I’m getting gay marriaged

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 LGBTQ housing and homelessness. This literature been a bit of a revelation – I’ve dived into it like a contestant on Drag Race 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.

The crashing together of getting gay marriaged and queer theory has been interesting and I thought I’d share a couple of insights.

Firstly, 

HETEROSEXUALS, MARRIAGE IS SO INCREDIBLY FUCKING GENDERED IT IS UNTRUE AND YOU REALLY NEED TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT THAT. 

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.

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, which they did (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 Don’t Tell the Bride.

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.

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, I’m still an atheist). 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.

Going on this journey to marriage, I have ended up challenging this, particularly with the insights from Celia Kitzinger’s fantastic paper Speaking as a heterosexual. 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.

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.

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.

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.

And trust me, as an academic, to over-intellectualise my own sodding wedding day. 

A Woman's Work

The most recent book I finished reading was Harriet Harman’s A Woman’s Work. I was interested in reading it after it had been trailed in The Guardian. 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

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.

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 trade union that represented poorly paid women workers in the textile industry the National Union of Knitwear, Footwear and Apparel Trades. The result was the Low Pay Commission. Of course, this led to her gaining enemies in the trades unions

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 being sexually harassed 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.

The third reason I liked the book came to me at the end – it’s tucked away in the acknowledgements. She writes:

“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.” (p.383)

She goes on:

“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.” (p.383)

There’s a wonderfully humility and 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. 

Leadership?

I got a new qualification back in May. I’m usually very proud of getting new qualifications, including my PGCert in Academic Practice, which most people treat as a burden. I didn’t tweet or brag about this one though because it was a leadership qualification. I am now an accredited leader to level 5 of the Institute of Learning and Management leadership framework. I was ashamed of this qualification because of one of the key learning points from the course for me – that when we think of “leaders” in English, we think of, well ultimately:

A man. Shouting. Bullying people to do what he wants them to do. And ultimately what he wants people to do is wrong.

I ended up doing the course because after I was promoted to Senior Lecturer last year I ended up leading a couple of key pieces of work in the University – leading a research programme, and leading an Athena SWAN application. I realised in October 2016 that I was writing about how good the Aurora leadership programme was for women and thought I need something like that. Fortunately for me, a space had come up on the University’s ILM5 course that was starting the following week. Luckily I could make all the sessions over the six months. I realised quite how much I needed it when I was walking through Waverley Station the day after I'd said to HR I would do it and I burst into tears realising that I'd said "I can't do this anymore and need some help."

Because of my preconceptions about leadership, I went in very skeptically and determined to have a feminist approach to my learning. Chatting to colleagues, they suggested speaking to Frances Patterson who leads our social work leadership courses. She put me onto shared leadership theory that is heavily informed by feminism, and particularly the work of Joyce Fletcher on post-heroic leadership.

A lot of contemporary leadership theory is based on neuroscience, and I have to confess, I remain unconvinced of that. I’m just too focused on understanding sociologically to accept psychological evidence for human behaviour.

Engaging with the literature and realising that the way I operate in organisations is good leadership that is empirically demonstrated to lead to better performance was really eye-opening and empowering. As I say, I think the word “leadership” in English is too corrupted now. If we were into compounds nouns in English, like the Germans, I’d say empoweringcaringsharingrolemodelperson would be a much better word.

As part of the course I got some leadership coaching sessions with Michele Armstrong. I had my last session this morning and it gave me time to reflect on my “leadership journey”. A big part of my leadership reflection was getting to my core values – what makes me tick. These are helping the most vulnerable in society and delivering equality. Another key value for me is competence, and getting the job done and delivering change.

One key reflection, that I need to discuss with others, is how I come across on this. Although these are my values, and I would say they are progressive, I don’t immediately leap to activism, resistance and complaint to go about delivering them. I like to go with the grain and use bureaucracy for positive ends. Also, in a HE context, a lot of the things that are the focus of ire – audit and “administration” – because they are “Neil Librul”, I actually think are not all bad. Following Clive Barnett, I always look for the shades of grey in our friend Neil. He’s not a totalising force. A lot of his tools – like audit, or performance measures – can be used to progressive ends. I feel more comfortable in this space and doing this work, and I think I need to talk about it a bit more as I'm worried I come across as a management stooge.

I keep my “resistance” quieter. For me, it means using the inefficiency of bureaucracy to thwart its own ends – no one will notice if I don’t fill in that spreadsheet I’ve been asked to complete. I’ll conveniently forget to forward on requests to protect colleagues from something either I could do, or I think is ill-advised and needs to be rethought. In working with colleagues, I’ll focus on how exciting their ideas are and encourage them to take them further, rather than bash them over the head with targets. If you meet the targets it’s a bonus, but your job should be enjoyable, empowering and intellectual stimulating. The chances are, if you are doing that sort of job then your “customers” (students) will be happy and getting good learning (and a Gold TEF award) and you’ll be doing the sort of research that will tick the REF boxes.

I suppose a key frustration of mine though is that on these leadership and coaching courses I go on, everyone has been like me - already a very good leader, who just needs to space to reflect and some theory and practical ideas to hone their skills. That we have said to ourselves that we need to develop these skills, to me, says that we are good leaders. Those who think they are good leaders, who practice heroic leadership, aren't reflexive enough to attend such courses and yet they quite often are in leadership positions. 

So, I am proud of being a leader, and my leadership skills. I still don’t like the word leadership though. 

How many LGBT+ people are homeless in the UK?

It would not be an understatement to say we are currently experiencing a homelessness crisis in the UK, especially youth homelessness, particularly due to cuts in Housing Benefit and wider support services. We need to be campaigning and working hard to ensure these changes are reversed, or proposed changes are not implemented. There is also a broad debate about what should be done, although some of the proposed solutions are not necessarily based on the best evidence. 

