The first results from the Poverty and Social Exclusion UK 2012 study will be broadcast on ITV at 7.30pm on Thursday, 28 March in a special ‘Tonight’ programme on ‘Breadline Britain’. More details at the project website here – the first report from the project will be published tomorrow on the website too (any DD206 students out there might want to have a look, this is the survey used as the basis of the exercise students have participated in as part of The Uses of Social Science).
Noticing, rather belatedly I now realise, that the last book by Iris Marion Young had been published got me reflecting on the different encounters I have had with her work over the years, making me feel old, and slow, but also making me realise that sometimes thinkers act as helpful companions. I have always found, on reading Young, that she had got somewhere I wanted to be well before I arrived there, but I have also found this kind of affirming – she is one of the thinkers who always reassured me that I wasn’t completely on the wrong track. So I have been reconstructing ‘my life with Iris’, which does, oddly, include one occasion when I met her in person.
I think my first encounter was in late 1989 – I was in my first term as a graduate student, and this was the moment of postmodernism in geography: Ed Soja’s Postmodern Geographies had been published earlier that year, shortly before I took my Finals as an undergraduate; the week I started as a graduate student, David Harvey’s much awaited (by me anyway) The Condition of Postmodernity was published (this is the last book I read before getting glasses; actually, I started it without glasses, but was wearing glasses by the time I finished). Shortly after this, I was leant an advance copy of the collection Feminism/Postmodernism, edited by Linda Nicholson (which might just be one of the most influential books, in a more or less unacknowledged way, in geography of the last 25 years or so). This was a revelation – it opened a door into a world where though ‘postmodernism’ was still used as a term, people were talking about more serious things in more serious ways – deconstruction, phenomenology, post-structuralism. I’m not sure that I ever took discussions of ‘postmodernism’ in geography terribly seriously again, all a bit too Rorty-lite as they were, after reading this book, which included essays by Young, Nancy Fraser, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway. I remember around that time reading Young’s ‘Throwing like a girl’ in a reading group that some of us had set up , and remember too that the argument in it resonated because, well, I’m a boy who never could throw quite well enough – a slightly different subject-position, as we all learnt to say about that time, from the one primarily intended by Young’s analysis of gendered embodiment.
What particularly sticks in my mind as a turning-point, intellectually, for me is coming across a copy of Young’s Justice and the Politics of Difference in a bookshop in 1990. In October to be precise – more or less systematically, I put the date in the front of books when I get them. Around this time, I was trying to start ethnographic research which somehow was meant to keep together various things I was interested in – space, gender, money, urbanism, culture, language, all sorts really. I gave this up, for various reasons, but partly it was because Young’s book impressed upon me the sense that there were a set of theoretical traditions it might be fun to engage with in greater depth than discussions about ‘postmodernism’ seemed to allow. So, alongside Robert Young’s White Mythologies, Justice and the Politics and Difference set me off in the direction of doing a reading-based dissertation all about deconstruction, discourse theory, Foucault, Ricoeur, postcolonialism Said, Spivak. (The two Youngs, Iris and Robert, also strike me now as exemplary figures whose work gets subjected to a certain style of reading in geography – finding someone talking about ‘spatial’ or ‘geographical’ things, but then finding them not quite up to scratch, not materialist enough perhaps, lacking an adequately sophisticated grasp of the wobbliness of spatiality, that sort of thing. Sometimes, most of the time perhaps, there are more interesting things to talk about than space, spatiality, and the like).
Over time, I came to work out just how smart Young’s use of Derrida, Levinas, Irigary to re-read notions of public space in more affective registers was – I ended up writing about this in my book, Culture and Democracy (pages 60 to 65 if you’re really interested), but really didn’t have much to say on these issues that Young had not already got to in developing the notion of communicative democracy, in Inclusion and Democracy for example. I’m not sure whether one should admit it, but sometimes, in a field like mine, ‘critical exegesis’ is shaped primarily by the commitments of the fan.
Young’s response to David Harvey’s Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference is also a key reference point for another thought I now take almost for granted. Reading this in Antipode in Columbus, Ohio in the summer of 1998, what I took away was the insistence on thinking of universal notions of justice or rights as, well, discursive, that is, in terms of claims. That is, I think, a much more political understanding of universality than one finds in most other places, but also a more redeemably ‘universal’ notion of universality because of its concern with the to-ing and fro-ing of claim-making. More generally, it was, for me at least, a precursor to thinking about claims as an important register for thinking about practices of representation or responsibility, or democracy more generally, an idea I have tried to articulate myself, but which other people like my former colleague Mike Saward or John Parkinson have smarter versions of than me.
