tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-86479667828090312792024-03-16T01:09:12.277+00:00Urban policy and practiceThe personal blog of Dr Peter Matthews, Lecturer in Social Policy, University of StirlingDr Peter Matthewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06308785385644187726noreply@blogger.comBlogger221125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647966782809031279.post-90018888508505714952022-08-19T08:45:00.002+01:002022-08-19T08:45:10.922+01:00Teaching is a drag<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> Teaching is a <i>drag. </i>When I first did one of these teaching philosophy
statements, for the FHEA application my philosophy was all about teaching as an
empowering and subversive activity, and I railed against edutainment. That was
a decade ago. For the past eight years, the core of my teaching activity has
been a second year module of over 300 students, the vast majority of whom do
not really want to study the subject they’re forced to study (Social Policy). And
we had a pandemic which moved everything online.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 18.0pt;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">I hear a drag queen answer the question why drag is suddenly so much
more popular. She explains how people have discovered how empowering it is to
have another persona; someone who is brash and can go out into the world
confidently; a mask to put on to slay. And I realise my teaching is <i>drag</i>.
I’ve realised there’s nothing wrong with edutainment. If students do not want
to be studying my modules, why make it a doubly boring experience for them.
Make learning fun! Spend two years of online pandemic teaching lip-synching for
your life every Friday; in the absence of teaching support assistants, employ
two sock puppets to teach Scottish devolution! Develop a postgraduate module that
is famous for a distinctly middle-aged, ten minute rant about the inability of
my neighbours to use a waste bin correctly! Literally dress up to pre-record
teaching materials! <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 18.0pt;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Does this cheapen the learning experience? It might do. Every year I get
one or two students who think I’m not taking it seriously and I’m patronising
them. But this is outweighed by the students who end up loving the subject
because I make it interesting and fun. But in putting on my teaching drag, like
a drag artist, I can reveal aspects of my true self, including my sexual
identity, in a way that makes me vulnerable, but on my own terms. It enables me
to “queer” the boundary of my self as an academic and my self as a queer, “39”
year-old man who quite likes ABBA and Taylor Swift. This produces a deeper
empathy with an otherwise anonymous group of students. It enables students to
feel open about their sexual and gender identity with me and feel more included
in the University space. It means that one of my favourite aspects of
pre-pandemic teaching – the “front row fan club” in the Logie Lecture Theatre –
are also there in the online teaching environment. They are inspired, engaged
and ready to be the critical scholars I want them to be. </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>Dr Peter Matthewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06308785385644187726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647966782809031279.post-9227706099538429092021-04-09T09:55:00.001+01:002021-04-09T09:55:09.908+01:00Edinburgh Council Want Poor Kids to Die<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> I’m extremely angry. I’ve been ranting on Twitter; so I
thought it might be an idea to write a blog post.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">This time last year, across the world, people looked at
their empty city streets and thought “this is the opportunity we’ve been
waiting for to remake our cities for people, not cars”. In the UK, local
councils sprung into action laying down new cycle paths and widening pavements.
Us residents in Edinburgh got a bit restless though. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Council here have been, slowly, trying to make the city’s
streets better. Though they have good intentions, they still seem to get stuck
with the road traffic engineers’ obsession with “flow” (the disastrous <a href="http://www.spokes.org.uk/documents/members-campaigning/edinburgh/leith-walk/">Picardy
Place gyratory</a>, that went from a “cyclist blender” to a horrific two-lane
motor system) and the overly bureaucratic system (the Roseburn to Haymarket
cycleway that’s been <a href="https://www.roseburncycleroute.org.uk/">stuck in
the statutory consultation system</a> for over a decade). But the Council had
been making some dramatic plans, including basically closing off the city
centre to motor traffic. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Us Edinburgh residents wanted some of their more dramatic
plans to come to fruition. Glasgow – the city that had a new motorway ploughed
through the inner core a decade ago – was even laying out new infrastructure quicker
than Edinburgh. Eventually the Scottish Government got a funding package
together and in May cones started springing-up across the city to make the
streets slightly better places to be with <a href="https://www.roseburncycleroute.org.uk/">Spaces for People</a>. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Where we used to live – in Leith – it was good. The road
closures due to the tram works, combined with these measures, made the place
really nice to walk around. However, I started to notice something was afoot. As
the first wave of temporary measures were reviewed, I noticed our local measures
– pavement widening on Great Junction Street – were slated for removal. It seemed
that if you were a middle class shopper in Stockbridge and Morningside, then
you deserved space to walk past a queue for the game butchers, or sourdough bakery,
but if you were working class and wanted to walk past a butcher in Leith, then
it didn’t matter if someone coughed the rona all over you.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">However, we moved in November 2020 and that’s when I
realised quite how egregious the inequalities in road safety provision in the
city are. We now live in the north east of the city – Pilton to be precise. Our
nearest Spaces for People provisions are the new cycle routes on Ferry Road and
Crewe Road South. Both are really nice and I use them regularly, but essentially
are just cones on existing paint. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">We live just off Crewe Road North. It’s a lovely 1930s suburban
avenue, surrounded by four-in-a-block housing, and mansion-style interwar
tenements; a mixture of council tenants and owner-occupation. At the bottom of
the hill there is a nice row of shops. The only pedestrian crossing is at the
southern end of the road to control traffic onto Crewe Toll roundabout. Just
across the road is social housing which is in the 20% most deprived
neighbourhoods in the city. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Not long after moving in, I noticed how fast vehicles shot
down Crewe Road. At the southern end, it narrows under the former railway
bridge so the pavement is only one paving slab wide with a railing alongside.
With the Kent variant of coronavirus surging through the city, if you wanted to
socially distance, you had a choice of stepping into the road and risk
facing-down a HGV travelling over 30mph; wait patiently for another pedestrian
to pass; or don your mask, hold you breathe, and walk quickly while apologising
profusely. We thought the traffic was going quite fast, especially since most
of Edinburgh’s roads are now a 20mph limit. Surely this residential street had
a 20mph limit? And then we spotted the 30 sign.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">It got me angry. We’d been living in a very walkable
neighbourhood, but now walking to our local shops was difficult because it felt
very dangerous. I watched the terrified school crossing patrol officers for the
local primary school tentatively step out into the road, just hoping that drivers
would stop. I contacted one of my local councillors with my concerns – asking why
the road wasn’t 20mph and had so few pedestrian crossings. It was passed onto
the Council’s Road Safety Team. They replied that their last survey, in 2019,
showed the average speed was 29 mph, so they didn’t feel a 20mph limit was warranted
(a quick google shows that puts the kids at the local school at seven times the
risk of being killed by a driver) and the same survey showed that very few
pedestrian cross the road. I replied pointing out that this was no surprise –
as a fit and healthy young man, I find it difficult to cross the road safely.
The reply to that (which I eventually got after chasing) just fobbed me off
into a bureaucratic process of the review of the 20mph limit that will happen
some time in the future. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">And then I started getting out-and-about in the city again.
I noticed in Barnton, on a very quiet suburban road, where the house price is
basically the phone number with a pound sign in front of it, there were some
lovely Spaces for People cones out widening a very wide pavement. Meanwhile I
was stepping out into the road to walk past people waiting for a bus. In the
New Town, there was a quiet residential street which didn’t have a pavement on
one side because that was where the shared private garden was, and in the early-nineteenth
century you didn’t need pavements to save yourself from being killed by a Range
Rover. I noticed there were some lovely Spaces for People cones marking out access
to the <i>private</i> garden. Meanwhile, tenants of the Council’s housing don’t
have safe access to the Council’s schools. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Frustrated by this visible inequity, I popped in an access
to environmental information request, asking for details of how the Spaces for
People provision was distributed across the city according to deprivation. It
got rejected because the information was already in the public domain. The
Council expected me to sit with a map of the hundreds of datazones in Edinburgh
and plot on the Spaces for People provision myself. I have appealed this
decision, pointing out they can do this with a couple of clicks of GIS. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">And this all just leaves me angry. It has been known for decades
that children in deprived neighbourhoods are far more likely to be killed by
drivers. And I’m using active language because I loathe the passive language of
driverless cars accidentally mowing down vulnerable pedestrians. It really
feels like Edinburgh Council just do not care about the safety of residents in
deprived neighbourhoods. Because our houses are worth less, so are our lives.
My research has focused on middle class activism, so I <i>know </i>a lot of
this is down to the active, able communities in these neighbourhoods campaigning
for improvements. But it is also down to officers and councillors just not
caring, or thinking, about deprived neighbourhoods. They should have actively
suggested improvements in these neighbourhoods, not wait for residents (who are
probably rather busy dealing with losing their jobs to worry) to respond to a
consultation. Given this is a brilliant opportunity to make our roads safer
temporarily, we should not be forced to have to wait until a review in the
future to make our lives safer. Unless Edinburgh Council want poor kids to die.
</span><o:p></o:p></p>Dr Peter Matthewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06308785385644187726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647966782809031279.post-41687549912316574482021-02-01T17:18:00.001+00:002021-02-01T17:18:47.689+00:00A paper I'm very proud of<p><span style="font-family: verdana;">I’ve not blogged in a while because of 2020, but a paper I
wrote with a researcher colleague <a href="https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/applied-health/poyner-chris.aspx">Chris Poyner</a> is now out in <i>Public Administration Quarterly</i> and I
want to summarise it. I’m also extremely proud of it. It emerged from my
research on LGBT+ homelessness and housing which I’ve written about before, and
in it I valiantly attempt to set a new research agenda based on a very
simplistic use of queer theory.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">It had a pretty torrid time getting published. It was
eventually (after three rounds of revision) rejected by one journal I suspect
for disciplinary reasons – I think they had a very fixed idea of what social
science theory, and queer theory, which is essentially a collection of ideas
and concepts you can use to look askance at society and culture didn’t really
fit that model. However, the editor and reviewers for PAQ were extremely
helpful and it was published. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The paper focuses in on one particularly finding from the
research: while housing and homelessness organisations were never <i>explicitly</i> homophobic, they were <i>implicitly </i>homophobic. To unpack this I
used the concept of heteronormativity from queer theory to demonstrate how, in
incredibly mundane ways, they reinforced compulsory heterosexuality. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">A key way they did this was to completely ignore sexual
identity. None of the organisations involved in the research regularly
collected sexual identity data. I know this is a <i>very tricky subject</i>. If they had been LGBT+ identifying people
talking critically about it, I would have been less critical. But this was
cisgender, heterosexuals, saying they didn’t want to put sexual identity on a
standard monitoring form for fear of insulting people (straight people).
Ironically, these forms of <i>equality</i>
then became forms of ensuring heterosexuality: you could be any ethnicity,
gender, race, impairment. But you could not be non-heterosexual. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">This became a real problem because the organisations then
didn’t know if there were problems that needed to be tackled. The most obvious,
and worrying, of these would be homophobic or transphobic abuse by neighbours.
The tenants we interviewed talked in graphic detail about the impact this had
on their lives (as discussed in this paper) but the organisations didn’t think
it was a problem as they never sought to ask their tenants. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The bigger point I make in the paper though, is that if you
look across the literature on LGBT+ people and politics and policy, quite
rightly and understandably, this is focused on achieving basic legal rights, or
combating direct discrimination and violence. This is still the case for the
vast majority of places in the world. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">However, the UK, and many other northern European countries,
now have a legal framework that is largely progressive. In the UK, thanks to
the Equality Act, this <i>should</i> also
mean policy is progressive and inclusive as well. Therefore, we suggest in the
paper, the focus on these contexts needs to be turned much more to these everyday
ways that policy and administrative processes reinforce heteronormativity and
make the lives of LGBT+ people more difficult. Therefore public policy, and
public administration research needs more queer theory. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">You can read the paper <a href="https://paq.spaef.org/article/1957/Achieving-Equality-in-Progressive-Contexts-Queer-Y-Ing-Public-Administration">here</a> or drop me an email for a copy of the pre-print version.</span></span>Dr Peter Matthewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06308785385644187726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647966782809031279.post-81460145905097748372020-04-20T16:07:00.000+01:002020-04-20T16:07:04.358+01:00The emerging crisis in Scottish higher education<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Given the demands of the current crisis and response to
COVID-19, and the need for governments to prioritise expenditure on healthcare
and income support, higher education has been nowhere near any government’s
priority list. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But a crisis in higher education is emerging, particularly in
English-speaking countries. For decades now, demand for tertiary education from
rapidly developing countries – most notably China – has fuelled an enormous
growth in the sector. It is well-recorded that the UK has done exceedingly well
in this market. Many universities now rely on this income to fund a large part of their activities. In the space of three
months, this income has all but entirely dried-up. Higher education is counter-cyclical,
so there may be some uptick in domestic students to make-up a small proportion
of the income from international students. The impacts on universities will be
highly differentiated as well – some have fostered strong local, domestic
student markets so may be more resilient; others, particularly some of our most
prestigious institutions, are probably looking at not being a going concern in
a matter of months as their cash-flow dries up and they’re left with only enough to
pay three months redundancy. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The HE sector in the UK itself is highly differentiated as
well, and this often gets hidden in debates (including with ongoing industrial
disputes in the sector). Indeed, higher education policy is probably one of the
areas where there is the starkest difference between the four nations and
regions of the UK. Therefore there is a need for analysis to be differentiated and reflect the different decisions by the devolved administrations.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It is easy to blame the current situation on my mate Neil
Librul. The hens of market logics have come home to roost. If a company’s
market vanishes it goes bust. This is capitalism in action. However, because I’ve
used discourse analysis in my research to critique neo-liberalism, I do not
like using it as a catch-all thing to blame as that disguises <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">who </i>is implementing neo-liberal policy
decisions, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">why</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">how</i>. So that is what I want to do in the blog post. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">One of the things that sets Scottish higher education policy
apart is that, seemingly, the government explicitly rejects neo-liberal logics
that higher education is an individual asset that can be purchased as an
investment through a loan. Through its flagship policy of “free” higher
education it publicly proclaims higher education is a public good. A former
First Minister put a stone in the grounds of one of our HEIs to proclaim this
very point. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">However, I want to suggest that there is an emerging crisis in
Scottish higher education because the Scottish Government has never fully
funded its commitment to a public education. Indeed, in the operation of its
policies it has pushed HEIs towards a market logic. To do this argument
justice, I would need a barrage of links to old newspaper articles; SFC reports
and university accounts. Frankly, I don’t have the time to do this as in my job
I’m trying to stop the crisis in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a </i>Scottish
university having a massive detrimental impact on the institution. If you want
something like that, get a copy of Andrew McGettigan’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745332932/the-great-university-gamble/">The
Great University Gamble</a></i>. Although it focuses on England, most of it
also applies to Scotland; the only difference in Scotland is that we still have
money coming into universities from the Scottish Funding Council paying for
some tuition. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Of course, hair-splitters will point out that higher
education was only not “free” in Scotland in a brief period between 1997 and
2001. After that, the up-front fees of just over £1000 were replaced by the “<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/6747811.stm">Graduate Endownment</a>”
that was tacked onto your student loan when you graduated. When the SNP won the
2007 Scottish elections and formed their first minority government they vowed
to make higher education free and even abolish this fee. So, we have the
totemic social democratic policy of “free higher education” in Scotland. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As many analysts and organisations such as the NUS in
Scotland have pointed out though, this has led to particular quirks in the
system. To fund the fees, student grants have steadily been eroded and replaced
by loans to pay for maintenance, so that we end up with the odd situation that
students in Scotland who come from homes with the lowest household incomes end
up with the highest levels of graduate debt. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">However, to go back to my core point, the fees policy itself
has never been properly fully-funded. I first became aware of this when I was
a PhD researcher in 2009 and the Scottish Government first started shuffling
the cards to deliver the student numbers they wanted without the bill becoming out-of-hand – they shifted what
subjects were in what funding bands, and reduced funding for degrees in the
lowest bands (art, humanities and social sciences). When I got my first
academic job in 2011, the Scottish Government were effectively only funding
three years of the four years of a Scottish undergraduate degree. The idea had
been that further education colleges would increasingly deliver the first two
years on the cheap through HNCs and HNDs and there’d be growing second and
third-year entries to Scottish universities. From what I know of the sector,
experience of this has been patchy. Also, the “free higher education” policy
was paid for by halving the budget for further education, amalgamating colleges
in regional mega-colleges, and drastically reducing provision to highly
gendered vocational qualifications in a limited range of industries. And then
until this financial year, for a number of years universities have had a
flat-cash settlement for the teaching grant and research quality grant from the
Scottish Funding Council. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Now, I do have some sympathy for the Scottish Government on
some of this. Until the recently increased powers over taxation, it was limited
by the funding envelope provided by the Barnett formula. It was having to make
difficult choices about what areas to fund and what areas to de-fund. Actually,
compared to further education, policing, fire and rescue and local authorities,
higher education in Scotland has not done too badly. We’ve not seen the wincingly
painful cuts they experienced. And I know this personally from living with a
local government officer and seeing the struggle he has to get basic things
done because the resources simply are not there. But then again, the Scottish
Government could have made painful policy choices in 2011 when they won their
majority, such as to completely reform local government finance, getting rid of the
Council Tax, and creating a new local tax that could have brought billions into
the public sector creating more fiscal leeway. But we are where we are. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Because of this situation, of an underfunded principle
policy commitment, Principals and governing bodies of Scottish universities
have been forced to make a choice: stick to a flat-cash income from the
Scottish Funding Council and watch your university slowly wither away as it
loses staff through voluntary severance and natural wastage as staff costs increase, and buildings and equipment fall into disrepair;
or make riskier investment decisions in the hope than the return on these is
high and allows you to expand. This latter choice of expansion is the policy agenda of the
Scottish Government. It needs growing universities to: educate growing numbers of
Scottish undergraduates as it seeks to meet its own targets for improving
education equality; to invest in regional research and development; to bring in
export income; and to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">be </i>Scotland in
international markets. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">So we’re left with universities that have aggressively
expanded into international higher education markets to pay for new staff,
shiny new buildings and equipment, fantastic library resources and who are now
horribly exposed as income from international students falls off a cliff. And
students from Scotland will suffer because of this, as universities are forced
to make staff redundant so class sizes increase and as very basic services like
libraries and IT are curtailed to make budget savings. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I’ve tried to be measured about writing this and
thinking this through, but I’m not. I’m angry. I’m angry and frustrated that the
Scottish Government have pushed universities into this situation. Its made me
angry during our current industrial disputes. We’re meant to be angry at our
management, but I’m not. I can see why they made the decisions they made. I’m
angry at the Scottish Government. And both my trade union and the employers
have both been told, explicitly, by the current Higher Education Minister in
Scotland that if the sector needs more money then it has to raise it itself
through attracting in international students. The Scottish Government want a world-class higher education sector, but the money is not there. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As I wrote at the start of this post, the current COVID-19 crisis is
bringing this into stark relief. Some Scottish institutions will be just as
exposed as those in England. So, what to do? This is interesting as higher
education in Scotland is such a totemic part of our national identity that the
government portrays on an international stage – Scotland had more
universities than England until the late nineteenth-century. Higher education
is what Scotland <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">does</i>. Therefore, I
cannot see the Scottish Government allowing an institution to go bankrupt and a
reduction in the number of HEIs through forced mergers (a proposed 2011 merger <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-15773250">between Abertay and Dundee never happened</a>). There is also the unquestioned assumption that
a Scottish undergraduate degree is four years. Woe betide the Scottish HE
minister who suggests that a Scottish degree should only be as long as it’s
actually funded for. To clarify, I think the four-year degree is a good thing; I only wish it were funded. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There was going to be a <a href="http://www.sfc.ac.uk/publications-statistics/announcements/2020/SFCAN072020.aspx">small
real terms uplift in funding from the Scottish Funding Council</a> for
universities in Scotland this year anyway. Given the counter-cyclical nature of
higher education, the Scottish Government <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">could</i>
just chuck more grant income into the sector and hope for the best. Yet for
some institutions this will only be pennies compared to what they will need
because of the gaping hole from international student income. However, the
economic collapse due to COVID-19 might put an almighty hole in the Scottish
Government’s budget as income from devolved taxes falls. It remains to be seen
whether Barnett Consequentials from UK Government expenditure will be enough to
make up the shortfall, or if the Scottish Government’s limited borrowing powers
are enough to tide it over until tax income increases again. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But why are we even talking about institutions going bust?