One particular aspect of youth homelessness has quietly grown in prominence - the risk and experience of homelessness among people who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or trans- (LGBT+)(1).

Due to this, there’s a statistic that is used in a very commonplace way in the UK – that a quarter of all young people (16-24 year olds) that are homeless identify as LGBT+. It most recently turned up at the start of an episode of Queer Britain on BBC 3 to frame the rest of the programme. In this post I want to question this statistic.

First of all though, whatever the real number is going to be, it will be almost impossible to accurately get because the two categories involved are difficult to define. I’ll start with the relatively easier one: homelessness. I discussed this in a podcast with my colleague Dr Beth Watts, if you want to know a bit more. Basically this is a definitional question. The UK has a legal definition of homelessness (it varies between the devolved jurisdictions) because when you “fit” into this definition a housing authority (usually your local council) then has a duty to house you(2). Outwith Scotland, this is associated with being “priority need”. Housing authorities do returns on how many people they have assessed as homeless using these definitions which are collated nationally. Local authorities also provide housing advice and homelessness prevention services (such as family mediation). This includes a wider group of people who would not necessarily be homeless under the legal definition.

We know that these numbers massively under-report homelessness because we know the majority of people who experience homelessness don’t access local authority housing services, or actually define themselves as homeless. An additional issue is that most researchers would define homeless as not having somewhere safe and secure to stay. Therefore, people who fell out with their parents and sofa-surfed for a few nights would have experienced homelessness under this definition. Asking survey questions about this is a little tricky, and unlikely to get data that is useful for statistics. This data is collected at a population-level (the Scottish Household Survey has a fiendishly tricky question on it), but you get a very small n (number of respondees) so you can’t do much  analysis with.

Now, sexual identity. This is extremely difficult to measure, and probably not for the reasons you think. Epistemologically, many queer theorists would legitimately argue you shouldn’t/couldn’t ask this question, as you’re asking people to put themselves into categories that were invented by a patriarchal, heteronormative society to oppress people. It is wrong to ask people to ascribe themselves labels - such as "homosexual" that they vehemently resent and could cause them harm. The less theoretical issue is a technical issue for survey design: what people do and what people say they are is often a different thing; or as my colleague Dr Kirsten Bessemer put it, it’s when a man says “I’m not gay but my boyfriend is”.

The NATSAL survey in the UK demonstrates how this is an issue among young people. Most population surveys in the UK find that c. 3 per cent of the population are not-heterosexual. NATSAL asks about sexual experiences, romantic attachment and sexual identity and gets wildly different answers. It found that 3 percent of men and 4 per cent of women aged 16-24 would describe themselves as gay or bisexual. However, it found that 7 per cent of men aged 16-24 had had a sexual experience with a man and nearly 3 per cent had had at least one sexual partnership with a man in the past five years. Among women aged 16-24, nearly 19 per cent had had a same-sex sexual experience, and 6.2 per cent had had at least one sexual partnership with a man in the past five years. Based on all this, I’m going to be generous and say 5 per cent of 16-24 year-olds are LGBT+.

I’m using the acronym LGBT+ but I’m only really talking about sexual identity. So, an apology to T+ people – I’m not ignoring you, it’s just there is absolutely no data on gender identity, or other complex sexual and gender identities.

Anyway, we don’t know how many people experience homelessness, and we don’t know how many people are LGBT+. So how can we get anywhere near the 25% figure?

In this section I am going to use statistics from England because a) they’re available b) as the biggest nation in the UK, England is most like the UK statistically and c) because Scotland’s homelessness law complicates things (see note 2).

Mid-year population estimates from the Office of National Statistics tell us there are roughly 6,192,870 16-24 year-olds in England. If we estimate that 5 per cent are LGBT+ then we can say about 309,643 of these are LGBT+.

On homelessness, we can use statistics from the Department of Communities and Local Government. In 2016 local housing authorities declared 13,280 people aged 16-24 homeless – this would miss a lot of people, but would include people who had to leave their parental home because their parents threatened violence, or those with mental health problems. It would miss all those in full-time education. If a quarter of them were LGBT+, that would be 3,320 people, 1 per cent of all LGBT+ people. That’s plausible and would mean LGBT+ people are over-represented in this population.

However, local housing authorities deal with a lot more people through an approach called Housing Options – this is an interview with a housing officer where they work to reduce your risk of homelessness, or prevent your homeless, without going down the statutory route. The number of people given these services are collated by DCLG. This gives a (slightly) more accurate figure of who is homeless. In 2016, 200,610 people aged 16-24 in England used these services. Now, 25 per cent of that would be 50,152. If this were the case, this would mean 16 per cent of young LGBT+ people had experienced homelessness, and again it would mean an over-representation compared to a rate for the non-LGBT people of around three per cent.

As I’ve made clear, this is all very difficult to measure. We even know that the 200,610 people who had accessed Housing Options is an underestimate. Some estimates put youth homelessness (including having to sleep with a friend because you have fallen out with your parents) as high as 25 per cent of all young people. This seems high, but even for me, who lived a pretty middle class life as a teenager, it rings true as a few friends did become homeless during these turbulent years. If we use this figure we could estimate that 1,548,217 young people become homeless in a year. Then, 25 per cent of that number is 387,054 – that’s more LGBT homeless young people than there are LGBT+ young people. However, this homelessness rate would be an over-exaggeration as it is a rate for all 16-24 year-olds i.e. 25% of young people experience homelessness at some point when they are young.

Something still does not ring true with the 25 per cent figure though – there are too many questions around it. It also does not match the figures of service users I’m finding in my own research (5-10 per cent). It would be easier to say: we don’t actually know how many LGBT+ young people become homeless. Because we don’t. 