When I started work at Bristol, in the early 2000s, I tried to teach Young alongside more obvious geographical literature on justice, by Harvey, David Smith and so on – not least, I think by then I was working out that her work did rather different things with a Rawlsian line of thought than you got in geography, where Rawls was either summarily dismissed as ‘liberal’ (an accusation that I have come to think reflects more negatively on the person making it than on the person so accused), or taken as providing a universal model to be applied to empirical situations.
In 2003, during the long Easter weekend in Durban, when most of the country seems to close down completely, I actually met Iris Young, visiting as a guest of Raphael Kadt, then editor of the journal Theoria – a few of us, Di Scott, Jenny Robinson, Murray Low, spent an afternoon in the garden of Gill Hart’s house in Musgrave, drinking wine and eating nibbles. I admit to having been more than a little bit star-struck.
Then in the late summer of 2003, Marion Werner, who had been a Masters student at Bristol that year, left a copy of Dissent in my pigeon-hole, pointing me in the direction of an essay by Young on a social connection model of responsibility in relation to labour solidarity campaigns. This was another ‘Wow’ moment, and I have spent the last decade shamefully ripping-off Young’s model of political responsibility in various research and writing projects. When I started at the OU, later that same year, I did my best to get Young’s account of responsibility adopted as the framework for the course on globalisation that we were making then. Later, in 2004 or 2005 we approached her to do an audio interview for the OU globalisation course, but she was unable to do so, because she was by then already dealing with her illness, from which she died in 2006. Her influence does, though, resonate across that course and various pieces of work by myself and others who engaged with it at that time. Her influence is reflected in the idea that structures that course – globalisation is a process that is realised through demands and responses that different actors make on each other. The responsibility theme also provided an important reference point for the project on ethical consumption that I worked on at this time too – Young’s ideas on the distribution of responsibility across extended fields of action provide the intellectual ballast at the front and end of the book from this project.
Most recently, in writing about justice and responsibility and ethics in geography, I have tried to be more explicit than before about what it is that Young’s work brings to the debates that geographers engage with, or at least draw from. Her concept of political responsibility comes into better focus if you triangulate it, for example, with Cohen’s work on justice and Pogge’s working up of the idea of a global basic structure. I also noticed around the time of writing these pieces that Young, like one or two other thinkers I was reading, made more or less explicit reference to Pettit’s account of republican freedom as non-domination in working up her account of responsibility – one day, if I have time, I’d like to delve deeper into that relationship in the case of Young’s ideas and others. I think, in particular, what is of most value is the theme of shared responsibility that Young develops across all the work on the idea of justice and responsibility over the last decade or so of her life: this is a lot smarter than the standard move of simply asserting that one needs to think in terms of collective responsibility rather than individual responsibility (which kind of closes down problems of effective agency in its knock-down simplicity). By bringing into view differential capacities to act responsibly, it is a resolutely political but not moralising notion of responsibility. And if you can’t find something of ‘geographical’ value in this work, something which does not need simply to be corrected, then you just aren’t trying.
Introducing Globalization: ties, tensions and uneven integration is a new book by Matt Sparke, configured around the theme of interdependencies – you can access the Intro chapter for Xmas reading.
There has been a flurry of interest in the theme of ‘planetary urbanization’ recently. Andy Merrifield has an essay on the theme of ‘Whither urban studies’, and there is a longer published version of his argument about the contemporary fate of the old-fashioned sounding ‘urban question’ (and Andrew has a new book coming out on all this too, The Politics of the Encounter). There is a video of the workshop discussion of the same theme at theurbanfix. This post also includes a link to a lecture by Neil Brenner on similar themes, re-posing ‘the urban question’ as ‘the urbanization question’ – and outlining some themes from a paper on planetary urbanisation by Brenner and Christian Schmid in a recent collection, Urban Constellations, edited by Matthew Gandy.
My interest in these interventions arises both from some things I have been trying to work on (teach, mainly), and also because I am meant to give a paper in a session at the 2013 Association of American Geographers meeting in a set of sessions on the future of critical urban theory. Reading and watching these and other things are helping me to clarify what it is I might try to say then.