Well, that’s the odd quirk of the British higher education system that, due to
historical quirk and the demand for academic freedom, our universities are
private charitable companies and governed as such. They just happen to get the
majority of their income from government. I’m on the board of a similar
organisation, so I know well the odd pressures it put on the governing body. On
the one hand, you want to deliver a public service, but on the other, you’re
subject to company law and have to ensure every year that you are a financial
going concern. You have to borrow from commercial money markets, with all the limits
that entails.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Which, oddly, brings us to another policy option that would
be a sort of radical status quo – turn HEIs into public sector institutions, as they
are in many European countries. Government agencies that shadow each HEI could
be created and staffed TUPEd across. The charitable companies that are left,
with their liabilities could be wound down over time. Academics and all
university staff would become civil servants. The sector would become wholly
dependent on the whim of government policy, rather than be subject to the “freedom”
of the market. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I happen to know that crisis talks between representatives
of Scottish HEIs, the trades unions, the Scottish Funding Council and Scottish
Government are ongoing. And this is a crisis. There needs to be a policy
resolution to the crisis in Scottish universities in the next few months
otherwise there will be mass redundancies, massive reductions in investment in
research infrastructure, and if the “market doesn’t correct” quickly then HEIs
will be forced into the decisions their public sector cousins have been forced
to make since 2013: cutting even essential functions just to keep some
lecturing staff in the classroom; a fire-sale of buildings and land and an end
to pretty much all ongoing investment in infrastructure. Yes, the Principals of
Scottish universities have made risky, market-based decisions, that have led
them into this situation, but as far as I am concerned, this is because an
underfunded Scottish Government policy has left them with no other choice.</span></div>
Dr Peter Matthewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06308785385644187726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647966782809031279.post-66833487856001927832019-07-26T15:29:00.001+01:002019-07-26T16:01:18.570+01:00The rather staggeringly obvious face of racism and xenophobia in Edinburgh<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I bloody love Edinburgh. It’s why I’ve lived here for 15
years. I fell in love with the city when I visited as a tourist in 2003. I love
it when people I follow on social media visit the city for the first time and
post photos in awe at the beauty and idiosyncrasies of this wonderful, unique
city. It rekindles that love in me.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Over the fifteen years I’ve lived in the city the number of
tourists visiting the city has increased dramatically all year round. This has,
quite rightly, led to debates about what impact this is having on the city.
Tourism was presented solely as an economic benefit to the city, bringing in
money and creating jobs and opportunities. Now the costs of tourism are being
highlighted and the debate about the <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-47157011">Hotel Tax in Edinburgh</a>
began to suggest that the industry does not provide sufficient social economic
benefit to outweigh its social costs. I support such a levy wholeheartedly and
I found the hoteliers’ arguments that it would put off visitors absolutely
laughable. This would suggest a truly incredibly elasticity for demand for
tourism in the city. And, as I once ruminated on Twitter, the whole reason
cities like Edinburgh are tourist hotspots is they have monopolistic qualities –
there is only one Edinburgh. I’m not going to visit Birmingham just because
Venice has a hotel tax and Birmingham has more canals. And tourists are not
going to flock to stay in Stirling instead of Edinburgh, just because it’s got
a castle in the middle of it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The negative impacts of tourism on Edinburgh are becoming a
much greater part of public discussion in the city due to the explosive growth
of Air BnB, and the number of flats in the city shifting from the
private-rented sector to short-term lets. It does seem there is <a href="https://housingevidence.ac.uk/short-term-lets-the-need-for-balance-regulation-and-better-data/">some
evidence</a> that this is happening, and anecdotally I know it’s more difficult
than ever the get a PRS flat in the city. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In many ways I’m very glad this debate is happening. I’ve
recognised for some time that Edinburgh needs a proper tourism strategy that
isn’t just about encouraging more tourists, growing the industry, and ensuring
tourists have a great time, but is rather about balancing that growth with the
sustainability of the wider city and the experience of longer-term residents. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">What I don’t like, increasingly, is the way this debate is
happening. Basically, this debate is increasingly racist and xenophobic and
portrays Edinburgh as being like Royston Vasey – a local city for local people
(although in my case, the Royston Vasey slogan of “You’ll Never Leave” does
seem to apply). What is most concerning to me, is this racist dog-whistling is
increasingly coming from heritage organisations.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The most egregious recent case of this, which caused me to
write this blog post, was the reporting of a report carried out by Edinburgh
World Heritage on the damage of tourism to the Old Town, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="https://www.scotsman.com/news/environment/heritage-body-warns-edinburgh-s-royal-mile-is-at-risk-of-becoming-tourist-ghetto-1-4970844">The
Scotsman <span style="font-style: normal;">on 25 July 2019</span></a></i>. The
news article stated: “Surveys of more than 500 visitors found they were far
more likely to feel “surrounded by foreigners” than “hear Scottish accents” on
the Royal Mile.” The same is repeated in the <a href="https://ewh.org.uk/new-research-highlights-threats-facing-edinburghs-royal-mile/">EWH
press release</a> and their <a href="https://ewh.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Perceived-authenticity-of-the-Royal-Mile-Edinburgh-Report.pdf">report
(p.9)</a>. I’m sorry, but as an Edinburgher without a Scottish accent, funnily
enough I find it deeply offensive that I’m not seen to be an “authentic” part
of the Royal Mile by the EWH. The last time I noted that foreign accents were
talked about in such a way in the press was when <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/feb/28/nigel-farage-ukip-immigration-speech">Nigel
Farage was lambasted for saying he felt uncomfortable hearing foreign languages</a>.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Edinburgh’s civic association, The Cockburn Association, is also
quite bad at broadcasting similar views through its twitter activity. On
numerous occasions this year I have sub-tweeted (for fear of a Twitter pile-on)
when it has re-Tweeted people who are, in the most thinly veiled way,
advocating for an Edinburgh that is only for white people, born here, who speak
with a “local” accent (of course, anyone who knows the city knows there’s a BIG
difference between the local accents of Leith and Wester Hailes and the local
accents of Trinity and Morningside). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">This xenophobia becomes even more of a problem for me when
it spills over into other development controversies in the city. Here I see,
with an alarming increase, a coalition between a xenophobic heritage lobby that
wants to preserve everything, and a green/left lobby that believes everything
that is local is good. Therefore, a proposed development is opposed, and in the
opposition the developers’ nationality becomes a key feature. Why? Do you not
want “them” making money in “our” city? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">With four universities in Edinburgh, this xenophobia also
emerges in debates about the development of student accommodation. Again,
Edinburgh is seeing a massive expansion of private sector student accommodation.
This has problems that could be better managed, in particular the poor quality
of much of the building which means it cannot be used for anything else if the
market for international study collapses. The biggest issue for me is I see it
as a way developers can bring sites to the market which are economically viable
and side-step requirements to build affordable housing, which they’d have to do
if it was a residential development. International students are also brilliant
for the city – they bring their expertise and skills to the city. If they
could, I’m sure many would stay after they’d completed their studies, boosting
the economy further. They help fund our universities.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Yet in the opposition to student development we see people
explicitly saying that their issue is that this is accommodation for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">wealthy international students</i>. We wouldn’t
mind if it was accommodation for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">local </i>students.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">So, I ask you, please do keep debating the impact of
tourists and other transient visitors on our city. But please don’t make these
debates racist and xenophobic. Do not “other” these people, and recognise the
massive diversity of the long-term residents of the city. The problems
Edinburgh is facing due to these transient visitors are the root of global and
national issues that the city can respond to the best it can. It needs to
respond better and we need citizens to engage in the debate about what this response
looks like. But we cannot continue blaming the “other” for this. Edinburgh is,
and should be, an international city for everyone. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />Dr Peter Matthewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06308785385644187726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647966782809031279.post-70519160124676765482019-01-30T12:22:00.002+00:002019-01-30T12:22:49.296+00:00Collaborative studentships<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">This is a blog-post to help advertise a couple of doctoral studentships I have been awarded through the ESRC funded Scottish Graduate
School of Social Sciences (SGSSS). As funded studentships, they are open to
UK/EU applicants and you will be given a monthly stipend and, if required,
you’ll be funded to do our MRes in Applied Social Research. This blog post is
just to give some more general background – please do follow the links below
for the SGSSS website and the formal rules and regulations that we will be
following in completing the studentships.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The first one is on <span class="MsoHyperlink"><a href="https://www.sgsss.ac.uk/studentship/using-administrative-data-to-improve-neighbourhood-environmental-services-and-outcomes/">Using
administrative data to improve neighbourhood environmental services and
outcomes</a></span> and is a collaboration with <span class="MsoHyperlink"><a href="http://www.improvementservice.org.uk/">The Improvement Service</a></span>
for local authorities in Scotland. A short summary of the project is: you will
work with some case study local authorities to map the administrative data they
have got from the information they record when citizens contact them with
everyday problems – potholes, fly-tipped waste etc. Once this stage has been
completed, the maps will be discussed with the councils and local citizens to
understand if the mapped data is of use in understanding the challenges faced
by councils in delivering these services in a period of austerity. This project
builds on my long-term interest in <span class="MsoHyperlink"><a href="https://drpetermatthews.blogspot.com/search/label/middle%20classes">middle-class
community activism</a></span> and the risk that in empowering citizens we might
exacerbate existing socio-economic inequalities. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The successful candidate will work quite closely with the
Improvement Service and the case study local authorities. The required skillset
is therefore quite broad – an ability to spatially analyse statistics (or a
willingness to develop these skills) alongside the soft skills in engaging with
organisations and communities. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The second one is on <span class="MsoHyperlink"><a href="https://www.sgsss.ac.uk/studentship/understanding-student-homelessness-in-higher-education-in-scotland/">Understanding
student homelessness in higher education in Scotland</a></span> and is with <span class="MsoHyperlink"><a href="https://scotland.shelter.org.uk/">Shelter Scotland</a></span>.
It actually emerged from an almost throw-away finding from my research on <span class="MsoHyperlink"><a href="https://drpetermatthews.blogspot.com/2018/10/what-do-we-know-about-lgbt-homelessness.html">LGBT+
homelessness</a></span> – that a couple of participants in that study were
students while they were homeless and their university accommodation services
supported them in being housed. We know surprisingly little about homelessness
among students in higher education. Given Shelter’s policy focus, and the small
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">n </i>of higher education in Scotland,
this project will seek information from all universities on the extent of
homelessness they encounter and their organisational and policy response to
these incidents of vulnerability among students.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Predominantly this will be a qualitative research project,
but an interest in homelessness and policy is useful. Again, the successful
candidate will have to be prepared to work with Shelter Scotland to provide
policy and practice relevant findings.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Potential applicants <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">might</i>
be put off that these are projects that are already developed with partners.
However, the studentships will still very much be that of the successful
candidate – it will be up to you to synthesise the literature and develop the
initial proposal further into a research strategy that can be implemented
successfully to deliver the intended outputs for the partner organisations, as
well as produce a thesis of doctoral quality. You will also develop invaluable
skills at working across boundaries with organisations outside academia.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Why would you want to be supervised by me? Well, I generally
get excellent feedback from my doctoral supervisees; it’s the bit of my job I
enjoy the most. I am absolutely committed to the long-term development of
doctoral researchers and will support you in your ambitions the best I can. I
take a strong mentoring/coaching approach to supervision and aim to support my
doctoral supervisees to become confident, independent researchers at the end of
their projects. I know this is an approach shared by my co-supervisors on these
projects. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">One of my more controversial commitments is to support
students to complete on time. This is a very personal commitment – doctorates
in the UK are only funded for three years, and when I did my own PhD I had to
finish on time otherwise I would have been plunged into poverty and/or forced
to move back into my mum’s home. This doesn’t mean I will drive you to despair
trying to finish on time, but I will work supportively with you to ensure the
project is realistic and broken down into steps that can be achieved within the
timescale. In particular, I will not expect you to overwork, work long hours
and weekends, just to complete the PhD and get a good CV. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I am also committed to diversity in the academy as well, so
if you’re a woman who loves stats, apply! If you’re a man who is interested in
qualitative research with vulnerable populations, apply! If you’re disabled, we
will provide reasonable adaptations, so apply! We’re an increasingly
international and diverse Faculty, so if you a from a BAME background you will
find a welcoming home and apply! If you identify as LGBT+ I’m as woke as can
be, so apply! <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">If you are interested in applying, do feel free to get in
touch directly with me with any questions pertinent to project design etc. or
click on the links above to access the SGSSS website and start the application
process. I look forward to receiving your applications.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />Dr Peter Matthewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06308785385644187726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647966782809031279.post-38778283933303489622018-12-21T08:38:00.001+00:002018-12-21T08:38:43.947+00:00PhD Supervision by Instagram<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I’ve blogged quite a bit on here about using social media in
my teaching – </span><a href="https://drpetermatthews.blogspot.com/2015/12/yikyak.html" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">YikYak
for anonymous questions</a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> when it was still a thing; and making </span><a href="https://drpetermatthews.blogspot.com/2015/11/i-did-social-media-bad.html" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">a
complete balls-up</a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> shaming my class on Twitter. But I don’t actually use
social media much in my teaching. My Facebook profile is a very private place,
so it’s quite locked down (I generally avoid being Facebook friends with
colleagues). I use Twitter to get stuff out to students, but I don’t expect
them to rely on it. It is completely unethical to expect students to use a
commercial service external to the University for their learning.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">One social media I’ve only got into using over the past year
is Instagram. My use of it changed quite a lot when they started Instagram
stories. I don’t use them very much, but on most days I’ll post something banal
to my story. I quite like catching up with the stories of the people I follow
too. It’s fun watching what people are up to and I occasionally chat to them.
And as the everyday functions of Instagram have grown I find I use the
messaging function quite a bit. I can have simultaneous conversations with the
same person on Instagram, WhatsApp and email about different topics.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">One of the people I follow on Instagram is one of my PhD
students. I started following her after she suggested she might use Instagram
to collect data for her fieldwork. I’ve followed PhD students on Twitter
before, but most of the interactions there had been quite banal and work-like –
just congratulating them on achievements and that sort of stuff. Like most
doctoral supervisors I talk to, I find it is the most rewarding part of my job
– I learn so much from my students and watching them flourish as scholars and
rounded-individuals just gives me the greatest pleasure. Part of this is
building up a trusting relationship, but I’m always wary to keep it
professional. I don’t feel I should be the researcher’s friend, particularly
when I’m in that supervisory relationship. We never know how a PhD is going to
go, and I don’t want to be the friend who has to have an awkward conversation
with a researcher telling them exactly what they’re doing wrong and that they
have to buck-up their ideas and work harder if they’re going to finish this
PhD. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Pretty early when Instagram stories started, I realised that
following my PhD student was going to blur this line between a professional and
a personal relationship. I was seeing everything that my student was up to across
their life in a way I had not done before. It did dawn on me to stop following
them, or just skip through their story. But I did them interesting – she’s a
fun person with a rich life, and also seeing how she fitted the PhD into her
life was interesting. I would respond to her stories and we’d message each
other in the way friends day (we’re both gay, so this was common ground).
