for a local library, and one that still provides knowledge quite hard to come by in other ways: it is true that the Web has revolutionised historical research, but the more specific and local the knowledge you want the more likely it is to still be held in particular documents or simply in the minds of particular individuals. This kind of local history centre therefore remains a key access point for historical knowledge, and the published materials held by the library give a level of detail it would take a significant investment of time to reconstruct from scattered digital sources, assuming one could at all. In following the dead stock plan for this section, the role of staff is to simply ignore the management system’s recommendations. The value these books offer is almost impossible to measure through borrowings, because they are largely used for reference. Even if one could track their reference use in the system, one would not be justified in using this as a guide to remove stock, as the knowledge stored in that small area of a local library is highly unlikely to be replicated in any other such convenient location. It’s value lies as much in its availability as in its level of use. The library management system recommends that at least c.500 books should be removed from this collection, and a maximum of c.700. The collection itself numbers c.900. In other words, a few iterations of the algorithm without human intervention would see this resource rendered pretty near useless.

You may think that this example is isolated, a case where one could simply rewrite the system to ignore this section and be done with it. But actually it points up the paradox at the heart of this approach to stock management: it assumes that what is popular now is what a library should keep, and that anything else can safely be moved along. This view can be applied quite straightforwardly to, say, books released as TV tie-ins or the biographies of only briefly famous individuals. Libraries do not have infinite space, and something must give way for new titles, so it makes sense that those items that date the most quickly needn’t be kept out of some desperate need to archive everything. Nonetheless, there are classics within every genre, books that contain great beauty and wisdom and should be available as a resource just as the local history collection is. Yesterday we ‘saved’ biographies, histories, travel guides and others that keep our offering valuable, that allow the library to exist as a real service for people, not simply an alternative to Waterstones. You can wander in and peruse these books still, and take pleasure in them whether or not you borrow them.

And I suppose that brings me to my fundamental point: a library is not a shop. A bookshop is essentially aimed at sales, and so can use sales as a metric for all its stock. But the use of issues as a metric across stock fails to understand that a library is essentially a resource, and that the reading of books on site without borrowing them is not a negative in the same way it is for a bookshop. There are children who regularly use the library as a base for their homework, conducting research online and supporting it with the books on site, but perhaps mostly using the library because it is quiet and away from home. But if borrowings become the main way libraries judge themselves or their stock, we are saying that these children are not using the space at all, as their use is something that is not measured.

When judging public services, be very wary of using the metrics of the private sector. And next time your in a library, ask yourself why their most popular titles are grouped as ‘bestsellers’.

*I’m not going to name my former employer in this post. It is not written against them, but against a way of working that is increasingly common across sectors

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‘Good News Everyone!’ or What I Might Do If I Grow Up

In which I return to this blog after something of a hiatus, reflect on what I’ve been up to lately, and outline plans for the future. 

Over the past few months I’ve learnt a lot about myself and what really drives me. I am now more comfortable than I have ever been in clearly assessing my goals and judging my ability to achieve them. This is not something that has ever come easily to me, as I have generally felt the call to clearly state goals and routes to achieving them as a sort of managerial imposition on my life. This goes back to my childhood response to that seemingly harmless question ‘what do you want to do when you grow up?’* I generally felt that this was some kind of challenge, that at some future point someone would turn up to announce that I should put away childish things and begin the serious business of Doing, in order to justify my existence. The thought terrified me.

During what I suppose we had best call my adult life, I have had a range of jobs, mostly of the kind one gets if you are resistant to developing an actual career path. I would regret none of these, they’ve certainly helped me see life from many different perspectives, and there is something wonderfully reassuring about knowing that you can work as a manual labourer if academia collapses altogether. But equally, I wouldn’t pretend that any of them felt to me like something I wanted to stay in for any length of time. In some slightly odd way, that was even part of the point: these were a sign of my resistance to that call to predict and plan out my own path.

