Michael E Smith provides a link in a comment to a paper of his, on the uses of urban theory in archaeological research on ancient cities – his argument is that this work serves as middle-range theory in contrast to grand theory of the sort developed by Latour, or Giddens, or Bourdieu. I like the idea that theories are always best when they are marked by a certain sort of empirical modesty – although it’s interesting that the sorts of social theory that Smith thinks of as ‘grand’ in his field would in geography these days appear to be much more ‘middling’ than the grandly philosophical styles associated with current work on spatial ontologies, affect, events, the post-political, and related themes.
Category Archives: Social Science
Geography and ethics: justice unbound
The first of my three ‘progress reports’ on Geography and Ethics is now published in Progress in Human Geography. This first one is dubbed ‘justice unbound‘, and discusses recent literature on justice and injustice in and around geography and related fields – including Sen’s recent book, G.A. Cohen’s leftist riposte to Rawls, Nancy Fraser, and Iris Marion Young . It was written before recent books by Danny Dorling, Ed Soja, Susan Fainstein were published, but these otherwise different works sort of confirm the point I am trying to make in this piece – that it might be worthwhile to think through the idea that injustice is the medium of justice (the line is J.M. Berstein’s), without thinking that this absolves us completely from engaging with normative reflection on what these terms mean. It’s not meant as a warrant for assuming that we all just naturally know injustice when we see it.
Anyway, as I say, this is the first of three of these reports; the second is already done, the final one I’ll do later this year. I have ended up not quite writing about ‘geography and ethics’, not least cos most of what I know about ethics is part of that poststructuralist strain of thought that Jeff Popke had already reviewed rather thoroughly as the previous ‘incumbent’ of this role; partly because it might be more interesting to think about how normative practices are an ordinary aspect of how life hangs together, rather than thinking of ethics as an extra special ‘responsibility’ that requires a special effort to pull off; and partly because I said ‘yes’ when invited because I wanted to write about some overlaps between social theory, political theory, and moral philosophy that I find intriguing for no other reason that they don’t quite show up in geography-land despite being on the edges of conversations which take place there. I think their not showing up has something to do with the degree to which Theory in geography has drifted into such a resolutely ‘metaphysical’ register, in the sense of this term that someone reminded me this week Ian Hunter uses to describe the genealogy of contemporary Theory-land. But that’s another story.
Making sense of AHRC/Big Society ‘controversy’
James Sumner has a detailed, funny, and smart analysis of the unfolding to-do around the AHRC, Big society, petitions, etc, here.
More on the AHRC
AHRC and ‘Big Society’: What’s the story?
There has been lots of comment about the story in yesterday’s Observer suggesting that the AHRC had been ‘ordered’ by the government to fund research on the Big Society in order to secure it’s funding settlement. Lots of complaints, lots of gnashing of teeth about infringements of academic freedom, the erosion of the Haldane Principle, and the like. But something about this story doesn’t quite ring true. Firstly, there is an odd delay involved – the Research Councils received their settlements before Christmas, when they published their Delivery Plans. So why it took humanities scholars so long to notice the substance of the AHRC’s delivery plan is a little unclear. Second, the agendas around community, cohesion, fairness, and the like are not new, post-election issues, and nor is the impact agenda – again, it seems like some people haven’t noticed the general drift of funding policy which has been going on for a while.
But the main thing lacking from the discussion I’ve seen so far is any acknowledgement that the ESRC’s delivery plan hardly mentions the Big Society at all – one mention, in passing. The relevant ‘priority’ area is dubbed ‘A Vibrant and Fair Society’. Now one might suppose that the social sciences would be more likely to be targetted to deliver research knowledge on the Big Society if there was such a coordinated intent by ‘government’ – the difference between the two Research Councils in this respect seems to suggest that this might be about the internal decisions at the AHRC, who reject any suggestion of undue influence. One might still bemoan the fairly brazen aim of the AHRC to ‘contribute’ to ‘government’s Big Society initiatives’, without having to buy into the idea that this reflects an inappropriate meddling by politicians. The credulity invested in The Observer story seems to indicate a naivety on the behalf of some academics about how research funding does work, and specifically a lack of awareness amongst people in the humanities about just how proactive the arts and humanities bodies have been with ‘instrumental’ agendas of public engagement and impact for some time now.
A couple of final thoughts. First, isn’t this a story about the way in which University issues are reported, which might be a matter worth discussing in more detail. And second, what would be so bad with funding research on ‘the Big Society’ – wouldn’t that be an opportunity to do lots of research on Alinski, the histories of mutalism and co-operatives, the relevance of inequality to civic participation, and the like?
