Public Engagement and Social Science 9781447306870

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Public engagement and social science

Edited by Stella Maile and David Griffiths

PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT AND SOCIAL SCIENCE Edited by Stella Maile and David Griffiths

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Policy Press North American office: University of Bristol Policy Press 6th Floor c/o The University of Chicago Press Howard House 1427 East 60th Street Queen’s Avenue Chicago, IL 60637, USA Clifton t: +1 773 702 7700 Bristol BS8 1SD f: +1 773 702 9756 UK [email protected] Tel +44 (0)117 331 5020 www.press.uchicago.edu Fax +44 (0)117 331 5367 [email protected] www.policypress.co.uk © Policy Press 2014 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 978 1 44730 686 3 hardcover The right of Stella Maile and David Griffiths to be identified as editors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of Policy Press. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the editors and contributors and not of the University of Bristol or Policy Press. The University of Bristol and Policy Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Policy Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design by Policy Press Front cover image: www.alamy.com Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Policy Press uses environmentally responsible print partners

Contents Acknowledgements v List of contributors vi Introduction vii Stella Maile and David Griffiths Part One: The meaning of public engagement Introduction to Part One Stella Maile and David Griffiths one Café scientifique and the art of engaging publics Stella Maile and David Griffiths two Social Science in the City™: reflections on public engagement Stella Maile

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Part Two: Public engagement in practice Introduction to Part Two 47 Stella Maile and David Griffiths three ‘Grab and go’: some sociological musings on the 53 2011 ‘disturbances’ Steve Hunt four 1976 – the moral necessity of austerity 69 Matthew Clement five The Occupy movement 83 Samantha Fletcher six ‘Brave new world’: how will the government respond 95 to the social care challenge of an ageing population? Robin Means seven Road wars: contesting paradigms of road safety, public 113 space and well-being Richard Kimberlee eight Restorative justice, community action and public protection 127 Kieran McCartan and Nikki McKenzie nine Chew ’em up or throw ’em up? Disorganised responses 145 to interpersonal(ity) disorder and social disease Christopher Scanlon and John Adlam ten Resilience 159 Paul Hoggett

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Public engagement and social science Part Three: Applying Social Science in the City™ and beyond Introduction to Part Three 175 Stella Maile and David Griffiths eleven Social science and severely troubled children – working in 179 partnership, working in and on relationship Anne-Marie Cummins and Jem Thomas twelve The professional impact of Social Science in the City™ 193 Tansy Clark thirteen Sharing worlds: managing complex community relationships 201 in challenging times Hen Wilkinson fourteen Talking about personal experience and its relationship to 215 social inequality across the generations Amanda Radix fifteen Social research, community engagement and learning 225 through partnerships: a collaborative project Stella Maile, with Grace Aciro, Bethany Addicott, Laylee Arfsarpour, Joe Fitt, Georgia Leonard, Michael Nash and Annabelle Wilson sixteen A student’s reflections on engaging in social science 235 Conclusions: Managing public engagement Stella Maile and David Griffiths

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Index

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Acknowledgements This book draws on the experiences and thinking of the early days of Social Science in the City™ and it would not have happened without the guidance, encouragement and support of Professor Robin Means who was Dean for Research and Knowledge Exchange at the time when our proposal for this book was drawn up. We thank Robin and all those who have contributed their research ideas to public social science debates in venues throughout Bristol, and all contributors to this book. Decisions about whose work to include in an edited collection of this sort are always difficult and in this case based purely on issues of consistency. We would like in particular to acknowledge the contributions and public spiritedness of our colleagues Lita Crociani Windland and Nigel Williams who have been regular supporters of Social Science in the City. We would like to thank the participants in the Lockleaze research on which Chapter Fifteen is based – including Peter Archer, Jennie Bashforth, Sally Gapper, David Griffiths, Joy Langley, Paul Purnell and Alex Wood.The research was supported by Quartet and the University of the West of England’s Better Together Fund, and was generated from talks with Oliver Shirley. Thanks also to Marcus Archer Maile, aged eight at the time, who helped in preparing strawberries and in clearing away tables and to Anne-Marie Cummins for her public-spiritedness. Thanks also to the hard-working women who made decorations, helped serve food and tea, and prepared space for the tea party in a community and church hall. Above all, thanks to all the people who participated in the focus groups and tea-table discussions for their invaluable contribution. There are a whole range of other colleagues who have been fellow travellers in this project, some of whom have moved away from Bristol to embark on new lives and who are too many to name here but we are sure they will know who they are.We would also like to thank Tracey Penberthy as a member of the Social Science in the City, UWE team for her professionalism, efficiency and her tireless and cheerful efforts in maintaining the web-site and offering ideas. It is also important to thank Pippa Stokes and her team for their invaluable administrative support. We would like to thank all those people who we feel are members of Social Science in the City, UWE – those who attend our events and contribute to discussions about the very pressing issues and dilemmas faced in their everyday and professional lives. Without you and your willingness to share your insights and experiences there would be no Social Science in the City. v

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List of contributors Grace Aciro, freelance market researcher/troubleshooter for grassroots and start-up projects Bethany Addicott, market research intern at DJS Research Ltd John Adlam, group psychotherapist and reflective practice and team development consultant, South London and Maudsley Foundation NHS Trust and SWLSTG Mental Health NHS Trust Laylee Afsarpour, freelance youth worker and charity fundraiser Tansy Clark, teacher, voluntary youth worker and PhD student, Bristol Matthew Clement, lecturer in criminology, University of Winchester Anne-Marie Cummins, senior lecturer in sociology and psychosocial studies, University of the West of England Joe Fitt, freelance housing consultant who also works in recruitment Samantha Fletcher, lecturer in sociology, University of Staffordshire David Griffiths, independent social researcher, and associate lecturer for The Open University Paul Hoggett, professor of social policy, University of the West of England, psychoanalytic psychotherapist and member of the Severnside Institute for Psychotherapy Steve Hunt, associate professor in sociology, Department of Health and Social Sciences, University of the West of England Richard Kimberlee, senior research fellow, Department of Health and Social Sciences, University of the West of England Georgia Leonard, community fundraiser and trustee for Brighton and Hove LGBT Switchboard

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List of contributors

Kieran McCartan, associate professor in criminology, Department of Health and Social Sciences, University of the West of England Nikki McKenzie, senior lecturer in criminology, Department of Health and Social Sciences, University of the West of England Stella Maile, convenor of Social Science in the City™, University of the West of England, and senior lecturer in sociology and psychosocial studies Robin Means, professor of health and social care, University of the West of England and president of the British Society of Gerontology Michael Nash, graduate criminology student, University of the West of England Amanda Radix, community development professional and trainer for Community Resolve Christopher Scanlon, consultant psychotherapist, team development consultant, East London NHS Foundation Trust and South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, and psycho-social research fellow at the University of East London and the University of the West of England Jem Thomas, senior research fellow in psycho-social studies at the University of the West of England Hen Wilkinson, director of Community Resolve, Bristol Annabelle Wilson, management graduate at Bristol City Council

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Public engagement and social science

Introduction Stella Maile and David Griffiths

The rationale of the book The main aim of this edited collection is to critically investigate the different ways in which the theory and practice of public engagement can be applied to the social sciences. More specifically, it is based upon a series of café shop talks entitled Social Science in the City™ that have been taking place in Bristol since 2010.The term ‘public engagement’ in its broadest sense refers to a participatory model of consultation and policy implementation that, although relatively recent (the language of public engagement only became widespread in the late 1990s), can be seen as part of the broader process of disseminated governance that took hold in the 1970s, above all, in relation to public sector restructuring. By way of exploring the value of public engagement from a broader social-scientific perspective, a range of substantive topics affecting people in everyday life have been presented to the public. The aim has been to generate debate and to encourage individuals to think about critical social issues encountered in their everyday life, either as professionals or as citizens concerned about the world around them.

The structure of the book Part One of the book, The meaning of public engagement, is a general introduction both to the conceptual issues around public engagement and to the social science café.The introduction sets out the political and social context for taking social science out of the university campus and into a café environment and aims to contextualise the opportunities and challenges of a project based upon the principles of public engagement. Reference is also made in this context to the broader café scientifique movement and its application to the social sciences. The involvement of the different actors in the Social Science in the City project, café owner, academics and participants is outlined. The concept of public engagement as this applies to statutory services, social movements and higher education is outlined and contrasted. What is distinctive about public engagement in higher education as a form of participation and what changes in higher education have prompted the use of public viii

Introduction

engagement as an institutional strategy at a time of rapid policy change? The introduction also outlines the key concepts of public sociology and engaged research.The broader issue of how the social science café as a discursive space facilitated the creation of its particular public(s) is introduced although developed more fully in the conclusion to the book. The remainder of Part One includes reflections on the driving factors behind setting up Social Science in the City and an opportunity to reflect upon the benefits of a partnership initiative that makes good use of an alternative space to disseminate and share academic research, interests and insights with members of the public. Part Two of the book, Public engagement in practice, focuses on how the issues raised by individual papers presented to Social Science in the City relate to the theory and practice of public engagement. While covering a range of topical and current issues – which range from the application of social-scientific thought to understanding the riots, through to exploring the insights of psychosocial inquiry for thinking about our involvement in daily practices of social exclusion – the main focus in each chapter is on the impact and meaning of public engagement for research, teaching and other forms of social and political involvement and activity. The editors place the chapters in the context of the immediate backdrop of marches and protests against public spending cuts in Bristol and beyond that were taking place at the time. They also address how these activities and debates have fed back into the research, teaching and professional practices of the different contributors. Although each author is involved in different professional and policy agendas, what they share in common is a growing impetus to engage publics in a variety of ways in their research, teaching and practice. In Part Three of the book, Applying Social Science in the City and beyond, the editors introduce a series of chapters from participants in the café talks, including those that have resulted from partnerships between the University of the West of England and schools and community agencies. Reiterating Burawoy’s point that ‘Public sociology engages publics beyond the academy in dialogue about matters of political and moral concern’ (Burawoy, 2004, p 1607), this part of the book addresses how the dialogic space of the café helped to produce different publics, and with what results for the individuals involved. In the Conclusion to the book, the constitution of distinctive publics under the umbrella term of ‘public sociology’ is discussed and critically examined in relation to the Social Science in the City project. In particular, Burawoy’s contrast between the emancipatory aims of sociology and the alignment of other social sciences to the market and state is outlined and critiqued. ix

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How to read the book The reader is invited to participate in one specific public engagement journey.The book both reflects and is addressed to different audiences, including academic, policy, practitioner, student and the general reader with an interest in the applications of social theory beyond the confines of the academy.The individual chapters in Parts Two and Three of the book can be read as free-standing contributions to topics of current importance. Their primary rationale, however, is in forming part of a broader narrative about the relevance of public engagement to the social sciences and the audiences that they claim to address. Reference Burawoy, M. (2004) ‘Public sociologies: contradictions, dilemmas, and possibilities’, Social Forces, vol 82, no 4, pp 1603–18.

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Part One The meaning of public engagement

Introduction to Part One Stella Maile and David Griffiths We write this book in a period of dramatic change in the policy and goals of higher education. There has been a fundamental shift in the ways in which higher education is now conceptualised: it is to be treated no longer as a public good, articulated through educational judgement and publicly financed, but as driven by students in their primary role as consumers.Within this context, the meaning of public engagement in higher education appears particularly problematic. Chapter One asks what public engagement means within this revised and shifting framework. Debates around the meaning of public engagement are connected to broader discourses of participation and deliberative democracy, which have been significant influences in the policy field in the last three decades.While reviewing these issues, Chapter One also questions the meaning of the public sphere and the diverse conceptions of how publics are mobilised, represented and developed. Chapter One concludes by outlining Burawoy’s conception of public sociology, which then forms a thread that is developed throughout the book. In relation to higher education, the withdrawal of block grants and the substitution of student fees as the main source of income – other than in the case of science and medicine, which still receive state support – is the major innovation introduced by the Coalition government (Freedman, 2011). This is part of a more long-term process of restructuring in higher education going back to the introduction of regulation in the 1980s and the Research Assessment Exercise in the late 1980s, when the University Grants Committee (UGC) was replaced by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) (Collini, 2010). The period from 1981 to 1999 was characterised by an expansion of student numbers in addition to a reduction in funding per student. Other milestones in this period include the Dearing Report (Dearing, 1997) and the introduction of student fees under New Labour with the Education Act 2004, when fees were set at £3,000, with some grant provision and retention of the block grant. The Browne Report (Browne, 2010) explicitly articulated the new market model of higher education. It proposed the abolition of the block grant, with the main channel for funding through raised student fees. In this model, consumer-led student choice should determine which courses run and which universities would be more successful 3

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in a free, competitive market. The limitations of a consumer choice model of higher education and the incoherent rationale for continued state support for science and medicine (Why are they supported if the market is assumed to be a wholly rational allocator of resources?) have been amply documented (Collini, 2010; Bailey and Freedman, 2011; Head, 2011). As the campaigners for the public university argue (see: publicuniversity.org.uk), tying higher education exclusively to the goal of economic growth fails to consider the role of universities as a public good: disseminating knowledge for public purposes (Giroux, 2010). For the institutions of higher education, therefore, there is a conflict in aims as they struggle to balance privatisation and marketisation against their more traditional role as disseminators of public knowledge. How and in what sense are the institutions of higher education part of the public domain, producing public goods for public purposes (Calhoun, 2009)? A dominant theme that recurs throughout this book is what Calhoun has termed the ‘public mission’ of the university: its ‘responsibility to address public issues in public ways’ (Calhoun, 2009, p 590). The increasingly central role of public engagement in higher education is therefore linked to these broader institutional and political changes, as the post-war settlement in higher education is both restructured and reversed. In Part One of the book, we are concerned with the distinctiveness of a social science café and its relationship with public engagement agendas. What kind of space does it allow for people to reflect in an informal way on their experiences in relation to the politics of austerity, public sector restructuring and a range of vital public issues? Chapter One underlines the diverse meanings of public engagement as this applies in different domains, such as the policy, practitioner and academic fields. Our main aim is to develop a critical approach to public engagement in relation to the social sciences. The specific factors behind the establishment of Social Science in the City in Bristol are explored in Chapter Two. Chapter Two of the book is concerned with the opportunities and challenges of public engagement and the different hierarchies of expertise brought into play by the café project. Chapter Two provides the context within which Social Science in the City was founded, setting the initiative within a broader historical, institutional and conceptual framework. A different way of imagining the public–private dichotomy is suggested as a means of overcoming what seems like an increasingly unstable division.

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Introduction to Part One

References Bailey, M. and Freedman, D. (2011) The assault on the universities, London: Pluto Press. Browne, J. (Chairman) (2010) Securing a sustainable future for higher education: An independent review of higher education funding and student finance, October. Available at: www.delni.gov.uk/browne-reportsecuring-a-sustainable-future-for-higher-education.pdf (accessed 6 March 2013). Calhoun, C. (2009) ‘Academic freedom: public knowledge and the structural transformation of the university’, Social Research, vol 76, no 2, pp 561-98. Collini, S. (2010) ‘Browne’s gamble’, London Review of Books, October. Dearing, R. (Chairman) (1997) The Dearing Report: Report of the National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education. Available at: https://bei. leeds.ac.uk/Partners/NCIHE/ (accessed 13 February 2014). Freedman, D. (2011) ‘An introduction to education reform and resistance’, in M. Bailey and D. Freedman (eds) The assault on universities: a manifesto for resistance, London: Pluto Press. Giroux, H.A. (2010) ‘Public values, higher education and the scourge of neoliberalism: politics at the limits of the social’, Culture Machine, Interzone. Available at: www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/ article/viewFile/426/444 Head, S. (2011) ‘The grim threat to British universities’, The New York Review of Books, January.

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ONE

Café scientifique and the art of engaging publics Stella Maile and David Griffiths

Introduction The Bristol-based Social Science in the City initiative (see: http:// hls.uwe.ac.uk/research/ssc.aspx), around which this book is based, is a variation on the model of the café scientifique. The origins of café scientifique can be traced to the café philosophique movement that developed in France in the early 1990s. Café scientifique refers to a grassroots public science initiative that, according to the café scientifique website (see: http://www.cafescientifique.org/), is currently running across 42 cities in the UK and cities in other countries. It typically consists of one monthly meeting in which one or several scientists talk about their work.These meetings are pitched at an informal level and are believed to improve the image of science and scientists. According to its proponents, café scientifique is not a place so much as an idea based around the informal and discursive ambience of the café. It is now a global phenomenon with national variations, and is closely linked to the growth of internet technology and the globalisation of media technologies. More generally, the background rationale for café scientifique can be located in the gap between expert knowledge and an increasingly fragmented public sphere. In Risk society, Beck (1986) argued for the growing importance of expert knowledge and a polity based upon the management of risk.The risk society reflects public scepticism about the role of science in relation to contentious public issues, such as nuclear power, genetically modified (GM) crops and the environment. At a political and policy level, there is a perceived need to get publics ‘on side’ in relation to scientific innovation. The science café is therefore implicated in a broader set of policy and political issues than the image of the café as ‘meeting place’ immediately suggests.

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Science and society: from communication to deliberation As the authors of the Scientists on Public Engagement (ScoPE) report (Burchell et al, 2009) note, a ‘sea change’ has occurred over the last three decades in professional scientific culture towards an endorsement of public engagement as an integral part of the production of scientific knowledge. Public engagement is understood here as a means of addressing publicly defined priorities, improving scientific practice and helping to define the questions that scientists might address. Lay publics are included in this model as citizen partners. Burchell et al (2009) trace these developments to the Royal Society (1985) report Public understanding of science, with its advocacy of communication and understanding in relation to public education in science. Developing this position, an emphasis upon deliberation and dialogue was introduced with the Science and society report (House of Lords, 2000), in which engagement activities with the public in addition to the public understanding of science were actively promoted. The highly influential Science and society report had a number of institutional ramifications (Burchell et al, 2009, p 11), including the establishment in 2008 of the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement and six regional university-based Beacons for Public Engagement, which we discuss further later. Despite noting the misgivings felt by many scientists about the representativeness of the ‘publics’ involved in public engagement activities, that is, the lack of hard, large-scale quantitative data on public perceptions of science, Burchell et al note a general sense of the importance of public engagement among those scientists interviewed as part of the ScoPE report. In sum, public engagement is now widely regarded as a central component of scientific practice, combining both communication and deliberation.

Critical perspectives on science and public engagement In the UK context, Thorpe and Gregory (2010) have also noted the shift from a deficit model of science education based upon experts ‘filling in gaps’ in public knowledge to a model based upon dialogue and engagement.This process accelerated under New Labour in the late 1990s and resulted in various institutional changes and the production of a number of reports concerning the remit and aims of public science education in the UK. Public engagement, broadly defined by Thorpe and Gregory (2010, p 275) as ‘explicitly linked to democratic ideals 8

Café scientifique and the art of engaging publics

and processes’, ‘has become an inevitable stage in the policy making process about science’. The authors are generally critical of current participatory models in science education, which they view as a means of creating a post-Fordist public geared towards consumption.As they argue,‘Public engagement does not tap into a pre-existing public, but rather is itself a process whereby publics are constituted and constructed…. Engagement policies are attempts to produce a particular kind of post-Fordist public’ (Thorpe and Gregory, 2010, p 278). Engagement initiatives are about shaping markets and products and are central to understanding the social meanings of commodities and new technologies.The ‘scientific citizen’ is one who is geared towards constant innovation in new technologies. The authors draw a connection between participatory models of governance and science education: ‘A similar construction of citizens as active subjects – active as consumers, but also actively responsible within the polity – is key to government framings of participation in science policy’ (Thorpe and Gregory, 2010, p 285). In sum, the authors are critical of the elitist character of public engagement in science, in particular, as the agendas are set by and for policy elites. In a similar vein, Michael (2009) develops a critical understanding of publics as performative entities. He distinguishes between publics in general and publics in particular, noting the ways in which publics are enacted in different ways and are seen as performative entities in relation to the refiguration of science and society, which is concerned with establishing ‘voice’ and the credibility of scientific institutions. Michael focuses on the meaning of ‘doing being a member of the public’ and its relation to the ‘science and society’ constellation. He notes not only how public engagement creates a model of the engaged public as a form of governmentality, but also how lay people interpret their role as publics, distinguishing between different types of public in the process. Public in general (PiG) is pitted against science in general: here, the public may be represented as fickle, irrational or as rational actors/ committed citizens according to the particular public engagement model. Publics in particular (PiPs) are mobilised around specific issues and therefore have a more critical relation to expert knowledge. PiPs identify with specific issues and raise questions of identity and authenticity around these, for example, toxic waste or medical conditions, which also entail demarcations between particular publics. Michael (2009, p 626) highlights the ‘range of performative resources available to publics in enacting publics’, that is, it is not a simple case of top-down governmentality, but also a case of lay interpretations of ‘being a member of the public’ and how individuals demarcate publics 9

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in practice. This remains a useful corrective to Thorpe and Gregory’s (2010) top-down approach to the production of publics in terms of governmentality and control. At a European level, the European Commission (2007) report Public engagement in science across the European research area raises the interesting question of whether engagement should be about addressing the impacts of existing technologies or redirecting the course of scientific research to consider the ‘wider social imaginations’ of how science might progress. The lay knowledge of publics rather than knowledge about publics is a central part of the engagement process. How can active citizenship be incorporated in this process, including both ‘invited’ and ‘uninvited’ forms of engagement? The recommendations of the report acknowledge the diversity of publics – expert publics, concerned publics and engaged publics – and the mobilisation of publics by ‘experts of community’ (Rose, 1999, p 189). The literature on the relation between science and public engagement therefore indicates a range of positions: from the manipulation of publics in a form of engineered engagement to more democratic processes of dialogue and deliberation.The diversity of publics is a prominent theme in the literature, in particular, the performative character of publics as these are brought into being both by scientific elites and by lay actors. The significance of lay knowledge and of actors’ active involvement in delineating the character of specific publics is a central theme that we further develop in this book.The ‘wider social imaginations’ about how social-scientific knowledge might progress is another theme that we seek to address. The advent and growth of café scientifique – its promotion at both national and European levels for example (see: www.scicafe.eu/ learn_more) – and the institutionalisation of public engagement in science therefore raise a number of important questions concerning the character and aims of public engagement and its relations to broader policy agendas and institutional change. In particular, does a social science café raise different issues from a science café and does the meaning of public engagement change correspondingly? In the following section, we analyse the meaning of public engagement in more detail. After reviewing the public engagement literature in relation to participation in statutory services, social movements and higher education, we outline the concept of publics and their discursive, institutional and technical forms of production.

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Café scientifique and the art of engaging publics

What is public engagement? ‘Public engagement’ itself is a relatively new term and did not appear in common usage until the late 1990s.The roots of public engagement lie in the discourses of participation and consultation that have been central to policy developments in the UK since at least the 1980s (Clarke and Newman, 1997). Closely linked to the concepts of participation, participatory democracy, consultation, dialogue and partnership, there is considerable elasticity in the application of the term. There is a multiplicity of definitions of public engagement, and rather like the associated concepts of dialogue, participation and partnership, its meaning varies according to the institutional context and the particular intellectual or ideological provenance of a specific usage. Within the scientific field, for example, ‘public engagement’ has been defined as ‘an umbrella term that encompasses many kinds of activity, including science festivals, centres, museums and cafes…. Any good engagement activity should involve aspects of listening and interaction’ (DIUS, 2008, p 20). With the emphasis on listening and dialogue, the institutional objectives of public engagement relate to the generation of mutual benefit, trust, understanding and relevance. For the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS, 2008, p 20), public dialogue is ‘a form of deliberative participatory engagement where the outcomes are used to inform decision making’. While an emphasis upon participation and dialogue is common to most definitions of public engagement, the concept is nevertheless applied to a diverse range of fields and policy areas. It is important to register that a significant amount of the public engagement literature is in the form of policy documents, as in the case of HEFCE and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (see: https://www. gov.uk/government/policies/engaging-the-public-in-science-andengineering--3 [accessed 14 August 2013]), while some consists of good practice guidelines, as in the case of the Research Councils UK (see: http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/per/Pages/Bestpractice.aspx [accessed 14 August 2013]).Yet, other strands within the literature are academic reflections on public engagement (Rowe and Frewer, 2005) and related questions of measurement and evaluation (Hart et al, 2009). One influential model within the academic literature is Rowe and Frewer’s (2005) ‘A typology of public engagement mechanisms’, which proposes an information flow model of public engagement. The information flow between ‘publics’ and ‘sponsors’ results in three distinctive forms of public engagement – communication, consultation and participation – each of which involves increasing degrees of 11

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interaction between the different actors. The authors base their argument upon a general concept of public participation involving ‘members of the public in the agenda setting, decision making and policy forming activities of organisations/institutions responsible for policy development’ (Rowe and Frewer, 2005, p 253).The overarching conception of participation is then broken down, as we have seen, into its constituent forms of communication, consultation and participation. The term ‘engagement mechanisms’ refers to the means to realise these three forms of public participation. Rowe and Frewer include a lengthy discussion of how to identify public engagement mechanisms, highlighting questions of terminology and implementation. While pitched at a general level, the identification of types of engagement mechanisms – including communication types, for example, public hearings and meetings, and consultation types, for example, study circles – is a useful complement to the discussion of public engagement in higher education, which we address later in this chapter. More critically, it should be noted that while a typological approach is useful – in this case at least, it tends to assume a pre-existing public rather than investigating the different ways in which publics are produced and set in motion – our approach on the contrary is focused on a critical understanding of the relations between expert knowledge and the particular publics that are addressed and mobilised by that knowledge. We are also, as we argue later, concerned with how individuals imagine and mobilise themselves as publics of a particular type (Michael, 2009). In order to aid conceptual clarification, we now briefly review the meaning of public engagement as it has been applied to two distinctive fields: the statutory sector and social movements. This then leads into our discussion of public engagement in higher education.

Participation and dialogue within the statutory sector As Barnes et al (2004, p 2) have noted,‘In the UK the recent history of public participation can be traced through the community development initiatives of the 1970s, the consumer orientation of the 1980s and the more recent emphasis on creating “responsive public services”’.This has resulted in a complex overlaying of older professional, organisational and political frameworks by newer managerial discourses of service user empowerment, public involvement and local deliberation (Maile, 1995). While a significant strand of the critical social policy literature on participation and user involvement in service provision has underlined its unequal and generally incorporated character, others have emphasised the ways in which the ‘proliferation of public consultation 12

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and engagement strategies across local government, health, policing and other agencies’ has opened up potential spaces for the emergence of alternative social networks and new collective identities (Barnes et al, 2004, p 2). In this context, public participation can be regarded as a constitutive process in which ‘particular concepts of the public are mobilized, negotiated and enacted’ (Barnes et al, 2004, p 11). As in the case of Thorpe and Gregory’s (2010, p 278) scientifically informed and engaged publics, processes of public engagement can be seen to create the very publics that they both address and mobilise.

Social movements and democratic participation We have seen how public engagement in a variety of fields is typically conceptualised in terms of participation and deliberative democracy. The institutionalisation of the language of participation and deliberative democracy is, of course, related to a broader set of historical, social and political changes (Pearce, 2010a). The post-Cold War revitalisation of debates around civil society and social capital in the 1990s was followed by critical debates around the potential erosion of the traditional public sphere.The perceived ascendancy of neoliberalism (Harvey, 2007), tied to the dominance of the market and the erosion of welfare provision, has resulted for many in the absorption of participation in diverse forms of ‘participative governance’. This has produced ‘governable subjects’ (Newman, 2006) rather than the self-governing citizens posited by theories of deliberative democracy. The traditional national public sphere is also seen as under threat from globalising forces, which result in competing, multiple publics rather than a single public sphere within a bounded national community (Fraser, 2007). The proliferation of social movements and of single-issue politics that transcend national boundaries is one of the more striking post-Cold War developments and seriously undermines more conventional notions of the public sphere. In the critical literature on grassroots social movements, participation is often presented as a form of control. For many commentators, the rhetoric of participation now ‘masks continued centralisation in the name of decentralisation’ (Cooke and Kothari, 2001, p 7). Erstwhile radical notions of empowerment rooted in Freirian politics, for example, have been gradually depoliticised and individualised as a result of their absorption within the policy sphere. More generally, interlocked concepts such as social inclusion, citizenship, community and democracy have been incorporated within the broader discourses of participation and partnership that are now dominant within the public policy domain. The distinction between participation from 13

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above and participation from below is nevertheless important (Pearce, 2010b); that is, how far do modes of participation and engagement reflect the interests of publics or of sponsors (Rowe and Frewer, 2005)? To what degree are publics created by engagement practices and with what effects? According to Barnes (2008, p 468), ‘The practice of deliberative democracy is intended to open knowledge previously restricted to specific scientific or other communities to lay scrutiny, as well as to open up political arenas to more direct processes of citizen involvement’. Of central importance here is the opening up of expert knowledge to lay communities, albeit that this occurs within the uneven and contradictory processes of democratic participation and inclusion (Clarke and Newman, 2009). What is essential in the current context is the creation of potential discursive and political spaces and the emergence and mobilisation of new publics. What these two examples indicate, therefore, is a movement between modes of incorporation (Cooke and Kathari, 2001) and the opening up of potential spaces for the emergence of new identities and networks and the creation of new discursive and political spaces (Barnes et al, 2004; Barnes, 2008).

Public engagement in higher education As indicated earlier, the central role occupied by public engagement in higher education is related to a broader set of policy and structural changes. To briefly trace the institutional parameters of public engagement in higher education,‘Beacons for Public Engagement’ was launched in 2008 and is funded by HEFCE and Research Councils UK in association with the Welcome Trust.The six ‘Beacons of Public Engagement’ are based throughout the UK, with their coordinating centre in Bristol.The aim is to create ‘a change in culture’ in universities, working with partner organisations and establishing best practice. According to the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE), the aim is to make ‘engaging with the public’ a key part of what it means to be an academic. The goal is increased transparency and accountability, achieved by ‘listening to and involving the public’. There are three main issues that can be raised concerning public engagement in higher education: questions of definition; questions of implementation, funding and research; and questions of measurement and evaluation.

