Sociology and Criminology at Keele University

Response to an earlier post on the Stephen Lawrence trial by Guy Woolnough.

2012-01-19T13:25:00.000Z

I would like to engage with a few points from this post with which I disagree. The first claim is that the law on double jeapoardy or “artefois acquit” to give it its legal terminology, was expressly changed to put these two (Norris and Dobson) on trial. The sections of the Criminal Justice act dealing with double jeopardy came about as a result a recommendation for a review in the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry and a report by the Law Commission in 2002 responding to that recommendation.

The law wasn’t expressly brought in to put these two on trial, it was hoped that they would be if new evidence was found. If it were the law would not have contained a “new and compelling” requirement. It could simply have made all acquittals subject to appeals with lesser criteria, perverse decision for instance (Clive Ponting).

However the idea that double jeopardy was some golden rule running through the justice system is wrong. There were a number of important exceptions. One is the retrial following a tainted acquittal (jury or witness tampering) brought in 1996 following a number of high profile cases. Another is the order of a retrial following a successful appeal by a defendant who has been convicted of a criminal offence.

More importantly and less well known is the ability of a prosecutor to appeal a not guilty finding in the Magistrates’ Court. Here an appeal is made to the divisional court of the High Court who may set aside a not guilty verdict and remit the case with a direction for a guilty verdict to be entered or remit the case to be retried. This appeal can be on the grounds that the magistrates have made an error of law or have reached a decision that no reasonable bench of magistrates, properly directed by the court clerk, could have made.

The question to ask therefore is about the fairness of a procedure that allowed relatively minor crimes to be retried (TV license evasion for instance) and yet more serious crimes, such as murder, could only be tried once. It was an all or nothing gambit for the police and prosecution in which the victim and victim’s family were the ultimate losers.

Another important exception to the artefois acquit rule was given by the Law Commission and it is the rule in Connelly v. DPP [1964] AC 254 in which a defendant acquitted of murder was still able to be tried and convicted for burglary during the course of which the murder was committed, despite the factual situations taking place at the same time and most of the evidence being identical.

One may ask at this point why the defendants in the original trial weren’t prosecuted for GBH or attempted murder following the ruling in Connelly. The answer lies in the fact that the mens rea for both these offences is the same as murder and would have involved, legally, the same facts and law being retried.

Whilst I am not competent to comment on the Attainder laws there are important differences between the Lawrence case and those alluded to in the earlier post. There was certainly enough scientific evidence to lead the jury to conclude that Norris and Dobson had committed this crime. It is beyond all reasonable doubt that they did. Ex post facto laws may be outlawed by the US constitution but they are certainly not so in the British Constitution, to be sure there is a presumption against interpreting laws in this way that is applied by the judiciary but it is not absolute.

Two particularly troubling cases suffice to show how laws can have retrospective effect. The first is the War Crimes Act 1991 which prohibited murder, manslaughter and culpable homicide in relation to offences which violated the laws and customs of war during the World War 2 in German occupied territories.

A second case is that of rape during marriage. In the case of R. v. R (1991) the defendant sought to argue that he could not be guilty of attempted rape because he was the husband of the victim. Under common law consent to marriage was deemed to also include implied consent to sexual intercourse as and when required.

History of the Pleas of the Crown (1736), vol. 1, ch. 58, p. 629:

"But the husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife, for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband which she cannot retract."

The House of Lords (Judicial) quite rightly overturned this principle as no longer a reflection of contemporary life. Whilst the law itself was silent on this point social mores had moved on to such an extent that this belief was no longer held by any at the time of the offence.

So Norris and Dobson might not have known that they were going to be tried twice but the interests of justice, as these cases show, sometimes trumps the idea of finality and certainty. A fact that was persuasive to the Law Commission in its 2002 report.

It is certainly not disingenuous to suggest that case was brought about by new evidence. It obviously was, since that is the legal test that the prosecution must satisfy in order for a second prosecution to go ahead. The Criminal Justice Act 2003 requires that the prosecution prove to the Court of Appeal that new and compelling evidence is available and that it is in the interests of justice for a second prosecution to commence. It is three highly trained judges who make this decision, it is not parliament, public pressure or press outcry. Those justices in this case examined the forensic evidence and decided it was compelling, new and just to continue.

To be sure such a finding makes it difficult for the defendant to argue innocence in the aftermath. However there are safeguards, such proceedings are anonymous and are not reported at the subsequent trial. Whilst the press may publicise the judgement and this could affect the subsequent trial it is not a reason for abandoning the process altogether. Just because a matter is highly publicised doesn’t mean we should give up on justice, that is what the laws on contempt are designed for. They prevent the media from prejudicing a trial.

I can definitely agree with the quote:

“The positive outcome of this case must be that the police should investigate all serious cases with objective thoroughness from the outset”

Criminal investigation is a serious matter that requires serious and thoroughly professional actions throughout. It is to the shame of Metropolitan Police that this did not happen, and to all other forces that fail to respect ethnic and cultural diversity. However to conclude that retrial is about a publicly sanitised lynch mob is wrong and unfair and detracts from the professionalism of the CPS, Police, Judge and Jury in this case from reaching a conclusion that was not based on prejudice but on the “objective thoroughness” of the science of forensic investigation.

Dobson and Norris, no doubt with others, perpetrated a horrendous crime and they should and must pay for their actions and I for one am proud of a legal system that doesn’t close its eyes to injustice.

Adam Snow is a Ph.D candidate, in the Research Institute for Social Sciences. His project, entitled 'Pay-As-You-Go-Justice? On the spot fines and the future of the Magistracy' is jointly funded by Keele University and the Magistrates' Association. Adam is supervised by Dr Helen Wells, Professor Barry Godfrey and Dr Mary Corcoran.

The Stephen Lawrence trial

2012-01-16T15:38:00.001Z

Most of our blog entries are written by academic staff, however we welcome entries by our postgraduate students. Here is an interesting personal view linked to criminological history from one of our PhD students, Guy Woolnough. Responses welcome subject to our editorial control.

The verdict in the Lawrence case is welcome, in that it addresses the terrible wrong committed by the killers, and also the terrible wrong of the failure of the police to investigate properly in the days after the murder. But I do feel a sense of unease about the longer term implications of this case. The two men who have been convicted of this terrible crime have been pursued by the legal system for years, to such an extent and with such frenzy that it must be impossible for any thinking adult to be unaware of the case and to have no opinion on the subject. We have even seen the law changed with the express purpose of putting these killers on trial for a second time. The impetus to pursue this case has come from public opinion, which I find unsettling because we seem to have reached a point where a person is convicted because that is what the public want.

It reminds me of the Acts of Attainder passed by Parliament, in the 16th and 17th centuries, in which the traitor was condemned and executed simply because Parliament had so decreed it. Evidence was unnecessary; all that was needed was a simple majority and the king’s signature. Acts of Attainder and ex post facto laws are prohibited by the United States Constitution, but we seem to have allowed such abuses of law to operate in this case.

Howsoever I feel pleased for the Lawrence family that some resolution has been achieved for them by this verdict, I feel uneasy for the future. Will we see further cases where the press and public opinion conduct a hue and cry to secure the conviction of persons who are generally reviled? Will unpleasant offenders like Gary Glitter be pursued by the use of retrials until the public get the result they want?

It may be objected that the Lawrence case was different because the retrial was made possible by the discovery of new evidence. This is a disingenuous argument. With modern forensic science, the discovery of new evidence will always be possible. The real problem in this case was not, in fact, the lack of evidence but the failure of the police to search properly for the necessary evidence in the immediate aftermath of the killing. Although the killers’ names were passed to the police within hours, they failed to act decisively and inadvertently allowed the criminals to destroy the clues.

The positive outcome of this case must be that the police should investigate all serious cases with objective thoroughness from the outset. We must avoid the awful possibility of public opinion operating like a sanitised lynch mob to get the result it desires.

Stephen Lawrence – Britain, A Liberal Utopia?

2012-01-14T22:54:00.006Z

By

Dr Mark Featherstone and Dr Siobhan Holohan

On 3rd January 2012 Gary Dobson and David Norris were finally found guilty of the murder of Stephen Lawrence over 18 years after he died of stab wounds in April 1993. The immediate media reaction to the guilty verdict was that two of Stephen’s killers had finally been held to account for his murder and that some kind of justice had been done. However, there was a sub-text to this reaction - Britain has changed in the wake of the Macpherson Report that essentially exposed institutional racism in the Metropolitan Police and argued in favour of victim-centred justice. In other words, the media reaction has been that lessons have been learned. Britain is no longer a racist country, but rather a tolerant, multicultural, nation sensitive to difference.

A decade ago we wrote about the case using discourse analysis to explore media representations around Lawrence. On the basis of this work we argued that the media sought to save the image of Britain as a tolerant multicultural society by scapegoating various groups as ‘racist’ – the killers, as representatives of the racist underbelly of British society, and then the police as a symbol of intolerant British institutions. The central point, here, was that society itself was innocent – the problem resided in deviant others. In our works on the case – ‘The Search for Justice in the Media Age’ (Holohan, Ashgate, 2002) and ‘Multiculturalism, Institutional Law, and Imaginary Justice’ (Featherstone and Holohan, Law and Critique, Vol. 14:1, 2003) – we disagreed with this popular media construction and argued that what we really needed to learn from the Lawrence case was much more profound – we argued that until we learn to take responsibility for the racism running through our society, and stop believing that we can contain it in particular individuals or particular institutions, we will never be able to deal with racial inequality. In other words, we argued that we live in an exclusionary, intolerant, society and that the Lawrence case needed to be taken as a wake up call, rather than a singular event revealing particular criminal elements within society. On the contrary, we wanted to say that those criminal elements were not somehow other, but rather symbolic, hyperbolic, representations of the social whole.

We would make a similar point today by examining the contemporary Lawrence verdict in relation to recent events, such as David Cameron’s condemnation of state multiculturalism speech and the summer riots, which we would argue show that Britain is far from inclusive. Speaking about the failure of multiculturalism early last year (February, 2011), Cameron argued that Britain needed a unified ethnic identity, and that passive tolerance was an invitation to extremism. Advocating a brand of macho ‘muscular liberalism’, Cameron explained that we need less tolerance, and more sense of morality, and the courage to make tough decisions about right and wrong. There was really nothing revolutionary about this speech. In many ways, Britain was ready for this message and had been since 7 / 7, which as we have shown in another article (Featherstone, Holohan, Poole, ‘Discourses of the War on Terror: Constructions of the Islamic Other in the Wake of 7/7’, International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, Volume 6, Number 2, 2010) produced widespread racist sentiment in Britain and normalised Islamophobic exclusionary politics. In other words, we would not see Cameron’s advocacy of ‘muscular liberalism’ as objective or neutral, but instead based in notions of right and justice which are essentially white, and also very male, in their construction.

Following 7 / 7 we argued that Britain was moving away from multiculturalism and that this position was becoming more acceptable. Indeed, our view was that British society was becoming increasingly intolerant and exclusive in ethnic, gendered, and class terms. Although, this is not the place to explore each of these social exclusions in depth, in our paper on 7 / 7 we connected the increasing exclusivity of British society to the expansion of neo-liberal economics and the hegemony of an ultra-competitive model of society. We would argue that this exclusivity has been further revealed by the economic crash and the increasing stress this has placed on society. Under pressure, British society has become a more hostile place, and social inequalities based upon divisions such as race, gender, and class have simply widened and become economic and political battlegrounds. Certainly two of these social divisions – race and class – were central to the summer riots, which began on the basis of ethnic tensions between the black community and police in Tottenham, and quickly expanded to take in class divisions between ‘normal’ Britain and the excluded underclass in other cities, such as Manchester.

But what does any of this have to do with Lawrence? Our point is very simple. Against the background of Cameron’s critique of multiculturalism and advocacy of muscular liberalism and the summer riots, we think it would be a mistake to imagine that the contemporary Lawrence verdict says anything about the transformation of Britain into an inclusive utopian society. We cannot use Lawrence as a political football. On the contrary, we would follow Domenico Losurdo, and argue that liberalism has always been a colonial discourse, possessed by an exclusive dark side, which means that the price of tolerance is the construction of some other who is by definition tolerated on the very margins of society. Is this not exactly what the Islamic and underclass other represent today? These people are in society, but only insofar as they inhabit the very margins of the social system. They are in, but out of society. They are marginal others that normal society 'tolerates'. What does this mean and how should we conclude our discussion? Again, we have a simple conclusion. Despite the Lawrence verdict, which has finally seen some kind of justice done in relation to Stephen’s murder in 1993, we would argue that this is no time for complacency and we need to remain critical. As Islamophobia and the summer riots show, Britain is no liberal utopia.

PhD bursaries and studentships in Sociology, Criminology and other Social Sciences

2012-01-06T19:24:00.000Z

Keele University is offering a wide range of funded postgraduate scholarships for PhD research in Criminology, Sociology and other fields. Closing date for applications is February 17th 2012. A number of graduate teaching assistant posts are available, along with fully funded studentships, bursaries and fee-waivers.

Please note that the Sociology research group is under the heading of 'Social Policy', however supervisors are available in a wide range of sociological fields (including cultural sociology and social theory) and students are
advised to explore research profiles on our website and contact potential supervisors before submitting an application.

Criminology research group is also - as you might expect - within the Centre for Social Policy.

Further details of the studentships and the application process can be found here:

http://www.keele.ac.uk/pgresearch/choosingaresearchdegree/studentships/

You would be well advised to make contact with potential supervisors in areas of interest before submitting any application.

Sociology research profiles can be found via individual pages here:
http://www.keele.ac.uk/sociology/people/

Criminology research profiles can be found via individual pages here:
http://www.keele.ac.uk/criminology/people/

New book by Keele Criminologist

2011-12-05T12:25:00.000Z

Helen Wells, graduate of Keele and now lecturer on the Keele Criminology programme has just had her first book published by Ashgate. The book The Fast and The Furious: Drivers, Speed Cameras and Control in a Risk Society is based on her PhD research carried out at Keele between 2002 and 2006 and is published as part of the Human Factors in Road and Rail Transport series. The book offers an explanation for the continued debate about one particular and emotive road safety intervention - the speed camera - by situating that debate within contemporary literature about the ‘risk society’ (Beck, 1992) and more broadly understood experiences of risk faced on a daily basis by drivers. Rather than a focus on risk as something that can be objectively assessed, measured and managed separately from the social context in which it is encountered, it suggests that ‘risk’ is something that permeates this particular debate from every angle.

You can read sample pages of the book (or even buy it!) here.

The book has received the following reviews:

‘Helen Wells sets out on an important and timely quest to place roads policing through speed cameras in the context of a “risk society”. Rightly, she avoids a debate about their effectiveness. Rather, she looks at changes in policing through greater use of technology and at the roles played by researchers, pressure groups and experts. As an expert cited, I found this a fascinating survey of a controversial topic.’
– Robert Gifford, Executive Director, Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety, UK

’We’ve waited a long time for this fresh perspective on a topic that touches us all in risk society. Using a multi-method, multi-site empirical study as her basis, Wells unpicks the many and contradictory strands of the speed camera debate, deliberately retaining a neutral stance and positioning the whole enterprise within a risk narrative. As such it delivers a powerful analysis of what was seen to “go wrong” through giving “voice” to drivers, and serves up timely insights for the enforcing authorities. A real tour de force!’
– Claire Corbett, Brunel Law School, UK

’A real thought provoker for anyone who has ever had an opinion about speed cameras! Through the voices of drivers, enforcers, persuaders, and decision-makers, this is an insightful look at the debate on arguably the most contentious of ‘techno-fixes’. In explaining how, in many people’s eyes, “safety cameras” became “speed traps”, Wells reminds us that opinions cannot be changed by scientific evidence alone and that public acceptance is a prerequisite for any intervention.’
– Lindsey Simkins, Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, UK

Should we care about the number of criminal offences?

2011-09-27T15:28:00.002+01:00

By Adam Snow

William Stuntz in his essay “Pathological Politics of the Criminal Law” Michigan Law Review (2001-2) 505 argues that criminal punishment drives criminal law. That is the desire to punish transgressing behaviour drives the implementation of endless laws and regulations criminalising conduct. However, Stuntz argues, contrary to expected wisdom this drive does not end up criminalising “the other” or “them” the criminal class, but instead criminalises “ordinary” “normal” members of society.

If there is one thing about criminal law that Stuntz wants us to recognise it is the law’s extraordinary breadth and depth: “that which they cover, they cover repeatedly” (Stuntz 2001: 518.) The causes of this widening of criminal codes has its roots in politics, at both the surface and institutional level. The surface, in that (apparently) voters want more punishment for ‘real criminals’ and legislators oblige by passing ever more criminal laws which make punishment easier to achieve. At the deeper level the institutional design of criminal justice systems allows interested parties (we might include the police here) to present zero sum equations to politicians requiring ever more regulations to reduce the cost of, or likelihood of a trial. Stuntz’s metaphor is of a box in which criminal law seeks to punish those in the middle, while those at the periphery generally adopt for trial since it is not clear or easy to prove their offence. In such circumstances legislators, who for understandable reasons would rather punish than allow someone to “get away with it”, pass ever widening criminal laws to either increase the size of the box and place those previously at the periphery in the centre, or create a new box in which to put those peripheral cases.

So should we be worried about this trend? Undoubtedly so according to Stunz. But also according Nick Clegg and Nick Huhne who in 2006 lambasted Tony Blair’s Government for creating 3000 offences in its 9 years in office (see Blair's'frenzied law making' : a new offence for every day spent in office The Independent 16-8-2006 and Has Labour really created 3,000 new crimes? Channel 4 New, 19-09-2006)

So concerned were the Liberal Democrats with this proliferation of criminal offences their 2010 manifesto contained a commitment to

Halt the increase in unnecessary new offences with the creation of a ‘stop unit’ in the Cabinet Office. Every department in Whitehall would have to convince this unit of the need for a new offence p.94

So the question for this Blog is has this commitment translated into practice? Have there been fewer offences created? Is there a Stop Unit in the Cabinet?

Certainly the Coalition Agreement p.6 still contains a promise to create

A new mechanism to prevent the proliferation of unnecessary new criminal offences

As yet no mechanism has been forthcoming; there is no “Stop Unit” in the Cabinet Office although Nick Clegg remains committed to his pledge.

Perhaps the government are awaiting the draft Freedom Bill’s reception before entering into any arrangements for slowing the proliferation of offences. Certainly the Bill does not contain any clauses establishing such an agency, and perhaps the costs of such an enterprise would not fit with the government’s determination to reduce the deficit and cut the number of Quangos.

So although there may be an expressed political will as yet it has not materialised into anything concrete. Perhaps, as they say, actions speak louder than words, and the figures provide support for Clegg’s aims?

Well the picture there will provide little succour to Mr Clegg. Since the coalition took office 11^th May 2010 there have been 460 offences created, the overwhelming majority by way of statutory instrument. To be sure they cover a range of activities, a majority of which we would probably think need government action. However if we are using the same logic that Mr Clegg used in 2006, his and PM Cameron’s Government have created 460 offences in 491 days. (Although no questions in Parliament have been asked about these figures, they are taken from a reading of Statutelaw.gov.uk). If this is to continue apace then if the coalition lasts 9 years (this would include 3 leap years, unlike the Labour figure which only included 2) the figure extrapolated would be 3074 offences created. Almost exactly the same pace as the previous administration!

To return to Stuntz’s article, Mr Clegg may well be playing the surface politics game very well, looking to get rid of “pen pushers and busy bodies” as PM Cameron described local officials who, he suggests, have nothing better to do than trample the traditional British freedoms. However the instrumental political landscape, the 'deeper politics' as Stunz calls it, seems very much harder to navigate. It is not the thieves, the rapists, the murderers that are affected by these laws it is ‘us’, the normal non criminal class, the businessman, the farmer, the purchaser and seller. And stopping this trend, as the coalition presumably desires, requires more than political rhetoric and minor institutional tinkering.

Adam Snow is a Ph.D candidate, in the Research Institute for Social Sciences. His project, entitled 'Pay-As-You-Go-Justice? On the spot fines and the future of the Magistracy' is jointly funded by Keele University and the Magistrates' Association. Adam is supervised by Dr Helen Wells, Professor Barry Godfrey and Dr Mary Corcoran.

Are you going to be joining us at Keele later this month?

2011-09-07T11:45:00.000+01:00

If you will soon be joining us here at Keele to study at either Undergraduate or Postgraduate level, we want to make sure that you feel well informed and supported. We'd like to draw your attention to a number of developments which are all aimed at enhancing the experience of our students as they transition to life as a Keele Student.

These web pages have been designed to provide new students with important and relevant information. They offer clear and concise direction and information about what you need to do before and when arriving at Keele. They also provide an essential insight into what life as a Keele Student will be like. Welcome videos from VC Professor Nick Foskett and the KUSU Student Officer team are a great addition to what we hope will be a resource that can be developed year on year.

Within these webpages (on the opening page) you will find the Welcome Handbooks for new students. This year three handbooks (Undergraduate, Postgraduate and International) have been designed and are being distributed to students. The handbooks contain key information about preparation forarrival, enrolment, welcome talks, events and activities and key services and support on campus.

This year also sees the start of a new e-newsletter called 'Keele Life' which is aimed at incoming students due to arrive in 2011/12. Keele Life features introductory passages from a number of University services together with interviews with staff and students. As a new student you will receive three e-newsletters between late August and the start of the semester. The first one is available here.

There is also a whole series of induction events planned to run during Welcome Week that are designed to support you, our students, and make your start to University life as good as it can be.

We look forward to welcoming you later this month!

Marx was Right...

2011-09-05T22:03:00.002+01:00

Click the title of this blog to read the political philosopher John Gray on the fatal instability of capitalism.

National Student Survey confirms Keele as a top ten University for student satisfaction

2011-08-17T13:26:00.000+01:00

Statement from Marketing and Communications @ Keele:

Keele University has today (17th August 2011) been confirmed nationally as a top ten University by the National Student Survey. The annual survey which began in 2007 has shown that 90% of Keele students were satisfied with their course compared to an average of just 83% nationally.

Keele students were particularly pleased with the intellectual stimulation that their course offered and the quality of feedback they receive from academic staff. Students also indicated that they felt Keele's courses made them more confident personally and equipped them to deal with a breadth of challenges that modern day graduates are required to face.

Commenting on the results Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Rama Thirunamachandran, said "This is an excellent result for the University and is testament to all the hard work of both staff and students. Keele recognises that students have real choice in where to study and we take the responsibility of supporting them and ensuring that get the most from their time at Keele very seriously."

The summary data for the NSS 2011 can be found here
http://www.hefce.ac.uk/learning/nss/data/2011/

The course specific information can be found on the Unistats website at
http://unistats.direct.gov.uk/

More on the specific results for Sociology and Criminology soon...

Riots, Government Irresponsibility, and the Need for an Equal Society

2011-08-09T23:23:00.003+01:00

In the hours since my last blog I have heard calls for police to use rubber bullets and water canons to disperse rioters. I am generally curious how large scale government incompetence and irresponsibility over the last year have resulted in calls for more aggressive policing. Is this not the sign of a government that has no idea how to handle a section of its population?

The truth is that the Coalition Government represents the very rich, and at a push the upper middle classes, leaving the rest of us to put up, shut up, and swallow austerity measures designed to protect the rich. My feeling is that the current riots in our major cities are the result of what happens when a political class actively constructs and pursues the creation of an ultra-divided society comprised of included and excluded peoples. What is happening now is that the excluded – the scum, the rats, as one women called them today – are returning to remind Cameron et al that they are part of the society that he governs whether he likes it or not.

As has been noted endlessly over the last few days, these riots are not about political protest. Of course, they are not. Politics are irrelevant in our society because those in power are entirely dis-interest in the views of the people (consider student demos and strikes which had absolutely no impact on government opinion) and the opposition is too weak to offer any kind of worthwhile opinion. New Labour may as well not exist.

Instead of occupying a political society we live in a consumer society. Consumption is what matters and this is why protest today has to take the form of looting and stealing – if subjective protest takes the form of demos and strikes, objective protest is on the side of the rioters and looters. Of course, there is no defence for this behaviour, but let us make no mistake, the Conservative government is responsible for this situation. They have taken an already divided society and pulled up the ladder of social mobility leaving the excluded with nowhere to go. They have created social chaos.

In response to this, I do not think we should listen to popular right fascists who want to see military police on our streets. This is not the answer. Instead, what we need is a government who can manage our society responsibly in the name of everybody in our society, including those people Cameron, Gove et al, think are scum. Unfortunately, I do not think this is the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition. Our current government is clearly not fit to create and oversee an equal, peaceful, society.

Riots, rolling news and responsibility: some reflections

2011-08-09T17:13:00.001+01:00

Firstly, it struck me that there seemed to be very little in the way of an organised political agenda in what I was spent most of last night watching (apart from the politicians taking the opportunity to score points off each other with comments about tans and sun loungers and, occasionally more ideological observations). What I saw seemed more about opportunistic consumerism. As the Hackney resident in the extensively re-tweeted clip accused the rioters, “we’re not all gathering together and fighting for a cause we’re running down Footlocker and thieving shoes”. Granted, there were references to Cameron and student fees scrawled on the wall behind her, but that these groups of (mainly) young people were taking this opportunity to stock up on designer goods and must-have gadgets made me think that, rather than striving to bring about fundamental social change, there was the implicit assumption (expectation, requirement) that their own communities and society in general would soon return to a state in which those items would again have some kind of status worth. Little point in parading the latest 4G phone or boasting a 50” TV if civil unrest brings down the national infrastructure including telecommunications and power. Rather, the items being opportunistically looted were the items that carried some kind of worth ‘before’ and that they could be reasonably confident would do so again ‘after’. Relative deprivation in action, perhaps, but not an attempt to challenge the fundamental underpinnings of our society, to rail against capitalism or (and this might be a little more controversial) to protest at ‘the cuts’.

Secondly, I found myself reflecting on the watching experience itself. The irony of the BBC News channel blaming social networking sites for spreading news of violence and “potentially violent groups of young people”, yet not once reflecting on the effects of rolling 24hours news reporting struck me. As did the irony of finding myself entering something along these lines as my status update on Facebook. To someone so inclined, the possibility of being Breaking News on one of the many channels offering us the crisis in minute-by-minute realtime could, it seems feasible, be the spur needed to head out into the streets, set a fire, and see how long it took the Sky News helicopter to find them. The reporting of copycat violence in other UK towns didn’t once reflect on the source of the information that could be copied.

Of course, these observations skirt around the meatier issues of causation. I have used the term ‘so inclined’ (above) carelessly perhaps, whilst uncomfortably aware that these are the real issues here – and the ones less easily reflected on and put into words. Are the police part of the cause or part of the solution? Is the anger of these young people directed at them as representatives of an institution or as representatives of the state, or society in general? Are they simply the ones on the ground, and present (or not present if you believe some of the reporting) when other issues boil over? If you were to ask a looter or rioter engaged in the act what their motivations were, would they have any? And would the absence of any clearly articulated motive prove that this was random and wanton, or would it signal the lack of educational opportunities that both underpinned their anger and denied these individuals the skills to enunciate their grievances? Is it a coincidence that many of these images are so redolent of scenes from Grand Theft Auto (and here I know I am getting into uncomfortable territory). Are these apparently motiveless acts actually desperate attempts by the powerless to exercise power for even the briefest of moments – destined to be extinguished along with the fires they set.