There are some interesting overlaps in the arguments being made across this range of ‘post-Lefebvrian’ urban theory (I just made that up). There is the gesture of noting and then taking one’s distance from the oft-repeated line about ‘more than half the world’s population’ now living in cities, or at least in some type of urban settlement. It’s no doubt sensible to pause awhile about such stylized facts (although the stats about urban population growth might be better thought of along the lines suggested recently by David Runciman in LRB, as representations that enable certain sorts of political work to get done, not just as data to be dismissed as empiricist distractions). The distance-taking involves a move towards a claim about what urban theory can and should do, negatively and positively. It should definitely not, it turns out, presume the adequacy of taken-for-granted, ‘positivist’ understandings of what a city is, or of what counts as an urban settlement more generally – that risks buying into not only out of date notions, but ‘ideological’ ones too. What urban theory should do is burrow down into the ontological – to define clearly what the object of analysis of what-used-to-be-called- ‘urban studies’ actually is, in all its multiplicity-yet-dialectical-unity. It’s not at all clear why any intellectual field needs this sort of philosophically underwritten definitional clarity – other than as a prop to cope with a lack of confidence.
Don’t get me wrong – I think the arguments going on here are, in terms of their content as it were, really interesting: Brenner and Schmid’s theme of concentrated and extended urbanization processes is a really neat way of capturing the dynamics of contemporary spatial processes; Andy Merrifield has a really interesting riff about thinking of so many urban attributes (but I’m not sure we need to think of these as all an expression of a singular substance).
In general, the story seems to be that we should think in terms of processes, maybe practices and strategies too, rather than fixed entities like ‘cities’ or discrete spatial objects like ‘the urban’. I suppose. This is a not unfamiliar argument of course, one made around issues of scale, for example, or indeed pretty much any other concern touched by Theory – personal identity, the state, Capital. I wonder whether this is really all that exciting any more as a claim about what theory can do for us. It is actually rather odd to assume that one needs theory to gain insight into the made-up, enacted, assembled, contingent, flow-like qualities of things that we often talk about and experience as if they were thing-like. And if theory is given this special privilege in the register of revelation, attached to a claim about its ‘political’ significance, then there is a risk of missing some important dimensions about the ordinary ways in which things (cities, states, people-with-identities) configure our lives in manageable, responsible ways (it also risks buying into some hoary modernist notions that somehow ordinary language isn’t quite adequate to capture the processual and relational qualities of live; it is, of course, perfectly adequate for that task, that’s why we have words like ‘process’ and ‘relation’ in the first place, and verbs, stuff like that).
It’s easy to pick holes in definitions of ‘the urban’. If you spend enough time looking at these definitions, you can come away thinking that you are in the middle of a Borgesian fiction, social-science style. Urban can mean:
‘Localities of 200 more inhabitants’ (Greenland); ‘Agglomerations of 2500 or more inhabitants, generally having population densities of 1000 persons per square mile or more’ (USA); ‘Towns, that is, localities legally established as urban’ (Bulgaria); or just ‘Town of Stanley’ (Falkand Islands(Malvinas)).
Borges’ lesson about the arbitrariness of classification was, of course, that the seemingly arbitrary qualities of classifications which lack definitive clarity are best read as an index of specific practical purposes and plans. I suppose, then, that doubts about the adequacy of some concepts of the urban are really an indication of doubts about the value of the projects of which those concepts are central. Radical urban theory, after all, has been consistently suspicious of ‘applied’ styles of urban thinking, those too closely connected to fields of planning, for example, or development, or even environmental management, where all those clunky concepts of bounded settlements and territorialised objects do their useful work – preferring to identify with social movements, and with more or less concrete imaginations of protest and resistance.
I have to come to like the idea that ‘the urban’ is really a name for a problem, or for a series or variable problems (not quite the same as thinking of variable ‘attributes’). This is an idea I am stealing for my own purposes from my colleague Allan Cochrane, who develops it in his book on Urban Policy (if one is looking for an authoritative Theory reference, Foucault’s observations in his lectures on Security, Territory and Population about ‘the problem of the town’ might be a fun place to start – ‘the town’ emerges there as a figure for an extended network of dependence and vulnerability to which various agencies seek to respond). Allan, Scott Rodgers and I have been trying to articulate some of the implications of thinking about the urban in this way, partly through an edited collection on the theme of ‘Where is urban politics?’ that might hopefully see the light of day next year. Meanwhile, I have also tried to articulate the same set of ideas while thinking about making an OU Masters course on the theme of Changing Cities intended primarily to translate critical urban theory into a useful resource for those professions who act as key ‘intermediaries’ of contemporary spatial politics (planners, environmental managers, those sorts of people, maybe the occasional ‘activist’). To cut a long story short, I think the point would be that all those various attributes of ‘the urban’ are generative of their own points of political contention – but also that there is more to the variety of urban politics than protest; and indeed, that there is often more to protest than protest (protest is a form of claim-making, after all, of one sort of another). And, finally, that there is no reason whatsoever to assume (or want) this variety of urban-generated-but-not-contained politics to coalesce into anything so coherent as ‘revolutionary politics’ (one of the unacknowledged achievements of Marxist spatial theory is to demonstrate that the universalised agency required of a revolutionary political imaginary is always already, as they say, displaced and deferred).