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Questions of definition Research Councils UK define ‘public engagement’ as an umbrella term ‘for any activity that engages the public with research, from science communication in science centres or festivals, to consultation, to public dialogue.Any good engagement activity should involve two way aspects of listening and interaction’ (see: www.rcuk.ac.uk/documents/scisoc/ peupdate.pdf [accessed 16 August 2013]). Elaborating on this in the context of social science and higher education, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) propose the following definition of public engagement: the involvement of specialists in listening to, developing their understanding of, and interacting with, non-specialists. It is a participatory model of consultation to inform policy development and entails promoting the flow of authoritative information and exchange of views between social scientists, members of the public and policy makers. (ESRC, 2008, p 4) Despite some degree of unanimity on the participatory character of public engagement, there remains considerable terminological confusion, with civic engagement, community engagement, community outreach and public engagement often used interchangeably. In practice, there is also some overlap with the concepts of knowledge transfer and knowledge exchange, both of which are concerned with the practical application of knowledge. Reinforcing an increasingly businessdriven model of higher education, according to the ESRC, a central aim of knowledge transfer is ‘to strengthen the UK’s competitiveness and wealth creation by enabling research organisations to apply their research knowledge to important business problems’ (see: www.esrc. ac.uk/collaboration/knowledge-exchange/KT-partnerships.aspx [accessed 16 August 2013]). On the other hand, the remit of knowledge exchange is broader and is defined by the ESRC as ‘opening a dialogue between researchers and research users so that they can share ideas, research evidence, experience and skills’ (see: http://www.esrc.ac.uk/funding-andguidance/impact-toolkit/what-how-and-why/knowledge-exchange/ index.aspx [accessed 16 August 2013). This may involve a variety of methods, including workshops and collaborative research, and is similarly concerned with influencing policy and maximising impacts. The term ‘knowledge brokers’ (Phipps and Morton, 2013) has also gained some currency, referring as it does to individuals who act as 15

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intermediaries in the transfer of knowledge between higher education and other sectors and services. The term ‘broker’ again comes heavily laden with the language and values of the market. Given the extreme fluidity in definitions and the overlap of public engagement with knowledge exchange – as academics and community workers in public and voluntary sectors work together in a variety of ways – it is important to emphasise the constructed and inherently political character of public engagement, both in theory and practice (Michael, 2009). This is especially the case given the occlusion of the type of ‘public’ addressed that often occurs in the public engagement literature.As in the case of the ESRC’s (2008, p 4) reference to ‘members of the public’ or the NCCPE’s emphasis on the importance of ‘engaging with the public’, there is a tendency towards the naturalisation of terms. On the contrary, we need to address how specific public engagement initiatives mobilise and constitute ‘publics’ and with what aims in mind. Reciprocally, how do actors imagine themselves as ‘publics’ and what is brought to the process of ‘doing being a member of the public’ (Michael, 2009)?

Questions of implementation, funding and research The institutionalisation of public engagement in higher education is part of a broader process involving the NCCPE, the Beacons for Public Engagement and – from 2015 onwards – the tying in of engagement criteria to funding and research through the Research Excellence Framework (REF) (see: https://www.publicengagement.ac.uk/sites/ default/files/NCCPE%20REF%20update%20February%202012%20 FINAL.pdf [accessed 20 August 2013]). For academics, a particularly thorny issue raised by the institutionalisation of public engagement activities is the conflict between voluntary participation and mandatory performance. How far might engagement activities in higher education be concerned with meeting performance targets, rather than their stated aims of fostering public involvement and dialogue? Above all, will the linking of public engagement to incentivised and target-related academic performance simply be regarded as an additional workload by hard-pressed academics? A number of related issues are raised by the institutionalisation of public engagement activities, which is an integral part of the 2015 REF. The tying in of funding to the proven relevance of research in terms of its outcomes – in relation to economic performance and sustainable growth, influencing behaviour and fostering a vibrant society (in descending order in the 2015 REF; see: www.esrc.ac.uk/_images/ 16

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ESRC%20Delivery%20Plan%202011-15_tcm8-13455.pdf [accessed 20 August 2013]) – represents a thoroughgoing instrumentalisation of knowledge, which has met with criticism from academics and commentators alike (Hammersley, 2005, pp 2–3; see also the Times Higher Educational at: http://timeshighereducation.co.uk/409403.article [accessed 20 August 2013]). Similarly, the ministerial commitment to evaluate scientists’ and academics’ public engagement activities in terms of impact measurements in the 2015 REF represents a further move in the direction of centralised diktat, rather than voluntary participation (see: www.esrc.ac.uk/funding-and-guidance/impact-toolkit/what-howand-why/what-is-research-impact.aspx [accessed 25 August 2013]). As we argue, the institutionalisation of public engagement within higher education brings with it a number of constraints and challenges, but also opportunities. While Social Science in the City began as a purely voluntary activity (see Chapter Two) it has, after growing in popularity, become integrated within the formal structures of the university. This, in turn, raises a series of open-ended questions concerning the effects of public engagement activities upon teaching, funding and research, which are addressed throughout the book. Finally, the issue of how to measure and evaluate public engagement activities remains in need of elaboration.

Questions of measurement and evaluation Concerning the question of evaluation, Rowe et al (2008) distinguish between the theoretical/normative (How should we evaluate?) and the practical (How do we evaluate?). An initial difficulty, therefore, lies in disagreements concerning the nature of public engagement, which are both theoretical and normative in character. Taking this into consideration, and based upon earlier research (Rowe and Frewer, 2000), the authors first suggest demarcating what counts as ‘success’ in relation to a particular public engagement exercise. In general, they argue that this will involve some notion of ‘representativeness’, that is, that the public concerned is adequately represented, and also some demonstrable ‘impacts’. The next stage is then to measure ‘success’ according to criteria of reliability, validity and usability. A list of nine ‘universal’ factors is outlined by Rowe et al (2008, p 3), including representativeness, transparency and influence, among others. Based upon a review of their contribution to the ‘GM Nation?’ debate (Rowe et al, 2005), evaluation in their example consisted of a multi-method approach combining survey questionnaires, interviews, observation and media and document analysis.The authors note a number of difficulties 17

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in evaluation, which we consider later in relation to the Social Science in the City initiative. Focusing on the evaluation of public engagement in higher education, the NCCPE’s Briefing paper: Auditing, benchmarking and evaluating public engagement (Hart et al, 2009) reiterates many of the points in the earlier NCCPE documents.A number of common themes are identified in the six Beacons for Public Engagement projects, including breaking down barriers to public involvement, increasing the relevance of universities and increasing trust, accountability and transparency. Based upon a review of the literature, the authors (Hart et al, 2009) outline seven dimensions of engagement that are relevant to universities: • • • • • • •

public access to facilities; public access to knowledge – including public engagement events; student engagement – including volunteering; faculty engagement – including public lectures; widening participation; economic regeneration; and institutional relationships and partnerships.

Of the seven dimensions, the second, third, fourth, fifth and seventh are most relevant to the social science café, as Stella Maile illustrates in Chapter Two. The authors also note that there is no one model of evaluation that can be applied to all universities involved in public engagement (Hart et al, 2009, p 15). They outline several current approaches to evaluation, including those of HEFCE and the Russell Group, and conclude that ‘there have been few attempts at producing evaluation frameworks in university public engagement’ apart from the University of Bradford’s Reciprocity, Externalities, Access and Partnership (REAP) model (Hart et al, 2009, p 27) and some international examples, which are briefly discussed.The authors’ conclusions are markedly open-ended, suggesting the need for further collaborative research in the development of appropriate indicators (Hart et al, 2009, p 39). As we have outlined, there are a number of issues around definition, implementation and the evaluation of public engagement in higher education. As Rowe et al and Hart et al acknowledge, there is considerable ambiguity in the concepts of the public(s) and forms of participation, which work against the application of a single, uniform model. There are nevertheless several points that can be made here concerning Social Science in the City as a public engagement exercise. The identification of engagement mechanisms by Rowe and Frewer (2005) 18

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is useful here, as the talks that took place at the social science café can largely be characterised as communication-based, while the reading group that developed out of the talks were a form of consultation in which dialogue and participation were foregrounded.The diversity of activities occurring under the umbrella of Social Science in the City is discussed in more detail in Chapter Two. In terms of evaluating Social Science in the City, it is important to emphasise that this was not a one-off exercise related to discrete policy outcomes, as in the case of the ‘GM Nation?’ debate cited by Rowe et al (2005, 2008), but an ongoing project concerned with the dissemination of social-scientific knowledge around a number of topical themes. At the time of writing, evaluation was not built into the project, which developed initially on a largely ad hoc basis and has only over time become relatively institutionalised. In this context, we would reiterate a number of points cited by Rowe et al (2005, p 340) concerning the difficulties involved in evaluation. We would support the position that predetermined criteria should not be imposed on the evaluative process, but should rather flow from the actors concerned. In our case, the different values brought to Social Science in the City by academics, community workers, statutory services and interested ‘lay’ persons needs particularly careful unravelling. Given the ongoing nature of Social Science in the City, interim assessments have been made by the ‘sponsors’ of the project, involving a short questionnaire administered by email and a small number of qualitative interviews, again conducted by the ‘sponsors’ of Social Science in the City. The results of these are discussed in Chapter Two. There are obvious limitations and difficulties involved, including bias, selectivity and lack of representativeness in our interim assessments. The evolving character of Social Science in the City and the lack of earmarked resources to conduct a more structured evaluation are the primary reasons for the tentative conclusions we are currently able to draw. In addition, with time constraints and a largely voluntary contribution from the ‘sponsors’ of the project, our attention and focus to date has been more on development rather than assessment. More fundamentally perhaps, we are concerned with developing the relationship between public engagement and social science, both in terms of understanding and practical activity.

Public engagement and social science Our review of the literature has indicated a number of key points.The increasing importance of public engagement in higher education is 19

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related to broader institutional and policy changes, as the public role of the university is undermined by market-driven criteria. The case of public engagement in science has been used to illustrate several key themes: the gap between expert and lay knowledge; the performative character of publics as these are enacted by elites and lay actors; the diversity of publics; and the oscillation between governmentality and the creation of new discursive and political spaces. These themes are developed in the broader public engagement literature, particularly in relation to modes of participation in statutory services and social movements.The specific case of public engagement in higher education highlights a number of specific issues, especially concerning questions of definition, implementation and evaluation. As social scientists working within higher education, we would like to draw particular attention to the politicisation of public engagement, as this occurs both in theory and in practice (Michael, 2009, p 617). As Rowe et al (2008) indicate, the definition of public engagement is inherently theoretical and normative in character. In this respect, the manner in which publics are constituted, that is, the relation between ‘sponsors’ and ‘publics’, should be at the forefront of analysis. In seeking to develop our understanding of public engagement in relation to social science, we underline the following questions: ‘Which “publics” are addressed and by whom?’ and ‘How is engagement defined and put into practice?’ A final, more tentative, question concerns whether a distinctive model of public engagement in social science can be generated.

Defining the ‘public’ in public engagement? As Mahony et al (2010) argue, there is a need to re-evaluate the meaning of the public beyond the nation-state level, taking into consideration the local, national and international intersections of different publics that mobilise around a range of issues. At the same time, national governments are increasingly interested in fostering the active citizen and consumer and in the creation of ‘responsible’ communities. Therefore, the old public sphere bounded by the nation-state seems to be under challenge from a variety of sources. In practice, the new publics mobilised by social networking media and different social movements and governmental actors are cross-cut by older publics. Mahony et al (2010) ask how publics are summoned, represented and sustained through discursive, material and institutional practices. Their underlying approach emphasises the way in which publics are summoned or called into being. The emergence of publics depends upon objects (issues), subjects (actors) and mediums (means) of publicness 20

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(Mahony et al, 2010, p 3). Publics are assembled of discourses, spaces, technologies and objects. They are therefore fluid and mobile and, moreover, are assembled at particular points for particular purposes. Mahony et al (2010) differentiate four levels of analysis that are useful for the current discussion: • Personalising publics: Feminist theory has challenged the distinction between the rational public sphere and the private, emotional sphere. How does the private become public in this context? The politicisation of personal identities from below has fractured any notion of a unified public sphere. Government policy similarly taps into this private sphere through a form of top-down personalisation that aims at the governmentality of subjects. The discourses of empowerment, participation and engagement are, from this perspective, part of a wider process of governmentality and control. We can therefore talk of a multiplication of publics, each of which has its own mode of address, of ‘personalised grammars and registers’ (Mahony et al, 2010, p 6). • Representing publics: How publics are represented depends upon certain claims-making processes and is therefore inherently performative in nature. What defines a public action is its status as representative of a particular constituency: ‘claims seek to embody, affirm, give voice to, bring to light, speak for and make visible particular issues, interests or identities in the hope of eliciting some form of response’ (Mahony et al, 2010, p 7). • Mediating publics: Publics are put together through various devices, procedures, things and mediums. For example, it is important to compare the newspaper and print technology with the Internet and social networking and the different ways in which they generate publics. The broader process of mediation is involved here, rather than the narrow one of media, that is, institutional, technological and organisational mediation. • Becoming public: Publics are ‘always emergent, rather than mere expressions of pre-existing interests, issues and identities’ (Mahony et al, 2010, p 8). Publics emerge and pass away, specifically around the problematisation of combinations of objects, subjects and mediums of publicness. We have cited this discussion at some length given its relevance to the social science café and the generation of its specific public(s). What questions of public representation, mediation and becoming are raised by the social science café? How might we begin to think about the 21

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changed relations between the public and the private? Again, these themes are addressed throughout the book, and more specifically in the Conclusion. For present purposes, it is important to note that the public enacted by the social science café was based upon a shifting constituency, which was characterised by its diversity and by differences in aims and approach. Some of the issues around the diversity of the actors involved in the social science café are further discussed in Chapter Two, which also addresses the immediate background to the social science café. In putting engagement into practice, we drew heavily upon Burawoy’s shorthand definition of public sociology as engaging ‘publics beyond the academy in dialogue about matters of political and moral concern’ (Burawoy, 2004, p 1607). Some of the opportunities and challenges posed by this approach are discussed in more detail later.A further issue raised by Social Science in the City was the type of knowledge that was generated under its remit. In particular, we need to ask what forms of teaching and research might have been facilitated by Social Science in the City and what impacts there were for the individuals concerned. These issues are addressed in individual chapters throughout the book, and particularly in the Conclusion. Of more immediate relevance now is the question of the public status of knowledge produced within the context of public engagement activities and, in particular, the question of what we might mean by a public sociology.

The role of public sociology According to Burawoy, public sociology can be distinguished from policy, professional and critical sociologies in terms of its remit, audiences and goals. Burawoy’s four types of sociology are based upon the distinction between instrumental and reflexive knowledge, on the one hand, and the type of audience addressed, that is, whether it is academic or extra academic, on the other (Burawoy, 2004, p 1607). Burawoy argues that while professional and policy sociology are instrumental, public and critical sociology are reflexive. Public sociology and policy sociology are oriented outside the academy, with the added distinction that ‘Public sociology engages publics beyond the academy in dialogue about matters of political and moral concern’ and is therefore less instrumentalist than policy sociology (Burawoy, 2004, p 1607). Professional and critical sociology are oriented towards the academy, with the latter reflexively engaging with the basis of sociology itself as a discipline. While the relation between the four sociologies varies from nation to nation and over time, the distinctiveness of sociology lies in its relation 22

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to civil society, and the defence of human interests against the market and the state. Burawoy makes a detailed case for Weberian, valuebased research programmes coupled with a Durkheimian emphasis upon sociology as a professional actor in civil society. The outcome is public engagement, on the one hand, and professional self-defence, on the other (Burawoy, 2004, p 1605). Policy interventions are to be distinguished from both of these, that is, policy interventions based upon a recognised body of research.According to Burawoy, sociologists need to address broader issues about the purposes of research, its ends and also what it might contribute to the idea of the good society. The outward-looking, reflexive and morally and politically engaged character of public sociology are therefore the main features to underline in Burawoy’s account. The complexity of the notion of the public is also emphasised by Burawoy, who argues that ‘Public sociology comes in many forms’ with ‘different forms of dialogue (mediated or unmediated, unilateral, bilateral or multilateral) and different types of publics (national and local, thin or thick, hegemonic or counter hegemonic, active or passive)’ (Burawoy, 2004, p 1607). Burawoy proposes a distinction between elite and grassroots public sociology: traditional public sociology is focused on a narrow social audience and formulates public issues at arm’s length from practice. By contrast, organic or grassroots public sociology engages with the particularistic interests of circumscribed publics. Policy sociology, on the other hand, is more oriented to specific problem-solving for client groups, whether the government or non-governmental organisations (NGOs). According to Burawoy, there is interaction between the different types of sociology, which are not sealed off from one another: ‘Public sociology has been the transmission belt of the civil rights and women’s movements that have transformed professional sociology’ (Burawoy, 2004, p 1611). However, the relationship is usually hegemonic, with professional sociology having a dominant relationship to the other types, at least within the US context. Burawoy suggests the need to incorporate public sociology more firmly within the remit of the academy. Sociology itself as a body of knowledge often creates social categories that form the basis of new publics and identities. The relation between public sociology and its publics is therefore reciprocal. Burawoy suggests that the professionalised model in the US is nationally limited – other nations, particularly in the developing countries, know mainly of public sociologies. Yet, other nation-states are dominated by policy models. Burawoy further contrasts the dominant position of economics as a discipline with 23

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sociology, which is reflexive and pluralistic.This marks out sociology’s distinctive relation to the public realm. If economics reflects the dominance of the market and political science in the role of the state, then sociology has a distinctive relation to civil society as the bearer of human independence and autonomy. Responses to Burawoy in the British context have been variable: a special edition of Sociology (Holmwood and Scott, 2007, p 41) noted the overlap of Burawoy’s Presidential Address to the American Sociological Association in 2005 and the development of sociology in Britain as a profession with inbuilt public commitments. Turner (2007), in the same volume, argued that the case for public sociology depends upon the claims for authoritative expertise made by sociology and the positive effects on ‘social problems’ that this makes possible. Turner makes the Weberian case for the intrusion of private values into research, but with no prescription as to the character of these values. Sociology’s success depends upon its rigour and its ability to link up with various publics.Turner argues that the state should support this type of sociology because it enhances opinion diversity and the quality of public discussion. McLaughlin and Turcotte, on the other hand, pinpoint a number of empirical and conceptual ambiguities in Burawoy and propose a synthetic model that aims to develop ‘a general theory of knowledge production that does not simply universalise the particularities of the American context’ (McLaughlin and Turcotte, 2007, p 825). Although there are clearly issues of national variation involved, we can link these debates about public sociology to the issue of public engagement in higher education and also to changes in the character and purpose of the university as an institution, which we raised at the outset of this chapter. How can public engagement activities in the social sciences be linked to a more critical position on the production of public forms of knowledge that aims to engage in dialogue with actors beyond the academy? In this context, the Social Science in the City initiative is committed to the extension of the methods of participatory, applied and engaged research in the social sciences (Pearce, 2010b). The overlap with and relevance of action research, cooperative inquiry and participative action research is an important theme throughout the book (Klein, 2012). Individual chapters outline their specific relation to the issue of public engagement and its influence upon the research agendas and outcomes of research. Rather than paint a too-optimistic account of the relation between social science and its ‘grassroots’ sponsors and audience, it is as well to point out that there are inherent limitations, which Burawoy also 24

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draws attention to. The circumscription of research by interested parties has its drawbacks, whether these are state agencies, NGOs or civil organisations. Hammersley (2005, p 3) makes a similar point in arguing that a public social science: is likely to tempt researchers into claiming more for their work than is reasonable – into pretending that it can indeed identify social problems, show which policies are and are not ‘socially just’, indicate what kind of social change is required and so on. While acknowledging the validity of Hammersley’s critique, there still remains the need to address the political and ethical issues that are raised by publicly engaged research. In this context, Calhoun’s premise that ‘the public mission of the university’ involves ‘addressing public issues in public ways’ (Calhoun, 2009, p 590) bears reiteration. Whether or not public sociology has a distinctive role as the bearer of ‘human independence’ in the social sciences – as Burawoy suggests – is at least open to question. The contributions in this volume are from a wide variety of disciplines, including psychotherapeutic practice and psychosocial studies, criminology, sociology, social policy, public health, and community work of various kinds. In this context, sociology does not have a monopoly on the defence of ‘human independence’, but rather increasingly functions as a meeting point for divergent theoretical positions and traditions of research. What they share in this instance is an interest in engaging with publics ‘beyond the academy’ and in opening up new discursive and political spaces (Barnes et al, 2004 ). With these limited aims in mind, it is to be hoped that this volume avoids the hubris that Hammersley, perhaps justifiably, associates with the aims of a particular variety of public social science. References Barnes, M. (2008) ‘Passionate participation: emotional experiences and expressions in deliberative forums’, Critical Social Policy, vol 28, p 461. Barnes, M., Newman, J. and Sullivan, H. (2004) ‘Power, participation and political renewal: theoretical and empirical perspectives on public participation under New Labour’, Social Politics, vol 11, no 2, pp 267–79. Beck, U. (1986) Risk society, London: Polity Press. Burawoy, M. (2004) ‘Public sociologies: contradictions, dilemmas, and possibilities’, Social Forces, vol 82, no 4, pp 1603–18.

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Burchell, K., Franklin, S. and Holden, K. (2009) ‘Scientists on public engagement: from communication to deliberation? Public culture as professional science’, final report of the ‘Scientists on public engagement: from communication to deliberation?’ (ScoPE) project, London School of Economics. Calhoun, C. (2009) ‘Academic freedom: public knowledge and the structural transformation of the university’, Social Research, vol 76, no 2, pp 561-98. Clarke, J. and Newman, J. (1997) The managerial state: power, politics and ideology in the remaking of social welfare, London: Sage Publications. Clarke, J. and Newman, J. (2009) Publics, politics and power: remaking the public in public services, London: Sage Publications. Cooke, B. and Kathari, U. (2001) ‘The case for participation as tyranny’, in B. Cooke and U. Kothari (eds) Participation: the new tyranny?, London: Zed Books. DIUS (Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills) (2008) A vision for science and society: a consultation for developing a new strategy for the UK, July. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/ uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/36747/49-08-S_b. pdf (accessed 17 February 2014). ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) (2008) ‘Developing dialogue: learned societies in the social sciences: developing knowledge transfer and public engagement’. Available at: http://www.esrc. ac.uk/_images/Developing_Dialogue_tcm8-4628.pdf (accessed 2 April 2013). European Commission (2007) Public engagement in science across the European research area, Lisbon: European Commission. Fraser, N. (2007) ‘Transnationalizing the public sphere: on the legitimacy and efficacy of public opinion in a post-Westphalian world’, Theory, Culture & Society, vol 24, no 4, pp 7–30. Hammersley, M. (2005) ‘Close encounters of a political kind: the threat from the evidence based policy-making and practice movement’, Qualitative Researcher, no 1, pp 2–3. Hart, A., Northmore, S. and Gerhardt, C. (2009) ‘Briefing paper: auditing, benchmarking and evaluating public engagement’, National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement. Available at: http://talloiresnetwork.tufts.edu/wp-content/uploads/ AuditingBenchmarkingandEvaluatingPublicEngagement.pdf Harvey, D. (2007) A brief history of neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holmwood, J. and Scott, S. (2007) ‘Editorial foreword: sociology and its public face(s)’, Sociology, vol 41, pp 779–83. 26

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Social Science in the City™: reflections on public engagement Stella Maile This chapter provides a discussion of the location and relative worth of public engagement initiatives in the current political and economic climate, one that is dominated by neoliberalism and the market. It is suggested that we need to retain a sense of the different values and imaginaries brought to bear on public engagement, along with the dynamism and creativity of people in dialogue with each other. The chapter focuses on one example of a public engagement initiative, Social Science in the City, which was initially created to offer spaces for critical reflection in the face of public sector cutsand globalisation under the auspices of the University of the West of England. This initiative is now subject to competing discourses and policies focused on evidence-gathering and impact assessment. It is not clear how the impact agenda will influence what was originally conceived as simply as a series of events focused on allowing people to gather together for critical reflection about key contemporary issues. At the same time, there are currently opportunities for expanding Social Science in the City in ways that both straddle the impact agenda and the alternative imaginaries that encouraged some of us to choose to study social science subjects in the first place, namely, a concern with social justice based on principles of equality and inclusiveness.

The broader political context It has been argued that universities are being refashioned away from their national social-democratic goal of inclusiveness and equality of opportunity identified in the Robbins Report (1963), towards a neoliberal idea of the university as serving global, corporate and economic interests (Holmwood, 2013).The Browne Report (2010) was prefigured by the 2003 White Paper on higher education (Secretary of State for Education and Skills, 2003), which recommended an American model of universities based on the replacement of publically funded research with corporate sponsorship, a greater reliance on wealthy 29

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alumni and the creation of highly skilled knowledge workers. The application of research, particularly science and technology, to innovative products and services for companies competing in increasingly saturated markets to enhance the ‘global competitiveness’ of higher education was an essential strand in this account (Deem et al, 2008). It is this overwhelmingly neoliberal, market-driven terrain on which public engagement is being played out that can make for ambivalence and suspicion among academics because of the negative implications for academic freedom. Public engagement activities are presented as a vehicle for dialoguing with a range of stakeholders as potential co-creators of research and knowledge). This changes the very nature of academic research itself, particularly under conditions where ‘research must also show value for money by demonstrating … benefits to the economy, society, culture, public policy and services, health, the environment, international development and quality of life’ (HEFCE, 2010, Appendix). Once aligned with an impact agenda, it is also possible that the social sciences may be transformed into a kind of behavioural ‘psychosociology’, due largely to a focus on behaviour change, in partnership with big business performance across the public and private sectors, locally and globally. Through such developments, it is possible to see social science as contributing to new forms of governance that are intricately tied, as Holmwood suggests, to neoliberal policies in general. For Holmwood, higher education is implicated in social inequality ‘ by colluding in and benefiting from a knowledge economy which fails to address increasing disparities in income and wealth’ and/or the traditional function of a university ‘as a space for dialogue’ (Holmwood, 2013). It is important, though, to remember that the role of business in shaping university agendas and knowledge frameworks is not new (see, eg, Harold Wilson’s government papers on knowledge transfer driven by the Department of Trade and Industry [DTI] initiatives of the 1960s), neither is the long-standing dependence of universities on the private sector (Dawes, 2011).What is novel is the growth of universities as global corporate entities (Holmwood, 2013), selling research for economic growth and transferring knowledge for the acquisition of human capital. Again, the servicing of policy agendas by social science means that there has traditionally been some overlap between economic/ business directives and developments in social theories, particularly in relation to sociology and social policy. For example, the deterministic dimensions of the white heat of technology finds its echo in Toffler’s ‘third wave’ (Toffler, 1981), while more recent changes associated with the acceleration of neoliberal economic and political strategies were presaged in the 1990s by Giddens in his Beyond Left and Right 30

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(Giddens, 1994) and The Third Way (Giddens, 2000). These assays into the policy sphere were not that remote from the governance discourses then being pursued by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (Maile and Braddon, 2003). Arguably, there have also always been complex motives entering into the pursuit of social-scientific research, both on an individual and collective level. Social scientists have continually had to walk a fine line between supporting unjust social and economic policies – by virtue of their dependence on the conditions and priorities of funding bodies across the public and private sectors – and attempting to unravel social processes that might otherwise be experienced as overwhelming on an individual level. C. Wright Mills’s distinction between private troubles and public issues bears reiteration in this context (Wright Mills, 1959), pointing as it does to the interrelation between the two while underlining the distinctiveness of public issues as structural features that transcend the individual. In the current climate, we can note both the potentially problematic dimensions of public engagement and opportunities for social scientists committed to issues of equality and social justice. On the one hand, it would appear that universities are now becoming involved in repairing some of the fallout of continuing public sector privatisation and cuts. As the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) makes clear, agencies and organisations of civil society are gaining: an increasingly important role in relation to the delivery of services; strengthening community cohesion; providing a voice for under-represented groups; campaigning for change; and promoting enterprising solutions for economic, social and environmental challenges. Social science can help to develop and inform the evidence base for this sector, contribute to its continuing growth as well as helping to demonstrate the impact that such organisations have in the UK and internationally. (see: http://www.esrc.ac.uk/ research/evaluation-impact/research-evaluation/impacton-business-by-business-and-management-schools.aspx [accessed 30 September 2013]) In the context of public sector funding cuts and having pointed to the need for universities to demonstrate value for money, the ESRC states:‘We believe that by raising public awareness of the social sciences

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and encouraging their involvement in both social and science-related research this will translate into real benefits for society and individuals’. Increasing pressures to demonstrate that public engagement effects positive changes for communities, organisations and agencies appears little different from other exercises in governance and governmentality (Rose, 2000; Jessop, 2006), where selves, as former citizens, passengers, patients and, now, students, are reconstituted and reoriented to an apparently apolitical consumerist decision-making. In such a scenario, as Holmwood points out, the self-referential choices of individual consumers are not dialogical. It is important to register, as a variety of studies have indicated, that policies are rarely consumed wholesale, but are subject to negotiation and change, sometimes with uncertain or novel outcomes. The mediation of expert knowledge by lay publics, which we discussed in Chapter One, also applies to policies affecting higher education. The ESRC, cited earlier on the effectiveness of social science for businesses, indicated that while there were those who enjoyed collaborative relationships with business, there were others adverse to what they regarded as the ‘anti-intellectual’, closed-mindedness of business cultures. Clearly, not all were equally committed to business impact work. Similarly, a much earlier survey conducted in the US (Weiss, 1979), where public engagement has a longer history, drew attention to the various ways in which social scientists devised different strategies for managing tensions between social-scientific expertise and the practice of public participation.These strategies ranged from the deployment of social science in advocacy and campaign work – including the sharing of research in order to promote access to knowledge and information – to the outright critique of prevailing policies. At a more general, societal level, the increasing blurring of the boundaries between the public, private and personal spheres of life also offers some opportunities for what Giddens (1994) has referred to as ‘dialogic democracy’. The role of civic publics, of cosmopolitans who reflexively take responsibility for their personal values and actions, is highlighted as key to new forms of social and political engagement. Above all, Giddens refers to individuals who engage with the dilemmas and pressures now occurring in the sphere of ‘life politics’ (Giddens, 1994, pp 91–2). In this context, public engagement and knowledge exchange activities can be regarded as increasingly dialogic. While we can acknowledge Holmwood’s point regarding a consumerist vision of the self, registering the impact of powerful political and economic drivers is not an argument against engaging with publics who may otherwise be thrown back onto their own individual resources to 32

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grapple in fragmented and isolated ways with social, economic and political problems. Public engagement and the exchange of knowledge associated with it may not only include, but also surpass, the practical and vocational skills necessary for ‘global competitive success’. Similarly, what is regarded as ‘real’ and ‘applied’ includes the pursuit of knowledge, even its more abstracted conceptualisations, since these can also help us identify, name and cohere some of the irrational and complex phenomena associated with ‘globalisation’. In addition, social science surrounds us in our everyday lives: it is part of the fabric of the social and operates in the manner of a double hermeneutic, whereby social-scientific terminology comes to inform common-sense understandings of the world (Giddens, 1987). We return to and develop these issues in the Conclusion to the book.