Oh, and where I live, of course, the Research Councils are one of the major public sector employers in town, after the Borough Council and the NHS, suffering like the rest of us from funding cuts and efficiency savings.
John Keane’s questions to David Held
In response to David Held’s account of his involvement with the Libyan regime, John Keane has published an open letter at openDemocracy raising further questions for Held. This is one of the smarter interventions in the whole affair, it seems to me, because amongst the specific issues of ‘who’, ‘when’, ‘where’ and ‘why’ that Keane raises about money, PhDs, plagiarism, etc, he ends with a set of questions that transcend the specifics of this case. His ‘parting question’ is the ‘least tangible but most concrete of all’: “do you think the LSE Libya affair has done damage to the scholarly credibility of research programmes in the area of democracy?” Keane raises interesting questions (and not just for Held) about the extent to which research on a concept and practice which has such powerful normative force, undertaken in a spirit which wants to do justice to the values and promise behind this force, might always lend itself to the possibility of ‘perversion’ or ‘misrepresentation’. One response of course to Keane’s line of questioning on this issue is to dismiss all such research as hopelessly naive and idealistic. But that is hardly his intention. His question does raise some important issues about the relationship between broadly normative and more worldly analyses of democracy and democratization, however – and of how to temper the idealism of the former with the realism of the latter without reducing the real-world force of the normative content of ‘democracy’ in its various registers and forms to mere ideology and hypocrisy.
citizen joe smith on nuclear power
Workshop on the Politics of Participation
Crisis of Participation; Participating in Crisis – 12 April 2011
The Open University, Walton Hall, Michael Young, Rooms 1-3, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA
http://www3.open.ac.uk/contact/locations.aspx
One-day workshop organised by the Publics Research Programme (Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance, The Open University) in collaboration with Jenny Pearce (Professor of Latin American Politics and Director of the International Centre for Participation Studies, University of Bradford).
Workshop rationale
Just as publics are increasingly solicited to participate in solving the economic, social and political problems of various contemporary crises, so many existing forms of public participation seem to be straining under the tensions and antagonisms they are expected to contain. Crisis of Participation; Participating in Crisis is a one-day workshop intended to inaugurate conversations about the contemporary places, problematic roles and possible futures of public participation.
The idea is to come at the overarching theme from three perspectives: (i) contemporary art practice, critical social theory and popular culture/politics; (ii) critical social policy and governance; iii) development studies. These are three ways of cutting into debates about contemporary public participation in politics that have so far not sufficiently been brought into relation. The aim of this workshop is therefore to generate some new ways of viewing, engaging with and intervening in what’s going on.
Programme
10:15 -10:45 Welcome and coffee
10:45 -11:00 Introductions (Dr. Nick Mahony, Prof. Jenny Pearce and Prof. John Clarke)
11:00 -13:00 Panel 1: ‘Participating in crisis: public creativity’
Dr. Jeremy Gilbert (University of East London),
‘The desire for participation’;
Cecilia Wee & Sonya Dyer (Curators/organisers, ‘If Not, Then What?’ Chelsea Programme/Chelsea College of Art & Design)
‘Participatory creative practice in a climate of dissent’
Dr. Deena Dajani (The Open University)
‘Crisis of Representation: Gender and Participation in the 2007 Jordanian Parliamentary Elections’
13:00 -14.00 Lunch
14:00 -15:45 Panel 2: ‘Crisis of Participation: the contemporary politics of public action’
Prof. Jenny Pearce (University of Bradford)
‘The Twist in the Participatory Turn’
Prof. Marilyn Taylor (University of West of England)
‘Community Organising and the Big Society: is Alinsky turning in his grave?’
Prof. Helen Sullivan (University of Birmingham)
‘Does a ‘big society’ demand a limited localism?’
15:45 -16:00 Tea
16:00 -16.30 Reflections, identification of key themes and next steps
16:30 Depart
RSVP: If you would like to attend please e-mail: Socsci-ccig-events@open.ac.uk (Sarah Batt, Research Secretary, CCIG, a.s.c.batt@open.ac.uk, Tel: 01908 654704). For further information please contact Nick Mahony, (n.mahony@open.ac.uk) / CCIG website: http://www.open.ac.uk/ccig/
Sarah Batt
Research Secretary, ICCCR and CCIG
The Open University
Faculty of Social Sciences
Research Office
Walton Hall
Milton Keynes
MK7 6AA
Tel: +44(0)1908 654704
Fax: +44(0)1908 654488
Oecumene: Citizenship after Orientalism
The website for the Oecumene research project based at The Open University, led by Engin Isin, is now up and running. The project has its own blog, and you can sign up as an ‘Oecumene Affiliate’ to keep up to date and become involved.