Some years ago, perhaps beginning to feel that my youth would not last forever, I came to the conclusion that really all I had ever wanted to do was to study history. When I graduated the first time round, I had been put off postgraduate study by the expense (modest by today’s standards!) and also by a sense that I ought to gather more from life to know if this thing was really for me. I had been, I would say, a decent but by no means brilliant student, and looking back I think that I was aware that I needed to learn more about myself rather than simply drifting towards an academic life. It took some years for me to realise that this was what I had been doing, and that really the only thing that consistently called to me was the study of the past. After a year of saving, I returned to the University of Leicester to study for an MA in Urban History. I started this blog as a part-time masters student, feeling myself on the edge of academia but determined to be part of it.

This is not the time to go into all the ins and outs of the PhD proposals I have written and considered. Suffice to say that I became an MA without having received a funded offer, and waiting to see the results of proposals I had sent in. I returned to my parents’ house and took some work at my local library. I remained on the look out for interesting positions, but determined not to fall into the same ‘apply for everything’ trap that I had in the past. I wanted work that would add to my experience. This led me to my current role in the Technology Enhanced Learning Team at St Mary’s University, Twickenham.

People seem to glaze over a little when I tell them exactly what I do, so I’ll just mention that it involves trying to improve digital skills training at the University, for both staff and students. This has involved a lot of research, writing and discussion, all things I enjoy. It has been by far the most rewarding role I have ever had.

Meanwhile (and I have to be cautious here) I may now have an opportunity to continue my studies at a top institution with an excellent supervisor. I do not know if this will actually work out, but the thought is thrilling. The possibility emerged in a slightly roundabout way, and involved me compromising on some positions I have previously stated. Right now, however, it feels as though all the key elements will be on my terms. Even if this one doesn’t happen, it has got me thinking more seriously about PhD plans again, and reminded me that this really is what I want to do.

I said that I had learnt a lot recently, and what it boils down to is this: I know what I care about now. I still aspire to scholarship, certainly, but if this does not mean being Professor of History or whatever that is not a problem for me. Existing on the fringe of academia, combining my interests in history and learning technology, right now sounds like rather a good option. I begin to see glimpses of a portfolio career emerging. It’s very early days, but there is hope.

This blog was named for Castalia, the mythical scholarly kingdom in Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game. The ‘peri-’ suffix refers to my sense that I was on the edge of it. This allows some freedoms, while also at times feeling lonely. But I am not alone. Witness, as one example, the Ronin Institute in the US, promoting a whole new understanding of what a scholar is. Initiatives such as this can, I hope, begin to break down the walls of academia’s ivory towers and connect us once again with society at large. As the number of PhDs awarded continues to outstrip jobs (stats for history PhDs can be found here) inevitably there will be an increasing number of people with outstanding academic qualifications who are not in the roles that those qualifications traditionally prepared people for. I may find myself amongst them, and I’m ok with that.

I hope that this post has given some sense of the complexities of my own, ongoing academic journey. The wider message, I suppose, is that no matter how much you know about how challenging postgraduate study is, or how important it is to have clear goals, you will not really know until you’ve lived it. And that’s ok. In a sense that’s what learning is: looking back at what you did before and knowing how you could have done it better.

*It is interesting to note that this is sometimes phrased as ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ This sounds even more intimidating to me, even now.

[pericastalian-blog]

Solidarity, Casualisation and Academia

I’ve been thinking of writing a post about the changing nature of modern work for some time, perhaps as a follow-up to my earlier thoughts on postcapitalism. Recent news that UK Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt will impose a new contract on NHS junior doctors has further served to bring questions of working practices to the forefront of public debate. This particular post, however, is largely a response to a piece from the Guardian’s Academics Anonymous strand. In ‘Casual contracts are ruining universities for staff and students’ the writer describes the devaluation of their teaching work through the use of temporary contracts. Importantly, they point out that this also undermines the work of permanent members of staff, by chipping away at the amount of time teaching a module is expected to take. Thus, even as they are charged more, students are increasingly presented with a cut-price version of university teaching that cannot live up to their inflated expectations. While one might take issue with some of the specific claims in the piece, such as whether university teaching is actually worse under the current system than during any previous period, I want to focus instead on one element of how this argument is presented: the lack of serious engagement with broader trends in employment.

