#les back

[jazz-improvisation]

Jazz guitar timeline

Illustration: Les Back

[galina]

Every year around this time I seem to return to Les Back’s brilliant book Academic Diary – I especially love that Hoggart quote, ah 🤍

[galina]

‘All this made Goldsmiths a place people either loved or hated […] if they loved it, if it felt immediately right, they stayed and worked far beyond the call of duty.’

Richard Hoggart, quoted in Les Back, Academic Diary: Or Why Higher Education Still Matters

[blackbritishreader]

Throughout the twentieth century the black presence in Britain has been viewed by public commentators as constituting a serious moral and cultural problem; a central anxiety focused on the issue of ‘race mixing’ and the impact of immigration on the social and cultural fabric of British society. Clive Harris has shown that black people in seaports such as Liverpool and Cardiff posed a serious moral and political problem for politicians and bureaucrats of the day. Documenting the survey conducted in 1935 by the British Social Hygiene Council, Harris demonstrates how this organisation was preoccupied with inquiring into black sailors ‘sex demands’ with regard to their white partners their promiscuity and the suggestion that white women became addicted to the ‘black sailor’s sex’. In addition to this black men were also connected with the transmission of venereal disease and seen as leading white women into prostitution. Harris goes on to show how the growth in so-called ‘half-caste children’ became another significant feature of the discourse of state officials, particularly in Cardiff and Liverpool and ultimately at the Home Office. These young people were constructed as being ‘marked by a racial trait’ and to ‘mature sexually at an early age’. This moral panic was to be revisited within a more public arena when, after the Second World War, a number of stories were published about children born to white women and black American and West Indian servicemen. These children were viewed as a ‘casualty of war’. One of the Home Office’s proposed solutions to ‘this problem’ was to send these children to America to be brought up with ‘other coloured children’. In the face of opposition from within Britain’s black population this proposal was never implemented.

Racism and Society, John Solomos & Les Back

[migrationmadepublic]

Les Back’s website - interactive diary about his research into listening

[migrationmadepublic]

CMDS Annual Lecture: New Hierarchies of Belonging

[verolivotto]

On sociological listening

to pay attention to both the insights and the blindness in the accounts of the people who live the consequences of our uncertain world, and at the same time have the humility and the honesty to reflect on our own assumptions and prejudgements.

In a sense, one of the values of the kind of sociological listening I want to argue for is the importance of living in the service of understanding, of trying to grapple with moral complexity.

My hunch is that moral cannibalism produces a situation in which the worst is always expected.

Speaking about research findings presented in large block quotations from respondents:

Quotation is not portraiture and it is the task of sociological writing to bring to life the people we work with and listen to.

Speaking of globalization and time:

As much as the here also contains the elsewhere, the now also contains the legacy of the past.

Speaking of the inadequacy of words and the task of ethnographic representation:

This involves being open to the complexities of the incomplete nature of present-tense experiences, while at the same time avoiding reduction, fixing and closure.

On a photography that listens:

It is interesting to me that Salgado speaks of picture being given. There are at list two senses in which these pictures are given. The first is the sense of the verb to give. Those who look back give them; their look is a gift that is received. The second is in the sense of the adjective, something that is known, bestowed and specified in the look of those who stand before the lens. This  is a description of a condition that outlines a sense of being that isn't fully articulated.

Excerpts from Les Back's "The Art of Listening" (2007)