Hierarchies of knowledge exchange: academic versus applied At least as important as the interests that lie behind the public engagement agenda are the broader hierarchies of knowledge that are brought into publically engaged encounters. Clearly, not all knowledge is of equal status.The fact that some knowledge is produced as a result of systematic, rigorous procedures and is subject to refereeing processes where ideas and theories are refined through critique and empirical analysis does not, in itself, invest this type of knowledge with status. The broader culture, in addition to vested political interests in which knowledge is produced, is important here.As sociologists have indicated, knowledge may function as a kind of cultural capital, reserved for elites justifying their own claims to status (Bourdieu, 1984).‘Academic’ knowledge is symbolically loaded and, as such, is often either defensively rejected as having little worth for people’s lives (especially by those who bear the labels of being ‘non-academic’ and therefore less intelligent) or courted by those who believe knowledge from the ‘academy’ is the best kind of knowledge. In this respect, we might ask whether some of us in the academic community have not been reflexive enough about our own self-interest in the perpetuation of such myths! Although business and managerial discourses proliferate in the market, it would be unhelpful to discount the residual status of academic knowledge in the social psyche. In relation to this, the current discourse of public engagement offers an implicit critique of higher education and ‘academic’ knowledge as being somehow out of touch with the realities and needs of diverse communities – a drain, like other public services, on the public purse. Putting aside for a moment the hegemonic 33

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austerity agenda that has framed this current way of thinking, it is important to remember that such discourses and policies have been effective in drawing on social imaginaries and fantasies surrounding ‘academic’ or ‘bookish’ knowledge (the pinnacle of which was found in the dreaming spires of, say, Oxbridge and, through a process of symbolic equivalence, all other universities) and ‘common-sense’ practical or applied knowledge. There has always been a fantasy somewhere that books are, as in Tony Harrison’s poem Book ends, social dividers (see: www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=7834 [accessed 13 September 2013]). It is still possible now to feel in some of our students and in our communities of origin distrust and fear of the book. In addition to the increasing tendency to treat students as consumers, problems with books relate to the fact that, for some, the book is, in itself, a dense symbolic object that signifies social exclusivity and anxieties about failure.These fears can be drawn into alternative hegemonic agendas that favour a ‘common-sense’,‘real-world’ privileging of narrowly applied, vocational or business knowledge. The problem relates not so much to different types of knowledge, but to the splitting of ‘types’ of knowledge, which somehow corresponds with those who have it and those who do not. Publically engaged activities can cut through these problematic binaries and draw people, far more helpfully, from the inquiries and understandings they bring from their everyday, working, non-working, personal and social lives. For the individuals involved in initiating this public engagement project, a passion for Social Science in the City has been influenced by formative experiences, in addition to an understanding of the fears that could get triggered by purely ‘academic’ knowledge. By the same token, in pursuing public engagement initiatives, there is often a sense of an unspoken debt concerning the books and papers that have been written and the people who taught and shared them with us. Needless to say, this was at a time when higher education was more obviously aligned with a social-democratic rather than neoliberal vision of the world. Such commitments and activities offered a different perspective on what were, for some of us, often painful exclusionary social processes. To assume that such values are simply eliminated by current policy would be naive. Although lecturing, conferences and teaching are not typically part of the public engagement and impact agenda, it would be mistaken to discount the public service provided by broader academic inquiry, or the individual values underpinning it.The role of social and personal imaginaries is of particular relevance to how the public sphere

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is constituted as an ongoing social reality (Castoriadis, 1997; Maile and Griffiths, 2012; Griffiths and Maile, forthcoming). Publically engaged social science offers opportunites to those who wish to improve their surroundings and everyday practices. This is particularly important in the context of diminishing trust in formal political channels and the increasing saturation of the public sphere by market-based values. But this would require some retention of the unique, specialised skills and theoretical insights (albeit ones that develop dialogically) of social scientists. Undertaking research and knowledge in partnership does not necessarily mean a dilution of the significance of rigorous and scholarly research, pursued in the interests of wider publics. In this context, we regard academic research as being, in principle, separate from lay publics and focused on the refining of theories and ideas through rigorous academic discourse. The type of dissemination and delivery of research in Social Science in the City café events comes under the heading of public engagement. The products of research, some of which had already been completed, were delivered to publics in cafés, community halls and a media centre, with the intention of encouraging reflection and discussion. This is different from and not superior to related pursuits, which have included action research – discussed in Chapter Fifteen – on a housing estate. The latter is more akin to knowledge exchange activities focused on the kinds of impact activity highlighted by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), with its related emphasis upon the co-construction of knowledge in research design and process. It is different to public engagement, which has been defined in terms of public dissemination and can include the delivery of conference papers, blogs, tweets, working papers, public lectures, workshops and so on. From the perspective of HEFCE and the ESRC, these kinds of activity are thought about in terms of ‘pathways to impact’ – pathways to engaging potential stakeholders in research projects and questions that are mutually beneficial. There is no intrinsic contradiction between the general aims of Social Science in the City and the pursuit of research that benefits different stakeholders. Problems can arise in conditions where some types of impact are favoured over others. In addition, the strong policy emphasis on measuring the performance of public engagement initiatives along financial lines, where value is equated with discrete, measurable impact, can detract away from the generalised social good that often emerges in unspoken, but shared and relational ways. It is the approach and disposition of the research that is important in this context, research that reflects the social and political values 35

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of public sociology, to be of service to publics in the pursuit of social justice. From this perspective, Orr and Bennett (2012) argue that ‘The dialogical nature of relations and interactions between academics and lay publics and practitioners are potentially generative rather than instrumental and transactional’. In relation to this last point, social science can be regarded either as an apologia for the status quo or as playing a critical role in helping individuals understand the structural, political, social and personal processes framing their experience.

The origins and aims of Social Science in the City A social historian, offering a presentation to Social Science in the City on the implications for publics of the closing of libraries and museums, recently remarked: “Your programme of talks is in the great tradition of the 19th-century Workers’ Education movement – taking the university out to the people”. Others have remarked that they enjoy the values and atmosphere of Social Science in the City as an arena for critical reflection and debate. When we set up Social Science in the City, three and half years ago, the HEFCE research impact agenda, with its emphasis on creating paths to impact potential stakeholder research partners, was not uppermost in our minds. Our main concern in Social Science in the City was to tap into what felt like an alternative discursive space – to encourage reflection beyond the university about the often bewildering changes and pressures we are trying to navigate, in our different ways, sharing some of the tools of social-scientific inquiry to help us.We were drawn to the insights of Bauman (1999, 2005), in particular, concerning the shifting political and social terrain of globalisation and neoliberalism and the problems that this raises for the generation of a meaningful public sphere. According to Bauman, the dominance of market relations and individualism pose quite specific challenges. In particular, there is an enhanced need for protecting and recreating public spaces that span the public and the private spheres. For Bauman, the hope of bridging the current gap between public issues and private troubles lies in and is encapsulated by the metaphor of the ancient Greek Agora, something picked up by Chris Scanlon and John Adlam in Chapter Nine on the dynamics of social exclusion. In particular, we were interested in the increasingly socialised and public nature of private realms in contemporary society (Dawes, 2011) and the importance of taking social research into the modern ‘agora’ or marketplace (Bauman, 1999) as a means of bringing critical 36

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public debate to modern meeting places. Our concerns were with the reduced spaces for the expression of everyday concerns beyond service development issues, and the increasing disparities in income and wealth that lead to generalised depression and anomie – neither of which is conducive to a thriving social environment (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2010; Jones, 2011). In the 21st century, being attentive to opportunities for publically and critically engaged social science is necessary given a range of other socio-technical developments in multimedia and computer technologies, where the latter expands the public arena for critical argument and debate beyond face-to-face encounters. Also important are a range of developments that, as Kellner (1995) argues, necessitates a broadening of the public sphere as: a site of information, discussion, contestation, political struggle, and organization that includes the broadcasting media and new cyberspaces as well as the face-to-face interactions of everyday life.These developments, connected primarily with multimedia and computer technologies, require a reformulation and expansion of the concept of the public sphere – as well as our notions of the critical or committed intellectual and notion of the public intellectual. In this context, social science may have a very specific role to play. Through the opening up of sites of discussion and debate, much can be gained from people’s capacities for thinking, critiquing and shaping their social worlds.The sharing of social-scientific inquiry when applied to everyday problems can acquire critical importance when we turn our attention to the broader public sphere in which activities occur between state and private life.This is a sphere of cafés, blogs, cyberspace, community halls, parks and media centres where people come together not only as social agents carrying the culture and expectations of their social worlds, but also, increasingly, as informed critics of daily lived experiences and the policies framing them. Social Science in the City can be thought of as one of many such endeavours: a broadly interdisciplinary public engagement initiative that aims to promote discussion and understanding of various issues, dilemmas and ‘social problems’ within the city in the pursuit of inclusive projects of social justice. It includes a commitment to a public sociology and social science of the kind referred to by Burawoy (2004) and, for example, by the range of individuals who are involved in the Campaign

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for the Public University. There is a sense that, now, in particular – in the face of growing income and wealth differentials, increasing poverty, continuing cuts to public expenditure, and an array of inequalities in education, health, employment and politics (see, eg, Wilkinson and Picket, 2010; Jones, 2011) – public debate about critical social issues is greatly needed. A collectively owned project that includes regular members and a variety of shifting and new attendees who come from a range of social and professional backgrounds to listen to research findings and ideas and to think about and discuss them constitutes a form of public engagement that extends beyond any sectional interest. Social Science in the City is now placed in a context in which public engagement and the research impact agenda are acquiring additional significance. The pressures of funding on universities are clearly one factor involved in developing and furthering public and/ or community engagement projects. We can respond pragmatically to this policy agenda while retaining a commitment to a public social science: the idea of the social sciences themselves as a public service to increasingly diverse and critically informed publics, which includes university personnel who were drawn to the public service dimensions of their work, whether lecturers, administrators or senior managers. We do, however, need to address the implicit superiority of academic knowledge in hierarchies that still, to some degree, pitch academic knowledge against practice.

Questioning the public–private divide: engaging with different publics The activities of Social Science in the City began with café seminars and discussions, and then were followed by a website, lectures, workshops and action research. Café talks were initially held in Tart Café but other venues in the city have been used, particularly in Stokes Croft and Lockleaze. Community centres and church halls have also been used, as well as media centres, which have included Bristol’s Watershed. As indicated in Chapter One, because of the ad hoc way in which the initiative has developed, our emphasis has been more upon development than assessment and evaluation. We were more interested in simply engaging with diverse groups of people. In many ways, Social Science in the City drew on counter-hegemonic imaginaries of public space while tapping into those new social spaces made available to extend learning and reflection. Social Science in the City was later supported by a Dean who had responsibility for Research and Knowledge Exchange because the initiative was 38

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regarded as resonating with the values associated with public services and the reorientation of the social sciences towards a more applied model in a new faculty. The public service values of those who have supported Social Science in the City have been powerful motives and have resonated with the aims of the initiative; they have certainly not been counter to it. Throughout the university, there are those who hold strong social values and beliefs and are dedicated to practices of social inclusion, even if we might question the broader neoliberally framed nature of some developments, which both restrict and, in other ways, paradoxically, offer novel opportunities to work as advocates of and campaigners for social justice and socially inclusive policies and practices. In addition to the prevailing policy agendas associated with pressures on higher education funding, supporters and participants involved in Social Science in the City bring their own professional, personal and imaginary engagements, along with their social values and experiential insights, to the initiative.There are over 400 people on our circulation list from a range of organisations and interest groups. This list is growing and is supplemented with the use of Twitter and links with other research centres whose specialist activities draw on social science. Different events and different venues have drawn different groups of people and types of public. At various times, the discussions have attracted youth workers, housing workers, GPs, psychiatrists, school teachers, retired educationalists, psychotherapists, homeless people, grassroots activists, photographers, artists, business people, retail managers and others, depending on the subject matter of the talks.All have shared with the speakers at the café their thoughts and their concerns about life in contemporary Britain. The experiences of individuals working in partnership with other agencies and organisations are continually changing in the context of underfunding and the restructuring of public sector and community organisations.The experience of insecurity and uncertainty has not, it seemed, damaged individuals’ capacity to imagine alternative visions of public space and the public good. Our first Social Science in the City talk was delivered by Professor David James, whose talk drew on the sociology of education to discuss the significance of school choices on the part of parents for their children’s academic success. The talk drew in parents, students, school teachers and professors of education from nearby universities. To give other examples, Nigel Williams’ work on intergenerational trauma attracted a range of educators and individuals from therapeutic communities, while the University of the West of England Vice Chancellor Steve West’s talk on the ‘Future of Universities’ highlighted 39

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the importance of diverse ways of thinking about a publically engaged university, including the application of knowledge to scientific and technological progress, but also to contribute to civic life. Set within a larger public forum at the Watershed in Bristol, his talk drew together some classical ideas of the university as involved in the building of character and civic life along with a pragmatic, managerial response to changes in higher education and a concern with the ongoing survival of the university as a functioning institution. On this occasion, there was a notable lack of consensus from the floor, with several individuals arguing for the broader political and social role of the university. Those attending the talk included senior managers from nearby universities and also academics critical of the political agendas impacting on university restructuring. Broader philosophical questions about the role of the university were counterposed with a managerial outlook. Other individuals speaking at the Watershed have included those who are critical of agendas entering into education more generally, while others have addressed our collective involvement in individualised forms of social harm and aggression. As indicated by some of the chapters in this collection, café seminars have ranged from concerns with the policy implications of an aging population, to the benefits of applying social theory to work with disturbed and deprived children and to managing community conflicts. Others have spoken about the impact of their environmental and health work on businesses and employers’ policies as these relate to the creation of healthy workplaces. Some very preliminary feedback from an initial exploratory survey indicates that the most popular talks have been those that encouraged critical reflection on issues of social justice, social inequalities and human rights.The critical dimensions of the café as a public space are therefore most prominent in the feedback we have obtained to date. The growing emphasis on impact research within the context of cuts to publically funded university research does potentially give Social Science in the City a different political inflection. Continuing support for the initiative is likely to be bound up with the capacity to deliver ‘impact statements’. These are likely to form 20% of the total weighting for each Unit of Research Assessment, a substantial change from the earlier Research Assessment Exercise, where there merely had to be evidence that research had ‘benefited society’. The assessment of research impacts is expected to continue as a component of the Research Excellence Framework exercise and to grow in importance. Research itself will be conducted with stakeholders, not apart from them. We need to ask whether this will change the kind of dynamics 40

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associated with dialogic reflexivity and lead to more powerful forms of governance and governmentality. On the other hand, is measuring the effectiveness of engagement necessarily problematic for critical social scientists? With this in mind, we are in the process of improving information-gathering tools to find out who is using Social Science in the City and for what purposes. Other ways of gathering information are now being pursued, including the use of storytelling, drawings and post-it notes to gather people’s responses, feelings and thoughts about the impact of the events. It will be important in embarking on such measures not to interrupt the energy or atmosphere of events, or to steer the initiative into purely impact-led directions.

Concluding remarks Concerning the future of the Social Science in the City initiative, we need to prioritise an issue that is at the heart of the public engagement agenda: how to address the large number of individuals who, as alluded to at the beginning of this chapter, find it hardest to engage or simply do not want to. An initial Social Science in the City survey that has been completed by a small percentage of people shows a bias in participation towards white, older men. We have had diverse groups of people attending the talks and workshops and so this may reflect more responsiveness to surveys on the part of male attendees. Who decides to complete the survey is an issue and there are those who are not necessarily on the mailing list who have not completed the survey, or others who are and who have not completed it.There are a variety of possible reasons for this, including time constraints. It is clearly the case, as some other feedback suggests, that we need to offer more in the way of talks relating to gender and sexuality (something colleagues are now organising). As another individual also suggested, it would be good to involve wider groups of people from the heart of the inner city. In this respect, our more positive feedback consistently points to the importance of a university having a more public role, both in sharing ideas and in offering an alternative space for dialogue and debate. What emerges in public debate is never completely anticipated or predicted, it depends upon the concerns and interests of those who attend the talks and workshops, and this, in turn, will depend upon the title of the talks themselves and the ways in which these are written and marketed for broader publics.The needs of different publics also shape research, but whoever the funders may be, there is usually a dialogic relationship in research that encourages reflection and may often have a bearing upon the changing policies of a variety of organisations. 41

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It is useful to think about people’s responses to the research and the implications of findings for their own practices. We have outlined an initiative that resonates, at least in part, with the shifting policies of higher education in the face of reduced public spending. Social Science in the City nevertheless remains a ‘broad church’ and includes talks, workshops and collaborative, partnership working.The conflicting interests involved in this initiative do not pose insoluble problems; rather, there may be possibilities for improving and enhancing our initial aims. What is crucial from our point of view is that it remains possible for individuals to continue to critically reflect on and question their social worlds. References Bauman, Z. (1999) In search of politics, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Z. (2005) Liquid life, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (1984) Homo academicus, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Browne, J. (Chairman) (2010) Securing a sustainable future for higher education: An independent review of higher education funding and student finance, October. Available at: www.delni.gov.uk/browne-reportsecuring-a-sustainable-future-for-higher-education.pdf (accessed 6 March 2013). Burawoy, M. (2004) ‘For public sociology’, American Sociological Review, vol 70, no 1, pp 4–28. Castoriadis, C. (1997) The imaginary institution of society, Cambridge: Polity Press. Dawes, S. (2011) ‘The public university as a response to funding cuts to UKs higher education’. Available at: www.truth-out-.org/news/ item/5103:the-public university-as-response-to-funding-cuts-touks-higher-education Deem, R., Mok, K.H. and Lucas, L. (2008) ‘Transforming higher education in whose image? Exploring the concept of the “world-class” university’, Europe and Asia Higher Education Policy, vol 21, pp 83–97. Giddens, A. (1987) Social theory and modern sociology, Cambridge: Polity Press. Giddens, A. (1994) Beyond Left and Right: the future of radical politics, Cambridge: Polity Press. Giddens, A. (2000) The Third Way and its critics, Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Griffiths, D. and Maile, S. (forthcoming) ‘Britons in Berlin: imagined cityscapes, affective encounters and the cultivation of the self ’, in M. Benson and N. Osbaldiston (eds) Understanding lifestyle migration: theoretical approaches to migration and the quest for a better way of life, London: Palgrave. Higher Education Funding Council for England (2010) The higher education workforce framework 2010: Overview report 13. Available at: www.hefce.ac.uk/media/hefce/content/pubs/2010/201005/10_05. pdf (accessed 25 March 2014). Holmwood, J. (2013) ‘Markets, democracy and public higher education’, Speech to the Convention for Higher Education, University of Brighton, May. Available at: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=pIcjTopShSg (accessed 25 March 2014). Jessop, B. (2006) ‘From micro-powers to governmentality: Foucault’s work on statehood, state formation, statecraft and state power’, Political Geography, vol 26, no 1, pp 34–40. Jones, O. (2011) Chavs: the demonization of the working class, London: Verso. Kellner, D. (1995) ‘Habermas, the public sphere and democracy: a critical intervention’. Available at: http://gsels.ucla.edu/faculty/ kellner/kellner.html (accessed 21 August 2013). Maile, S. and Braddon, D. (2003) Stakeholding and the new international order, Aldershot: Ashgate. Maile, S. and Griffiths, D. (2012) ‘Longings for Berlin: exploring the workings of the psycho-social imaginary in British migration’, Journal of Psycho-Social Studies, vol 6, no 1, pp 30–53. Orr, K. and Bennet, M. (2012) ‘Public administration scholarship and the politics of co-producing academic practitioner research’, Public Administration Review, vol xx, pp 1-10. Robbins Report (1963) Higher education: Report of the Committee appointed by the Prime Minister under the Chairmanship of Lord Robbins, October. Available at: www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/ robbins/robbins1963.html. Rose, N. (2000) ‘Community, citizenship, and the Third Way’, American Behavioral Scientist, vol 43, no 9, pp 1395–411. Secretary of State for Education and Skills (2003) The future of higher education, White Paper, Norwich: The Stationery Office Limited. Toffler, A. (1981) The third wave, New York, NY: Banton Books. Weiss, C.H. (1979) ‘The many meanings of research utilisation’, Public Administration Review, September/October, pp 426-31. Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. (2010) The spirit level: why equality is better for everyone, London: Penguin Books. 43

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Wright Mills, C. (1959) The sociological imagination, New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

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Part Two Public engagement in practice

Introduction to Part Two Stella Maile and David Griffiths As we argued in the Introduction to the book, there are different conceptualisations of public engagement and participation, which reflect shifting policy, political and social agendas. Public engagement in higher education has tended to be framed in largely managerial terms as a question of increased transparency and accountability, involving ‘the public’ in dialogue and promoting participation and knowledge transfer. In this model of public engagement, promoting access to universities’ facilities and academic knowledge and fostering student and faculty engagement are part of an ongoing process of widening participation. In this perspective, the broader structural and policy framework affecting higher education and the effects of power upon the types of knowledge produced within universities have tended to fly well below the radar. What the contributors in this part of the book have in common is a critical approach, both to substantive issues and to their specific area of expertise. While they all have a background in social science, a wide variety of disciplines is covered, from social policy and sociology to criminology and divergent psychotherapeutic approaches. Clearly, social-scientific research is not uniform, but informed by a variety of research agendas, interests, theories and methodologies. Provisionally extending Burawoy’s concept of a public sociology to the other disciplines, we suggest that each of these contributors is concerned with moral and political concerns that reach beyond the university. The chapters in this part of the book reflect the different contexts for the application of social-scientific research; they also represent different audiences beyond the café environment, audiences and participants either as teachers and researchers, as activists, or as policymakers and practitioners. In the first three chapters, Hunt, Clement and Fletcher address the 2011 riots, the politics of austerity and the Occupy movement, and the limits to participation. Steve Hunt, in ‘“Grab and go”: some sociological musings on the 2011 “disturbances”’, provides an overview of interpretations of the 2011 riots that were in common currency at the time and also applies the insights of classical sociology, in particular, the work of Durkheim. Does the limitless desire promoted by the consumer society result in a state of anomie? Ranging over a number 47

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of authors from Sennett to Bauman the ‘cult of individualism’ is located at the root of the problem. Only a reformulation of the importance of social connections can generate a route out of our current malaise. Matthew Clement, in ‘1976 – the moral necessity of austerity’, argues that the current politics of austerity in Britain are in many respects a replay of the 1976 International Monetary Fund (IMF) crisis in which the forces of international finance enforced stringent spending cuts and the erosion of welfare provision. Clement proposes that austerity is constructed as a moral panic that enforces adherence to neoliberal nostrums of balanced national accounts and liberalised markets. Referencing the emergence of ‘new publics’ and social movements associated with the ‘Arab Spring’, Clement argues for the increased relevance of an engaged sociology and the importance of a critical public engagement with the politics of austerity. The alternative framing of austerity within a broader political and historical context generated some keen debate in the café and resonated with individuals’ particular areas of engagement and professional practice. Although, the world of global finance seems to have a stranglehold over public and political debate, it must also deal with the dynamic tensions it throws up – including the costs of increasing social alienation, environmental destruction and politically and socially displaced peoples, to name a few. There are pockets of resistance that may take a variety of forms, from the growth of campaign organisations like Avaaz to Occupy. Samantha Fletcher’s talk to the social science café took place, in the spirit of Social Science in the City, in a café in Stokes Croft, not far from Bristol’s own riots against a local branch of Tesco. The talk was attended by members of the Occupy movement, as well as those who had witnessed the Stokes Croft riots. Samantha Fletcher’s chapter on ‘The Occupy movement’ asks what types of constraint operate on participation in public movements like Occupy and identifies a number of themes, including ‘physical’ intimidation and coercion and ‘metaphysical’ problems over the meaning of participation in a fully networked society (the substitution of virtual communities for locally grounded ones). Fletcher argues that oppression is, to some degree, selfenforced and suggests the need for more critical research into ways of circumventing what she terms the ‘oppression binary’ of physical and metaphysical constraints, as well as the provision of ‘protected spaces’ for public discussion. In the middle section of Part Two, specific policy areas are discussed in detail: ageing populations, paradigms of road safety and restorative justice and community protection. As we have argued, there is communication back and forth between different publics, including 48

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academic researchers, the public of the users and people working in and developing different public services. Robin Means, in ‘“Brave new world”: how will the government respond to the social care challenge of an ageing population?’, analyses governmental responses to an ageing population and social care policies towards older people. He is interested in what drives policy and what consequences there are likely to be in terms of shrinking services, cutbacks and an ageing population.The author critically engages with the discourse of the ‘Big Society’. He concludes with some key messages about engaging with the public, including combating ageism and rethinking funding models for social care services. On a final point, Means also makes suggestions for promoting working with older people ‘as an inspiring opportunity’ on professional courses concerned with social care. Richard Kimberlee’s chapter on ‘Road wars: contesting paradigms of road safety, public space and well-being’ stems from publicly engaged work with communities and young people around issues of road safety. Kimberlee charts the inequalities associated with the road safety paradigm, exposing class differences and the impact upon the use of public space, as, for example, in the decline in children playing in the street. Sedentary lifestyles and health impairment are one result of the continuing dominance by cars of public space. Challenges to the road safety paradigm stem from a number of different actors, including environmental groups and those promoting alternative modes of transport. Kimberlee illustrates these, arguing for new models of participation in public space. The UK’s road spaces are a site of contestation for different actors, as motorists, pedestrians, cyclists and local communities engage in the new ‘road wars’ for the use of public space. McCartan and McKenzie, in ‘Restorative justice, community action and public protection’, discuss restorative justice as a means of reintegrating offenders back into communities and its relation to current government policies such as the ‘Big Society’. The chapter focuses on youth offenders and sex offenders as particular cases in which greater public engagement is seen as a potential solution to reintegrating offenders. The authors warn that public engagement is not a ‘quick fix’ to the problem of reintegrating offenders, although it does have some benefits from the perspective of victims of crime. In the concluding chapters in Part Two, Scanlon and Adlam, and Hoggett adopt a psychosocial approach to the issues of homelessness and resilience in individuals and communities. Chris Scanlon and John Adlam, in ‘Chew ’em up or throw ’em up? Disorganised responses to interpersonal(ity) disorder and social disease’, refers to the significance 49

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of the agora for thinking about the processes of social exclusion and inclusion that operate in society. Bauman (1999) has highlighted the importance of taking advantage of the market spaces and increased information flows and global networks associated with the current phase of neoliberalism. Drawing upon the example of the ancient Greek marketplace, he views the agora as a means of overcoming the private–public divide by creating a hybrid space ‘where private problems meet in a meaningful way’ (Bauman, 1999, p 3). Scanlon focuses on our own reflexive forms of violence that occur in the insistence that others are incorporated into the status quo, the regimes of power that reside in a range of agencies involved in ‘managing’ the homeless, those of homeless states of mind, as well as those who literally live without a physical home – the home of a nation-state, the home of bricks and mortar.Those of a homeless state of mind are both partly created by us and offer us, if we care to hear them, critical lessons about the problems we share and participate in our societies. Paul Hoggett, in ‘Resilience’, asks how it is that some individuals and communities can retain their spirit and optimism under conditions of sustained hardship. Writing as an academic, a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and as an engaged citizen concerned with climate change and the resilience of ecosystems, Hoggett reviews psychological and ecological approaches to resilience. In the accounts of personal resilience in the psychological literature, much appears to hinge on the role of belief and values in sustaining an individual and also on the role of external resources. What counted as resilience in the past may, however, result in ossified behaviour that fails to adapt to current challenges. The idea of negative spin-offs from resilience is further developed by Hoggett in his analysis of the ecological literature. From an ecological perspective, resilience is the product of a disturbance to or crisis in an ecological system that produces novel responses, thereby enhancing diversity.Too much resilience in the form of active ‘adaptation to disturbances’ brings its own problems in train, particularly in relation to the manipulation of the environment through ‘geoengineering’ solutions. Hoggett argues against the pathological functioning of social systems, which contain within them the seeds of their own destruction. What he proposes as ‘resilience thinking’ is a way of grasping the interconnectedness of phenomena and is also a way of resisting the temptation to control what are in fact uncontrollable systems, be these environmental or governmental. In his conclusion, Hoggett argues firmly against governmental centralism and in favour of a more

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balanced or ‘resilient’ approach to governance that has firmer roots in local forms of control. References Bauman, Z. (1999) In search of politics, Cambridge: Polity Press.