I have worked for a major retail chain at a railway station, an online secondhand book dealers, a supermarket, a university and (currently) a county council library service. In what follows i will try to bring in some of these experiences to provide some comparisons with academia. I have not worked as an academic, but as the Guardian post deals with that anyway some comparison at least will be possible. Before I get into the nitty gritty, it’s worth just restating why casualisation in academia might be bad: this is generally taken as gospel by academics, but outsiders may wonder if its really much of a big deal. I think this speaks to a larger issue about how universities present themselves: at all the open days, recruitment fairs, in the prospectuses and so on, so much of what universities say is directed at potential students and their families that these groups might be forgiven for believing that they are the sole focus of what actually happens at a university. Indeed, this is what politicians want the public to think: that universities are really just sought of very large schools with excessively smart teachers who also discover cool things occasionally. This is not entirely inaccurate of course: academics do take teaching, and the student experience more broadly, very seriously and it takes up an enormous amount of their time (rightly so!). But whereas a school exists only to teach, a university would be more accurately thought of as a place where new ideas are produced: students are active participants in this process, as well as being learners. (Some of this may be especially true in the humanities, and I’d be interested in scientists’ thoughts on whether they’d agree with this characterisation). The relevance of all this here, is that the teaching experience at a university is shaped by the whole set up of the institution. The teaching should reflect research in that university, because that is part of what makes a university education different from school systems: this is undermined by relying on temporary staff with little connection to the department for which they teach. These staff may be great teachers, of course, but if they don’t feel a part of the institution then a fundamental part of the learning culture is lost. In the conventional models of UK Higher Education, it is the student who is a temporary member of the university: if this shifts so that their teachers become the temps, then all the elements of student support, mentoring and so on become significantly less dependable. I think these things are assumed to be obvious by many who work in universities, and many similar points could be made about non-academic staff too, but they appear somewhat opaque to those outside the walls.

It should be clear from the above that I have much sympathy with the anonymous Guardian author, but I wish now to expand on my issue with the piece. This sentence gives a clue: ‘There would be outrage if an employer, say a manufacturer, terminated their workers’ contracts and then hired them back to do the same job for less money.’ Now hold on... This is exactly the kind of thing that has happened in many public sector jobs under austerity: a very quick search brings up a story about local councils and another about the NHS. Off the top of my head I could add the shift to volunteer-run libraries in many areas (who do you think the volunteers are?) and police services also using former employees as volunteers. These are all part of a general shift to cut the price of work, to discover exactly how cheaply any service can be run while preserving a veneer of effectiveness. This has been most obvious in the public sector, but builds on practices already developed in the private sector. In both my retail jobs I was part-time, as were the vast majority of my colleagues. This practice allows companies to contract for the bare minimum required to cover slow days, and then to offer big overtime packages during busy times of year. Having a large number of staff on part-time hours means they can usually find people to cover any extra time needed, except at the very busiest times of year when temps will be hired. At the supermarket I worked for, most temps would then be offered ‘seasonal’ contracts, effectively agreeing to return for the other peak times of year. Of course, for small companies doing business with a few clients, this kind of practice is both impractical and too risky to the quality of service they can offer. To a supermarket chain, however, the individual customer is essentially unimportant, it’s bulk that matters. Customers need to feel valued, of course, but losing one is not the end of the world. 