Depending on what you read, and where you read it, the problem is Conservative policy, a legacy of New Labour, poor parenting, blocked opportunities, immigration, and (occasionally) the death of Mark Duggan. To many it seems that this is to be taken as an opportunity to trot out some well-rehearsed grievances about the state of the country, the youth of today, the decline of old-fashioned values, whilst for others (e.g. those using Twitter and Facebook not to co-ordinate destruction but to marshall clean-up operations) it requires a stout defence of community, a determined effort to deny these events the status that others see them as having.

Either way, we are currently in some kind of peculiar limbo as we wait for the rioters to sleep off their nights’ activities, for dusk to fall again, and for the cogs of political decision making to slowly crank into emergency action. Meanwhile I am left with the uncomfortable sense that the unprecedented nature of the events (and potentially the response being considered in Westminster) is as much about the unprecedented nature of the multi-media and communications context as it is about the unprecedented nature of the broader social climate.

Helen Wells

On the Current Riots in London and Other British Cities

2011-08-09T15:57:00.003+01:00

After the third night of rioting in London, other British cities, such as Birmingham, Nottingham, Liverpool, and Bristol, have also seen serious disturbances and vandalism. Media reporting has been very clear that the rioters are young people, but unfortunately there has been little attempt to understand the reasons behind the unrest.

Akin to the Home Secretary, Theresa May, who has talked about ‘sheer criminality’, the media has tended to report the unrest in terms of a kind of irrational, meaningless, pointless deviance. As a Sociologist, I have no doubt that the riots appear irrational and meaningless, but I also know that this is not really the case and that there are social reasons for these kind of disturbances. In some ways it is easy to talk about ‘criminality’. All you have to do is lock people up. You don’t have to try to understand or deal with deep rooted social and political issues. Having said this, there is no doubt. The riots are not explicitly political. Instead, they are the acts of people who feel excluded and believe that they have no stake in the communities and society they are seeking to destroy.

But if the riots are clearly an expression of rage, and reflect what happens to people when society falls to listen to them or factor them into its plans, they are also clearly entrepreneurial in respect of the fact that the rioters are clearly looters, stealing clothes, electrical equipment, and other consumer durables. Again, one does not need a PhD in Sociology to understand the reasons behind looting. The American Sociologist Robert Merton explained in the 1930s that if a society sets itself up on the basis of particular goals and objectives and then deprives a large section of the population from access to those goals and objectives, then that excluded population will find alternative means to achieve those goals and objectives. In Merton’s American case, it is easy to see how this theory plays out. The goals and objectives are money, consumption, success, and the American dream and the excluded population are the poor people, and especially the racially excluded Blacks and Hispanics, who turn to crime in order to achieve the goals that the middle classes take for granted.

Is the same theory not playing out in Britain today? What has happened over the course of the last 15 years is that we have raised a generation of people on the basis of an ideology that said that the capitalistic goods of society should be accessible to everybody. Following the last Conservative government, the New Labour model of social mobility, premised on the value of education, was meant to allow everybody to have a piece of the pie. Unfortunately, even then, youth ran out of control in a society absolutely geared around consumption and enjoyment, because nobody wants to wait and our society is already massively unequal. However, Blair et al held back the tide of criminality because they could offer people the potential of legitimate means to achieve the socially determined goals of consumption and success. Unsurprisingly for a group of millionaires who have never had to think about means to ends because they have always been there, the Conservatives behaved in an entirely socially irresponsible manner and set about destroying the basic social framework in Britain which could allow for the promise of legitimate means to the goals of inclusion in consumer capitalism.

Cuts to everything, including welfare and education, have created an atmosphere where the poor and alienated feel that the basic means to the ends of success are no longer available. Moreover, at the same time that austerity is expected of the poor, who are simply meant to swallow their lack of opportunity, it is, of course, business as usual for the rich who continue to consume and the mass media which persists in selling everybody a consumer fantasy. In other words, at the same time as the Conservative government has pulled up the ladder of social mobility, the media has continued to advertise the spectacle of the riches and excesses of the consumer society. As a consequence, our society has effectively rubbed the noses of the poor and young in their lack of opportunity. Of course, New Labour never did anything to tame the excesses of the rich, but at least they had the good sense to leave a crack in the door open for the poor and centrally the young who still believe they can make it.

It is precisely this crack in the door that the Conservatives have slammed shut. If our current economic problems last for another five to ten years, the average 16 year old could be somewhere between 21 and 26 by the time we emerge from this situation. It is not enough to sacrifice these people and treat them as collateral damage in order to save the bacon of the rich who would rather not pay more tax. It is not enough to say that cuts are necessary and lump the burden on the poor and the young, leaving the rich free to enjoy what they have apparently earned. If cuts are necessary, the burden should fall on the richest members of our society, who should carry the weight of the mistakes of the past, because they are the people who benefited most in the good times. Quite apart from the ethical evil of throwing a generation on the scrap heap before they have even had the chance to start their adult lives, it is entirely socially irresponsible to do so, because riots will inevitably by the result. As a Sociologist, I am truly amazed that the Conservative government did not see these riots on the horizon. The fact that they clearly did not see this coming illustrates a number of important points for me, which should lead us to democratically remove them from office as quickly as possible. First, they have absolutely no sense of society or the majority people who live within it. They have no idea about the way people feel or how they react when they feel that they have no future. They are out of touch.

Second, they have no idea about recent history. Did these people not live through the inner city riots in the 1980s, which were the result of Thatcher’s war on the working classes? There is no specific working class unrest today, and what we are witnessing is not class war, so perhaps we can excuse people with no sense of social history this over-sight. But what about the French riots in 2005, 2006, and 2007. Did the Conservative government not see how young, disenfranchised, people responded to deep social exclusion in Paris and other French cities? Did they not imagine that the same events might occur in Britain? Third, the Conservatives are clearly arrogant and socially irresponsible in the extreme because they did not consider the possibility that their policies could destabilize our society in this way. They thought they could ride roughshod over people and that everybody would simply consent to their violent policies. Unlike New Labour who understood the political import of maintaining the idea of social mobility, the Conservatives appear to have such a low opinion of the people and their aspirations that they do not feel the need to provide them with the basic possibility of opportunity.

Regardless of the entirely predictable line of Theresa May – we have to be tough on crime – we have to ask ourselves whether we want to live in a society where so many people feel excluded and badly treated? What kind of society do we have where people, and especially young people, feel this way? What kind of democracy do we have where people riot because they feel that they have no voice and no future?

Ironically, we have the same kind of democracy that ignores massive student protests and waves of strikes. We have the same kind of democracy that we had in the 1980s when the Thatcher government felt it was acceptable to destroy entire communities in the name of economic growth and the same kind of democracy the French have today which leaves young ethnic people to rot on sprawling suburban estates. But I do not think we should accept a return to the social divisions of the 1980s. It is not enough for a government to mindlessly repeat the mistakes of the past in the name of protecting the privileges of the rich. Nobody wants to live with riots and social chaos. Nobody should have their homes and businesses burned to the ground. This is not the kind of society anybody wants and it is not enough for government to say that every rioter is a mindless criminal. That is no explanation and that is no way to handle massive unrest. A true democracy listens. As we know from the Arab Spring, democracy is better than authoritarianism because it involves all of the people. It does not ignore them and lock them up.

On the basis that nobody should want to live in a society where so many people are excluded to the extent that they feel that rioting is the way forward, I think it is a mistake to simply focus on the symptom – the rioters – and talk about their ‘sheer criminality’ because this will not change anything. Instead, I think that we need to think about the deep social and political causes of what we have witnessed over the course of the last three nights in our major cities and decide that we need a society that is inclusive and cares about the future of the majority of the population, rather than one which is dominated by a self-interested elite who have no sense of the need to provide the rest of the population with the means of social mobility.

Mark Featherstone

Muslims in the European Mediascape Survey – can you help?

2011-07-12T13:23:00.003+01:00

By Siobhan Holohan

Can you help with this research project?

The 'Muslims in the European Mediascape' Research Project funded by The Institute for Strategic Dialogue in partnership with the Vodafone Foundation Germany and the British Council aims to explore the complexity of media production and consumption in an ever-more diverse Europe. The research is being led by two teams based in the UK (Dr Siobhan Holohan, Keele University and Dr Elizabeth Poole, Staffordshire University) and Germany (Professor Andreas Zick and Dr Jörg Heeren, Bielefeld University), and aims to identify relationships between social cohesion and trends in the use and production of media in view of key variables, including socio-economic background, education, gender, ethnicity, religion, generation, personal and private inter-cultural relationships, and age in the UK and Germany.

Having completed the first stage of the research – in-depth interviews with media producers from mainstream and ‘Muslim’ media organisations – we are now looking for participants for stage two which aims to identify the choices people make when it comes to the media they consume, and what impact those choices might have on inter-cultural social relations in the UK and Germany. The first part of this research is being conducted via a short online survey which can be found at http://www.unipark.de/uc/muslim-media-research. This version of the survey is specific to UK media consumers. However, we are looking for people from all cultural / ethnic / religious backgrounds and from as many walks of life as possible to participate in the survey. All views are valid. The survey should take no more than 10 minutes to complete and is anonymous. From this start we hope to build a picture of media consumption and attitudes toward inter-cultural relationships which can be furthered by qualitative media consumer focus groups at a later stage.

If you would like further information about this survey or the project as a whole please contact Dr Siobhan Holohan, s.holohan@keele.ac.uk or Dr Elizabeth Poole, e.poole@staffs.ac.uk.

Graduate Teaching Assistantships / PhD opportunities at Keele

2011-07-12T10:10:00.000+01:00

School of Sociology and Criminology moves up in all three major league tables

2011-06-24T15:15:00.000+01:00

The Times Good University guide, released on June 23rd 2011, has confirmed the place of the School of Sociology and Criminology at Keele University as a rising star. The Times guide showed the Sociology subject area at 26th, moving two places closer to a Top 20 rating. As there are nearly 90 Sociology departments across the UK, this improvement to an already impressive rating is welcome news. In the two other key league tables, Sociology showed some dramatic improvements, moving nine places to 21st in the Complete University Guide and moving seventeen places to 20th in the Guardian University Guide. Meanwhile Criminology (listed in the tables under the ‘Social Policy’ heading) confirmed its place as a Top 20 subject scoring 16th in the Times, 14th in the Guardian and 20th in the Complete University Guide.

Dr Bill Dixon, Head of the School of Sociology and Criminology said: “We are delighted that our teaching and research excellence is showing through. Staff in our School are committed to providing a high-quality and well-supported learning experience for our students”. This commitment shows through in student feedback: the national student survey rates Keele overall 11th in the country for student satisfaction and ten members of the staff (half of the teaching team) in the School of Sociology and Criminology were nominated this year for Teaching Excellence awards with Dr Dixon himself receiving an award.

While providing excellent teaching and student support is a priority, the School of Sociology and Criminology also achieved a number of key successes for students and staff in community and workplace engagement. A student from our School again won the prestigious Neil and Gina Smith Student of the Year award for 2010-11. Amy Chapman, a local mature student who came to Keele from an Access to HE course at South Cheshire College, won this award for her academic excellence while playing an active role locally improving opportunities and aspirations for other young people. Two out of the three runners up in this year’s award – Dani Hughes and Danielle Bremner - are also from our School. Amy is the third winner from our School in only six years that the award has been running. Sociology and Criminology student Matt Bedding managed to get elected as Student Union Vice-President for Welfare while continuing his work with Nightline for which he received a national lifetime award. All of these students will graduate with first class honours.

The School also successfully launched its new Master’s degree in Criminology and Criminal Justice, which is taught in blocks to allow professionals to study while maintaining their employment, and a new module ‘Working for Justice’ which enables undergraduate students to find out more about the Criminal Justice field from professionals. A further scheme with work experience opportunities is in development for both Sociology and Criminology students, following the award of a Teaching Innovation grant for employer engagement to Dr Rebecca Leach.

Ghost Town Beijing

2011-06-23T14:17:00.008+01:00

By Dr Mark Featherstone

Following a presentation on urban utopianism and dystopianism in Beijing last night, I was surprised to find myself in an indie bar playing late 1970s-early 1980s British punk-new wave music. The surreal effect of listening to music by The Undertones, Buzzcocks, and Vapours that I grew up with in late 1970s Hull in the middle of Beijing was cemented when The Specials’ anthem to Thatcherite urban decay, Ghost Town, began to play. Visiting the bar, I was even more surprised to see the video for the record running on a large screen on the wall, and I could not help but remember seeing images of Terry Hall et al packed into a car for the first time on TV in 1981. While many of the other records I heard last night reminded me of growing up in the 1980s, what was different about Ghost Town was that it said everything to me about my experience of the social condition of Hull and the decay and decline of the city in a kind of urban gothic that I found simultaneously depressing and frightening, but also exciting because of the sense of possibility I found in the ruins of a society slipping away into history.

Ghost Town is thirty years old this year, having been released in 1981, the year of widespread riots across the UK, but I cannot help but feel that is has renewed relevance to British society today. The destruction of industrial Britain which took place under the Thatcher governments in the 1980s and produced the kind of urban gothic so brilliantly captured by The Specials is today being repeated at a more advanced level by the coalition government which is similarly in the process of wasting large parts of the country which are heavily reliant on the public sector for employment. It is ironic that I heard Ghost Town for the first time in many years in Beijing because the Chinese capital would initially appear to be about as far away from a ghost town as it is possible to imagine. Contrary to English cities such as Hull and Stoke-on-Trent, which are haunted by ghosts that have never been laid to rest, Beijing recalls the sci-fi urban imaginary from Blade Runner, and seems completely devoid of history. Whereas it would seem appropriate to understand places such as Hull through Ghost Town, if you need to understand Beijing I would suggest looking to French post-modern theorists, such as Paul Virilio, and other contemporary urban thinkers, such as Mike Davis, for guidance.

However, first impressions are not always correct and there is a sense in which perhaps post-modern Beijing is also haunted by its own particular ghosts and possessed by a kind of melancholia related to the destruction of the old city and gradual decline of traditional life, as documented in classic books such as Beijing Record. Perhaps, then, Beijing is also a kind of post-modern ghost town and in some ways this has been confirmed by my impressions of the place. Apart from my alienation from the architecture of Chinese power, my overwhelming feeling about Beijing is that it represents a hyper-divided society inhabited by a kind of ultra-poor who live in urban villages, strange slum spaces constructed on the basis of some rural imaginary of feudal China, and a post-modern super-rich, who live in upscale apartments in the Central Business District and enjoy wealth and opportunity similar to the super-rich in other global cities, London, New York, and Tokyo.

As a Marxist sociologist, speaking to Chinese academics about urban division has been a strange experience, primarily because the standard western notion that what is required to tame the worst excesses of capitalism is leftism and socialism makes no sense in a society where the Communist party is in league with business and drives the destruction of community. Unfortunately, my response to my Chinese colleagues who have celebrated the freedoms of the west, and talked positively about rightism, is that neo-liberalism with personal freedom is really little better than neo-liberalism with Chinese characteristics because both are essentially anti-democratic and controlled by elite business interests set on the money making policy of creative destruction which produces the kind of ghost towns The Specials sang about in the early 1980s. As you can imagine, the result of my response led us towards a kind of impasse, and we had to try to imagine a new way forward beyond traditional leftism and liberalism, since both of these approaches seem today to be totally under the thumb of business. Although we did not reach any conclusions, beyond ideas about progressive taxation and incorruptible politicians, we agreed that the importance of imagining a new kind of utopian politics today that transcends divisions between left and right, and centrally is willing and able to control business.

If my work in Beijing has taught me anything, apart from the fact that the Chinese have good taste in late 1970s-early 1980s punk / new wave music, it is that the task of contemporary sociology has to be to find this utopian anti-economic middle way between left and right. Unfortunately, this task may have been made more difficult by the idea of the third way, which was essentially neo-liberalism with a human face, but I think that the size of the challenge means that we must try to rethink solutions of social inequality on a macro scale which does not involve becoming servants of a state which has already made all of the important political decisions and simply wants sociologists to produce raw data. If we are not willing do this I think we can forget about resolving the problems of the ghost town and should instead simply accept the teenage kicks of the consumer society, when and where we can get them.

Making a difference: Amy Chapman, Neil & Gina Smith Student of the Year 2011

2011-06-17T13:00:00.002+01:00

The School of Sociology and Criminology are delighted to see the 2011 Neil & Gina Smith Student of the Year Award go to Amy Chapman, a Criminology Major in our School. Amy was a mature entrant via an Access course and the first in her family (from Crewe) to attend university. As well as achieving academic excellence while supporting herself financially throughout her studies, she has played an important role in 'making a difference' to the lives of other local young people. The Student of the Year award is given in recognition of outstanding academic achievement alongside outstanding commitment to public service, citizenship and/or overcoming hardship. Students from our School - Danielle Hughes (Criminology) and Danielle Bremner (Sociology) were also two out of the three runners' up for this award. Congratulations to all of you.

We are particularly pleased because Amy is the THIRD annual winner from our School in the six years that the award has been running. Previous winners from our School are Rachel Cason (nee Wiggett) and the first winner Heather Phillips. A prize of £5000 is made and both our previous winners have made good use of the fund to continue their studies at Keele.

Alongside Matt Bedding's national award this year for his work with Keele Nightline, it is clearer than ever that our students are graduating ready to put their studies in Sociology and Criminology to good use in 'making a difference' in society. And we also know that for every exceptional individual who receives the awards and plaudits, there are many more of you who are working away at your studies while seeking to make things better in your communities, or those of people less fortunate. This makes us very happy, because it is often one of the key reasons people study our subjects: that you are enabled to put this into practice while studying with us is a testament to your commitment and to the relevance of the teaching programmes in Sociology and Criminology at Keele.

Ray Pahl - RIP

2011-06-09T12:53:00.000+01:00

We were saddened to hear of the death of Ray Pahl last week, just a few days after he donated his papers to the Keele University library, as an extension to the Foundations of Sociology archive. Ray was - among many other roles - an honorary Visiting Professor in Sociology at Keele in the last few years of his life and he worked with a number of Keele staff (in particular Graham Allan and Chris Phillipson) as well as taking an active interest in the work of Keele's staff and students. We were very pleased that he chose to leave his papers in the archives here, which will give future scholars at Keele and beyond the opportunity to explore further the enormous legacy he left to British sociology. I am sure there will be many obituaries and plaudits for his life, his work and his contribution to communities across Britain, but for now, we'd just like to note a gentle 'thanks' for his engagement with us.

Two Months In

2011-06-01T11:02:00.000+01:00

By Adam Snow, PhD Candidate at Keele

So here I am two months into a 3 year PhD and already the to-do list is piling up! I started my PhD in April, I’m undertaking a funded study into “on the spot” fines and the future of the magistracy. Fixed penalty notices are now the primary way in which most “crimes” are dealt with, accounting for over half of all punishments given out by the state. They are the primary way in which “ordinary” people come into contact with the justice system, either as drivers, receiving FPNs, or social drinkers receiving PND’s (Penalty Notices Disorder). My study aims to examine both the debates about the use of on the spot fines and the theories underpinning their use.

By now I had planned to have it all worked out, the reading planned out and a very definite direction. I was so excited when I started that I thought 3 years, pah! I’ll get this done in 12 months no problem. And then the books and articles started piling up and you realise just how much work is involved, I’m coming to the conclusion that there is literally a book for every idea that has ever been.

You start off with a very definite idea of where you want the study to go; you have completed your masterful research proposal. Surely it’s just a matter of following this to its conclusion. And then you begin reading. That’s when it starts to kick in how naive your research proposal is. You start off thinking that this study is going to shake the very foundations of knowledge, then soon start to fear that (within about a week) you’ll be lucky if anyone but your supervisor and external examiners will want to read it!

Having worked for years prior to starting my PhD was a blessing; I am used to the early mornings and work day monotony, following the Dolly Parton day 9-5. It wasn’t like this as an undergraduate: I had friends, we had fun; now I have books and concepts to keep me entertained! Only 34 months to go...

One question that I keep bugging the other PhD candidates with is when does the study start to take shape, when do you really know what you are doing? A third year candidate told me to give them a ring if I ever find out because they haven’t found an answer yet.

Having said all that I would still choose a PhD over work every day of the week and twice on a Sunday. The freedom to determine what you do on a day to day basis is a precious liberty and one that will not be afforded to you at work!

I still count my blessings every day that I obtained this position, Keele is a wonderful place to work and study and the people are incredibly friendly. The best tip I can give, with all my 2 months of experience, is to get a good supervisor! (I have) It makes all the difference. I remember a friend of mine telling me how when she was training to become a surgeon her supervisor would boast how he was unhappy if he did not make his students cry at least once a day. Luckily Dr Wells, my supervisor, doesn’t subscribe to this mantra. Well, not yet anyway.

Anyway it’s time to get back to work: there are books to read! I’ll keep you posted throughout my study as to how things are developing.

Adam’s project is partly funded by the Magistrates’ Association, and is linked to their ongoing seminar series ‘The Magistracy in the 21st Century’. It is being supervised by Dr Helen Wells, Professor Barry Godfrey and Dr Mary Corcoran. If you are interested in Adam’s project or his experiences as a new PhD student at Keele, you can contact him at a.j.snow@ilpj.keele.ac.uk. He is looking for volunteers to take part in focus groups or interviews later in the study, so if you have ever received “on the spot” fine he would love to hear about your experience.

The Unsettler: Sociology and Demobilisation

2011-05-24T18:49:00.005+01:00

By Dr Mark Featherstone

After having been away from blogging for a few months because of research leave and teaching commitments, I decided to return after a research visit to Paris to finish talking about the sociology of immobility. I was curious to essay my own situation upon my return, but it has taken me more or less a month to get around to writing this piece. This is, of course, no advertisement for the high speed society, nor the advantages of blogging where information moves lightning fast. I wish that I could claim laziness, say that I had plenty of time on my hands, and that I simply hadn’t been bothered to write, because this would mean I had taken time off. But there is no laziness in the high speed society and unfortunately the truth is much worse. I simply have not had the time to write anything. Now, as research projects stack up around me, must-read books pile up in ever increasing quantities covering my office, and my diary swells with meetings, and many more appointments I have probably not written down, I thought I needed to sit down to write about the paradoxical relationship between mobility and immobility in contemporary society. So here we are.

There was something interesting about flying off to Paris, spending a day and a half in the suburbs of the French capital, and then returning to the UK in a desperate attempt to secure a visa for entry into China a week later. I never made it to Beijing in the end and had to postpone my trip. But by the time it became clear I was going nowhere the very effort of trying to organise a visa, flights, foreign currency, not to mention finish off papers to present in the Chinese capital, made me feel as though I had been to China and back without ever having left my office. Email went back and forth, and I made aborted phone calls to Beijing, without getting anywhere, before I eventually accepted I was staying put. In the end I had achieved very little, apart from discovering I had the wrong documentation to enter China on a lecturing visa. I had remained completely immobile in every sense of the word, and yet by the end of the week, I felt in a state of panic.

Admittedly, I may be prone to this kind of reaction when confronted with the prospect of travel. Those who know me know very well that I have never really considered myself a member of the global elite, having been brought up in a particularly immobile environment where nobody seemed to do anything and nothing ever seemed to change. On a continuum spanning those who belong to, or dwell in a place and those who live nowhere and everywhere at the same time, I fall very much into the former category, having never found mobility very easy. Unfortunately, having said all of this, I am, perhaps, in the worst possible position, being somebody who wants to dwell somewhere, but is also an exile from that place. So I live between somewhere and nowhere, which really means nowhere or a kind of liminal place. As a researcher of utopias I know that nowhere should be best possible place, or at least that’s what Thomas More told us, when he called his perfect world utopia meaning both good place and no place, but I can’t really sustain that belief. Nowhere is really no good. It is like the non-places French sociologist Marc Auge talks about. These places, airports and the like, are only good for moving through on your way somewhere else.

But then again, I’m ambivalent. Nowhere has its attractions. For example, I like airports. They’re transitory places and I feel a great sense of freedom in them. The paradox of airports is that even when you’re loaded down with bags, you have no baggage. You’re on the move and you could go anywhere. Unfortunately, the problem with non-places is that its easy to get stuck there. Nobody wants to be stuck nowhere, like the traveler in the Tom Hanks’ film, who ends up living in an airport for months on end, because its impossible to settle and grow any kind of roots there. There is some kind of freedom in that admittedly, but it becomes a bit tiresome in the end. So nowhere, and the non-place of the exile is nowhere to be, even though sociologists have long known that aliens make the best critical thinkers because the normal looks absurd to them. That’s okay, and it may make for good academic work, but it’s hard to live on the outside looking in. Having said all of this, I should not over-egg my status as melancholy exile. I spent my early life thinking about escaping from my immobile situation. Everybody I knew did. That was life. In this respect, roots and the idea of dwelling are based on a kind of imaginary situation for me. In the language of Benedict Anderson, I have an imaginary view of what it was like to live in a working class community.

But I also know that in a society premised on the idea of mobility, immobility kills. Perhaps this is why airports are the best and worst of places to be – we are all mobile in the airport, until we get stuck, and then our immobility is thrown into sharp relief by the very fact that the place we occupy is a kind of transitory non-place that exists for no other reason than to move people on. You absolutely do not want to get stuck there. In fact, perhaps we should learn to appreciate airports more for what they can tell us about contemporary society and our mindset today because the condition of the airport which enables movement but also invariably malfunctions and breaks down causing panic-inducing immobility symbolises the great problem of the mobile society. That to say that the great problem of moving around and running about without stopping to take stock is that you end up getting nowhere and nothing ever happens.

As such, there is a point where mobility folds into immobility, with the added ingredient of the desperate need to move in a society geared towards dynamism and change. Herein resides the difference between me now, stuck between Paris and Beijing in a kind of twilight zone, and me twenty years ago, caught on a council estate on the edge of Hull, wondering how I could escape. In the past I had nowhere to be. I had no reason to leave, even though I knew there had to be more to life, whereas now I have somewhere to be, but have come to see everywhere as a kind of transitory place on the road to somewhere else. In the past everywhere was an end, a kind of dead end, and now there is no end, but only endless movement. What is more is that I am not unusual in this view – I use myself as an example of a particular world view, the world view of the contemporary global nomad, the unsettler, who is propelled ever forward by the demand to move contained in contemporary society.

Unlike the nomads of the past who went to a place and eventually settled somewhere, today we are unsettlers because we never stay anywhere for too long. My own case is hyperbolic, because as I am well aware that I have a dislike of both mobility and immobility, and this puts me in the difficult, even comic position of not wanting to go anywhere, but also not wanting to stay where I am for too long, wherever that may be at any given time. Perhaps this makes me the ideal of citizen of More’s utopian city that did not exist, a place that was also a no place. But I don’t think so. The problem with More’s people was they were far too settled where they were and that’s not how the unsettler is today. Caught in a place that’s not a place, but rather a non-place, the unsettler displays a strange psychological condition we might want to call topophobia – the fear of places. More’s people don’t show any symptoms of this problem. They seem happy where they are. By contrast the contemporary topophobic does not like any place that exists, but instead wants to imagine places they would like to inhabit and then inhabit these imaginary places through mental constructs made up of equal parts of melancholia and desire. Imagination and the desire to move are, therefore, key to understanding the topophobic. As I see it, there is none of this unrest in More’s people.