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THREE

‘Grab and go’: some sociological musings on the 2011 ‘disturbances’ Steve Hunt In this chapter, I provide an overview of a topic that is close to my heart.The reasons for this will quickly become apparent. Any publicly engaged social scientist will be concerned with one of the core questions in the social sciences, namely, why do sociologists research and write on particular themes if they are not personally touched, often in indirect ways, by the issues they raise? Posing the question in this way is a reminder that social scientists are simultaneously academic analysts and commentators on the one hand, and social actors on the other. This, of course, raises further issues around subjectivity and empirical scholarly analysis, with its focus on causal factors and relationships – not least of all, where does one begin and the other end? It is with these observations in mind that I address the subject of the 2011 ‘disturbances’. I am acutely aware that sociology should be relevant and speak to an informed audience that can become part of an ongoing conversation and offer positive feedback. This chapter began life as a presentation given to my students as part of their degree programme and their comments were incorporated into an early draft. I am also aware of the need to address a wider audience. Earlier talks that I gave to the Social Science in the City™ initiative held in Bristol were on the subject of Latin American migrants in the city and the broader area of religious and sexual rights. Feedback from these audiences enhanced subsequent publications and work undertaken in public engagement with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual groups and my work with Amnesty International. It is with such public impacts in mind, and the requisite for sociology to have practical significance, that I address the theme of the 2011 ‘disturbances’. In the second week of August 2011, I, like millions of others, switched on the television to witness that many cities and major towns in the UK (or, more precisely, in England, but interestingly not in Wales or Scotland; see Lloyd, 2011) were subject to arson attacks, looting 53

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of shop centres and other major incidents of urban unrest. To my bemusement, I watched the images of several buildings burning in my home town of Croydon, including a large furniture store that was once a local landmark. The destruction of the store was to become perhaps the dominant image of the worst urban violence in the UK for three decades. The statistics resulting from what came to be known as ‘the disturbances’ were truly staggering: five deaths; at least 186 police and 16 civilian injuries; approximately 3,100 arrests; an estimated £200 million worth of property damage; and nearly 3,500 reported crimes across London alone. Clearly, these disturbances, or what might more realistically be referred to as ‘riots’, are rich in sociological significance and practical implications in terms of future academic research At the same time, the riots entreat a good measure of public engagement in attempting to open up a space for debate in providing a reflexive understanding of the dilemmas and concerns of everyday life, raising pertinent questions about the kind of society in which we live, and not only in urban environments. Not surprisingly, the riots have generated major ongoing debates in the media, among politicians and in the public sphere as to both their immediate and long-term causes. The explanations advanced differ considerably and all have helped shape our views. This is evident in a YouGov (2011) poll carried out during the height of the riots. It simply asked a sample of the UK population what they thought to be the main causes. Some 42% of those polled thought ‘criminal behaviour’ to be the principal explanation; 26% ‘gang culture’; 8% ‘government cuts’; 5% ‘unemployment’; 5% ‘racial tensions’; and 3% ‘poor policing’. In the interest of further contributing to public debate and hopefully engaging others in the insights that can be drawn from sociological theory in our attempts to make sense of some underlying causes of the riots, I will provide an overview of explanations offered by YouGov and others. Drawing on the ideas of one of the founding fathers of sociology, Emile Durkheim, I suggest that we need to conduct some personal soul-searching in regard to the kind of culture that we are creating for ourselves. In short, I will suggest that the riots constitute a highly relevant topic not only in matters of social policy, but also in providing a compass of what our collective values are. Moreover, the events of 2011 generate a discussion around political and social contexts relevant to our everyday lives. Such a discussion should not be limited to social science as an academic discipline since the ‘disturbances’ readily offer an opportunity to contextualise deliberations pertinent to public engagement.To be sure, sociology can 54

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provide a critical mode of understanding the ‘riots’, which impacted the lives of thousands, seeking to analyse such issues. However, the events reinforced my point that sociology also needs a range of public audiences to engage with over issues of profound social concern, opening up a space for debate to provide a reflexive understanding of public concerns, thus raising pertinent questions about the kind of society in which we live, and not only in urban environments. I will return to the significance of this in my summary.

Some explanations Community relations The first night of rioting took place on 6 August 2011 after a peaceful protest in Tottenham, London.This followed the fatal police shooting of Mark Duggan, a local man suspected of a gun crime, two days earlier. Police failed to notify Duggan’s family of his death, while it seemed that no senior police officer was available to talk to protesters, hence creating resentment of the way police handled the matter. The riots in Tottenham after the death were initially blamed on poor relations between the police and the black community in particular. In this sense, there were striking similarities with the causes of the Broadwater Farm riot, also in Tottenham, in 1985.

The copycat effect While Duggan’s death initiated the riots in Tottenham, we are still left with the question of what exactly the looting that followed elsewhere had to do with the tragedy. In the following days, further riots took place in diverse parts of London, perhaps most notably in Brixton, Chingford, Croydon, Ealing, East Ham, Enfield, Hackney, Peckham and even at the very heart of London in Oxford Circus. Within two days, the disturbances had spread to other cities, including Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester and Liverpool. The media was quick to dub the disturbances as ‘copycat violence’, which suggests, with a degree of irony, that rioters were simply imitating the scenes that they had seen on television news and elsewhere in the media.

Social network communication The speed by which the disturbances spread and the level of organisation apparently behind them raised questions connected to the 55

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role of the social media, particularly BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), which is emblematic of everyday technological communication. There was evidence that the BBM service was used by looters to spread misleading accounts of Duggan’s death and may have incited disturbances – informing where the riots were taking place, the best routes to travel to be involved and the extent of police presence in specific areas (BBM was also used by the police to track down rioters). During the riots, Twitter accounted for four out of every 170 UK Internet visits on 8 August. While social communication networks were the means by which news of the riots were spread and organised, they cannot be said to constitute a major cause however.

Gang culture By definition, riots are a collective enterprise and are often associated with gang culture by way of asserting a great deal of youth peer pressure to be involved. It was discovered that approximately 19% (337 suspects) belonged to 169 different gangs. In other cities, less than 10% were found to be gang members. However, most official reports suggested that gangs did not play a substantial role in the riots (Travis, 2011). Nonetheless, on the BBC’s Newsnight programme of 12 August 2011, the historian David Starkey singled out black gangs in particular and their culture of gangster rap music, and argued that this culture had impacted youths of all backgrounds – an assertion that was heavily contested.

Economic crisis Predictably, a good deal of debate in the media and among politicians focused on the economic climate engendered by the ‘credit crunch’ behind the deep recession of the time. Much emphasis was placed on high youth unemployment and the creation of a new underclass (interestingly, Tottenham had the highest unemployment rate in London and the eighth highest in the UK) (Gainsbury and Culzac, 2011).The blame was also aimed at the Conservative–Liberal Coalition government’s cutbacks to services and benefits as part of the austerity measures undertaken to tackle the nation’s economic problems. This suggests that the riots were not unlike those that occurred in the early 1980s, including St Paul’s in Bristol,Toxteth in Liverpool and Brixton in London, under similar circumstances. Such economic explanations ensured that the riots of 2011 became heavily politicised, with opposition parties predictably explaining the disturbances as a result of government policy. For instance, Ken Livingstone, the Labour candidate 56

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for Mayor of London in 2012, stated: ‘The economic stagnation and cuts being imposed by the Tory government inevitably create social division’ (Lammy, 2011). In addition, there were claims that there had been a failure by successive governments over the last 30 years to properly address social housing: that it has been a low-priority area in terms of policy and has thus aggravated the problems experienced in many poorer neighbourhoods.

Political alienation A related explanation was that the riots were a result of political alienation, social exclusion and the general disenfranchisement of young people from a political system that brought little meaningful participation in allowing them to shape their own lives. In this respect, the riots were compared with the so-called Arab Spring and demonstrations by populations in North African and Middle-Eastern countries calling for the extension of political rights and participation (Ryan, 2011). However, the lack of political demonstrations and the emphasis on looting and destruction suggests that the disturbances were fundamentally apolitical.

Family breakdown The riots have been linked with England allegedly having the ‘worst record in family breakdown in Europe’ (Odone, 2011), generating a lack of parental control of children and teenagers that has created a young ‘feral’ generation. Put otherwise, family breakdown has brought about a generation void of personal discipline, purpose and structure in life. This was often said to be connected to a lack of male role models in the family, meaning that gang members, in particular, had no father in the home and were hence vulnerable to the influence of older gang leaders (Gainsbury and Culzac, 2011). Statistical evidence is often advanced to support this viewpoint; in particular, that the proportion of dependent children in the UK living with a lone parent has almost doubled over the last 20 years (from 14% in 1986 to 24% in 2006), and that the effects are arguably starker in cities since childless households and lone-parent families are concentrated in urban areas.

Criminality Then there was perhaps the most obvious explanation – simple criminality – an explanation also subject to much political rhetoric. 57

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During the riots, Home Secretary Theresa May stated: ‘I think this is about sheer criminality. That is what we have seen on the streets’ (Apps, 2011). Kenneth Clarke, the Secretary of State for Justice, similarly described the riots as mostly ‘an outburst of outrageous behaviour by the criminal classes’ (Lewis et al, 2011). He cited the statistic that almost three quarters of the adults who had been charged with offences related to the disorder had a previous criminal record. Clarke interpreted this mostly as a result of ‘a broken penal system’, which failed to prevent reoffending. He proposed stern new measures, focusing on vigorous punishment and on measures to reduce reoffending (Lewis et al, 2011).

Moral decay A final explanation is somewhat more all-embracing: Britain’s alleged moral decay.Typical was the claim by columnist Max Hastings (2011), writing in the Daily Mail: ‘Rioters are victims of a perverted social ethos, which elevates personal freedom to an absolute, and denies the underclass the discipline – tough love – which alone might enable some of its members to escape’. The Daily Telegraph writer Peter Osborne (2011) suggested that moral decay was behind the riots and that such decay was also evident at the top of society, as well as the bottom, with the rich and powerful enraging the sentiments of the British public. He cited the MPs’ expenses scandal, excessive bankers’ bonuses and the phone-hacking scandal related to sections of the press. To illustrate this point, The Financial Times cartoonist Ingram Pinn depicted a Union Flag being ripped through by a ‘hoodie’ looter carrying a stolen box of Adidas trainers following two respectfully dressed figures carrying piles of cash, one labelled ‘MPs’ Expenses’ and another ‘Bankers’ Bonus’.

Revisiting the ‘classics’ I am in little doubt that many of the explanations mentioned earlier are viable in shedding some light on the urban disturbances of 2011 and at least some are perfectly consistent with sociological observances of similar occurrences. In my own account, however, I would like to dig a little deeper in offering not just an explanation of why the riots occurred, but a commentary in respect of what they say about the society we have created for ourselves. My tack is perhaps rather unorthodox, so the approach needs a degree of justification. In recent years, there has been a discernible return to the ‘classics’ of the discipline, namely, the work of the so-called ‘Founding Fathers’ 58

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of sociology, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and Karl Marx. Curiously, I have come across very few recent sociological writings that have applied the work of Marx to the nature and repercussions of the world economic recession. Surely, Marx would have had something to say about the riots. ‘Blame the bankers’ for the recession and everything that happens in its wake. After all, we live in a world where finance capital accumulation has wreaked havoc, cutting out the troublesome effort, as Marx prophesised, of ‘production’.Why produce things when you can live off those who do (including employers and employees) and bypass all the hard work by speculation and usury? To be sure, the bankers and speculators are frequently blamed today for a world where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, playing a game of financial monopoly with our hardearned money. Perhaps, though, this is a symptom as well as a cause of our malaise. Similarly, it is all too easy to suggest that the riots in English cities and towns were an expression of some underdeveloped class consciousness. This is why I tend to think that the riots were not politically motivated. Certainly, it is interesting to note that the looting of 40-inch plasma televisions was preferable to creating a social movement aimed at challenging the powers that be and demanding radical political and economic change.The 2011 riots were not without their heroes. Pauline Pearce, a grandmother, jazz singer and community radio activist, gained a measure of fame by lambasting the rioters, shaking her walking stick and castigating looters as being without a cause and making her ashamed to live in Hackney. She asked the rioters: Why are you burning people’s shops that they have worked hard to build up? And for what, just to say you are warring and a bad man? This is about a man who was shot in Tottenham, this ain’t about busting up the place. We’re not gathering together to fight for a cause, we’re running down Foot Locker and thieving shoes, dirty thieves. (see ‘Woman Confronts Rioters in Hackney’, The Telegraph, www. telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8692712/Hackneyspeech-woman-revealed-to-be-local-jazz-singer.html) Yet, maybe there is a sense in which we are all to blame. Perhaps we should point a finger at the ‘us’ rather than the ‘them’, the ‘outsiders’. The great majority of us subscribe to the consumer ethic and the unlimited expectations that this brings in its wake. It would appear that the Holy Grail we all search for is little more than an ever-increasing standard of living to which we believe we are entitled (Moran and 59

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Hall, 2011). But we do not ask why this is desirable as a goal. Do we need more and more material possessions, endlessly expecting more and more? (Not to mention the impact on the environment.) There is thus the key question of whether materialism makes us happy. Maybe it does, maybe it does not. The fact that such a high percentage of the populations of the Western world suffer from one form of depression or another might suggest the latter. While many explanations can be advanced, a different approach is to ask those involved and understand the subjective motivation of the individual ‘social actor’. I was struck by two rioters who were asked by a television interviewer “Why did you do it?”. One young looter answered that he liked to go into the West End of London suitably dressed. Apparently, his designer trainers were not stylish or expensive enough to be seen out in public and there was the need to keep in fashion with his peers. He badgered his mother who could not afford to buy them for him, “So, I took them!” When asked if he had given thought to the shopkeeper whose store had been looted, he replied “Shopkeepers.They’re nothing man!” Then there was the older woman who was asked the same question as to why she looted and replied: “They make millions of these [TV sets] on conveyer belts.They won’t miss one.” It is too easy to focus on the underclass as the cause of the 2011 riots – those who have missed out on the economic boom of the recent years before recession occurred, now rendered powerless and alienated from community roots, void of participation and lacking social inclusion, but seemingly not marginalised from the ethic of greed. But, as became clear, all sorts of people were involved: office workers, students and affluent people – individual opportunists, as well as organised gangs. In this respect, the title of Marcuse’s (1964) well-known book Onedimensional man comes to mind.The volume amounts to a neo-Marxist account of the dominance of the consumer society. Although rather dated now, it still provides a clue:‘I am what I consume’. No philosophy, no religion, no sense of moral or public responsibility. The masses are so duped by consumerism, claimed Marcuse, that they fail to challenge existing power structures or ‘think outside of the box’. ‘Grab and go’ is the strapline of a well-known coffee house chain. It seems to be fashionable to be seen there. Good for one’s image. ‘Grab and go’ has become the slogan for a generation and, I would suggest, this is what makes the 2011 riots different from those of the 1980s. It is not just a response to poverty and powerlessness. Looting has taken a dominant mentality to its furthest conclusion, ‘Grab and go, but don’t bother to stop to pay’. Consumerism and materialism 60

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has gathered apace. ‘How much is my house worth?’ – a common topic for everyday discussion. Up until recently, the chattering classes told their friends to put money in Icelandic banks and make a quick return, and now expect the state to bail out UK-owned banks. When I lecture to my undergraduate class of 150 students, I ask them to hold up their hands if they do not have a mobile phone. No one is without. Nor are rioters, who are able to coordinate mayhem through technological communication (which apparently they can afford to buy or have appropriated by ‘other means’). To an older audience, I might ask people to hold up their hands if they do not have a credit card. They might answer that credit cards are a necessity of everyday life. Besides, everyone else has one. That is just the point.

Durkheim’s ghost What might be the most fruitful sociological way to proceed in trying to understand the ‘disturbances’? Despite the allure of revisiting Marx and perhaps Weber, this is not the approach that I propose to take here. In contrast, I would like to examine what Emile Durkheim had to say in his writings a century ago.They are prophetic words taken up by other more recent commentators and I will come to their writings shortly. At first glance, Durkheim might seem to be a curious way forward. He is often maligned, with the main critique being that his work is inherently conservative, even reactionary. But as my old professor used to say, ‘every time you think that Durkheim is dead and buried, his ghost has a habit of coming back and haunting us’. Durkheim (1997, p 63) stated:‘The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own. It can be termed the collective or common consciousness’. For Durkheim, in any society, a collective conscience must function to bind its members together via norms and customs that engender social awareness. These constitute a shared set of core social values that link us, the ‘we’, all together – a kind of social ‘glue’. If this collective consciousness breaks down, anomie takes over and lawlessness results. Anomie is best understood as the deteriorating condition that results from lack of binding in collective solidarity, a loss of shared norms that impose conformity. So, it might be argued that the 2011 rioters are not sufficiently socialised into a work ethic or a respect for the rule of law. There is more to the equation however. But what if our collective beliefs and sentiments are themselves dysfunctional, even pathological? For Durkheim, this was always possible, and in discussing the subject, he presents us with a philosophy of human nature that 61

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we can accept or otherwise. For Durkheim, we are fundamentally asocial as a species. Individuals are merely a buddle of appetites and these appetites are unlimited. We are mere animals but at an advanced stage of evolution and are forced to be social only by cooperating to meet our individual needs. In turn, society is something greater than its individual parts – the ‘us’. Only society can regulate our desires and the danger arises when it fails to do so. Curiously, some of the poorest societies are the most peaceful and contented, as are those that are more equal (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009). The problem emerges when the more we have, the more we want. It is society that sets limits and expectations. But what if those desires are limitless? Consumer society has allowed unbridled materialistic desires that never bring total gratification. Parallels of our present economic state are often drawn with the 1930s. But that was a deep depression, not a recession, the Great Depression. The truth is that most people did not have much to lose in the first place and did not expect much. Our present maladies result from the discrepancy of when our material desires and expectations are not met. This was a theme examined in T.R. Gurr’s (1970) Why men rebel. For Gurr, rebellion, at worst, and civil disturbances, at best, only occur when individuals have shared grievances. Things go wrong not because of poverty per se, but after a period when things get better and then worse, often with the onset of economic recession. In the gap that results from rising expectations and the failure of those expectations to be fulfilled, frustrations overspill into violence and lawbreaking. Such an analysis would seem to be particularly feasible when applied to today’s younger generation. In the mid- and late 1990s, Zygmunt Bauman’s books (including Work, consumerism and the new poor; Bauman, 1998) gained a great deal of currency in exploring the link between postmodernity (although he preferred the terms ‘fluid’ or ‘liquid’ society) and consumerism. Bauman highlighted that a fundamental shift had occurred in the contemporary Western world in the latter half of the 20th century, which was marked by a shift from a society of producers to a society of consumers dominated by expectations of unlimited prosperity. In an article in the Guardian newspaper in 2012 (Bauman, 2012), Bauman pointed out that every generation has its measure of outcasts. However, he argued, we may be looking at a whole generation of outcasts. After several decades of rising expectations, present-day youth are confronted by expectations falling ‘and much too steeply and abruptly for any hope of a gentle and safe descent’. With prospects of long-term unemployment and long stretches of ‘rubbish jobs’ well below their skills and expectations, this is the first post-war 62

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generation facing the prospect of downward mobility. Bauman describes the current situation in this way: The past few decades were times of unbound expansion of all and any forms of higher education and of an unstoppable rise in the size of student cohorts. A university degree promised plum jobs, prosperity and glory: a volume of rewards steadily rising to match the steadily expanding ranks of degree holders.That temptation was all but impossible to resist. Now, however, the throngs of the seduced are turning wholesale into the crowds of the frustrated. (Bauman, 2012)

Individualism and civic responsibility One of the other main features of modern society for Durkheim is the importance, indeed, the ‘sacredness’, of the individual. It is yet another part of the equation of understanding the current state of affairs (a theme taken up by more recent influential sociologists such as Anthony Giddens [1991] and Ulrich Beck [1992]).The individual, rather than the collective, becomes the focus of rights and responsibilities, the centre of public and private rituals holding society together – a function once performed by religion. To stress the importance of this concept, Durkheim advanced the notion of the ‘cult of the individual’: Thus very far from there being the antagonism between the individual and society which is often claimed, moral individualism, the cult of the individual, is in fact the product of the society itself. It is the society that instituted it and made of man the god whose servant it is. (Durkheim, 1974, p 29) But there are dangers.As Durkheim noted, there are several possibilities that could lead to a breakdown of social integration and the disintegration of society. One is extreme individualism (and perhaps we delude ourselves that we are truly individual), which erodes community and public obligations – concern for the well-being of others.‘Others? They’re nothing man.’ This kind of mentality is also explored by two books that I have found personally insightful and resonate with Durkheimian thought. The first is The fall of public man by Richard Sennett (1977). According to Sennett, ‘public’ life once meant that essential element of one’s life exterior to the circle of family and close friends. Today, our lives are 63

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bereft of the joy of being with others. We have lost this interchange with our fellow citizens. Sennett suggests that the decline of public life results in the distortion of the private as we increasingly focus upon ourselves, which, in turn, generates increasingly narcissistic forms of relationships and self-absorption. He concludes that our personalities cannot fully develop. Moreover, we have come to fear the outsider, the ‘them’. We have lost the ethos of charity and cooperation – the kind of spirit that would allow us genuine and pleasing relationships with those whom we do not know intimately. The other volume (not without its faults) is Robert Putman’s (2000) much-discussed Bowling alone, which examines the state of community relations in the US. Putnam warns that our stock of social capital – the very fabric of our connections with each other – has disintegrated, impoverishing our lives and communities. Few of us now belong to fewer organisations that meet for collective pursuits. We do not know our neighbours. We meet with friends less frequently. We even fail to socialise with our families. Using Putnam’s analogy, we are bowling alone. But it is more than an analogy. More Americans are literally bowling than ever before, but they are not bowling in leagues.They are bowling alone. Putnam blames changes in work, family structure, age, suburban life, television and computers – to which we can add mobile phones. Some of these changes are ‘structural’, some are technological. The underlying ethos of generating these transformations, although not exclusively so in Putnam’s rather tautological argument, is the importance of the ‘me’. These books, along with Durkheim’s work, encapsulate much of my thinking about the ‘disturbances’ as caused by our lack of public spiritedness and duty, our desire to be concerned only with ourselves and self-interest (despite the collective enterprise of gangs), which interlocks with rampant consumerism. To be sure, consumerism is an individual pursuit, but we are also a social collective that subscribes to consumerism as our overarching ethic. Yes, we have our anonymous ‘meeting’ points, such as the shopping mall, but the motivation is consumerism, with the individual as the site of consumption.

Summary Going by the political discourse regarding the riots of 2011,‘our’ society is under attack from ‘outsiders’ dedicated to ‘mindless criminality’ from whom we need protection. But is it possible that we need protection from ourselves? In appreciating our lack of public spirit and collective good, I am tempted to leave the last word to Durkheim. Marx might 64

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have said that we are all duped by mass consumerism as the ultimate expression of late capitalism as some inevitable stage of history.Weber would have said that we meaningfully created the monster in the first place. Durkheim would have had his own perspective on things and may have suggested a way forward. His views on crime were a departure from conventional notions of his time. He might well have challenged the explanations of the ‘disturbances’ that we can read today in common-sense discourses. Durkheim believed that crime is ‘bound up with the fundamental conditions of all social life’ . Crime is a product of social forces, the ‘us’.This sort of statement gets sociology a bad name. But he had more to say. Crime also serves a social function. He stated that crime implies ‘not only that the way remains open to necessary changes but that in certain cases it directly prepares these changes’(Durkheim, 1965, pp 872–75). Crime is a warning that things are going wrong and that we must change things, perhaps ourselves. I will leave the final word not to Durkheim, however, but to a victim of the riots. Three men were killed in a hit-and-run incident in Birmingham during the riots, including Haroon Jahan, who were attempting to defend their neighbourhood. Tariq Jahan, the father of 21-year-old Haroon, gave a speech asking for calm, social unity and an end to the disturbances soon after his son’s death. He was held up as a hero and for relieving tensions.This was recognised by politicians and the media, with the Financial Times stating that ‘His selfless intervention contrasted with the rapacious self-interest of the looters, and was a timely reminder of the obligations of community’ (Financial Times, ‘Editorial: Disunited Kingdom’, 12 August 2011). The riots of 2011 also asked profound questions regarding social policy. Perhaps we need to think about family life, social inequalities, alienated youth, community relations and much more besides. We also need a point of reflection, a reflexive space in the public sphere, to consider where we are heading as a culture. This may sound rather vague and glib and changing ourselves and inculcating greater public spiritedness would be no easy enterprise. It is unlikely to come about with mere logos or slogans. In our busy lives, we rarely reflect on the recipe for our collective anomie: too busy to find a point of reflection. We need a rethink. Consumers of the world unite.You have nothing to lose but your credit cards.

Reflection The events of 2011 have come and gone. Yesterday’s news. But we cannot discount the possibility of repeat performances. Hence, I can 65

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conclude with reference to my earlier points. For social science, the challenge is to direct the key issues to public engagement. This means seeking an environment for discussion over and beyond the ‘commonsense’ explanations of the riots and fostering a deeper understanding of the social world that we all share. By adopting a Durkheimian framework, we can at least begin to articulate questions related to our collective values and sociology’s role in disseminating and understanding these. Reflection on this project also enhances my personal concerns. As sociologists, the subjects we choose to research and write about are often derived from our interests and experiences.The subject has to be personally meaningful.The ‘disturbances’ certainly were. I commenced this chapter by flagging up my bemusement as I watched the television images of several buildings burning in my home town of Croydon, including a large furniture store that was once a local landmark. The viewing was an emotional experience. Parts of the town in which I spent much of my life no longer exist. Based in Bristol, I now rarely revisit that part of South London. My last trip was one year before the ‘disturbances’. I sensed an atmosphere of unease, even menace; so the events of 2011 came as no surprise. Nonetheless, my initial response was of shock and bewilderment. And foremost in my mind was the question ‘What have we done?’ References Apps, P. (2011) ‘London riots point to much wider risks of youth unrest’, Reuters, London, 10 August. Available at: http://www. reuters.com/article/2011/08/10/uk-br itain-unrest-youthidUSLNE77901H20110810 (accessed 28 August 2011). Bauman, Z. (1998) Work, consumerism and the new poor, Buckingham: Open University. Bauman, Z. (2012) ‘Downward mobility is now a reality’, The Guardian, 31 May. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/ commentisfree/2012/may/31/downward-mobility-europe-youngpeople (accessed 26 August 2012). Beck, U. (1992) Risk society: towards a new modernity, London: Sage. Durkheim, E. (1965) ‘On the normality of crime’, in T. Parsons, E. Shils, D. Naegele and J.R. Pitts (eds) Theories of society, New York, NY: Free Press. Durkheim, E. (1997) The division of labour in society (trans Lewis A. Coser), New York, NY: Free Press. Durkheim, E. (1974) Sociology and philosophy, New York: Free Press.

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Gainsbury, S. and Culzac, N. (2011) ‘Rioting link to deprivation revealed’, The Financial Times, 4 September. Available at: www. ft.com/cms/s/0/236110aa-d716-11e0-bc73-00144feabdc0. html#axzz1X3nspCJu (accessed 9 March 2012). Giddens, A. (1991) Self-identity. Self and society in the late modern age, Cambridge: Polity. Gurr, T.R. (1970) Why men rebel, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hastings, M. (2011) ‘Years of liberal dogma have spawned a generation of rioters’, Daily Mail, 10 August. Available at: http://nation.foxnews. com/london-riots/2011/08/10/max-hastings-years-liberal-dogmahave-spawned-generation-rioters#ixzz24XvJPz7G (accessed 26 August 2012). Lammy, D. (2011) ‘Tottenham riot: the lesson of Broadwater Farm’, The Guardian, 7 August. Available at: www.guardian.co.uk/ commentisfree/2011/aug/07/tottenham-riot-broadwater-farm (accessed 14 September 2011). Lemert, C. (2006) Durkheim’s ghosts: cultural logics and social things, London: Cambridge University Press. Lewis, P., Taylor, M. and Ball, J. (2011) ‘Kenneth Clarke blames English riots on a “broken penal system”’, The Guardian, 5 September. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/sep/05/kennethclarke-riots-penal-system (accessed 23 August). Lloyd, S. (2011) ‘Young people have no right to riot, but they have a right to be angry’, Herald Scotland, 18 August. Available at: www. heraldscotland.com/mobile/comment/iain-macwhirter/a-societythat-is-slipping-into-dickensian-darkness-1.1118346 (accessed 5 May 2012). Marcuse, H. (1964) One-dimensional man: studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society, London: Routledge. Moran, L. and Hall, A. (2011) ‘British youths are “the most unpleasant and violent in the world”: damning verdict of writer as globe reacts to riots’, The Daily Mail, 10 August. Odone, C. (2011) ‘London riots: absent fathers have a lot to answer for’, Daily Telegraph, 9 August. Available at: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/ news/cristinaodone/100100154/london-riots-absent-fathers-havea-lot-to-answer-for (accessed 25 August 2012). Osborne, P. (2011) ‘London riots: military could be brought in’, TVNZ, 9 August. Available at: http://tvnz.co.nz/world-news/london-riotsmilitary-could-brought-in-4343698 (accessed 14 November). Putman, R. (2000) Bowling alone: the collapse and revival of American community, New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. 67

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Ryan,Y. (2011) ‘From the Arab Spring to Liverpool?’. Available at: http:// english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/08/2011811122931660627. html (accessed 7 November 2011). Sennett, R. (1977) The fall of public man, New York, NY: Knopf. Travis, A. (2011) ‘UK riots analysis reveals gangs did not play pivotal role’, The Guardian, 25 October. Available at: www.guardian.co.uk/ uk/2011/oct/24/riots-analysis-gangs-no-pivotal-role (accessed 12 March 2012). Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. (2009) The spirit level: why more equal societies almost always do better, London: Penguin Books. YouGov (2011) ‘YouGov/The Sun survey results’, 8–9 August.Available at: http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/ygarchives-pol-sun-riots-100811.pdf (accessed 3 May 2012).