Does it matter? I would say yes, it does, and I say this as a gay man who is passionately interested in this subject and the housing outcomes for LGBT+ people. I would argue it matters for two reasons. Firstly, I think it distracts us from the actual issues around LGBT+ homelessness. The causes of LGBT+ youth homelessness are, from what we know, the same as they are for all young people – family breakdown, unemployment, poverty and mental health. In terms of family breakdown, their sexual or gender identity is very likely to have an intersection with this, or be the primary cause (they are fleeing homophobic or transphobic parents or guardians). However, the key issue to consider then, in a UK context, is what services they can access and some pretty basic issues like:

• Do services record sexual and gender identity of service users? (we’d then know how many were LGBT+!)
• Do LGBT+ people consider themselves “candidates” for housing and homelessness services, or are they self-excluding?
• Are services sufficiently understanding and tailored?
• How are shelters managed? Are they gendered? How do they respond to homophobia/transphobia?

These are all issues raised by LGBT Youth Scotland in their excellent evidence submission to the current inquiry into homelessness by the Scottish Parliament Local Government and Communities Committee. I shall also be following them up with further blog posts coming out of my current research project.

I think there is also an issues that focusing on this 25 per cent has a danger of foregrounding risks of homelessness associated with sexual and gender identity to the detriment of the widespread risks we know are there, are increasing, and we need to do something about: the massive cuts in housing benefit for young people; poor quality work, that is low paid and insecure; problems with tenure security; lack of suitable affordable housing for rent.

Finally, as a social scientist, I think we have a duty to produce rigorous evidence, particularly when it might be used to inform public policy. Yes, we do not know nearly enough about the experience of LGBT+ people at all, let alone youth homelessness. But we should present statistics such as the quarter with suitable caveats – that we simply do not know, in this case.

(1) I am, very badly, using "trans-" here to cover a multitude of sins - the sins being mine. I'm using this term to cover people who identify as transgender or non-binary, and also people who identify as queer. I know this is wrong, and I know this is a lazy shorthand, but I talk more about definitional issues later on, so please let me off. 

(2) So, the key thing here is “priority need”. Everywhere but Scotland, a local housing authority only owes you a duty of housing under legislation if you have “priority need” – basically four reasons: you are pregnant or a parent or guardian with children; you are disabled, ill or have mental health problems; you are a victim of domestic violence; you have been made homeless by fire, flood or disaster. The first one of these obviously commonly excludes LGBT+ people. Something else to add here is that you also need to a “local connection” to the area. This might indirectly discriminate against LGBT+ people who leave small towns to be with LGBT+ communities in larger cities. 

Lady training

BEFORE YOU ALL SHOOT ME, THE TITLE OF THIS BLOG IS AN IRONIC PUN.* PLEASE READ ON.

The Athena SWAN truck rolls-on. Along with colleagues, I'm co-leading our Faculty application for a Silver Award that is due to be submitted next April. If we are awarded it, we might be the first social science department to have such an award, which we will be very proud of, but will also be in the fullest knowledge that there will still be a lot of work to do to make my Faculty a more inclusive place.

Anyway, why the title - well, a criticism I have heard of Athena SWAN action plans has been that they use Aurora Leadership Training as a solution to everything. Most Athena SWAN gender audits correctly identify stuff we already know, but put concrete numbers on it: women are under-represented at higher grades in universities, are much less likely to apply for promotion and are also less likely to get it when they do apply.

The logic of leadership training as an action is that, firstly, the role descriptors for academics at Senior Lecturer and Professorial level include lots of leadership stuff - you have to have demonstrated you have done this to get the promotion. Secondly, the training is also predicated on improving the assertiveness of women in actually doing things like going for promotion in the first place. This is all very laudable, and I am sure evidence exists that it makes a difference.

Yet it troubles me. I apply my policy analysis brain to it, specifically work on problem definition and causal stories, and note that this presents women themselves as the problem in their own advancement. If women were more like men in their leadership and assertiveness, then they would do better within patriarchal bureaucracies. The only "solution" applied to men is often unconscious bias training. But, as a colleague pointed out, it's great knowing you've got unconscious bias, but it's very difficult to do much about it.

This got me thinking as to what else you might do, more systematically and structurally, to tackle such problems: blinding advancement and promotions processes, for example. The fact many women are sent on the Aurora training also led me to consider whether I needed leadership training - I've suddenly found myself, as a mid-career-academic (gulp) with a lot of leadership roles, including around equality and diversity. I noted that the Leadership Foundation in Higher Education do such a course - Transition to Leadership.**

The logic I've now followed is that maybe this is a bit of the answer: we need inclusive leadership. having an interest in issues of gender rights in higher education I have specifically trained myself and changed my behaviour in the following small ways:

• I make sure I am not the first person to ask a question in a Q&A session and will wait a long time before doing so to provide more space to women (I also sometimes keep a gender count of the questionners on Twitter);
• I put my hand up to ask to speak in meetings;
• I try to not speak over people, or raise my voice or be too assertive;
• I call-out Mrs Triggs moments when I see them, and call myself out on it when I do it;
• I have refused to speak on an all-male panels;
• I've become very active in Athena SWAN processes and encourage other men to do the same as feminist allies.

This has not come naturally. I've been brought-up a man with the confidence that this is my world. I have all this in-built behaviour that was given to me by patriarchal society and conditioning. I know I'm not perfect in my behaviour either, but I do my best. I'd hope as I develop as a leader then the sorts of inclusive practices I do would grow in number. 

The sort of behaviour change I'm describing here could be delivered through wider leadership training - perhaps the Transition to Leadership course does do this; it's not clear from the website. In sum, it seems an inclusive leadership training course for men would actually place the responsibility for sorting out the problem where it lies - on men who recreate the structures of patriarchy in their everyday actions. This seems a much better way of delivering the outcomes we want than blaming women from the structural inequalities they face. 

*or at least it's trying to be,
** this was after a bit of internal "oh isn't it so awful to to be a man" grumbling about the fact I couldn't access the Aurora programme.