I have also witnessed, during my relatively brief retail career (the first job I mentioned above started in 2008) changes to employment practices similar to those now being forced on junior doctors. When I started that job, weekday employees such as myself received time-and-a-half for working Saturdays, double time for working Sundays, and time-and-a-half for any standard hours we did that took us over 40 hours per week. I think weekend employees got their standard rate for any over time up to 40 hours total, and time-and-a-half beyond that. Night shift pay was, from what I recall, around time-and-a-half, although you had to do an actual nightshift: just working after 10pm wasn’t necessarily paid more. Sunday pay was reduced to time-and-a-half during my time there. A few years later, working for the supermarket, I had no overtime rate: all hours were paid the same except night hours, which was anytime after 10pm. The night rate was a couple of pounds more than the day rate. Now, I suspect that that chain always had less generous overtime pay than the first one I worked for, but even so the trend is obvious: the spread of ‘normal’ working hours to cover increasing amounts of time, allowing the employer greater flexibility. This was possible in retail because of a completely atomised workforce, the vast majority of whom attach no great importance to their jobs and therefore spend little time trying to improve working conditions. The onus is on employees to hunt down better jobs, not distract themselves by insisting that all jobs should meet some basic standards.

And here I think we meet the nub of the issue: jobs have been divided into ‘real’ and ‘easy’ jobs, and the latter category have been allowed to be bad jobs, because no-one is expected to want to stay in them forever. Even those who do spend their career in retail are expected to work up to some higher level, although from what I can gather this doesn’t necessarily bring improvements. This is hardly surprising, because once you allow that some jobs are not real, the interests of employers will be to extend this category as far as possible, and to take the practices that are developed in managing those on ‘easy’ jobs and apply them to those in ‘real’ jobs. I’m not suggesting some kind of conspiracy to do this: it is simply the logical step. Which returns us to academia: I’ve already pointed out many issues with casualisation, but the most pernicious is the idea that people on temporary contracts are not ‘real’ academics. Some will object that supermarket work is just obviously less hard, important, valuable than academic work, and that the parallel is therefore false. But those things should be reflected in the different pay for the two roles: we should get over the idea that it’s ok to add to this by also expecting things of those on low pay that we do not demand of the better paid. And we should also see such thoughts as dangerous, because they undermine the ability of people to see the connections between different sectors: what is arriving for doctors and lecturers now has already been done to others, and being blind to that process leaves academics pleading special treatment. We should be alert to the injustices of employment practices in all sectors, and look beyond our own patch of grass. This is a call to solidarity with lecturers, doctors, and supermarket staff.

[pericastalian-blog]

Time, Work, and Postcapitalism

Paul Mason argues in PostCapitalism: A Guide to our Future (2015) that the changes and challenges currently affecting capitalism represent the birth of a new system within the old. He sees the new technologies and networks driving economic growth as fundamentally anti-capitalist in tendency; whereas previous periods of technological innovation have fuelled new forms of capitalism, what we are currently experiencing will ultimately dismantle it. This will happen because infinitely replicable information represents the main commodity in this new system, and by its nature information drives prices towards zero. I do not intend here to evaluate his argument in detail. Rather, I will examine his thoughts on the changing world of work in relation to two historians whose writings seem to me to be relevant to the new patterns identified by Mason: E. P. Thompson and Dipesh Chakrabarty.

Central to Mason’s argument is the case study of Wikipedia. The free encyclopaedia, which relies on volunteers across the world to write and edit posts, demonstrates two parts of Mason’s argument: 1) the work done to produce it is free, and therefore largely ignored by conventional capitalism; 2) because Wikipedia exists, it is impossible for a commercial company to fill its place in the market: capitalism has been driven out by the possibilities of the information network. Thus, a form of organisation that stands outside conventional capitalist models of work not only produces a useful product but also prevents the market from providing the same product. It is this combination of attributes that, for Mason, suggests that capitalism will be destroyed by these new forms of production, rather than simply updating itself.