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FOUR

1976 – the moral necessity of austerity Matthew Clement

Introduction Debt reduction has become central to political discourse. Despite disagreements about the speed and scale required, there is a broad Westminster consensus that substantial economies are unavoidable. Those who question this paradigm are judged to have fallen into the ‘trap’ of believing another economic model than austerity is possible. Several years on from the tumultuous economic crash of 2007/08, the ‘new politics’ of coalitions necessarily committed to austerity measures, especially in the public sector, while living standards fall for the vast majority, have become a long-term reality that we are told will last at least a decade. Recent social upheavals across several European countries have resulted from the brutal results of these programmes, which have shaken many people’s faith in mainstream political parties to govern in the interests of all, leading to the growth of ‘new publics’ on the extreme Left and Right who are prepared to defy market nostrums and question the necessity of austerity.Although, at the time of writing (late 2013), the UK economy has managed to halt some aspects of the decline for the last few months – with slightly improved growth and employment figures – many elements of the crisis remain. This is not the first time that politicians have stared into the abyss of a financial crisis; one recent example was the 1976 International Monetary Fund (IMF) crisis.With hindsight, the necessity of spending cuts looks questionable: are there lessons to be learned from the last time that British government policy was dictated by international finance? What were the results of the British public choosing to accept that the crisis really meant that ‘there is no alternative’ to deindustrialisation and mass unemployment, with all the social consequences that followed over the next decade. Do today’s public want to consider creating alternatives today, in the form of campaigning social movements encouraging

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resistance, or should we seek inspiration in more spontaneous outbreaks, such as the UK’s 2011 ‘summer of discontent’ (Briggs, 2012)? These are not merely academic or theoretical questions.Arguably, the acts of resistance to austerity in Europe have challenged the dominant mindset and slowed down the pace of a brutal economic reconstruction process that otherwise threatened to engender poverty and anomie on a scale that could melt down existing social relations.There is a power generated by activism (Clement, 2009) and committed campaigning for social goals that undermines the hegemony of neoliberalism and could herald what Badiou (2012) has called the ‘rebirth of history’. Governments have been very keen to promote public engagement with the idea of the national debt in recent times. Necessarily so, for if we are not convinced that our economic state is perilously fragile – with all manner of social institutions under threat if the markets judge the UK to be chronically indebted – then we may not accede to all the ‘necessary’ economies the new climate of austerity requires. In my opinion, the role of Social Science in the City is to critically analyse such phenomena, specifically to see whether there really is a case for a shift in public attitudes towards accepting a common sacrifice in wages, welfare and public service provision, or whether vested corporate interests are unnecessarily manufacturing austerity – with potentially antisocial and calamitous economic consequences. Can Cohen and Young’s (1981; Cohen, 1987) theory of moral panics help us to understand how the spectre of austerity has arisen? Hindsight can be useful in shaping foresight today. By presenting evidence about how genuine the British IMF crisis of 1976 was, my aim is to empower the audience to ask: was the economic picture really as bleak as the government and the markets believed, and, most importantly, what was the true cost to the public of accepting the fall in living standards of 1977/78? As European governments are increasingly populated by politicians seeking alternatives, should we see these as irrational actors or enlightened critics of market realities? The positive response that this chapter received as a useful antidote to contemporary ‘common sense’ when it was presented in March 2011 has been vindicated by the climate of rising resistance to markets, technocracies and the erosion of welfare democracy at the time of writing.

Austerity: a new moral panic? Stanley Cohen describes a moral panic as a phenomenon whereby ‘A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented 70

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in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media’ (Cohen, 1987, p 9). Ever since the election campaign in 2010, the principal moral panic that has dominated political and media discourse has been about the perilous state of the national economy. There has been an immense moral panic generated about the size of the national debt and, consequently, the necessity of the imposition of a range of measures to reduce public sector services and welfare spending. All politicians, the heads of financial institutions and the media barons are agreed that this regime of austerity is both essential and of paramount importance, trumping any other goals of social policy. A consensus has emerged which believes that the last government has created this condition of near-bankruptcy, and the current Coalition has no alternative but to reverse the measures that had been widening educational opportunity and improving the welfare system during the century’s first decade. Even at the time of writing, despite their rising unpopularity and growing popular anger at growing economic inequality, mainstream politicians believe themselves trapped within the hair shirt of austerity, which they cannot throw off – however much it chafes. Nick Clegg recently explained ‘we’re doing it, not because we want to, but because we have to’ (BBC, 2012). Cameron helpfully pointed out that it was a matter of perception,‘What you call austerity, we call efficiency’ (BBC, 2012), while Ed Miliband seems determined not to take advantage of his opponents’ discomfort – when asked if Labour would follow France’s new president in denouncing austerity, his answer was a plaintive ‘we must remember not to make promises that we can’t keep’ (BBC, 2012). Cohen maintains, however, that sociologists ‘must question and not take for granted the labelling … by certain powerful groups in society of certain behaviour as deviant or problematic’ (Cohen, 1987, p 13). Is the deficit, in scale and impact, really so damaging to the functioning of everyday life as to justify the range of highly divisive and punitive measures proposed for its amelioration? Some light can be shed upon this situation by examining the last time Britain’s government was dictated to by the banks, and evaluating – with the benefit of hindsight – how necessary all the measures taken were. Moreover, given their socially divisive impact, how far did the Labour government’s 1976 moral panic make such folk devils of the trade unions as to enable the Tories to grind down their resistance in the 1980s? Fundamentally, this article attempts to address the question posed by Paul Foot: ‘Why was the world in recession? Why, after thirty years of relative growth, full employment and expanding public services, was it suddenly necessary for [a] Labour Government and its trade union allies to throw all three into reverse? (Foot, 2005, p 388). 71

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Back to the future By 1976, the rulers of Britain were convinced that the Labour government’s programme of social democracy was really going too far. Not only had the legitimate party of business, the Tories, been unceremoniously vanquished when it tried to discipline the trade unions in 1974, but the Labour government had then received an improved mandate in its October election victory.This had encouraged those activists among the working population, particularly shop stewards and their supporters, to believe that they should have more of an influence in the running of the economy: a partnership of unions, government and business. The new Tory leader, Margaret Thatcher, saw the writing on the wall. Free markets were being leashed by these social goals. To her eyes, without the reinforcing element of market discipline, people’s ambitions for their standard of living and quality of welfare could run riot. In her opinion, the country could not afford, for example, to have everyone believing that their children were entitled to go to university, which would mean equal educational opportunities for all. And Britain certainly could not afford the progressive taxation regime, which funded comprehensive schools and the welfare state through clawing significant chunks of wealth from the pockets of the wealthiest. Worst of all, these measures were actually popular. As the vast majority of the population stood to gain, they could not see how wrong it was for a government to make these reforms.Thatcher saw it as her mission to manufacture a sense of doubt, a climate of uncertainty, leading to a moral panic about the dangers of taking this path. The first ingredient required to manufacture moral panic is a nightmare: a vision of the future that so alarms the public as to instil in them a sense of foreboding. Thatcher chose to utilise a concept to be taken up again 30 years later by the next Tory PM, that of ‘broken Britain’, claiming that ‘If Britain were to break, a well-nigh mortal blow would be struck against the whole western world’ (Beckett, 2009, p 388). In 1976, Thatcher allied herself with those maverick right-wingers in the military and at the top of the civil service who saw Labour’s piecemeal nationalisation programme and concessions to the idea of workers’ participation in industry as a red-blooded assault on their long-held privileges. Their panic was genuine – one of endangered self-interest – but their aim was to get the rest of the population to join in – in order to rein in their aspirations and accept falling living standards. Perhaps rightly, the international rulers of finance reckoned that the Tories could not be relied upon to successfully 72

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co-opt British workers, as Heath’s humiliation had shown.The 1970s’ Labour leadership would have to be the architects of the downfall of the interests of the working class; for this, a change at the top would be necessary. In 1975, the same year that they were getting out of Vietnam, the US was plotting economic intervention in Europe. Why else was it that Henry Kissinger ‘flew specially to Cardiff to see Labour’s Foreign Secretary, Jim Callaghan, given freedom of the city’ (Beckett, 2009, p 328)? New Yorkers had seen their public administration declared bankrupt that year by the federal government and the banks, ushering in a wave of cutbacks that well and truly signalled the end of the ‘Great Society’ welfare programme of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Now he had a similar message for Labour: the economic crisis was coming for Britain, in which US interests through the IMF would be a principal instrument, and this was an opportunity for ‘sunny Jim’.The Americans had never trusted Harold Wilson, notoriously bugging him when he was PM in the 1960s. Wilson had blamed the bankers – the ‘gnomes of Zurich’ – when he had seen his last reform programme scuppered in the 1967 sterling crisis and could not be relied upon to accept the necessity of succumbing to this latest financial ‘moral panic’ measure (Foot, 1968; Ponting, 1989). Moreover, when the unions successfully opposed Wilson’s 1968 ‘In place of strife’ legislation, Callaghan – an ex-trade union leader himself – had joined in the attack. This gave him some credibility within the ‘labour movement’, that coalition of MPs, trade union leaders and members whose interests the government claimed to represent, which would be crucial in ensuring that trade union leaders stuck to imposing wage cuts through the social contract during 1977/78. Consequently, Kissinger told Callaghan that, for them, he was the man of the hour. He could become Labour’s new leader – if the markets induced another sterling crisis and toppled Wilson – and if he was prepared to lead a ‘new Labour’ party, willing to comply with the demands of the international bankers.‘And don’t worry, Jim’, Henry may have said during his Welsh stopover, ‘because we trust you, we’ll make sure you get the money to cover the “debts”. It’s a win–win.’ The tragedy here is that Labour’s leaders succeeded in ‘seeking a way of cutting back on government spending at so controlled a rate that political and social upheaval did not immediately ensue’; Coates calls this ‘little short of a political miracle, winning Trade Union support for wage cuts and unemployment, and ending abruptly the highest level of industrial militancy since 1926’ (Coates, 1980, pp 26, 25). To understand why, we need to look closely at the trade unions, specifically the difference between the attitudes of the leaders and the 73

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rank-and-file membership towards that ‘glorious summer’ (Darlington and Lyddon, 2001) of strike action in 1972 that had seen off antiunion laws and launched waves of sit-ins and occupations to save jobs, protect wages from rising inflation and assert some control over their working conditions. For the workers, their victories in 1970 to 1974 had strengthened their movement and sought to put some socialist backbone into the resolve of the incoming Labour government. By contrast, once in office, the leaders of Labour and the trade unions swiftly convinced themselves that ‘the country’ could not afford to not cut public expenditure any longer. Tony Crosland, for example, ‘a man who believed high public expenditure was morally right’ (Crosland, 1983, p 293), according to his biographer, in an uncanny echo of today’s Tory government, claimed that ‘the surge of local government spending under the Tory government has continued through the first year of Labour’s return to office. Tony accepted that local authorities were certainly spending more than the country could afford’.This led to his notorious speech in Manchester in May 1975, where his blunt message was a dire warning of government determination to impose austerity:‘British people must experience the first real decline in living standards in a generation.We have to come to terms with the harsh reality of the situation which we inherited. The party’s over’ (Crosland, 1983, p 295). Twenty years earlier, Crosland had written The future of socialism (Crosland, 1956), which promised an increasingly prosperous Britain in a mixed economy of private investment and public welfare. Now the ship of state was floundering in a crisis of currency speculation and inflation produced by the markets. Once again, government was being ‘blown off course’. For the leaders of social democracy, the only option was surrender. They were caught up in a moral panic; they believed they could not control the economy and had, at all costs, to obey the market – and, more importantly, persuade Labour voters and trade unionists to do the same. They were manufacturing the panic and its austere consequences. As Cohen and Young (1981, p 346), describing the process, put it: ‘Their over-all effect is nevertheless to help close the circle by which the definitions of the powerful become part of the taken-for-granted reality of the public by translating the unfamiliar into the familiar world’.

Panic in the Cabinet Of course, we will never know the actual contents of Callaghan and Kissinger’s Cardiff conversation, but the crisis hit the pound the next 74

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year – ‘in the fortnight before Wilson’s resignation, it began to lurch downwards … on 8 March, a fall of over 5 cents occurred in a single hour’ (Beckett, 2009, p 330). With Wilson gone, Callaghan became PM and Healey, already a convert to Milton Friedman’s doctrine of monetarism, remained as Chancellor. Both men set out to push massive spending cuts through a Cabinet full of ministers ostensibly committed to defending working-class living standards, although some – like Crosland – had already shown their fragility. Callaghan’s notorious renunciation of Keynesianism at the 1976 Labour Party conference began with a Cassandra-like prophecy of doom: ‘Britain has lived for too long on borrowed time, borrowed money, borrowed ideas’, dramatically manufacturing the sense of panic by shattering old Keynesian ‘myths’, he went on:‘We used to think you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that option no longer exists’ (Whitehead, 1985, pp 188–9). This apocalyptic outburst rightly caused outrage from delegates, but only reiterated Crosland’s earlier statement. Callaghan and Healey assembled the ingredients to manufacture a moral panic that would undermine the resolve of the likes of Peter Shore, Tony Crosland and Tony Benn. Healey, himself an ex-Communist Party member, gambled that the Labour Left would rather remain in power carrying out measures they disliked, than admit defeat. During prolonged Cabinet negotiations he argued: So long as we live in an open and mixed economy, we shall depend on the market judgement to determine our future. If we couldn’t persuade our followers that these were the facts … then another Party would have to take over….We would have proved that our brand of social democracy doesn’t work. (Benn, 1990, p 695) Healey’s ‘brand’ was monetarism – a form of economics that we now understand as neoliberalism. It is well known that Blair created New Labour to embrace neoliberalism and junk social democracy, but the events of 1976 prove that it was ‘old Labour’ that began post-war austerity before Thatcher took up the standard (Cliff and Gluckstein, 1988, p 322). Austerity is not a brand of social democracy – it is its nemesis. It denies the possibility of any social element ever taking priority over profit-making. In Labour’s hands, the ‘social contract’ evolved from a negotiated partnership between labour and capital into a regime of cuts in jobs and wages imposed by big business upon the 75

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trade unions.The key to getting the Labour and trade union leadership to implement these cuts was the creation of a moral panic over the state of the economy; one manufactured by the markets and amplified by its willing acolytes, Callaghan and Healey, but also swallowed wholesale by those who led the labour movement. Foreign Secretary Tony Crosland was initially forthright in condemning the logic of cuts.According to one recent commentator, he argued that ‘the situation was nowhere near as catastrophic as was being painted, he suggested simply facing down the IMF. Crosland’s analysis was, by any objective measure, perfectly sound’ (Turner, 2008, p 188). He was adamant, stating in Cabinet: ‘There is no case for a change…. New cuts would have a disastrous effect … they’d damage wages policy and destroy confidence’ (Beckett, 2009, p 352). Crosland’s resistance was not as left-wing as Benn’s, he was arguing that even accepting the parameters of the capitalist economy, there was no logic dictating the necessity of cuts; the markets did not need to impose them as the ‘Public Spending Borrowing Requirement’ (PSBR) – Labour’s rather opaque term for the deficit – was exaggerated: ‘Far from reducing the PSBR, the spending cuts would mean higher unemployment … thus actually increasing the PSBR. In any case, the Treasury forecasts of the PSBR were unreliable; other experts’ forecasts were much lower than the Treasury’s’ (Crosland, 1983, p 377). This last point nailed the exaggerations and panic-mongering carried out by Healey and the Treasury. Today, politicians talk of reducing the deficit to gain the ‘confidence’ of the markets. In 1976, it was the size of the PSBR that was deemed decisive. But if the figures cannot be relied upon, then perhaps the motive was simpler: revenge – a backlash against the rising expectations of Labour’s core support. Gavin Davies – later to head the Confederation of British Industry and become a Labour peer – was then a junior adviser at No 10, his explanation was simpler: ‘The markets wanted blood. They wanted humiliation’ (Turner, 2008, p 188). Just like Miliband today,Tony Benn and the trade union leaders Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon accepted the scale of the so-called national debt – and therefore the huge PSBR that necessitated holding down wage claims and cutting benefits to ‘balance the books’. Benn had rightly opposed Wilson, who in turn demoted him from Minister for Industry in 1975, but failed to see Callaghan’s agenda, naively welcoming his election as leader. During their extended cabinet discussions about what to cut and where to satisfy the IMF’s requirements, Benn sums up his feelings in his diary with remarkable honesty (for a politician): he was ‘almost sick with anxiety and disgrace to hear people elected with 76

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the support of Labour people talking in that way’ (Benn, 1990, p 637). Tragically, his will to resist was paralysed by his belief that loyalty to his party was vital despite all, resulting in a failure to ‘lose his illusions’: Benn continued to hope against hope that the government would change course: ‘I really do wonder now whether I can possibly stay in a government that does this. But this morning they said I must stay in because the alternative strategy is winning’ (Benn, 1990, pp 637–8). The alternative economic strategy of import controls and greater regulation was not winning. Callaghan and Healey’s gamble that the Left would rather stay in a government acting against their beliefs than allow it to be defeated was vindicated. Holding the coalition together was deemed more important than representing the working-class interests that they were pledged to uphold.The centre, represented by Crosland, watched the Cabinet opposition to accepting the IMF package crumble, telling his wife that ‘I may well switch my argument tomorrow’, she records:‘Tony went down the corridor to the PM’s room.“In Cabinet tomorrow,” he said to Jim, “I shall say I think you’re wrong, but I also think that Cabinet must support you”’ (Crosland, 1983, p 381). For Benn, ‘the death of the social democratic wing of the party occurred in that cabinet, when Tony Crosland said at one stage: “It is mad, but we have no alternative”’ (Whitehead, 1985, p 199). He and his other Cabinet colleagues voted for austerity, while trade union leaders enforced effective wage cuts on their members still in a job the following year.They were caught up in the moral panic of the PSBR, accepting the imperative that the government must cut its cloth to the market pattern, not realising that ‘the market’ was not a neutral umpire, but an institution with its own agenda and interests.Whitehead summarises Benn’s role:‘Benn had the ability to be the most creative of cabinet ministers or the most effective tribune of the party outside. He believed he could do both … he was wrong’ (Whitehead, 1985, p 147). The alternative was, literally, unthinkable: a phenomenon Zizek has described whereby people can believe in the possibility of the destruction of the planet, but are not able to envisage the end of a capitalist system and its ‘self-governing’ markets (Callinicos, 2010).

The cost of living A detailed examination of the period shows how artificial this climate of ‘necessary’ austerity was.Throughout 1976, the speculators were selling England by the pound. Endless attempts to rescue the currency only used up government reserves of currency without halting its decline. Huge sums – £1.25 billion in March, £1.5 billion in April – were 77

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transferred from state coffers to those of the speculators via the stock exchange currency markets, a massive earner for the rich in itself, as it still is in the City today. David Coates relates how Healey’s rhetoric initially refused to give in to market blackmail and admit that the cuts were necessary, but he then implemented them anyway: At the peak of the first major run against sterling, in June, the pound lost ten cents against the dollar in just thirteen working days…. Healey maintained throughout that there was ‘no economic justification for the fall which has taken place in recent weeks….Those who have sold sterling have done so in disregard of the basic facts of our economic situation.’ Still, he was forced to take £1012 million off planned public expenditure. (Coates, 1980, p 39) By October 1976, sterling was in freefall, only slowed by the government’s announcement that they had asked for the maximum loan permitted by the IMF – £3.9 billion. Healey and Callaghan duly delivered the price they wanted in return: ‘after lengthy battles in Cabinet, further cuts in public expenditure were announced. £3000 million’ (Coates, 1980, pp 40–1). This was in December 1976; now, instead of further decline, the whole bout of speculation stopped the following year. The pound ‘improved against an ailing dollar in 1977 and 1978’ (Coates, 1980, p 32). One does not have to be a conspiracy theorist to see that speculation was bound to calm down once the markets had achieved their goal. Now it was the turn of the working class to pay the price – and from 1977 to 1978, real wages were cut by 5%, according to Callaghan (Turner, 2008, p 189).Today’s financial powers still have the same goals – epitomised by governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King’s advice in January 2011: ‘The Monetary Policy Committee neither can nor should it try to prevent the squeeze in living standards, half of which is coming in the form of higher prices and half in earnings rising at a lower rate than normal’ (BBC, 2011). Despite her bloody record of industrial vandalism, the subsequent Thatcher government was never able to inflict an actual fall in living standards for those in work.This was Labour’s achievement in 1977/78; it halted the ‘forward march of labour’ by attacking and demoralising its core supporters. The offensive militancy of 1968–74 had failed to prevent austerity. Of course, resistance was not permanently vanquished. It reappeared – eventually – in 1978/79’s ‘winter of discontent’, when public sector workers’ anger exploded over the endless demands from the government for ‘sacrifice’ at the altar of economic necessity. But, 78

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by then, the mood was no longer one of fighting for positive changes, but rather punishing the party that had betrayed them. In the name of protecting their brand of neoliberal governance, Labour had allowed the Tories to claim that ‘Labour isn’t Working’, shoehorn themselves into office and proceed to embark on their notorious bout of 1980s’ deindustrialisation. There was nothing inevitable about this course of history, no rationality in either Callaghan or Thatcher’s claims that ‘there is no alternative’.

Conclusion So, what was the IMF moral panic all about? The message was simple: the economy was broke and huge sums of money were required to guarantee that everyday life could continue. Only a combination of public sector cuts and wage restraint could change the social landscape sufficiently to reassure international investors, specifically the IMF. It was a tragic, apocalyptic and harsh reversal of all Labour’s aspirations for those who voted for the government. Above all, it was vital that however painful these cuts were, people believed them to be necessary. This characterisation of high levels of public spending as a form of deviance reminds the reader of Howard Becker’s nostrum:‘social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance’ (Becker, 1963, p 2). The results of succumbing to this moral panic were hardly rewarding for its architects.All the idealism and aspirations associated with Labour fell away as Healey’s cuts bit. According to Foot, ‘the effect of his cuts was a two per cent drop in disposable income… Labour lost its majority in Parliament and in early 1977 cobbled together a deal with the Liberals’ (Foot, 2005, pp 309, 393). There would be some crumbs of comfort for the decision-makers if they really had no alternative, but, astonishingly, Healey later admitted that there was, concluding his interview with Beckett about the IMF deal with:‘we didn’t really need the money at all … very irritating but there you are’ (Beckett, 2009, p 356). In an earlier interview, he was still more upbeat about how well he thought the government had managed the crisis: We got a good deal, and managed our own economy so well that I drew only two slices of the four slices of money available and paid it all back before I left office….The virtue of the whole thing, even though it wasn’t necessary, is that sentiment internationally completely switched around. (Whitehead, 1985, p 200) 79

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The Labour leadership, trade union leaders and international bankers had all believed that they had something to gain in becoming gripped by an unnecessary moral panic that there was no alternative to austerity. It was a ‘magical effect’ that they fell for wholeheartedly; a trick whereby workers saw their living standards cut by accepting pay deals well below the rate of inflation – until the dam finally burst in 1978/79’s ‘winter of discontent’. The roots of the bankers’ moral panic were the preservation of their profits: a product of the love of money, the necessity of seeing every use of resources as an investment, a possession to be hoarded and guarded in competition with everyone else. In Our mutual friend (Dickens, 1901), Dickens describes how the Industrial Revolution bred a climate of ‘financialisation’, which breaks down social ties and alienates selflessness while rewarding hypocrisy and the selfish spirit of calculation. His characters, upon becoming wealthy, degenerate into misers and speculators, parasitic upon society. Their imperative to accumulate, with its perverse and anti-social consequences, corrupted their morality, and their greed for ever-greater profits led to speculation – creating a tottering edifice of debt, upon which Dickens passes judgement: My lords and gentlemen and honourable boards, when you, in the course of your dust-shovelling and cinder-raking, have piled up a mountain of pretentious failure, you must off with your honourable coats for the removal of it, and fall to the work with the power of all the queen’s horses and all the queen’s men, or it will come rushing down and bury us alive. (Dickens, 1901, p 437) It may be that it is the wilful blindness of the captains of the financial ship, believing the old corrupt practices of tax evasion and bonusgrabbing can still be sustained while demanding that the crew take short rations. They are certainly aided by politicians more than happy to acquiesce to their corrupt private practices while hypocritically denouncing and dishonouring the worst offenders in an attempt to assuage public disquiet. Much of the public are, however, far more aware of what criminologists label the ‘crimes of the powerful’ (Pearce, 1976 than they were in the 1970s, and organisations like UK Uncut have successfully targeted corporations for their tax avoidance – growing the private corporate profit rate while public services are necessarily cut. The growth of the Occupy movement in the US and the UK, and movements such as the Spanish indignados, occupying city squares and organising free food distribution to the poor from the supermarkets, 80

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are inspired by the greater revolutions in the likes of Egypt and Tunisia (Calhoun, 2013; Gitlin, 2013).These waves of protest may rise and fall over time, but their imminence and existence is testament to the depth of opposition to this contemporary financial ‘moral panic’. The jury is still out as to whether the bulk of UK citizens are succumbing to the moral panic of necessary austerity today. One of the purposes of creating Social Science in the City is to gain a greater appreciation of what, why and how groups of people feel about these issues: to create a counter-hegemony to the ruling discourse, as Gramsci would see it. The media and the ruling politicians of Europe may remain convinced of the necessity of austerity (Clement, 2013); to them, the ‘folk devils’ are those who dare to disagree. As long as the population leave the government and management of austerity in the hands of the rich and powerful, they will necessarily perpetuate their exploitation; but there are heartening signs that, today, many of those affected are resisting being caught up in an anti-social moral panic and are seeking alternatives to austerity (Clement, 2012). References Badiou,A. (2012) The rebirth of history: times of riots and uprisings, London: Verso. BBC (2011) Newsnight, 26 January. BBC (2012) Newsnight, 8 May. Becker, H. (1963) Outsiders, New York, NY: Free Press. Beckett, A. (2009) When the lights went out: Britain in the 70s, London: Faber. Benn, T. (1990) Against the tide: diaries 1973–76, London: Arrow. Briggs, D. (ed) (2012) The English riots of 2011: a summer of discontent, Hampshire: Waterside Press. Calhoun, C. (2013) ‘Occupy Wall Street in perspective’, British Journal of Sociology, vol 64, no 1, pp 26–39. Callinicos, A. (2010) Bonfire of illusions: the twin crises of the liberal polity Cambridge: Polity. Clement, M. (2009) ‘Praxical sociology and the algebra of revolution’, Critique, vol 37, no 3, pp 415–24. Clement, M. (2012) ‘Rage against the market: Bristol’s Tesco riot’, Race and Class, vol 53, no 3, pp 81–90. Clement, M. (2013) ‘Manufacturing austerity in the Eurozone’, Human Figurations, vol 2, no 1. Cliff, T. and Gluckstein, D. (1988) The Labour Party: a Marxist history, London: Bookmarks.

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Coates, D. (1980) Labour in power? A study of the Labour government 1974–1979, London: Longman. Cohen, S. (1987) Folk devils and moral panics: the creation of the Mods and Rockers, Oxford: Blackwell. Cohen, S. and Young, J. (1981) The manufacture of news: social problems deviance and the mass media, London: Constable. Crosland, C.A.R. (1956) The future of socialism, London: Jonathan Cape. Crosland, S. (1983) Tony Crosland, London: Coronet. Darlington, R. and Lyddon, D. (2001) Glorious summer: class struggle in Britain 1972, London: Bookmarks. Dickens, C. (1901) Our mutual friend, London: Chapman & Hall. Foot, P. (1968) The politics of Harold Wilson, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Foot, P. (2005) The vote, London:Viking. Gitlin,T. (2013) ‘Occupy’s predicament: the moment and the prospects for the movement’, British Journal of Sociology vol 64, no 1, pp 3-25. Pearce, F. (1976) Crimes of the powerful, London: Pluto. Ponting, C. (1989) Breach of promise?, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Turner, A.N. (2008) Crisis? What crisis?, London: Aurum. Whitehead, P. (1985) The writing on the wall: Britain in the seventies, London: Michael Joseph.

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The Occupy movement Samantha Fletcher

The Occupy movement is one of many new protest movements that emerged in the year 2011. The limits, borders and boundaries of its affiliation are fairly fluid and can include not only those captured under the narrative of ‘Occupy’ explicitly, but also those linked through solidarities with the ‘reclaim’, ‘decolonise’ (Schrager Lang and Lang/ Levitsky, 2012) and ‘(un)Occupy’ (Davis, 2011) movements. Despite the difficulty in quantifying actual numbers of participants ‘on site’, there have been some efforts to capture estimate figures from various camps. Occupy Wall Street is perhaps the, albeit Western-centric, hub of the Occupy movement. Estimated numbers at Occupy Wall Street have ranged from 2,000 to 15,000 according to mainstream media outlet ABC News (2011). Speaking about his own experiences regarding the Occupy site at Zuccotti Park, New York, Neil Smith of City University New York highlighted that alongside the claim that Occupy had ‘captured the global imagination’, the Occupy movement was relatively ‘small’ in terms of the numbers of people physically occupying spaces. Smith (2012) estimated that Occupy Wall Street had around 21,000 protestors in total, a number that is comparatively small if taken in the context of other movements in the last decade, which have seen far more people physically take to the streets. For other Occupy camps, the reported numbers varied even more, but what is clear is that, comparatively speaking, for a movement that utilised the concept of the ‘99%’ to refer to widening income disparities between rich and poor, not even a mere fraction of that ‘99%’ turned out to occupy. For a protest movement that claims to represent the interests of the ‘99%’, these numbers are somewhat moderate. In response to Warren Buffet’s acknowledgement of a clear class war, which he claimed ‘the rich’ were winning, Harvey (2012, p 53) asks: ‘the only question is: When will the people start to wage class war back?’. Evidently, some of them have, albeit not entirely or explicitly through the means of class, but many still have not, at least in terms of contemporary understandings of political contestation and resistance. This lack of participation by vast swathes of the ‘99%’ poses a series of 83

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important questions. Where are the seemingly elusive ‘99%’? Why are so many not partaking in the spaces for political discussion on ‘camp’? What constitutes contemporary participation in protest movements? And how do we measure or understand meaningful participation? Thus far, asking questions about the Occupy movement has often been associated as a rhetoric ‘leading up to dismissal’ (Johnston, 2011, p 78).The arguments outlined here are not a challenge to the Occupy movement, whose success in puncturing a much-needed hole in the previously perceived impenetrable hegemonic blanket of capitalism (Fisher, 2009) is duly noted and commended. Instead, this piece seeks to open a critical and timely dialogue about public engagement using Occupy as a contemporary vehicle to explore a series of issues. Occupy is seeking new ways to keep the space for alternative discourses alive; and here it will be discussed what conditions hinder participation in such spaces and what conditions help them to flourish. These are discussed here in terms of physical and metaphysical barriers to participation that, when expressed together, articulate the challenge of an oppression binary for contemporary protest movements.