This is, of course, paradoxical since one would imagine that unrest is exactly what makes one a utopian. Is unrest not what defines the utopian imagination? But we know that unrest is difficult to live with and nobody wants to live between places. It’s not easy. Does this amount to saying that utopia is bad, and that social dreaming is no good, because what it means is that you will never be happy where you are, and always want to find somewhere else that doesn’t really exist? Does this mean that the utopian topophobic is a person who is addicted to movement, but at the same time hates going anywhere because what they want more than anything is to stop moving and rest for a little while in some imaginary place they will never find? In many ways this question touches upon the key point of utopian thinking and practice. What most utopian dreamers have done over the course of history is to try to design imaginary places where people could rest and would have no more need of their imaginations. In utopia other places cease to exist. You are where you are and that’s it.

This is exactly what communists of all types have sought to do over the course of history – from Plato through Stalin to Pol Pot, reds have sought to destroy our ability to think otherwise. Let’s imagine imagination out of existence, because its too hard to keep wanting something that you can never have, a place that does not exist. The response to this strategy has, of course, been the great dystopias which say exactly that. From Diogenes the Dog to George Orwell, the utopians of freedom have told us that even though its hard to keep moving, nobody wants to be subsumed in a place that is completely immobile. So accept your desire to move and live with it. I think that’s true, and I would go along with the radical critique of Plato’s Republic and the Orwellian attack on Stalinism, but the problem is that our own society has taken the idea of mobility too far.

Nobody wants to be stuck in a hopeless situation, where all you can do is dream but never go anywhere, but equally topophobia is no good either. In many respects this is where we are today in contemporary global capitalism. We are all supposed to be ‘super-busy’ - and smile about it. If we have any time we are meant to cram it full of work or leisure. There is no time to do nothing. But it’s enough to drive anybody mad and I’m not sure what’s worse – sitting on a council estate bedsit somewhere wondering what could be or finding yourself caught in a similarly immobile position frantically struggling to manage an overloaded work and leisure schedule.

Although the nature of the collapse of time may have changed, the experience of immobility remains the same. In the case of the bedsit dweller, time has no meaning and it is impossible to go anywhere, because they have nowhere to go and no reason to be anywhere. By contrast, the member of what Zygmunt Bauman would call the contemporary liquid class has no time and can’t get anywhere because he has to be everywhere and has no time to do anything. The outcome of both situations is the same, I think: topophobia, the desire to move, and escape, into a stable yet imaginary place which does not continually propel one forwards.

The great founder of liberal philosophy Thomas Hobbes would have considered any such attempt to find a place beyond mobility ridiculous, since he thought about life in terms of a race. In his view people are like atoms bouncing around in abstract space. They possess trajectories and this is what keeps them alive. Unfortunately, however, nobody can ever have an unimpeded trajectory through life. The very nature of human existence means that people desire similar objects and therefore invariably clash in their life trajectories. As such, we must compete and struggle to ensure that we come out on top in the great race that is life. Obviously, Hobbes was no Darwinian before Darwin, and he did not simply advocate natural selection and the survival of the fittest, but rather thought that it was necessary to take the natural inclination of people towards struggle and competition and lift it onto the level of economic competition where it could be safely controlled. Or at least, this is how the great Canadian theorist of liberalism, C. B. MacPherson, thought about Hobbes' most famous work on the emergence of society.

Although his work is not so well known today, I think that MacPherson provides us with a useful insight into the nature of contemporary society because what it illustrates is that the root problem of our situation – and the problem of the simultaneous divergence and similarity of the experiences of the bedsit dweller and the global traveler – is the result of an economic system that imperils us in equal measure every minute of the day. Why do we fear staying anywhere for too long? Why are we all topophobic today? The answer is quite simple. In the great game of capitalist survivalism, it does not pay to stay still for too long. In order to stay in, and preferably ahead of, the game you absolutely have to keep moving and stay mobile. However, as we have seen, there is a limit to how far this is possible, and in the end it is likely that our society will congeal into a kind of immobile opposition between those who cannot go anywhere because they have nowhere to go and those who cannot move because they have to be everywhere all at the same time. We really need to avoid the emergence of this kind of society because it will result in one outcome – a massive outpouring of psychological unrest in a society committed to mobility.

What should we do, then, to oppose this situation? First, we have to resist the utopian temptation to oppose the addiction to movement with the resolution of stasis in a society where nothing changes. This has been tried by communists throughout history. It does not work. Total immobility is no way forward and only results in the reemergence of the obsession with change and dynamism. Second, I think we have to try to transform our society into a less competitive place, which is not geared around endless change and transformation, but rather takes care of those who cannot keep up and stops challenging people to do more and move faster. As Marx saw in the 19th century, and Simmel recognised early in the 20th century, the society premised on the notion that ‘all is solid melts into air’ is not easy to stand. We all know this to be true and yet, in many respects, we have yet to learn the lesson of the classical sociologists. I think this is the challenge for our society in the immediate future – we must learn from Marx and Simmel. We must learn to demobilise. But how can we do this in a society which functions like a race track? Perhaps this should be the subject for another blog. But for now I fear I must suspend my commitment to demobilisation - I need to try to re-book my flights to Beijing.

MAGISTRATES' ASSOCIATION SEMINAR SERIES AT KEELE

2011-05-23T09:16:00.002+01:00

Magistrates and academics came together last week at Keele Hall to discuss how the courts can encourage desistence from offending. Presentations from academics in the fields of criminology, law and social work contributed to a lively debate.The audience was also introduced to Adam Snow, who has just been appointed as the Magistrates' Association Fellow and will be studying for a PhD entitled 'Pay As You Go Justice: Out of Court Disposals and the Future of the Magistracy'.

This is the first in a series of seminars sponsored by the Magistrates' Association, organised by Dr Helen Wells, Dr Mary Corcoran, Professor David Gadd and Professor Barry Godfrey. The next two seminars will be held in Manchester and London and will discuss "the role of short sentences" and "the future of local justice".

This collaboration between academics and practitioners has been widely praised, and we look forward to more of these kinds of events at Keele.

Another 'what can I do with a sociology degree?' resource

2011-05-17T17:30:00.001+01:00

The Guardian Careers site is hosting a live webchat on Weds 18th May 2011 between 1-4pm on What to do with a Sociology degree. Please join in and post a question on their site: Guardian Careers/Sociology and do refer back to the page later since they will archive it and other commentators will no doubt post their views.

We've gained promotion to the Premier League! Keele Sociology and Criminology programmes confirm their Top 20 status

2011-05-17T15:23:00.003+01:00

The Sociology and Criminology undergraduate degree programmes at Keele were today confirmed as being in the 'Premier League' - recognised as two of the Top 20 courses in these subjects in the UK. The Guardian University Guide for 2012 confirmed Keele's place as one of the best places to get a good student experience and high quality education in these subjects. Sociology moved up 17 places from 37th last year to 20th this year; and Criminology (listed as 'Social Policy' in most guides) is 14th in the country. This high rating builds on our previous successes earlier this month in the Complete University Guide in which Sociology at Keele moved up to 21st and Criminology emerged as 20th.

Bill Dixon, Head of the School of Sociology and Criminology said "We're delighted that our programmes in Sociology and Criminology are achieving recognition nationally. Teaching staff here are committed to students and to providing high-quality, research-led programmes. Keele is a special place, and we're extremely proud to be providing a special learning experience."

"One of the things we're most proud of is the close, supportive relationships we build up with our students. Students appreciate this and we work hard to maintain good feedback, friendly learning environments and personal contact with teaching staff. In 2010/11 over half of the staff group in Sociology and Criminology were nominated by students for University teaching excellence awards."

You can find out more about the Sociology and Criminology programmes by looking at our prospectus, following this blog, following us on Twitter @socandcrimkeele or on our Facebook page www.facebook.com/socandcrimkeele If you'd like to come and visit us, you can talk to staff and current students at our Open Days or if you can't make these dates, contact us to arrange for a visit.

Urban Monstrosity

2011-05-10T09:59:00.015+01:00

By

Mark Featherstone

In Mathieu Kassowitz’s 1995 film 'La Haine' the outskirts of Paris are represented as a strange savage wilderness characterised by alienation, despair, ethnic tension, and low level criminality. Fifteen years on the characters may have changed, so that the ethnic aliens in Kassowitz’s film have been replaced by a new ‘other’ in the form of the Romanian immigrant, but the general condition of ethnic tension and class division remain the same. On my recent trip to le banlieues with the French cultural studies journal D-Fiction, I walked through the dystopian ruins of modern Paris, the spaces of Le Corbusier, a failed utopia, which has now decayed to a kind of anomic non-space.

But how can we understand the condition of urban monstrosity which has seen the modernist utopia become a post-modern dystopia in the context of contemporary Paris? How can we understand the contemporary nature of urban alienation in Paris, and the situation of the new ethnic alien, the Romanian or Transylvanian other, the vampire who threatens the life-blood of the French nation in Sarkozy’s neo-liberal imaginary? In my forthcoming work on urban monstrosity, I seek to explore the contemporary French urban condition through a discussion of Romanian philosopher, Emil Cioran, on the notions of decay, utopia, and dystopia, and a visual ethnography of the contemporary Parisian suburb. While Cioran spent much of his life in Paris, his dark works are important because they can shed light on the condition of urban decay, dereliction, and ruination. By contrast, images of urban graffiti and tags communicate the meaning of the contemporary suburban condition in the French capital, a neo-liberal dreamworld, the city of light, which is also a city of exclusion, marginality, and darkness.

Keele: (Virtually) a Top 20 place for Sociology and Criminology...

2011-05-05T14:51:00.000+01:00

Wow. Our rating for Sociology in the Complete University guide has moved up a whole 9 places, moving us into 21st spot. This is fantastic news and is no doubt partly due to the brilliant feedback we've been getting in the National Student Survey over the years. Criminology (included as Social Policy - see below for why) is also in 20th place, so I think this means we can just about claim we're in the Top 20 of places in which to study both subjects. Well, almost.

But while we're on, just a note about League Tables. Sure, they help you decide where you want to study; sure, they tell you a bit about the places you're interested in, and their reputation. But nothing really beats coming for a visit, talking to staff and students about what is important to you. Our Open Days are just that: open - you can speak to staff and students of the two programmes first hand to find out what it is really like.

One of the things about League Tables that makes a difference to us here at Keele is they can never have a 'perfect' methodology. It matters, in fact, because the clumsiness of the methodology doesn't always show us in our best light. For example, the National Student Survey only asks you ONE set of questions; yet still many if not most of our degrees at Keele are dual honours. Unless you've had EXACTLY the same experience in both your Schools, this fine-tuning of your views won't be reflected in your answers. There has yet to be any form of league table or 'rating' of University courses that can adequately reflect the Keele degree properly.

In addition, people often ask about the research rating for our subjects, since it is confusing. In some league tables you will see NO research rating for Sociology and/or Criminology. In others you will see we end up at the top end of the ratings! Sometimes, I've seen blogs, facebook comments and replies on The Student Room which highlight or question this. Why does this confusion arise?

Well, it is all to do with HOW research was assessed at Keele. Most of the School of Sociology and Criminology staff whose research was included in the last Research Assessment exercise (a process by which the quality of research in Universities is measured every few years) were submitted under the heading of 'Social Policy'. There isn't a separate 'Criminology' heading, and most of the sociologists (which was most of us) who were submitted went in Social Policy, which is quite common across the country. I won't bore you with the reasons these choices were made but you can rest assured that ALL staff in the School are research active. Keele was ranked 12th in the country for Social Policy - an excellent outcome- and criminology and sociology research in our School contributed to this along with research by members of other Schools (such as Public Policy and Professional Practice).

Now, some league tables have managed to reflect this complexity accurately, and have included part of the Social Policy score in their calculations for Sociology and Criminology. But some have not. So if it shows up a research score of 'zero', then take it with a pinch of salt. If you want to know what kind of research we actually do, and how good it is, look at the list of books on our Facebook page, the publications and research details on our individual homepages and so on.

The real issue in the league tables though is surely how good we are as educators, how much students appreciate what they get from us when they're here, and what difference it makes to them in the long term - in terms of employability and just general life-changing experiences. Hopefully, these rather arbitrary measures can get better at reflecting what you really get in the School of Sociology and Criminology: excellent, research-active teaching staff, who know and care about their students, teaching relevant and interesting courses that help develop you into all-round graduates.

Criminal Justice student exchange to Ball State University, Indiana

2011-05-05T12:25:00.002+01:00

A group of six undergraduate criminology students have recently returned from a Criminal Justice Exchange Programme at Ball State University, Indiana. Dr Clare Jones, a teaching fellow in the School of Sociology and Criminology, accompanied the group. The exchange programme has been running for the last four years with criminal justice students from Ball State University coming to Keele to learn about, and experience first-hand, the criminal justice system and how it operates in England and Wales.

Students from Keele have made the return leg of the trip for three years now and the programme has been a great success. Students learn about how the criminal justice system operates in a different country, particularly one where gun crime is a prevalent issue; where the police in response feel they need to carry an array of weapons for their own, and for public, protection; and where the death penalty still exists in many states. Students therefore had the opportunity to contrast this experience with what they have already learnt about the criminal justice system in England and Wales.

This year the week-long programme took place at the beginning of April and students enjoyed a packed schedule….

Monday 4th April: The students settled into Ball State University campus life and later attended a talk by the Chief of the University Police Department, and were treated to a K9 demonstration. Canines (usually German Shepherds) are predominantly used by the police for narcotics and bomb detection, and for tracking people. The demonstration involved a role-play exercise where a (rather nervous) police officer pretended to flee from a crime and the police dog was instructed to track and catch the ‘suspect’.

Tuesday 5th April: Students attended interactive sessions held on a victim advocacy programme, police investigation of domestic violence, and a court volunteering programme. Later that evening, students were given the opportunity to attend a police ride-along with the University, Muncie, and Delaware County Police Departments. This was a highlight of the week where students enjoyed (quite literally) a front seat to all of the action! Students were involved in stopping drivers who had committed a traffic offence; dealing with various disputes and disturbances; an alleged theft from a supermarket; as well as being involved in the arrest of individuals and taking them to the County Jail.

Wednesday 6th April: Students attended court to observe proceedings. The morning consisted of pre-trial hearings on ten cases, which included a 22 year old male being accused of sexual misconduct with a minor, a 29 year old female accused of child molestation, a 21 year old male accused of committing an armed robbery, as well as cases of theft, battery, burglary and probation violation.

Thursday 7th April: Students job shadowed workers from probation and community corrections. This provided an opportunity for students to see first-hand what working in probation and community punishment entails in another country. Students could also see how ex-offenders cope with life after prison, with one interesting case of an ex-offender who discussed the difficulties of adapting to modern life after being released from prison two weeks earlier, having served a 26-year sentence for murder. Later in the day, students attended a tutorial on gang violence and were asked to design some solutions and crime prevention strategies for what was becoming a particular problem in the area.

Friday 9th April: To end the programme, students had a guided tour of Pendleton Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison. This facility houses inmates who are serving long-term sentences as well as those who are on death row. Students were advised to wear non-provocative clothing on the day (due to the likely adverse attention from inmates) and to ensure all clothes and shoes were clean (due to the very sophisticated security system that all visitors must go through). Although certain wings were closed off on the tour for safety purposes, students were given a behind the scenes tour of all aspects of the facility. Despite a few shouts and whistles from inmates, students came away feeling privileged to have had this once in a lifetime opportunity.

Saturday 10th April: Students had an exciting opportunity to visit Chicago for a day of sightseeing. They visited navy peer, took a trip up to the 103rd floor of Sears Tower, sampled the famous caramel and cheddar popcorn from ‘Garretts’, and even managed to fit in some shopping along the ‘Magnificent Mile’.

Overall, the trip provided students with a first-hand experience of all aspects of the US criminal justice system, from the time where individuals enter the system during the arrest by the police, right through to the trial, punishment and subsequent monitoring after offenders have completed their sentence. Students enjoyed the week and were keen to recommend it to others…

"The trip to Ball State University did not only teach me a great deal about the fundamental elements of the American criminal justice system but we also 'stepped into the shoes' of Americans for a week and met some really great people. All of which gave my peers and I, a unique and memorable week."
[Laura, first year Criminology student]

Keele Sociology & Criminology student wins national award for commitment to student welfare

2011-04-06T21:49:00.000+01:00

A Keele University undergraduate in the School of Sociology and Criminology has been honoured for his dedication to a student listening service.

Matt Bedding, who is in his final year studying sociology and criminology, was presented with a lifetime achievement award by the Nightline Association - a confidential listening, support and information service, run by students for students - for his hard work at a local and national level.

The 21-year-old joined Keele Nightline in his first year at the University and has held several posts, including welfare, social and policy officer and external coordinator.

During the past year he has been responsible for promoting the service to Keele students and staff, establishing strong relationships to ensure Nightline's continued success.

He has run numerous awareness-raising campaigns, including the launch of the new online listening service, for which he secured funding from the University.

Matt is also the regional coordinator for the national Nightline Association, line-managing eight regional representatives, and has recently been elected national non-portfolio officer. He has also been elected as the next Vice-President (Welfare) of Keele University Students' Union.

Sally Wood, charity coordinator of the national Nightline Association, said: "Matt has shown exceptional commitment to the national Nightline Association and Keele Nightline. His management of Keele has been incredible as shown by his dedication to the online listening service and outstanding call volumes recorded.

"He is a true asset to the national Nightline Association, having taken the position of regional coordinator part way through the year due to a resignation. His effort with the regional representatives has led to anincrease in engagement from Nightlines. This will stand the team in excellent stead to continue their development over the next year. "We are looking forward to working with Matt as an executive non-portfolio officer next year. He has unbounded enthusiasm and we are honoured to be working with him again."

Matt, who comes from Wethersfield in Essex, said: "I am so honoured to have received this award. Keele Nightline has been an integral part of my University experience and ultimately shaped my ambitions within the welfare provision at Keele. I have put so much work into Keele Nightline and am so proud of what I have achieved in the past three years. I cannot wait to stay involved."

For more information about Keele Nightline, see http://nightline.kusu.net/

Big week for Bill

2011-04-06T15:24:00.000+01:00

The School of Sociology and Criminology is celebrating the receipt of a Keele Award for Excellence in Learning and Teaching by its Head of School, Dr Bill Dixon. Bill was selected from a very strong field of 25 applicants. Over 120 nominations were received for the teaching year 2010-11 from students for staff across the University, with nine members of staff from the School of Sociology and Criminology receiving nominations.

The Week@Keele notes that "[t]he record number of nominations and the high quality of the applications testify to the excellence of the teaching at Keele, and the increasing institutional emphasis on nurturing and recognising excellence in teaching and supporting learning." The winners receive a prize of £1,000 and will be presented with their awards at a summer graduation ceremony.

Bill has also been making the headlines with an appearance on Radio 5Live's Morning Report, where he was interviewed about 'frontline' policing. This followed the publication of a report by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary on the deployment of the police workforce in 'an age of austerity'.

My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding: Do you think the media presents Travellers fairly?

2011-04-06T14:33:00.003+01:00

By Guy Woolnough, PhD student in Criminology

The recent series “My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding” on Channel Four has done a lot to raise the profile of the Gypsy/Traveller/Roma community in Britain and to take reporting of these issues away from prejudice towards balance. The comments on the Channel Four Website are surprisingly positive. Even though some facets of Traveller culture seem very alien and challenging to modern British mores, viewers seem to have responded sympathetically.

My own research has, over the last year, drawn me towards the Traveller community, because in my study of fairs in Victorian England I have frequently found references to Gypsies in the primary sources. The Victorian press invariably used pejorative terms when writing of the Gypsies. One example may suffice to illustrate the point. The Westmorland Gazette reported in October 1871: “This migratory tribe was largely represented (at Brough Hill fair), there being scores of camps along the fair hill, and as many children rolling about in the straw, or playing about outside, as would almost populate a young colony.” The same paper reported, in March 2010: “The detail of a policing strategy to combat crime and anti-social behaviour by Appleby Horse Fair travellers has been revealed at a packed public meeting in Sedbergh.” Which is more racist, the implication that these people might be advantageously dispatched to a remote colony, or the unquestioned equating of Travellers with anti-social behaviour and crime? You might test these statements for yourself by replacing the words “migratory tribe” and “travellers” with “asylum seekers” or some other group of outsiders.

This may explain why I feel positive about the Gypsy Wedding programmes; after at least one hundred and fifty years of negative reporting on Gypsy and Traveller questions, it is delightful to see a programme aimed at the general viewer that aims to be both measured and unprejudiced. It is even more encouraging when the public response is positive.

_______________________________________________

What do you think? Do you agree with Guy that the public response to the programme was positive? Do you think the programme succeeded in being measured and positive? Do post your comments...

What on earth can you do with a Sociology degree? Become a tank-driving squeaky-voiced millionaire? Huh?

2011-03-19T10:13:00.003Z

Oh my god. It appears that James Blunt is a sociology graduate...

But don't let that put you off. This article in the Guardian gives a useful overview of what graduating in Sociology is all about...

What on earth do you do with a Sociology degree?

2011-03-15T15:48:00.012Z

by Michelle Buckberry, Keele graduate in Sociology

(On the left, Michelle now; on the right, Michelle when she was at Keele)

I graduated from Keele University in 2001 with a BA Joint Honours in Visual Art and Sociology. About two months before I was due to sit my finals, I went into panic mode. What on earth was I going to do with this degree once I got it? How on earth was I going to integrate my two main interests, art and society, into some kind of paid employment come July? It was a scary thought, and one I began to wish I had considered sooner. The spectre of the real world was looming and I didn’t have a clue how I was going to survive in it.

So, what did I do? Well, I read a self help book. Something that many of you (including my friends – you know who you are) will scoff at. However, this wasn’t any self help book. This was the guide to careers for artists and unconventional people. When I saw it in a bookshop in Nottingham, I thought I had been saved. Any maybe I was. Several quizzes, personality tests and soul searching sessions later I figured out what I wanted to be. An art therapist. It was perfect. I get to work with interesting people and paint at the same time. My dream job.

There were two obstacles to this dream. One was a rather costly MA. The other was the need to have experience working with vulnerable adults. Luckily a mature student in the year below me was less naïve about the wonders of work and pointed me in the direction of Society Guardian. Eagerly I scampered to the nearest newsagents and, after a few false starts, found a couple of jobs I could apply for that did not require any previous experience. One of them was working for Mencap as a support worker for adults with learning disabilities down in London. So, off I went on the train from Stoke on Trent and attended my first interview. The rest, as they say, is history.

I worked for Mencap for four and a half years, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Yes, it was challenging at times, but I look back on that first job with fond memories. But it became apparent quite early on in my career that I like change. I did a bit of voluntary work to widen my experience, first at a clinic for sex workers, and later at a hostel for rough sleepers where I ran an art group. In 2005, however, I knew it was time to move on. I had been promoted at Mencap and was now a deputy manager, and it was time to either move onwards or upwards. Literally, in fact, as I hopped across the river from good old Lambeth to Camden.

My first job at Camden Council was as a support worker for homeless families, but I soon moved on to work with ex-offenders and drug users who needed support moving into and living in privately rented accommodation. It was certainly an eye opener and my first proper glimpse into the Criminal Justice System. But, after about two and a half years, I was ready to try something new.

For the last two and a half years I have worked with Prolific and other Priority Offenders (or PPOs) and their families. My remit is to work with some of the most prolific offenders in Camden who are not currently under any statutory supervision from the probation services, in a multi agency team alongside London Probation, the Metropolitan Police and the Drug Intervention Programme (DIP). It has certainly been a challenge to say the least. My experience is that you can lead a horse to water…, which is certainly true of offenders, especially those who seem to have had their anti-social behaviour ingrained within them by the age of eighteen. However, every now and again we work with an offender who turns their life around, and some of them even end up working in the field themselves.

As for the Art Therapy? Well, I did apply to do a course a couple of years ago and was delighted when I was offered a place at Goldsmiths University. Unfortunately I ended up turning it down due to the sheer amount of time and money I would have to commit. However, I have yet to give up on the idea. Who knows what the future may bring? One thing is for certain: If you had told me when I graduated that in ten years time I would be knocking on the doors of burglars with the police and popping along to HMP Wormwood Scrubs on a regular basis, I don’t think I would have believed you.

Postgraduate Opportunities in Sociology and Criminology at Keele University

2011-03-11T13:22:00.004Z

Postgraduate Twilight Event

Thinking of improving your future prospects?

Then come to visit at our open event to explore your options; to meet our lecturers; and to talk to our current postgraduates. Postgraduate taught courses and research programmes are available full and part time and cover a wide and interesting range of subjects.

To take place on Wednesday 30 March 2011, from 4.30pm until 7.00pm in the Claus Moser Research Centre.

To RSVP (use this form)

Programme
Download the Twilight Programme

Courses:
Take a look at our selection of postgraduate courses

Hosted by:

* The School of Humanities
* RI Humanities
* RI Social Sciences
* The School of Law
* The School of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy: SPIRE
* The School of Public Policy and Professional Practice
* The School of Sociology and Criminology
* Keele Management School

A Serbian Film and the Culture of Cruelty

2011-02-27T00:22:00.004Z

(A Serbian Film)

On 16th February I co-presented a paper on the recent Serbian horror movie A Serbian Film with Beth Johnson, who lectures in English and Film at Keele. We presented the paper at the first monthly Keele cultural research seminar of 2011. The argument of our paper, ‘Ovo Je Srbija’, or This is Serbia, is that what A Serbian Film captures is the horror of the Milosevic years when Serbia was transformed into a kind of criminal state. In this respect we sought to root the cultural significance of A Serbian Film in a discussion of Serbian society. However, we also wanted to argue that A Serbian Film has significance beyond its immediate cultural context, and that in some ways it can be seen to illuminate fundamental human truths, such as those explained by Thomas Hobbes and Sigmund Freud, who both argued that human society is a kind of protective screen necessary to save us from ourselves.

In both Hobbes and Freud society is essential to save humans from themselves because we are essentially violent, sadistic, creatures who cannot be allowed to ever follow our natural inclinations. Hobbes sums up this natural inclination to violence in terms of a kind of ‘thirst for power’. He thought that humans are hard-wired to want to dominate each other and that the natural struggles between them can only ever be controlled by artificial social norms and values. Freud made a similar point in his classic essay, Civilization and its Discontents, but in his view what causes humans to tend towards violence is their fundamental death drive. Freud thought that we were all possessed by this death drive, or what he called thanatos, and that the aim of this destructive drive was the pursuit of peace and nothingness that we originally possess in utero.