Thinking about evaluation

The project I'm PI on at the moment comes to an end in a fortnight's time. It's been all about evaluation. Wrapping it up, writing and due to a couple of other things, I've been thinking a lot about evaluation. 

The first thing that made me think, a lot, was this story from the BBC - "University study says city's 'Triple P' parenting scheme 'a failure'". Two things I find most interesting are firstly that the evaluation did find triple-p was a failure (more of that later) and secondly the reaction from the partners who commissioned the evaluation. The partners, particularly the Health Board, immediately dismissed the evaluation it seems. I would love to have been studying the whole process from the outside because I'm left with a number of questions:

• Were the partners ready and willing to hear results that were negative?
• How was the evaluation commissioned? And what project oversight was there as it ran? (why wasn't this foreseen?)
• How did the evaluation team work? Did they communicate interim findings?
• Do the partners have a learning culture where they are ready to reflect on failure, develop and move on?
• Why did they spend money commissioning an evaluation and then dismiss the results in this way? Is this an efficient use of limited resources?

Obviously, I've neither read the evaluation, or been part of this process, so these will have to be left as questions. However, I find it interesting that the Health Board are quoted as saying: "The result is an incomplete evaluation based on very limited data and conclusions that do not stand up to scrutiny" which, to me, does not suggest a learning culture at all; it suggests a culture where if you're criticised the first thing you attempt to do is undermine your critics. 

I wonder if a weakness here was the lack of a developmental approach to evaluation overall by all parties. The project I'm leading has fallen into using developmental evaluation - it's essentially just a process of testing things through a process and then stepping back and reflecting on why the worked or did not, and moving forward. It aims to create a learning context within partnerships. 

The second thing that made me reflect on evaluation was a bit of developmental evaluation happening in transport in Edinburgh. For a year, the Council have made George Street a one-way street for vehicles and made the other side of carriageway a two-way segregated cycle way with some huts outside restaurants for the smokers and people foolish enough to want to eat outside in Scottish weather.

I love the George Street cycle path. I can cycle at the speed I want to go, rather than the speed determined by being chased by a Wheeled-Black-Box-Of-Death (taxi). It has some teething issues - for practical reasons, as it's an experiment it swaps side at Frederick Street. You have to follow the path through, something which I've always found very easy. The traffic lights at Hanover Street take an age to change, but they do for everyone. The exit and egress could be a lot better - it's an island of very good cycling provision in and amongst a load of guff though, so at the moment there is nothing to connect it to. In it's pragmatism it reminds me a lot of the Danish and German cycling infrastructure that I've seen, rather than the Dutch. It's far from perfect, but it keeps you a lot safer and it's more pleasant than the road before. 

But what I like most is it is an experiment - the Council are being very open about this. They are actively seeking responses from people who use it. Already they've put in some temporary bollards to stop idiots driving down it. So far, they're doing exactly what the Triple-P parenting folk weren't - listening to criticism and adjusting things as they go along, if they can. I encourage all critiques of it (and seemingly by a controversial twitter exchange there are many) to contact the Council. The last thing I want to happen is for the Council to conclude "well, everyone thinks this is rubbish, so we might as well give up". Let's celebrate some small successes where they've happened and we'll get more and it will be better. And long may Edinburgh's experimental spirit continue. If you want to feedback, email citycentre.vision at edinburgh.gov.uk.

Which doesn't bring me back to Triple-P, but I want to add this. I'm glad the evaluation of Triple-P was so critical. It's been very popular on the Scottish policy scene along with the Family-Nurse-Partnership (FNP). These are imported policy-initiatives that are all about "early intervention" which in Scotland is very much aligned to reducing the long term "burden" on the government from "failure". It's always troubled me that these initiatives can, and do, easily fall back on cultural explanations for poverty, without setting themselves in the broader context of a very economically unequal country, where the biggest cause of poverty is low income. Also, previous evaluations (as I've mentioned on this blog before) like the first incarnation of the FNP, Glasgow's "Starting Well" programme have been similarly critical. Often it is context that makes these interventions successful, as the core of realist evaluation make clear. Finally, as the evaluations of New Start (the inspiration for Sure Start) showed, and a finding repeated by a controversial recent study by the Institute for Education and Institute for Fiscal Studies on childcare showed, the benefits of these early intervention schemes get eroded fairly quickly by the daily grind of poverty and the children end up back where they started.

I don't want to dismiss these schemes completely out-of-hand. I'm currently reading the excellent Good Times, Bad Times by John Hills (BUY THIS BOOK) and he makes the point that the UK state does some of the greatest redistribution of any state in the world; the trouble is the society going into it is also the most unequal in the world, so the society we get out at the other end is very unequal. This suggests, to me, that there is something in Ed Milliband's "predistribution" - if we can increase skills, productivity and pay in the lower end of the labour market then we are probably going to achieve a lot more than relying on the state to redistribute income and wealth. And programmes such as Triple-P and a well-funded health visitor service (as the FNP should actually be) could be part of a programme of constant, tailored, service delivery to support the most vulnerable and poorest in society. Kind of what I argue for in neighbourhood policy.

Gender and HE

I had to make a very difficult decision recently. In the summer I’d agreed to speak at an event organised by a professional body. I said yes and confirmed things as the date was approaching. With a month to go I had a little niggle at the back of my mind. A movement has started among feminist men where they refuse to take part in panels at conferences and similar events where all the panellists are men. The first I read of this idea, I recall, was from feminist women suggesting men should do it. My niggle was that this event was an all-male panel. I checked the agenda and I was right so I decided, with a month to go, to leave the organisers in the lurch and pull-out suggesting they get a woman to speak instead. In doing so I made it very clear that I was happy to help them find a woman speaker (I know of many more knowledgeable women in Scotland who could speak on the topic) and if they were completely left in the lurch I would speak, but would mention the gender balance issue in my talk. It was a very difficult decision to make and I asked around quite widely, posting my suggested letter on Facebook. There in particular I was overwhelmed with the positive support from female friends from all walks of life who agreed that I was doing the right thing for the right reasons.