Theme One: physical The first item for discussion is an analysis of the physical barriers to participation that hinder public involvement in protest movements such as Occupy at ‘camp’ level. Participation in protest movements is not without a number of associated risks and potential harms, including long-lasting consequences for those who take part and/or are associated with these movements. The risks associated with engagement with Occupy and/or its related movements in terms of explicit activist actions, for example, partaking in the physical occupation of various spaces, are plentiful. These risks are facilitated and often realised through a number of state apparatuses, including increased surveillance, militarisation of police tactics, utilisation of and changes to legislation, and the broadening of police powers. The first consideration for those participating in public protest is the reality of the possibility of danger and physical harm in light of increased legitimised use of force and militarised tactics by police authorities. Perhaps the most illustrative example of the militarisation of tactics used against protestors has become that of the infamous ‘Pepper Spray Cop’, whose attack on seated student demonstrators ‘quickly became the face of liberal willingness to use violence against the Occupy/decolonize movement’ (Schrager Lang and Lang/Levitsky, 2012, p 225). Furthermore, at a rally at the Occupy Oakland site on 84

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27 October 2011, police responded to the demonstrators with tear gas canisters and flash-bang grenades, resulting in video footage depicting a scene where wheelchair users at the Occupy site were shrouded with tear gas (Taylor, 2011, p 138). Another similar scene was recorded a day earlier on 26 October at Occupy Oakland by Taylor and Resnick (2011, p 182), where police used rubber bullets and mace on protestors. At Occupy Wall Street, Writers for the 99% (2011) describe how in the early hours of 15 November, during the eviction from Zuccotti Park, a military-style operation of removal from the site took place. One activist describes waking up to be faced with a police officer in riot gear with a baton in hand (Writers for the 99%, 2011, p 178). Also reported during this time was a sense of disorientation ‘by the NYPD’s use of loud sound devices’ (Writers for the 99%, 2011, p 178) and officers ‘wielding nightsticks’ (Writers for the 99%, 2011, p 181). On 15 November, when a permit was granted that temporarily allowed people to return to Zuccotti Park, the following occurred: ‘an older woman waved a copy of the court ruling at police guarding the park, a cop punched her in the face’ (Writers for the 99%, 2011, p 187). This use of force spans globally, including illustrative scenes from the Indignados camp in Madrid, which saw the forcible removal of the occupiers from their camp in central Madrid (Baiocchi and Ganuza, 2012, p 300). Vitale (2011, p 74) analyses this scene and makes the already well-documented link between ‘Broken Windows’ theory and the impact this had on policing in the US, where police have been placed as actors in this theory supposedly seeking to ‘restore communities by controlling low level disorder’ (Vitale, 2011, pp 74–5). The dissent of occupiers has been placed in the rubric of low-level disorder as a break from the mundane and subsequently as a threat. Use of legislation has also been employed in order to facilitate the harassment and often arrest of occupiers; this includes the utilisation and manipulation of modern and antique laws to hinder the Occupy movement, such as harassment for ‘illegal’ street vending of hotdogs (Barksdale, 2012, p 8), the application of anti-camping ordinances to remove occupiers, the requirement of a permit to amplify sound and arrest warrants for violations of a 150-year-old state statute that ‘prohibits masked gatherings of two or more people, with the exception of masquerade balls’ (Khalek, 2012). Furthermore, we have seen the broadening scope of legislation set to criminalise a series of acts associated with protest movements, most notably, plans by the Spanish government to implement legislation changes in 2013, such as the ability to label the peaceful occupation of public spaces as ‘an attack against public order’ (Hudig, 2012, p 4). A further example of the 85

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legitimation of police powers was at Occupy Oakland, where a short journalistic piece suggested that the camp was ‘attracting rats’ (Bady, 2011, p 133) and was subsequently a hazard despite having shown little concern previously about levels of vermin within the city. The ability of the state to manipulate the meaning and scope of legislation is highly problematic. Overnight, the description of the Occupy Oakland site went from one of ‘peaceful protest’ to that of ‘unlawful assembly’ (Ty, 2011); similarly, quite suddenly, the City of London listed Occupy London as a ‘domestic terror threat’ (Richmond, 2012, p 294). Narratives such as this reinforce inaccurate perceptions of protesters as dangerous deviant bodies, the consequence of which is that it ‘instils fear and suspicion in public discourse and discourages nonactivists from participating in movements’ (Smith, 2011). These state apparatuses have thus served as a stepping stone towards legitimising the unjust introduction of many protesters into the criminal justice system, leading to ‘frequent arrests’, such as those during the mobile occupy protest that took to Brooklyn Bridge in October 2011 (Vitale, 2011, p 80) and an overall arrest count of over 830 at Occupy Wall Street (Jaffe, 2011, p 257). It is also important to note that these risks are also not heterogeneous, as engagement in activism against the status quo poses significantly different and increased risks and consequences for people based on various forms of identity. These groups include lesbian, gay and bisexual individuals (Taylor and Raeburn, 1995) and minority ethnic groups, where Yassin (2012, p 95) at Occupy Oakland highlighted how there was sometimes a lack of appreciation that ‘what could mean a citation for a young white person, could mean jail time or an expensive bond for a non-white activist’. These illustrations are, for all intents and purposes, limited to discussions surrounding public policing, but this is not to say that the ‘wider police society’, such as that described by David Blunkett in the UK in 2002 (Minton, 2009, p 45), does not also have a substantial role. This exercise of police powers by those who are not state police has been documented in Occupy sites in the UK. Available footage from a series of networks online shows violent actions by private security or ‘ambassador’-style security sectors towards those occupying within the UK. It is also noted that the widening of policing powers is not exclusive to the UK and since Rudy Giuliani’s Police Strategy no 5, New York has perhaps had some of the most perverse experiences of widening police powers at the hands of ‘safety ambassadors’ (Minton, 2009, p 49). This is all compounded with the ever-present surveillance society, which was, at its 2007 estimate, inclusive of over 42 million cameras, 86

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equating to 14 closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras for every citizen (Aas, 2007, p 59). Increasingly high concentrations of CCTV in urbanised areas, where many of these Occupy sites are placed, have given rise to a sense of constant monitoring of behaviours of dissent, which, as previously demonstrated, are constantly vulnerable to being placed in the remit of ‘criminality’ and consequently the criminal justice system. Barksdale (2012, p 8) describes how the presence of this CCTV did not go unnoticed by occupiers at Occupy LA and that the feeling of being perpetually watched was present: ‘there are cameras everywhere. You are being watched.You think you’re occupying, but you’re occupied’. This feeling of being occupied as opposed to occupying yourself is a feeling that can perturb potential public participation and engagement. Again, this sentiment was echoed by occupiers at the Occupy Wall Street camp, where it was noted that looming was ‘the white cantilever of a mobile NYPD [New York Police Department] observation tower, maintaining a sinister Panopticon Stare on the vista below’ (Writers for the 99%, 2011, p 63). Scenes from Occupy Boston also showed how police distributed a series of leaflets explaining that their intent to videotape the occupation ‘to better identify and prosecute’ (Squibb, 2011, p 174).This was simultaneous in timing to the removal of media entities from the area as police claimed that ‘their safety could no longer be assured’ (Squibb, 2011, p 174), and, similarly, police at Occupy Wall Street arrested six journalists on the night of the eviction from Zuccotti Park ‘and barred countless others from entering to witnessing the scene’ (Writers for the 99%, 2011, p 179). Combined, these aspects of surveillance, militarised strategies of policing, considered manipulation of legislation and the ever-present threat of arrest do not make for a culture conducive to encouraging participation in activism at ‘camp’ level. Gilmore (2010, p 21) details how the criminal justice entities specifically make a ‘critical distinction between “organised declared” and “non declared” protests’, which subsequently provides the conditions for a ‘discourse of the dangerous, unpredictable, abnormal deviant [which] is the key foundation stone on which is built the culture of impunity and immunity surrounding state servants’ (Sim, 2010, p 6). And where the claim to the ‘legitimate’ use of force becomes the exclusive remit of the state (Weber, 1919;Ty, 2011, p 238), the consequential monopoly on the notion of ‘violence’ also means that, in the context of Occupy and protest movements, arguably, ‘peace is not equated with justice but with pacification. A desire for order, for predictability, for security’ (Brissette, 2011).

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Theme Two: metaphysical Speaking at Occupy Wall Street, Naomi Klein showed support for the occupiers in their efforts to challenge issues at the structural level as opposed to previous forms of contestation that had perhaps focused on targeting symptomatic parts of a broader structural issue. During her speech, Klein (2011, p 48) recounted that what did not matter was if the demands, challenges and dreams of Occupy were ‘hard to fit into a single media-friendly sound bite’ (Klein, 2011, p 48). Klein’s (2011) claim is arguably a sound one, as the emerging issues from the various Occupy camps depict a complex history of the multifaceted consequences of persistent inequality, marginalisation and exclusion at the hands of a dominant capitalist system. However, simultaneous to this claim made by Klein (2011) are a series of parallels which suggest that while, in utopian terms, Klein would be accurate, in fact, the current everyday reality for many means that the media sound-bite remains an important notion to be explored. In the emerging literature from the Occupy movement, factions of the Occupy movement expressed how ‘some general assemblies were too time-consuming and tedious’ (Kroll, 2011, p 18) when not kept to a certain limited time frame.The media sound bite is fast becoming the modus operandi for many of our everyday interactions and all other formats are being positioned as arduous and deviant from this media sound-bite ‘norm’. These media sound-bite interactions are often by means of a new media technology platform such as Facebook or Twitter, whose updates are limited in terms of the number of characters in which the message can be expressed. Many accounts from the events of Tahrir Square in 2011 were broadcast to a global audience via the social networking site Twitter, culminating in a book (see Nunns and Idle, 2011) wholly dedicated to just the 140-character-or-less ‘tweets’ posted by those involved. While the 140-character-or-less limitation of Twitter is at the extreme end of the media sound-bite spectrum, it is nonetheless indicative of an increasingly normalised mode of communication. The question this raises is can 140 characters or less provide the tools or the level of depth required for meaningful engagement in the political discourse of new social movements such as Occupy? And does a comparatively laborious general assembly discussion of complex issues reaching far beyond the 140-character spectrum discourage public participation for various populations who might need to relearn the art of sustained convoluted discourse? The second problematic element worthy of discussion here is understanding the meaning and scope of the concept of ‘participation’ 88

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in contemporary times. In the past decade, the ‘ways’ in which we can ‘participate’ have broadened in scope. New media technologies, again, most notably, social networking platforms, have provided new forms of ‘participation’ through the Facebook ‘share’ and ‘like’ buttons and the ability to ‘retweet’ via Twitter. These avenues can provide a sense of participation and engagement when, in fact, arguably they create more distance than they do togetherness, cultivating an ‘alone together’ culture, as discussed by Turkle (2011).The potential implications of this are alternative futures that are merely ‘liked’ on Facebook in isolation and never actualised in solidarity. White (2010) argues that many have succumbed to the ‘marketization of social change’, adopting ‘the logic of the marketplace’ to the detriment of meaningful activism, resulting in an exclusive focus on metrics and ‘a race to the bottom of political engagement’ (White, 2010). Similarly, the arguably false sense of meaningful participation could extend the notion of Zukin’s (1996) ‘pacification by cappuccino’ to pacification by cappuccino and Wi-Fi, the two of which come hand in hand as we are encouraged to stay both caffeinated and ‘connected’ at all times. None of the points raised here are intended to devalue the potential of social media and technology, which has provided a platform for many useful communications and sharing of information that can link activist groups such as Occupy like never before; however, what needs to be recognised is that these media are a dangerously double-edged sword. The increasing frequency of use of these media for communication can create a culture that promotes the media sound-bite as the normalised modus operandi and, more troublingly, yields to the needs of a ‘#’ audience in order to elicit participation but compromises the integrity of the content needed for meaningful participation that could give leverage to the actualisation of an alternative future.

Conclusion The Free Association (2011) describes anti-capitalist politics as breaking free from a series of limitations and restrictions and subsequently seeking ways to ‘re-potentialise’ the world. Presented here as an oppression binary are some of the physical and metaphysical limitations and restrictions imposed on, and sometimes facilitated by, contemporary protest movements. The first stage of such anti-capitalist politics is to seek ways in which we can limit, reduce and ultimately remove ourselves as the hosts of our oppressors (Friere, 1996, p 30). To meet this end will require a steady diet of daily critical self-reflection.This is no easy task, not least because we are dealing with a set of challenges 89

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that are not only vast in scope, but fluid and ever-changing in their manifestations. This is particularly pertinent with reference to a ‘recodifying’ and ‘ambidextrous’ state (Coleman et al, 2009; Peck, 2010) that is constantly shifting in its borders and parameters. The role of academia, therefore, becomes a crucial one if executed meaningfully. Many portions of the critical social sciences and beyond are conducting research and engaging in a variety of discourses that feed into understanding the obstructions and barriers presented by the oppression binary illustrated here. In order to use this knowledge successfully, then, academia should focus its energies on outreach and public dissemination of its work promoting protected spaces for discussion and subsequent plans of action to tackle these emerging issues. In itself, this is not without challenges and it will take a concerted effort on the part of those who are also working in an environment that is itself far from exempt of the oppression binary discussed here. Much of this is evocative of earlier feminist consciousness-raising activities and, ultimately, will face a similar set of challenges. Cooper and Hardy (2012, p 4) outline that, ‘to arrive at a conjuncture where anticapitalist strategies can be implemented will require an extraordinary transformation in the consciousness of millions’, and the start of that journey begins with a rigorous and determined effort to uncover and expose the intricacies of the oppression binary that thus far perpetually contains and halters the potential of the ‘99%’. References Aas, K.F. (2007) Globalisation and crime, London: SAGE. ABC News (2011) ‘Occupy Wall St. protests: live blog’. Available at: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Economy/occupy-wall-st-protestslive-blog/story?id=14675410 (accessed 9 February 2013). Baiocchi, G. and Ganuza, E. (2012) ‘No parties, no banners: the Spanish experiment with direct democracy’, in A. Schrager Lang and D. Lang/ Levitsky (eds) Dreaming in public: building the Occupy movement, Oxford: New Internationalist Publications, pp 298–304. Barksdale, A. (2012) ‘Occupy LA: the worst of the best’, Journal of Communist Theory and Practice, 15 January. Available at: http:// insurgentnotes.com/ (accessed 26 February 2012). Brissette, E. (2011) ‘For the fracture of good order’. Available at: http:// bjsonline.org (accessed 16 April 2012). Coleman, R., Sim, J., Tombs, S. and Whyte, D. (2009) ‘Introduction: state power crime’, in R. Coleman, J. Sim, S. Tombs and D. Whyte (eds) State power crime, London: SAGE, pp 1–19.

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Cooper, L. and Hardy, S. (2012) Beyond capitalism: the future of radical politics, Winchester: Zero Books. Davis, A. (2011) ‘(Un)Occupy’, in A. Taylor, K. Gessen, n+1, Dissent, Triple Canopy and the New Inquiry (eds) Scenes from occupied America, London: Verso, pp 132–3. Fisher, M. (2009) Capitalist realism: is there no alternative? London: Zero Books. Freire, P. (1996) Pedagogy of the oppressed (2nd edn), London: Penguin. Gilmore, J. (2010) ‘Policing protest: an authoritarian consensus’, Criminal Justice Matters, no 82, pp 21–3. Harvey, D. (2012) Rebel cities: from the right to the city to the urban revolution, London:Verso. Hudig, K. (2012) ‘European governments step up repression of antiausterity activists’, Statewatch, vol 22, no 1, pp 1–7. Jaffe, S. (2011) ‘Occupy Wall Street prepares for crackdown: will Bloomberg try to tear it down?’, in A. Schrager Lang and D. Lang/ Levitsky (eds) Dreaming in public: building the Occupy movement, Oxford: New Internationalist Publications, pp 254–9. Johnston, A. (2011) ‘What I saw at #OccupyWallStreet last night, and what I saw when I left’, in A. Schrager Lang and D. Lang/Levitsky (eds) Dreaming in public: building the Occupy movement, Oxford: New Internationalist Publications, pp 75–8. Khalek, R. (2012) ‘12 most absurd laws used to stifle the Occupy Wall St. movement around the country’.Available at: http://www.alternet. org (accessed 10 December 2012). Klein, N. (2011) ‘The most important thing in the world’, in S. Van Gelder (ed) This changes everything: Occupy Wall Street and the 99% movement, San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers (Yes! Magazine), pp 45–9. Kroll, A. (2011) ‘How Occupy Wall Street really got started’, in S. Van Gelder (ed) This changes everything: Occupy Wall Street and the 99% movement, San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers (Yes! Magazine), pp 15–21. Minton, A. (2009) Ground control: fear and happiness in the twenty-firstcentury city, London: Penguin. Nunns, A. and Idle, N. (2011) Tweets from Tahrir: Egypt’s revolution as it unfolded, in the words of the people who made it, New York, NY: OR Books. Peck, J. (2010) ‘Zombie neoliberalism and the ambidextrous state’, Theoretical Criminology, vol 14, pp 104–10.

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Richmond, M. (2012) ‘Disguising, mythologizing and protest’, in A. Schrager Lang and D. Lang/Levitsky (eds) Dreaming in public: building the Occupy movement, Oxford: New Internationalist Publications, pp 291–4. Schrager Lang, A. and D. Lang/Levitsky (2012) ‘Introduction: the politics of the impossible’, in A. Schrager Lang and D. Lang/Levitsky (eds) Dreaming in public: building the Occupy movement, Oxford: New Internationalist Publications, pp 15–25. Sim, J. (2010) ‘Thinking about state violence’, Criminal Justice Matters, vol 82, no 1, pp 6–7. Smith, J. (2011) ‘How elite media strategies marginalize the Occupy movement’.Available at: http://bjsonline.org(accessed 16 April 2012). Smith, N. (2012) ‘Every revolution has its space: from occupying squares to transforming cities?, OpenSpace LeverhulmeVisiting Professorship event at The University of Manchester, 25 April. Squibb, S. (2011) ‘Scenes from Occupied Boston’, in A. Taylor, K. Gessen, n+1, Dissent,Triple Canopy and the New Inquiry (eds) Scenes from occupied America, London:Verso, pp 170–5. Taylor, A. and Resnick, S. (2011) ‘Rumours’, in A. Taylor, K. Gessen, n+1, Dissent, Triple Canopy and the New Inquiry (eds) Scenes from occupied America, London:Verso, pp 176–91. Taylor, S. (2011) ‘Scenes from Occupied Oakland’, in A. Taylor, K. Gessen, n+1, Dissent,Triple Canopy and the New Inquiry (eds) Scenes from occupied America, London:Verso, pp 134–45. Taylor, V. and Raeburn, N.C. (1995) ‘Identity politics as high-risk activism: career consequences for lesbian, gay, and bisexual sociologists’, Social Problems, vol 42, no 2 pp 252–73. The Free Association (2011) ‘On fairy dust and rupture’, in A. Lunghi and S. Wheeler (eds) Occupy everything: reflections on why it’s kicking off everywhere, Brooklyn, NY: Minor compositions, pp 24–31. Turkle, S. (2011) Alone together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other, New York, NY: Basic Books. Ty, M. (2011) ‘The coming general strike’, in A. Schrager Lang and D. Lang/Levitsky (eds) Dreaming in public: building the Occupy movement, Oxford: New Internationalist Publications, pp 234–44. Vitale, A. (2011) ‘NYPD and OWS: a clash of styles’, in A. Taylor, K. Gessen, n+1, Dissent,Triple Canopy and the New Inquiry (eds) Scenes from occupied America, London:Verso, pp 74–81. Weber, M. (1919) ‘Politics as vocation’. Available at: www.sscnet.ucla. edu/college/

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White, M. (2010) ‘Clicktivism is ruining leftist activism’, 12 August. Available at: www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/aug/12/ clicktivism-ruining-leftist-activism (accessed 24 January 2013). Writers for the 99% (2011) Occupying Wall Street: the inside story of an action that changed America, London: OR Books. Yassin, J.O. (2012) ‘Occupy Oakland day four: wherein I speak to some folks and the general assembly debate Move On’s move in’, in A. Schrager Lang and D. Lang/Levitsky (eds) Dreaming in public: building the Occupy movement, Oxford: New Internationalist Publications, pp 92–8. Zukin, S. (1996) ‘Space and symbols in the age of decline’, in A. King (ed) Representing the city: ethnicity, capital and culture in the 21st century metropolis, London: Macmillan, pp 43–59.

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‘Brave new world’: how will the government respond to the social care challenge of an ageing population? Robin Means

Introduction This chapter is based upon the author’s Social Science in the City™ talk at the Tart Café on 14 October 2010 but has been updated in the light of evolving government policies and reactions against the negative consequences of these for many older people. It starts by exploring what we mean by ‘old age’ but goes on to focus down on social care policies towards older people in terms of both what is driving them and their likely impacts. The final section of the chapter focuses down on the key messages for future public engagement activity, as well as some reflections on the different mechanisms available for having an impact. On a personal note, the initial talk was given six weeks before by 60th birthday, when still an Associate Dean for Research and Knowledge Exchange in a large Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, which covered a huge range of subjects, from plant sciences to social work. As such, I had a broad responsibility to support public engagement in the faculty, with one of my contributions being the provision of a small financial allocation to support the Social Science in the City initiative.

Public engagement and understanding old age Social care for older people has a high profile in England and Wales at the moment.There is wide recognition that the ageing of the so-called ‘baby boom’ generation will place high pressures on public and private pensions systems and, subsequently, as they age further, on health and welfare budgets. There is great disquiet among older people and their relatives about how they might have to use the equity in their homes

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to help pay for a care home place. Local authorities are struggling to meet their statutory responsibilities under adult social care legislation. As a result, there is already a great deal of public engagement occurring in this area. However, the key message of this chapter is that this debate needs to be underpinned by a much more nuanced and positive understanding of the diversity of later life than is the case at the present. The importance of this can be illustrated by the simple question of ‘When does old age begin?’, since the answer given to this is often narrow and limiting. In much of the period since the Second World War, the dominant lay assumption was that the beginning of old age or being ‘elderly’ was connected to entitlement to a state pension, which was until recently 60 for women and 65 for men.Today, pension entitlement is more elusive to pin down, with state pensions now to arrive at different ages for different cohorts of the adult population as the government seeks to control pension costs in an ageing society. Bytheway (2011) has complained about how old age is often defined narrowly by the length of time a person has lived, and linking age to the chronological point of pension entitlement is a classic example of this. The main thrust of Bytheway’s argument is that (old) ‘age … is more than just a way of measuring time: age is about the experience of growing older’ (Bytheway, 2011, p 6), an experience that is often manipulated by governments. It is now over 30 years since Phillipson (1982) produced his seminal work on the social construction of old age. He pointed out how the concept of retirement through entitlement to a pension emerged in the 1920s from the need of governments to remove older workers from the labour market as a result of mass unemployment.The right to a state pension was consolidated through the welfare state ‘reforms’ of the 1940s, although Phillipson argues that labour shortages in the 1950s led governments to stress the need to stay in work as the best way to enjoy a good later life. Higher unemployment in the 1970s led to yet another switch as the obligation to retire early was stressed, especially for those with private or employer pensions, in order to free up opportunities for younger workers.This was linked with a stress from government on the enormous leisure and self-fulfilment opportunities opened up through retirement from work. The message of Phillipson is that governments manipulate our understandings of later life in terms of the possibilities of work and leisure according to perceived economic needs. An argument of this chapter is that the same type of manipulation is now occurring in the policy area of social care through ‘the Big Society’ and civic engagement debates. Older people who retain their health are presented as having

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an obligation to give back to society in return for being part of the lucky generation of ‘baby boomers’.

Public understanding of social care If there is a need for a mature debate about what it means to be old in the 21st century, there is equally a need to increase public understanding of what social care is and how it differs from health care. There is always great sensitivity from politicians to anything definable as a National Health Service (NHS) cutback because of continued public commitment to the NHS. There is no equivalent sensitivity around cutbacks in local authority social care apart from the specific issue of funding care home costs. The UK policy system, unlike many others in Europe, attempts to make a clear distinction between social care and health care needs.The legislative cornerstone of this distinction remains an Act that is well over 60 years old, which underlines the lack of political priority given by governments to social care rather than the NHS. Section 21 of the National Assistance Act 1948 states that: it should be the duty of every local authority … to provide accommodation for persons who are by reasons of age, infirmity or any other circumstances in need of care and attention which is not otherwise available to them. However, this leaves open the question of what is covered by being ‘in need of care and attention’ and how this differs from health care needs (Means and Smith, 1998).The simplest answer is that social care needs relate to the wide-ranging statutory responsibilities of local authorities for adult social care. However, the answer is more complex than this, in that the definition has changed over time, with more and more older people now being seen as having social care needs who were once seen as having health care needs. Individuals who have been shifted from a health care to a social care responsibility in this way include many older people with dementia and severe mobility problems (Means and Smith, 1998, pp 121–53). Why has this happened? Those of a generous nature may see much of this as empowering, with an increasing number of older people now seen as having social needs rather than being defined by their health problems.Those of a more cynical nature are inclined to point to how social care services can be charged for, unlike most services provided by the NHS, which remain free at the point of consumption. This is 97

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especially contentious in terms of the high charges levied on older people as a result of them entering a care home. It is hard not to conclude that the cynics have a point when the negative reaction of the government to the Majority Report of the Royal Commission of Long Term Care (Sutherland Report, 1999) is considered.This included perhaps the most extended attempt to explore the logic of the distinction between health and social care needs (called personal care by the Royal Commission). Their conclusion was that no such logic existed: Older people need long term care not simply just because they are old, but because their health has been undermined by a disabling disease such as Alzheimer’s disease, other forms of dementia, or stroke. As yet, these diseases cannot effectively be cured by medical care but people suffering from them will require on-going therapeutic or personal care of different kinds in order to enable them to live with the disease. In this regard, the only difference between cancer and Alzheimer’s disease is the limitation of medical science. (Sutherland Report, 1999, p 27) This led the Majority Report to propose that the main social care/personal care provision of local authorities with adult social responsibilities should be funded through general taxation like health care rather than means tested and charged for. The then Labour government rejected this logical proposal on grounds of affordability and, rather, supported the view of two Commission members whose ‘Note of dissent’ argued that ‘this huge addition to the burden on public expenditure would not, however, increase spending for elderly people by a single penny’ (Joffe and Lipsey, 1999, p 113). Interestingly, the Scottish government took a very different view and decided to introduce a personal care policy underpinned by general taxation in the way proposed by the Majority Report. Part of the rationalisation for the non-introduction of free personal care has become the argument that what is needed is not personal care free at the point of consumption, but rather care that is personalised to the individual needs of the older person. The move towards this goal has long roots.The government-commissioned review of community care in 1988 criticised how older people were slotted into a limited number of inflexible and traditional services and called instead for case (or care) managers to put together packages of care tailored to individual need (Griffiths Report, 1988). The next 20 years has seen numerous 98

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experiments and reforms, with personal budgets and direct payments emerging as the key mechanism for enabling older people to make their own care decisions (Department of Health, 2007; Glendinning et al, 2008). One of the last social care publications of the previous Labour government was called Building the National Care Service (HM Government, 2010), which stated that: Everyone will be entitled to a care plan based on their needs which they have been involved in designing. Rather than being told what services they will receive, people will be offered a personal budget if they want one, giving them much more choice about how their care and support entitlement is spent. (HM Government, 2010, p 15) The incoming Coalition government may have downplayed the discourse of ‘rights’ and ‘entitlement’ but it remained fully committed to the policy of personalised care. A vision for adult social care: Capable communities and active citizens (Department of Health, 2010b) included a full chapter on ‘our vision for personalisation’ (Department of Health, 2010b, pp 15–20), which at its simplest was ‘to make sure everyone can get the personalised support they deserve’ (Department of Health, 2010b, p 15).

Social care and older people: four concerns to alert the public about This section looks at four interlinked reasons for concern about the future of social care and older people despite the positive rhetoric around personalisation. These are: (1) the deep-rooted nature of ageism in the social care system, leading to what is sometimes called a ‘Cinderella service’; (2) the implications of an ageing population; (3) growing hostility to ‘the baby boom’ generation as members move into their 60s; and (4) expenditure cutbacks in social care. Each of these requires an increased appreciation of their importance from the general public.

A Cinderella service This chapter does not have the space to explore the complex reasons why older people in the UK often face ageism and age discrimination (for a useful discussion, see Gullette, 2011).Within the confines of this 99

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article, it is important to stress the deep-rooted ageism embedded within the social care system, which has so often been expressed by the low priority of social care services for resources and the lack of dignity afforded to those who consume such services. The term ‘Cinderella service’ was coined in the 1950s (Means and Smith, 1998) and it will now be shown that this term still has resonance today. Just after the Second World War, the government encouraged a national charity to carry out a review of conditions in public assistance institutions prior to the establishment of the NHS under the 1946 Act, as well as residential care homes under the National Assistance Act 1948. The situation uncovered with regard to older people was shocking: All are agreed that the reproach of the masses of undiagnosed and untreated cases of the chronic type which litter our Public Assistance Institutions must be removed. Without proper classification and investigation, at present young children and senile dements are ‘banded together’ in these institutions, along with many elderly patients whom earlier diagnosis and treatment might have enabled to return to their homes. (Nuffield Provincial Hospitals Trust, 1946, p 16) The apparent solution to this was to be the development of geriatric medicine within the NHS and, as we have discussed, local authority residential care homes for those ‘in need of care and attention’. The new residential care homes were intended to be like ‘sunshine hotels’ in which residents would be treated with dignity and respect (Means and Smith, 1998). It was perhaps not surprising that in the early 1960s,Townsend (1964) found that many of the older public assistance attitudes had been retained by staff and most accommodation was of a very poor quality. However, it is hard to believe that 25 years later, a Director of Social Services could have uncovered the following: They took me to this stable block and downstairs there was nothing, so we had to go up these stairs and upstairs … there were five, what I would call cells in it … I went into one and there was this old man there and he was blind. And he has the tinniest … radio you’ve ever seen with a bit of wire stuck to the wall, a bed with an iron frame and a wardrobe that looked like it’d come off the scrap heap. (Quoted in Means et al, 2002, p 67)

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This private care home had residents funded by this Director’s local authority and he ensured that it was closed with almost immediate effect. However, even that incident was over 20 years ago and it could be argued that such inadequate care is no longer a feature of our social care landscape. The scandal of Winterbourne View, a home for adults with learning disabilities, showed that one would be unwise to make this assumption. Winterbourne View was exposed by a Panorama programme on BBC One in May 2011 and prompted numerous reports attempting to tackle poor and inadequate care practices (eg Local Government Association et al, 2012).