This is how the project is described:
“Oecumene: Citizenship after Orientalism focuses on the tension between two different institutions: citizenship, the process by which belonging is recognised and enacted, and orientalism, the process by which European political institutions are considered originary and primary. What connects citizenship to orientalism is that citizenship has been historically seen as a Judeo-Christian institution contrasted against Buddhism, Confucianism, Islam, and Hinduism. The project revisits questions of citizenship as political subjectivity in ‘orientalized worlds’ through genealogical investigations without orientalist assumptions. The aim is not only to uncover citizenship practices that remained either invisible or inaudible in other worlds but also to explore the possibilities of a renewed and expanded understanding of European citizenship.”
Whatever happened to social theory?
I’ve just been reading the new book by Andrew Sayer, Why Things Matter to People. It is a full-scale elaboration of the importance for critical social science of what Sayer calls ‘lay normativity’ – people’s evaluative orientation, or relation of concern to the world around them. Sayer thinks this aspect of life is systematically downplayed or misrepresented in lots of social theory. I think he is probably right about that. The notion of lay normativity was used in Sayer’s previous book, The Moral Significance of Class, and the project on ethical consumption that I have been working on, for it seems like ages, made use of what we at least understood this term to be getting at – the importance of giving credence to the evaluations of their own practices that people provide in social science encounters, not least as being able to tell us something interesting about how practices work. Here is the publisher’s blurb for Sayer’s new book:
“Andrew Sayer undertakes a fundamental critique of social science’s difficulties in acknowledging that people’s relation to the world is one of concern. As sentient beings, capable of flourishing and suffering, and particularly vulnerable to how others treat us, our view of the world is substantially evaluative. Yet modernist ways of thinking encourage the common but extraordinary belief that values are beyond reason, and merely subjective or matters of convention, with little or nothing to do with the kind of beings people are, the quality of their social relations, their material circumstances or well-being. The author shows how social theory and philosophy need to change to reflect the complexity of everyday ethical concerns and the importance people attach to dignity. He argues for a robustly critical social science that explains and evaluates social life from the standpoint of human flourishing.”
It will be interesting to see what sort of traction, if any, Sayer’s book gets in critical human geography. Once upon a time, when I was little, Sayer was one of the big names of Theory in geography, in the 1980s heyday of critical realism. Apart from forays every so often to call for more robust normative reflection in the discipline (most recently in Antipode), Sayer is much less of a presence now. He wrote an excellent book in the mid ’90s, Radical Political Economy: A Critique, which I remember Marxist colleagues being apoplectic about because it took seriously non-‘dialectical’ styles of social thought and made productive use of Adam Smith and Hayek.The style of theory that Sayer performs, with its close attention to argumentation, is rather uncommon in geography now. I’m not necessarily sold on all of Sayer’s arguments – I think, for example, that he might find more support for his broad thesis about human vulnerability and ethics in thinkers such as Levinas or Derrida, or for the importance of everyday attachments to things that matter in styles of cultural theory concerned with thinking about the ordinary, such as Lauren Berlant’s work; these are not traditions Sayer has much patience with. Genre blindness? But I think his diagnosis of the limits of current styles of critical thinking has a lot going for it – critical thinking does find it really difficult to give credence to ordinary dispositions as having value in and of themselves beyond their function in systems of discipline, as effects of subjectification, or as indices of unconscious dynamics, or at best residues of untapped resistance or invention.
I happen to think that Sayer over-eggs the normativity-is-important cake by insisting on making the argument with reference to ethical theories – there is a less explicitly ‘moral’ strand of philosophy concerned with rationality, reason, embodiment, and values that might inform the sort of reconstruction of social science Sayer recommends. I have been trying to write about these same issues in a rather more tentative fashion, for a series of ‘reports’ on ‘Geography and Ethics’ due to be published any time soon. The first deals with some recent accounts of justice; the second with some of the philosophy mentioned above, focussing on notions of practical reason [Sayer has lots of interesting things to say on this topic]; the third is still to be written, and will focus on the kind of social theories of value, normativity and justification that Sayer, amongst others, has been developing.
Pop Theory 