However, that I was blurring the professional and personal did dwell in my mind
and a few months ago I did say that their might be a point in future where I
might politely end the supervisory relationship if mixing the personal and
professional was getting difficult. I’d become friends, in a way, over
Instagram stories. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But recently things have changed again with our supervisory
relationship and Instagram. It all began when the student had a block on
submitting a journal article that was just about written. I’m currently doing a
coaching course, so I suggested we have a coaching conversation to work out
what was going on and get her in a place to submit the article to her chosen
journal. The conversation worked a treat and we set some pretty tight
deadlines. And then it appeared on her Instagram story! I felt so pleased that
she had got there that I had to engage with it positively – it’s what I would
do as a coach and a friend. She didn’t quite make the deadline, but the paper
was submitted and we celebrated through her Instagram story together. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">She then went for a period of travel away through her
research. And our Instagram story engagement, to me, took another little turn
into a deeper relationship. Being away from our home and comforts pushes us
into uncomfortable areas and we end up doing a lot of things that are socially
brave, but doing so also brings out all the anxieties that hold us all back. I
knew this as I’d done it a year before. So just occasionally I’d check in with
her through the Instagram story, showing empathy, but also celebrating the many
successes that have happened during this trip. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And I realised I’m sort of supervising by Instagram. What
makes me a good supervisor, I think, is that I build a good, trusting
relationship with my students. I support them to achieve what they want to
achieve. And I’ve now just moved this onto Instagram stories. Hopefully it
won’t all go horribly wrong…</span></div>
Dr Peter Matthewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06308785385644187726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647966782809031279.post-80978643439997922522018-11-09T16:17:00.003+00:002018-11-09T16:17:55.499+00:00The three per cent<br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It’s beginning to look an awful lot like <a href="http://visual.ons.gov.uk/lesbian-gay-and-bisexual-people-say-they-experience-a-lower-quality-of-life/">three
per cent of population are lesbian, gay, or bisexual</a>. Governments are now
beginning to ask standardised clunky questions to capture sexual identity in
population surveys – this is a case where Scottish exceptionalism is true, as
the then Scottish Executive pioneered this with the Scottish Health Survey in
200#. As the number of surveys that include such a question spread, the finding
ends up being that around three per cent of people say they are not solely
heterosexual. Reassuringly, an analysis of Google search data (looking at what
porn people search for) finds that around three per cent of people are solely
homosexual, with another two per cent on top of that “curious” (of course I can’t
find the link to that article now). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There are all sorts of well-rehearsed issues with this
statistic, many of which boil down the basic issue of what are we actually
measuring? We’re conflating identity, attraction and sexual behaviour into a category
on a form. You don’t have to be a queer activist to quickly become
uncomfortable with that – the data on sexual behaviour from <a href="https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(13)62035-8/fulltext">NATSAL</a>
should be enough to get you questioning simple categorisations. But I very much
fall into <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A1020976902569">the camp</a>
(pun intended) that those categories of “gay”, “lesbian” and “bisexual” or
“pansexual” are empowering. In a heteronormative world they allow you to label
your difference and be with others that are similarly different. So, in a
patriarchal, heteronormative culture like the UK three per cent of people will
call themselves not-heterosexual; they will have sexual and romantic relationships
with people of the same gender as themselves. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I’ve ended up thinking about the three per cent quite a bit
recently. It’s been lurking in the back of my mind and keeps popping-up
unexpectedly. This is mainly because when we consider the position of a
structurally marginalised group in society, the focus tends to end up on
representativeness. We are now, rightly, called-out for creating, or taking
part in manels; the utterly shocking lack of ethnic diversity in many areas of
public life is highlighted as an example of the outcome of structural racism;
the disabling effects of our society are reflected in the marginalisation of
disabled people in major institutions. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Representation is also said to matter because of the
visibility of the group. Non-members of a group continue to have negative views
of group members because they do not see them in everyday life in positive
roles. Similarly, group members might not think that opportunities are open or
appropriate for them as they do not see people like themselves in such roles. Achieving
levels of representation when groups are quite large is difficult, but obvious
– in a world where over half the population are women, manels <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">are just inexcusable.</i> But, what about
when it’s three per cent?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Only gay in the village<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I wonder about this in terms of my own life. I grew up in
the homophobic 1990s. About the only stat on non-heterosexuals that was
muttered then was the Kinsey one-in-ten. This statistic has now been <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/05/10-per-cent-population-gay-alfred-kinsey-statistics">roundly
debunked</a>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I sort of came out as gay at secondary school when I was 15.
I felt very, very alone. I did wonder where all the other gay men were. I was
the only gay in the village. Now I know that in my school of 1,000 pupils,
there were probably another 14 gay men. Probably another three in my year
group. If I’d know that at the time, would it have made me feel any better
about myself? What if I knew these other gay men and I didn’t like them?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">When I went to university and started dating the feeling of
being alone didn’t really go away – if anything it got worse. A lot of this was
entirely down to how I was feeling about myself. But I can’t help but think
what I would have thought about the 3% stat then. There weren’t many out gay
people in my college – definitely not 3% – but ironically enough of my peers
have come out since we graduated that I now realise there were more than 3% of
us. Even in a very large university like the one I attended, 3% is not very
many people. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">From what data we have there are also a couple of other
things I can’t help but consider. Firstly, in the UK, non-straight people are
evenly distributed across the country. Us gays, and particularly gay men, have
a tendency to congregate in London and the south-east. We’re better educated
and less likely to be unemployed than heterosexuals, so we go there to get
better paid jobs. This means, if you’re living in a small, northern town, the
chances are there’ll be slightly less than that 3%. Alas, it also looks like
they’ll be a “selected sample” who are different to those super-gays in That
London. How would that make you feel if you were in one of those places? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We also know that there is a generational divide. Younger
people are more likely to identify as non-heterosexual than older people;
obviously this is linked to the declining significance of homophobia in
society. Indeed, a colleague recently told me how her 11-year-old daughter is
being pressured at school to identify as bi/pan – what a refreshing change from
the homophobic bullying so many of us older people experienced! It’s great that
young people have this openness to explore, but as I explained to my colleague,
I’ll be intrigued how many people who have had sex with people of the same sex
do end up settling on an identity as “not-heterosexual”. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>Over-representation</b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The other issue with the three per cent I think needs to be
discussed among the LGBT+ community is over-representation – where do LGB
people make up more than three per cent of a group and is this ok? This came to
my mind during the period that of the five political parties who had
representatives in the Scottish Parliament, three out of the six leaders (or
convenors) were openly LGB. This was celebrated, and incredibly rightly so.
Even a decade ago, a politician would remain closeted for fear of the
reputational damage it may do, so that we had so many openly LGB leaders was
absolutely fantastic.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">However, I think questions need to asked about this level of
over-representation. Not necessarily to challenge, and end in a conclusion of
“this is wrong”, but to understand what drives it, do we need to ask what barriers
heterosexual people (particularly women) might face in getting to similar
positions of power and responsibility. I would also be interested if this
over-representation existed at other levels as well in terms of political-party
staffers and other roles (I suspect it does). The question then might be what
attracts LGB people to such roles? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">If we accept, from political theory, that we need groups
engaged in political processes to ensure policy reflects their needs and views,
then perhaps we do need to question that it is good that LGB people are
over-represented in particular roles? As with any example of
over-representation, this also means that LGB people are under-represented
elsewhere. </span></div>
<br />Dr Peter Matthewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06308785385644187726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647966782809031279.post-14049348223654992892018-10-25T08:42:00.000+01:002019-01-30T11:58:43.212+00:00What do we know about LGBT+ homelessness<br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Not a lot, is the answer. We know a little bit more thanks
to a project I’ve been leading on that finished last year and that is now being
published in academic journals. You can read my blog posts about the project as
it ran on here – it led me to quite a discovery of my own sexual identity.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Anyway, the first paper from the project is now out in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">International Journal of Housing Policy</i>
and, if I say so myself, it has an ABSOLUTELY CRACKING title: <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19491247.2018.1519341">Lesbian,
gay, bisexual, transgender and queer experiences of homelessness and identity:
insecurity and home(o)normativity</a>. Of course, <span class="MsoHyperlink"><a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0165551507086261">this means
it will never be cited</a></span>, but hey-ho. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Blogging about your paper is supposed to increase its
citations, although with my “Pink Pound in the Gaybourhood” paper it helped it
garner one citation after three years. So, here is my blog summary of the
paper.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In writing-up this project, I’m drawing on my positionality
as a public policy and housing scholar who has recently branched out into
research issues around sexual and gender identity. The mainstream literature in
public policy and housing is staggeringly silent on issues of sexual and gender
identity. Through this research I discovered the rich work in disciplines like
human geography (queer geographies); sociology and cultural studies. In writing
up the research I therefore wanted to do an activist project into public policy
and housing research by bringing the lives of non-heterosexuals, and how we
understand them from varying theoretical perspectives, into
heteronormative/heterosexist disciplines. It’s, therefore, reasonably good
public policy scholarship, and pretty shoddy queer studies scholarship, but it
is trying to bring the literatures together.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In the case of homelessness among LGBT+ populations the
literature is, let’s say, difficult. There’s some dated stuff that comes from
an era of less socially liberal attitudes that suggests that it is caused by
family rejection. But even a quite old study by Prendergast et.al. questions
this simplicity. There’s also the “pop” social science of things like the “a
quarter of all young homeless people are LGBT” which I rail against for their
lack of evidential basis. I also get annoyed at that stat, and it’s
presentation, because of the simplistic way in which it is assumed sexual or
gender identity is a variable in homeless; i.e. it is a direct cause.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">There’s also US and North American research. However, this
is of limited applicability. Firstly, a lot of it is written from a public
health/social work perspective so it is mainly focused on the risks of harm to
health caused by rough sleeping, rather than detailed exposition of causes,
experiences and routes out of homelessness. Secondly, the situation in the UK
regarding homelessness and rough sleeping, although bad, is no way near as
horrific as it is in the US. Particularly in Scotland, a lot of the people
captured by US research would have a right to housing which would reduce their
risks. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In terms of the homelessness literature, I was pointed
towards the work of Carol McNaughton-Nicholls. She used the concepts of
“edgework” and “thin rationality” to explore the agency of the participants in
her research on homelessness in Glasgow. Thin rationality especially, really
resonated through our data – how these LGBT people had to make difficult
decisions at points of their housing pathways that resulted in them
experiencing homelessness and then experiencing a feeling of being-at-home.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And I use the term being-at-home on purpose here (it’s not
in the paper, but this is the argument we make). This is because, what we
actually uncovered was not that sexual or gender identity was a direct cause of
homelessness – indeed many of our participants would have experienced
homelessness whatever their sexual or gender identity – but that sexual and
gender identity was wrapped up in experiences of homelessness in complex ways.
Importantly, it seemed that for our participants, being-at-home (as opposed to
just being housed) was associated with a deeper sense of security in their own
identity as queer people. This meant that being-at-home could be felt at stages
of their housing pathway where, in legal terms, they would technically be
homeless or at least inappropriately housed. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Thus the paper begins to “queer” the homelessness/housed
binary to the extent that I have a fun opening conversation gambit now of “I
don’t actually think homelessness exists”. This is a theoretical route I want
to explore further – <span class="MsoHyperlink"><a href="https://www4.shu.ac.uk/research/cresr/staff/dr-lindsey-mccarthy">Dr
Lindsey McCarthy’s</a></span> recent paper in <span class="MsoHyperlink"><a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02673037.2017.1408780">Housing
Studies</a></span> was interesting in this regard. I am reassured that two
recent pieces of doctoral research on the topic of LGBT+ homelessness by Carin
Tunaker who was at Kent, and <span class="MsoHyperlink"><a href="https://www.ncl.ac.uk/gps/geography/postgrad/students/studentprofiles/philipmullen.html">Philip
Mullen</a></span> at Newcastle, found similar results. And I cannot thank both
of them enough for their time in sending me stuff to read and talking to me
about their research (which is a lot better than mine!). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">This finding also led me to my policy recommendations –
which are that homelessness service providers need to be less reticent about
opening-up conversations with young people about their sexual and gender
identity. I was quite shocked about how worried people were about doing this;
yes straight people, it is difficult to talk about your sexuality, but us gays have to do it all the bloody time, thanks, because we live in a
heteronormative world. Anyway, it is only by opening-up such conversations that
the complexities can be understood. I would add, that in my opinion based on
this research, that it is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">mainstream </i>services
that should be doing this for two reasons. Firstly, practically because
arithmetically, in a country as small as Scotland, with a population group that
is three per cent of the whole population, it is going to be difficult to
deliver specialist services for LGBT+ across a wide area. Secondly, and
normatively, be because mainstream homelessness services <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">should be</i> welcoming, supportive and tailored to all people, no
matter who they are.</span></div>
Dr Peter Matthewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06308785385644187726noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647966782809031279.post-24026974784078021742018-06-15T15:50:00.005+01:002018-06-15T15:50:40.344+01:00Is public administration and public policy education in Scotland threatened?<br />
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I recently learnt from a
colleague that the Master of Public Administration programme at Queen Margaret
University in Edinburgh is threatened with closure. This leaves Scotland with
one MPA and three postgraduate programmes in public policy. Therefore the
closure of this programme brings into question the entire existence of public
administration as a scholarly subject in our country. Yet in practice public
administration is booming – there is more that we need skilled public servants
to deliver: the Scottish Parliament is gaining more powers; Scottish
communities are being asked to take a greater role in the design and delivery
of public services; and the demand on our public services has never been
greater. Yet many public service organisations, such as community councils,
charities and local authorities do not have (individually) the budgets to support
Masters level professional development.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background: white; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
<br /></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In other parts of the UK public administration scholarship is seen
as vital to the economy and to civic society and so is financially supported by
Government’s, For example, the Northern Ireland Executive fund civil servants
to complete the first level of the <a href="https://www.ulster.ac.uk/courses/201819/public-administration-15672" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;" target="_blank"><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0cm; padding: 0cm;">MPA at Ulster University</span></a>; the Welsh Government have
funded an ‘<a href="http://academiwales.gov.wales/pages/public-service-graduates-graddedigion-gwasanaeth-cyhoeddus" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;" target="_blank"><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0cm; padding: 0cm;">All Wales Public Services Graduate Programme</span></a>‘ with
University of South Wales and the <a href="https://www.wcpp.org.uk/about/" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;" target="_blank"><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0cm; padding: 0cm;">Welsh Centre for Public Policy</span></a> at Cardiff
University; and in England there are major developments taking place at many
universities including Manchester Metropolitan University, Northumbria
University, Nottingham Trent University, University of Birmingham and
University of Exeter.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background: white; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background: white; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Scotland risks being perceived in this context as being hostile to
public administration research and teaching. This runs counter to the ambitions
of the <a href="http://www.gov.scot/Topics/archive/reviews/publicservicescommission" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;" target="_blank"><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0cm; padding: 0cm;">Christie Commission</span></a>, to the ethos of our Scottish
Government and to the nature of the <a href="https://iancelliott.co.uk/2018/02/05/the-scottish-approach-to-public-services/" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;" target="_blank"><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0cm; padding: 0cm;">Scottish Approach to public services</span></a>. Yet currently we
face the very real prospect that public administration and public policy
scholarship becomes restricted to the rest of the UK. We can only hope that our
elected representatives will take notice and act soon before this becomes the
case.</span></span></div>
Dr Peter Matthewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06308785385644187726noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647966782809031279.post-88570986142213218562018-05-11T15:20:00.000+01:002018-05-11T15:20:20.831+01:00My Big Idea by Peter Matthews aged 35-and-three-quarters <br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I’ve been in marking hell since the end of the period of
strike action which I’ve just emerged from. I can’t read anything without
correcting the grammar.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Anyway, during the strike, among all the amazing USS Strikes
Tweets I saw one from the Times Higher about research that had shown that
European universities spend more on getting European Research Council funding
than they receive in grants awarded. This led to the usual moaning about the
ridiculousness of the situation, and also the suggestion that grants should be
replaced by a <a href="https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/universal-basic-income-better-option-research-grants">research
basic income</a>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">This got me thinking more about an idea I’ve had which I’ve
discussed with a few people now and I now have time to tell the entire world
about…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">To start with, why do we have research grants? Basically
they emerged (as I understand it) as there was an awareness that some research
required levels of investment in people and infrastructure that were beyond the
capacity of all but the largest universities. Over time, in the UK, as the
other elements of state funding to universities have been reduced, they now
have to account for the vast amount of research funding for universities. There
are two problems (I see) with replacing grants with a fixed sum to each
researcher. Firstly, is the ability to fund large-scale research particularly
that which requires investment in non-staff capital resources. Secondly, it
adds an odd perverse incentive for universities to just keep appointing staff
even though they might struggle to cover the rest of their salary with teaching
income, as you know you’ll get some money for the post. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">This leaves us with a distributional problem – the pot of
money to distribute for grants must always be limited. As a result complex
mechanisms of measuring the quality of proposals to target funding at those
which academic peers believe will be most important, have grown over time. At
the same time demand for research income has grown as more researchers want to
do more research; as the funding landscape for HEIs has changed; and as
pressure is put on staff through HEI’s expansive strategies to bid for more
funding. As a result, success rates for UK research council grants are now
hovering around the 10% mark.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">There are obvious massive sunk costs here. I’ve heard quite
a number of people who have had “outstanding” scores across the board on
research proposals which have not been funded because there’s just not enough
money. The system also has massive in-built biases. At the most basic level,
grants beget grants – as this <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/115/19/4887">recent
paper shows</a>. More problematic are the massive gender and race biases in who
gets funded – what <a href="https://www.uts.edu.au/staff/deb.verhoeven">Deb Verhoeven</a>
hilariously calls the “<a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2017-11-24/australian-research-has-a-daversity-problem/9178786">Daversity</a>”
problem. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">So, what’s my big idea? A lottery. Or actually something a
bit like Premium Bonds. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">How it would work is when a research-active member of staff
joined a UK university you would be given a unique identifier – your research
premium bond number. Every year there would be a draw for “winners”. If your
number was called out you would then get £1 million to spend on research over
the next few years. Within six months you would have to submit a short proposal
as to what you will spend the money on. You would have to report every year on
your progress and at the end of five years you would have to return any unused
funds. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">You could spend the money as you can spend research council
grants now – employ staff, buy-out your own time, buy equipment, and share it
between institutions. So, if you didn’t win, but your colleague who you had
been working with on a research idea did win, you could work together using
their winnings. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The advantages of a lottery for me are:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">You remove most of the sunk costs in unsuccessful bids.
