This post is not about #IndyRef

#Yes Scotland in Leith pic.twitter.com/TWBg7PxUYG
— Peter Matthews (@urbaneprofessor) September 8, 2014

Well, the above tweet has got 36 RTs at the time I write this, so it gives an impression of what the ferment of the #IndyRef debate on social media is like at the moment. Therefore, I'm not optimistic that a blog post about my recent paper will have much success. But here goes...

Most of my research and writing outputs to date have been on urban policy and urban regeneration with a distinct interpretive policy analysis approach (here, here and here) with some dabbling in discourse analysis (here and here) and most recently in my work on middle class community activism with Prof Annette Hastings (here, here and here). My most recent paper is dabbling into the world of urban sociology a bit more, published in Housing Studies.

In this post I want to shamelessly promote my writing by producing a synopsis of the paper, but also reflect a bit more on the process of peer review, as I am wont to do. The paper comes out of the AHRC Connected Communities project, led by Prof Chris Speed at Edinburgh Uni that was involved in called Ladders to the Cloud, along with RCAHMS and community partner organisations in Wester Hailes. You’ll have probably heard about this project before because of the totem pole that was partly a result of it.

The paper essentially takes further the analysis and argument made in blog posts for the social history blog From There to Here, here and here. If you look at the comments on the photos on the From There to Here Facebook page, I argue, you see residents and former residents of Wester Hailes collaboratively writing stories. There’s two main formats: “Do you remember this?”, “Yes, it was X in Y”; or “Is that you and X”, “Yes and that’s X we were doing Y”. These stories add a little more evidence as to how working class people understand their sense of home and place.

In the first version of the paper I focused on two aspects of sense of place in particular – firstly, coming out of the coproduced fieldwork and my research background, was how these stories resisted widespread stigma to Wester Hailes and reframed the neighbourhood in a positive light. Secondly, I drew on the concepts of selective and elective belonging to explore how committed these commenters were to their neighbourhood, or former neighbourhood.

The very positive, useful and extremely in-depth comments from the peer reviewers also allowed me to bring in a broader literature on working class sense of home from Chris Allen among others. This massively improved the paper, though due to work commitments at the time, it did delay the process of producing the revisions.

The process of peer review was very good indeed (although a little bit lengthy, but hey-ho). The original paper focused much more on the aspects of stigma, but also tried to bring in the broad literature on social capital, social class and community activism. I sort of knew it wasn’t working, but thought the paper was ready for peer review. The reviewers comments made me realise this part of the argument really wasn’t working and I just dropped it and focused on a much slimmer argument.  And luckily, mashing together the chopped stuff with some stuff from this paper that was rejected by a journal with some quite staggeringly bad comments, has left me with another paper ready(ish) to go to a community development journal.

However, what was most surprising was the paper went from “Reject and resubmit” to “accepted” following one set of revisions. I was absolutely gob-smacked. The last time this happened was with my first ever paper from my MSc dissertation. Anyway, I can’t complain as reading through the paper to correct my proofs, it isn’t half bad, if I say so myself. Also, unlike some reviewers (me not included) my reviewers focused on improving the broad sweep of the argument being made, rather than providing corrections line-by-line. As a result when I submitted corrections I’d almost run out of my 50 spaces manuscript central would allow me.

Anyway, I hope you do read the paper and enjoy it. To summarise the argument, it is:

• If we look at historic, naturally shared narratives of working class belonging then they are complex and nuanced with various degrees of selectiveness to their belonging; 
• Facebook sites can be a really good source for “natural” talk about neighbourhoods and belonging;
• Facebook is media and the content of it shapes responses - beware the algorithms.

Tada! As ever, copies available if you drop me an email.