A couple of them rightly pointed out that maybe they had asked women and the women couldn’t make it. It turns out, when I got the reply, that this was the case. This made me feel a bit bad, but I’ve stuck to me guns because, firstly I had agreed to help them find a suitably qualified woman and secondly because, as a feminist scientist pointed out in something I read once, that, yes, it might be more difficult to get a woman to speak because they might have care responsibilities (you may have to pay for their care for the day), or be less confident because of societal gender norms, but that means you should just try harder, not give up and choose men.

Someone on Facebook suggested that it should be “a person replaces another person”. I really wish this was the case and that I didn’t care this much. I wouldn’t care as much if, when you took a survey of all panels in world and found out that on average, allowing for people being ill or dates clashing, that there was equal gender representation. But we know this is not the case for a vast number of reasons: women cannot find the time to present because of competing responsibilities often care and family; women feel more nervous in social roles such as public speaking because of pre-existing gender norms; just the other day I read a study that showed women academics are more likely to select shorter speaking engagements and spoke for a shorter amount of time at conferences; and finally because of unquestioned bias among conference organisers. And this would just be equal representation across the piece; the really big challenge is to ensure a panel of nurses is not all women and a panel of engineers is not all men. Which I shall return to…

This has given me an awful lot to think about and crystallised a lot of thoughts I’ve been having recently about patriarchy, inequality, and employment in higher education.

Internalising patriarchy

The first thing that struck me was my emotional reaction to the whole situation. I found it extremely difficult to send the original email – I felt very guilty and did think “am I just causing a fuss about nothing”. I also cried with the positive response from my female friends. This really was a smack-in-your-face striking example for me of the way I have internalised patriarchal oppression. What I was doing was one small, practical act to challenge something that was clearly unfair. Having breasts and a vagina does not stop you speaking about the topic I was invited to talk about. There was absolutely no reason why the panel could not have had better gender balance. And yet I felt guilt, as though I was doing something horribly wrong, about pointing this out and imposing a minor imposition on the event organisers.

This also raised in me a bit of a thought that what is the point of my small protest? Chances are the space will actually be taken by a man. But maybe the organisers will ensure in future that panels are more gender balanced. Or consider saying at the start of a conference with an all-male panel that they apologise for the gender imbalance and they will be working to rectify it in future. Hopefully more small acts like mine will do a bit to start challenging structural inequalities in society?

I am superman

The second thing I dwelt on was male grand-standing. This came up in a twitter conversation recently which got nowhere because, well, twitter. Basically, the point being made was that just like when men do gender work like housework they expect massive praise for it, when men make feminist statements or stands they also expect enormous praise for it. I am completely guilty of this in this case. But to write my way through this as an argument I want to explain my feminist journey. My mum gave up work for about six years when my older brother and I were born which really held back her career. I remember at about the age of four I made a sexist comment along the lines of “women can’t do x” and she pulled me up on it and explained mummies can do these things. It obviously stuck with me. As a teenager, modelling myself on Adrian Mole, I read my way through the Female Eunuch after watching Germaine Greer on Late Night Review on BBC 2 and then dragged my mum and a friend along to hear her do a public lecture at Bradford University. I then read the Whole Woman. My feminism then lay fallow until the end of my doctoral studies and has been reawakened by the emergence of third wave feminism over the last decade. My stance now, informed by radical feminism, is that patriarchy is a system that creates false binary gender divisions in society and this impacts on everyone and has an enormous negative impact on women. Ultimately, in my feminism I want a society where the only time sex matters is when we’re talking about things to do with breasts, vaginas and penises.  The fact I feel I have to act “manly” in some situations, and the vast numerous petty oppressions of women I see all the bloody time just because they are women, means we are no way near attaining this.

So, I’m a “victim” of patriarchy because it shapes what I think my manliness should be like. I’m also a “victim” of patriarchy (boohoo, poor me) because I can’t help but grandstand when I do good things. Society tells me, as a man, that when I do a good thing I should brag about it and bragging about it will make me feel better and reinforce my sense of superiority in society. I don’t do it to downplay the centuries of activism by oppressed women, and I definitely don’t want to overshadow that. But I want to write about it because I feel bloody passionate about it. I want to live in a better society where gender ceases to matter. So I will openly shout out about the things I do to further that, mainly in the hope that other men will do the same. As I suggested above, hopefully if enough men put the interests of women first and refuse to be on all male panels, then we’ll see fewer all male panels.

And higher education

I’ve written on here before about the working hours culture of academia here and here. I’m enormously critical of the idea that you’re only a good academic and you’re only working well when you’re leaving the office at 9pm and working 60+ hours a week. But here I want to go a bit further and write out something I say quite openly if you’ve ever heard me rant speak about the subject in person. The working hours culture in higher education is misogynistic. I’m using this stronger word rather than sexist because I truly see it as an implicit loathing of women. In the society we have the expectation of working responsibilities on academics has to negatively impact on women more than men.

What is more is this model is predicated on a very male model of academic labour practices – basically the male professor going off around the world leaving a dutiful wife to look after the home and bring up the kids and generally deal with the emotional fallout of this family member never being there. This hit me hard, again, reading a report of a research project I’m involved with which is being launched next Tuesday in which a woman spoke of the career sacrifices she had made just so she could be with her family. Paul Cairney has written brilliantly in the past as well. I know of male colleagues who have had similar career sacrifices because they actually wanted to be part of the process of raising their children.

This post so far is horribly self-reflexive and naval gazing, and I’m afraid it’s not going to get much better. Because, what’s struck me recently, is that because I am a childless gay man I am basically, the male-professor of yore. I have no care responsibilities so I have incredible freedom over my time and can commit myself to my work in a way other people cannot. Ironically, whereas in many domains my sexual orientation might be a barrier to advancement in a career, in academia I have to be very open and honest and acknowledge that it benefits me.