An ageing population Ageing populations are a feature of both developed and developing countries (Harper, 2006; Bloom et al, 2010). Overall, this is a reason for celebration. Longevity should be celebrated and most people enjoy life even in advanced old age (Bytheway, 2011). However, governments worry that older people are high consumers of public expenditure, including through health and social care services when health deteriorates. The demographic figures are certainly striking for the UK. The government has estimated that: By 2026, population estimates show that there will be double the number of people aged over 85 than there are now, and the number of people aged over 100 will have quadrupled…. Currently, there are around four people under 65 for every person aged over 65. By 2029, there are expected to be three people under 65 for every person over 65. (HM Government, 2009, p 9) Two factors are driving these changes: first, people are living longer than ever before; and, second, as already indicated, the baby boomers of the early post-war years are now reaching into their 60s in great numbers. How is our government going to react to these changes, especially in terms of what is often called the ‘baby boom’ generation?

Hostility to the ‘baby boom’ generation David Willetts is Minister for Universities and Science and has written a book with the extraordinary title of The pinch: how the baby boomers 101

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took their children’s future – and why they should give it back (Willetts, 2010). The starting point is that many of the ‘baby boom’ generation will have the enormous advantage of final salary pension schemes, an advantage denied to nearly all future generations. They are seen by Willetts as having gained enormously by the house price boom years and, hence, found themselves in a position to borrow against their housing wealth. They are seen as having monopolised political power, hoarded half of the UK’s £6 trillion wealth and ended up leaving their country with unprecedented public debt.Their selfishness risks taking away their children’s future. Other authors have followed the same logic in a similar if less inflammatory way, painting the ‘baby boom’ generation as the lucky generation who avoided war, gained from the expansion of the health service, the university sector and other public funded services, and enjoyed full employment (Howker and Malik, 2010; Norman, 2010). The lucky generation can then be juxtaposed with what Howker and Malik define as ‘the jilted generation’ of young adults who have been bankrupted by the decisions of previous generations. All this creates, at best, an uncomfortable climate and, at worse, an actively hostile climate towards older people in our society. A slippery logic can be seen whereby post-war state generosity now needs to be paid back in a time of austerity. Who could complain if social care for older people is taking more than its fair share of cutbacks?

Cutbacks in social care It is clear that social care services for older people in England are close to collapse (Local Government Association, 2012).This is partly because of the pressures upon services created by the ageing population, but it also reflects how local authorities were picked out as being especially worthy of harsh treatment in the Spending Review instigated by the incoming Coalition government (Rogers, 2010). Adult social care services thus find themselves near breaking point, with huge disparities between local authorities in what services are available but with a common theme that it is only those in the most urgent and desperate of situations who stand any chance of receiving help. On 7 May 2012, 78 organisations who work with older people had an open letter printed in the Daily Mail as part of its Dignity for the Elderly Campaign. Headlined ‘The damning letter from campaigners’, the letter opened by stating that ‘Social care is in crisis – the system is chronically under-funded and in urgent need of reform’. It ended by calling upon the Prime Minister ‘to show the vision and courage’ … ‘to take forward social care reform 102

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as your personal mission’. Is this likely to lead to a ‘brave new world’ of social care for older people?

Towards an affordable personalised care system or the continuation of a crisis in social care? Earlier in the chapter, it was argued that there is a consensus across the political spectrum in the UK on the need to move to personalised social care. This section explores the likelihood of an affordable way forward being found to achieve this or whether the dark warnings of the letter of 7 May 2012 from the 78 organisations working with older people will turn out to be true.This will now be explored in terms of two issues. The first of these relates to a new funding model for social care and the second as to whether an explosion of voluntary effort through ‘the Big Society’ could help to meet a significant element of the present social care shortfall. The final section of the chapter will draw out some of the public engagement implications of this critical issue to older people.

A new funding model for social care? Since the Second World War, there has been no shortage of reports that have explored the funding of social care services for older people from a perspective of concern about affordability (see later). In its final year, the Labour government drew upon the Wanless Review (2006) to suggest the need to move to a partnership model in which everyone with assessed need would be entitled to have a proportion paid for by the state (HM Government, 2010). People would need to meet remaining care costs from their own resources (and to top up for a more ‘delux’ service), but there would be means-test protection for the less well-off. The government argued that this was a more fruitful avenue than the current system (ineffective and unfair), general taxation (not affordable), pay for yourself (unfair) or an insurance-based system (too complex to introduce). Reviews of funding for social care • Firth Report (1987) Public spending for residential care, London: Joint Central and Local Government Working Party, Department of Health and Social Security. • Griffiths Report (1988) Community care: an agenda for action, London: HMSO. • Sutherland Report (1999) With respect to old age: a report by the Royal Commission on Long Term Care, London: The Stationery Office.

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Since then, of course, there has been a change of government to one that is determined to squeeze public expenditure in order to reduce public debt. This makes reform of the funding of social care a political ‘hot potato’.The Coalition soon announced its own review of funding options ‘with a view to introducing legislation … to establish a sustainable legal and financial framework for adult social care’ (Department of Health, 2010a, p 10). The subsequent Dilnot Review (2011) proposed a system based on contributions from older people themselves to meet their own care needs but underpinned by a more generous means test than presently available, and where the lifetime contribution of any individual to their adult social care needs should be capped.The Dilnot Review suggested that the cap should be between £25,000 and £50,000, with its own preference being £35,000. Many readers will see these proposals as hostile to older people by refusing to embrace general taxation as the fairest mechanism, but Dilnot still estimated that ‘our recommended changes to the funding system would cost from around £1.3billion for a cap of £50,000 to £2.2billion for a cap of £25,000’ (Dilnot Review, 2011, p 8).The Dilnot Review (2011, p 8) also stressed that the government needed to ensure ‘that there is sufficient and sustainable funding for local authorities’ and made it clear that this was just not happening at the moment. Their proposed reforms would fail unless this issue was grasped by the government. The long-promised White Paper on Social Care was finally published in July 2012 (HM Government, 2012). Perversely, it supported the principles behind the funding model proposed by the Dilnot Review but went on to say that it had not been possible to identify the monies needed to support such reforms. Funding decisions were pushed back to the next Spending Review at the earliest, with hints that the cap might need to be raised to £100,000.

The ‘Big Society’ David Cameron has consistently argued in recent years for what he calls ‘the Big Society’, which he believes involves:

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a huge culture change where people in their everyday lives, in their homes, in their neighbourhoods, in their workplaces, don’t always turn to officials, local authorities or central government for answers to the problems they face, but instead feel both free and powerful enough to help themselves and their own communities. (Press release from the Conservative Party, 20 July 2012) Some commentators have gone so far as to call ‘the Big Society’ a new politics that seeks to establish an alternative to top-down statism and a total reliance on the free market (Norman, 2010). The relevance of this perspective to personalisation debates and adult social care is not hard to see. Volunteers’ effort, or what is often now called civic engagement (Kaskie et al, 2008), can be a mechanism by which an ageing population receives individual care and support through local community initiatives. ‘The Big Society’ approach has been embedded within the formal social care vision of the Coalition government. A vision for adult social care: Capable communities and active citizens (Department of Health, 2010b) presented civic engagement as the prevention arm of the personalisation approach. The Big Society will minimise isolation and loneliness, as well as meeting lower-level needs, and, hence, the numbers needing personal budgets to ‘buy’ personalised care packages will be reduced. Also, ‘the Big Society’ and its vision for social care meshes well with the drift to hostility towards the ‘baby boom’ generation noted earlier. Willetts (2010) and others point out how older people have time and resources, with Gilleard and Higgs (2005) noting how many see this privileged position being wasted on the pursuit of individualised consumption-based lifestyles. Given the overwhelming evidence that active ageing and social participation improves physical and mental health in later life (Means and Evans, 2012), it is only a small step to argue that the baby boom generation need to commit themselves to civic engagement in their communities, and perhaps that they even have an obligation to do so. Such a response would take pressure off the public purse through: (1) the older volunteers maximising their health and well-being; while (2) meeting the social care needs of those receiving their help. Such a perspective from government is open to the challenge that it is manipulative and ageist in terms of how it seeks to impose obligations upon a cohort of older people because of their perceived selfishness in the past. However, ‘the Big Society’ can also be challenged as failing to learn from the past. Governments after the Second World War also 105

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placed a high emphasis upon volunteering action to meet social care needs, but this approach had to be abandoned because it proved too difficult to deliver any kind of consistent provision across the country through such mechanisms. The National Assistance Act 1948 gave local authorities virtually no powers to provide care services to older people in their own homes (Means and Smith, 1998). As a result, such provision as meals on wheels, day care and visiting services in the 1950s and 1960s depended upon volunteers/the voluntary sector, but variations in services, poor coordination and shortage of volunteers were increasingly uncovered by research (Harris, 1961, 1968; Slack, 1961, 1970; Hunt, 1970), with one of the biggest issues emerging being the limited provision in deprived communities or ones that we would now see as lacking social capital. The response was a series of legislative changes in the early 1970s that placed the dominant role in provision in the hands of local authorities (Means and Smith, 1998). Local authorities were, in turn, to be pushed to the sidelines as the key service provider in subsequent years, as governments sought to achieve both responsive and cost-efficient services based upon a quasi-market (Le Grand and Bartlett, 1993) in which the central provision role was to go to both the voluntary and private sectors. However, this has always been seen as very much about paid staff rather than volunteer efforts, until the recent emergence of ‘the Big Society’ debate. In fairness to the Coalition government, it does recognise that local authorities will need to be proactive in supporting ‘capable communities and active citizens’, announcing a Community First Grant programme to ‘help build community capacity, particularly in areas with less social capital’ (Department of Health, 2010b, p 12).

Can the crisis be averted? The answer as to whether the crisis in adult social care can be avoided does not lie in ‘the Big Society’ initiative, which is little more than a sideshow compared to the lack of a sustainable and coherent funding model for adult social care in the context of a rapidly ageing population. As already indicated, the White Paper on Social Care (HM Government, 2012) failed to address how it would fund the introduction of the Dilnot Review’s (2011) proposals, let alone how it would address the underfunding of existing local authority services. I am not expecting the crisis to be averted.

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Key messages and engaging with the public The rest of this chapter is concerned with the public engagement implications in terms of social care policies and older people. Some of these messages are clear-cut to this author, but others are much more challenging to frame. The first message is that social policies for older people in this country have often been riddled with ageism and age discrimination and we must continue to campaign for a much less compromised future. The confines of this chapter have meant that we have had to restrict ourselves to looking at underinvestment (the Cinderella services) and the present tendency to blame older people for the public expenditure implications of their survivorship, a tendency that seems to have gained a rather nasty twist in recent years through the intervention of Willetts (2010) and others, who seem keen to encourage intergenerational tensions. There is a need to assert the right of older people to be offered dignity with care and at the very least no more than their ‘share’ of the misery of the present public expenditure cuts (and many would argue for a more general campaign against these cuts). Linked to this is the difficult history of the so-called health and social care divide.The NHS faces huge financial challenges at a time of highly controversial reorganisation (Department of Health, 2010a), but it still has a kind of protection through the support of the public that local authority-linked social care has never been able to generate. In practical terms, older people still find themselves shunted between health and social care services in an incoherent way that undermines their wellbeing irrespective of the rhetoric of personalisation. A key feature of the reorganisation of the NHS is the move to GP commissioning and a greater role for local authorities in public health. If these reforms come to fruition, and they now seem certain to do so, there is a need to try and ensure that the new commissioning of services framework operates in a way that takes a holistic view of services across the health and social care divide. However, it is hard to be optimistic since it is just too easy for governments to neglect investment in social care services compared to health services. This brings us to perhaps the most challenging message to decide upon.What should be the new funding model for social care services? Should we campaign and argue for the Royal Commission approach of general taxation (Sutherland Report, 1999), the Wanless Review’s (2006) partnership model, with its guaranteed state input, or the Dilnot Review’s (2011) partnership approach, which limits how much any older person will need to contribute to their own care? 107

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My strong preference is for the general taxation approach but the reality is that some kind of new partnership model is what is going to emerge since this is supported by all the main political parties. As such, there is a need to engage the public in the implications for older people of the failure of the White Paper to specify how reforms are to be funded, with the real prospect now of continued planning blight with disastrous consequences for older people. Finally, in terms of key messages, I wish to promote the importance of a historical perspective when developing contemporary critiques of present social care policies. Berridge and Stewart (2012, p 46) have recently argued that history is not about collecting interesting facts, but rather ‘a means of analysing issues in the past and of looking at how those factors can be transferred into discussion in the present’.We need to understand the rich history of voluntary action in social care, past approaches to funding social care services and the long troubled history of the health and social care divide. Above all, we need to understand and then communicate the long history of neglect of these ‘Cinderella services’.

Communication options and the importance of new professionals Throughout this book, there has been an extended debate about the different options for promoting public engagement, with options including active campaigning, public lectures, active media engagement and the production of detailed research reports that pressure groups can then use. All of these are highly relevant to the messages drawn out from this chapter. I wish to conclude with one option that is unglamorous but I still believe to be important. Social care (and health care services) for older people are person-intensive. Funding regimes give (or take away) the possibility of services and decide how much you will have to pay. However, individual judgements by older people about the actual services received are often made in terms of the dignity and respect with which older people are treated by health and social care professionals and, just as importantly, non-qualified staff. I have always felt it important to inspire students on professional courses to see working with older people as an inspiring opportunity. One way of attempting to do this is through the books and articles that underpin such courses. This was part of the driving force for Community care: policy and practice, which ran to four editions from 1994 to 2008 (eg Means et al, 2008). Initially co-written with Randall 108

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Smith, and then co-written with Randall and Sally Richards, the intention was to produce a book suitable for third-year social work students and professionals on Master’s courses that was accessible and yet had a depth of analysis, including a historical perspective, missing from many such texts. Where next? I was recently presenting at another public engagement forum in Bristol. My fellow presenter talked passionately about how he was attempting to ensure dignity in care for the residents of care homes in his organisation. In the middle of that talk, I decided I wanted to help write a new textbook on Dignity with care. References Berridge,V. and Stewart, J. (2012) ‘History: a social science neglected by other social sciences (and why it should not be)’, Contemporary Social Science, vol 7, no 1, pp 39–54. Bloom, D., Canning, D. and Fink, G. (2010) ‘The greying of the global population and its macroeconomic consequences’, 21st Century: Journal of the Academic of Social Sciences, vol 5, no 3, pp 233–42. Bytheway, B. (2011) Unmasking age: the significance of age for social research, Bristol: The Policy Press. Department of Health (2007) Putting people first: a shared vision and commitment to the transformation of adult social care services, London: Department of Health. Department of Health (2010a) Equity and excellence: liberating the NHS, London: Department of Health. Department of Health (2010b) A vision for adult social care: capable communities and active citizens, London: Department of Health. Dilnot Review (2011) Fairer care funding:The report of the Commission on Funding of Care and Support, London: Department of Health. Firth Report (1987) Public spending for residential care, London: Joint Central and Local Government Working Party, Department of Health and Social Security. Gilleard, C. and Higgs, P. (2005) Contexts of ageing: class, cohort and community, Cambridge: Polity Press. Glendinning, C., Challis, D., Fernandez, J., Jacobs, S., Jones, K., Knapp, M., Manthorpe, J., Moran, N., Netton,A., Stevans, M. and Wilberforce, M. (2008) Evaluation of the Individual Budgets pilot programme: final report, York: Social Policy Research Unit, University of York. Griffiths Report (1988) Community care: an agenda for action, London: HMSO. Gullette, M. (2011) Agewise: fighting the new ageism in America, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 109

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Harper, S. (2006) Ageing societies, London: Hodder Education. Harris, A. (1961) Meals on wheels for old people, London: National Corporation for the Care of Old People. Harris, A. (1968) Social welfare for the elderly: Vol. 1, comparison of areas and summary, London: HMSO. HM Government (2009) Shaping the future of care together, London:The Stationery Office. HM Government (2010) Building the National Care Service, London: The Stationery Office. HM Government (2012) Caring for our future: reforming care and support, London: The Stationery Office. Howker, E. and Malik, S. (2010) Jilted generation: how Britain has bankrupted its youth, London: Icon Books. Hunt, A. (1970) The Home Help Service in England and Wales, London: HMSO. Joffe, J. and Lipsey, D. (1999) ‘Note of dissent’, in Sutherland Report (ed) With respect to old age: A report by the Royal Commission on Long Term Care, London: The Stationery Office. Kaskie, B., Imhof, S., Cavenaugh, J. and Culp, K. (2008) ‘Civic engagement as a retirement role for ageing americans’, The Gerontologist, vol 48, no 3, pp 368–77. Le Grand, J. and Bartlett,W. (eds) (1993) Quasi-markets and social policy, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Local Government Association (2012) Funding outlook for councils from 2010/11 to 2019/20, London: Local Government Association. Local Government Association, NHS Confederation and Age UK (2012) Delivering dignity: securing dignity in care for older people in hospitals and care homes, London: Independent Commission on Dignity in Care. Means, R. and Evans, S. (2012) ‘Communities of place and communities of interest? An exploration of their changing role in later life’, Ageing and Society, vol 32, no 8, pp 3000–18. Means, R. and Smith, R. (1998) From poor law to community care: the development of welfare services for elderly people, 1939–1971, Bristol:The Policy Press. Means, R., Morbey, H. and Smith, R. (2002) From community care to market care: the development of welfare services for older people, Bristol:The Policy Press. Means, R., Richards, S. and Smith, R. (2008) Community care: policy and practice (4th edn), Basingstoke: Palgrave. Norman, J. (2010) The Big Society: the anatomy of the new politics, Buckingham: University of Buckingham Press.

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Nuffield Provincial Hospitals Trust (1946) The hospital surveys: the Domesday Book of the hospital services, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Phillipson, C. (1982) Capitalism and construction of old age, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Rogers, D. (2010) ‘Preparation for the worst’, Community Care, 30 September, p 6. Slack, K. (1961) Councils, committees and concern for the old, Welwyn: Codicote Press. Slack, K. (1970) Old people and London government, London: Bell. Sutherland Report (1999) With respect to old age: a report by the Royal Commission on Long Term Care, London: The Stationery Office. Townsend, P. (1964) The last refuge: a survey of residential institutions and homes for the aged in England and Wales, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Wanless Review (2006) Securing good care for older people: taking a long term view, London: King’s Fund Institute. Willetts, D. (2010) The pinch: how the baby boomers took their children’s future – and why they should give it back, London: Atlantic Books.

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Road wars: contesting paradigms of road safety, public space and well-being Richard Kimberlee With the ascension of Philip Hammond to Transport Secretary, the new Coalition government declared their intention to end Labour’s ‘war on the motorist’. Calling for the raising of the maximum motorway speed limit to 80mph, Hammond seems to prioritise the needs of motorists over other transport users (Wolmar, 2011). Every year more than 3 million cars are added to the European car fleet. Total road traffic kilometres travelled in urban areas are predicted to grow 40% by 2030 (European Commission, 2000). Our city streets witness growing tensions around road usage. Heaped flowers mark the fallen; road rage and transport modal interactions the battle. This chapter explores the paradigms that have emerged from participatory engagement with road space. This chapter is informed by research I have conducted around road safety. Through engagement with communities and, in particular, young people living with high levels of child pedestrian injury on the streets in which they live, I have learned to reconceptualise my understanding of what is meant by road safety. My ideas evolved from several projects, including a European Union (EU)-funded project that explored the consequences of health inequality and exclusion, and the socially creative strategies that have developed to challenge these inequities in Europe. In this research, I highlight the growth in community engagement around attempts to establish car-free spaces and actions to support and develop healthier communities (Kimberlee et al, 2009); work exploring local governance and road safety (Lyons et al, 2008); the evaluation of the Department for Transport’s Neighbourhood Road Safety Initiative; a community development project which promoted community engagement with road safety (Christie et al, 2010); and an inner city road safety project that engaged young people in highway design to address high levels of child pedestrian injury in local, ethnically diverse communities (Kimberlee, 2008). It particularly draws 113

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on a presentation I made to the Parliamentary Council on Transport Safety (PACTS) in London in the autumn of 2010. PACTS bought together engineers, community leaders, urban designers and road safety professionals to debate how to develop: Better, safer communities: the contribution from street design (PACTS, 2010).This chapter explicates my view that professionals have to respond to the changing participatory strategies evolving on our contested road spaces in cities if they wish to continue to address road safety and promote well-being.

The road safety paradigm When thinking about public engagement, it is important to understand the different community and civic interests involved. This is true for road safety. In the UK, passenger and pedestrian killed and seriously injured (KSI) rates have steadily declined since the introduction of local government road safety departments four decades ago. In 1967, the Department for Transport (DfT) published a key document: Road safety – a fresh approach. It was a response to growing concerns about high levels of death on the road. It prompted the establishment of a central road safety unit to coordinate a national programme of road safety policies to be delivered by local area units. These new local road safety departments adopted a scientific approach. They were tasked with identifying accident and injury facts and implementing ‘scientifically’ based remedies. This approach dovetailed with the findings of the 1963 Buchanan Report, which had recommended the separation of pedestrian and motorised transport modes in future urban planning and design.The unintended consequence of this separation was that it shifted travel risk from drivers to pedestrians by enhancing motorists’ movement at the expense of public space ownership (Adams, 2005). Local authorities implemented physical changes to the urban environment to ensure that people and cars existed in separate spaces. Accident risk was reduced and safety was enhanced through engineering solutions, for example, barriers, speed humps, pedestrian crossings and so on. Within road safety and popular discourses, the term ‘accidents’, with its connotation of being an unavoidable misfortune, enabled policymakers and communities to understand KSI at a local level as just a one-off event (Ogden, 1996, p 45). It is clear that these road safety policies, programmes and measures have reduced the numbers and consequences of ‘accidents’, but they do not necessarily solve risk in communities.This realisation is important because it changes the focus from a problem that will go away if 114

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we devote enough resources to it, to a situation requiring ongoing management. This management of accidents requires continued scientific analysis and remedies to ensure that safety resources are well-spent and effective. To Johnstone (2009), this approach ensures the dominance and mobility of cars, and accidents, death and trauma are simply seen as an externality to be managed by local authorities and public emergency services. Road traffic fatality remains a major cause of death within the UK; particularly for young people. However, as Figure 7.1 suggests, since the adoption of the road safety paradigm and the development of road safety units, there has been a large reduction in road deaths. Success is largely seen as an outcome of hard work by road safety professionals and their partnerships with emergency services like the police.

Figure 7.1: Deaths on Great Britain’s roads

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0 1967 1972

1977

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Source: ONS (2009a).

Clearly, other technological improvements (safer cars) and safety measures (eg compulsory seat belt-wearing) have also contributed to this reduction in death rates; but, according to a former Minister of Transport, governments need to continue to encourage investment 115

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in improved highway engineering, as it is clear that such schemes are continuing to reduce casualties at a relatively low cost (Clark, 2009). In 2007, 646 pedestrians were killed in road accidents in Great Britain; this was 22% of all deaths from road accidents, a 78% decrease from 40 years ago when pedestrian fatalities were 2,964. However, the number of fatalities has remained fairly constant over the last 10 years. Nearly half (49%) of people killed in road accidents were car users in 2007. Pedal cyclists and motorcyclists represent 5% and 20% of those killed, respectively.The decline in the casualty rate, which takes into account the volume of traffic on the roads, has been much steeper. In 1967, there were 199 casualties per 100 million vehicle kilometres. By 2007, this declined to 48 per 100 million vehicle kilometres (ONS, 2009b). However, there are large inequalities in road traffic injuries. It is the leading cause of death among children aged 5–14 years, and official figures are believed to underestimate the extent of the problem (World Health Organization Europe, 2005).The DfT estimates that the average cost per seriously injured casualty on the roads is £178,160 and that the average cost per fatality is £1,585,510 (Child Accident Prevention Trust, 2012). The externalised cost of emotional and mental trauma and its impact on families and communities is probably inestimable (Wenham-Clarke, 2007).What is staggering about the UK’s KSI figures is that it is in the poorest communities where death and injury are worst. According to the Public Accounts Committee (2009, p 5), child pedestrians from the most deprived areas remain four times more likely to be killed or injured on the roads than those from the least deprived areas. Nearly one fifth of the people injured in road traffic crashes subsequently develop an acute stress reaction and one quarter display mental problems within the first year. Long-term mental disorders consist mainly of mood disorder (10% of cases), phobic anxiety (20%) and post-traumatic stress disorder (11%) (World Health Organization Europe, 2005).The burden of injury varies: the problem is more acute among vulnerable road users like pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists and so on (Jacobs et al, 2000) A recent UK study estimated that child pedestrians and cyclists from the most deprived neighbourhoods were in fact over 20 times at greater risk of death from road traffic accidents than more privileged children (World Health Organization Europe, 2007). So, the links to exclusion dynamics are clear, with international data linking child death and injury to poverty, single parenthood, low maternal education, low maternal age at birth, poor housing, weak family ties and parental drug or alcohol abuse (UNICEF, 2007, para 1.16).

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This persistent inequality in road deaths suggests that there are limits to the road safety paradigm. It is clear that poor neighbourhoods endure more involuntary injury than affluent areas. But they also endure more environmental threats and these persistent inequalities challenge the paradigm that we can simply get ‘scientific-based remedies’ to solve injury and reach zero levels of death, as envisaged in Sweden’s Vision Zero road safety policy. It is recognised that poorer neighbourhoods now need to improve their health at a faster rate than the improvement trend for the population as a whole if their exclusion is to be addressed (Kunst et al, 2005). Their greater exposure to death and injury on the road ensures that these inequalities are maintained. But other lifestyle changes are being compounded by the road safety paradigm approach. The Office for National Statistics (ONS, 2009b) estimates that only 48% of children walked to primary school in 2008, down from 62% in 1991. The main reasons parents gave for accompanying their children to school were the danger of traffic (58%) and fear of assault or molestation (29%). Fear of traffic is also a powerful deterrent to allowing children to cycle to school or play outdoors, especially in deprived neighbourhoods (Institute of Public Policy Research, 2002). With children perceived as becoming more sedentary, it is also known that childhood rates of obesity range from 10–20% in Northern Europe to 20–36% in Southern Europe, where the scale of the problem has been compared to that of the US (Rigby and James, 2003, p 7). The problem is affecting adults. Europeans are developing sedentary lifestyles and becoming more dependent on motorised transport and ever-more reliant on the consumption of processed food (Ogilvie and Hamlet, 2005, p 11). Looking at the latest Active People Survey for England, only 16.2% of adults aged 35–54 undertake three 30-minute sessions of exercise every week (Sport England, 2011). Half the population of the World Health Organization (Europe) region were deemed to be insufficiently active to meet health recommendations, and the trend was towards less activity (Cavill et al, 2006, p ii). Europe is at the crossroads on nutritional health. Obesity continues to escalate; which is seen as a pandemic with major economic as well as health consequences, increasing the burden of chronic non-communicable diseases (Rigby and James, 2003, p 4). Increasing reliance on privatised motorised transportation is reducing the amount of time people spend physically active in public space. Our pavements and streets are contributing to a growing sense that nonmotorised transport is a threat to health. It is leading to a withdrawal from participation in public spaces and contributing to environmental damage. Epidemiologists and public health specialists in the US and the 117

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UK estimate that up to 60,000 Americans and 10,000 UK citizens are killed annually as a result of particulate pollution fumes from motorised vehicles, with young people being the most vulnerable to respiratory complaints like asthma (World Health Organization Europe, 2005). The withdrawal from public space, fear of traffic and stranger danger are powerful deterrents to allowing children to cycle to school or play outdoors, especially in deprived neighbourhoods (Institute of Public Policy Research, 2002). Less exposure to road traffic and greater insulation from risk is an important contributor to the decline in road deaths. The scientific-based remedy of road safety units contributes to withdrawal from space. With an increase in obesity and a decline in physical activity, new challenges are emerging to question the road safety paradigm. Road safety and, indeed, health services per se have only a partial role to play in the determination of people’s well-being. Contemporary solutions to inequalities in health are more likely to be discovered in neighbourhoods, where local people understand and have insight into the exclusionary dynamics their communities face (Asthana and Halliday, 2006). Thus, the Audit Commission (2007) argued that local solutions involving community participation were the only way forward to promote road safety in the future. It is at the local level that challenging innovation has emerged to question motorised dominance of city spaces. Although KSI rates have declined, the road safety paradigm’s failure to address other health and environmental issues stemming from increased car usage and sedentary lifestyles suggests that it is limited in its understanding of what constitutes well-being.Well-being is about risk reduction in their paradigm. However, the World Health Organization promotes a vision of healthy neighbourhoods. Barton (2000) argues that by linking health and environment disciplines together, we can begin to provide an alternate approach to understanding well-being in our neighbourhoods. Given that globalisation poses complex challenges, practical, participatory strategies to address exclusionary dynamics are increasingly likely to demand interdisciplinary approaches that draw upon knowledge from a broad range of fields, including medicine, epidemiology, sociology, the political sciences, the environmental sciences and economics (European Commission, 2006).

