Issues with The Conversation

This morning I was reading a piece on the website The Conversation. 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.

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. pic.twitter.com/KdIv1Ztugr

— Peter Matthews (@urbaneprofessor) February 3, 2018

I was struck that it really hit a nerve with a lot of my fellow academics.

For those of you who don’t know, The Conversation is a website, funded by a large number of universities and higher education organisations, 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.

I have written for The Conversation in the past – Bulldoze Belgravia 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.

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 all 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 The Guardian reblogged the piece and a reader referred to me as an “envy-driven” and “masquerading as an academic”. I was quite proud.

However, I now wouldn’t write for The Conversation, and I’ll explain why.

Editorialising

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.

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 ideological 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. 

Now, why am I describing this? Because, a while back I read this piece in The Conversation: Nationalising Britain’s Railways is the Only Way to Fix Chronic Problems. 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 Modernisation Plan 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.

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.

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 this was a better much better piece.

The crisis in journalism

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.

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.

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.

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 more 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.

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”. 

Becoming a queer scholar

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.

Some of you may have noticed that my last post – about getting married – ended up being picked up by The Times and we became national news 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.

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.

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.

Why? Well predominantly because I was being quite a bit “post-gay”, in that Nate Silver “ethnically straight”. 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 Stuart in Queer as Folk. 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.

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 come out to my students 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 surprise finding 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.

The other day I was reading Michael Warner’s introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet (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 really resonated with me – this was what I was doing.

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.

And that introduction to queer theory has been immensely eye-opening, particularly the concept of heteronormativity – as I suggested when I over-analysed my own nuptials. 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 Kath Browne that it’s better to know so we can do something (especially about things such as hate crimes) than to not know at all.

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 policy studies of not doing enough of in my most recent paper!

To conclude, I am now definitely out of the closet. And I'm happy to be accused of homonormativity. 

Community empowerment and renewal

The Scottish Government are currently consulting on a Community Empowerment and Renewal Bill. I see this as a sort of Scottish Localism Act. A couple of my colleagues have done very good blog posts on the consultation and I’d recommend you read them: Dr Kim McKee and Malcolm Combe.

I thought I’d add my tuppeneth worth here as well. Most of my response is going in as part of an AHRC Connected Communities project, Reframing Citizen-State Relations (see job advert for that project here as well) so I’m not going to be answering every question here. I just want to raise three points on: community empowerment; processes of community participation in different services; and Scottish Government consultations.

Firstly, throughout the consultation document and implicit in many of the questions is the presumption that community engagement is a good thing. I have a couple of problems with this. From our work on middle-classcommunity activism I do not think community engagement and empowerment is always a good thing. In fact, it seems to me that in many ways it can just recreate and reinforce inequalities in wider society – empowering the already powerful. This comes across in the discussion around Community Councils. We know that middle-class people are more likely to join groups such as Community Councils (a bit like English Parish Councils). What is needed is much greater investment in community development resource to bring in those who wouldn’t get their voices heard. I’d also be interested in if there is community development literature on getting people to shut up. One of the most interesting bits of my doctoral research was watching an Inspector from Lothian and Borders Police calmly tell a very middle –class person that the police would not routinely patrol by their allotments to combat a spate of stealing from sheds, as every evening the police were completely stretched maintaining a level of normalcy in less affluent neighbourhoods. The police officer recommended the purchase of insurance. A much braver person than me! But an extremely valid point.

There is also the point, made quite often during the heady days of the late 1990s and early noughties of the New Labour government, of community engagement seen as a way to improve communities themselves as well as services. I ended my PhD thesis with this quote from a document produced by the Scottish Social Inclusion Network that neatly summarises my views on this:

‘…community participation should not be seen as a pre-requisite for the delivery of decent services.  People living either in poor or more affluent areas are entitled to both quality services and an acceptable living environment.  We should not accept a situation where people living in more deprived communities have to go to countless meetings or engage in endless arguments with decision makers simply to receive a level of service that other people take for granted.’

Scottish Social Inclusion Network, Strategy Action Team (1999). Inclusive Communities. Edinburgh, p. 23

Another way to put it is “you can’t eat engagement”. I see a worrying trend along these lines in the proposals for community ownership and communities being given the right to run services. What I fear is that while affluent communities will be able to choose what services they want to run public services will use these provisions as an excuse to disinvest from services only used in less affluent neighbourhoods (such as community centres) and then “offer” them to the community to run. This is not empowerment but injustice.

