This post is not about #IndyRef

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Academic wiriting - the theory paper

I wrote a theory paper and it got published. I thought I’d blog about the process because it’s been, well, interesting. To save you reading the navel-gazing below, I thought I’d start off with my top-tips for writing a theory paper:

• Don’t. Well, don’t do it while you’re a busy ECR, struggling to find the time to read and write. Do write one while you’re in the midst of your doctoral literature review or when you’ve secured that research professorship;
• Make sure the theory you’re writing about has a home in a journal.

The challenge that’s always given to academic is “can you sum up your research in a sentence". So, let’s see if I can do this with this paper. Basically it argues, you cannot hope to ever create a Habermasian public sphere in short moments of community engagement, but if you look over the longer term, especially in the built environment, you will see all the evidence of Habermasian communicative action at work.

It looks neat when written like this and other academics have expressed interest in the insights of the paper. But I’m really not happy with it. I’ll start by just telling the story of the paper. Doing my doctoral fieldwork I realised that a lot of the critical insights in my field (loosely, political science, policy analysis, urban geography, urban planning) particularly those from a Foucauldian perspective did not explain what I was observing. Whereas what I knew of Habermas’ work and his theorisation of communicative action and the public sphere did. When I read Bernstein’s Between Objectivism and Relativism I was even more sure of this view. So, Habermas became the theoretical hook for my thesis. My external examiner, Dvora Yanow, said this was the first she knew of Habermas work being applied in this way and that I should publish.

So, I finished my doctorate and like all good scholars got a publication plan sorted (three papers so far, plus one published during my phd and one on its way, possibly) and one of these was this theory paper. The trouble I had was which body of theory did it speak to? I am happily eclectic in my academic inspiration. I presented a draft of the paper at the International Interpretive Policy Analysis conference in Cardiff in 2011 and got positive feedback. I could have submitted it to that conference’s journal, Critical Policy Studies, but I already had a paper in the works for them. And it really wasn’t going to fit into any of the other political science journals I knew of.

A colleague and friend, Janice Barry, had just had a paper accepted for Planning Theory and spoke positively of the process. My paper was about planning, sort of (it was about policy and the built environment) so I thought I’d give it whirl. It needed a home. The experience with the journal was brilliant. If you’re reading this and you have a planning theory article to write, I would strongly recommend you submit here. It went through two revisions. All three reviewers asked for major changes on the first draft, but all provided 1-2 sides of A4 comments on making the paper better and references for further literature I should read (very different from this). It just needed a bit more tweaking after the second reviewers. But what with other work commitments these revisions took a long time. Eventually I had to apologetically email the editor and give myself a deadline for the first set of revisions.

Why aren’t I happy? The planning literature it fits into is the work on collaborative planning from theorists like Healey, Inness and Booher and Quick and Feldman. In fact, if you look at their work and compare it to Habermas’ theoretical work, it’s just a very small extension of this work into new empirical work. However, the work the reviewers wanted me to read was the critique of collaborative planning from an agonist perspective. This I did and reading this I felt that these theorists constructed collaborative planning as a straw man and then knocked it down with the messy realities of the real World. I now had to reconstruct the literature review section to construct a straw man of collaborative planning, to knock it down with agonist planning, to then knock this down with my empirical work. Being less than comfortable with the planning literature I was wading in, I did feel like my straw men were more stick men than anything out of the Wickerman. The paper has found a home in planning theory, but I’m pretty sure it will remain unread in the field.Or, as my colleague suggested this morning, will get cited a lot because it's so bad.

The other reason I don’t like it is I just don’t think it reads very well. It reads like it took over a year to get to the state it is now in. It reads as though I am unsure of the argument I’m making. It reads like three articles shoved together with a vague introduction and conclusion attached. In sum, it’s not a substantive contribution to theoretical work in urban planning.Frankly, it could come from the Department of Omnishambles.

But it’s out there and I’m just going to write this blog post about it and then stop beating myself up. If I ever get that research professorship I’ll have time to digest a lot more literature again and write a proper theory paper. Until then, I’m going to stick to empirical work. I don't want to dishearten other ECRs too much - if you feel you have a theory paper in you, do write. I'd give my colleague Kim McKee's paper on Post-Foucauldian Governmentality as a brilliant example of an excellent theory paper where an ECR has made their mark in the field. But, if you have a bit of an odd career trajectory like me, or you're struggling with it, I would advise you to tread carefully.