This raises the question of ‘pre-capitalist’ or other non-capitalist forms of production. Historians have longed faced issues around how to understand and engage with these: famously E. P. Thompson spoke of ‘seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity’ (The Making of the English Working Class, 1963). In Marxist models of history, there is a danger that narratives that are not in step with the supposed direction of development are neglected or seen as nothing more than backward remnants of a dying system. Thompson was studying the early days of industrial capitalism, but similar challenges are faced by historians constructing histories of work in former colonised countries. Dipesh Chakrabarty has written about how generally accepted models of historical time distort our understanding of non-Western societies: these are often described as if they are representatives of the past, caught at some ‘earlier’ phase of development and denied full membership of modernity. The prospect of postcapitalism raises the possibility that a new relationship between time and work ought to be emerging. What light can the labour histories of Chakrabarty and Thompson shed on possible developments?

In ‘Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’ (Past & Present, 1967), Thompson charts the long rise of clock time as a disciplinary mechanism. This is portrayed as part of the triumph of capitalism over other systems, as an example of how new kinds of worker had to be created in order to drive efficiency. Resistance through more traditional working habits that enshrined ‘Saint Monday’ and allowed for more flexible approaches to time, with hard work late in the week compensating for slack days, met increasingly complex forms of control through ‘the division of labour; the supervision of labour; fines; bells and clocks; money incentives; preachings and schoolings; the suppression of fairs and sports’. This new discipline would inevitably be spread to the ‘developing world’ in the end, as it was necessary to industrial capitalism. Thompson allows himself to wonder if the ‘advanced industrial countries’ are in fact beginning to experience the limits of this highly moralised attitude to time: 

For we are now at a point where sociologists are discussing the “problem” of leisure. And a part of the problem is: how did it come to be a problem? Puritanism, in its marriage of convenience with industrial capitalism, was the agent which converted men to new valuations of time; which taught children even in their infancy to improve each shining hour; and which saturated men’s minds with the equation, time is money... And the interesting question arises: if Puritanism was a necessary part of the work-ethos which enabled the industrialized world to break out of the poverty-stricken economies of the past, will the Puritan valuation of time begin to decompose as the pressures of poverty relax? Is it decomposing already? Will men begin to lose that restless urgency, that desire to consume time purposively, which most people carry just as they carry a watch on their wrists?

In Mason’s terms, one might wonder if Thompson is catching a hint of the postcapitalist future on the air. It is clear, however, that he sees this purely as a problem of the ‘developed’ economies of the world: those outside this select group are still waiting to be converted to work-discipline, and this is a necessary part of their progression. Historical time is seen as a linear path along which peoples and nations progress. Further, Thompson sees this as an issue concerning leisure; he does not see the possibilities for new kinds of work. Since 1967, of course, capitalism has embraced the commercialisation of leisure as one of its core functions, so that the puritanism Thompson describes has indeed gone through some serious decomposition. One can point, however, to contemporary representations of the poor and disabled for proof that these ideas have far from disappeared from our society.

Chakrabarty criticises Marxist historians such as Thompson for consigning subaltern groups to a historical ‘waiting room’, in which their histories are seen as having already happened in the West. In Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000) Chakrabarty argues capitalism has always been modified by forces ostensibly outside its own driving narrative. Following Marx, he distinguishes between two different kinds of historical process: History 1 is the kind of history necessary to produce capitalism, which becomes clear once capitalism has emerged. The connection between land and workers, for example, must be severed in order for capitalism to emerge, and once capitalism exists this becomes part of its own narrative about its emergence. History 1 thus represents the antecedents of capitalism as understood from within capitalism itself. By contrast, History 2 concerns forces that capitalism encounters but which are themselves not part of its reproduction. This type of history Chakrabarty sees as offering ways out of the teleologies of History 1: 

This is the possibility that, I suggest, Marx’s underdeveloped ideas about History 2 invite us to consider. History 2 does not spell out a program of writing histories that are alternatives to narratives of capital. That is, History 2s do not constitute a dialectical Other of the necessary logic of History 1. To think thus would be to subsume History 2 to History 1. History 2 is better thought of as a category charged with the function of constantly interrupting the totalizing thrusts of History 1.