Secondly is the actual process of community engagement in different services. One of the proposals is to place a general duty on engagement across all public services. I disagree with this and will probably be copying and pasting this into the consultation form for my own response. I disagree from my perspective as a planner. I’ve never worked as a planner, and am still not a member of the RTPI, but I still call myself a planner. Planning in the UK is interesting as, as far as I’m aware, it was the first public service in the UK to include a statutory right for the general public to be consulted on policies and decisions. Since the Skeffington Report in 1969 a vast chunk of planning research and practice has been done on public engagement. And a lot of it is quite atrocious and the system is still balanced towards developers. But the statutory right exists and the statute, especially in Scotland since the Planning etc. Scotland Act 2006, say when the public can expect to be engaged. From this a whole host of policy on engagement, specifically focused at the planning system has been developed. My fear is that a general duty would lead to a race to the bottom on community engagement and all services would revert to worst practice (not mentioning any large organisations of three letters beginning in N and ending in S).

Finally, in a Twitter conversation between Kim, Malcolm and myself Kim mentioned how badly the consultation document has been designed. This is becoming an increasing bug-bear of mine. The document is huge, but what is even worse is there are more pages of questions than of text being consulted on – 49 questions in total. It takes someone quite dedicated (sad?) to fill in that consultation, not your average community activist. I worked on the consultation analysis for the Scottish Government’s tackling poverty framework in 2007. If I remember rightly, this was led by the Poverty Alliance and it showed – a few broad questions that produced really interesting responses (still didn’t stop my analysis being broadly slated, but hey-ho). Now, the Scottish Government approach seems to be “we don’t know the answer to a question, so we will shove that in the questionnaire” rather than actually letting us respond to the issues that might interest us within the consultation document. Something needs to change in Scottish Government Towers if consultation is going to be worthwhile.

Tram Lines: The Love of Solutions

Scottish Television got in touch with me yesterday asking me to comment on the trams. I did so, with reference to Aramis and Aalborg. Original article here.

It was with a wry sense of irony that I read the other day that the company that runs the Paris Metro, RATP, had offered to run the Edinburgh Tram.

Back in the 1970s, the company along with French multinational Matra, spent billions of Francs on a project called Aramis.

This was to be a wonderful modern transport solution for Paris. A cross between a tram and a taxi. You’d hop into a car at your local stop, press a button for your destination, and Aramis would whizz off with no stopping in between. Funnily enough, Paris is now still renowned for the Art Nouveau Metro signs, not super-modern Aramis. Something similar has just opened at Heathrow Airport. It will deliver you to your car park.

In a study of the “death” of Aramis (subtitled, Or the Love of Technology), the French sociologist Bruno Latour described how the engineers, managers and politicians around Aramis almost literally fell in love with the idea. This blinded them to the massive technical challenges of the project and a basic social challenge – when asked, Parisians were rather worried about being sat in a driverless car with strangers. If you’re wondering what did happen to Aramis, if you’ve ever been in a Renault Espace you’ve driven in it. And if you’ve ever been on the TGV you’ve been powered by its motors and stopped by its control system.

Similarly, when the Edinburgh Trams were first getting stuck in late 2008, I was reading a book about a very modest transport project in the city of Aalborg in Denmark by the planning academic Bent Flyvbjerg. Rationality and Power describes how a project to close and pedestrianise some streets and build a bus station ended up taking well over a decade and was wracked with controversy.

Everyone agreed that Aalborg needed a transport solution and the plan was Very Good. Supporters and detractors of the project could marshal all the rational arguments they wanted to but what mattered was the messy business of politics and power. The traders blocked it because they feared the loss of business and had the ear of the politicians. The project stalled as municipal politics swung in one direction and then the next. At one point work stopped due to an economic crisis and reductions in government spending.

All sounding very familiar. Many commentators have caterwauled about Edinburgh’s inability to complete the project compared to European cities. I wonder how many of them were residents in these towns and cities during construction and listened to taxi drivers stuck in congestion. Or read decades of local press cuttings in French or Spanish to understand what the local conflicts and arguments were. I have not, which is why I’m using these two texts that have been published in English. And from these, it seems Edinburgh’s problems are almost universal – we “love” the tram, but are having a lot of difficulty giving birth to it.

I don’t want this to read as “I told you so”. But back in the early 2000s when the grand transport strategy of three tram lines, congestion charging and underground car parks was being dreamt up, I wonder if people would have been quite as ambitious if they had delved into this literature. Or even looked back at the difficulties Edinburgh had with Colin Buchanan’s 1971 Transport Study for the city. Big projects are difficult, complex and expensive.

I’m just enjoying sitting back and watching rather than saying what the “right” solution is.