So I have decided that arguments about the need to update and refine, specifically, to refine, our understandings of urban and urbanization, by posing this issue in terms of a debate about ‘the urban question’ from almost 40 years ago, tell us more about the operative concept of ‘theory’ at work in certain strains of critical urban and spatial theory than they do about how best to think about the meaning of ‘urban’, urbanism, the city, or urbanization. I wonder whether theory is really the sort of practice that has the task of isolating the ontological outlines of phenomena – of ‘the urban’, or perhaps, ‘the political’, from the appearances of town and cities and mere politics (there is of course much the same concept of theory at work in accounts of ‘the political’ as in contemporary discussions of ‘the urban question’, sharing much the same intellectual lineage – not for nothing does the notion of ‘post-political’ attach so easily to discussions of ‘the city’). I wonder too whether theory is really the proper medium for identifying the immanent potential for radical change in current events. Theories are, by definition, always theories of something – which means that any theory is caught in a subordinate relation of accountability to something that it isn’t. Unfortunately, too often this ‘other’ of theory is just assumed to be ‘Politics’ – which means that an overly theoreticist account of theory ends up holding itself accountable to an overly theoreticist account of what counts a proper politics.
So I’m left thinking that what the current state of radical urban theory confirms is not so much that ‘the urban’ is conceptually incoherent, but rather that the model of theory at work in this field needs to be challenged.
Here are a couple of OU-related initiatives and research projects on issues of poverty – a series of documentaries on Why Poverty? with other media resources too; and the re-launched website of the ESRC-funded collaborative project on Poverty and Social Exclusion (this will at some point soon have links to audio-visual materials associated with the new module The Uses of Social Science that has just started it’s first presentation – I’ll post again when this is live).
Here is a short film introducing a new Open University undergraduate module, The Uses of Social Science (DD206, in OU-speak), which has its first presentation this October, and which we have been making for a while now (I think I was thinner when we started). The story told by the module is that social science is used to describe, understand, and enact the worlds in which we live (for good or ill).
The film gives a little flavour of some of the topics and issues covered – the module makes extensive use of video, audio, and on-line resources, as well as old fashioned printed text too. Sign-up now.
I have a new iPad – well, it is not mine, it’s from my department, part of a deal whereby three of us get to play with them in return for trying to find ways of sharing with colleagues what we have learnt about how these devices transform the conditions of student learning. ‘Mobile learning’ is a strong emphasis in distance education at the moment, certainly at the OU.
I already have an iPhone – an important stimulus to starting this blog was getting it, back in August 2010, and wondering what new worlds it opened up – I signed up for twitter, friended people on Facebook, and then decided to start a blog, after conversations with bright young techie things like Scott Rodgers and Kellie Payne. A way of getting inside the medium, that’s my excuse.
And we also have an iPad already in the house – shortly before the birth of Baby 2 in early 2011, the expectant mum decided to buy one, brooking no argument against the idea (I bought a car; like the iPad, justified on the grounds that this was all for the good of the family). So now we have two in the house (iPads).
I have a worry that these new arrivals are leading us to neglect the paper based media that still litters the house – the daily paper, weekly or monthly magazines, the fiction and non-fiction books. But it is not a controlled environment, I keep reminding myself – the reason these might all be unread these days might have something to do with the disruption caused by the other mobile device that did finally arrive at the end of January last year, the one which turns out to be much more interactive and increasingly mobile than an iPad.
Anyway, I’ve had this one, ‘mine’, about 10 days, and I’m trying to take seriously the task of using it to learn about mobile learning (I have also been reminded of just how wonderful the B52s’ Private Idaho is, accidentally, on YouTube). Using it seriously, mainly, immediately makes clear how far this sort of device is primarily a reading medium – you can of course write on them, emails, even blog entries, but there is something for me at least rather constraining about them in that respect (and I know you can get widgets to annotate online documents, but it’s still not the same as writing in your own books, or as naughty).