But as I’ve stated before, I take the choice not to be such as selfish bastard – I take time to be with my partner who’s not an academic and also a big chunk of time training as part of my real passion of swimming (current freestyle PBs: 25m 13.5; 50m 31; 100m 1:07.5; 200m 2:42; 800m 11:08) because it keeps me sane, healthy and I prefer it to a lot of work.

Ultimately, as well it’s because I recognise the big structural issue in academia, at least in the UK, is that there is more work than there is people to do it. The employers make millions out of the overworked, tired academics, doing tasks in what should be their time, because of that wonderful phrase in our contracts “hours will be those required to fulfill the duties of the post”.

And I’m angry about this, and we should all be angry about this. We should also be angry that this means that academia is ablist as well. So, to bring it back to the start of the post and me pulling out of the panel, I have to use the utterly overused phrase of Ghandi – be the change you want to see in the world. I want to see a world with fewer all-male panels, where women are given opportunities to excel. I want to work in a sector where you can succeed by working 38 hours a week not 60. In terms of inequalities this involves people who are in privileged positions – and I have enough of them – to give up these privileges. The way I always think of this is when there are organisational discussions about the lack of women in senior roles, I always ask “what are you doing to ensure men are in low paid administrative roles?”. The UK population is roughly 50/50 male and female, therefore if we are to have equal gender representation in senior roles, then we must have equal representation in junior roles. And this is a much more difficult proposition but one that must happen. Stepping down from all-male panels is a small step in this direction, I feel. 

And I recognise (as hopefully you will) that I have privilege, so I do welcome feminist feedback from women on this. 

It’s not what you know but how you know it

I’ve (literally) just finished* my evidence review for the JRF on poverty and social networks that I’ve blogged about here, here and here and sent it off for their feedback (which I’ve just received some of, all generally quite positive *phew*). Because it’s still drafty, I’m not going to release it to the world for a while yet, but I did want to blog about the methodological thoughts it’s led me to have, and this links to the title of the post. The phrase “it’s not what you know but who you know” really demonstrates the “folk” interest in the links between social networks and socio-economic mobility. However, now I’ve read a load of this evidence, methodologically, it actually seems to be more about how you know about these social networks. This is for two specific reasons: methodology, methods and disciplinary contexts; and bigger epistemological experiences about experience and how this is “collected” by the research process.

On the first point, the review was the first time in a while to read a good chunk of North American social science. I’ve read about the “methods wars” between qualitative and quantitative social science in America, and the feeling that the latter had won; I’d also listened to American delegates at the International Interpretive Policy Analysis conference bemoan the dominance of the rational actor model and quantitative methods. But I’d really not realised how dominant quants where. Successive were based on big datasets, with endless methodology sections explaining how survey instruments were used, with big scary equations that, as a qualitative researcher, I didn’t have a clue about. What struck me about them was they usually ended with, firstly, a lot of uncertainty about their findings and secondly a lot of unanswered questions. So, for example, some regression models would support theories, others would contradict them; when you controlled for different factors the overall conclusion was “meh”. And the unanswered questions didn’t help – invariably there would be the conclusion “but we cannot understand causation here”.

Which brings me to one of my favourite methodology books I’ve read for a long time, Mike Savage’s Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940. It’s essentially a history of social science methods in the UK from 1940 and it’s the historical approach that I love. To go back to the title of this whole blog – urbanity and history – that I chose three years ago, it’s always struck me how social scientists don’t get history, or even have much of a sensitivity to time. Savage sort of makes this point – the technocratic sociology that emerged in the 1950s was a study of the now. I often find it funny – and I’m guilty of doing this myself – how the strictures of social science writing mean that people will present evidence that is decades old in such a way as to suggest its contemporary, without any reflection on how the social world might have changed since then, and reflexively, how that knowledge has since changed the world that is now the object of study. The presumption is the knowledge is scientific and presented in the linear, “standing on the shoulder of giants” way. What I love about Savage’s book is it highlights the social context where the methods of modern British sociology/social science, particularly the survey and semi-structured interview, emerged from.

So, why does this all matter, well for me it brings us onto the second bigger epistemological question. The best way to talk about this is how it emerged in the evidence review itself. In terms of that folk idea of “it’s not what you know, but who you know” is the idea that if poorer people know wealthier people then they will do better in life. It also leads to the more negative idea, which I’m deeply uncomfortable with for its use in “underclass” discourses, of “cultures” of poverty – that experiencing poverty around others in the same situation lessens your chances of leaving poverty because you behave like them and this excludes you from wider society and opportunities. A lot of this sort of theorisation lies behind the “neighbourhood effects” literature I read for the evidence review; I discussed the problems with this in this blog post. However, I want to go back to a striking theme running through the neighbourhood effects literature: basically, most quantitative studies that try and find a neighbourhood effect either find a very small impact, or none at all, or the data is too messy to form consistent conclusions. Qualitative studies tend to find there is an impact, people recognise it when they work or live in the neighbourhoods. This is a contrast discussed in a very well-title article by Atkinson and Kintrea – Opportunity and despair it’s all in there (£) – and in the critique of neighbourhood effects by Tom Slater (who critiques the distance of the quants researchers from their research subjects).

In this quants study of neighbourhood effects in Scotland, van Ham and Manley suggest that it might be down to the geography that we measure neighbourhood effects on. Usually we have to do statistical analysis at the level of census super outputs areas or datazones, or similar administrative boundaries that have quite large populations (1000+). Like any “contagion”, if neighbourhood effects are diluted among a large population then they will have less of an impact. Van Ham and Manley suggest that we might need geographies of just a few hundred people to find a neighbourhood effect. However, this leads me to question (prompted by a point someone made at a Poverty Alliance panel in Glasgow on Friday 28 February) whether this then is a neighbourhood effect – surely if the geography becomes really small then we’re talking about a sociological or socio-psychological impact; residence is just by-the-by as the social network could be anywhere? All points raised in the quants neighbourhood effects literature.