The radical nature of Freud’s idea was, therefore, that we are all suicidal creatures who seek out violence and destruction because what we really desire is self-annihilation. Of course, we would not live very long if thanatos was everything and Freud was clear that the function of society, and eros, the life drive, was to defer the desire for death and project it into alternatives methods for expending life energy, such as consumer culture, addiction, and risk taking. I have already illustrated in an early post on the American war movie, The Hurt Locker, how this strategy works and I think that the idea that the recent American taste for war was in some ways an expression of the American death drive is a persuasive thesis. This is exactly what I argued in my paper on the American Death-Drive, which was published in the journal Fast Capitalism. In another paper, I also explored what the cultural studies writer Henry Giroux calls the American culture of cruelty.

However, what I think A Serbian Film illustrates is that the American death drive is just that, an American death drive, and that other nations, and other cultures also have similar thanatologies. The terrible abusive machine expressed in A Serbian Film is, therefore, a representation of the Serbian version of the death drive. But if this is the case, then, and there are multiple death drives, what we need is a kind of comparative cultural study of the death drive, which would say something about the differences between American torture porn movies such as Saw and an expression of the Serbian death drive such as A Serbian Film. The results of such a comparative study would be culturally significant because they could tell us about the ways different societies think about violence and destruction. In the above instance we may conclude that whereas A Serbian Film is essentially critical of the death drive and demonises the agents of violence, Saw moralises violence and seems to make it appear somehow necessary. The next move would then be to think about the cultural implications of such a conclusion for the societies in question. This is the kind of work we are looking to carry out in our future project on carnographic cultures, which will explore comparisons and contrasts between diverse cultures of cruelty.

Mark Featherstone

A student blog: Keele World Sociology Society - Sexuality discussion

2011-02-24T11:37:00.006Z

The Keele World Sociology Society has a number of events planned for this semester, which are open to all Keele students.

The first event of this semester focusses on 'sexualities' and here Alex, a committee member, reviews the evening:

"On the 15th of February Keele World Sociology Society met in conjunction with Keele Afro-Caribbean Society -a special event! - For an evening focused upon sexuality. We started the group with a talk from Glenn Hussey from Keele Life Sciences department, who talked on topic Sexuality. I think all the attendee's are in agreement that Glenn was a fantastic and hilarious speaker to whom we're eternally appreciative! :)

After an interesting question and feedback session with Glenn we moved onto an open debate which was very active and respectful, it went excellently well!

Thank you to all involved, including a cohort of people from Keele LGBT society who came to voice their opinions as LGBT people, and really added depth to the debate!

Several pertinent issues were raised in the debate which occurred on the 15th of February, at the Keele World Sociology Society Meeting, on the topic of sexuality. Initially, general comments were made that from a philosophical perspective, consent and the idea of sovereignty of the body is an unsustainable justification for sexual activity. The person who made this point cited illegal sexual activities which may be consenting, but are still prohibited. The idea of 'harm' was also raised, when can a sex act be socially/individually harmful? Leading on from this point attendee's raised the question of if or how individuals should defer to society on matters including sexuality. Should people submit themselves to social scrutiny and manage their behaviour based upon it? Or does the doctrine of individual liberty support sexual activity which is engaged in entirely without reference to social register, notwithstanding the harm principle.

Another interesting point was also how individualistic some people perceptions of what homosexuality meant/'what homosexuals are'. Many people would raise a point in the debate and another person would interject to state that their understanding of the issue is entirely wrong, despite the individuals who initially raised the point believing that what they said was a non-controversial fact. i.e. What activity qualifies as 'sexual'? Is sexuality conditioned by environment, genetic-if indeed there is such a clear divide! - or both combined? And are religious statements about homosexuality accurate/truthful, and, if so, should they carry as much weight as an empirical 'scientific' fact in the public arena?

Ultimately the debate was very fruitful due to wide participation, a civil debating style, and the fact the it was clear during the debate that many people had scrutinized their beliefs and re-formulated them owing to other peoples points of view!:)

As always, our events will occur on every Tuesday in room CBA1.103 at 6.30pm and of course we understand that not all people will want to be loud and forceful in their opinions; many people have a good time coming along and quietly observing too!

Thanks again to all involved, and thanks in advance to all those attending next week!"

The society can be contacted via email - keeleworldsociology@hotmail.co.uk

Accountable policing: two steps forward, one step back?

2011-02-07T09:44:00.001Z

By Bill Dixon

Reconnecting the police and the public is at the centre of the Coalition government’s approach to criminal justice. One way of achieving this is through the election of police and crime commissioners to oversee local policing. Detailed proposals were set out in a government White Paper on Policing in the 21st Century published last year and elections are due to take place in 2012 under the terms of the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill currently going through Parliament.
Another, less obvious, attempt to make local policing more accountable was made last week with the launch of the Home Office’s crime-mapping website at www.police.uk. Armed with detailed information about crime and anti-social behaviour in their neighbourhood people will be able to demand that the police take action. Or so the theory goes. Unable to cope with up to 18 million hits an hour, the site crashed and stayed down for most of its first day. Home Office and police officials rushed to its defence. The launch-day disaster was evidence of the public’s thirst for information about crime and disorder. It simply wasn’t possible to deal with this level of traffic whether people were in search of information about crime or tickets for Take That. Teething troubles were unfortunate but inevitable.
What few people asked was whether the maps millions of people were so eager to see were worth the pixels they were made of. Nor was it clear what police forces facing significant cuts in their budgets were supposed to do in response to a sudden surge in demand for their services. After all, as Egon Bittner put it many years ago, the core function of the police is to deal with things that ‘ought not to be happening and about which someone had better do something now!’
As people from Portsmouth to Preston discovered when their quiet residential streets were flagged up as hotspots of crime and disorder, the data on which the maps are based says much more about the way police record incidents than events on the ground. Living near a police station or a busy town centre entertainment district could turn your sedate residential street into a maelstrom of criminality at the click of a button. Angry householders and local councillors took to the airwaves complaining that they were innocent losers in a bizarre game of postcode lottery. Why were they, their streets, their neighbours, their children being misrepresented in this way? And what about the impact of this bad publicity on property prices?
Less well publicised was the fact that crime maps based exclusively on incidents reported to the police, and then recorded by them, don’t tell us very much about what is actually happening on the streets, and even less about how people behave behind closed doors. Findings from the British Crime Survey published by the Home Office tell us that rates of reporting for different types of crime vary widely. While nine out of ten car thefts come to the attention of the police, only around one in every three assaults are reported. What are often, if controversially, called victimless crimes, including drug use and prostitution, are even more problematic. Since neither drug dealers nor users, prostitutes nor punters make a habit of turning themselves in, these offences rarely come to light unless and until the police decide to do something about them. So a sudden upsurge in reported drug offences or soliciting is much more likely to be the fruits of a special police operation than an accurate reflection of any underlying increase in drug use or street prostitution.
Asked what local residents could do about local crime problems identified by the Home Office’s shiny new maps, one spokesperson - fearful perhaps of their impact on already overstretched police services – recommended neighbourhood watch. But here again, the Home Office’s own research suggests that this is likely to be a futile, even counter-productive, response. Apart from the fact that neighbourhood watches have always been easier to establish in relatively low crime areas where they are least needed, the available evidence indicates that setting up a watch has little impact on crime and may actually increase people’s feelings of insecurity and lead to more calls on police time.
In the same week as the Home Office launched its crime maps plans were also being discussed in Parliament to cut ‘police red-tape’ by removing the requirement that people stopped (and either searched or asked to account for themselves) on the street should be issued with a written record. Introduced as an important way of holding forces to account for the use of police powers – particularly against black, Asian and other minority ethnic groups in the wake of the Brixton ‘riots’ of 1981 and the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 - records are now seen as adding unnecessary bureaucratic complications to the fight against crime and disorder.
What does all this mean for police accountability? At its most basic it means that the Coalition government, following faithfully in the footsteps of its Labour predecessor, is playing to a gallery ministers seem to believe is desperate for more information about the dangers they face but indifferent to the means used to reduce them. In the process the government is missing the opportunity to make those same people less anxious by publicising the quite remarkable reduction in criminal victimisation that has taken place over the last 15 years (between 40 and 50 per cent according to the British Crime Survey). It also risks the gradual erosion of public confidence in the police if large numbers of entirely innocent people continue to be stopped in the street for reasons that seem (at least to them, their families and friends) to have more to do with who they are and how look than what they have done. To paraphrase the old American definition of a conservative as a liberal who’s been mugged; the danger is that a radical may increasingly come to be a citizen who’s been stopped and can’t find out why.
An accountable police force is part of the bedrock of a democratic society. Making the police more accountable is a laudable goal for any government. So it’s a great pity that this one seems more interested in technological wizardry and media headlines than either its own research or holding the police to account for the powers they exercise on our behalf.

2011-01-11T10:24:00.006Z

Two exciting Criminology-related PhD Studentship opportunities are currently being advertised at Keele, supervised by Criminologists within the Social Policy Research Group.

CASE Research Studentship: The Voluntary Sector Role in Promoting Offenders’ Desistance through Peer Mentoring (reference no. RILPJ 2011-1)

Closing Date: Monday 14th February 2011, 5 pm

Interview Date: Friday 25th February 2011

An exciting opportunity exists to undertake a PhD exploring the role of voluntary (third) sector organisations working with offenders and ex-prisoners. The study will conduct research into peer mentoring programmes in England and Wales in partnership with voluntary sector providers. The research will explore the ways in which peer mentoring contributes to ex-offenders’ life chances and reintegration, as well as the value of mentoring to participants, both as mentees and mentors. This studentship arises from a partnership between Keele University and Clinks
The CASE research studentship, which will start from April 2011, will be
funded full time for three years. It will suit someone who combines an interest in voluntary sector involvement in criminal or social justice with strong analytic and writing skills essential for research at this level. Experience with research methods (qualitative or quantitative) is essential.
The successful application will work under the guidance of Dr Mary Corcoran (Lecturer in Criminology) and Professor Barry Godfrey (Professor of Criminology) together with Clinks. The research will involve periods spent at Keele University and at the participating projects.
Eligibility:
Applicants should hold a good honours degree, preferably in a relevant social science. You should have, or expect to gain, an ESRC recognised Masters in Research (MRes), or other recognised research qualification, or have training and experience which are demonstrably equivalent to this.
For further information on academic and residential eligibility see the ESRC Postgraduate Research Studentship Guidance Notes for Applicants 2010

Value:
The successful applicant will receive tuition fees at UK rates, access to £750 annual research costs and an enhanced annual stipend of £15,590 (for full-time students) for three years.

Contacts and further information:
Academic contact: Dr Mary Corcoran m.corcoran@crim.keele.ac.uk

Administrative queries: Miss Helen Farrell, PGR Administrator, Phone: 01782 733641
Email: phd@ilpj.keele.ac.uk

To apply:
Apply online for this studentship visit the Keele studentship website reference RILPJ 2011-1

Research Studentship: Pay-as-you-go justice? Out of court disposals and the future of the Magistracy (reference RILPJ 2011-2)

Closing Date: Monday 14th February 2011, 5 pm

Interview Date: Friday 25th February 2011

The studentship will explore the growing trend for the disposing of cases outside of the traditional courtroom environment through the use of fixed penalty disposals. Such methods, relying extensively on strict liability legal principles, automated prosecution systems and fixed penalty punishments are being used for an expanding range of minor 'quality of life' offences (traffic, littering, parking, dog fouling). In addition, they are increasingly being deemed appropriate for more serious offences traditionally dealt with by the police and Magistrates' Courts (for example being drunk and disorderly in a public place, selling alcohol to a minor, threatening behaviour or language and behaviour likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress).

Should the average citizen encounter the criminal justice system in the role of 'problem' they will usually do so via this type of non-court disposal. The project will employ interviews with magistrates, policy makers and other relevant authorities to explore views on these punishments. The project will explore what messages about behaviour, punishment and justice they communicate to sentenced offenders, and ask questions whether the increasing reliance on such methods is a desirable direction for criminal justice in England and Wales.

Duration and eligibility:
This studentship, which will start from April 2011, is for three years duration.
Applicants should hold a good honours degree in a relevant subject. A postgraduate degree or experience of Magistrates Courts policy or practices is desirable.

The successful application will work under the guidance of Professor Barry Godfrey (Professor of Criminology) with
Dr Mary Corcoran (Lecturer in Criminology) and Dr Helen Wells (Lecturer in Criminology).

Value:
The successful applicant will receive a stipend for 3 years £13,590 at 2010/11 rate and payment of tuition fees at UK rates for 3 years.

For contacts and further information go to:
For general enquiries, please speak to our PGR administrator, Helen Farrell, Phone: 01782 733641 Email: phd@ilpj.keele.ac.uk

For academic queries, please contact:
Professor Barry Godfrey b.s.godfrey@crim.keele.ac.uk Dr Helen Wells h.m.wells@crim.keele.ac.uk

To apply:
Apply online for this studentship, visit the Keele studentship website: http://www.keele.ac.uk/pgresearch/choosingaresearchdegree/studentships/

The Keele World Sociology Society

2010-12-21T13:55:00.012Z

In October 2010 a group of Keele Sociology students established a new sociology society open to all Keele students - 'The World Sociology Society'. The society aims to focus on sociological issues of everyday life around the world. The society has met weekly throughout semester one and have watched a range of films, held debates and invited speakers from around Keele to talk about current affairs and sociological research. The sociology teaching group has welcomed and supported this new student society.

The reviews below discuss a few of the weekly meetings and show the range of activities that the society has engaged in. New members are welcome - contact e.l.head@keele.ac.uk and I will pass your email on to the society organisers for semester 2.

October 26th - a review by Sally

The Wave

Unlike the practice of previous weeks, we started this week’s session with the option of three very different feature films surrounding what appeared to be highly different, yet equally important, World Issues. After adopting a democratic and egalitarian decision-making process (OK, a vote!) to decide which one was going to be shown, many of us rushed down to Comas to buy chips and drinks and we settled down for the viewing.

Actually, I cannot remember the rest of the films that were offered because I was only attracted by the film called “The Wave”. At first sight, I was interested because of its title, but the synopsis also sounded great! It was based on a real life psychology experiment and I was very curious about the end result of the experiment. Luckily - for all concerned - after my heavy promotion, “The Wave” won (Hurrah~!!!).

The movie aimed to show how totalitarianism - Nazism - grew to become such a powerful force in Germany during WWII and drew our attention to just how easily it could happen again in any part of the world in any time period.

Everyone was shocked after watching this movie; especially over the tremendous power of manipulation. We started our discussion by asking if this situation could more easily happen in Communist countries, where high social control exists. Many argued that within a society where people are highly disciplined, it would indeed be easy to slowly develop ‘totalitarianism’ style control of a group of people. In the film, the teacher originally just wanted to show the students how powerful the pressure ‘to belong’ or to ‘stay in-group’ could be utilised negatively during the school’s ‘project week’. However, he soon found that the exercises grew out of control and turned into a real-life scenario of a place under totalitarianism, and violent attacks started to become apparent to members of the ‘out-group’. Therefore proving – theoretically anyway - that the history of totalitarianism could be repeated anywhere and anytime.

We then discussed the power of manipulation and what made it so strong.

Many suggested that it was the power of the discipline and the fear of the individual being forced to become a member of the ‘out-group’ that made the power of manipulation become so strong. In effect, fear made the students conform .In addition, with more and more signs of unification (eg the wearing of identical uniforms, together with the implementation of standardised logos and gestures) students were ‘processed’ into becoming obedient and being ruled under the dictatorship.

Finally, we discussed whether the teacher should be punished as he was in the film. I personally believed that the teacher was also a sufferer and should not be punished, but others felt that he should. However, everyone agreed that he was largely responsible for the manipulation of his students, and should have assessed the dangers of exposing young adults to life's realities. Clearly, like most of us, he too underestimated the power of manipulation.

9th November - a review by Alex

The subject of this week's World Sociology Society was a viewing and discussion of a film about rites of passage in 1960's Hong Kong. It was shown in its original Cantonese and subtitled in English, and Hong Kong produced, providing a valuable perspective of a production removed from the cultural norms of the UK/US.

The highly emotive discussion following the presentation focussed around the role of Hong Kong in the modern world, particularly its relationship with the People's Republic of China; and the lives of people in both countries. The meeting was attended by lots of new faces, and the session was run by Sally Ng from Sociology and Criminology, who gave the film a short introduction and chaired the discussion.

2nd November - a review by Alex

'The shock doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism'

Lots of new faces attended on Tuesday to view a documentary based on Naomi Klein's book. The showing was preceded by a talk by Dr. Mark Featherstone (Sociology, Keele) who explained the implications of the film in today's current 'coalition government' climate, how we might apply Klein's message to the recent economic downturn, and various government related narratives of how it came about.

The was chronological in sequence and gave a broad range of ideas for the discussion which took place after the viewing, which was part chaired by Dr Beth Johnson (English, Keele).

New book by Keele Criminologists - Losing the Race: Thinking Psychosocially about Racially Motivated Crime

2010-11-22T11:59:00.007Z

Based on a two-year research project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the book explores why many of those involved in racially motivated crime seem to be struggling to cope with economic, cultural and emotional losses in their own lives. Drawing on in-depth biographical interviews with perpetrators of racist crimes and focus group discussions with ordinary people living in the same communities, the book explores why it is that some people, and not others, feel inclined to attack immigrants and minority ethnic groups. The relationships between ordinary racism, racial harassment and the politics of the British National Party are also explored, as are the enduring impacts of deindustrialisation, economic failure and immigration on white working class communities.
The book assesses the legacy of New Labour policy on community cohesion, hate crime and respect in terms of its impact on racist attitudes and racist incidents, and explores how it is that racist attacks, including racist murders, continue to happen. The book concludes by using psychoanalytically informed psychosocial concepts to explore examples of how and why race-thinking can be put aside and what it is that needs to happen to get perpetrators to loosen or shed their emotional investments in hatred and violence.

Dr David Gadd is Senior Lecturer in Criminology and Deputy Director of the Social Science Research Institutes at Keele University Dr Bill Dixon is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology and Head of the School of Sociology and Criminology at Keele University.

Student Fees Demonstration

2010-11-12T09:33:00.004Z

By Siobhan Holohan

Thousands of students and lecturers from universities across the country, including Keele, have marched in protest against the cuts in Higher Education. While politicians and media only sat up and took notice once violence had erupted among a handful of protesters, the wider British public could not fail to notice the strength of feeling behind yesterday’s student led demonstration, the largest in the UK since those staged against the introduction of student loans in the mid 1990s. Lord Browne’s controversial plan to raise the cap on tuition fees to £9000 per year has led to much debate on both sides of the classroom as academics and students ponder the impact that such an action might have on the higher education landscape. Many believe that the change will encourage the reintroduction of a two-tier system whereby those that can afford to will pay, while others will think twice before committing to lifelong debt.

In the month since Browne’s report, Internet message boards have been full of conflicting views on the proposals. While some maintain that education is a right not a privilege, many more agree with the plans complaining that they have been funding student’s lackadaisical ways and partying lifestyles for too long. This is an outmoded contention, which fails to recognise the sacrifice that many students currently make in order to attend university and the benefits they make to society once they graduate. Graduates who earn more already pay higher taxes contributing to the education of those to come in the same way that those who went before them paid higher taxes in order to fund their higher education.

While this debate will clearly rage on, what is clear is that by eroding the principles behind an affordable university system, we are at the cusp of dismissing the point of a higher education altogether. The logic of what Browne and the coalition government are proposing is a market driven knowledge industry bent on churning out a skills-based workforce based on an over-prescriptive view of what is ‘useful’ to society, rather than encouraging an intelligent public able to think, debate and, yes, protest.

The role of the magistracy in the 21st century: prestigious funding for Keele

2010-11-08T09:30:00.002Z

As reported in their magazine 'The Magistrate' the Magistrates’ Association have commissioned Keele University to deliver a seminar series. The series will cover a variety of topics addressing the theme of the role of the magistracy in the 21st century. Members of the judiciary, academics and policy makers will discuss the place of short term custody; current theories of preventing reoffending and the part that the courts can play; and the meaning of local justice. A report, along with key recommendations, will be issued and discussed at a large conference to be held later in 2011. Professor Barry Godfrey will organise the three seminars with the help of Dr Mary Corcoran and Dr Helen Wells. The same team, from The Research Institute for Social Sciences at Keele, will supervise a doctoral student funded by the prestigious Magistrates’ Association Fellowship from January 2011.

New faces in Criminology at Keele

2010-10-22T15:37:00.002+01:00

Criminology at Keele is welcoming five new faces in teaching and research at the start of the new academic year. We are delighted to be joined by three new PhD students, a research assistant and a new member of teaching staff to add to both our research and teaching capability.

Stephanie Alger, a former Masters student at Keele, joins us as a PhD student. Steph holds a linked ESRC studentship called Inverting Assumptions about Domestic Abuse.

Emma Murray also joins us to begin her PhD. Emma comes to us from Liverpool John Moores University where she graduated with a First Class degree in 2009 and has since gone on to study for her Masters in Criminal Justice, also at John Moores. Emma will be researching the topic of Returning Soldiers and their Involvement in Crime. The title of Emma’s Ph.D is ‘Out of the Killing Zone and into the Fire? An analysis of the journey from ‘soldier’ to ‘citizen’ as armed service personnel resettle into British society post combat’ and is based on extensive pilot work in the form of an ethnographic case study of a group of Royal Marine Commandos, focusing on their self-reported racism and violence post deployment. The overarching aim of the project is to provide an empirically rich study that explores the effects of combat on returning soldier’s involvement in crime and attitudes to diversity, and to situate this within approaches sensitive to the experiences they have had and the challenges of resettlement they face.

Ian Mahoney, a recent graduate of the MRes in Social Science Research Methods in Social Relations at Keele, and also a Keele BA graduate, rejoins us to begin his PhD. Ian won one of the ESRC Criminology Quota Awards to carry out research into the link between crime and unemployment with the current working title of:
'Unemployment and Criminality in Stoke on Trent: The impact of unemployment upon criminality in an area of high skill and employment deprivation.'

Mary Louise Corr also joins us as a Research Associate on the ESRC Boys to Men project looking at what can be done to reduce young people's involvement in domestic abuse. The main aim of the research is to produce an answer to the question as to why some young men grow up to be perpetrators of domestic abuse - and to learn more about how we can prevent them from becoming reliant on a range of violent, controlling and threatening behaviours. The research involves administration of an attitudinal scale, self-report questionnaire, focus groups, and in-depth biographical interviews with young people. Mary Louise joins us from The Children's Research Centre Trinity College Dublin project.

Finally, we are also welcoming back Clare Jones, a recent PhD student in Criminology at Keele, who rejoins us in the capacity of Teaching Fellow. Clare will be contributing to the undergraduate Criminology programme at all three levels, as well as on the new Masters in Criminology and Criminal Justice and the MA Ethics of Policing and Criminal Justice. Clare's PhD explored the recent wave of migration of Polish nationals to a small working class town in Cheshire, and questioned whether immigration is inevitably disruptive for neighbourhoods increasing crime, conflict, and insecurity amongst “established” and “newcomer”
groups. Clare said “I am delighted to be joining the criminology team again at Keele, where I first became passionate about criminology when completing my undergraduate degree here in 2005. After continuing to study criminology at Keele for the following 5 years, I am now looking forward to contributing to the programme.”

Chilean miners: 'science' is vital in this human story

2010-10-13T22:49:00.010+01:00

By Dr Rebecca Leach

It has been a momentous week. The world is watching 33 men saved by a clunky steel rocket and a host of saints in hard-hats and hazard jackets. It is an almost unbelievable story, except that we are watching it in every tiny detail on TV. Today, it was also the day in which the Science Is Vital campaign closed their petition to defend funding for science research in British universities, and the day after Lord Browne proposed the biggest change to student funding in two generations. And the week before the biggest cuts to university funding since the last slash and burn policy of the mid 1980s.

The irony of this rescue won't be lost on the science geeks: the people who are pulling the miners out of the ground are utterly dependent on university science: their training, their gadgets, their pulleys and winches and cages and breathing apparatuses and bio-belts ALL built from the brains of the geeks. Sure, the block and tackle (or whatever) is made and greased by worker-bees, but the buck stops with those doing the thinking, and the design. The geeks - in effect - got them out.

Some tweeters have objected that the geeks got them in there in the first place. Maybe. There is a mining and geology specialism in universities of course. But profiteering mine owners have been around far longer than the appliance of science started to make things go further, deeper and both safer and more dangerous simultaneously. Given the choice of a bloke with a gold pen and a dodgy record of exploitation, and a spotty, pale youth with an obsession for torque, I know who I'd rather have writing the manual. OK, and perhaps a raft of experienced burly miners to help him 'apply' his writing...

You can't escape the value of science in this human drama however - whatever recriminations rightly emerge about the safety failures in this mine, we all need to be grateful in part to the science. I hope the Science Is Vital campaign will exploit this link as much as they need to.

Next week, when the Comprehensive Spending Review slashes funding, the biggest cut will come - in teaching and research - in the Arts and Social Sciences. The teaching budget is likely to be all but wiped out, and it is hard to see how Research Council funds will be held at anything like current levels. Who cares?, most of the press and public will say. It will seem to make little difference to anyone's lives. The 'Science vote' will care very little too, barring a few with a broad education, because of their own sense of the necessity of their own disciplines, compared to ours.

But what will happen to these miners now? And how will the rest of us make sense of the 'miracle' (or 'tragedy')? The science bit is easily seen: the gadgets, manuals, experts are evident to the world at large. Nobody will, however, make too much of the lengthy training of the eloquent psychiatrist Dr James Thompson, commenting for the BBC, which although medical in part, could not possibly have succeeded had he not developed some grasp of the human condition from other sources. How could Freud, Jung, Klein, Winnicott, Piaget and countless other contributors to the understanding of the human personality have known what they know without cultural ideas? How could we all 'get' the drama of rescue, without a narrative of, erm, drama? More prosaically, who will be behind the film makers, writers, journalists who need to be there (perhaps not in quite such volume...) to help the rest of us make sense ? Perhaps the political plan in shutting down the debate is to get everyone to just shut up, and stop trying to make sense of difficult events. The chattering classes have been desperately annoying for the right wing, doing what they do to ask questions and all...

Look, I'm not suggesting people won't make sense without the hidden hand of Peter Mandelson telling us what to think. The point is more general: humans need to make sense and make meaning, and will continue to do it. Ordinary bods do it better, mostly, than lily-livered, soft-handed academics. But the writing, thinking, the ideas generated in arts, humanities and social science departments DO make a difference, albeit in subtle and small ways. A sociologist might help a family therapist trying to put back together those miners' broken relationships once the reality of wife vs mistress hits home. And an artist might help those traumatised children sleep at night. And a philosopher might contribute to a think tank who pushes the Chilean prime minister to rewrite his mining policy, so that the value of human life is reassessed. Someone really will, perhaps, be saved by a historian in a cord jacket, reflecting on this day. Even those betes noires of the Establishment, Meeja Studies graduates, might have their part to play. Not as the journalists (we all know they have Oxbridge degrees in English, which somehow escape the oppobrium...) who bring it all to our living rooms; but as the parents, teachers, managers, friends who say, in their pub or office conversations: 'hey, never mind the distracting rescue narrative, we're ignoring the back story about exploitation here...'.