There would be a shifting of resources to actually supporting good quality
research to be developed and go ahead, and good reporting so the outcomes can
be adequately captured and disseminated.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I think you would actually get a lot more innovative
research funded. I imagine there’s researchers in UK HEIs who never have the
time to even think about what they might do with £1 million of research money,
but if they got it would probably do something really quite exciting. You would
probably end up with a lovely mix of utter blue-skies, ivory-tower research and
some really applied stuff from all kinds of disciplines. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It would reduce the inherent biases in a system of
quality-assessed research applications. I don’t know what the research councils’
annual budget is – I’m guessing billions – divided by a million will mean
enough prizes that all researchers would be equally likely to win. Also,
institutions, and academic disciplines, would be equally likely to win, no
matter what their level of research infrastructure. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Given the above, I reckon everyone would win at least once
in their career and have a chance to do some amazing research. You might even
win twice. It would be up to the random number generator.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">You might say that people might just waste the money. This
would be a small risk I reckon. I think the need to submit a research proposal and
annual updates would negate this. Some of the current sunk costs in developing and assessing applications would have to be shifted to post-award audit. I also think if you were not a very good
researcher you would also have trouble spending £1 million over five years and
you would end up giving a lot of it back. Also, I don’t think you can say that
our current system ensures that poor quality research doesn’t get funded – it just
has well written research proposals to support it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I think there would have to be a residual pot for the
absolutely massive research projects (the big STEM infrastructure investments;
humanities investments in new collections; social science longitudinal surveys
etc.) and you would need a competitive funding system for that, but it would be
a small part of the overall budget. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">So, that’s my big idea. UKRI – hit me up.</span></div>
Dr Peter Matthewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06308785385644187726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647966782809031279.post-42088361192209160472018-02-22T09:22:00.001+00:002018-02-22T09:22:23.301+00:00What it means to be on strike<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Members of UCU are embarking on a substantial
period of strike action with some universities over proposed cuts to our
pensions. Oddly enough, as a union member at a participating branch, I’m not on
strike as it is our reading week, so we start next week.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As a union member and activist, I’m not actually that left
wing – I hold some views that a socialist would wince at. But one thing I do
hold as very important is strike action and solidarity with strike action. This is partly because there’s a long
history of trade union activism in my family. So I know the number one rule is,
even if you disagree with a strike, you do not cross a picket line. It’s about
solidarity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It’s also because as a lefty, I recognise that the only
right we have as wage-slaves, is the right to withdraw our labour. In the
history of the labour movement, all striking workers made the bargain that
they will lose out less than the boss – that the loss in wages will be less
than the loss of profits to the boss. This is especially effective when
everyone engages in this level of disruption. The equivalent in a public
service is to cause as much disruption to service provision that bosses pay
attention.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">One thing that especially angers me when academics go on
strike is how bad we are it. I notice this particularly among academics who
profess to be “radical” and then spend the strike action tweeting about how
much reading and writing they’re doing. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">So here goes my outline of what it means to be on strike:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Academic reading while on strike means you are doing
academic labour, have crossed a picket line and are a strike breaker.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Academic writing on strike means you are doing academic
labour, have crossed a picket line and are a strike breaker.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Preparing that grant application on strike means you are
doing academic labour, have crossed a picket line and are a strike breaker.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Ploughing through your inbox to clear it while on strike
means you are doing academic labour, have crossed a picket line and are a strike
breaker.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Preparing slides for a talk while on strike means you are
doing academic labour, have crossed a picket line and are a strike breaker.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Preparing teaching while on strike means you are doing
academic labour, have crossed a picket line and are a strike breaker.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The sole point of strike action is to cause disruption, not
just to leave the campus ghostly empty while you work from home. Come on, if
you had the chance, you’d work from home anyway. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Now the argument against these, particularly around reading
and writing, I hear is that “it will damage my career”. This really smacks of
the over-individualisation of academic labour that we really should be railing
against in our union activism. Let’s get this straight – YOUR career success
benefits YOUR employer. If you get a Chair through writing a paper during the
strike period, then that’s because you’ve met the performance targets set by
your employer, which benefit it in terms of REF submission and prestige, so the
VC gets paid more. If you write that successful grant application, then it
brings in income to your employer, and your Pro-VC research gets a nice bonus
at the end of the year. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The detriment to your career is the sacrifice you are making
in solidarity with your fellow workers to the collective benefit to us all. And
let’s consider what that sacrifice might look like. In a former job we had a
period of rolling strikes about terms and conditions. A colleague at the time
worked part time and the strikes were always on days they were supposed to be
at work. They basically didn’t get paid for a month. They had a young child, a
mortgage, and their partner worked part time. They really struggled. But they
gritted their teeth and did not cross the picket line. They did this because
their father was a miner who was on strike for a year during the miner’s
strike. That’s what sacrifice for solidarity looks like.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">So, please, before you even think of doing any academic
labour during the strike, think of solidarity with your fellow workers. We need
this dispute to be successful. The cuts to pensions are truly staggering. We
need to cause as much disruption as possible. Don’t be a strike breaker. Don’t
cross a picket, even working at home.</span></div>
Dr Peter Matthewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06308785385644187726noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647966782809031279.post-27811806543317393822018-02-03T14:58:00.002+00:002018-02-03T14:58:58.523+00:00Issues with The Conversation<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">This morning I was reading a piece on the website <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk">The Conversation</a>. As I got to the
bottom, I noticed a bar asking for donations to fund “fact-based journalism”. I
was a little taken aback by this, as I’ll explain why, so I tweeted about it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<div dir="ltr" lang="en">
I can't believe the Conversation have this at the bottom of their pages! It's basically a site for gobby academic men to explain why their opinions are right. I have read so many things on it that are factually wrong and based on ideology dressed up as intellect. <a href="https://t.co/KdIv1Ztugr">pic.twitter.com/KdIv1Ztugr</a></div>
— Peter Matthews (@urbaneprofessor) <a href="https://twitter.com/urbaneprofessor/status/959737049963286528?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 3, 2018</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I was struck that it really hit a nerve with a lot of my
fellow academics.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">For those of you who don’t know, The Conversation is a
website, funded by a <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/partners">large
number of universities and higher education organisations</a>, to publicise
academic research. When you write for it, you work with an editor to get the
angle right. When you input your text into the website it has an “intelligibility”
gizmo that has to be “amber” so your piece is readable. The also commission
pieces; and if your institution is a partner then they come around to do
communications training.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I have written for The Conversation in the past – <i><a href="https://theconversation.com/creating-mixed-communities-means-starting-at-the-top-so-lets-bulldoze-belgravia-28223">Bulldoze
Belgravia</a></i> and another piece on urban design. This was in the early days
of the site when what it seemed to be aiming for was academic input into
current affairs issues (what do we actually know about this issue?) and also
for academic takes on other societal issues – what I produced. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">What I wrote was ideological – it comes from my belief that
state action should maximise equality between people. From that belief I then
set out a fairly straightforward, logical critique of mixed communities
policies that seek to diversify tenure in deprived neighbourhoods – that they’ll
never work because we need to consider tenure diversification in <i>all </i>neighbourhoods. It’s a fairly simple
argument in urban studies you could work out yourself with some coloured tiles.
The ideological tinge of the argument got me vilified below the line when <i>The Guardian</i> reblogged the piece and a
reader referred to me as an “envy-driven” and “masquerading as an academic”. I
was quite proud. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">However, I now wouldn’t write for The Conversation, and I’ll
explain why.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><b><i>Editorialising<o:p></o:p></i></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">This is what got me about the “fact-checking” ask. Far too
often I have read things in The Conversation that are factually wrong. This is
a wider ethical issue for me, which academics need to be more reflexive on. As a
social scientist, I know “objectivity” is a problematic concept, and I can give
you a cracking post-structuralist denunciation of “the truth” if I want to, but
in my opinion, in the public domain, academics have a duty to be absolutely
clear on whether what they say is their ideological opinion, or is based on
their research.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">To give an example. Prior to my doctoral research, I thought
that the state was generally a Good Thing, and if not necessarily Good, it was
at least democratic and reasonably neutral. It should be criticised when it
gets things wrong; but with this <i>ideological
</i>position I would have said I was in favour of nationalising a lot of
services that were previously own by the state, such as the railways. During my
research career, I’ve realised that the state can actually be really bloody
awful at delivering services, can be grossly undemocratic, and other ownership
models, such as community ownership and cooperatives, can deliver the aims of
social justice and a pluralistic democracy that I believe is right. When I discuss this in public forums, I try to ensure that I am clear on what is my opinion, and what is based on my research. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Now, why am I describing this? Because, a while back I read
this piece in The Conversation: <a href="https://theconversation.com/nationalising-britains-railways-is-the-only-way-to-fix-chronic-problems-heres-why-88591">Nationalising
Britain’s Railways is the Only Way to Fix Chronic Problems</a>. I’m a bit train
nerd, so much so that I know a lot of the way British Rail was run was bloody
awful – I’d love to do a PhD on The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rail_transport_in_Great_Britain_1948%E2%80%931994#The_Modernisation_Plan">Modernisation
Plan</a> of 1955 which lumbered the network with brand new infrastructure
designed for the 1930s and a range of new diesel locomotives of variable
quality. So I clicked on the link thinking I’d get a thoughtful piece on the
pros and cons of private ownership versus state ownership. What I actually read
was pretty poor editorialising with factual inaccuracies. The third paragraph I
thought was particularly awful. It reels off a list of the ways the private
railways companies are worse than British Rail, with an impressive set of links
to back it up. I bothered to click on the links. What they actually point to is
a load of analysis and statistics that start in 1995, when the railways were
privatised, and then show how on these indicators performance has deteriorated.
None of them compare their performance to that of British Rail. The entire
paragraph was making a false statement. One example of this inaccuracy – a book
I got last Christmas on British Rail design had a load of old train tickets
printed on the inside. Quite a few of these were “regulated fares” – season tickets
and peak-time returns. I popped a few of the post-decimal prices into an RPI
inflator to find out what the price would be today. When I then checked the
same ticket today, the price was virtually the same. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">This is just one example of the sort of editorial writing
that The Conversation seems to increasingly publish, where respect for the
truth is subsumed to the ideological opinion of the author. Quite a few of the
replies to my tweet had similar experiences. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">To get all Habermasian on you – Habermas argues we assess truth
claims on three bases: their accuracy; whether we trust the speaker; and
whether they fit into existing norms. Academia is, arguably, the domain of
third criteria, where we debate the existing norms and paradigms of knowledge.
But in wider society, the second criteria is where we, as academics are
privileged and we should be much more reflexive of that, and be absolutely
clear when what we are describing is based on a disputed norm. In this case, there is a
broad range of scholarship on privatisation. Some of this is very right wing
and says all state intervention is distorting markets; some is very left wing
and asserts that capitalism as a system of ownership is wrong. There is also a
chunk of empirical work in the middle that uses a range of indicators and
outcomes to make judgements as to whether specific cases of privatisation were
good or bad. I would expect something like The Conversation to reflect this
diversity and complexity in the scholarship in its published material. If you
want this sort of academic reflection on railway privatisation, I personally
thought <a href="https://theconversation.com/britains-railways-were-nationalised-70-years-ago-lets-not-do-it-again-89545">this
was a better much better piece</a>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><b><i>The crisis in journalism<o:p></o:p></i></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">My other issue with The Conversation is I think it’s a
problematic intervention in a market – that for news journalism – that is in
dire straits. The fact that newspapers like The Daily Hate Mail and The Scum
are now seeing falling sales, falling revenues and falling profits really shows
what a state the market is in. You might hate their content, but for decades
these two newspapers were journalistic powerhouses, selling thousands of copies
and earning millions through advertising revenue. One only has to look at
MailOnline – BuzzFeed before BuzzFeed existing – and see how different it is to
its paper version to understand the way things are going.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">With falling revenues, and readership driven through clickbait
headlines to get someone to hover on your website long enough to kick-in an
advertising fee, news is in crisis. News organisations can no longer afford to
pay a lot of staff to cover the sort of things that an academic might input
into – social and policy commentary for example; or science stories. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">You might argue that The Conversation is therefore filling a
gap that needs filled – it’s allowing academics to input into news debates with
“facts”. But I don’t think it does do that because it falls into the same
editorial traps of clickbait and sensationalism that mainstream news
organisations use which distorts the news. And, as discussed, problematically
they do this with authors who are trusted in society. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In an industry that is now driven by journalists maintaining
their jobs through getting clicks, I would actually suggest that by providing
free content, The Conversation is putting journalists out of work and is actually
distorting the market. It is making the crisis in news journalism worse. Because
of its reliance on income from partner institutions that are higher education
bodies, The Conversation is state-funded news. Directly, it gets its funding
from organisations that are funded directly (through grants) and indirectly
(through student loans) by the government. It is also funded indirectly by the
government as its writers (us academics) write for free for it and have our
overheads covered by our state-funded organisations. Because of this, I believe
it should be far more closely scrutinised than it is. When The Conversation
gets things wrong, it should be <i>more </i>of
a scandal than when the BBC gets things wrong. And, I’m sorry, but in a lot of
the material it publishes, I do not see The Conversation meeting a high bar of
accuracy and impartiality that we should expect. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The real risk for this is that, in the context we live in of
“fake news”, distortions of the truth, and news organisations financially
unable to do their job, that The Conversation could make discourse in society
worse, not better. If it continues to publish editorialising statements by non-reflexive
academics, then the public have every right to not “trust the experts”.</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> </span></div>
Dr Peter Matthewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06308785385644187726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647966782809031279.post-21728752780963655992018-01-24T11:48:00.001+00:002018-01-24T11:48:35.901+00:00Ursula K LeGuin<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I woke up this morning to the incredibly sad news that the
science fiction writer Ursula K LeGuin has died. I thought I’d like to do a
blog post about how important she was for me, but didn’t know if I’d have time.
However, a storm has wreaked havoc on central Scotland’s railways, so I’m using
the lengthy delay I’m experiencing to pen some thoughts.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I wasn’t much of a sci-fi reader under I started reading
LeGuin’s work. Not long after I first met my husband, he made me watch a very
good BBC2 documentary about her work. He reads loads of sci-fi and fantasy, or
varying quality, and is also a massive fan of LeGuin’s work. This spent some
time discussing <i>The Left Hand of Darkness</i>.
I was fascinated by the themes it picked up and my husband encouraged me to
read it. Not being a regular reader of sci-fi at that point I did find it hard
work – the funny names that my brain couldn’t work out how to pronounce to
itself; the descriptions of alien worlds. I’ve since realised, if you’re not
regular sci-fi reader that this is a barrier you have to overcome (I’ve
currently a third of the way through Iain M. Banks’ <i>Excession</i> and am just about understanding it now). Once I’d
finished it, I knew it was a good book, but I wasn’t overawed by it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A little while later, it was during the write-up of my PhD
thesis, I then read <i>The Dispossessed</i>.
This story of lives in anarcho-syndicalism and rampant capitalism really
resonated with me. In my thesis I was grappling with how to write about
regeneration policy that was more than just going “oooh, it’s bad and
neo-liberal” and also write in an ethnographic way. It was in <i>The Dispossessed </i>that LeGuin’s background
in anthropology (her parents were anthropologists) really shone through for me.