We lucky three are meant to report to the department on our i-Experiences, sometime, so I thought I might try to record first impression ideas about just what I am learning, on the move, sitting down, with a device you have to plug into the wall every night, and sync occasionally with your PC, and that’s so expensive you can’t leave it on its own ever, about the wonders of not-so-mobile learning. So, this stream might be become a regular feature.
Like much of the hype about blogging being a terribly important new medium of academic communication (hasn’t anyone noticed that blogging is a bit old, a bit 2000s?), I actually find the concept of mobile learning terribly muddled, not least in terms of the amount of thinking that might still be required about what the implications are (and aren’t) of new technologies for designing quality distance education curricula that enhance student learning and don’t just assume that good teaching is now all about sending students off to, well, YouTube to surf for 35-year-old footage of the B52s.
My hunch is that we are living through a moment when what ‘new technologies’ are doing is making much more clearly visible, and making practically possible, the distinction between quite abstract or ‘dispersed’ practices of literacy – reading, writing, watching, listening, chatting, presenting, taking notes, reflecting – and the specific material mediums with which, until very recently these practices have been most closely associated with. Thinking of this iPad as a learning device immediately brings into view the questions of how we learn from reading text (and from reading different genres), how and what we learn from watching TV, film, video in general, or what we learn from listening to other people talking, or, singing. Which are not, of course, new questions, or shouldn’t be, they just might now have been made much more explicit as pedagogical problems rather than assumptions.
And my second first thought about all of this: the ‘mobile’ bit in mobile learning might be misleading to the point of distracting from the more relevant aspect of ‘mobile learning’, which is so obvious but seems to get covered over by the mobility theme: the really dramatic thing about mobile communication is all about the temporalities of communication they open up, and close down,, in terms obviously of allowing real-time collaborative learning, storage and retrieval on the go, that sort of thing, but also more generally, and mundanely, it is to do with how ‘mobile’ devices actually function as mediums for allowing us to fill in all sorts of previously quiet times, off-line times, with very active communicative engagement with our favourite authors, journalists, or friends. Another obvious thought, bought into focus by the new arrival in our home.
I have just read a little book, an essay really, by the Mexican writer Sergio González Rodríguez, The Femicide Machine. He is one of a number of writers and journalists who have campaigned for justice for the hundreds of women murdered in Ciudad Juárez over the last two decades, or more. This is a subject that the geographer Melissa Wright has written extensively about, for example. Rodríguez’s book does not provide a load of background to this phenomenon – others, like Charles Bowden and Diana Washington Valdez do that – but it does provide a lite-touch theoretical contextualisation of what at first appears to be an almost incomprehensible level of misogynistic violence, and in particular, of the almost systematic failure of Mexican authorities to address the murders effectively. The language is Deleuzian, providing a sense in which ‘the femicide machine’ thrives in the spaces opened up by the concatenation between ‘the war machine’ (Mexico’s enrollment in ‘the war on drugs’) and ‘the criminal machine’, all in the context of the longer history of maquiladora-based industrial and urban development in northern Mexico (I think he might miss a theoretical trick by not connecting ‘assembly’-based manufacturing with ‘assemblages’, but that might not be the main point of the book). This is the ‘trasnlineal’ space of the US/Mexico ‘transborder’ zone, a space which Rodríguez characterises by quoting Cormac McCarthy’s line that it is here that ‘the probability of the actual is absolute’.
I’m interested in this issue because 7 years ago now (7 years? Where did they go?), I was involved with some filming for an OU course which used the campaigns against femicide in Juárez as a case study for teaching students about the geographies of global responsibility. This was actually before things got really bad, since 2006, with the ratcheting up of militarised anti-drug trafficking on both sides of the border. It was at the time that Amnesty, the UN, Eve Ensler, and others were actively making the Juárez murders into an international issue – this is the issue that we focussed on (along with other issues, such as control of water along the border, the movements of people over the border, and work in the maquiladora – it’s not too late to sign up for the course). It was both a fascinating experience, and at times a very uncomfortable one, not least interviewing women involved in the femicide campaigns; and being detained by the Mexican army, for wandering across the Rio Grande (there was no water in it at the time; technically, we were trying to get into the USA, the U.S. Border Patrol just told us to go back, the Army weren’t pleased).