Do we need to do this in universities? Should the public pay for it? Of course it should. Otherwise we leave all our big questions to blokes with gold teeth who give answers influenced by their paymasters. Good luck to the Science lobby - they need it. They have the luxury of knowing they can do what the public can't. We need more luck and more support, because the public thinks they don't need us. They do.

The Power of the Past: Classical Sociology and the Urban Present

2010-10-12T11:38:00.002+01:00

By

Andy Zieleniec

We live in times that have been variously described as post-industrial, post-modern, post-ideological. Whilst there may be some veracity in these analyses as they are applied to western developed nations where the fruits, however bitter, of a neo-liberal politics and economics are vicariously distributed in unequal portions, it is less certain how well these epithets fit for nations and regions in the developing world. What can be said with certainty is that for the southern hemisphere it is certainly not a post-urbanising world.

In the Northern hemisphere the twin processes of modernity, urbanisation and industrialisation, have been experienced for some 150 years and may have reached their zenith. Evidence for de-industrialisation (the decline of traditional manufacturing industries, mineral extraction, etc.) and the development of a reliance on service sector employment and income generation is also marked by socio-spatial inequalities as some towns/cities or regions do better than others in the changed economic climate. Similarly cities in the northern hemisphere are experiencing a demographic change in which growth rates have declined or, as in many cases, are showing signs of a movement of people away from urban living as a return to the suburb or country marks a lifestyle choice in which commuting longer distances is an accepted part of everyday existence.

However, globalisation as expressed in the flows of power, finance and status (see Sassen, 1991, Castells 1996, etc.) has also been experienced as flows of people. Migration is an international phenomenon that has seen vast movements of people not only from country to country, region to region but also as a movement from the country to the town and city. Thus whilst Britain became the first predominantly urban nation in 1850 the rest of the world has inexorably been moving in the direction of urban growth.

The fastest rates of urban growth are now no longer in the developed world but in those parts of the world that has, so to speak, previously lagged behind. As UN figures indicate the population of the world that is living in towns and cities is still increasing and as the figures demonstrate (http://esa.un.org/unup/), in 2010, half the world’s population will be urban. What we can also determine is that the world is not only becoming increasingly and more dominantly urban but that the fastest growth rates are in developing countries.

The scale of urbanisation and the growth rate and size of 21^st century mega-cities is much greater than that experienced in 19^th century Europe and America. We also now see mega-cities of a demographic and geographical scale never before experienced in the history of human populations.

The prospect of growth for the worlds’ largest cities (See: United Nations, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2003 Revision) demonstrates that in the 21^st century there will be a radical change in the living conditions and experience of hundreds of millions of people as the shift from rural based populations to urban cities necessitates changes in ways of life and of cultures.

However, despite the differences of scale it can be argued that much of the social theory that developed as a means to explain the shift from feudalism to capitalism and from agrarian to urban societies in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries still has some pertinence when seeking to understand and analyse contemporary processes and experiences. I will provide a few examples below that emphasises both the development of sociology as an academic discipline and much of its foundational social theory as inspired and influenced by the transition to urban, industrial and capitalist societies and that these very insights still have relevance for understanding the modern world.

The founders fathers [sic] of sociology all considered in various ways how modern industrial and urban society had an impact on social relations. Karl Marx amongst other things, along side his collaborator Fredrick Engels, demonstrated how social (class) inequalities became much more clearly elaborated in industrial urban societies and this would, for them lead to the development of a revolutionary working class conscious of itself and its potential. Emile Durkheim also considered that the breakdown in traditional social norms was in part due to the increased moral and social densities that people in urban societies were increasingly subjected to. Max Weber, in his analysis of the historical development of ‘ideal types’ of city was also concerned about their bureaucratic organisation and administration as a means to mitigate revolutionary change.

In all of these one can see how such issues and concerns still have relevance in contemporary urban settings. The problem of continuing socio-spatial inequalities can be shown in the huge disparities between the wealthy and the rest in many cities that is expressed by amongst other things the rise of the favellas or shanty town existing alongside ‘gated communities’ or securitised residential enclaves for the rich. Weber’s assessment of the increasing role of administrative elites in attempting to organise and plan functions and services in urban centres, not least policing and law and order functions, is a concern in most urban areas. Similarly, Durkheim’s identification of changes in social norms and traditions as the result of increasing population densities and opportunities for new types and kinds of interactions is still a feature of societies today undergoing rapid urban growth.

At the end of the 19^th century and the beginning of the 20^th there was also a concern with how the changes wrought by technological and social developments was impacting not only on the structure of society but also on the experience of individuals and groups as they go about their lives in an increasingly urban world. Ferdinand Tonnies (1897) in his work on the differences between types of social organisation in predominantly rural settlements (Community) versus those found in the city (Association) points to changes in social structure and experience that is being felt in societies today as they move from agrarian dominated activities and arrangements versus those found in the city. One can look to the experience of China is recent years as rapid urban growth and industrialisation is changing the social fabric of Chinese society. Georg Simmel in his famous essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (original 1903) as well as in his other works on the city stressed the social and psychological consequences of an increasingly faster, more intense experience of life in modern cities. Simmel’s analysis of late 19^th century European cities still has resonance and relevance for understanding and studying the consequences for individuals and groups who have migrated to the city and are faced with a multitude of new stimuli, experiences and opportunities (not all of them positive).

I could expand on these examples as well as to bring in other theories of urban change, structure and culture to develop my claim that there is a need for an understanding of past theoretical perspectives in order to understand the new world order of urbanisation in this era of globalisation. We need to know how the urban was understood and analysed in the past in order to be able to recognise and identify similarities as well as differences with the experience of urbanisation in an era of globalisation.

To paraphrase Karl Marx: “if we don’t learn from history we are doomed to repeat it” and we would do well to take heed of this warning lest we may end up re-inventing the wheel in 21^st century urban studies. The past still has a power to illuminate the present.

Select Bibliography

Castells, M. (1996) The Rise of the Network Society Oxford: Blackwell Ch 6-7

Chadwick, E. (1842/1965) Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press

Durkheim, E. (1933) The Division of Labour in Society, New York, Free Press

Engels, F. (1848) “The Housing Question” reprint in Marx/Engels: Collected Works, Lawrence and Wishart

Engels, F. (1958) The Condition of the Working class in England. Oxford, Blackwell.

Mearns, A., (1883/1970) The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Inquiry into the Condition of the London Poor, London

Park, Robert E., Ernest Burgess, Roderic McKenzie (1925). The City, University of Chicago Press.

Sassen, S. (1991) The Global City Chichester N.J: Princeton U.P.

Simmel, G. (1903) “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, in Kasinitz, P. (ed.) (1995) Metropolis: Centre and Symbol of Our Times Basingstoke, Palgrave and Malcolm Miles and Tim Hall (eds.), (2004) The City Cultures Reader (2^nd edition) London, Routledge

Simmel, G. (1997) ‘Sociology of Space’ and ‘Bridge and Door’ in D. Frisby & M. Featherstone (eds.) Simmel on Culture. London: Sage. pp.137-174.

Tönnies, F. (orig. 1887) Community and Society, any edition,

Weber, M. (1966) The City New York Free Press

The Sociology of Immobility I

2010-10-04T13:22:00.001+01:00

By

Mark Featherstone

It is entirely fashionable today to talk about the sociology of mobility, but I wonder whether this discourse is already more or less out of date. The theory of mobility turns off the idea that processes of globalisation have resulted in unprecedented levels of interconnectedness across the world, resulting in the emergence of what is normally called the network society. This process of global interconnectivity relies on information communication technologies to achieve the integration of financial markets and complex transport infrastructures to allow flows of people to move through global space. Ironically, this process of integration and networking, which we might imagine would lead to new levels of sociability, has also resulted in the emergence of a new brand of what we might call asocial hyper-individualism, whereby those linked into the global network are simultaneously sunk in networks of co-operation, but also provided with enormous levels of freedom.

Although it may seen strange to talk about asociality or a lack of social interaction in the context of networks of co-operation, it is important to remember that one can exist very well in society and be quite unsociable in terms of how one thinks about other people. The key here is, therefore, that processual co-operation does not necessarily entail deep social interaction. Instead I think that what continues to happen in the contemporary global society is that the high levels of co-operation demanded by the network in order to enable mobility are endlessly undercut by the kind of hyper-individualism produced by the desire to move, what we might call the will to mobility, and that it is this that means that the potential sociability written into the form of the global network continually collapses into a kind of manic individualism, whereby everybody is set on making it big and escaping from the constraints of the very social form that creates the possibility of making it in the first place.

But before we move on, let’s slow down and take stock. What we must recognise from the above is that the sociology of mobility is not simply about flows of money and people around the world or the technologies that make movement possible. Instead, I think that we have to understand that to a large extent mobility is in the head and a psychological condition. This may, in large part, be a psychological condition created by the explosion of ICTs in the final decade of the 20th century. What do ICTs do, if not allow us to let our imaginations run wild and explore the world of the mind in the fantasy space of the net?

In many respects, then, it is possible to say that the entire world is available on the World Wide Web. Moreover, the strange philosophical consequences of this statement, which revolve around the emergence of a form of spatial short circuit that shrinks the global to the level of the local and makes the macrosphere totally available to the cybernaut locked into the delimited space of microspherical PC terminal, are that it is absolutely not metaphorical to say that the internet makes the world available to everybody without the need for movement. On the contrary, what the internet, the hard infrastructural technologies that make the WWW possible, achieves is the telescoping of the entire world, or the entire networked world, into every individual node or terminal connected to the global network. According to this logic, there is no need to travel anywhere or be mobile in a physical sense, since I can go anywhere and be everywhere, without leaving my PC terminal that plugs me into the global network. This is precisely what the French writer Paul Virilio talks about in his works on globalisation, speed, and ICTs. Virilio talks about ‘the terminal man’ or the last man who gives up his body to his PC in order to inhabit the new global network. Recalling science fiction films such as the Matrix he tells us that an ethics of 21st century should be about saving people from becoming sedentary no-bodies who never leave their house, but rather travel through the interface between their mind and the globalised network.

Is this science fiction? Although the above arguments sound like the plot from a Phillip K Dick novel, consider the Japanese phenomena of the shut-in and the net addict. In both cases the globalised network starts to take over from reality rendering the body, what Virilio calls the last vehicle, an archaic irrelevancy. For the shut-in, a figure closely related to the NEET who withdraws from the public world of education and employment, the entire social world becomes a frightening place to the extent that even the family becomes an alien institution. Thus the shut-in’s world contracts to the space of the bedroom, which often becomes a kind of cockpit for connecting to the wider world through ICTs.

Herein we enter the strange world of net addict who spends his entire life in cyberspace, often neglecting to attend to the basic physical requirements of human life, eating, drinking, shitting, pissing, sleeping, and gradually losing the ability to differentiate between the fantasy space of the net and the hard materiality of the real world. Surely the classic example of this phenomenon is the recent case of the Korean couple who allowed their 3 month old baby to starve to death while they surfed the net, raising a cyber-child in the process. It would, of course, be hyperbolic to suggest that this is a generalised condition today, but the seeds of the problem of voluntary immobility and the consequent wasting of the obsolete body are clearly present in our contemporary globalised society.

After all, who has not spent their entire day sat in front of a computer screen, surfing the net, sending e-mail to people sat at PCs in far off places, and moving about in the globalised network that collapses mobility into immobility in the light speed it takes to connect to the world wide web? My wager would be that the majority of the people reading this short piece have spent days like these. It is for this reason that I would suggest that we counter the sociology of mobility, which seems to me to be largely celebratory in its view of the value of movement and dynamism, with a new dire sociology of immobility, which recognises that the flip side of the explosion of kinetic energy that has resulted in processes of globalisation is a implosive force that exerts an enormous gravitational pull on every one of us, commanding us to stay put, don’t move, because the only way to really move is to live in the wires of the net.

100 Days: The Politics of Shock and Awe

2010-08-28T22:50:00.003+01:00

By

Mark Featherstone

I recently watched Winterbottom and Whitecross’s film adaptation of Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine and was immediately put in mind of recent news media marking the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government’s first 100 days in office. Despite the inescapable conclusion that their first 100 days in office had been marked by anxiety over public sector cuts and the onset of the so-called age of austerity, the coalition was keen was tell us that the new government was not simply about cutting back for its own sake. Instead, we were told that the future would be bright if we could take our medicine. We were told that we needed to be aware that cuts were essential in preparing for a bright new future. However, at the same time it was difficult to avoid the conclusion that the suggested cuts were too severe, too much too soon, and likely to cause a double-dip recession, with even the Business Secretary Vince Cable able to be no more precise than saying that the chances of the economy slipping into another recession were ‘below 50/50’.

We do not need to be economists to understand why we may face a double dip recession. The problem with applying savage cuts to the public sector in order to reduce the budget deficit resides in the nature of the British economy which has been organised on the basis of neo-liberal theory, consumerism, and credit since the 1980s. On the surface it may appear that the best way to reduce the national deficit is to cut public sector spending, and simply weather the negative consequences of mass unemployment and social instability in the name of balancing the books, but the problem is that taking this short-cut in the context of a socio-economic system marked by neo-liberal ideology, consumerism, and the demand for credit is only likely to result in socio-economic disaster. We know that cuts in public sector spending will inevitably lead to increased levels of unemployment, primarily because the public sector became so bloated under New Labour, and that these increases in unemployment will hit particular areas of the country harder than others. Related to unemployment caused by the shrinking of the public sector, levels of youth unemployment are likely to increase steeply because of the reduction of university funding and the lack of entry level positions in areas of the labour market that had previously provided employment for new entrants to the world of work.

Of course increased levels of unemployment are not in themselves signs of socio-economic catastrophe, even though they may spell disaster for individuals and communities, because societies can cope with massive levels of worklessness, if they are sufficiently prepared to weather the storm and manage outbreaks of civil unrest. We know this much from the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher was prepared to destroy the lives of so many people and so many communities in the name of socio-economic modernisation. We also know that the Thatcher governments were able to manage these transformations on the basis of an aggressive approach to law and order and policing, an approach that became necessary to cope with the fall out of the destruction of the industrial working class, and the creation of a new middle class able to drive the country into a future of consumption and credit that was, of course, expanded by the New Labour revolution that made us all into middle class consumers.

Unfortunately, the recent economic crash and related recession signaled the end of the New Labour revolution. But now that the party is over we need a new socio-economic direction. My view is that the age of austerity and cuts cannot be it because it is entirely negative in its approach to social engineering and will only result in the further decline of the Thatcher-Blair model of capitalism. It is totally unclear what Cameron-Clegg have in mind to lead us into the bright new future. It is not enough to dismantle the Thatcher-Blair socio-economic model because public sector cuts will only result in unemployment, the threat of unemployment, increases in precariousness, anxiety, and the collapse of consumer confidence, the motor of the neo-liberal economy. As soon as consumer confidence collapses, as has been seen in the housing market, production fails, and economic growth slows further, resulting in more unemployment and so on.

Whereas Thatcher, who oversaw the transformation of Britain from an industrial to a post-industrial society and replaced the destroyed working class with a new expanded middle class, Cameron-Clegg seem to have no sense of the need to replace the middle class they are about to destroy in the name of balancing the books. They cannot fall back on industry, since Britain has long since outsourced its industrial production, but equally seem to have no sense of the impending socio-economic catastrophe they are about to cause, because they have made no particular noises about policing or law and order, but rather jettisoned the New Labour security state in favour in a small state and big society.

This feature of the coalition approach is particularly difficult to understand since to my mind mass unemployment and a society of people who had been brought up on the ideology of social climbing, but now must face up to the painful reality of downsizing with no sense of a future direction, is a recipe for unrest and potential social disaster. How, then, can we explain this lack of foresight on the part of the coalition? Much has been made of the socio-economic make-up of the new government, people from old money who have no sense of the reality of the majority of people who must make it in life through social mobility, but I’m not sure this is everything. We must add to this the problem of the lack of social and political imagination that characterises our age, and has done since Thatcher’s declaration that there is no alternative, and it may be that we are close to understanding why Cameron-Clegg have no sense of the need to construct a new future for the majority, seem to lack an understanding of why it might be important to mitigate against the consequences of not providing people with any sense of a future, and probably could not provide any sense of a future social direction even if they were in a position to do so.

However, I do think that we find the glimmer of a recognition of the need to think about a better future in the declaration that there is more to the coalition than cuts, and that it is in this glimmer of a recognition that I think we can detect the roots of the kind of apocalyptic thinking that Winterbottom, Whitecross, and Klein explain in the theory of the shock doctrine and disaster capitalism. The apocalypticism of this mode of thinking resides primarily in the view that a bright future awaits after painful transformation, but centrally in the fact that there is no real causal relationship between the painful transformation and the production of a new situation. That is to say that similar to religious thinking surrounding the apocalypse the coalition’s idea of social transformation involves pain, cuts, and destruction, with no real sense of how this pain will produce an improved future situation. Instead we are asked to take it on faith that pain and cuts will transform the future, but how, and in what ways? What will the future look like?

I think that these are the questions that we should ask of Cameron-Clegg. We should ask them to explain their social theory, and move beyond their apocalyptic theory of purgatorial pain, because my sense is that the only way we can explain the haste with which the coalition has implemented its cuts agenda is in terms of Klein’s theory of the shock doctrine, which traces the history of the view that the best way to impose radical social and economic transformation upon a population is through shock, disorientation, and trauma. Given that is it difficult to believe that at least some members of the government would not be aware of the potential socio-economic effects of rapid and savage cuts to the public sector, my sense is that the coalition’s objective has always been to push radical socio-economic change through social shock and disorientation. As Klein shows in her book, and Winterbottom and Whitecross’s film illustrates so well, social shock, disorientation, and a destroyed landscape clear the way for the implementation of new social and economic models and limits the prospect of political resistance. If this is indeed the case, I think our role should be to oppose shock with thought, resist the notion of the catastrophic economy, and the idea that there is no other way but pain and cuts, and ask the coalition to explain their theory of socio-economic transformation. What kind of society do they think will emerge from the age of austerity and how exactly will the period of purgatorial pain produce it?

Anti-Christ, Critique of Individualism

2010-07-12T16:13:00.005+01:00

By

Mark Featherstone

In continuing research into the contemporary culture of cruelty, I recently watched Lars Von Trier’s much hyped film Anti-Christ. In many ways Von Trier’s tale, which plays out the story of a couple struggling to come to terms with the death of their son, appears to be a study of a relationship in the process of melting down. However my view is that what the film really captures is a kind of natural history of humanity, filtered through biblical metaphor and sado-masochistic horror. I think that it is this back story that provides the existential meat which enthuses the explicit narrative of the film with so much of its power and makes it a profoundly unsettling viewing experience.

The prologue of the film shows the death of the couple’s son, an accident that occurs in the middle of their sex, highlighting the terrible symmetry of life and death, a theme which thinkers from Plato through Freud to Bataille have understood and returned to obsessively. Confronted with their loss, the two main characters struggle to cope. Chapter 1, Grief, shows Charlotte Gainsbourg’s character suffer psychological collapse, and her husband, played by Willem Dafoe, save himself by retreating into science, reason, and rationality. While Gainsbourg’s character, the child’s mother, grieves, confronting his death, Dafoe’s character seems to hide in his public role as therapist, taking refuge in her feelings of pain and loss, and never confronting his own feelings, which as we discover later on, may not actually exist.

This divergence in the way the two characters approach the problem of death is key because it enables Von Trier to turn them into representations of man and woman in general and tell a tragic story about the history of humanity through the concept of gender, taking in ideas of love, care, madness, and violence. The tragedy of this story, caught in the desperate depiction of man as a kind of Nietzschean demi-God, destined to rise above the world of nature, but totally unable to relate to those around him, is captured in the transformation of love into gynocide and the strange final scene, which shows Dafoe surrounded by a mass of faceless women and children who he is totally unable to relate to or recognise.

That the narrative of the film plays out in the woods, symbol of the Hobbesian state of nature where sex, death, and desire rule, and a site called Eden, referencing the biblical state of perfection and peace before the tragic fall of man, illustrates the wider context of the explicit content of the story. These two contextual frames, the human struggle to overcome nature in order to live in culture, and the biblical story of Adam, Eve, and the Devil who tempts Eve into sin are, of course, interrelated and entwined. But what are these two frames?

The biblical story of Adam and Eve depicts the fall of man from a state of perfection into nature, which is characterised by sex, death, desire, violence, and taboo and originates the drive to find some new form of peace, where humanity can finally overcome its own tortured nature. The Freudian story of civilization brackets out the original moment of perfection focusing instead on the drive to civilize nature, repress desire, and manage the eternal problem of the violent, savage, return of the repressed. In fusing these two stories together the film captures the drama of both, showing how Eden, the biblical state of perfection, always was the Hobbesian state of nature, the scene of horror, in the same way that the perfect Oedipal family, Father, Mother, Child, is always a traumatic triangle of sex, death, and violent struggle.

Charlotte Gainsbourg’s character seems to be acutely aware of the terrible symmetry of edenic perfection and the ultra violence of nature, a recognition captured in her choice of a phobic object, grass, that condenses her fear of the world. Gainsbourg’s mother is horrified by the feeling of grass under foot, terrified of Mother Earth who gives life, brings death, and is merciless in her application of the law of nature. Dafoe’s father figure seems to gain no understanding of the state of nature from the death of his son, but only later in moments which show similar scenes of death in nature, a deer still born, a fallen chick, consumed by a bird of prey, acorns falling, tapping relentlessly on the cabin, reminding Gainsbourg, Dafoe, the viewer of the terrible rhythm of nature, and the truth that life always gives way to death that brings new life and so on.

Gainsbourg’s character experiences nature in a memory of a child crying, a sound that fills the woods, and reflects her horror of the cycle of life and death characterised by grief, pain, and despair. These human responses to the relentless cycle of nature, a cycle which is entirely beyond our control, are offset by feelings of love, desire, and passion. It is the relationship between these two sets of emotions, love, desire, and passion, and grief, pain, and despair, which marks humanity down as a tragic species and leads Gainsbourg to tell Dafoe that nature is Satan’s Church. Satan’s Church, a place of desire, lust, and passion, and the drive to live, the drive to escape from the gravity of nature, offset by the crushing weight of death, and feelings of grief, pain, and despair at our inability to overcome our limit as earthbound creatures.

It is on the basis of a recognition of this tragic condition that the film progresses, showing how Gainsbourg’s recovery, her acceptance of nature, coincides with Dafoe’s collapse, and his struggle with the reality of life, death, and the ultimate futility of the disciplinary enterprise of civilization. Two events confirm this truth for Dafoe’s character. First, he meets a fox in the woods. The fox tells him that ‘chaos reigns’ and in doing so explains that all attempts at understanding and disciplining nature are fated to fail. Second, he revisits the autopsy report into his son’s death that shows a deformity in the child’s feet possibly caused by his mother confusing left and right and mixing his shoes up.

Although this tells us that there is a poor fit between culture and nature, with the former deforming the latter, and that the relationship between love and loss, grief, and pain turns off the failure of this relationship, Dafoe’s character makes a leap to a gendered value judgment. For Dafoe’s character, the classic father of psychoanalysis, representative of culture, what the autopsy report says is that the painful bind between love and loss is caused by the inability of human civilization to properly control nature, and that his other half is somehow implicated in this problematic, as a representative of nature, a flawed agent of culture.
It is at this point in the narrative that the relationship between Dafoe and Gainsbourg’s characters turns violent, with the former viewing the latter’s research into male violence and gynocide, and the latter announcing her masochist belief that women enjoy punishment and discipline. Dafoe’s character disagrees, but what follows depicts the classic psychoanalytic relationship between man and woman, where man represents culture and the desire to escape the world, and woman reflects the gravitational force of nature that seeks to pull him back down to earth. As Dafoe’s character seeks to dominate Gainsbourg’s character through the tools of culture, language and abstract knowledge, so Gainsbourg’s character seeks to control Dafoe’s character through ultra violence, tough love meant to ground him, and prevent him from ever ‘leaving her behind’. This tough love is, of course, paralleled by the infamous scene of genital self-mutilation, which represents Gainsbourg’s desperate attempt to realign herself with the world of culture, and thus her husband, who she has already sought to tie back to nature by driving a grindstone into his leg.

The final scene of the film shows the tragic failure of the couple’s relationship, torn apart by the death of their son, and their recognition of the truth of Jacques Lacan’s statement, ‘there is no such thing as a sexual relationship’. It is the main characters’ inability to accept the truth of this statement from the French psychoanalyst, which means that in any sexual relationship, or perhaps any relationship, each party is sustained by a different fantasy or perspective and that ultimately there is no symmetry, connection, or relationship between these fantasies, that pushes them towards sexual violence, because it is in their moment of loss, grief, pain, and despair that they need each other most.

It is here, in the recognition that now, when she needs him most, he is most distant, that the struggle between man and woman, culture and nature, becomes terminal, and she announces that ‘when the three beggars arrive someone must die’. Since grief, pain, and despair are on the scene, and the sado-masochistic relationship between culture and nature has reached the point of no return, we know that either she will stab him to death, thus ensuring that he will remain with her forever or he will kill her, abandoning her back to nature from where she came. The final moments of the film show the outcome. Dafoe’s character strangles Gainsbourg’s character and he wanders out into the woods to be confronted by a mass of faceless women and children who he cannot recognise or identify with and who speak of his profound alienation from his family, nature, and ultimately his own emotions.

In the late 1880s the great German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a book called Anti-Christ in order to announce his belief that some men are born to challenge nature, challenge God, and make their own way in the world. In other works, the figure of the Anti-Christ was represented by the famous Ubermensch or superman who was similarly capable of rising above the world. Like the superman who lived apart from society, Nietzsche was famously never married, had one brief sexual relationship, and remains one of history’s great individualists. Indeed, the Anti-Christ is thought of have been written when Nietzsche was stricken by syphilis, half mad, and totally caught up his own myth. What does this have to do with the cinematic Anti-Christ? I think that Lars Von Trier’s film tells of the other side of Nietzsche’s book. Where Nietzsche celebrates the life of the Anti-Christ, I think that Von Trier’s film is profoundly sociological in that it lays bare the horror of male, or what psychoanalysts might call, phallic individualism and shows what this approach to the world does to man’s relationships with women, children, and ultimately himself.

Question Everything: Is Greed Good?

2010-06-23T14:22:00.003+01:00

By

Mark Featherstone

As George Osborne, Chancellor of the Con-Lib Coalition government announced the ‘emergency budget’ to try to balance Britain’s deficit, I was put in mind of last week’s BBC Hardtalk interview with Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela, and subject of Oliver Stone’s forthcoming documentary on the return of socialism in Latin America, South of the Border. Although this may seem like a strange comparison, I think that drawing a contrast between Chavez and Osborne is interesting because it sheds light on both the nature of contemporary society and in my view the key purpose of sociology today.

In the BBC interview, Chavez, who rarely talks to the western media, told us that not only does capitalism not work, but also that it is destroying the world. Unsurprisingly Osborne speaks of ‘economic emergency, toughness, and a prosperous enterprise led future’. Immediately, the difference between the two speakers is clear. The contrast between Chavez and Osborne could not be more stark. In Chavez’s talk the key point is the transformation of capitalism as a system of exchange, which is, in his view, inherently exploitative.