She deftly used the otherness created by the genre of sci-fi to bring into
sharp relief the problems, and benefits, of both the capitalist planet and its
revolutionary anarcho-syndicalist moon. This helped me grapple with the fact my
policy ethnography had to reveal the difficult ethical and moral decisions all
actors in a policy process were making and try and draw out a compromise of “what’s
the best thing to do in the situation we find ourselves in” – driving be
towards Habermas’ pragmatics that still frame a lot of my thinking in policy
studies. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I then delved into <i>The
Lathe of Heaven</i> just as I was finishing up my thesis. This was brilliant
for me then – this is what my policy-makers were trying to do! The utopianism
of both social democratic policy and managerialism was trying to create a perfect
world from their dreams without thinking of the consequences. The best bit for
me was when the scientist got rid of races to get rid of racism and the world
then became incredibly dull. For me, at this time, this really spoke to
policies that were trying to normalise all neighbourhoods rather than accepting
difference between deprived and affluent neighbourhoods and working within that
frame. It also helped me further get to grips with what good ethnography
(particularly policy ethnography) is trying to do – to reveal the absurdities
in the taken-for-granted, such as the way in which people act within a “partnership”
meeting, compared to the differing ways in which partnership was understood by
the people round the table, a point I elaborate in <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03003930.2013.859141">this
paper</a>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Over the years I worked my way through virtually all her
books, including the dodgy fourth book in the <i>Earthsea </i>trilogy. She is one of the few authors I have re-read. I
read both <i>The Left Hand of Darkness </i>and
<i>The Dispossessed </i>within the last
eighteen months. Funnily enough, my views from my previous readings were
reversed – I found the dichotomy in <i>The
Dispossessed </i>quite clunky, and the exploration of gender and binary
divisions in <i>The Left Hand of Darkness </i>(plus
the drama of the escape) utterly enthralling. I think this was because I am now
much more attuned to issues of gender. Re-reading them also reminded me of my
dream from when I first started reading her books – to run a postgraduate
module on The Policy Analysis of Ursula K LeGuin.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I also think LeGuin, along with J.G Ballard (read <i>Vermillion Sands</i>), was one of the best
short-story writers I’d read. Her wonderful short collection <i>Changing Planes</i> is extremely witty, and
whenever I find myself spending a little too much time in an airport departure
lounge I think of its central conceit with a wry smile, and a wish that I could
change planes! <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">So, I am very upset that LeGuin has died – as a friend
commented, 88 seems very young these days. But I am so glad her writing could
be part of my life. Her work opened up the world of sci-fi to me, revealing
what the best sci-fi, the best ethnography, and the best policy analysis do –
make you look at the world askance.</span></div>
Dr Peter Matthewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06308785385644187726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647966782809031279.post-90259750604017389152018-01-05T15:44:00.003+00:002018-01-05T15:45:46.419+00:00This blog post is not about Toby Young<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Academic twitter in the UK got very angry on New Years Day. <i>The Guardian</i> broke the story, just after
midnight, that Toby Young had been appointed to the Board of the new Office for
Students, the HE regulator in England. People were very angry indeed, and quite
rightly so, and a lot of digital ink has been spilled. My main thought was that
the graun had rather landed on a good way of driving traffic to their website
on a dull Bank Holiday Monday.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">This might seem a bit of a snarky thought – TY’s appointment
is a bad decision – but it does also reflect that, outside of academia, I can’t
imagine anyone really gives a shit who has been appointed to the Board of the OfS.
Or even that the OfS has replaced the regulatory role of HEFCE and the Privy
Council. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I landed on this thought after repeated conversations I had
over the Christmas break with non-academic family and friends which started
with “so when are you back at work?” and occasionally the blunt “so when are
the students back?”. In answer to the first, it was “the 3rd January, and semester
starts on the 15th"; the answer to the second was the reverse of that. Having
been a lecturer seven years now, I’m getting used to patiently answering this question.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In polite conversation I sometimes almost hate being asked
what I do – I usually just say I work at the University of Stirling. I think
because of the middle-class circles I am in, this then leads onto this
conversation: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">“What do you do?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">“I’m a Senior Lecturer in Social Policy.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">“What’s social policy?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">“That’s a good question, don’t ask me!”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">“What do you teach?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">(precis of syllabus of second year module, while hoping the
conversation ends) etc. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Sometimes the conversation will drift onto my research. Then
I’m torn between pinning the poor soul in the corner while I run through my elevator
pitch for my next project, or just summarising it as “I’m interested in why we
have poor neighbourhoods and rich neighbourhoods”. I can easily end up having to
summarise how research funding in the UK works. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I can see why academics socialise with other academics, as
it shortcuts a lot of this.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">My mum was a social worker, and so she used to dread conversations
about her work for similar reasons. For a while she worked in Bradford Council’s
office in Manningham. If someone asked her where she worked she would just
reply “Lumb Lane”. It was then the location of the red light district, so that
would shut down this conversation completely.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The variation on this conversation I find most interesting,
and tread warily around, is when people who are quite professional clearly have
absolutely no idea what being an academic entails. You don’t want to patronise,
but then you don’t want to end up intellectualising either.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Particularly over the summer, academic public reaction to
the common comment “oh, are you off for the summer then” is rage. I used to be
like that. Now I just politely explain that I take annual leave like anyone
else and say where I’m planning on going on holiday.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">To get to the point. I think there is quite a lot of
snobbery in this response that we need to be aware of, and I will get this blog
post back to TY, I promise. Even in these days of mass participation in higher
education, the majority of people in the UK have absolutely no experience of
higher education except for the fact it’s a big building in their city or town.
Not many people will actually no any academics, and even if you have had experience
of HE as an undergraduate or even postgraduate taught student, the chances are
you will have no idea what academics actually <i>do</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">So, when you have no idea about something, what do you do –
you reach for something you do know about: your education to-date. Which has
been at schools. And school teachers do have most of the school holidays as their
holidays. It’s not that big a leap of logic to presume that your teachers when
you are an adult live fairly similar lives to your teachers when you were a
kid. In fact to presume otherwise would be the greater leap of logic. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I told you I’d get this back to TY.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And, I think this is what we’re quite bad at remembering
when things like the TY appointment happen. Yes, it is bad, but it’s
particularly bad for us as academics. For most people in the UK, it is
completely inconsequential. Higher Education is inconsequential for most people
in the UK. This is why Michael Gove can get away with dismissing the “experts”.
This is partly one of the reasons, I would suggest, that we seem to be losing
the battle for our relevance against some pretty ferocious attacks. My concern
has always been that focusing on specific issues like tuition fees, or the
appointment of TY, we miss the bigger picture of “reducing barriers to entry to
new actors in the market”, and reducing the barriers to exit, that are a key
part of these reforms.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">So, if you’re an academic reading this, next time someone
asks you if you’re off for the summer, can I suggest that you smile and
politely explain that you’ll be off on leave and recall that the person asking <i>does not know</i>. Can we ensure that what we
do is comprehensible to a wider audience so that we don’t have to rely on liberal,
middle-class Guardian-readers as our allies? For me, this is what the radical proposition
of coproducing our universities should be about. Being universities in new contexts
with diverse communities.</span></div>
Dr Peter Matthewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06308785385644187726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647966782809031279.post-8314544238816850522017-12-15T11:24:00.000+00:002017-12-15T11:24:15.831+00:00Book Review - The Cement of Civil Society<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A Twitter conversation has just made me realise I never published this book review on here. The proper version is available from the journal <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03003930.2016.1228563">here</a>. In sum - the book was so dull, I literally fell asleep on a train reading it. What the author managed to completely miss was that his analysis helped explain the decline of Labour in Glasgow and the rise of the SNP. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The Cement of Civil
Society: Studying Networks in Localities<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Mario Diani<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015, 244+xxii pp,
£64.99 (hbk)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">ISBN: 9781107100008<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Professor Marco Diani is a world-leading scholar on social
movements. His book <i>The Cement of Civil
Society </i>begins with the widely held proposition that the UK saw an
unprecedented rise in protest activity in the 1990s, with growth in visible
protest activity on the environment, animal rights, poverty, ethnicity and human
rights, and peace. This also included the spread of protest to ‘unusual
suspects’ (p.26). This change was paralleled by the growth of opportunities for
civic groups to be involved in policy-making within the local state, especially
from 1997 onwards. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">By focusing on what is termed the voluntary and community
sector within two UK cities – Glasgow and Bristol – Diani argues that his study
offers particularly novel contributions to the study of local government and
urban governance. However, the text very much emerges from a literature on
social movements from political science and political sociology, a literature
this reviewer is not familiar with. The key innovation is methodological,
driven by theory. In his analysis Diani focuses on relational data – that is
network data – about the voluntary and community sector, not aggregative data,
arguing that: ‘this conceptual and methodological shift leads us to reframe
some basic questions about the features of political activism, participation,
and civil society in contemporary Western liberal democracies.’ (p.1)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The book begins by setting out a three-fold typology of the
voluntary and community sector based on how strong their boundary work is, and
the level of resource exchange they engage in: organizational, social movement and
coalitional type organisations. The two-by-two grid that leads to this analysis
also includes ‘Subcultural/Communitarian’ groups, but these are not a focus of
the rest of the book. The second chapter sets out the methodology and mixed
methods approaches and the case study choice, arguing that Glasgow had been
traditionally dominated by one left-wing party (Labour at this time) and a
history of class-based protest whereas Bristol has been more politically
plural, with a civil society dominated by middle-class groups associated with
new social movements, such as the environment. It should be noted that within
each city, Diani only looks at voluntary and community sector organisations in
one particular neighbourhood. Thus, Diani suggests, we should see substantive
difference between the civil societies if we were to use an aggregative
approach to highlight the novel insights of his relational approach.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Chapters three to eight set out the findings of his
fieldwork, carried out between 2001-2, in a series of tables and short quotes
from the qualitative fieldwork. Chapter three begins the relational analysis by
looking at who organisations in both cities form alliances with and why,
suggesting that they work with groups that are organisationally similar but who
have a higher profile in civic society. Chapter four then conducts a network
analysis of civil society in both areas, looking at resource exchange between
organisations and social ties. This neatly suggested there were three different
networks in both cities, with different levels of resource exchange and
embeddedness. Chapter five succinctly relates the findings of chapter four to
how organisations viewed themselves, finding congruence and shared protest
repertoires among the networks. Chapter six then brings in evidence of
engagement in local events to show a continuity across types of networks,
protest repertoires and the sorts of events groups were involved with, and the
events that link organisations. Chapter seven looks at the centrality of
certain organisations in both cities’ networks, with a surprising finding that
umbrella councils for the voluntary sector in both cases were not very central,
but also attracted different groups in the different cities: coalitional groups
in Glasgow and social movement groups in Bristol.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Chapter 8, on the links to local urban governance is
probably of greatest interest to readers of this journal. However it falls
short on methodological grounds outlined below. The data presented shows that
most organisations had contact with the local authority in some way – which
should not come as a surprise. The extent to which organisations engaged with
public-private partnerships was very high, but this could be down to how they
were defined in survey questions, rather than involvement in formal,
contractual partnerships. The qualitative data echoes the findings of the
broader work on partnerships from this era, with Diana concluding that ‘[e]ach
group’s specific experience with council departments and/or partnerships seemed
very much mediated by intervening factors such as quality of the civil servants
concerned, or the nature of the issues addressed.’ (p.181) A good, and amusing,
example of this was the close ties between peace protest groups and the police
in Glasgow; the former had to rely on the latter to organise their disruptive
protests including providing the police with a handy guide of how many people
they expected to be arrested!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The theoretical and methodological innovations of this book
will be invaluable to scholars of social movements and civil society in an
urban context. As stated above, as a reviewer I am not one of these scholars,
therefore the book has a number of weaknesses for a more general reader.
Firstly, the data is now extremely dated. Writing from the perspective of
Scotland, immense changes have occurred in the 13 years since these data were
collected. The Scottish Socialist Party, who are so central to Diani’s analysis
and went on to win six seats in the Scottish Parliament in the 2003 elections,
are now a spent force in Scottish politics. Most obviously, the class-based
politics focused on Labour has been replaced by an (arguably) class-based
politics focused on the Scottish National Party, who have come to dominate
politics in the west of Scotland. Thus, as studies of the two cities, Diani’s
book is mainly a historical account, albeit fascinating at times because of
this.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">However, the analysis and theorisation offered by Diani does
go some way to explain <i>why</i> such
dramatic changes in political fortunes could occur so rapidly. The relational
approach shows why these voluntary and community sector organisations are the
cement of civil society because of the networks they are in. If a political
party can successfully replace key nodes in these networks through working with
these organisations – as the SNP and latterly the Yes referendum campaign in
Scotland did – then a broader change in political outcomes is likely. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A second issue this reviewer has with the book is subjective
and epistemological. Diani’s work is set within a tradition of quantitative
political science and political sociology with its roots in the “normal”
paradigms of North America. Here, it seems, that if a study does not include a
regression model then it is not adequate as social science. I’m not fully
qualified to comment on the adequacies of the statistical techniques Diani
uses, yet for me when these are supported by the rich accounts of his
participants the mixed methods really come alive. This is even admitted by
Diani when he occasionally introduces a quote as making a point much clearer
than the table of data that preceded it. While this reflects an unresolvable
issue of epistemological difference, it is a shame that some more of the
richness of the qualitative data does not come through in the analysis.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Finally, Diani argues that his relational approach offers
new insights into local government and governance. There is no doubt that it
does. However, as the discussion in the final chapter shows, suggests this is a
product of research design and limitations, rather than intention. The social
movement analysis the books sits in, judging by the bibliography, focuses on
aggregative analyses of social movements at a national or even international
level. As Diani admits in chapter two, the data for a relational analysis at a
city-level would be too complex, let alone a national-level. The use of his
analysis in specific neighbourhoods was thus a choice of convenience.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As such the analysis technique would be useful for people to
replicate to understand the rich linkages between organisations in specific
urban neighbourhoods. It would offer a richness of quantitative data to add
empirical weight to what we already know about urban governance, and changes
over the past 20 years. This type of work would also add to our knowledge the
relationship between governance and social capital (c.f. Putnam). The insights
of the book do not necessarily transform what we already know about the
governance of urban contexts; rather it provides new empirical insights. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This is clear in the final chapter, which as stated draws
lessons from the book for two more contemporary changes – the growth of online
social networking and the wave of revolution that sped through the Middle-East.
That these were national events, and international changes, testifies to the
fact that this book speaks firmly to an international literature on national or
global social movements. The book is therefore best suited to scholars
interested in local government who wish to use its methodology to better
understand the relations of governance. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
Dr Peter Matthewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06308785385644187726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647966782809031279.post-3835519220698231322017-12-15T10:02:00.001+00:002017-12-15T10:02:33.778+00:00Is it a bit shit to be gay in the USA?<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This is a blog post I should’ve written last week and posted
on Monday. Oh well. I’m now wrapping up my small research project on LGBT+
housing and homelessness. I should’ve written this post last week as we
launched the two reports on Monday – one for <a href="http://hdl.handle.net/1893/26234">housing providers</a> and one for <a href="http://hdl.handle.net/1893/26233">homelessness service providers</a>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Our recommendations in both are pretty straight-forward, and
should not come as a surprise to readers of my blog post – service providers should
routinely <a href="http://drpetermatthews.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/are-you-gay.html">ask
service users their sexual and gender identity</a> and get over <a href="http://drpetermatthews.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/what-dont-straight-people-like.html">their
own cringe</a>. In doing so, we would start to get <a href="http://drpetermatthews.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/how-many-lgbt-people-are-homeless-in-uk.html">decent
data</a>, but also begin a conversation with service users that is: “we are
interested if you are LGBT+ because we realise it might matter to you”. One of
the recommendations focusing on homelessness services might seem a bit odd
though: we explicitly state that we don’t think LGBT+ specific provision, such
as hostels or other supported accommodation, is required in the context of the
lives of people who participated in our research in Central Scotland. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A lot of the lobbying for LGBT+ specific provision comes
from two concerns. One is that LGBT+ homelessness is an enormous problem; we
just have not found evidence for this. In fact, we recreated the methodology of
<a href="https://www.akt.org.uk/Handlers/Download.ashx?IDMF=c0f29272-512a-45e8-9f9b-0b76e477baf1">The
Albert Kennedy Trust</a>, and surveyed homelessness services in Scotland. We got
a very low response rate, and some really ropey data. If I were to make an
estimate based on that, I’d say around five per cent of homeless people
identify as LGBT+, compared to three per cent of whole population identifying
as LGBT+. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Second is a presumption that the cause of homelessness in
the case of LGBT+ is family rejection – that is, people come out as LGBT+ and
then their families ask them to leave. We really did not find evidence of
simple causation like this in our data. For example, two of our gender-queer
participants had periods of homelessness because their families were not
accepting of their gender identities, but their families were also emotionally
abusive and this was just the latest example of this, so they had to leave the family
home. In such complex cases, we cannot say for sure, but we could surmise that
they would have ended up homeless because of leaving their abusive family whatever
their gender identity. Similarly, another bisexual participant became homeless
after their relationship with an abusive partner broke down and they started relationships
with people of a different sex. Again, the causes of the homelessness are very
complex here – we cannot say that the person was homeless because they were
bisexual. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Because of these two reasons, we don’t think LGBT+ specific
provision is suitable in a Scottish context. What is needed is better training
among service providers to make the excellent current service provision more inclusive. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Now, to get to the subject of this blog post – I also think
that the drive for LGBT+ services comes from the USA (and to a lesser extent Canada)
and, from what I’ve read among LGB studies, it looks like being LGBT+ in
America is <i>really </i>bad. It really struck
me when I was reading <a href="http://repository.essex.ac.uk/14216/1/5JResGenderStud23.pdf">this paper</a>
that compares UK data to a wider literature review. That paper analyses data
from the UK longitudinal panel study Understanding Society. It demonstrates
that in some categories there is a small negative impact on your life from
being LGBT+ in the UK. But the comparison data Uhrig pulls together from the US
in particular, is far worse. To give one example that really shocked me: data
from the US in 2013 showed that women with same-sex sexual attraction did far
worse in terms of educational outcomes. In the UK, lesbians were three-times
more likely to be educated than their heterosexual counterparts. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What’s going on then? Why do things seem to be worse in the
US? I suspect there’s a lot of methodological things going on here. Firstly,
data on sexual and gender identity is pretty poor everywhere, but it seems to be
quite staggeringly bad in the US. The main source of data used by many
researchers is the US Census, which has allowed same-sex couples to “out” themselves
on their forms for a while and say they are a household. There’s three main
problems with this: it misses single people, and we know LGBT+ people are more
likely to be single; it doesn’t really allow for bisexual people to be recorded
anywhere, and certainly ignores transgender people (but then, so do most
surveys); and finally, it’s a self-selecting sample, from what I can gather,
you don’t have to fill it in if you don’t want to. Whenever you create “prefer
not to answer” categories in questions like this, you end up with that being
your second biggest category after straight. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It seems there are very few population-level surveys which
include LGB, or transgender, questions in the US. This means a lot of the US
research that I’ve come across, for example focusing on homelessness, comes
from a <i>problem </i>perspective and
samples populations with problems, which as people like <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1468794112451038">Prof Mark McCormack
point out</a>, leads you to find particularly troubling findings. To give one
example, in my hunt for the source of that <a href="http://drpetermatthews.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/how-many-lgbt-people-are-homeless-in-uk.html">bloody
25 per cent stat</a> (that a quarter of young homeless people identify as
LGBT+), I discovered the root of one of the more bizarre versions – that a whopping
40 per cent of young homeless people identify as LGBT+ – comes from <a href="https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/research/safe-schools-and-youth/serving-our-youth-july-2012/">this
report</a>. You just have to read the subtitle to work out how they got that
stat: funnily enough a lot of people who identify as LGBT+ use LGBT+ services.