However, I think we are talking about a bigger epistemological point here that we need to recognise fully and debate and play with. For example, this study for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found no quantitative neighbourhood effect on young people’s employment opportunities from postcode discrimination, a neighbourhood effect, whereas this qualitative study also for the JRF, found that young people who live in deprived neighbourhoods that are distant from local labour markets and geographically isolated have reduced geographical horizons for their job search strategies, a neighbourhood effect. These different findings, I think, can only be explained by differences is how we know, no what we know. These are different experiences of young people in deprived neighbourhoods understood in different ways.

As a qualitative researcher I use my research to illuminate how socio-structural factors – particularly socio-economic inequality and status – have an impact on people’s lives. However, a problem for me is that a broader focus on “lived experience” of conditions such as poverty can easily lapse into the personal and focus on individual deficiencies or strengths, effectively blaming the poor, rather than emphasising the socio-structural forces that limit people’s opportunities and psychological reactions in any given context. This is a criticism that is levelled quite often at neighbourhood effects researchers, but most I know put the socio-structural first and want to understand neighbourhood effects as something that makes the situation that much worse. At its most problematic though, this individualising of experience and “witnessing” of negative experiences does lead into the sort of nonsense the Centre for Social Justice come up with – the production of ignorance – and deflects us from an emphasis on socio-structural causes. This is very apparent with the recent debate in the UK on changing the definition of child poverty and the conflation of cause and impact in the proposed measure (as well as initially coming up with something that is unmeasurable). I'm also always left with a nagging feeling that without the devolution of taxation and welfare matters to the Scottish Parliament and Government, policy-makers up here falls way to easily onto person-blaming, behavioural policy answers in areas like public health and social work, rather than the more obvious fact that if a few people had a lot less income and wealth and a lot of people had a little more, then a lot of problems we have would be far less severe. We get away with this victim-blaming because we can frame it in our lovely, fluffly, Scottish social democratic discourse. 

And I’ve just realised I’ve written myself into a corner. What am I saying? It seems that a lot of methodological choices in the social sciences are actually deeply circumscribed by the disciplinary and cultural context you find yourself in. If I was in the US my career would’ve probably have done nowhere because of my aversion and inability to wrangle big datasets and produce equations that are penis extensions. However, in the UK, with a methodological pluralism that welcomes qualitative research at the ethnographic end, I need to be careful that my research does highlight the structural, and doesn’t presume that cultural changes are all that are needed in society to produce more positive outcomes. 

* I finished the review on Thursday 27th, started writing this on Friday 28th and then got way-laid by a gin and tonic. I have now finished writing it.

Socio-economic inequality, poverty and place

This blogpost on elearning made me giggle this afternoon. And it's rather apposite as in this post I'm sharing some of my teaching materials and was wondering how to frame them - as "MOOCish" "SPOCish"...None of that; it's just a set of notes.

My postgrad courses are delivered as distance learning and so I spent a big chunk of my first year in the job writing extensive notes of rather dubious quality. Every year I go back to them to update and refresh them (this year I discovered a large section of text I left last year that just said "blah blah blah blah blah"). Every year, rather than cringe, I'm pleasantly surprised with how not-atrocious they are. So, here you go, the first tranche I'm willing to make more public - my notes on socio-economic inequality, poverty and place. All errors and omissions mine and I'm happy to accept that. This covers two lectures I deliver as part of a wider course called Social Sustainability. Once you've read them, if you pay us a lot of money, you can do the assessment and get the credit as part of one of our postgraduate programmes.

/edit: and given the first tranche of notes seemed to have been welcomed, here's another set of notes, this time on "policy responses" i.e. regeneration

Emerging thoughts on social networks, place and poverty

I’ve been very fortunate to have been awarded a research project by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, as part of their anti-poverty strategy, to investigate the evidence around social networks and poverty. In our expression of interest we stated our aims as:

• Review recent international evidence (defined as from the last five years) on the links between social capital and place and household outcomes, particularly in deprived neighbourhoods;
• Review recent UK statistical and international evidence on the links between equalities characteristics, place and social capital to provide a more nuanced account of the intersection between social capital, neighbourhood and community, and other individual characteristics and their impact on life chances.
• Review recent evidence from grey literature and evaluations on the success of policy interventions in developing social capital to alleviate or tackle poverty;
• Review recent evidence on the capacity of online social networking to develop social capital and any specific barriers to digital inclusion people experiencing poverty may have.

I’ve been working on the first and third aims and just thought I’d write-out my ideas so far to clear my head. 

The first bullet point is the crux of the work for me as, being a planner, I’m approaching this from a spatial perspective. So I’m particularly interested as to whether there is a neighbourhood effect on social networks for people experiencing poverty. To explain, a neighbourhood effect, is the effect that living around other people the same, or different, has on an individual’s outcomes. To sum it up even more simply, it’s the theory that it is worse to be poor in a poor neighbourhood than in a mixed neighbourhood, because characteristics of that neighbourhood mean your experience of poverty will be worse, and your chances of leaving poverty will be lowered.

This is a very controversial view, especially because it toes the line on the questionable “cultures of poverty” and underclass arguments that emerged into UK policy discourses with Charles Murray’s work in the 1990s. Tom Slater has written a strident critique of the work here, highlighting how the focus should really be on why do people experiencing poverty ending living in deprived neighbourhoods that are ill-served by markets and public services. I and all the other neighbourhood effects scholars I know would broadly agree with this too, but there’s still something about the neighbourhood that has to be of interest. It’s very telling that the JRF themselves use this stock photo to represent poverty, even though everyone knows the majority of poor people don’t live in poor neighbourhoods.