In Osborne’s budget speech the idea of the form of the economic system is bracketed out in favour of an attempt to re-balance the economy, cut debt, and create equilibrium. Clearly, from the realist’s point of view, Chavez’s talk represents a kind of utopian rhetoric. How is it possible to change the system today? Surely the idea of criticising capitalism itself, the system of economic exchange we live by, is madness? The Cold War is over. In the wake of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, all sane people accept that ‘there is no alternative’.

However, once we accept this position we close off the possibility of radical change and George Osborne is one of two characters pushed centre stage. The other is, of course, Gordon Brown. Whereas Osborne represents one phase of capitalism, bust, and the attempt to restart the economy from a stable base, Brown represents the other side of the capitalist economy, boom, characterised by the good times, when we spend money we have not got and worry about it later. George Osborne is bust, worry, and recession embodied and his best hope of maintaining any level of popularity is to try to blame everything on his alter-ego, Gordon Brown, and continue to talk about over-reaching, over-spending, and the over-inflated credit bubble of the New Labour years. Osborne and Brown are, therefore, the two faces of capitalism and they cannot be seperated.

But while these two characters represent the intra-systemic function of capitalism, which is why we will never see an Osborne or a Brown think about the value of the system itself, Chavez sits outside of capitalism and is in this respect extra-systemic. Chavez recognises the evils of capitalism related to poverty, inequality, domination, exploitation, and environmental destruction. He is, however, not the only extra-systemic character on the scene. The other character who reflects properly on the wider system is represented by another Oliver Stone invention, Michael Douglas’ brilliant Gordon Gekko, who famously told us in 1987 that ‘greed is good’.

Why is Gordon Gekko extra-systemic? Gordon Gekko is extra-systemic because he is not concerned with either boom or bust, but rather the ethic of the system. For Gekko the system is not evil, in the way it is for Chavez, but rather good in the original ancient use of the word, meaning the best way of living. Gekko sees opportunity everywhere. There is money to be made in the good times, and as Naomi Klein has recently shown us in her book on disaster capitalism, there is certainly money to be made in the bad times. This is why Wall Street, and Gordon Gekko, are such important cinematic creations. They tell us a lot about the contemporary world. In many respects the dominant philosophy in the world over the last thirty years was summed up by Gekko, ‘greed is good’. We don’t need to say any more.

And one would have to say that greed has been very good for a lot of people in the world for a very long time. The 1980s, 1990s, and much of the first decade of the 21st century have seen massive economic growth across the world, but also an ever widening gulf between the world’s haves and have nots. Supporters of capitalism would, of course, tell us about ‘trickle down’ and the ‘invisible hand’, explaining that society benefits from greedy people making money for themselves in the shape of job creation.

Unfortunately, this does not really help those people who suffer when the bubble bursts, the economy crashes, and we enter a period of bust. For this reason, and because it takes social effects as a by-product that either happen or do not happen, what we might call the social ethic of capitalism is profoundly asociological. The wealth of the greedy individual always comes first in capitalism. If there is a social effect, it is an unintended consequence, a kind of risk of the enterprise, a cost built into the project of making money in the shape of the inevitability that the capitalist will always lose some profit in social effects, thereby inadvertently wasting money giving to others.

However, perhaps even here, in wasting money on others, there is profit to be made if one plays the ethical card, thereby justifying one’s own greed by saying that it is in fact a socially responsible vice whereby making money for oneself makes money for others who are unable to do so for themselves. So update Gekko slightly, telling everybody greed is ethically good, and you can continue to make a fortune at everybody else’s expense, and avoid criticism. It is, of course, enormously important to be able to do this.

The capitalist philosophy of greed is enormously seductive, but it is also sleazy and needs to be kept out of sight, hidden behind a veil of respectability. This is why Gordon Gekko is such a brilliant characterisation of capitalism. An obscene or pornographic invention who says too much, tells it like it is, and reveals everything: greed is good, which one of us would not want to live a life of luxury, riches, and vice, if society allowed it?

For a long time of course this life was the province of the adventurer, the philanderer, the cheat, but what has happened recently is that capitalism has more or less legitimised the pursuit of luxury in line with Gekko’s advice in the creation of a society organised around the principle of enjoyment and pleasure. But quite apart from the fact that legitimation takes all the fun out of fun, the social effects of this transformation are disastrous, and this is part of what has happened in what David Cameron calls contemporary broken Britain. When the individual has no responsibility to anybody but themselves and their own enjoyment, society is in trouble, and no amount of attempts to attach a minimal sociological dimension to greed by talking about trickle down and the socio-economic benefits of consumption will change that fact.

The problem of the capitalist philosophy of greed is, therefore, that it is enormously seductive, because it taps into our base desires, and it produces a normless society, that is endlessly on the edge of collapse, and for this reason makes the philosophy of greed, pleasure, and enjoyment even more seductive. What we can see then is that the kind of society this philosophy produces is not really one anybody would want to live in unless you could be sure you would be able to satisfy your desires and would not consigned to the mass of people consigned to the endless frustration at not being able to enjoy in a society geared around endless enjoyment.

And this is not the worst of the story. The division between those who enjoy and those who are frustrated probably marks out the key division in rich western nations, but the problem of the haves and haves not takes on an entirely new dimension based on survival when we turn out attention to the relationship between the west and the rest. It is here, in the division between two kinds of inequality (rich societies based on a division between those who enjoy and those who are endlessly frustrated versus a global economy of haves who live in luxury and have nots who struggle to survive), that the difference between Osborne and Chavez resides, and the reason why it seems so strange to compare them.

An effective comparison between them requires us, rich westerners, to make a shift in perception, suspend our normal view of reality, and see the world from a different point of view. We have to move from thinking like Osborne, who talks about the economy of enjoyment and frustration, in a society where people more or less accept capitalism as a good way to live, to thinking like Chavez, who talks about the economy of luxury and immiseration, where the situation is more or less intolerable for the majority of people who live on the edge of survival. This is properly sociological.

But making this shift throws up new questions. Why is making money, why is greed, always exploitative? Why can’t I be greedy, have things my own way, and forget about other people. Do I have to hurt other people? Is capitalism really a zero-sum game, where my making money means you must live in poverty? Does capitalism have to divide over enjoyment and frustration and luxury and immiseration? The answer to these related questions sends us back to classical sociology. Karl Marx teaches us that like society, capitalism is a relation, a relation based on unequal exchange and exploitation, and that there can be no real equality under capitalism. If I make money, I make money out of you, and you are exploited. My enjoyment is premised on your frustration and so on.

In light of this recognition one can see that it is perhaps the greatest trick that capitalism has ever played, a trick it has been able to play particularly well over the last thirty years, to conjure the idea that capitalism is fair and that is possible to have some form of equality in capitalist social relations.

In the first phase of industrial capitalism there was little sense that this was a system based on anything but naked exploitation. Hence, the rise of socialism and communism. In the wake of the first great crash in the 1920s, a new form of capitalism emerged based on social responsibility, but the problem with this was that it was honest to its word. The result of this honesty was a contraction of capitalism as a profit producing machine. Hence the rise of the current brand of capitalism based in naked exploitation and the fantasy of reform aimed at producing more equal societies, and a more equal world.

The evidence of this new fantastic brand of capitalism is everywhere. Consider the third way, which suggested that it was possible to have free market profiteering, and a society based in greed, and social welfare, and a fair society. And what about philanthropic capitalists? Contrary capitalist who make enormous amounts of money, only to give a small portion back to the people they exploited in the first place, once they have made their money and secured their position at the top of the economic food chain.

There is no doubt that there is a great deal of fantasy about the new brand of capitalism, but the problem may have been that too many people let the fantasy run away with them and actually bought into the idea of endless enjoyment without exploitative social relations. The problem with the fantasy here is whether it was consciously understood to be a fantasy and was therefore a cynical attempt to deceive people, dampening down their unrest, unhappiness, and frustration, or whether the exponents of the third way actually believed in the fantastic idea of socialistic capitalism.

Regardless of what one thinks about this, it seems that today the idea of endless enjoyment is over, and nobody believes that it is possible to have this, that, and other without paying for it, with the result that we are now entering the so-called age of austerity where we will have to suffer and stop enjoying ourselves. I think that it is likely that the result of this belt-tightening will be the rise of a new form of class consciousness, a new sensitivity to exploitative social relations, similar to that rehearsed by the recent ‘outing’ of the financial sector and bonus culture and MPs and their corrupt expenses culture, and that this will make Chavez’s extra-systemic anti-capitalist message more relevant to those in rich western countries, who have for too long ignored the socialist critique of global capitalism because they simply did not need to bother about the poverty of those in far off places.

It may be the case then that after twenty or thirty years on top Gordon Gekko, the philosopher of capitalism unleashed and desire realised, may be about to give way to Chavez, the champion of public ownership, free health care, and free education, as we are forced to do what Marx told us to do long ago, and good sociologists should always do, question everything, including and especially those things that seem absolutely beyond question, such as the capitalist system itself.

Research Associate opportunity - Teenagers’ Experiences of Domestic Abuse as Witnesses, Victims and Potential Perpetrators

2010-06-17T13:34:00.004+01:00

Within the Faculty Of Humanities And Social Sciences, Keele University

(Fixed Term for 34 months)

Starting Salary, Grade 7: £29,853 per annum

We are seeking a full-time post-doctoral research associate for a major ESRC study of teenagers' experiences of domestic abuse as witnesses, victims and potential perpetrators. With support from an experienced research team, and relevant training, the postholder will have the opportunity to develop a career in the field of violence research. The main aim of the research is to produce an answer to the question as to why some young men grow up to be perpetrators of domestic abuse - and to learn more about how we can prevent them from becoming reliant on a range of violent, controlling and threatening behaviours. The research involves administration of an attitudinal scale, self-report questionnaire, focus groups, and in-depth biographical interviews with young people.
Applicants must be able to demonstrate competency with respect to both survey and qualitative data collection, including the administration and analysis of research data. Experience of working with or conducting research with young people on sensitive subject matters is highly desirable. The postholder will be expected to undertake the bulk of the fieldwork for the project, participate in the analysis of the project's data, and work with the project's interdisciplinary research team to deliver on the project's main outputs, including academic publications. The fieldwork for the project will take place primarily in the North Staffordshire area. Appointment will be from 1st October 2010.

Job packs and further particulars are available from: www.keele.ac.uk/jobs, vacancies@keele.ac.uk, Human Resources, Keele University, Staffordshire, ST5 5BG or Fax: 01782 733471. The job advert is available at: http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/ABG664/research-associate/

Informal enquiries are welcome to

Dr David Gadd, email: d.r.gadd@crim.keele.ac.uk Tel: 01782 733598
Or
Dr Claire Fox email: c.fox@psy.keele.ac.uk Tel: 01782 733330

Please quote post reference: RE10/15UK and see http://www.jobs.ac.uk/

Closing date for applications: 7th July 2010

Garden Times

2010-05-26T16:15:00.002+01:00

Now that season of the sun is upon us and we are all basking in the opportunities of summer it is appropriate timing to consider the role and functions of gardens in contemporary life. If ‘an ‘Englishman’s home is his castle’ his [sic] garden is something else besides. Gardens tell us something not only about the people who have and keep them but also something more about society in general. This is not as easy as it first seems. The private garden is a complex of competing ideas, ideals and uses that reflect different class as well as tastes, aesthetic preferences, penchants and predilections, not to mention sizes, forms and functions.

The history of the private garden includes the development of the landed gentry’s country estate in which the view and perspective f the surrounding countryside was moulded and shaped to meet an ideal of an Elysium field in which order and beauty could be arranged (including suitably dressed and posed peasant farm labourers). In this the role of landscape gardeners and architects such as Capability Brown came to the fore to design and build new estates and gardens for wealthy landowners in the 18th century. Such private parkland surrounded the mansion and houses and country retreats not just of a landed gentry but also increasingly the new moneyed classed that began to appear in the 19th century. Humphrey Repton, Brown’s successor was to develop the idea of the English Garden that not only was exported to the countryside but also to bring back ideas of landscape design and aesthetics to Britain. During the 19th century as urbanisation and industrialisation turned Britain into the first predominantly urban society the need to provide access to nature in the city for healthy leisure and rational recreation for the increasingly populous working classes was eventually recognition and commitment to the provision of publicly owned and maintained urban public parks. One important figure in the 19th century was Sir Joseph Paxton who was responsible designing may of the great urban public parks in Britain that provided much needed green and leisure space for the industrial urban working class to gain access to nature, relatively fresh air and amusements, recreation and leisure in the overcrowded and polluted industrial cities.

The development of the private garden as a more commonly accessible private green space was associated with changes in residential housing design and the development of both a move to privately owned suburban urban development and working class housing with an attached garden. For many rural labourers and those who lived in tied cottages associated with some industries as well as the more large scale development of social housing in the 20th century the provision of a small garden allowed many to have a small piece of land to cultivate. This led to the ‘cottage garden’ now known as a distinct informal style of dense planting use of traditional plants and materials but which also had more pragmatic uses. Originally the cottage garden provided herbs and fresh vegetables as a necessary supplement for wage labourers as well as the opportunity to spend some leisure time in the fresh air after the working day in the factory, mill or mine.

Nowadays, the idea of the garden has evolved and changed over time as new fashions in planting and uses have developed. Take a walk along any street and observe the choices and judgements, the time and money invested in creating the front garden that presents to the street and the world an idea or representation of the house-holders public face. Or not as the case may be given that so many urban terraced streets have replaced the front garden with a paved, concrete or mono-blocked parking space for the all pervasive culture of the car. Better still, spend some time on a train or a bus, along the canal or river towpath peering into the back gardens of the houses one passes and one will see a variety of uses, styles, functions, forms as well as fads and fashions. If one takes a critical investigation over the back walls and fences of the various styles and classes of areas you pass along you can make fairly accurate assessments of the people whose gardens one can see.

In countries where the climate is more consistently warm an outside culture is lived out in which all sorts of everyday activities take place in the outdoors as a matter of course. In Britain, the garden, for those of us fortunate to have one, takes on an extra dimension as it comes in to regular use only at certain times of the year. It is very much used and viewed as an extra room in summer, (lebensraum), an outside living ‘room’ providing the opportunity not only to take a break from the inside months of weather enforced internal imprisonment that our climate imposes on us but also provides much more. In this, it gives an opportunity to study and think on how we relate not only to the (self) created nature that gardens provide but also how we act and interact, represent our identities and selves, in the outside spaces that we inhabit.

The garden is a multifunctional space that can and does reflect the aspirations, status, ideals as well as life course of those who have them. It also tells us something of the way we live and how in the garden as much as in the home or in other more commonly considered consumption and life-style spheres (clothes, music, film, TV, cars, etc.) fads, fashions and trends have become part of a huge industry. As we peer into the gardens of others or perhaps think of our own we can sketch this multiplicity of uses as well as lifestyle and identity statements that are represented in the enactment and landscape of the domestic garden.

The garden when the weather is clement is not only a place to hang and dry washing, to sit with a beer or chilled glass of wine at the end of the working day or in the permitted leisure time of weekends and holidays. It is also a ‘safe’ space for children to play, exercise and let off the boundless energy of children. In fact, we can not only glean whether or not a family with children resides in the house by the presence or absence of play equipment we can also make assessments as to the ages of the children and even their genders. If there is a sandpit, paddling pool, the ubiquitous plastic play-equipment and tricycles we can guess the presence of the pre-school age-group. Swings may be stereotypically for girls to use whilst football goals are designated male, whilst a swingball, climbing frames or trampoline is more gender neutral. There may also be play houses of all sorts, sizes and costs as well as well as enclosures and homes for pet rabbits all of which are indicative of younger children.

But the garden is more than a play area for children. As they grow older the garden matures as the inhabitants mature and take son new or different functions. One can see how different styles of gardening reflect not only individual tastes but also fashions in plants and landscape design. Take as examples how the hardwood decking, patios, expensive brick built or gas fired barbecues have expanded over the land as they have become essential elements of the garden as a leisure and party space, where dry and mud free feet can enjoy not only the al fresco dining of a picnic but also a special type of cooking and eating. The barbecue has become an essential summer experience of contemporary British summers. Similarly what was once essential elements of gardens, greenhouses and sheds (the quintessential place of escape of many married men) the range of architectural features now includes ha-has, summer houses, gazebos, fountains, ponds, arbours, arches, benches, bridges, fences, gates, obelisks, pergolas and planters populate gardens with an architectural element that is more than merely functional.

Gardens and their aesthetic appeal in terms of their planting and appearance reflect not only the individual tastes and proclivities of the owner. They also reflect the changing fads and fashions of the industry that has grown up to serve and inspire the gardener. As the graph below indicates this industry makes a significant contribution to the domestic economy.

UK Garden Products Market 2004-2014 £M
Source: "Garden Products Market Research & Analysis Report - UK 2010-2014"
(http://www.marketresearchreports.co.uk/Garden-Products-Market-Size.htm)

Furthermore changes in gardening practice reflect and have a correlation to wider socio-economic, political and environmental concerns and issues. An example of this can be discerned from the emphasis this year on grow-your-own. There has been a tradition of the self cultivation of fruit, vegetables and herbs that is reflected in the history of not only the cottage garden but also the popularity of allotment gardening. For those not familiar with the tradition of the allotment it is characterised by the concentration in a limited place of a number of relatively small parcels of land assigned to individuals or families for cultivation. The individual gardeners are organised in an allotment association which leases the land from the owner who may be a public, private or ecclesiastical entity, provided that it is only used for gardening (i.e. growing vegetables, fruits and flowers), and not for other purposes such as business or residence. Such is the current popularity of gardening and the shortage of suitable land for allotments that in some areas particularly in the cities there are waiting lists of sometimes up to 10 years for an allotment.

http://sustainablecities.dk/en/city-projects/cases/havana-feeding-the-city-on-urban-agriculture

A variation of this theme has been hugely successful in Cuba since the Soviet Bloc collapsed in 1989, and Cuba lost its food imports and agricultural inputs from which it depended for an adequate supply of food. The US Embargo also created a shortage of petrol necessary to transport the food from the rural agriculture sector to the city. This marked the beginning of serious food shortages that shook the entire country, but most of all Havana where urban agriculture has taken on many forms, ranging from private gardens (huertos privados) to state-owned research gardens (organicponicos), Havana's popular gardens (huertos populares) are the most widespread and accessible to the general public. These are small parcels of state-owned land that are cultivated by individuals or community groups in response to ongoing food shortages. The program for popular gardens first began in Havana in January 1991, and has since been promoted in other Cuban cities. In 1995, there were an estimated 26,600 popular garden parcels throughout the 43 urban districts that make up Havana's 15 municipalities. A wide selection of produce is cultivated, depending (on family needs, market availability, and suitability with the soil and locality. In addition to vegetable and fruit cultivation, some popular gardens also cultivate spices and plants used for medicinal purposes.

(http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/07ogcou96kd1W/340x.jpg)

The private garden demonstrates not only a complexity in respect of form and aesthetic appeal but also their use value as not only a recreational appendage to the house but also as a more useful and necessary space for physical and psychological health and well-being. The benefits of time spent in the garden or in any green space for relieving stress, promoting physical and mental well-being was recognised by public authorities and urban park designers in the initial phase of municipal park building in the 19th century. The difference with private gardens nowadays is that we have much more choice and control over the style, form, content and use to which we can shape and mould our private green space to meet our own tastes, needs and values. This can reflect the changing habits and lifestyles but can also reveal positive and negative aspects of the state of neighbourliness in modern Britain. Summer in the garden can bring neighbours and friends together for garden parties and get-togethers, for chats and conversation over the fence with seldom seen neighbours and the sharing of plants and gardening tips. However, it can also bring conflict over the noise of parties and loud music, dog barking, barbecue smoke and boisterous children’s games, over the cutting of shared hedges. Patio or garden rage is the term given to the verbal and sometimes violent confrontations between neighbours because summer and sunshine in the garden bring into contact people who would not meet at other times of the year.

Next time you spend sometime in your own or someone else’s garden this summer reflect on its role and place in the social life of Britain and how it reflects tastes and tendencies, lifestyles and habits that tells us something about how we live and interact with nature and with each other through and in the such a taken for granted green space as the private garden.

What is the Big Society?

2010-05-20T22:13:00.003+01:00

By

Mark Featherstone

At the end of March the new Prime Minister David Cameron unveiled the Conservative Party plan for a ‘Big Society’ to tackle the problem of ‘Broken Britain’. Although these media friendly terms faded from view somewhat during the subsequent election, and have been overtaken by events that have taken place since, my sense is that the idea of the Big Society functions as a kind of exemplar of Conservative thought in the UK and also illustrates the essential bi-polarity of politics in Britain that the Liberal Democrats sought to overcome, but have ended up reinforcing in the days after the election when they were effectively forced to choose between Cameron and Brown, Miliband, or whoever else New Labour thought could form a government. However, it is not yet clear what the result of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition will be, impotent compromise, deadlock, or the emergence of some new third form.

I think we must remain suspicious of the third option after New Labour and Anthony Giddens’ theory of the third way, which effectively jettisoned Labour’s socialist roots in favour of a limited view of a social state supporting a strong form of individualism and capitalistic entrepreneurialism. As we now know the result of this compromise formation was unfortunately the emergence of a strong bureaucratic state, a left over from Labour’s socialist past, without a commitment to real equality, and a rampant form of individualism in the higher echelons of the class structure, which eventually led to economic collapse, since in many respects the New Labour agenda represented a kind of ‘neo-liberal capitalism with a human face’. In this respect New Labour’s nod to equality was to ensure that Britain was not Brazil, Dubai, or even America, but that was about it.

Unfortunately, history teaches us that the Conservatives have no such commitment to even a minimum level of social justice. At this point I must confess my own bias, as a child of Thatcherism who happened to grow up in city that was wrecked by de-industrialism and became a Marxist Sociologist as a result. But at the same time I want to emphasise that I have no commitment to old style working class parochialism because this leads to closed communities, closed minds, and social, economic, political, and cultural stagnation. Instead, I believe that the evolution of any society requires raising the level of its most disadvantaged members as an absolute priority and that the economic success of those in the higher echelons of that society should be made subordinate to this goal through the imposition of progressive taxation.

This was, of course, the original objective of the Labour Party, before Thatcherite ideology shattered the working class as what Marxists would call ‘a class for itself’, a class aware of itself, since there is no doubt that a subordinate class still exists today, although it is clearly not conscious of itself as such. The turn to New Labour was, therefore, an attempt to catch the attention of the new Thatcherite middle class of aspiring consumers who bought their class identity on borrowed money, and created the problem of spiralling debt now facing Cameron and Clegg.

Thatcher told us that ‘there is no society’ and that the truth is every man and woman for themselves. New Labour adapted this idea, sustained a basic social state, and began to tell us that society was now a meritocracy, where anybody could make it so long as they had good credit. In the process they advanced the cause of the Thatcherite anti-society based on what the American sociologist Robert Merton long ago termed the success theme – that is to say that economic success is everything and that the good life is reliant on money. Merton’s point was, of course, that this creates enormous strain in society, because not everybody can achieve the aim of economic success through legitimate means, and therefore we start to see the emergence of criminal cultures of alternative means and pockets of alienated people who have simply fallen out of the bottom of the success-society. Today we call this class of people the underclass.

Although the Conservatives confronted a problem of law and order in the 1980s, I would suggest this was largely an effect of class and race war. The problem that faced New Labour in the last decade of the 20th century and first decade of the 21st century was very different. They were confronted by the problems of alienation, anomie, disenchantment, exclusion, and criminal adaptation from a money-society that could never include everybody because as sociology undergraduates learn capitalism must have its winners and losers.

Even in the good years, when the economy was buoyant, Tony Blair was unable to solve the problem of what David Cameron came to call Broken Britain. His Respect Agenda, which in many respects preceded the notion of the Big Society, failed because civic responsibility never emerged and what remained was a punitive state that was completely unable to cope with the scale of social breakdown occurring in neo-liberal Britain. This is the problem facing Cameron today – how to manage anomic Britain in the face of an economic crisis that is only likely to exacerbate the original problem of social meltdown? The Big Society is Cameron’s answer, but what is the Big Society and is it likely to work?

The first point to note about Cameron’s idea of the Big Society may be discerned from the front page of the Big Society paper which contrasts the idea of the Big Society to the notion of Big Government, which is associated with New Labour statism and bureaucracy throughout the report. This aspect of New Labour policy, which was a left over from its socialist past, was rooted in the idea that the state management of society was necessary to enable freedom. In this respect New Labour, Labour before them, and socialism in general was always premised on the idea of positive freedom, the idea of ‘freedom to’, the idea that the state should enable us to pursue our life choices.

Against this theory of positive freedom, which in contemporary Britain has been tainted by a state that has become overly restrictive of individual freedom to choose another route through life, the Conservative mode of thought relies on a conception of a minimal state, and a rejection of big government, in the name of negative freedom, the freedom to not be interfered with by government authority. The negativity of the Conservative theory of freedom, that it has no positive content of its own, is represented on the front page of Cameron’s paper – there is no theory of the Big Society without a critique of Big Government that defined the problem of the restriction of freedom under New Labour.

But what can we take this from point – the negativity of the Conservative theory of freedom? This theory is not problematic in itself because it simply leaves the individual to make choices and to make their own way in life. However, I think that it becomes deeply problematic in relation to Cameron’s overall programme, which locates the notion of freedom from state intervention within a theory of a Big Society, which will limit, restrict, and police individual behaviour through the imposition of a form of personal, professional, civic, and corporate responsibility. Against Thatcher’s theory of the non-existent society, where there was no limit on individual freedom, it turns out that Cameron’s Big Society is the new brake on self-expression, achievement, or selfishness, depending on how one wants to view the pursuit of self interest.

At this point we should note that the Big Society paper holds America up as an example of a Big Society, characterised by activism and community spirit, noting that Obama is a product of this mode of social integration. Unfortunately, what the paper fails to note is that America is also a deeply divided society, beset by enormous social problems, and that where community has emerged it has emerged largely as a result of the failure of the state to manage the economy in the name of the public good. Here community emerges as a form of damage limitation or catastrophe management to make up for the lack of government intervention in problems that can only really be solved by political action in the economic sphere. The problem occurs, of course, when this will to modify the economy is not there, when the government does not want to interfere with economy because it is committed to upholding the right to make money at the cost of others. But this is, of course, the American way, where the idea of negative freedom dominates social and political theory.

However, even though Cameron’s Big Society idea is problematic, in that it seems to undermine the idea of negative freedom by replacing one limit of individual freedom, the state, with another, society, thus creating a situation where the individual would be limited by something as unenlightened as common sense or public opinion, it is understandable why the Conservatives thought it necessary to move away from the Thatcherite idea of the non-existent society in the context of the anomic state of Broken Britain. Unfortunately though I think that what really undermines and ultimately defeats the idea of the Big Society as a useful theory resides in what the idea excludes or remains silent about. What the idea of the Big Society excludes or screens out by expanding the idea of society is first a consideration of politics, and government responsibility to make positive change at a structural level, and second economics, where this may be related to a consideration of jobs, welfare provision, and public sector funding. The Big Society remains silent on both politics and economics, apart from suggesting that the role of government should be to enable the Big Society and help communities to somehow combat their own anomic condition.