To be fair on the authors of that report, it seems that the stat has got mangled
in translation. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The other methodological issue is the complex intersection
of sexual identity and socio-economic status. I’ve only seen glimmers of this in
what I’ve read, but I suspect middle class people in the UK feel more comfortable
in their sexuality, which might explain why things don’t look too bad in our
data. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">However, I do wonder if there is something qualitatively different
about the experience of LGBT+ in the USA, that it is a more socially conservative
society. It certainly seems that social attitudes are marginally more
conservative, with a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/01/us-survey-shows-dramatic-rise-in-acceptance-of-same-sex-relationships">small
majority of people in the USA in 2014</a> still believing same-sex relationships
were not “not wrong at all”. This compares to the UK, where in the most recent
British Social Attitudes Survey, the vast majority of people think same-sex relationships
are “<a href="http://bsa.natcen.ac.uk/latest-report/british-social-attitudes-34/moral-issues.aspx">not
wrong at all</a>”. More <a href="http://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/">recent
data from the US</a> suggests that they are equally supportive of same-sex
marriage as people in the UK are of same-sex relationships, however I would
caution the conclusion that the US has become very socially liberal, not just
because of the current POTUS, but because I think there’s some qualitatively
different in the socially-sanctioned institution of marriage, and same-sex
relationships more broadly.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As an aside, as <a href="http://drpetermatthews.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/what-dont-straight-people-like.html">I’ve
commented before</a>, I think these questions no longer collect accurate data
due to social desirability bias, and we need to start asking some more, possibly
more explicit questions, to get to the heart of peoples attitudes. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Finally, I think another issue is the lack of a decent welfare
state in the US. For example, in terms of homelessness, one <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14036096.2012.756096">UK scholar</a>
commented that “[t]he sheer cruelty and vindictiveness of the US system,
indeed, is sometimes difficult for Europeans to fathom”. To give one example,
if you were a single, young, gay man in Scotland and your family kicked you
because of your sexual identity, you would be unintentionally homeless, and
your housing authority would have a duty to provide you with housing. I’m sure
it’s not as simple as this, and housing authorities would try and wriggle out
of it – one shocking example I read was of a housing authority in southern
England who said a young man had made himself intentionally homeless because he
chose to come out. But despite these cases, and despite the increases in
homelessness and rough-sleeping in the UK over the past seven years,
homelessness support is <i>much </i>better
in the UK than it is in the US. And this cuts across a wider range of social and
public services. If your welfare state is stronger, then if you come across a bump
in your life, say due to exclusion related to your sexual or gender identity,
then it is going to be easier to get your life back up-and-running again. So, I
wonder if this is why outcomes do not seem to be as bad for LGBT+ people in the
UK compared to the US, and it’s also why we don’t think LGBT+ specific
provision is suitable in the UK. We have good mainstream services, we just have
to make sure they are inclusive and supportive. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
Dr Peter Matthewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06308785385644187726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647966782809031279.post-8624446192498350032017-11-28T13:50:00.000+00:002017-11-28T13:50:12.572+00:00Official stats, and how to publish them - a post with Taylor Swift<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I’ve previously discussed <a href="http://drpetermatthews.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/ferguslie-is-not-most-deprived.html">on here</a> how I found the portrayal of one particular set of government statistics – the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation – problematic. To summarise that argument – reporting, based on government press releases, called certain neighbourhoods “the poorest”, even though IMD does not measure poverty, is a relative measure, and most problematically, this added to the stigma of the neighbourhoods. I covered some of the impact of this in <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19460171.2012.699233">one of the papers I’m most proud of</a>.
So when I was contacted by the statisticians working on SIMD16 to come and have a chat with them about how they could present it in a better way, I leapt at the opportunity. When their report came out I was extremely impressed. You can download it <a href="http://www.gov.scot/Resource/0050/00504809.pdf">here</a> – it’s quite a big PDF. The things I particularly like were: </span><br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The very clear statement of what SIMD measures and how it works, and can be used, on page two </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The case studies that demonstrate that living in a neighbourhood ranked as deprived by SIMD isn’t awful, and that it can help target resources for great things to happen </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The very clear “do not use SIMD for” list on page six </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The fact that nowhere does it say which is the “most” or “least” deprived neighbourhood. </span></li>
</ul>
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The team that did SIMD were nominated for a UK Civil Service Award, which they won!
</span><br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<div dir="ltr" lang="en">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Here’s <a href="https://twitter.com/PermSecScot?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@PermSecScot</a> congratulating member of Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivations team-winners of <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/csawards?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#csawards</a> Use of Evidence award. Her pride is plain to see! <a href="https://t.co/1uYo8ULhiB">pic.twitter.com/1uYo8ULhiB</a></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">— Suzannah Brecknell (@SuzannahCSW) <a href="https://twitter.com/SuzannahCSW/status/933789733771186177?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 23, 2017</a></span></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">
I was incredibly pleased on their behalf, because they really deserve it.
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="height: 0; padding-bottom: 56%; position: relative; width: 100%;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="giphy-embed" frameborder="0" height="100%" src="https://giphy.com/embed/xTiTng24g6V2BCRjDG" style="position: absolute;" width="100%"></iframe></div>
<a href="https://giphy.com/gifs/bbmas-bbmas-2015-xTiTng24g6V2BCRjDG"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">via GIPHY</span></a><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And, they’ve only gone and done it again – not won an award, but produced a report that is <b><i>staggeringly good.
</i></b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="height: 0; padding-bottom: 56%; position: relative; width: 100%;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="giphy-embed" frameborder="0" height="100%" src="https://giphy.com/embed/l0K4c8bZHJzDCmg6Y" style="position: absolute;" width="100%"></iframe></div>
<a href="https://giphy.com/gifs/iheartradio-2015-iheartradio-music-awards-iheartawards-l0K4c8bZHJzDCmg6Y"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">via GIPHY</span></a><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It’s a report on a set of experimental statistics that have used new questions on material deprivation asked in the Scottish Household Survey to create a local poverty measure. Have a look at it <a href="http://www.gov.scot/Resource/0052/00528170.pdf">here</a>. It is soooooo good. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Again, they’ve combined qualitative data with the presentation of the statistics to make the reality of lived experience come to life, but in a non-stigmatising way, for example on page six “Mary” describes how: </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">“My kettle blew up, so I went and got a kettle off my catalogue. Cause I wouldn’t have been able to afford to just go and buy a kettle. And I didn’t want to say to anybody, ‘I can’t afford a kettle.’ Ken, people are coming in for a cup of tea and that, and ‘oh my kettle’s blew up, and I can’t afford another one’” </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">An absolutely brilliant way to describe what material poverty means. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And it gets better. There are bar charts throughout which show a percentage with confidence intervals. Rather than getting bogged down with complex descriptions of confidence intervals and statistical significance, the charts are simply labelled “The bars show measurement uncertainty. Where two bars overlap, there may not be a real difference between the two groups”. I mean!!!!!!
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="height: 0; padding-bottom: 56%; position: relative; width: 100%;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="giphy-embed" frameborder="0" height="100%" src="https://giphy.com/embed/l41m4B6lC28gtyuME" style="position: absolute;" width="100%"></iframe></div>
<a href="https://giphy.com/gifs/bbmas-taylor-swift-l41m4B6lC28gtyuME"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">via GIPHY</span></a><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">AND AND AND <b><i>it gets even better</i></b>. Not only do they have CI’s clearly labelled, they then go onto interpret them for you. Each chart has a very clear description of “What the data says” and “What the data doesn’t say” to ensure that people don’t misunderstand the charts.
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="height: 0; padding-bottom: 56%; position: relative; width: 100%;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="giphy-embed" frameborder="0" height="100%" src="https://giphy.com/embed/1k6cQEDbfSVHi" style="position: absolute;" width="100%"></iframe></div>
<a href="https://giphy.com/gifs/taylor-swift-vevo-1k6cQEDbfSVHi"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">via GIPHY</span></a><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And the data is really interesting. I just wish all official statistics documents were published this well, with this much thought put into their presentation.
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="height: 0; padding-bottom: 140%; position: relative; width: 100%;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="giphy-embed" frameborder="0" height="100%" src="https://giphy.com/embed/u23zXEvNsIbfO" style="position: absolute;" width="100%"></iframe></div>
<a href="https://giphy.com/gifs/u23zXEvNsIbfO"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">via GIPHY</span></a><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">With thanks to the <a href="https://twitter.com/t_s_institute">Taylor Swift Open Data Institute</a>.
</span>Dr Peter Matthewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06308785385644187726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647966782809031279.post-67500138040415683712017-10-13T06:29:00.003+01:002017-10-13T06:29:59.878+01:00Becoming a queer scholar<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A lot of my recent posts have been about my research on the
experiences of LGBT+ people in homelessness services and housing. This post is
about what a revelatory journey this has been for me personally. It’s also a
sort of late coming-out day post.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Some of you may have noticed that my last post – about getting
married – ended up being picked up by <i>The
Times </i>and we became <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-41441611">national
news</a> while in Hiroshima on our honeymoon. The only way I could be more out
than that would probably involve riding a unicorn across the pitch during the
FA cup final wearing nothing but a gold lamé thong and a rainbow feather boa.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I came out to my close friends at school when I was 15 and
was out when I went to university as an undergraduate. That was when I came out
to my parents, when I was 19. So I’ve not been closeted, but like many LGBT+
people I always felt awkward; ashamed even. Earlier in the year I listened to
Archive on 4 by Peter Tatchell about the decriminalisation of male homosexuality.
This included clips from the House of Commons debate about lowering the age of
consent between men. I was 12 when that happened in 1994, so just beginning to
realise my difference. The hatred and bile that was spoken snapped me right
back to the bullying and overwhelming, explicit homophobia of my teenage years.
So it’s very little wonder that I was not necessarily comfortable in my
sexuality. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">So I was definitely not a Queer academic – my identity as a
gay man was not part of my research. In fact, when I did my MSc in urban and
regional planning in 2005/6, Richard Florida’s work on the creative class was
just coming to the fore and my now-husband suggested I might want to do my
dissertation on gay places. This was also a time when Newcastle Council had
actively planned for the “Pink Triangle” to boost economic development. I
rejected this idea.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Why? Well predominantly because I was being quite a bit “post-gay”,
in that Nate Silver “<a href="http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2012/12/19/nate-silver-my-friends-describe-me-as-sexually-gay-but-ethnically-straight/">ethnically
straight</a>”. There was a gay male lifestyle projected to me, through a
particular commercial gay male culture, that I did not (and still do not) feel
a great affinity too. I was never going to be <a href="https://youtu.be/wQyB4-jLoH0">Stuart in <i>Queer as Folk</i></a>. I also thought the world was “post-gay” (how naïve
I was) and that most discrimination against LGBT people was declining – the fight
had been won. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Because of this, my research to date, has been predominantly
heterosexual, and thus (I now know) heterosexist. By doing fairly “mainstream”
research, I was happily advancing my career. My identity did bump into my work
occasionally, such as when I had to <a href="http://drpetermatthews.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/coming-out-in-classroom.html">come
out to my students</a> to point out their own homophobia, but other than that,
it did not matter that much. My journey to ending up getting messy with queer
theory started with <a href="http://drpetermatthews.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/debunking-pink-pound-lgbt-poverty-and.html">a
surprise finding</a> about non-straight people from a project I was doing. Even
dealing with that, working out what it meant, and deciding to publicise, left
me feeling a little uncomfortable. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The other day I was reading Michael Warner’s introduction to
<i>Fear of a Queer Planet</i> (1993) where
he writes: "Queers do a kind of practical social reflection just in
finding ways of being queer. (Alternatively many people invest the better parts
of their lives to avoid such a self-understanding and the social reflection it
would imply.)" The bit in parentheses <i>really
</i>resonated with me – this was what I was doing. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In doing my current research project on LGBT+ housing and
homelessness I’ve had to confront queerness. On the one hand, I knew I had to
engage with lesbian and gay studies, and queer theory, to understand how other
people have understood queer lives. Also, I have had to read transcripts from
people who have experienced horrible things, including homophobic and transphobic
abuse. That was a wake-up call to the amount of work we still have to do to
progress equality, and also drove me on to make sure my research helped make
the lives of LGBT+ people better.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And that introduction to queer theory has been immensely
eye-opening, particularly the concept of heteronormativity – as I suggested
when I <a href="http://drpetermatthews.blogspot.com.au/2017/09/im-getting-gay-marriaged.html">over-analysed
my own nuptials</a>. As ever, with critical theory, as an applied researcher it
does leave me in the position of: it’s great to deconstruct society, but how do
we reconstruct it again? One of the main recommendations from my research – the
routine collection of sexual and gender identity data – is problematic on this
score. It is suggesting the imposition of essentialist criteria, created by a
homophobic world, onto a queer world. However, here I side with <a href="https://www.brighton.ac.uk/staff/professor-kath-browne.aspx">Kath Browne</a>
that it’s better to know so we can do something (especially about things such
as hate crimes) than to not know at all. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">So now, I would say I am a queer scholar. The question which
emerges is how much will this impact on my research going forward? Will I queer
my wider research programme on broader aspects of inequality? Will I do more
research with the LGBT+ community? Will I do simple things like being more out
when I present my research or making sure I use pronoun introductions? I need
answers to these questions because it’s something I accuse <a href="https://soundcloud.com/anucrawford/queery-ing-policy-studies-by-peter-matthews">policy
studies of not doing enough of in my most recent paper</a>! <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">To conclude, I am now definitely out of the closet. And I'm happy to be accused of homonormativity. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
Dr Peter Matthewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06308785385644187726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647966782809031279.post-45107998406898549482017-09-14T14:15:00.004+01:002017-09-14T14:33:56.509+01:00I’m getting gay marriaged<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">If you’re wondering about the title, it’s what me and my
husband-to-be call equal marriage. Yes, I am to be wed this coming Saturday to
my partner of 11 years. It’s all getting a bit hectic and exciting in the
run-up to the Big Day. Rather fortuitously, this momentous occasion in my life
has coincided with me reading a lot of queer theory for my current research on <a href="http://drpetermatthews.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/unsolicited-cock-pics-and-some-wanted.html">LGBTQ</a>
housing and <a href="http://drpetermatthews.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/how-many-lgbt-people-are-homeless-in-uk.html">homelessness</a>.
This literature been a bit of a revelation – I’ve dived into it like a
contestant on <i>Drag Race </i>would dive
into a dressing-up box. Part of why I’m coming to this late in my academic
career is related to the broader theme of this post – in my academic career
to-date I’ve ignored my own queerness focusing on mainstream policy studies
which has helped advance my career. This will be the topic of another post
later.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The crashing together of getting gay marriaged and queer
theory has been interesting and I thought I’d share a couple of insights.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Firstly, </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">HETEROSEXUALS, MARRIAGE IS SO INCREDIBLY FUCKING GENDERED
IT IS UNTRUE AND YOU REALLY NEED TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT THAT. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">My first awareness
of this was when I first announced my engagement at work the Monday after my
partner proposed. I was chairing a meeting and as an ice-breaker I asked people
to share an interesting bit of non-work news when they were introducing myself.
I came last and my news was my engagement (I was actually trying to think of
something else to share; make of that what you will). The women in the room
whooped with joy and immediately followed it up with questions about the
details of the proposal and when the wedding was going to be. This took up a
good five minutes; the men in the meeting looked bored and had clearly mentally
moved onto item five on the agenda. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And this has basically continued ever since. We had a wait a
long time before actual wedding planning got going as we’re members of the
congregation of the Church of St John the Evangelist on Princes Street, part of
the Scottish Episcopal Church. We were waiting for the Synod of the church to
change the Canon Law to allow same-sex marriage, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-40190204">which they did</a> (I
heard the news via Twitter on the train home from work, and cried quite a lot).