Poverty?

This has become particularly clear with a literature search I’ve carried out. I was only focusing on literature in the last five years, but searched Web of Knowledge for combinations of “social capital”, “social networks”, “poverty” and “low income”. It was striking how the vast majority of the results focused on communities of propinquity – the neighbourhood or similar spatial units. The other striking thing was how the vast majority (I’d say 80%) of the studies focused on the links between social networks and poor health and wellbeing. These were discounted from our review as the outcome the studies tended to mention was health and wellbeing, not poverty or social networks (although, of course, causation is a complex web here).

So, what do I know now I’ve done quite a bit of reading? Well, I found George Galster’s seven possible pathways of neighbourhood effects to be useful to start as a theoretical framework and have narrowed this down to three possible pathways by which place, poverty and social networks might be linked:

•           Socialisation – norms and role models, essentially.
•           Threshold socialisation – that norms and thresholds have to reach a certain level to have an impact
•           Social networks – direct social contact may have an impact on opportunities to get on, or improve a neighbourhood.

I’ve included the first two, which are very closely linked, because they kept coming up in the research. It’s mainly because it’s very difficult to measure social networks in quantitative neighbourhood effects studies because of lack of data, so you end up researching social norms, really. But in a number of papers a link is made between social norms and sociability. For example, this interesting Dutch paper highlights how parents of children in deprived neighbourhoods cut their children off from local social networks to protect them from negative socialisation.

The socialisation stuff is also useful because of this bit of logic. The negative socialisation thesis, even though there is scant and mixed evidence for it, is used by policy-makers to justify “mixed communities” policies; basically knock down deprived neighbourhoods and introduce tenure mix. It makes your indicators look good, just ask Glasgow.

Now, the thing here is homophilly – not sure how you pronounce it, but it reads like a word meaning someone who really likes Philadelphia. Basically the theory that people like to be around, and socialise, with people like themselves. And it looks like it’s true. So no matter if you mix poor people with wealthier people, chances are they are not going to meet and talk to one another, except maybe at the school gate. There’s also the pragmatic reality of modern neighbourliness; as one respondent quoted in this research said:

“it has taken us two and a half years to get to know our neighbours . . . and we know our neighbour across the driveway very well because he is not very nice.”

So, even if we live around people and know them, it’s not as if we’ll necessarily get along anyway. Also coming up in the literature a lot is the fact that support networks in deprived neighbourhoods are vital for helping people get-by, particularly within kin. People will have smaller networks, but they will be able to rely on them less.

All-in-all, however, I’m already moving to a view that focusing on social networks within an anti-poverty strategy is not really worthwhile, as there’s plenty bigger fish to fry, particularly around maximising income. But we'll see. Still got a lot more to read...

Teaching deindustrialisation

All our postgraduate courses are delivered as distance learning, so I've had to write a full set of notes for them. These are generally in a chatty textbook style and are available to on-campus students to support the lectures as well. I intersperse the notes with examples from practice and other bits to break the flow of text. I thought I'd blog an addition I just made to the notes for Social Sustainability which I'm teaching next semester. Hopefully you'll see why.

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Personal stories or history?

When I teach issues that touch on deindustrialisation I am actually speaking from personal experience. I was born in 1982, just a the UK was in the major recession of the early 1980s and as the industrial regions of the UK descended into full-on deindustrialisation. The trouble is, I look around the classroom and see predominantly young people looking back at me and presume you must know the same. I’ve come to realise from the blank looks staring back at me that you’re all a lot younger than I think (some of you won’t have been born when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister) and that a lot of you are not from the UK. Those of you who are younger will have really just known about our current recession and economic difficulties since 2008. Those of you from outside the UK might not have a clue what I’m talking about at all.

To give an idea of the extent of the change, in my own doctoral research, an officer from a local authority in the west of Scotland described the deindustrialisation as a “psychic shock”. In my own home town I watched very large mills, such as Listers Mill up the road from my house in the city of Bradford, empty out and eventually close. This was also as much about economic restructuring. Bradford was known for its woollen industry. Predominantly it made worsted, a very fine cloth used for suits. In 1994 the Bradford woollen industry produced more miles of cloth than it had ever done in its history, but this was at a small number of very large mills with electric machinery employing very few people.

There is a club in the centre of Bradford called the 1 in 12. It was so named because that was the unemployment rate in the city when it was opened in the mid-1980s. In 1984 the UKs unemployment rate reached its highest ever recorded level of 12%. It’s easy now to think this isn’t that bad. Even during the long boom from 1994 – 2007, unemployment was 4%.  But the unemployment of the 1980s was set against a context where from 1945 to 1976 governments had focused on reducing unemployment. If unemployment started nudging towards one million people then the government would intervene to keep the economy going. The memories of the Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s haunted the political and social memory. The 1980s changed this.

The whole identity of places was also closely tied to the industries that declined, both in employment and output. Bradford was known as “Worstedopolis”, Sheffield made steel, Manchester was cotton, Glasgow shipbuilding, Dundee the three Js of jam, jute and journalism. As these industries declined, so did the identity and raison d’etre of the towns and cities.

This was evoked in popular culture. One of the most striking portrayals was Yozzer Hughe’s, an unemployed Liverpudlian dockworker in the TV drama Boys from the Black Stuff, with his now famous catchphrase “gizza job”.

http://youtu.be/0CRXnO9v0sA

The 1996 film Brassed Off and the 1997 film The Full Monty both evoked the destitution and emotional destruction wrought by these processes of deindustrialisation particularly on male working class identity.

http://youtu.be/lKx3MUqzCcQ

http://youtu.be/nA3W36JVnRc

This was also picked up in music. Listen to “Ghost Town” by the Specials on the Social Sustainability playlist and this excellent BBC radio documentary The People’s Playlist.