The core problem of this approach is, of course, that economy and politics are central to social conditions. There can be no Big Society without economic change through political intervention. This is what is required today. Unfortunately, the Conservative’s failure to understand the relationship between society, economy, and politics is not in my view a conscious ideological trick, since New Labour where similarly unable to understand why it is not possible to have a social state and a rampant capitalist economy. A classical sociologist would tell you that this is an either or choice, but in our post-modern times characterised by hybridity, bricolage, and the end of ideology nobody believes in contradiction any more.

Beyond the Big Society programme, this problem of the failure to understand the reality of contradiction is rooted in the Conservative-Liberal Democrat agreement on policy objectives for the coalition government. This hastily thrown together document tells us that the new government will reduce the national deficit, but fund disadvantaged schools. Where will the money come from to fund these schools, since we know public funding will suffer in the next round of savage cuts? The answer is a turn to new education providers, who will ensure a new freedom of curriculum. But the problem with this approach is that it refers to a new stage of privatisations, which as we know results in uneven provision, new inequalities, and the creation of an education system characterised by the very advantage and disadvantage the policy set out to combat in the first place. We find the same contradictory thinking in the new government’s vague declarations about higher education. We will apparently see an increase in spending and improved quality in teaching and research. Nobody would disagree that this is desirable, but the problem is that higher education is currently under attack and likely to suffer massive budgetary cuts over the course of next five years.

Apart from this problematic vision of education, it is interesting that the security state is entirely missing from Conservative-Liberal Democrat thinking as a support to freedom. It is almost as though the war on terror ended with New Labour. There is no mention of Afghanistan, the Taleban, or Al Qaeda in the Conservative-Liberal Democrat document. Instead, where the idea of the security state appears it is as a restriction on personal liberty. Here the war on terror and the security state is constructed as an example of New Labour paternalism and the problem of the punitive state. Of course nobody would want to defend the New Labour model, which saw the emergence of a controlling bureaucratic state without the pay off of social and economic equality, but the Conservative model is no better because what it is delivers is freedom from bureaucracy and state control without any kind of attempt to level the playing field, enable individual freedom across the board, or brake the mass production of inequality.

We should conclude then that the third way may be dead, recognising that it was never realistic to combine the social state and capitalism, but point out that the Conservative plan to jettison state intervention and replace it with the Big Society is unlikely to solve the problem of Broken Britain. What is the solution then? My view is that what is required is a modification of economic power relations and an assault on the root causes of inequality through progressive taxation policy because only this will save anomic Britain from social decay. In other words, I think that what is required is a new social contract based on a political modification of economic power relations, rather than an attempt to use the social, and the concept of the Big Society, to screen economic power relations from view and somehow expect our communities to rebuild themselves in the context of a society characterised by economic ruin, massive inequality, economic insecurity, and failing social mobility.

EVALUATION EXPLORES ROLE OF PARENTS IN THE LEARNING TO DRIVE EXPERIENCE

2010-05-17T15:36:00.003+01:00

By Helen Wells

Research recently conducted by a team involving Keele University, Staffordshire County Council and RoSPA, found that parents’ involvement in driving lessons (for instance sitting in the back seat during a lesson) helped to cut out the age-old quarrels between learner drivers and the mums and dads who offer private practice, resulting in a more productive practice experience.

An evaluation of the initial few months implementation of the Staffordshire Young Driver Coaching Programme (YDCP), has found that young drivers’ learning experiences can be enhanced by getting their parents more involved in lessons generally. The evaluation, carried out as part of the RoSPA/BNFL scholarship scheme, also found that an accompanying resource pack full of materials designed to be used during private practice sessions also proved vital to producing better, safer drivers.

The 17-24 age group is a priority area for Staffordshire County Council as, although that age group represents about 10 per cent of the population, it makes up 28 per cent of all fatal driver casualties.

Although the study could not, at this stage, research long-term goals such as reduced crash rates, it did highlight the kind of good practice - such as parents sitting in on lessons – which other research has suggested might enable those aims to be achieved. The underlying principles of the YDCP are to increase the effectiveness of private practice in conjunction with professional instruction, and to involve parents in the learning to drive process. These principles are supported by findings from international research on road safety, learning to drive, and adolescent development.

A quarter of all approved driving instructors (ADIs) in Staffordshire signed up to the scheme, which is now in its tenth month.

As well as parents recording progress in the learner’s training book, they also received guides about how to support the lessons conducted by the learner’s ADI.

An evaluation of the resource pack’s effectiveness found that it improved the structure of private practice by giving parents a better understanding of their child’s progress with their instructor, while also updating their own knowledge of the Highway Code. This resulted in parents having more confidence to supervise learners and more efficient paid-for lessons - not to mention the guides being used to solve arguments in private practice.

It also culminated in a closer working relationship between ADIs and the local authority road safety unit.

The programme’s evaluation was funded by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents’ scholarship scheme, which was set up after British Nuclear Fuels donated £500,000 to support research that would have a significant impact on improving safety in the UK and around the world. A grant of £20,000 was successfully submitted by Dr Helen Wells of the Research Institute for Law, Politics and Justice, and the Road Safety & Sustainable Travel Unit at Staffordshire County Council.

For more information on the research, contact Dr Helen Wells.

Post-graduate study while you work? Visit our Twilight Event

2010-03-18T15:45:00.002Z

Are you interested in studying for a full-time Masters' degree while you work full-time? The School of Sociology and Criminology at Keele University is offering an innovative way of studying which allows you to keep your earnings coming in while pursuing your intellectual ambitions, and completing your Masters' within a year...

Come and find out about your post-graduate options at our Twilight Event
Wednesday, 31st March, 2010
Starts 4.30pm until 7.00pm
in the Claus Moser Research Centre, Keele University
Download the programme and the RSVP form

Our new MA in Urban Futures and Sustainable Communities, and our new MA in Criminology and Criminal Justice will offer taught modules within week-long blocks, instead of weekly classes. This means you can use annual leave, or negotiate 'professional development time' in order to study. The blocks are spread over the year, typically in early Autumn, Winter, early Spring and early Summer, followed by a Dissertation.

This mode of teaching also means you can visit from wherever you live in the world because you don't have to be on campus all year round: we support your learning with online resources and reading materials, and your assessments will be completed with in-person or remote supervision following each of the teaching blocks.

Of course, if you wish to come and sample life on the beautiful, green Keele campus all year round, you're welcome: there is a wealth of cultural and intellectual activities going on - seminars, concerts, cultural events. The Claus Moser Research Centre for the Humanities and Social Sciences hosts a range of post-graduates and provides study and meeting space

There are plenty of other post-graduate options to choose from, including our Masters' in Research in Sociology

Poverty Porn

2010-03-12T17:47:00.010Z

By Siobhan Holohan

For a while now the current economic downturn has presented programme makers with a dilemma of sorts. After years making a good living off the back of the property boom with television gems like Channel Four's Location, Location, Location, the credit crunch, accompanied by thousands of job losses and home repossessions, made the conspicuous consumption found in such shows hard to swallow.

Move over property porn here comes poverty porn. I first heard this phrase last year in relation to Danny Boyles’ hugely successful film Slumdog Millionaire, then again a couple of months ago in relation to Channel Four’s Slumming It. This programme saw property guru Kevin McCloud spend time living in and exploring Dharavi, a shanty town in Mumbia and one of the largest slums in Asia. Like poverty tourism, where the affluent travel to less developed parts of the world to ‘experience’ how the other half live (sometimes with horror other times through rose coloured spectacles) the television equivalent drops a presenter and camera crew into an area exemplified by poor living conditions and subjects it to the lofty gaze of the Eurocentric traveller.

But it’s not just global others programme makers treat as strange. Recent weeks have seen a number of reality television programmes alluding to social and economic deprivation in the UK. Coming close on the tail of Channel 4’s The Tower Block of Commons, which dressed MPs as 'ordinary members of the public' and housed them with council tenets, this week BBC One offered up Famous, Rich and Jobless, a two-part examination of how unemployment affects the 2.5 million currently out of work in Britain. In this programme four celebrities were sent to unemployment black spots around the country ostensibly to find out what its like to be out of work in the UK today. With the trappings of celebrity taken away and replaced with a bag of second hand clothes (apparently the poor person's uniform), they spent four days (!) experiencing life on job seekers allowance. In that time Meg Matthews (famous for being married to Noel Gallagher) found work on a market stall, celebrity gardener, Diarmuid Gavin, managed to find a few odd jobs to supplement his JSA, Emma Parker Bowles (one time It girl and recovering alcoholic) worked a shift in a pub, and Larry Lamb, AKA Archie Mitchell from EasterEnders, bucked the trend by living quite happily on the £40 he was given to survive. The underlying narrative was clear: job seekers – there are jobs get on your bike and find one.

In the second part of the experiment the celebrities went to live with people currently on job seekers allowance in order to help them to break the cycle of claiming benefits. Regardless of the fact that this is purportedly what government agencies are for, the strange shift in gear between programme one and two saw a new form of moralising appear. While Meg, Larry and Emma embraced their roles as part therapist, part life coach, Diarmuid found his role in a household with two long-term unemployed parents and their five children (with another on the way) morally problematic. He could not escape either his dismay at what he considered to be their poor parenting practices, or the mindset that told him that they shouldn’t keep having kids if they can’t afford them. In the end the celebrities got their own clothes back, went home and no real solutions were found.

Beyond the idea that such programmes simply exploit those living in poverty and socially degrading circumstances for television ratings, I’m not sure what the moral of this programme was. Perhaps that celebrities have more get up and go than the average person? This is the difficulty with these kind of unreflective reality shows, they simply serve to perpetuate the hyperbole found in much of the mainstream media which continues to suggest that people in difficult circumstances are there of their own making. What the programme makers, the celebrities, and possibly the job seekers failed to recognise was that there is no easy solution to the problems of job losses or long term unemployment. These issues must be tackled at every level – top to bottom – not just by forcing blame on those affected by their social conditions.

The Hurt Locker: What is the Death Drive?

2010-02-25T11:24:00.003Z

By

Mark Featherstone

I have recently written two papers on the psychoanalytic idea of the death drive and the ways in which it manifests itself in society. In these papers I focus on the war on terror and the ways in which violence, destructiveness, what psychoanalysts call aggressivity, and other perversions such as sadism have become widespread in western society.

My argument in these papers is that although we regard these perversions as horrendous distortions of what it means to be a social being when they occur in events such as a the Baby P case, it should come as no surprise to us that these events happen because our culture is in many ways characterised by violence and sadism. Consider contemporary popular culture. We watch 24, where Jack Bauer tortures people on a regular basis, play Grand Theft Auto, and enjoy torture porn movies, such as the Saw franchise. For the cultural sociologist Henry Giroux, our popular culture provides us with an education in cruelty and creates a general atmosphere where violence and aggression is tolerated and in many cases encouraged. This is not the place, however, to discuss the finer points of Giroux’s theory or enter into age old debates about media effects.

Instead, the reason I start with reference to this work is because it was in the context of having recently written these papers that I viewed Kathryn Bigelow’s critically acclaimed film The Hurt Locker and recognised that it perfectly captures the idea of the death drive as a social and cultural phenomenon that transforms violence, aggression, and more centrally destructiveness from social pathologies into aspects of a norm or ethical principle of deadly risk to be employed as a guide for living and dying. Moreover, my sense was that The Hurt Locker, a film about bomb disposal in Iraq, could be used to show how psychoanalytic theory could be employed in social analysis to reveal a meta- or socio-psychological condition, on the basis that film condenses these kind of conditions into a text that we create in order to tell ourselves about our own society and culture.

The idea of a link between the psychological condition of the death drive and contemporary society raises some interesting questions. First, we must ask ourselves, how is condition this written into the film and how can psycho-social analysis reveal its presence? Second, we have to think about timing. Why now? What is it about contemporary society that makes the death drive current, since as we will see, Freud saw the death drive as a kind of ahistorical phenomenon, which is somehow hard-wired into humans? However, before we start to answer these questions, let us think about the idea of the death drive.

Freud wrote about the death drive or thanatos in his essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In his view human psychology is governed by two opposing principles – a life drive (eros) and more fundamentally, a death drive (thanatos). For Freud thanatos emerges because human existence is characterised by trauma. Human birth is traumatic. In Freud’s eyes the newborn experiences birth as a traumatic separation from its mother. This experience is then repeated later in life when the child learns from its father that it will eventually have to leave its mother behind and become an adult in its own right. All of this psycho-sexual trauma means that humans are wounded creatures.

For Freud we are naturally wounded creatures and we spend our lives searching for a sense of completion and peace. But there is no ultimate satisfaction. There is no way to return to the state of peace that we experience before the original moment of trauma, birth. There is no way to return to the womb. In Freud’s view this is why human life is largely characterised by a kind of raging turmoil set on the return to the peace originally experienced in the womb which in his view can only be repeated in one experience, death. Hence the founder of psychoanalysis regarded humans as essentially self-destructive creatures who have evolved various defence mechanisms for staying alive.

The first of these mechanisms is called projection, whereby the desire to destroy oneself is projected onto other people in the shape of what psychoanalysts have come to call aggressivity. But how to control aggressivity, which would essentially transform humanity into a self-destructive species? The answer is society or what Freud calls civilization. Civilization controls our violent impulses and prevents us from killing each other, but only at the cost of limiting our instincts. Society is, therefore, a social control machine.

This is the meaning of Freud’s idea of the life drive or eros. The life drive counter-acts the death drive by re-directing our natural instincts to destruction into social construction and social development. But unfortunately, civilization offers no lasting peace and we are haunted by thanatos. For example, we may seek out peace and completion through religion, which tells us about heaven and the afterlife where the endless desire to find the thing which will complete us no longer exists, and other secular forms that offer ecstatic experience, such as sex, narcotic, and alcohol addiction. All of these forms of addiction numb the pain of life and provide us with the momentary relief Georges Bataille talked about in terms of le petite mort, or the little death, meaning the moment of orgasm, ecstasy, or inebriation, where we lose ourselves, go blank, and descend into nothingness for a short period of time.

The little death is, however, just that, a small death. The limit state of ecstasy is forever balanced by the need to carry on, by the need to persist, by the need to live provided by eros. Eros means that the apocalyptic moment of death is postponed for as long as possible. The apocalypse is, therefore, not now, but rather distributed across life in whatever limit experiences we can manage to cram into our limited time in the world.

This Freudian theory is, of course, perfectly captured by the film, The Hurt Locker, which tells the story of an American bomb disposal expert in Iraq, William James (Jeremy Renner), who takes unnecessary risks and lives for the limit experience. The film clearly shows that he feels most alive when he is closest to death, a condition supported by the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who spoke about being-towards-death, and told us that we should live every moment as though it was our last, in order that we might live a full and meaningful life. I think that this much is explicit in the manifest content of the film. However, a deeper, psychoanalytic understanding of the film, requires an interpretation of the latent meaning of the scene of bomb disposal itself that we might talk about through Heideggerian language, being-with-bombs. I use the term being-with-bombs because in Freud’s theory humans live with bombs every day of their lives. We all live with psychological bombs lodged deep in our unconscious minds waiting to explode, turning our lives to rubble. The death drive, the product of the trauma of birth, is, of course, the ultimate unexploded bomb, the bomb that Freud knew could never be defused or disarmed. In Freud’s thought the best we can ever do is to avoid detonation. We can hold our selves, or in Freud’s language our egos, together and keep the death drive in check.

It is this situation, this psychological complex, that is beautifully captured by The Hurt Locker. The psychological complex of the struggle between the life and death drives is perfectly depicted by James’ confrontation with the bomb. The moment when he is most alive, the moment when he is potentially about to die, the moment when he confronts the bomb, is the moment when the life drive meets the death drive and life hangs in the balance.

Should we consider the work of one of Freud’s followers, Melanie Klein, we can reinforce this theory, so that it becomes more than simply a metaphor. For Klein, who wrote about the life and death drives as they play out in child psychology, psychological processes are always embodied processes that we also project onto the world around us. In this respect, the link between the life / death drive complex and bomb detonation is no longer simply a metaphor because the threat of psychological collapse is the threat that the body will be exploded to pieces. Moreover, the fact that the war between the life and death drives is played out in terms of bomb detonation is not simply a metaphorical connection, since it is possible to see the latter social political reality as an expression of a deeper psychological reality in the same way that everything in the world is from a psychoanalytic perspective an expression of human psychological reality.

Following this train of thought, we can consider the meaning of the bomb suit, which the detonation experts wear to protect themselves from blasts. The bomb suit is the Freudian ego, the front stage social self, that defends us against the chaos of the death drive that threatens to blow us to bits. When James dons the bomb suit to confront the bomb he is caught on the line between the life drive, designed to keep us alive by turning us into unified selves, and the death drive, that threatens to blow us to bits, but when he throws the bomb suit away and stands before the bomb with no protection, he puts himself at the mercy of the bomb, the embodiment of the death drive. Herein lies James’ ethic of deadly risk, his attempt to realise Heidegger’s idea, being-towards-death, in what for Freud would be a perverse form, being-with-bombs.

In Freudian / Kleinian terms, the bomb is also a projection of the self because it consists of a hard shell containing powerful explosive material. In light of this process of objectification, the disposal experts’ tinkering with the bomb’s wires and components is really an expression of his attempt to work out his own life / death drive complex through the object that will ultimately decide whether he lives or dies. And should he live, he will confront bombs, different bombs, but essentially the same bomb, over and over again, because the war between eros and thanatos never ends, apart from the moment when we finally succumb to death and thanatos reaches its telos. Freud called this condition which runs through life the compulsion to repeat. Klein talked about it in terms of the vicious circle. Either way, what it means is that the battle between the forces of life and death is always on and will never end so long as humans are alive and continue to be born.

It is an understanding of this fact that gives the film its existential edge. We see James’ attempt to live a normal life. He spends time with his son and his divorced wife, who he tells his friends stuck with him for some reason that he can’t fathom, but he can never leave the bomb behind. So he returns to the front and the war re-starts. At that point the film ends.

What we can see then is that James’ psychological war with himself is played out across the urban war zone of Iraq. The idea of the war zone is crucial here for enabling us answer the vexing question, why now? What is it about our society, the society of risks we might also call the society of the death drive, that makes it more risky and more deadly than previous societies, given that Freud thought that the death drive is a primal human condition?

Essentially the answer to this questions reveals the beauty of The Hurt Locker, which is that it is plays out a deep existential conflict common to all humans in a contemporary scene and manages to suggest that there is something very particular about this contemporary scene that thrusts this deep existential conflict front and centre.

In Freudian theory we know that war, the war in the self, and the projected war with other people, is resolved by society, and the norms and values of society. What we have not mentioned is that these norms and values are only effective because authority, the primary authority of the father figure, is internalised in the form of what Freud called the super-ego. The super-ego, the law in our heads that tells us that you cannot do this, that, or the other, is the authority that keeps us in check and prevents the war from breaking out, holds society together, and ensures that the life drive maintains some semblance of control over the death drive.

What the film illustrates through its depiction of the Iraq war, which symbolises the condition of perma-war that has come to characterise contemporary globalisation, is what psychoanalysts knew in the 1960s, which is that authority is on wane and that the forces of violence and chaos are now, more than ever before, barely contained by civilized social structures. We can see this condition today. Globalisation is a state of barely contained chaos. Is this not what the recent economic collapse was all about? Is this not what the war on terror is all about? Society is a state of barely contained chaos. Is this not what theories of broken Britain are about? Is this not what panics about youth deviance are about? And the self? The contemporary self is in a state of barely contained chaos on the edge of complete breakdown. Is this not what the story of James in The Hurt Locker is really about? Is this not what gives this film its particular resonance?

So all of this is contained in The Hurt Locker, a film that illuminates the chaotic nature of globalisation through its depiction of the Iraq War and the chaotic nature of the self thrust into these chaotic circumstances in the form of a bomb disposal expect who plays out the endless struggle between the life and death drives every time he confronts a bomb in the field. In this way we can see how it is possible to link psychological theory to cultural analysis to form a complex theory that can shed light on the contemporary human condition, a condition that takes in the microscopic level of social psychology and the macroscopic level of globalisation.

Objects of Global Warming?

2010-02-23T23:27:00.003Z

By Lydia Martens

The mediated world has in recent weeks once again been preoccupied with controversies surrounding global warming. We read the prediction that the Himalayan glaciers will have disappeared by 2035, that 50% of the Netherlands will soon be sea, and that, surprise, surprise, the fossil fuel giant ExxonMobil is financially supporting sceptics of human induced climate change. This is environmental politics with a big “P”, one might say. Meanwhile, scholars in the social sciences, humanities and arts have been asking questions which are equally intriguing, but which do not gain this level of mediated interest.

These are questions which concentrate on the unrelenting progress of interconnected sets of routine practices in everyday life, which demand the use of energy consuming objects and resources in ever greater numbers and intensity. Think for instance about the relatively recent change to daily showering practices, which not only require a good boiler, gas, electricity and plenty of water, a bathroom suite, shower curtain and soft towels to match, not to speak of the collection of plastic bottles containing soaps, body washes, shampoos and the detergent to maintain that shiny sanitised look of the bathroom’s infrastructure itself. Have I forgotten anything?

Routines of cleanliness are part of a larger set of daily routines and systems of organisation that allow those of us living life in the accelerated affluent world to be dual earner families or fast-lane professionals and accommodate the various demands and ideals that such a life encompasses. Thus we fill our homes with computers and other leisure technologies, we keep two or more cars to allow mums, dads and kids to move about, and we accrue airmiles as the latest city-break deal sounds an excellent opportunity to create that all so necessary distance from our harried lives.

The intensification of energy and consumption rich practices in domestic life appears to be an inevitable accompaniment of societal development in our world. It is without doubt greatest in the world’s most affluent societies, resulting in the observation that we would need the capacity of three Earths to support the consumption levels of everyone living on the globe, if all were to consume at the rate ‘we’ do. This is environmental politics with a small “p”, one might say, because such practices are part of the everyday goings on of private domestic life, which, whilst perhaps questioned by those amongst us with an active environmental awareness, are nevertheless hard to change in ways which make a significant impact. Such is the power of routine and social organisation!

On 4 & 5 February, I attended the first international workshop of Objects of Energy Consumption; a research project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, and jointly conducted by researchers at the Deutsches Museum and the Central Institute for the History of Technology at the Technical University in Munich, Germany. The Deutsches Museum was founded over 100 years ago, and is today well known for its specialism: the show-casing of technology and science. Walking to dinner in the evening, I am told by one of the Museum’s researchers that, given it is currently developing future orientated exhibition projects, the museum is not only a place where science and technology are exhibited from a historical perspective. Having said so, Objects of Energy Consumption is focused in the conjunctures between objects and history, using ‘the vast collections of the Deutsches Museum as sources’ to analyse ‘the historical mechanisation of the household from the perspective of consumption, gender and environmental history as well as museum studies’.

Intended to help the multi-disciplinary research team to fine-tune its theoretical and methodological approaches, the workshop brought together experts from different disciplinary traditions to talk about a range of topics. I was invited to provide a sociological input to the discussion, though any analysis that brings together gender, consumption and mundane domestic practice, I argued, necessarily straddles across disciplines to engage with feminist perspectives, history, technology and cultural studies. Domestic mechanisation without doubt constitutes an important facet of a gender-informed and environmental history of consumption, especially that pertaining to the 20th Century, but I suggested that this formed part of a broader enquiry about change and continuity in domestic life, in which the cultural valuation of domestic identities, domestic practices and the home come together. I pointed out that these complexities create challenges for the development of a coherent conceptual framework.

Perhaps the most interesting question for me (though clearly not for the material culture scholars attending the meeting, or, perhaps for those whose interests are more clearly and directly aligned with the environmental impacts of practices) was what the methodological and theoretical advantages are of investigations in which the object forms the central focus of enquiry. Clearly, objects may be seen as the connecting thread between different economic and cultural processes and conjunctures, including design, production, production standards, marketing, retailing, purchase, use, storage, disposal, recycling and display.

Criss-crossing with these are the conventions and configuration of domestic life and the passage of time. Speakers pointed out that objects have agency, for instance, in the sense that they have a physical presence, and, to coin a phrase used by Gudrun König from the TU Dortmunt, they may also have a veto right, and speak back. Even so, one of the big methodological challenges facing the project’s researchers will be that the mostly obsolete objects they have selected for special attention are no longer situated in the domestic contexts through which they gained their original purposes and meanings. Another way of saying this is that when objects become objects at an exhibition, their realities and meanings change, posing problems for those who desire to understand the contribution they made to the meaning of domestic life in their various historical contexts.

For further information about the project, have a look at its website @ http://www.energiekonsum.mwn.de/. Also have a look at the current BBC History of the World in 100 Objects interactive website, which is accompanied by a series of downloadable radio programs. See: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/1jKTi_S6Tui36_OFk0gJ_g

Sociology BITES: What is sociology for…?

2010-02-12T10:06:00.003Z

Sociology BITES: What is sociology for…?
[NB programme is provisional and subject to change]

Keele University, School of Sociology and Criminology are delighted to offer this FREE post-16 conference between 10-3 on March 17th 2010.

The event is sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council and is part of the Festival of Social Science which runs between 12th-19th March. The Festival is a national series of events intended to engage the public in the exploration of the social sciences. Our post-16 conference will introduce students to real-world research conducted by Keele’s national and international experts. A mix of different curriculum-relevant sessions will be offered using a range of delivery styles and supporting resources. Sessions will also be supported by experienced Associate Teachers in Sociology.

We appreciate this is short notice for many of you but this is a new opportunity for Keele, which we hope to repeat next year (with more notice!), and external funding was only notified recently. We do hope you will be able to come. Please note however, places will be limited and allocated on a ‘first come first served’ basis. For registration details, please see below.

Programme:

10-11: Welcome and introduction – Sociology BITES: what is sociology FOR…?

Dr Rebecca Leach and Dr Yvonne Hill
Orientation, outline of the day, sign-up for afternoon workhops

11-12: ‘Meet the Sociologists: Question Time’

An interactive session in which a panel of experts will answer your questions on topical matters with a sociological spin, researching sociology in the real world, studying sociology and what they think sociology is FOR…

12-1: Lunch
Students will be escorted on campus by CRB-cleared mentors
Tutors will attend a free Networking lunch with members of the School of Sociology and Criminology

1-2: Sociology Nibbles…

Workshop options will include the following (programme subject to revision). Students will sign up for one of these in the morning sessions

• The Sheep are Shopping till we all Pop? Dr Rebecca Leach

Baaaa. Branding. It means you’re part of the flock, doesn’t it? This session is a hands-on exploration of the power of the brand. From its role in reflecting group identity and culture, to the power to destroy the planet, sociology NEEDS to understand consumer culture urgently…

• Negotiating the edge: voluntary risk-taking and the risk society Dr James Hardie-Bick

Risk has now become a pervasive feature of everyday life and people are
continuously attacked by feelings of anxiety and uncertainty about the risks
they are exposed to in their everyday lives. Evidence of increasing
uncertainty can be found by observing a number of debates in relation to
food, health, crime, children and the environment. According to the
sociologist Ulrich Beck, even terrorism should only be considered the latest
risk in the evolution of the global risk society. But to what extent are
people increasingly worried about risks? If we are living in a risk society,
why do some individuals actively seek out high-risk activities such as
skydiving, base jumping and rock climbing that could result in serious
injury and even death? The overall aim of the session is to introduce you to
recent sociological research on voluntary risk-taking and to consider some
of the main attractions of engaging in these high-risk activities.