In essence, Chakrabarty is calling for an understanding of the ways non-capitalist forces constantly modify capitalism. The latter is not engaged in a gradual triumph over backward forces of resistance, but in fact is changed by these into something it would not be if it were driven purely by its internal processes.

What does this historiographical debate have to do with postcapitalism? In essence, Mason is arguing that History 2s have reached a point where capitalism itself is threatened. Voluntary labour, which has always existed alongside capitalised labour, in his view now offers such extensive possibilities that it will erode the need for paid work in some sectors completely. The wealth created by capitalism paradoxically reduces the necessity for work, as Thompson had already noticed in the 1960s. Demographic and ecological crises create additional stresses on the system. Mason has attempted to forge these forces into a new kind of master-narrative, albeit one that embraces complexity and a multi-faceted future. What is revealed by historians is the need to take seriously the kinds of people we will have to become in order to realise the possibilities of postcapitalism. If industrial capitalism required an effort to shape the whole lives of workers, from cradle to grave, as much as possible to the clock, then to create postcapitalist societies is unlikely to be a matter of simply leaving individuals to follow their economic self-interest. Also, there is a danger that in promoting History 2 as an alternative narrative to History 1, the same errors of simplification might be committed but in the opposite direction: the factory hand or the office clerk becoming the representatives of the irrelevant past just as the stockingers, croppers and hand-loom weavers before them. A more thoroughly inclusive intellectual approach will see that all of us contribute to the future, and this mode suits the radically collaborative models of postcapitalism. Perhaps part of this future is to admit that change is driven by resistance as well as by the avant garde.

Reading

D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Time (Oxford, 2008 reissue, 1st Edition 2000)

P. Mason, PostCapitalism: A Guide to our Future (London, 2015)

E. P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, Past & Present, 38 (1968), pp. 56-97

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To the nation and beyond? A review of ‘London and the Nation’, 10th July 2015 at Birkbeck College

On Friday 10th July I attended ‘London and the Nation’ at Birkbeck College, University of London. This was the academic leg of a two day event, with the somewhat more high profile Saturday conference being a more public affair with journalists, artists and writers speaking. I greatly enjoyed the event but I also had a few issues with particular elements, which I will expand on below. But before I get into what I thought, an outline of how the day went.

The day consisted of four panels of three speakers each, over eight hours with no parallel sessions. As well as the panels, Jerry White of Birkbeck provided introductory remarks and concluding comments came from Sally Alexander of Goldsmiths, David Feldman of Birkbeck and David Glover of Southampton. [I think all the above are professors, but the programme doesn’t give titles so I’ll mostly just be giving names and institutions here.] The papers ranged widely over the modern history of Britain and London, and were anchored to the general historical picture through the narrative accounts provided by White, roughly eighteenth century up to the Second World War, and by Michael Ward of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who spoke on ‘London: Population, Jobs and Growth, 1945-2030′. By reminding us of the broader context for the research being presented these talks played a valuable role in the structure of the day. In particular, White emphasised that London has always been a city of outsiders and Ward drew out an interesting shift from the planned reduction of London during the post-war decades to the current consensus that London should invest to meet the demands of a growing population, and that planning the city should be in the hands of London politicians rather than national planning bodies.

The papers presented were of a remarkably high standard and covered an exciting range of topics, my favourite panel probably being the first of the day featuring Simon Jarrett (Birkbeck) on London jokes and slang in the eighteenth century, Jeremy Crump (De Montfort) on the Primitive Methodists’ attempts to convert the capital, and Lucy Dow (University College London) on the relationship between London and ideas of a British nation as traced through the recipes in cookery books in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I suspect that anyone looking to get regularly booked on the conference circuit would be well advised to start researching the history of humour: it’s both a fascinating and new research area, and lends itself to entertaining presentations.

I don’t want to catalogue every paper, but you can view the programme here. Others that I found especially interesting were Kim Smith’s (University of East London) on the history of Mayfair hairdressing and its spread beyond the capital, and John Toohey’s (Concordia) exploration of the beautiful night photography of Fred Judge. Perhaps the only paper that fell a little flat, due to an admitted lack of preparation rather than any paucity of ideas, was Peter Martyn’s (Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences) on dystopian London. Other than this the presentation standard was exceptionally high, and questions were also well considered and to the point.