As planning got going this gendered divide about wedding discussions continued –
I couldn’t briefly mention it to women without getting the Spanish Inquisition
treatment, whereas men, on the whole, could not give a fuck. I started
mentioning this and it was interesting how heterosexuals found this irritating
too. One women explained how her husband organised her wedding and she actually
got very angry at the number of people who questioned this. Another male friend
explained how they equally shared tasks, and similarly was angry that people
were aghast. In culture, this divide that weddings are women’s work is
recreated in things like <i><a href="http://www.channel4.com/programmes/dont-tell-the-bride">Don’t Tell the
Bride</a></i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I suppose this came as such a shock to me as the discourse
around marriage has changed so much. It’s all about “partnership” and the
inroads of feminism have made it less of an imposition of patriarchal power in
our society. The weddings I’ve attended (oh, so many weddings…) really, I
thought, reflected the input of both people in the couple; I rarely considered
that it was mainly a woman’s work. What my experiences have led me to consider
is that this profound gendering really demonstrates how far the institution of
heterosexual marriage has to go until it becomes something more equal. This
behaviour, for me, demonstrates how still marriage is something women must
aspire to – hence the focus on the “big day” – and it’s something that men must
be subject to – hence their lack of interest. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">This also demonstrates how marriage is one of the everyday
ways in which patriarchal heterosexuality is remade as the norm in our society.
As a young gay man I thought I would never, ever get married, let alone married
in a church (I should add, <a href="http://drpetermatthews.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/im-atheist-who-goes-to-church.html">I’m
still an atheist</a>). A common criticism of equal marriage from queer
activists is it is just another tool of assimilation; it is part of the way LGB
people are become normalised in a neoliberal society that will accept us as
normal consumers, but doesn’t really want to accept our queerness. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Going on this journey to marriage, I have ended up
challenging this, particularly with the insights from Celia Kitzinger’s
fantastic paper <i><a href="https://pure.york.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/speaking-as-a-heterosexual-how-does-sexuality-matter-for-talkininteraction(628fe325-520c-4b39-a127-e2bf2e6fcfb7).html">Speaking
as a heterosexual</a></i>. In this paper Kitzinger describes the everyday ways
in talk that heterosexuality is made, and key among these is through marriage
and the associated pronouns – husband, wife, and the general presumption of an
opposite-gender partner. Indeed, until equal marriage, just ticking the box on
a form to say “married” implied heterosexuality. To be non-heterosexual had to
involve awkwardly correcting people – pointing out incorrect pronouns after you
spoke about your partner was a fairly regular occurrence in my life. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Same-sex marriage upsets this entirely, and therefore,
although I fully recognise where critics of homonormativity are coming from, I
think they underestimate the possible radical change that will come about from
widening the scope of such an incredibly heterosexual institution to us queers.
For a start, it gives us a new vocabulary to play with – husband and wife. It
also, profoundly, means that a wedded couple cannot be assumed to be
opposite-sex. If you notice someone’s wedding ring on their finger, your
thought now must be “what gender is their spouse?”. My research on housing has
really opened my eyes as to how much the heterosexual family unit is subtly
normalised in all manner of simple interactions. This will be eroded. Ironically,
the campaigners against equal marriage are right – it might destroy, or weaken
marriage; but a particular form of heterosexual marriage. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I think I note this radical possibility more intensely than
other LGB people might because of the religious aspect to our marriage. I’ve
had a lot of time to think about this. Also my husband-to-be was heavily
involved in the SEC’s “Cascade Conversation” about equal marriage and also gave
an impassioned speech about same-sex marriage at the Synod back in June (people
said afterwards what a big impact it seemed to have on the audience). So it’s something that’s been
considered quite a lot indeed. The opening liturgy of our ceremony on Saturday
emphasises how the love in our marriage reflects and reinforces the love of God
and the love of Jesus when he died for us on the cross. By getting married in
church, this is stating that this love is as bountiful for everyone equally; as
the priest presiding at the Cathedral in Vancouver on Pride Day said: God loves
us in all the ways he made us fantastically different. This liturgy could not
be more radically different from the old “honour and obey” liturgy of days of
yore that was saying God made man to dominate woman. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">So I’m hopeful of equal marriage. I hope it will change
society and make heterosexuality be questioned a bit more as the norm, and
allow people to be more easily proud of their queerness in an everyday way. I’m
also hopeful for our own marriage – from what I know we’ve got good odds. The
same-sex divorce rate is the same as it is for opposite-sex couples (c. 45%,
yes, we’re as bad at this as you straights are) but we’ve made it past the
average length of the failed marriage – 10 years – already. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And trust me, as an academic, to over-intellectualise my own
sodding wedding day.</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> </span></div>
Dr Peter Matthewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06308785385644187726noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647966782809031279.post-13093364591925592382017-08-18T12:02:00.002+01:002017-08-18T12:44:22.746+01:00Unsolicited cock pics and some wanted attention<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I’m currently doing a research project on LGBT+ experiences
of homelessness and living in the most deprived neighbourhoods in Scotland –
more details here. It has been funded by the British Academy and is quite
small. I was aiming for 30 participants in total. I have found it really
difficult to find participants, particularly young homeless people. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I did expect this to be the case – I’m working with a subset
of a small(ish) population. Estimates are that a quarter of young people
between 16-25 are homeless at some point, by the broadest definition (i.e.
falling out with their parents and crashing on a mate’s couch). The Albert
Kennedy Trust suggest a quarter of this quarter identified as LGBT+ (although there's <a href="http://drpetermatthews.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/how-many-lgbt-people-are-homeless-in-uk.html">quite a few problems with that</a>). People
often don’t realise they’ve been homeless, and might not be out, so might not
define themselves within the target population. I figured using homelessness
organisations would be a good gatekeeper organisations.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I contacted quite a few homelessness organisations and still
struggled. So, I thought, where do gay people hang out and I might be able to
recruit them? Grindr! <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">For those of you who don’t know, Grindr was one of the first
dating apps. I believe it was actually invented by a straight guy who was
impressed with how easily his gay brother managed to hook-up in the places he
visited. You set yourself up a profile – picture optional, but it can’t be rude
– and fill in other details (including your “tribe” [otter, twink, bear etc.
I’ll leave you to Google, but don’t blame me]; your preferred sexual practices
[it seems versatile bottom is where it’s at, again Google if you don’t know],
as well as age and height and other usual stuff. It’s location based, so when
you open the app you get the photos of people in a grid with distance
increasing as you go down. There is also a “Fresh Faces” bar at the top which
lists recent joiners. You don’t swipe people away like Tinder, so it’s more
like a chatting app.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I hadn’t intended to use it for participant recruitment. In
fact I’ve been in a long-term relationship for 11 years, long before Grindr had
been invented, so I had never actually used it. I had used the precursor
website Gaydar (I can almost hear the wistful sigh from gay men of a certain
age when you mention that) so I sort of knew what it was like. Anyway, I had to
apply for a change to my ethics permission (<a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0KqwKD6R-qkcXR2MDBLSWE4TFk/view?usp=sharing">form here for info</a>) from my University’s General
University Ethics Panel to use it. Before I got to this stage, <a href="https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/staff/mark-holton">Mark Holton</a> at
Plymouth University mentioned I should also check the Grindr terms and
conditions. These are quite explicit on not using it for marketing, or to
recruit people actively, but I wasn’t going to be doing this – I couldn’t tell
if anyone was suitable for my research from their profile, so this was more
lurking and seeing who approached me. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">When I submitted my ethics application it was the week after
<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-38045742">Stephen Port</a> had been convicted for murdering four young men he had lured to
his flat using Grindr. This meant the main focus of the application was
actually the risk assessment, particularly since it was a straight male
colleague who would be doing the interviews – making sure that people recruited
this way were met in public places and that I’d talked to them briefly over the
phone to check everything was ok. This was on top of the usual assurances, such
as making sure the researcher checked in-and-out-of interviews by text message.
I also had to ensure the participants were consenting properly with full
information. I was also aware there was a reputational risk to the University –
I could chat people up on the app as a representative of my University.
Therefore I also set out that after people messaged me on the app, I would move
the discussion to email as soon as possible and provide them with full
participant information then. The usual participation and consent procedures
then kicked-in. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">So I set up my profile, example below:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMs2R1CRIO_Dj_Ac1TrOPUNfo6W333KZERBY_sqUNRK98VvG7EqeUq6dWLKZGtGYjOQdEQGurmsl1WoIVxCjfRAp0JLrgiNZ5UwOHms8ZT3NnCOqWklZF0ufhGqwFMKs5MbHa6pmGJO3mj/s1600/Screenshot_20170529-160211.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="900" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMs2R1CRIO_Dj_Ac1TrOPUNfo6W333KZERBY_sqUNRK98VvG7EqeUq6dWLKZGtGYjOQdEQGurmsl1WoIVxCjfRAp0JLrgiNZ5UwOHms8ZT3NnCOqWklZF0ufhGqwFMKs5MbHa6pmGJO3mj/s320/Screenshot_20170529-160211.png" width="180" /></span></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I changed it from that to asking if people lived in particular neighbourhoods in Edinburgh and Glasgow depending on what I was up to and where I was. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And, the burning question – how successful was it? Well, quite successful actually. I got 49 contacts by the time I wrote this blog post. Not all of them were interested in my research. More of that later. It took me a week to work out Grindr etiquette. I was expecting people to message me and say “I’d like to participate in your research.” However, you only ever start a Grindr conversation with “Hi”. My initial reply to these was an immediate “I’m only on here to recruit research participants”. After a couple of times it became apparent this was extremely rude, so it became a “Hi, are you interested in participating in my research?”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Quite a few of the contacts did fit the criteria, particularly people who had experienced homelessness, which was exactly the population I was looking for. The main problem was turning these into actual interviews. I found <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10461-012-0277-z">this paper</a> about a sexual health project that had used Grindr to find people for a project about men-who-have-sex-with-men. They noted that they got a higher participation rate if they phoned people, not emailed them. I offered to phone or email in my message to people who said they would participate. They all wanted to be emailed. I would email. And then hear nothing. I have no idea why.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And yes, I did get people who just looked at my photo (I used a professional work photo where I do look quite cute) and messaged me for the very purposes Grindr was invented for. And so far, yes, this has also involved some extremely explicit messages. As a gay man, I was sort of expecting this to happen, but if you were to recreate this method of participant recruitment and went into this naïve and oblivious it would’ve come as a bit of a shock. A handful of other messages I got would’ve raised eyebrows out of the context, but with all of these I just ignored the messages, or if someone was a tad too persistent, I politely ended the conversation explaining I was only on the app to recruit research participants. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">So, is it worth the effort to find research participants? LGBT+ people are roughly three per cent of the population, so they are pretty hard to reach. I have exhausted every single recruitment technique, apart from flyering gay bars on a Friday night, with this project and have still really struggled. Unbelievably even snowball sampling only got me two other participants (and one of them was someone’s partner and another someone’s sibling). Riffing on Michael Rosen’s book <i>Bear Hunt</i> I’ve been joking that “I’m going on a gay hunt, got to catch a big one”* and it really has felt like that. I think, like the public health researchers, if you were looking for people who were dating, or after no-strings-fun with a 9 inch top, for your research population, then it is definitely the place to find them. Otherwise, I think my research was a little too leftfield for your average Grindr user. They’re on it for a quick shag, or to meet the love of their life, not to discuss their housing circumstances. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I also swiftly realised there is ethnography to be done on how people present themselves on Grindr, and the rituals of introducing oneself on the app. A quick <a href="https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&q=grindr&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C5&as_sdtp=">Google Scholar search</a> identifies that this has been done. This raises the issue of how “public” social media is (</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">as did this blog post)</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">. An ethics panel would probably not give you permission to recreate Laud Humphries’ famous Tearoom Trade participant observation of cottaging. Yet, we could probably do an ethnography of interactions in a gay bar with no issues, comparing, say, how gay men approach each other with how straight men approach women. People do not put themselves on Grindr to appear in a research project, and if I provided any more detail about some of the profiles I’d seen, people could feasibly identify them. A defence of being overly cautious on these issues is we live in a heterosexist society. As I am finding out in this project, we know next-to-bugger-all (pun intended) about the lives of LGBT+ people in very ordinary ways. As a social scientist, I believe the only way to do this is to do research, and this involves identifying people as LGBT+ and then asking them about stuff. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Anyway, this is all I have to say on the topic so far. This will be written up as a proper methods paper, don’t fear! Oh, and as I tweeted a while back – an idea for a novel: the protagonist is one of the random people that appear in someone else’s online dating profile, and a North-By-Northwest style mistaken identity adventure then starts.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">*knowledgeable readers will get the many-levels on which that joke works. </span></div>
Dr Peter Matthewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06308785385644187726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647966782809031279.post-90620923028549178732017-07-18T10:33:00.003+01:002017-07-18T10:37:47.439+01:00A Woman's Work<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The most recent book I finished reading was Harriet Harman’s
<i>A Woman’s Work</i>. I was interested in
reading it after it had been trailed in <i>The
Guardian. </i>I wasn’t going to “review” it much at all; I was mainly going to recommend
people buy it, and give my copy to my mum. But two things made me thing again.
First was the “anniversary” of when, as stand-in leader of the Labour Party in
opposition, Harman advised her MPs to vote for welfare reform in 2015. This is
symbolically portrayed as when the tide turned in favour of Jeremy Corbyn in
the Labour leadership race. Harman became the totemic “Blairite”. Ironically,
for the theme of the book, I’d argue there’s an inherent sexism in there – the presumption
is Harman, as a woman cannot have her own views; she is just the stooge of the
men around her. Secondly, I asked my Twitter followers if they’d like a review,
and I got overwhelmed <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I just want to pick up on three aspects of the book that
were noteworthy to me. Firstly, life was really quite exceptionally bad for
women before 1997 and it’s quite a bit better now. It’s not perfect, but thanks
to Harriet Harman and her allies in the women’s movement, it’s quite a bit
better. This seems to come from something that only a woman could really do –
listen to women’s concerns, empathise with them, and make the practical changes
needed. For example, being a naïve man I was not aware how stupidly moralistic
and patriarchal the rules regarding lone parent benefit were. It was designed
on the presumption women should not be in work. They should be in a
relationship with a man who would earn the money for the household. Even if he
was abusing her. As Secretary of State for Social Security, Harman changed that
through the New Deal for Lone Parents. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Another good example this this approach, and the pragmatic
challenges it led to, is the minimum wage. The men-dominated trades unions had
pushed for this to be half the median wage. Harman realised that this rate would be good for men in full time work, but
probably lead to thousands of low-paid women losing their jobs. She argued
forcefully that such work was not “pin money” for households, but a vital part
of their income, the freedom of these women, and that many of these women were lone
parents who would lose their only income. She pushed this argument with the support of the </span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">trade union that represented poorly paid women workers in the textile industry the National Union of Knitwear, Footwear and Apparel Trades. </span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">The result was the Low Pay
Commission. Of course, this led to her gaining enemies in the trades unions</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It sort of goes without saying that Harriet Harman (or “Harperson”
as she was *hilariously* referred to) has received endless sexist, misogynist
abuse in her life. The reporting associated with the book’s launch focused on
her <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jan/29/harriet-harman-memoir-university-tutor-sex-better-grade">being
sexually harassed</a> by a lecturer at the University of York. This was
early-on, and shocking, but arguably not the worst. Taking on a men-dominated
labour movement through advocating for women workers, and all-women shortlists,
Harman was subject to truly shocking abuse and exclusion, as were many other
women. The story of the introduction of all-women shortlists should make many
men in the Labour movement utterly ashamed and should lead to public apologies
at the way women were treated. Of course, it won’t.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The third reason I liked the book came to me at the end – it’s
tucked away in the acknowledgements. She writes:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">“<i>I’d always denounced political memoirs as male vanity projects
and vowed never to write mine – so this book requires an explanation. I read
the mounting pile of memoirs of the men who’d been my Cabinet colleagues. They
wrote about themselves and each other but there was nothing about women.</i>”
(p.383)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">She goes on:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">“<i>Because I didn’t plan to write my memoirs, I never wrote a
diary during my time in politics. I thoroughly disapproved of colleagues who
sat in meetings writing theirs; I thought they should have been focusing on
getting things done in the here and now, rather than anticipating their place
in history.</i>” (p.383)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">There’s a wonderfully humility <i>and </i>passion here. After I read it I just thought "go Harriet!" She got into politics to change women’s lives for
the better. The book is not a memoir, or a biography. It is a book about the
progress the women’s movement had made over the past 50 years, from Harman’s
perspective, and it is a joy to read because of that, and incredibly
informative. The only weakness is she is not a brilliant writer and the prose
can be clunky. I imagine it’s how I might write a book – I’m very good at
reports and reasonably good at extended academic writing, but would struggle in
the genre of this type of book. But it’s definitely worth reading. Being the
first Mother of the House is a richly deserved accolade for Harman for all her
work in her 25 years in Parliament.</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> </span></div>
Dr Peter Matthewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06308785385644187726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647966782809031279.post-74267152437853472692017-07-07T16:19:00.000+01:002017-07-07T16:19:05.910+01:00What don’t straight people like? <div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As I’ve blogged about before here, an <a href="http://drpetermatthews.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/are-you-gay.html">emerging
finding</a> from my current research on LGBT housing and homelessness is the
reticence of heterosexual-identifying staff in organisations to ask service
users their sexual identity. In 20 days’ time, it will be the 50<sup>th</sup>
anniversary of the decriminalisation of sex between two men, in private, in England
and Wales when the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_Offences_Act_1967">Sexual Offences
Act 1967</a> received royal assent. The <a href="http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1967/jul/13/sexual-offences-no-2-bill#s5lv0284p0_19670713_hol_143">Hansard
record</a> of the debates relating to the parliamentary bill given an
interesting, if alarming, insight into social attitudes at the time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This has led to quite a bit of focus on changing social
attitudes to same-sex relationships. For example, the National Centre for
Social Research tweeted this graph from the British Social Attitudes Survey
demonstrating how we’ve become more accepting of same-sex relationships. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://bsa.natcen.ac.uk/latest-report/british-social-attitudes-34/moral-issues.aspx"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="http://bsa.natcen.ac.uk/media/39188/same-sex-relationships.png?width=485&height=298" data-original-height="298" data-original-width="485" height="195" width="320" /></span></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Yet my lived experience, and also my research findings
suggest something different – an acceptance, but a remaining discomfort. I’ve
got to think through this because one of the ways I was thinking of “queer-ying”
policy, and to hit home my point that it should be <a href="http://drpetermatthews.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/how-many-lgbt-people-are-homeless-in-uk.html">normal
to ask people their sexual identity</a>, was to do a cartoon gently mocking the
assumption that asking people if they are straight, gay or bisexual, is asking
a question about what they get up to between the sheets (or anywhere else they
may choose to have sex). I still think this will work, but I’ve realised I’ve
got to do some more work on it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As part of making sense of my data from my project I’m
reading into queer theory. I’m not an expert – in a disciplinary sense, I live
in policy studies – so I’ve been going to “readers”. It’s interesting for me
with my historians perspective on as a lot of the texts in them are quite dated
and pre-exist much of the legislative progress of the last decade in the UK and
elsewhere. Here, I want to draw on the excerpt from Ahmed in the <a href="https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Queer-Studies-Reader/Hall-Jagose-Bebell-Potter/p/book/9780415564113">Routledge
Queer Studies Reader</a>, ‘Queer Feelings’. She focuses on the discomfort
generated by being “queer”, or non-normative, and the way this rubs up against
a heteronormative society. I read a lot of the chapter thinking of Panti Bliss’
<a href="https://youtu.be/WXayhUzWnl0">famous speech on oppression</a>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It has also got me thinking a bit more about the discomfort
people say they would feel if they had to ask people their sexuality. As I
wrote previously, I do empathise with this discomfort a lot – I would probably
feel a little bit apprehensive. Reading Ahmed though has got me focusing on <i>what exactly is discomforting</i>? Arguably,
marriage equality has garnered such support because it is assimilationist – it
is gay people doing what straight people do, pairing up, settling down, and
having sex just with one another. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">So is it the sex that a heteronormative society finds so discomfiting?