• Imagining Perfect Worlds: Why we Need Utopias? Dr Mark Featherstone

Imagine there is no money? Imagine everybody has the same amount of property? Imagine there is no family, no marriage, and no idea of monogamy? Imagine that personal relationships are defined by sexual freedom? What would life be like? Would these ideas make a perfect world, a utopia? Or a nightmare society, a dystopia?

In this session we think about the major utopias in history and the central ideas that make them seem like perfect worlds. In the original utopia, Plato’s Republic, society is defined by economic and sexual equality. There was no private property and no family in Plato’s Republic, because in his view privacy was socially divisive. Unfortunately, the problem with the Republic was that there was no personal freedom, because Plato thought that the majority of people were incapable of thinking for themselves and the society had to be run by philosophers. In other utopias, such as the perfect world designed by the economist Milton Friedman, individual freedom is all that matters and social controls need to be kept to a minimum in order that people can flourish. Although we will focus on various different utopias and different ideas, what these two examples show is that one person’s utopia is another person’s dystopia or worst possible world and vice versa. What we will seek to do in this session is think about:
(a) the meaning of utopia and dystopia,
(b) why we need these ideas in society,
(c) the key utopias and central utopian ideas,
(d) what ideas and principles we would make central to our own utopian society.

• How many parents? Stepfamilies and family order Prof Graham Allan

Families are changing in all sorts of ways. One of the big changes has been the growth of different types of stepfamily. In this session we will explore some of the dynamics of stepfamilies and explore in particular the patterning of step-father / step-mother / step-child relationships.

• Crime, Deviance and the Media - the strange case of serial killers Dr Tony Kearon

This workshop will look at the mis-match between representations of serial killers in the media and real serial murder, and explore how the application of sociological imagination could help to explain this puzzle...

• Constructing the Mobile Phone Dr Dana Rosenfeld

Mobile phones: useful social networking tool? Electronic tag managed by your parents? Or evil brain-frying conspiracy? Social problems are socially constructed and in this workshop, you will do just that. A hands-on approach to understanding social constructionism and ‘everyday’ methods of understanding the social, you will use real-life examples to explore the world around you.

• Witchcraft and the Supernatural in the modern world: Dr Jane Parish

From vampires, zombies and werewolves, we appear fascinated with the
supernatural. And yet in the modern world, we are disdainful of what we regard as irrational primitive belief, elevating science and technology to a higher more sophisticated type of knowledge, and prioritising formal religions. So what does our obsession with films such as Twilight and Wolfman tell us? What light can these movies and others throw on contemporary society and the way in which we think about ourselves?

• The Death Penalty – sociological and criminological perspectives Dr Evi Girling
Details to follow

• What makes a racist? Dr Bill Dixon
Details to follow

2-3 Keynote lecture: Prof Richard Sparks (provisional), University of Edinburgh

What is the role of Social Science (sociology, criminology?) in public life?

Author of: Television and the Drama of Crime; Prisons and the Problem of Order; Crime and Social Change in Middle England

Details to follow

3pm Close

Guidance:

The conference is free but students will need to provide their own drinks/snacks/lunch. A number of outlets are available on campus to buy refreshments. Tutors are invited to a lunch hosted by the School of Sociology and Criminology.

Tutors are expected to remain with their students at all times, except when our CRB-cleared mentors escort them around campus at lunchtime.

Registration

Please email the following details to socbites@appsoc.keele.ac.uk
before 5th March 2010

We will then notify you to confirm if you have places by 10th March

Name of tutor:

Position in College/School (eg. Head of Social Sciences):

Email:

Phone:

College & full address:

Number of students requiring places:

Additional staff attending (names and emails please):

Will you require parking facilities? (please list number of cars/minibuses/coaches you will be bringing):

Re-thinking work and retirement

2010-02-02T15:11:00.004Z

By Professor Chris Phillipson

Scrapping fixed retirement age (as proposed by the Equality and Human Rights Commission in Working Better report, Phase 2 launched last week) raises concerns about social justice as well as issues about the purpose of retirement. Higher pension ages are unfair for those from working-class groups whose lower life expectancy means that they draw a pension for a significantly shorter period as compared with those from managerial and professional occupations. Manual workers invariably start work earlier than non-manual groups, leaving those with the longest contribution records receiving fewer benefits at the end of their working life. Raising the retirement age simply compounds this injustice.

Given the demographic challenge, with one in four workers aged 50 plus by 2020, emphasising the value of ‘senior workers’ appears sensible. But we need to avoid a muddled discussion about age discrimination (which it is right to challenge), and retirement from work (which people have a right to enjoy). The real challenge is giving equal priority to security in work and retirement. Key to achieving this will be policies which support the new type of retirement emerging amongst people in their 50s and 60s. To give three examples:

Informal learning is flourishing, illustrated by the growth of the University of the Third Age (U3A). But this needs matching with support from formal providers such as universities and further education colleges. The 21st Century will be a period when those 50 plus embrace different types of educational programmes – to maintain their quality of life as well as to assist continued engagement in the workplace. We need to start encouraging mainstream institutions to respond to this development.

Civic engagement in the form of environmental activism, community volunteering (at home and abroad), and inter-generational mentoring, is the new face of growing old. But this needs recognition in the form of financial support, training and networks that provide encouragement to maintain an ‘active’ rather than ‘passive’ form of ageing.

Paid work remains central for many but there are limited opportunities for developing and improving skills acquired over the life course. Taking older workers seriously will require policies which support a ‘culture of lifelong learning’ (with paid educational leave), which spread work more evenly through life (via career breaks), and which assist those with major physical and mental health problems (through strengthening occupational health). Proposals for ‘flexible working’ are fine but there is an acute shortage of good quality jobs able to provide this opportunity.

We need to re-think the balance between work and retirement rather than just increase the pension age. Life after 60 appears to be a problem because of the apparent lack of substance to the roles that supersede or run alongside those associated with paid employment. Conducting a debate about the range of activities we need to support will be an essential starting point for resolving dilemmas in a crucial area for economic and social policy.

Holocaust Memorial Day today: memory as political myth

2010-01-27T13:24:00.004Z

Professor Pnina Werbner has today published a paper, Displaced Enemies, Displaced Memories: Diaspora Memorial Politics of Partition and the Holocaust, arguing that the refusal of the Muslim Council of Britain to attend Holocaust Memorial Day highlights a key dimension of memory as political myth: namely, the sense that time is cyclical. Prior external and internal enemies (in their current manifestations) are apocalyptically destined to threaten the integrity of the nation once more. Hence, ideologies based on political myths draw on both the future hopes and the future fears of people. The paper highlights the similarities between Jewish and Pakistani fears, rooted in the Holocaust and Partition, of a repeated ‘cycle of death and suffering’. These loom large especially for those suffering racism. The more bound people are by their narrow group’s particular symbols and history, the more apocalyptic their vision of this future is likely to be.

You can read more of this paper in: Ethnos, vol. 74:4, Dec. 2009 (pp. 441–464)

Is equality achievable?

2010-01-27T09:33:00.002Z

by Dr Rebecca Leach

Part 3 in the 'What is Sociology FOR?' theme on our blog

The report of the National Equality Panel is out today, to much debate in the news. The gap between the richest and poorest is wider now than 40 years ago, and inequalities between black and white, and between men and women remain deep-seated.

Some of the most disturbing headlines from this report focus on the fate of children born into poverty. On the Today programme this morning, Professor John Hills pointed out the 'cumulative' impact that poverty and wealth have upon families, both for individuals and future generations within those families.

For every extra 100 pounds of family income when a child is young, an extra month's worth of educational development is gained. That is a simple, but awful, truth. And Hills points out that the gap in incomes between low- and high-income families runs to many hundreds and often thousands of pounds a month. Draw your own conclusions.

This reminds us that whatever the latest rash of 'initiativitis' that emerges from whichever party, it is still poverty in childhood that matters most when it comes to social mobility.

The other staggering, but unsurprising, headline is the revelation that despite women being better qualified educationally than men up to the age of 44, men are still paid on average 21% more than women. The explanations for women's disadvantage in the workplace are well-studied but can't agree whether it is pure sexism or women's likelihood of being the main carers for their children that is the most important factor.

These inequalities are cumulative, partly because they carry through from early life (and wealth/poverty), right through to pension age. In other words, if you start off poor and unequal, you're likely to end up more so. And you're likely to pass that down to your own children to because the cycle of disadvantage continues. Those at the upper end of the income and advantage scale look 'down', according to Hills, and see the threat of failure and poverty, and so they act to use their resources to bolster their own advantage and that of their children. They prop up their wealth with savings and investments, they buy education by moving catchment areas or supplementing with additional tutoring, they use their social networks to find out how access to education works and so on. So, in fact, the situation polarises rather than stabilises...

The papers are using this as a bunfight to attack the government. But of course, these patterns have developed over a very long time, and have not been eradicated in 60 years of the Welfare State. It isn't an easy job with a quick fix. More than ever, we need to understand the mechanisms and barriers within social mobility and economic well-being. Just at the time when universities, who can generate this knowledge, will be under financial attack along with the rest of the public sector. Social science - in particular - is often attacked by governments, and the public at large, because they struggle to see its point. It is sometimes seen as 'soft', overly politicised and jargonistic. Yet the National Equality Panel is overwhelmingly comprised of social scientists: sociologists, social policy specialists and economists who have spent their lifetime trying to 'make a difference' to exactly this kind of issue.

What is Sociology FOR? It is just this: ultimately, seeking to understand the processes behind child poverty, for example, in order to make it better.

Sociology Seminar series 2009-10

2010-01-26T14:15:00.002Z

All welcome!

(Please scroll down for Semester 2 seminars)

13th October (Tues, 12-1pm – Room: TBA)
Dr Rebecca Leach (Sociology, Keele University)
‘Generation and Consumption: Insights from the Baby Boomers Study’

28th October (Wed, 4.30-6pm – Room: TBA)
Prof. Dennis Smith (Social Sciences, Loughborough University)
‘Whatever Happened to Globalization?’

11th November (Wed, 4-30-6pm – Room: TBA)
Dr Dale Southerton (Sociology, The Morgan Centre, and
The Sustainable Consumption Institute, Manchester University)
Title: TBA

24th November (Tues, 12-1 – Room: TBA)
Dr Siobhan Holohan (Sociology, Keele University)
‘Representing the Mundane in Channel 4’s The Family’

8th December (Tues, 12-1pm – Room: TBA)
Dr Mark Featherstone (Sociology, Keele University)
'Living on the Edge in the Forgotten City: Utopia, Dystopia, and
Public Housing in Northern England'

9th February (Tues, 12-1pm – Room: CBA0.007)
Globalization and its Aftermath: Towards a New Sociology of Ageing
Chris Phillipson (RI Director, LPJ and LCS, Keele University)

17th February (Wed, 4-5.30pm – Room: CBA0.007)
Title: TBA
Anne-Marie Kramer (Sociology, Warwick University)

2nd March (Tues, 12-1pm – Room: CM0.12)
Flow, Enjoyment and High-Risk Autotelic Experiences
James Hardie-Bick (Sociology, Keele University)

16th March (Tues, 12-1 – Room: CBA0.007)
Moving Images: The Practices and Politics of Displaying
Family Photographs
Mark Davies (PhD, Keele University)

30th March (Tues, 12-1pm – Room: CM0.12)
‘Don't Rush to Mush’:
Infants, Food and Contemporary Childrearing Practices
Emma Head (Sociology, Keele University)

11th May (Tues, 12-1 – Room: CBA1.099)
Locating the Past in a Shifting Present:
Re-membering and Returning to District Six, Cape Town
Michelle Rickett (Centre for Social Genrontology, Keele University)

25th May (Tues, 12-1 – Room: CM0.12)
Title: TBA
Andy Zieleniec (Sociology, Keele University)

Haiti, Catastrophic Society

2010-01-24T20:37:00.002Z

By Mark Featherstone

I have recently been working on a paper on the French philosopher of speed Paul Virilio and the idea of catastrophe. Virilio’s basic idea is that we should understand the development of society in terms of speed and acceleration and that the modern idea of progress is identical with notions of dynamism and movement. So far so good. We can all identify with Virilio’s thesis. We know that modern technology and specifically modern technology in capitalist society functions on the basis of an ideology of speed where faster is better.

The problem is that for Virilio the speed of technology has started to reach its limit under conditions of globalisation, so for instance communication is now quasi-instantaneous, and the planet has started to shrink to the extent that there now seems to be very little space in the world. In a capitalist world where competition is everything, the collapse of space, or what Virilio calls geocide, has the effect of intensifying the struggle between people and making them more violent towards each other. This is part of Virilio’s idea of catastrophe: social catastrophe.

However, his core theory of catastrophe turns off the idea of technology and the view that when we invent technology we also invent accidents or disasters, so that the invention of the car is the invention of the car crash, the invention of nuclear power is the invention of the nuclear disaster, and so on. All of this is, of course, useful for explaining man-made disasters, but it seems to do little to explain natural catastrophes such as the Asian Tsunami or the Haiti earthquake, which occurred as I was writing about Virilio’s theory.

The earthquake that hit Haiti on 12th January left the capital city, Port-au-Prince, covered in dust. Large sections of the city, particularly the hillside slums areas similar to Brazilian favelas in design, collapsed leaving the population buried under rubble. Current estimates suggest that as many as 200,000 people may have died as a result of the earthquake with more to follow from the 250,000 injured and 1.5 million left homeless and exposed to disease and lack of food and clean water.

At first it appears that none of this can be explained by Virilio theory of catastrophe. The earthquake was a natural disaster and Haiti has been particularly impacted by natural disasters throughout its history. In recent years the country has been hit by hurricanes and floods and has never really been able to manage any of these catastrophes, primarily because of the grinding poverty that has characterised the country since its emergence from colonial rule in 1804 and its more recent turbulent political history.

Herein resides the relevance of Virilio’s theory because it can show how the natural catastrophe of the earthquake has been magnified by the historical tragedy of Haiti, the country which was the first, apart from America, to escape colonial rule, and where the slave population was inspired by the revolutionary ideals of their colonial masters, the French, to try to build a free society. This county, the country of CLR James’ Black Jacobins, which was under the thumb of the tyrannical regimes of Francois ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier and Jean Claude ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier for so long and only made the transition to democracy in 1990 with the regime of the slum priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide, has been caught in a poverty trap by the global socio-economic system that has exacerbated its catastrophic history and without doubt made the impact of the 12th January earthquake far worse than it would otherwise have been.

This is the thesis of Peter Hallward who has written extensively on Haiti. Hallward suggests that the unimaginable devastation that has turned Port-au-Prince into a tomb was caused by the global economic regime that has trapped Haiti in poverty. According to this view we may not be able to explain natural disasters, such as the Haitian earthquake, using Virilio’s theory, but we can certainly better understand the impact and aftermath of such disasters by studying the social, economic, and political contexts that condition the ways in which they effect particular societies in different ways.

From this perspective it is the social, political, and economic situation of Haiti that has led to its current predicament in the wake of the earthquake. It is this context, which has led Haiti to be called the poorest nation in the western hemisphere, that has exacerbated the devastation caused by the earthquake and brought about a situation where corpses litter the streets and the state is unable to cope with shortages of food, water, and emergency health care to the extent that an estimated 20,000 people are dying each day because of the inability of the international relief effort to manage the aftermath of the disaster. While a richer, more robust, nation may be able to cope better with such events, so for example Japanese cities are built to survive earthquakes comparable to the Haitian one, Haiti has been thrown into what Thomas Hobbes called a state of nature where individual survival is all the matters.

Under these conditions, two particular stories leapt out from the mass of media coverage of the aftermath of the disaster, and seemed to say a lot about the ways in which such catastrophes can impact upon societies and how societies can resist the chaos of the state of nature and even under the worst circumstances, such as those which has befallen Haiti, maintain some level of civility.

The first story, which focused on the orphans of Haiti, related details of the children of the disaster and explained that the terrible situation of these children has been magnified and made intolerable by the earthquake. They now face an uncertain future and even if they survive the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe their lives are likely to be characterised by severe psychological problems and mental trauma.

The second story, which explains how the residents of Port-au-Prince’s most notorious slum, Cite Soleil, chased escaped gang members from their streets in order to prevent the descent of their neighbourhood back into the kind of violence and disorder that made it infamous, provides a glimmer of hope that illustrates how even under the worst conditions human society can survive.

Perhaps we must hang onto this social utopianism in the face of such catastrophic conditions and affirm the ability of humans to survive in even the most disastrous situations because this spirit is, after all, written into the history of Haiti, the home of the Black Jacobins. Finally, and in affirming this spirit through recognition of our common humanity and gestures of charity that counter the hegemonic savagery of global capitalism, we must certainly reject the cruel sentiments of figures such as Pat Robertson, the American Christian fundamentalist, who claimed that Haiti brought the earthquake on itself by signing a pact with the Devil in order to escape from colonial rule.

Despite what Robertson believes, Christianity is a religion of empathy, sympathy, charity, and humanity and these sentiments are the ones which we should apply in our response to the catastrophe in Haiti. For Virilio, this is exactly what we can learn from thinking about both natural and unnatural catastrophes. In his view thinking about catastrophes can teach us that despite our enormous technological feats, human society is a fragile thing that we must defend together. This is why despite the natural origins of the Haiti earthquake, it still requires us to think sociologically, because sociological thought is essential for allowing us to think about how we respond to it, the ways it has been exacerbated by human social, political, and economic formations, and how we should reform those formations in order to prevent such devastation in the future.

Funded PhD studentships available in Social Sciences and Humanities

2010-01-21T10:06:00.007Z

Keele University

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

World-class interdisciplinary research

PhD Opportunities and Funding 2010-11

The Faculty of Humanities and Social Science is the largest Faculty in the University and is home to world-class scholars and research groups working across a range of topics and themes. The Faculty is proud of its success in the 2008 RAE, where 85% of the research assessed was classified as world-leading and of international importance. Research and postgraduate supervision is organised through Research Institutes which support a number of major research centres. The University has made a substantial investment in an exciting new building –The Moser Centre – to support high quality research and postgraduate work in the humanities and social sciences. There is now a strong commitment to expanding postgraduate research as a vital part of the University’s identity as a research-intensive institution.

Research Institutes: research interests and themes

Humanities (www.keele.ac.uk/research/humanities)
Cultural and social history from the local to the global; Musicology since 1900 and creative applications of music technology; Literature, science and environments; literary and cultural theory; interdisciplinary approaches to life writing, Modern America and early modern and modern England.

Law, Politics and Justice (www.keele.ac.uk/research/lpj)
Politics; International Relations; Law; Ethics; Criminology; Sociology and Philosophy -with particular interests in: Environmental Politics, European Politics, Crime, Security and Justice – and multidisciplinary fields such as postcolonialism, cultural studies, globalisation, urbanisation, environmental sustainability, racism, ethnicity and migration, professional ethics, legal identity and bioethics.

Public Policy and Management (www.keele.ac.uk/research/ppm)
Economics; Education; Management; Marketing; Health Policy, and Industrial Relations with particular interests in: Ethnographic and critical management studies; Public policy and the regulation of public service quality; Work and work cultures; Gender and organisation; Managerial, organisational and inter-organisational practices; Consumption; Economics of ageing and retirement; Stability of banking systems; Microeconomic analysis, Finance and development.

Life Course Studies, (www.keele.ac.uk/research/lcs)
Social Policy; Sociology; Social Work; Social Gerontology; Applied, Social and Cognitive Psychology; Health and Rehabilitation - with particular interests in Ageing; Families and Social Relationships; Children and Childhood; Communities; Gender and Sexuality; Consumption; Health, Rehabilitation and Well-being.

Studentships Available
We have funding to support up to 30 full-time and part-time postgraduate students across the Research Institutes. Fee waivers for UK and International Students are also available. We welcome expressions of interest from well-qualified applicants who wish to be supported by Keele in making an application to ESRC or AHRC for funding for MRes or PhD programmes. ESRC Quota Awards are available in Criminology and in Public Policy and Management. Part-funded applications with the public or private sector are also encouraged.

Closing date for applications is 28th February 2010. Applicants are strongly advised to discuss their interests with the relevant Research Institute or Research Centre and Prospective Supervisors. Helen Farrell should be contacted in the first instance for advice on the most appropriate contact point h.farrell@ilpj.keele.ac.uk or ring 01782 733641.

Or - if you're specifically interested in Sociology or Criminology PhD opportunities and grants, come direct to the School of Sociology and Criminology: contact the Postgraduate contact for Sociology Dr Emma Head, e.l.head@appsoc.keele.ac.uk , or the Postgraduate contact for Criminology, Prof Tim Hope, t.j.hope@crim.keele.ac.uk , who can direct you to the right person - there are many fields of expertise which don't quite fit into the categories in the RI list above so it is always worth exploring individual staff interests more comprehensively. You can find more about potential supervisors and their areas of interest in Sociology here, and in Criminology here.

Applications
Full details and application procedures can be found on the Graduate School website: www.keele.ac.uk/gradschool

Email gradschool@keele.ac.uk or ring 01782 734368 for the Graduate School Prospectus

Sex trafficking: facts and fictions

2009-11-12T14:24:00.004Z

By Kelly Prince, PhD candidate in Criminology, Research Institute for Law, Politics & Justice, Keele University

On 20th October, Nick Davies wrote an article for The Guardian which compared sex trafficking with the reports of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. An issue which is slowly developing a high profile in the UK, sex trafficking is just one form of human trafficking, a transnational crime which has attracted increased international attention in the last ten years. So, what can we learn from Davies’ article and the subsequent debate?

Human trafficking is defined by the United Nations Palermo Protocol, article 3 as the:

exploitation of human beings – be it for sexual exploitation, other forms of forced labour, slavery, servitude, or for the removal of human organs. Trafficking takes place by criminal means through the threat or use of force, coercion, abduction, fraud, deception, abuse of positions of power or abuse of positions of vulnerability. It relates to all stages of the trafficking process: recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons. Trafficking is not just a transnational crime across international borders - the definition applies to internal domestic trafficking of human beings. Department of Peacekeeping Operations, 2004.

Davies refers only to sex trafficking and restricts his definition to ‘force, fraud or deception’, a considerable narrowing of the true definition. Furthermore, he uses the word ‘trafficking’ interchangeably with ‘sex trafficking’ without giving due recognition of the fact that there are many forms of trafficking, sexual exploitation being only one.

The article also mentions a Home Office research paper by Kelly and Regan called Stopping Traffic (2000), stating that the authors themselves admit that various conclusions drawn in the study, particularly data on numbers, are “speculative”. However, a thorough reading of the paper clearly illuminates the fact that, following their extensive research, the authors strongly believe that “[T]rafficking in women is clearly an issue in the UK”. An important fact in terms of numbers, highlighted by Kelly and Regan and omitted by Davies, is that people trafficking is extremely difficult to measure. The International Organisation of Migration was given substantial funding by the EU to do just that; they concluded that it isn’t currently possible with any degree of accuracy.

Following a Guardian investigation, Davies suggests that the police operation Pentameter 2, was anything but the success claimed by the police and Home Office alike. He cites as evidence that, of the 406 arrests made, 106 were released without charge, 47 were released after being cautioned for minor offences, 73 charged with immigration offences, 76 convicted of ‘non-trafficking offences’ involving drugs or the ‘driving or management of a brothel’. Ninety-six were arrested for ‘trafficking’, of whom 67 were charged. Twenty-two were finally prosecuted and 15 convicted.

At first glance, the figures look damning. However, it is well known that from the point of arrest, there are several points at which a case may ‘drop out’ of the criminal justice system and not always because the individual is innocent. The collection of sufficient evidence to get a case safely past these ‘drop out’ stages is not easy in relation to every day crimes such as burglary and theft, but when the crime is human trafficking of any kind, it becomes extremely difficult. Witnesses are invariably victims with all the associated complex trauma and mistrust of authority. A growing body of evidence from organisations such as the UN and the IOM suggest that trafficking is not only international but organised, in the same way arms and drugs trafficking is, and with the same structures in place which are designed to facilitate evasion. With criminal activity so enveloped in secrecy, it is perhaps more understandable that only 15 cases carried enough evidence to reach court and convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt.

This ‘drop out’ or attrition, is not uncommon. Take for example, the crime of rape. According to the British Crime Survey 2004, there is an annual incidence rate of 47,000 adult (over 16 years old), female victims. Only 15% of these report the attack to the police. 80% of those do not proceed beyond the police stage, with a further 6% being discontinued by the CPS and only 14% proceeding to trial. Only 1 in 8 reported rapes result in a conviction (Home Office Report 293 – A gap or a chasm? Attrition in reported rape cases, 2005). I am confident that Nick Davies wouldn’t dream of suggesting that these sorry statistics indicate that the nature and rate of rape has been exaggerated.

Davies goes on to suggest that various evangelical and feminist organisations have hijacked the issue of sex trafficking to further their own agendas; the banning of all prostitution. And to some extent, he might be right. However, to say that increased attention given to sex trafficking is a direct result of a puritanical judgement of prostitution and a wish to persecute working women who are willingly trying to earn a crust in the sex industry is a fundamentally flawed and dangerous argument.

It is flawed because, by the very definition of sex trafficking, victims of this abhorrent crime are necessarily exploited and abused. The same cannot be said of prostitution, an occupation which some women enter and work in willingly. It is no surprise then that groups advocating for prostitutes, such as the English Collective of Prostitutes, have become adversaries of the sex trafficking cause. But this is not useful and unnecessary as prostitution and anti-trafficking campaigns are not automatically at odds. Fundamentally, they are both concerned with the protection of vulnerable women.

It is a dangerous argument because one of the most important aspects of the anti-trafficking campaign is the need to make the public more aware of the phenomenon, particularly indications of its presence. Trafficked people have been found in Britain’s hotels, restaurants, take-aways, on farms and beaches, as well as private households and of course some have been found in the sex industry. Those who wish to address the problem of trafficking may come to rely on local people bringing their concerns to the attention of the authorities.

It is fair to say that Davies’ article ignited some attention grabbing debate which can be seen both in the media and on the ‘Comment is Free’ Guardian blog site. Furthermore, he also makes some good points about how data is used and abused by various people pursuant of their own agenda. However, there is some concern that inaccurate, insensitive and sensationalist newspaper articles may serve only to turn the public away from a problem which desperately needs their support.

What is Sociology FOR? Part 2

2009-11-11T12:38:00.002Z

By Dr Dana Rosenfeld

Despite the muted grumbles of many outside of academia, sociological scholarship is relevant to a range of contemporary issues, is often readable and interesting to those within and without academia, and often has a deep impact upon how we view our own lives and social worlds. Sociologists are also private citizens engaged with social and political issues, and some mesh their academic and their political lives to good effect. A strong example is Alice S. Rossi, whose scholarship and political work deeply shaped the face of gender politics in the USA and beyond, and whose obituary appeared in the New York Times earlier this week.