As a set of papers on the urban history of modern London I had found the day invigorating, though it did seem something of a shame that the only explicit discussion of empire had come in response to questions from the floor, and that there had been no comparative work with other capitals or world cities. But then as the empire is my area perhaps I might be expected to think that, and the individual papers were not generally hampered by this lack of engagement, although the empire hovered around the edge of Aled Davies’s (Bristol) analysis of the history of The City from 1959-79, and of the Claire Allen’s (Northampton) account of millennial London literature. I found these slight qualms becoming more serious, however, during the closing remarks: all three speakers drew attention to the role of race in contemporary London and how demographic shifts set it apart both from the nation at large and in some ways from its own history. Yet no-one seemed keen to acknowledge the clear connection between this and Britain’s imperial past, with David Feldman going so far as to claim that the fact that no papers had been presented that dealt directly with empire might lead us to ask questions about current approaches to British history and efforts to tie this in to the history of the empire. I am aware from the twitter coverage that this view was pushed quite strongly at the recent Modern British Studies conference and so I wonder if that was in his mind. In any case it seems odd reasoning to suggest that because an issue hasn’t come up in a set of twelve research papers that it might therefore be less important to the broad discipline than previously thought, and indeed if that were the case there is no clear reason why one wouldn’t apply the same argument to race, which had also been mostly absent. I know that the strong version of New Imperial/New British history might insist that the empire must play some definite role in any area of research, but it seems to me that in practise most historians would admit that it needn’t be explicit in every single research paper. And besides, although I would admit the strength of the papers presented, it does seem to me that the conference as a whole would have benefitted from a direct engagement with London as an imperial capital and a world city, and some analysis as to how this outward projection relates to its relationship with the rest of Britain. Comparisons with other international cities might also have added more richness. 

In short, while I greatly enjoyed the day, I found the conclusions tended towards a narrow interpretation of national history that seemed potentially rather limiting. Having said that, it has led me to think more deeply about these questions, which can never be a bad thing.

[pericastalian-blog]

Durham and the Sudan Archive

It’s been a busy couple of months, the most notable thing being a fortnight spent in Durham (the one in the north-east of England, not North Carolina) researching the history of All Saints’ Cathedral, Khartoum. Through one of those quirks of history, most of the British archival holdings connected with the period of Anglo-Egyptian co-rule of the Sudan (which was largely controlled by the British with the Egyptians stumping up most of the cash... God, Englishmen, the dark etc.) are housed in the Sudan Archive in Durham University’s Palace Green Library. So this was my workplace for a couple of weeks:

My visit also coincided with the first stirrings of English summer, which has now gathered new strength and returned with a vengeance. By contrast to the record temperatures recorded today, early June remained pleasingly mild, and brought the best out of the historic townscape. (Yes Durham is technically a city but seriously it’s tiny)

I was pleased to discover that the author of Moonfleet, one of my favourite books as a child, lived right next door to Palace Green Library:

And although the World Heritage Site around the cathedral is beautiful, Durham is not all old stuff

I had a pretty successful time in the archives, and was also able to enjoy some country walks. Again, Durham is small. In summer weather I found this a pretty much entirely good thing, as one is never more than a few minutes from a pleasant riverside walk. In the winter winds I have found the place felt a little constricting, although admittedly that was on a much shorter visit.