I did a little experiment on this myself because I noticed that my tweets
regarding LGBT issues got very little attention. Searching for a GIF once I
found one that was from a gay porn film. It didn’t take much to find quite a
few others on the Twitter GIF search. So I posted a hard core gay porn GIF, the
obliquely showed a sexual act between two men, every day for a week. I got two
likes, and one of them was for a GIF that was a passionate kiss. This
suggested, to me, at least an ambivalence towards sexual acts between men. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Particularly in the UK we find all sex discomfiting.
However, we are getting better at having open discussions about heterosexual
sex – just not necessarily the right discussions with the right people. But we’re
happy to accept lesbian and gay couples, and indeed celebrate them through
marriage, yet when we consider them actually having sex, I suspect we’ve got an
awful lot further to go on social attitudes. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
Dr Peter Matthewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06308785385644187726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647966782809031279.post-70260034142307391692017-07-05T11:38:00.001+01:002017-07-05T11:38:23.931+01:00Habermas<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I read a 500-page biography of J</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">ü</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">rgen Habermas so you don't have to. Actually, it's quite a good read, better than I feared. There were times when I actually couldn't put it down, and I'm not a fan of biographies generally. I was read this tome to review for <i><a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/flgs20/current">Local Government Studies</a></i>. Given the book was so long, I asked the book reviews editor to give me the equivalent of two reviews, but he didn't think it was of sufficient interest to the readers of <i>LGS </i>to warrant the full version so it got brutally edited down to 800 words. I don't mind, this was what we agreed when I went in to write it. The shorter version will be published soon, and in the mean time, you can read the 1,600-word version. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>Habermas: A Biography<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Stefan Müller-Doohm (tr. Daniel Steuer)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Polity Press (Cambridge) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Hardback: 978-0-7456-8906-7 <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">£9.99<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As an undergraduate studying history, a Professor was attempting to explain
Habermas’ thesis in <i>The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere</i> in a lecture I was attending. They described how, like
all German intellectuals, Habermas “dived in deeper, and came out muddier”. For
many in the English-speaking academic world, this is one caricature they hold;
for others Habermas is seen as an irrelevance, with his utopian vision of
uncorrupted discourse being empirically disproved by a “post-truth” world of
discursive conflict. Yet, when we look at the emphasis put on deliberation in
governance reforms (the latest trend being co-production) or the campaigns for
rational discourse in society to counter “fake news”, arguably, we are seeing
the enduring impact of Habermas’ philosophical and political project, and his
ever greater relevance in the present day. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Stefan Müller-Doohm’s biography of Habermas, now translated
into English, gives an incredibly rich insight into Habermas’ intellectual
project, but more importantly the personal drive behind it. Born in 1929, and
growing up in the west German town of Gummersbach, Habermas’ cleft palate
marked him out as different all his life. From 1933 this difference became of
greater importance as it marked Habermas as a “degenerate” within the Nazi
regime. However, like many of his generation, he was a member of the Hitler
Youth, and trained as a first-aider and is photographed in marching to the
frontline in August 1944<i> </i>in the book.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What is very apparent from this biography is the deep impact
these early experiences had on Habermas for his entire life. From the
mid-1950s, Habermas started down the road to becoming the public intellectual
he is widely known as within continental Europe. Writing with the milieu of the
new democracy of the <i>Bundesrepublik</i>, he
was committed to creating a critical, public discourse. This was within a
country that had a very fragile democracy, of the sort even now we can barely
imagine – where de-Nazification had been partial so as to leave some
functioning bureaucracy; any alignment with Marxist doctrines ran the risk of
individuals being accused of being sympathisers with the <i>Demokratische Republik</i>. This was a country where it was not until
1969 that Willy Brandt became the Social Democratic Chancellor, and the CDU/CSU
dominance seemingly teetered on the brink of become authoritarian. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">With this background illuminated by Müller-Doohm, the drive
behind Habermas’ intellectual project become apparent. In sum, it is the
recognition that democracy is fragile, historically contingent, and it needs
explaining by social science. What is more, democracy also needs supporting,
pragmatically and theoretically. This drive to use critical theory to embed a
deep democracy that delivers equality, was in a context where Habermas had to
negotiate between conservative university authorities and the warring factions
that had emerged from the Frankfurt School. It is these moments, where the
ideals of critical theory, or of contemporary left thought, bang up against the
reality of navigating the contradictions of liberal capitalism, that are the
most interesting of the book, and produce some page-turning sections.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In this review, I want to mention two, both occurring around
the same time in that period of revolutionary fervour 1968. A thread running
through the book is Habermas’ close collaboration with the publisher <i>Suhrkamp </i>and close friendship with
Siegfried Unseld, owner and director, who turned it into an intellectual
powerhouse in post-war West Germany. This included Habermas’ role in editing
the <i>Edition Suhrkamp </i>book series. In
a closely described section, Müller-Doohm explains how Unseld’s editorial staff,
inspired by wider revolutionary fervour, presented an editorial charter to
Unseld asking for the publisher to be “socialized” (p.151). Alarmed and
supportive of Unseld, Habermas travelled to Frankfurt in October 1968 and, as
described by Unseld:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">“<i>using all his theoretical armour, presented the thesis that
it would be nonsensical if a publishing house that brought out the right kind
of progressive literature…was exposed to an experiment that would put the
publisher’s present impact at risk.</i>” (p.152)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The irony of one of the greatest critical thinkers of modern
Europe negotiating against workers’ rights, in favour of a capitalism that
could afford to publish his works and make them widely read across Germany, and
the world, is somewhat pointed. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The second incident which highlights Habermas’ ambiguous
position, is his response to student rebellions at this time. In the mid-1960s
Habermas was at the heart of protests against the CDU-CSU-led Grand Coalition and
its authoritarian tendencies. Along with protests against the Vietnam War,
Habermas became embroiled in student demonstrations. It is clear Habermas’ was
deeply committed to reform of higher education in West Germany. One of his
earliest pieces of research had been on higher education students, considering
the potential of them to drive social change. Habermas’ regularly spoke at student
occupations (although it seems he was a little less keen when it was his own
university being occupied). In 1969 Habermas’ collected writings on university
reform were published as <i>Protestbewegung
und Hochschulreform </i>(Protest Movement and University Reform). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">However, in June 1967 the students’ union of the Freie
Universität in Berlin protested against a state visit by the Shah of Persia. In
the resulting brutal police break-up of the protest, a 26-year-old student
Benno Ohnesorg was shot and killed. As student protests developed, Habermas
supported the protests “but at the same time he also warned against an activism
at any cost and against the danger of ‘provoking a transformation of the
indirect violence of institutions into manifest violence.’” (p.141). Habermas’
was heavily criticised by the leader of the students’ movement Rudi Durschke,
and in-turn, he denounced their ideology as “left-wing fascism”. This led to
the tide to turn against Habermas, with student groups now distancing
themselves from him. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">These stories from formative years for Habermas, going onto
Habermas’ period as director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of the
Scientific-Technical World in Starnberg, are the most interesting. It was at
the Max Planck institute where Habermas wrote the <i>Theory of Communicative Action </i>and Müller-Doohm does a sterling job
summarising the main thesis across a few pages. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">From the period of the late
1970s, the biography, unfortunately, becomes a little formulaic and something
of a hagiography. Endless visiting professorships, prizes and the spreading
importance of Habermas’ thought through the world are narrated. On reflection
this could just be the result of where Habermas’ career had got to – this is
the life of a global scholar. It could also be a result of a more careful
curation of his public profile by Habermas, as his fame grew. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Why should a reader of <i>Local
Government Studies </i>be interested in this (enormous) book? Participatory
initiatives have now become a norm in governing practices at a local level. In
manuals of good governance, countries are exalted to bring citizens into
decision-making processes to make them better. In our scholarship we can focus
on the policy initiatives that led to such participation institutions – for
example, the Skeffington Report into participation in the planning in the
United Kingdom. It is easy for us to get swept up in a critique of such
initiatives as utterly failing to meet the utopian goals they set themselves, for
example, using a Foucauldian critique to portray citizens as dupes doing what
government wants them to do. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Yet very few of us would now question that such initiatives
should exist, and that good quality discourse is essential to a lively
democracy. Our revulsion to the use of “fake news” and ambiguity in what we
count as the “truth” belies a deeper tradition from the enlightenment to seek
the truth. Underlying these concerns is Habermas’ concept of a rational
discourse among free and equal actors. In the English-speaking context, this
remains implicit – we don’t get to read Habermas’ numerous contributions to <i>Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung </i>and <i>De Welt</i> that make him a very public
scholar in Germany. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As already touched upon, it is clear from this biography
that Habermas himself could not, necessarily, always live up to his own ideals.
Another theme, is that throughout his career Habermas has benefited from many
structural privileges that his critics, particularly Iris Marion Young, have
suggested mean that his ideal speech situation can never come to pass. Put
simply, the only woman who really has a role in this book is his wife Ute
Wesselhöft, and then as an academic spouse, rather than a person in her own
right. All the other key characters in Habermas’ life were men. His career was
developing during a period when structural inequalities were much more likely
to hold-back women and minority groups, so this is partly understandable as a
product of the time. However, in the positions of authority he has had, such as
founding the Max Planck institute, Habermas seems to have done little in terms
of practical action, as his theoretical position would suggest he should, to
address such structural issues. One would hope as a leading critical thinker
Habermas was aware of such issues, but this is never apparent from the book. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">To conclude, this book is an astounding overview of the
life, and intellectual development, of one of Europe’s greatest thinkers, and
one who is neglected in English-speaking social science. Müller-Doohm’s
archival research is awe-inspiring. Reading the book from the perspective of
the UK, with dominance of the tabloid media; a referendum that was recently won
on a blatant untruth (the pledge Brexit would lead to £350 million for the NHS);
where we are “tired of experts”, it is easy to scoff at Habermas’ ideal speech
situation. What becomes clear from the book though, is that Germany does seem
to have this – through the scholarly debates on the pages of the leading
newspapers, major issues of the day are discussed. The continuing legacy for
all of us from Habermas’ work is that we must keep our fragile democracies, at
all levels, alive with discourse. </span><b><o:p></o:p></b></div>
Dr Peter Matthewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06308785385644187726noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647966782809031279.post-83956104744213434052017-07-03T11:39:00.000+01:002017-07-03T12:06:22.398+01:00What do we actually do when we do impact?<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away (well, when we
had a UK Government that was thinking about localism and “The Big Society”) the
Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Connected Communities programme funded
three projects, along with the UK Department for Communities and Local
Government (DCLG), to see how the research the programme had invested in so far
could help policy. Skip forward a year and the teams involved in doing these reviews
concluded that they had not, exactly, gone to plan. So, I ended up joining them
on a project called <a href="https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/usp/research/projects/translation">Translation
Across Borders</a> to try and find out why. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Well, I have a paper out based on this project in <i><a href="https://doi.org/10.1332/174426417X14982110094140">Evidence & Policy</a>.
</i>I’ll attempt to summarise it here. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Now, there is absolutely oodles of research out there, across
numerous disciplines, on how and why policy-makers use evidence in their
decisions, and the barriers to this. The unique value-added of this project was
that it was co-produced with a civil servant who was actually involved in
policy-making. Our co-author, Robert Rutherfoord, is a Principal Social
Research at DCLG, and did fieldwork with me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">My role was to interview all the academics who had
participated in producing the original policy reviews, with Robert, and find
out what they had done and the barriers they found in taking their evidence
into a policy-making environment. Our literature review found that doing this
is remarkably rare – us academics seem to love asking policy-makers what they
think the barriers are, and how they use evidence, but we don’t ask us
academics what we think the barriers are. This is all the more surprising given
all the wailing and gnashing of teeth regarding the Research Excellence
Framework’s measurement of socio-economic impact since 2013. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">What did we find? In the interpretive approach we took to
analysing the data, three things stood out. Firstly, as academics, we construct
our identities as biographies (like everyone else on the planet). These are key
meaning-making devices for us and help situate us, and our practices in the
here-and-now. Secondly, these biographies are strongly linked to disciplinary
identities. Unsurprisingly, some disciplines – like policy studies – more
commonly do work with policy-makers, or attempt to affect change in policy,
than other disciplines. This is a bit of a “no shit, Sherlock” finding, but
surprisingly it is not dealt with a lot in the literature, perhaps because the
need for diverse disciplines to affect policy-making has only emerged in the
last decade and they are only just beginning to self-reflect. On this count, I
find the delightfully naïve debates in mainstream political science interesting
when you compare them to policy studies, who have been concerning themselves
with this issue for the last 70 years. The final insight was that institutional
pressures, particularly the demand to produce 4* journal articles for the REF
means that the sorts of activities that are recognised to help deliver “impact”
– developing working relationships with policy-makers and networks of influence
– are not prioritised or encouraged within internal performance management
systems.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Now, a lot of this will come as no surprise to many
academics. Indeed it didn’t necessarily come as a surprise to us. What did come
as a surprise to us, and why this research is important, was that this our
civil servants we were co-producing with did not know about much of this,
particularly things like the impact of the REF on behaviour and incentive
structures. Therefore, our recommendation as to what should be done better is a
bit different to most other similar projects. Whereas a lot of “toolkits” and
other training focused on getting academic evidence into policy-making focuses
on “knowing your audience”, from a variety of different perspectives, we
instead focused on the need for academics to know <i>themselves</i> better. Because, basically, academics are weird. We
behave in a lot of ways that are completely alien to those outwith academia.
And we need to pause and think about this every now and then. And also,
policy-makers who want to work with academics would do well just to spend a
short amount of time learning about what makes them tick, and understanding
that there is diversity in what academics do, and how they do it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">To this end we did create some tools from this project to
try and make this process a bit easier. One of these is some fun “academic
archetype” cards that can be used to prompt reflection, and also help
policy-makers understand academics a bit better. If you want to use these, please
drop me <a href="http://www.stir.ac.uk/people/27268">an email</a>, and this can
be arranged. I’ll be presenting them at a “<a href="http://blogs.stir.ac.uk/isnews/?p=6436">Research Bite</a>” seminar in the
University of Stirling Library Enterprise Zone on 2 August at 12:30. I’ll also
probably bring them out at a session at the Australian National University on
11 October at 13:00, and possibly when I’m at the Department of Social Policy
and Intervention, University of Oxford from the 13 November for a week. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">We’re just organising Gold OA or Green OA for the paper, but
in the meantime drop me an email if you want a copy and you don’t subscribe to </span><i style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">E&P</i><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">.</span><br />
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Dr Peter Matthewshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06308785385644187726noreply@blogger.com0