Actually, I think the most important part of Rodríguez’s book is not the analysis, interesting as it is, so much as the Epilogue, titled ‘Instructions for Taking Textual Photographs’. This consists of a ‘photographic mise-en-scene’ in which he narrates, in the first person voice of one mother, the circumstances surrounding the abduction, murder, and (non-)investigation of her daughter. The narrative here reaffirms the line of the preceding chapters, about how the perpetrators are known and hide in plain sight. This is followed by 20 pages of ‘photographs’; only, there are no photographs – just the captions, a line or a few sentences each, re-iterating the ‘scenes’ from the first person narrative, including ‘photos’ incriminating the perpetrators. It’s an interesting device with which to raise the question about the politics of representation of femicide and it’s victims, certainly. But by presenting the ‘photos’ (which presumably are both real and imagined, judging from their listed content) in this way, he is making the same point about the degree to which the real mystery here is not ‘who did it’ but why so little has been done to address the murders and the demands of victims’ families. The captions indicate the ‘truth’ of the case, the absence of the photos stand as a kind of accusation about a culture of institutionalised impunity – the book is, after all, a manifesto, an intervention.
Either that, or Semiotext(e) just can’t afford to reproduce photos in their books.
One reason to have a blog, of course, silly to pretend otherwise, is shameless self-promotion. Or, to put it another, slightly more edifying way, to try to ensure that the things one has to say are made accessible and available in new ways. Like other Universities, the OU has an online repository for research publications – it’s great, it’s called ORO, Open Research Online. But they can be a bit sniffy about including publications that do not meet strict criteria of what counts as research. I have spent a lot of time over the last few years writing Dictionary and Encyclopedia entries, and these don’t get on ORO.
It’s an interesting experience, being forced to write short, concise, didactic summaries on topics like deconstruction, or fair trade, or foundationalism. I have mentioned before that I wrote a bunch of entries for the latest edition of The Dictionary of Human Geography. One reason this was an interesting experience is because it brings home how things you write are likely to be read in fundamentally different ways from how you might have intended. This is, of course, true of any writing, but the thing about the pieces I did for the Dictionary, I now realise, is that I wrote them as a group, just because I was working on them all at the same time, even though they were on seemingly disparate topics. But I wasn’t necessarily writing the entries for ‘adjacent’ topics. So in my head, at least, there is a riff running across these pieces that reflects something I was thinking about back then (I wrote my entries at the end of 2005, but they weren’t published ’til 2009). Of course, this is emphatically not how these entries will be read, because of the nature of the book they are published in – nobody reads one of these multi-author Dictionaries by tracking the contributions of particular authors (do they?). My entries contain strong links to related entries which I didn’t write, of course, and which might well not align exactly with the ‘line’ I thought I was trying to express on a particular issue.
This is all a long-winded way of saying that here they are, all in a line, for anyone inclined to read them like that – these are the pre-published versions I initially submitted. There is a little entry on the Cultural Turn, then longer ones on Essentialism, Foundationalism and Deconstruction which sort of play off each other I think – the first two of these were really difficult to write, not so much because they are difficult topics, more because I realised how poorly defined they generally are in geography, serving really as terms of abuse. And these two are my favourites. Another cluster links Culture, Ideology, Media, and Rhetoric (I would really have quite liked to have been offered the Discourse and Representation entries too, just to nail home the point). Democracy and Theory are a bit more free-standing, I suppose, but still kind of overlapping with these.
I’m going to post these as downloads on the ‘Things to Read’ page too, and will add some other ‘occasional’ pieces as and when I have the time.
A few months ago, Dan Weinbren, who is heading up the History of the OU project, posted a wonderful archive film clip of a real, live course team meeting – from 1976. The course team is one of the central organisational forms of OU-style distance education, although they have changed a bit – as Dan noted, there was a lot of smoking going on back then.
Things change, things stay the same…
Course teams are now technically ‘module teams’, and we don’t smoke anymore, not the in the meetings. The OU Social Science Faculty Facebook page has just posted a set of photos providing a ‘sneak peek’ at the course team I’m currently part of, which is producing a new social science module due for its first outing in 2012. If you do this course, you might find out why smoking no longer goes on inside the meetings, but outside in designated boxed-off spaces.
You can play spot the difference if you like. Obvious things, apart from the smoking, is a lot less denim in 2011, less facial hair too. There seems to be plenty of coffee in both meetings (or maybe tea in the 1970s), but larger cups in 2011. The great mystery, of course, is just whether the 1970s really were that brown compared to the light, airy shininess of 35 years later. Or is that something to do with advances in technology?
Pop Theory 