I hope this has been enjoyable, and a little lighter than my first post! I will leave you with a sign I stumbled across, looking for help in constructing a museum of the 1950s house. My Dad has a hatred of 50s houses dating back to growing up in and around them, so to me this sort of sounds like a weird torture device. But presumably it will also be an interesting record of a fascinating era ;)

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Scholarship and Academia

This morning I read this post from May, from someone far further along the academic career path than I. I would encourage anyone interested in academia to read it. It is sobering in many ways, although I’d also say that there is encouragement here: the writer has not become disillusioned with her subject; or indeed with much of the ‘official’ areas of her job, by which I mean those obligations that might be found in a contract. Rather, the difficulties described here are to do with snobbishness, arrogance and preciousness among those engaged in academic work. Really though, you ought to read the piece, there is a lot there and I don’t wish to give the impression that what I’ve just said can stand as a summary.

How do I, a postgraduate student with ambitions to enter academia, feel when I read something like this? Clearly the writer has had, in many ways, a high flying academic career path at an elite institution. She is one of the best and has been surrounded by the best, and yet she has found this a draining and ultimately demoralising experience. Certainly this hasn’t been the whole of her experience, but it has been far too large a part of it, because she is now considering leaving her institution and academia altogether. If this didn’t give me some pause, I’d be pretty naive. However, perhaps there are some seeds of hope here as well. Things that will help me if I bear them in mind. (Maybe. I mean, I don’t know in advance if they will!)

1) The writer has been at the same institution for several years. My suspicion is (and this might only apply to me, I don’t mean to insult the writer of the piece who clearly knows her life better than anyone...actually just take it as read that these thoughts apply to me, they are not dished out as advice to her or anyone else) that spending so long in one place would tend to lead to seeing the negative things grow larger and larger and the positives begin to pale. I once worked in a shop for eighteenth months and had to quit once I found myself becoming part of the system itself. Of course, that was a system I despised, so there is a difference. But nonetheless I think feeling yourself struggling to be an individual within a system that only accepts certain aspects of you, is probably an inherently negative experience in the long run. I know that I get itchy feet anyway. Further, it can lead (perhaps especially in elite institutions) to the illusion that all academia is the same as what you have experienced. The other thing to say about the shop is that when I later worked in retail again I found that many of the things that had annoyed me about that job actually were not true across the sector, or at any rate manifested in different ways. I think this is probably true for academia and many other areas of work. Intellectually of course one accepts that one institution cannot represent the world, but nevertheless it’s very easy to generalise from ones own experience. For my own purposes, I will attempt to gain experience of a range of universities, so far as possible. Of course, one cannot necessarily pick and choose.

2) The writer draws an important distinction between scholarship and academia. The latter refers to the set of intellectual systems and approaches that have developed within and alongside the modern university over the last couple of centuries. Scholarship, on the other hand, is a part of the general human quest for truth, beauty and understanding. It is older, deeper and more expansive than academia. In many ways, one might question whether universities are still the best model for the future development of scholarship. At present, they still hold many of the keys and form a vital infrastructure of learning. For my own purposes, I do not think I could pursue really significant research in my subject without first going through the rigours of a research degree. But in studying for this I must not lose sight of these wider concerns, nor allow the systems of academia to lull me into thinking that I only have one possible route to my career goals.

3) The writer is at pains to make clear that she has encountered many wonderful academics, not merely an army of self-satisfied monsters. While it is dangerous to believe that one can change a system from within, nevertheless it is true that academia is made up of individuals: perhaps if we can begin to work on the kinds of behaviour that are tolerated or rewarded, the seeds of change can be sown. In my more limited experience I have also met many wonderful and inspiring scholars, people who I aspire to become like in some small way. And yes, I have also met people who seem only interested in their own self-aggrandisement (naming no names, and accepting that as individuals they are probably victims of the system rather than somehow being inherently evil). I suppose the thing to remember is that it is kindness that makes one a good person, and that no amount of cleverness will compensate for that. I will try to go beyond the necessities of civility and to be kind to those around me. Which is probably a general lesson for life as well as academia.

I hope these thoughts have been of interest. They are simply things that occur, and probably seem quite naive. I hope through this blog to continue exploring some of the issues around academia, and how one might become a scholar while resisting some of the negative aspects of the academic environment. Who knows, perhaps we can even begin to move towards something more healthy.