Participatory innovation In recent times, the road safety paradigm has been challenged from: community responses to traffic encroachment; innovative and alternative designs to public space usage; and social movement reactions to the 118

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problems posed by environmental degradation. These participative approaches question motorised dominance in urban areas and demand an alternate understanding of well-being. This chapter suggest the adoption of a transdisciplinary approach to road safety. This requires a shift in the paradigm to meet the challenges being posed in public space by participatory practices of radical designers, road protestors and civil society; particularly of the latter, because, through direct action, some local communities are learning to challenge the road safety paradigm by expressing their concerns around speed, congestion and environmental degradation. The examples of innovation highlighted here represent important responses sometimes based on and networked into broader social movements that, like many in the post-Fordist world, are concerned with reproduction and consumption and not necessarily with production. Some are pan-European or even global in coverage, but they remain local in impact and reflect real participation from local communities. Such innovation involves bottom-up creativity, giving voice to groups that have not only been traditionally absent from the politico-administrative systems at the local and other institutional and spatial levels, but also never even been included in the state’s evolution into its post-welfarist forms.They are groups that evolve in neighbourhood spaces and take on unique forms: they are resident action groups, Critical Mass (CM) cyclists and environmental campaigners.These people matter because their local neighbourhoods are often open, dynamic and adaptive systems that do not have a simple cause–effect relationship with national or global drivers of economic, social or policy change (Blackman, 2006, p 1).

Community responses to traffic encroachment Actor Network Theory (ANT) emphasises the role of creative, innovative, entrepreneurial individuals in science (Latour, 1987). However, it is not enough to have an inspiration, enrolling other individuals and institutions into participatory networks is crucial to having new ideas accepted (Callon, 1986).Across Europe and in North America, there are various innovative responses to traffic encroachment. Later, we will look at individual engineers and artists, but, crucially, these have then been taken up by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and local communities, and, in some cases, accommodated by local government planning departments. The Australian artist, social inventor and street philosopher David Engwicht invented the motor-taming activities of the Walking Bus 119

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and the Neighbourhood Pace Car.The former is known to thousands of school children across the UK. It promotes physical activity and sociability among young people, reduces school-run traffic and protects the child from injury. Neighbourhood Pace Cars are little used in the UK. Schools in South Bristol tried them in 2005. Engwicht suggests that these participatory strategies for movement empower people to calm traffic on their streets and around schools. Pace Car drivers set traffic speed by driving within the speed limit and displaying the official Pace Car stickers on their vehicles. They make public spaces safer for local children and adults to walk and cycle in. Anti-car community protests are increasing. In Flitton and Greenfield, Bedfordshire, Residents Against Traffic Speed have declared exhaustion from the effects of speeding traffic on their families. They formed an action committee to work to reduce the excessive speed of heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) (especially through the night). Local communities are using speed monitoring devices like Community Speedwatch to track vehicles breaking speed limits while passing through communities. Ten local areas in Buckinghamshire saw volunteers use technology to monitor traffic. In 2003, an Oxford grandfather moved his front room and granddaughter into his residential street as a protest against ratrunning.The action is part of a broader Road Witch campaign, which, among other things, organises Halloween DIY traffic-calming measures. In 2010, in Chideock, Dorset, a 77-year-old pensioner galvanised the local community to repeatedly activate a pelican crossing on the busy A35.Traffic jams were soon created and the pensioner was threatened with an anti-social behaviour order (ASBO). Furthermore, recently, the BBC newsreader Alice Arnold won national praise for her efforts to tackle a litter lout when she saw a motorist throw a purple plastic bottle out of a car. She threw it back into the vehicle.

Shared space The challenge facing city urban planners and politicians is sometimes seen as balancing the demand for increasing personal mobility with the need to respect the environment and quality of life. Some communities are car-free, likeVauban, Freiberg in Germany (Melia, 2006).Also, given that analysis of international data on collision rates suggests that the frequency of vehicle and pedestrian/cyclist collisions declines with increases in the numbers of people walking and cycling at busy major intersections (Jacobsen, 2003), the Dutch engineer Hans Monderman developed ground-breaking shared space designs that challenged traditional traffic-calming measures (used within the road safety 120

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paradigm) (Glaskin, 2004). Similar to Home Zones, various schemes in the UK have been inspired through combinations of restricting density traffic, shared surfaces, pavement withdrawal, trees and planters (Hamilton-Baillie and Jones, 2005). These designs for urban centres necessitate drivers making eye contact with pedestrians to navigate space, forcing them to assume greater responsibility for safety and speed as people and bikes share all spaces. Shared space schemes are not uncontroversial. Even though they seek to redress the balance between pedestrians and vehicles, some groups contest their desirability. In October 2011, in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, protests against new shared space developments were led by blind and partially sighted people. They included disabled people, older people and families with prams. The protest was organised by Jill Allen-King, Chair of the European Blind Union’s Commission on Mobility and Transport, who warned that such developments breach the parts of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities on accessibility (Pring, 2011). In February 2012, London Mayor Boris Johnson faced protestors at the official opening of the Exhibition Road shared space scheme in Kensington and Chelsea, and anti-shared space protestors in Coventry have their own Facebook page (see: www. facebook.com/pages/End-Coventrys-Shared-Spaces-Experiment).

Neighbourhood responses to environmental degradation In an increasingly post-industrial European society, we recognise that city populations are threatened by global forms of pollution and the depletion of natural resources (Beck, 1992; Yearley, 1996). In the 1970s, fossil fuel-based industries and energy-intensive transport systems were simply conceptualised as depleting natural resources. Today, reconceptualisations see them, and the lifestyles they support, as posing threats to health and well-being through climate change (eg through increased risk of air pollution, drought, natural disasters etc). The road safety paradigm helped to minimise injury risk on roads by prioritising motorised transport in urban centres, complementing the agreed assumption that people and cars should be separate. The links between health and environment are increasingly recognised across World Health Organization policy agendas. Key themes include the interrelated issues of carbon emissions, climate change, energy futures, non-renewable resource usage, waste/pollution, environmental quality, biodiversity and so on. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report (UN, 2007) 121

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affirmed the broad scientific consensus validating the view that human activity is responsible for global warming and that this threatens people’s well-being (Coote, 2006). Since the Stern Review (HM Treasury, 2006), climate change, and the need for sustained integrated policy action, remains a key concern that runs counter to the notion of car dependency. Both the government and neighbourhoods have therefore been seeking ways to improve physical and social spaces to reduce inequalities, promote low-carbon lifestyles and sustain people’s well-being (Department of Health, 2004; Sustainable Development Commission, 2007). In neighbourhoods, NGOs, social movements and local people are beginning to mobilise a wide range of resources to address environmental degradation. In so doing, they valorise their own well-being in new ways. Because environmental problems are global in nature, it has become important to people in local communities to make transnational links. This can be seen in the CM movement. Using the internet, the CM movement has inspired thousands of people across the world to be physically involved in challenging car cultures and global warming impacts in our cities. Bicycle designer George Bliss first used the phrase ‘Critical Mass’ to describe a new type of protest action for the bike-culture art documentary Return to the scorcher (1992). Bliss observed bike flows at road intersections in China. A CM of cyclists builds up and halts the flow of cars, permitting them to undertake turns and manoeuvres from which they were previously excluded. Cyclists thereby gain the freedom to use the road while cars and other motorised traffic wait. ‘Bicycles are traffic too’ – CM’s rallying call. They attract participants wishing to express resistance symbolically. ‘Music on the move’ is a feature. Affiliated participants often include skateboarders and rollerbladers who relish the opportunity to reclaim the streets. CM events happen throughout the world on the first Friday of every month. In 2006, the Metropolitan Police tried to declare London’s CM ride illegal. Since losing that battle both initially and on appeal, the ride has operated independently. The court papers from the 2006 judgment reflect the changing CM attitudes. They cite the aims of some participants as ‘getting our own back at motorists’ and ‘causing disruption’; more recent CM events are ‘charm offensives’ (Wright, 2011). Deterring car use and promoting human-powered movement is an important consideration for health, environmental and social reasons. It has a direct impact on health in terms of air quality and traffic accidents, but it is also an important factor in terms of the design of urban areas, which can directly affect city dwellers’ well-being. In the UK, road wars 122

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and challenges to motorised vehicles in urban areas are increasingly taking different and innovative forms. People are participating in new ways and challenging the post-war consensus that demanded order in space usage and the primacy of motorised vehicles on city roads. The road safety model that delivered separation of space and injury risk reduction around accident prevention is now facing challenges from participants with new conceptualisations as to what constitutes wellbeing and how they want to participate in public spaces. The cyclist Masser, anti-rat run campaigners, active pedestrians and urban planners are shaping and entering the road wars in new ways, making UK road spaces not separated or shared space, but contested spaces with daily battles being fought between motorists, pedestrians, cyclists and local communities. References Adams, J. (2005) ‘Streets and the culture of risk aversion’, in What are we scared of? The value of risk in designing public space, London: CABE Space. Asthana, S. and Halliday, J. (2006) What works in tackling health inequalities?, Bristol: The Policy Press. Audit Commission (2007) Changing lanes: evolving roles in road safety, London: Audit Commission. Barton, H. (2000) Sustainable communities. The potential for econeighbourhoods, London: Earthscan. Beck, U. (1992) Risk society: towards a new modernity, London: Sage. Blackman, T. (2006) Placing health: neighbourhood renewal, health improvement and complexity, Bristol: The Policy Press. Buchanan, C. (1963) Traffic in towns, London: HMSO Callon, M. (1986) ‘Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay’, in J. Law (ed) Power, action and belief: a new sociology of knowledge, London: Routledge. Cavill, N., Kahlmeier, S. and Racioppi, F. (2006) Physical activity and health in Europe: evidence for action, Copenhagen: WHO Europe. Child Accident Prevention Trust (2012) ‘Making the link’. Available at: http://www.makingthelink.net/tools/costs-child-accidents/costsroad-accidents (accessed 15 May 2012). Christie, N., Ward, H., Kimberlee, R., Lyons, R., Towner, E., Hayes, M., Robertson, S., Rana, S. and Brussoni, M. (2010) Road traffic injury risk in disadvantaged communities: evaluation of the Neighbourhood Road Safety Initiative, London: DfT.

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Clark, P. (2009) ‘Hansard’, 2 July. Available at: http://www. publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmhansrd/cm090702/ debtext/90702-0020.htm Coote, A. (2006) ‘The role of citizens and service users in regulating healthcare’, in E. Andersson, J. Tritter and R. Wilson (eds) Healthy democracy: the future of involvement in health and social care, London: Involve and NHS National Centre for Involvement. European Commission (2000) Reclaiming city streets for people: chaos or quality of life?. Available at: ec.europa.eu/environment/pubs/pdf/ streets_people.pdf (accessed 13 February 2014). European Commission (2006) Health and food, Special Eurobarometer 246, Wave 64.3. Available at: http://ec.europa.eu/health/ph_ publication/eb_food_en.pdf (accessed 13 February 2014). Glaskin, M. (2004) ‘Innovation: the end of the white line’, Sunday Times, 22 August. Available at: http://driving.timesonline.co.uk/ tol/life_and_style/driving/article472085.ece?token=null&offset=0 (accessed 7 January 2007). Hamilton-Baillie, B. and Jones, B, (2005) ‘Improving traffic behaviour and safety through urban design’, Civil Engineering, vol 158, pp 39–47. HM Treasury (2006) The economics of climate change, HM Treasury/ Cabinet Office, London: Cambridge Press. Institute of Public Policy Research (2002) Streets ahead: safe and liveable streets for children, London: Central Books. Jacobs, G., Aeron-Thomas, A. and Astrop, A. (2000) Estimating global road fatalities, TRL Report 445, Crowthorne: Transport Research Laboratory. Jacobsen, P. (2003) ‘Safety in numbers: more walkers and bicyclists, safer walking and bicycling’, Injury Prevention, vol 9, no 3, pp 205–9. Johnstone, I. (2009) ‘Road safety futures – one paradigm shift too few’, Act Now for Tomorrow conference, Auckland, New Zealand, 2 September. Kimberlee, R. (2008) ‘Streets ahead on safety: young people’s participation in decision making to address the European road injury epidemic’, Journal of Health and Social Care in the Community, vol 16, no 3, pp 322–8. Kimberlee, R., Orme, J. and Purdue, D. (2009) ‘D1.4 survey paper: health and environment’. Available at: http://katarsis.ncl.ac.uk/wp/ wp1/ef4.html

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Kunst,A., Bos,V., Lahelma, E., Bartley, M., Lissau, I., Regidor, E., Mielck, A., Cardano, M., Dalstra, J., Geurts, J., Helmert, U., Lennartsson, C., Ramm, C., Spadea, J., Stronegger, W. and Mackenbach, J. (2005) ‘Trends in socioeconomic inequalities in self assessed health in ten European countries’, International Journal of Epidemiology, vol 34, pp 295–395. Latour, B. (1987) Science as social action : How to follow scientists and engineers through society, Milton Keynes : Open University Press. Lyons, R., Towner, E., Christie, N., Kendrick, D., Jones, S., Hayes, M., Kimberlee, R., Sarvotham, T., Macey, S., Brussoni, M., Sleney, J., Coupland, C. and Phillips, C. (2008) ‘The advocacy in action study: a cluster randomized controlled trial to reduce pedestrian injuries in deprived communities’, Injury Prevention, vol 14, p 136. Melia, S. (2006) On the road to sustainability: transport and carfree living in Freiburg, Bristol: Faculty of the Built Environment, University of the West of England. Office for National Statistics (ONS) (2009a) ‘Road casualties: deaths on Great Britain’s roads at all-time low’, ONS on line. Available at: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=1208 (accessed 1 November 2009). ONS (2009b) Reported road casualties Great Britain 2009: annual report, London: ONS. Ogden, K. (1996) Safer roads: guide to road safety engineering, Avebury Technical. Ogilvie, D. and Hamlet, N. (2005) ‘Obesity: the elephant in the corner’, British Medical Journal, vol 331, no 7531, pp 1545–8. Parliamentary Council on Transport Safety (2010) Better, safer communities: the contribution from street design, www.pacts.org.uk/2010/12/bettersafer-communities-the-contribution-from-street-design/ (accessed 13 February 2014). Pring, J. (2011) ‘Protesters block buses over danger of shared spaces’, Disability Go News. Available at: http://www.disabledgo.com/ blog/2011/10/protesters-block-buses-over-danger-of-shared-spaces/ (accessed 16 May 2012). Public Accounts Committee (2009) Improving road safety for pedestrians and cyclists in Great Britain, 49th report of Session, 2008/09, London: The Stationery Office Limited. Return to Scorcher (1996), http://greenplanetstream.org/bicycleadvocacy/return-of-the-scorcher/ (accessed 13 February 2014). Rigby, N. and James, P. (2003) ‘Waiting for a green light for health: Europe at the crossroad for diet and disease’, International Obesity Task Force Position Paper 3. 125

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Sport England (2011) ‘30 minutes moderate’, sports participation measure, Active People Survey 5. Available at: http://www. sportengland.org/research/active_people_survey/aps5.aspx (accessed 16 May 2012). Sustainable Development Commission (2007) Healthy futures: the natural environment, health and well-being, London: SDC. United Nations (UN) (2007) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Climate Change 2007:The Physical Science Basis (Summary for Policy Makers). Working Group I, 4th Report, United Nations. UNICEF (2007) Child poverty in perspective: an overview of child well being in rich countries, a comprehensive assessment of the lives and well being of children and adolescents in the economically advanced nation, Innocenti Report Card 7, Florence: UNICEF. Wenham-Clarke, P. (2007) When lives collide, London: Roadpeace. Wolmar, C. (2011) ‘The bizarre methodology of Philip Hammond’s transport economics’, The Guardian. Available at: http://www. guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/19/philip-hammondtransport-economics (accessed 15 May 2012). World Health Organization Europe (2005) ‘The solid facts on unintentional injuries and violence in the WHO European region fact sheet’, EURO/11/05 Rev.1, Copenhagen, Bucharest, 12 September. Wright, M. (2011) ‘The changing mood of Critical Mass bike rides’, Guardian Bike Blog. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/ environment/bike-blog/2011/dec/02/critical-mass (accessed 20 May 2012). Yearley, S. (1996) Sociology, environmentalism, globalization: reinventing the globe, London: Sage.

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EIGHT

Restorative justice, community action and public protection Kieran McCartan and Nikki McKenzie

Introduction Public engagement is at the heart of not only criminology, but all social sciences. In recent years, criminology has developed a renewed interest in social engagement, with this professional–public dialogue being seen as essential to developing a rounded public interest in the discipline as well as related policies and practices (Loader and Sparks, 2010). This chapter will discuss the importance of having a rounded debate about criminological issues and why it is important that the public, or publics (Kitzinger, 2004), fully comprehend the reality of a range of offences, offenders, victims and state responses. There are a number of different explanations for why people offend, including their biology, social relationships, psychology and personality; however, there is no one explanation, as all people, and therefore offenders, are heterogeneous (Towl and Crighton, 2010).The aetiology of offending behaviour is essential in understanding the heterogeneous nature of not only offending, but also how offenders can be rehabilitated and reintegrated. Offender management has increasingly become a community issue in recent years and this will only continue in the current era of the ‘Big Society’. It is important, therefore, for the public at large and communities in particular to understand offenders and their offending behaviour so that they can assist with their reintegration. In the UK, one approach to offender reintegration and management that has been steadily growing in popularity, contrary to the current climate of state-/community-sanctioned punitiveness, is restorative justice. This chapter will discuss restorative justice as a means of reintegrating offenders, particularly stigmatised offenders, back into communities and how this fits in with the current Coalition government’s social and criminal justice policies. In order to give the chapter a sense of grounding, it will focus on two offender populations, youth offenders and sex offenders, as they are prominent in current criminal justice 127

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policy and are seen as problematic offender populations by the media and public at large.

Current approaches to offender punishment and management The social construction and reflexive modernisation of ideas around crime and punishment have been directly influenced by government policy, with certain agendas being pushed at different stages (Alcock et al, 2008), often in knee-jerk fashion, in response to real or perceived public attitudes. In the UK, historically speaking, different governments have had different attitudes to crime,‘penality’, rehabilitation and social justice policy, meaning that we have moved through periods of control (nothing works, espoused by the Conservative government in the 1980s and the early 1990s), liberalism (what works, espoused by the Labour government in the late 1990s and 2000s) and now into one of increased community partnership (Big Society, espoused by the current Coalition government).These changing government attitudes to crime, criminal justice and social control are made more complex in the UK by the fact that the UK does not have a single legislative body with complete control over any or all aspects of criminal justice. Rather, the UK is split into three separate jurisdictions (ie England and Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland), each with their own government/assembly, laws, legislation, legal systems and criminal justice agencies. All three jurisdictions have similar, but not identical, legislation. Due to the fact that prison numbers have increased dramatically over the past 20 years and that penal populism is still dominating penal policy formation, it is clear that there are still two overriding beliefs: that delinquents and offenders need to be controlled and punished. These two beliefs (ie offender control and punishment) must be analysed within an existing social context, as society is a socially constructed reality that adapts and changes over time and space depending upon the individuals involved (Giddens, 1991). Concepts such as crime, punishment, rehabilitation and offender management are all in this sense socially constructed. This process is best explained through Giddens’s (1991) concept of reflexive modernisation, which argues that society and the individual constantly re-evaluate all aspects of life in light of emerging information.This means that social life adapts and changes over time, in particular, through modernisation, which is represented by increased travel, globalisation and developments in technology and the media.The media helps to report, discuss, shape and create current affairs, especially in relation to crime. This implies that 128

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the media can, and does, affect, create and change social and individual perceptions, a factor that is particularly salient given that modern society is media-saturated (McQuail, 2005). Despite the impact of the media, it is necessary to underline that its influence is limited by the ways in which media messages are socially and individually received (Howitt, 1995; Kitzinger, 2004). This suggests that individuals, communities and society may choose to accept, reject or alter media messages as they see fit. Hence, the media feeds into, but does not solely construct, changing societal perceptions. This interaction between social construction, media influence and reflexive modernisation is central to the modern risk society in which we live, especially in regard to the representation of areas such as sexuality, youth, drugs and violence as deviant and dangerous. This is significant as most of these ‘problem areas’ have been ever present in society, and have been subject to varying interpretations and degrees of acceptance. It is a truism in criminology that it is not the act that is deviant, but rather the perception and contextualisation of the act (Heiner, 2008). The situational character of deviance is particularly relevant when placed in the context of the drift towards a less tolerant and more punitive type of society. The current prison population now stands at 87,123 (Ministry of Justice, 2012a). Roberts (1992) had already argued that the increase at that time in the prison population (which stood at just 45,000 [Home Office, 2003]) was due to the perception that the public favours stronger law enforcement and more punitive sentencing. There is a disconnection between the realities of public opinion and public attitudes to crime and punishment (Yankelovich, 1991), as well as between public opinion and governmental interpretation and enforcement of these attitudes (Maruna and King, 2004). It is apparent that the UK government’s reactions to public opinion concerning crime are influenced by the media, which tend to create broad and non-nuanced depictions of complex criminal justice issues into ‘one size fits all’ models (Wood and Gannon, 2009). This is especially problematic given that the majority of the public believe that rehabilitation reduces the potential for reoffending (Home Office, 2001) and that offenders can be reintegrated back into the community (Sprott and Doob, 1997). It is generally felt, by the government, that in order to control nonlaw-abiding individuals, punitive measures need to be enforced. Not to punish is considered weak and permissive. If we consider punishment in a traditional sense as a continuum, with permissiveness at one end and punitiveness at the other, what we have is a very confined perspective with a limited choice of whether to punish or not, with the only other 129

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variable being the severity of the punishment, such as the amount of the fine or the length of the sentence.Wachtel (1999) has constructed a more useful view of social control by adding two more variables to the equation: control and support. Here, control refers to discipline or limit-setting, and support to encouragement and nurturing. He also combined a high or low level of control with a high or low level of support to identify four general approaches to social control: neglect, permissive, punitive (or retributive) and restorative.This is summarised in the social control window diagram (see Figure 8.1).Wachtel argues that if society takes the permissive approach to punishing offenders, what transpires is low control and high support, a scarcity of limitsetting, and an abundance of nurturing. In opposition to this is the punitive or retributive approach, which provides high control but is low on support.This, it is suggested, is generally the approach that the government and society in Britain have adopted. The third approach to managing offenders is what Wachtel describes as neglectful, as it has an absence of both limit-setting and nurturing. Finally, the fourth possibility put forward by Wachtel is restorative. This approach is both high on control and high on support. Wachtel suggests that the restorative approach confronts and disapproves of wrongdoing while supporting and valuing the intrinsic worth of the wrongdoer. Figure 8.1: Social control window diagram HIGH

C O

TO

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punitive

restorative

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authoritative reintegrative

N T R O

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permissive

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L

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Source: Wachtel (1999).

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This social control window can also represent parenting styles, and the term ‘authoritarian’ has been used to describe the punitive parent while the restorative parent has been called ‘authoritative’. Furthermore, Braithwaite’s (1989) reintegrative theory terms can also be attached to the window, as stigmatising responses to wrongdoing are punitive while reintegrative responses are restorative. The notion of social control and the management and methods of dealing with it are issues that are high on the government’s agenda as the current national Coalition argues that the community should have more engagement in all aspects of governance, including criminal justice. This is encapsulated in the ostensibly integrated approach it refers to as the ‘Big Society’. David Cameron suggests that the big society aims to create a climate that empowers local people and communities, building a big society that will ‘take power away from politicians and give it to people’ (Cameron, 2010). This explicitly promotes the transfer of decision-making to communities, encouraging people to take an active role in their communities, as well as greater support for co-ops, mutual societies, charities and social enterprises. Hence, the aim is to advance greater community partnership, greater civil/social responsibility and the enhancement of state trust in the public in the prevention of offending, as well as in respect to the reintegration/management of offenders. Overall, this indicates that the Coalition believes that social repair is a process based upon community engagement, restorative justice and successful reintegration. These are the core tenets of restorative justice. This desire to get the public and communities more involved in local affairs and to take responsibility for themselves is also tied up with the Coalition’s approach to policing, which aims to reduce the numbers of paid officers, increase the number of police volunteers and make the criminal justice system (CJS) more publicly accountable, as well as victim-focused. Therefore, this implies that offender management, policing and justice will become community partnership issues rather than simply state/CJS ones. This is also reflected in the Coalition government’s ‘rehabilitation revolution’, which means that offender management will be farmed out to independent contractors and judged through a payment-through-results process (Kemshall et al, 2011b). Hence, independent contractors will take on traditional CJS roles in a similar vein to what happened when parts of the National Health Service (NHS) were contracted out by the previous Conservative government, albeit that, this time, the process is labelled as community partnership and engagement (McCartan, 2012a). When the idea of the rehabilitative revolution is married to notions surrounding the 131

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Big Society and greater partnership-working, it emphasises that the public, community groups, charities, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and private companies (ie partner agencies) will be increasingly responsible for offender management. However, for this to work, there needs to be an implicit and reciprocal trust between the public, communities, partner organisations and the CJS. In reality, there are low levels of trust between the different actors: the state has little faith in civil society and third sector agencies, while they, in turn, regard state power with a large degree of scepticism. In turn, welfare professionals tend to believe that the public cannot be entrusted with this material and that it will lead to community conflict (McCartan, 2011).

Restorative justice One approach to offender reintegration and the continued education of communities around the realities of offenders and offending is restorative justice; which seems to align, in part anyway, to some of the current Coalition government’s ideas around the ‘big society’. Restorative justice, according to Zehr (1990), is the notion that crime is a violation of both individuals and society; therefore, there are obligations for the victim, offender and the community to work together to achieve solutions that promote repair, reconciliation and reassurance. With this in mind, a number of definitions have been created to try and pin down what restorative justice actually is. Restorative justice is by no means a contemporary form of ‘crime control’, and, in fact, was the dominant model of criminal justice until the Norman Conquest of Europe at the end of the Dark Ages (Weitekamp, 1999). However, as Harding (1992) and Schafer (1970) point out, from the end of the 12th century, a crime was no longer committed against an individual, but against the state, which is how it remained until the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999. Although restorative measures are often seen as an alternative to punishment, Daly (2001) argues that restorative sanctions and processes should be seen as ‘alternative punishments’ rather than ‘alternatives to punishment’. Restorative justice offers a new paradigm of justice as it does not define the ‘state’ as the victim, but works on the axiom that criminal behaviour is a conflict between individuals. Restorative justice places the offender and the victim at the centre of the system in active problem-solving roles (Umbreit, 1994). Daly (2001) felt that all hard burdens imposed and accepted under pressure, as with most restorative interventions in England and Wales, should be considered 132

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as a punishment, and thus restorative justice should be considered to be essential to crime control as it provides ‘hard treatment’ (Walgrave, 2001).

Restorative justice in the UK In the UK, use of restorative justice has been most evident through its application in the youth justice system. In order to clarify what is meant by restorative justice and what is expected from justice professionals, as well as representative schemes, the previous Labour government attempted to be specific about its definition and the role that it has within the CJS. Marshall (1996, p 22) argues that ‘Restorative Justice is a process whereby parties with a stake in a specific offence resolve collectively how to deal with the aftermath of the offence and its implications for the future’. Although this is an often-used definition and guides practice within the UK, Bazemore and Walgrave (1999) suggest that it is both too broad and too narrow. They state that restorative justice cannot be restricted to being called a process, as this gives the impression that the harm can be repaired without engaging the victim, the victimised community and the offender. They need to collectively define harm and develop a plan to restore it. This interconnectivity is essential to restorative justice, as the process needs to include the parties directly involved in the offence (ie the offender, the victim, their families and communities), and in order to do this successfully, public engagement and support is paramount. This raises the question: does restorative justice work and why should the public engage in this alternative method? In order to answer this question, one has to consider the purposes of restorative justice and it is suggested that these are: reparation (for the victim), reintegration (of the offender into their community) and responsibility (of the offender for their offending behaviour). It is suggested that these are the main purposes of restorative justice and the factors on which a scheme should be evaluated for success. Moreover, in order to satisfy the government and many members of society, reoffending statistics also have to be considered. To further explain and illustrate the use of restorative justice in the UK, past and present, we will focus on two groups of offenders: (1) young offenders; and (2) sex offenders.

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Restorative justice and youth crime One of the areas in which restorative justice has and is being used with some success is the youth justice system. We have been led to believe that the offending behaviour of our young people (10–17 year olds) is out of control and on the increase.This is not the case, as there has not been a rise in rates for the past 10 years. There were 198,449 proven offences committed by young people aged 10–17 that resulted in a disposal in 2009/10.This is a decrease of 19% from 2008/09 and 33% from 2006/07 (Ministry of Justice, 2011).This is despite a hard-hitting recession, youth unemployment rising to its highest recorded level and the Coalition government cutting funding for Youth Offending Teams, which has hit valuable preventive interventions (Ministry of Justice, 2012b). It is true that England, Wales and Northern Ireland have one of the lowest ages of criminal responsibility in Europe, at 10 years of age. Since 2011, Scotland will not prosecute below 12 years of age. In Europe, 14 or 15 is more usual, with Belgium and Luxembourg as high as 18 (see Muncie, 2009). Also, young people aged 10–17 are responsible for only 25% of crime committed and youth crime is rarely serious. We have seen a fall in burglary and car crime, but while violent crime is relatively low, there has been a slight increase in crime involving drugs. However, even though we have seen a decrease in youth offending, England and Wales have particularly high rates of youth custody; second in absolute numbers only to Turkey in Europe (Aebi and Delgrande, 2009). The number of 15–17 year olds in custody has doubled over the past 10 years, with approximately 3,000 young people being in custody at any one time. The reconviction rate ranges between 60% and 90% (Muncie, 2009). The evidence suggests that what works for young offenders is not incarceration, which is not only damaging for the young person, but also costly for society in terms of the damage an angry, aggressive and criminally active young person can do to a community. The financial costs are also high: detaining a young person in a Young Offenders Institute for 12 months costs £55,000 (Youth Justice Board, 2011). What have been seen to work are community-based programmes that deal with the individual offending behaviour of the young person (Muncie, 2009). It is suggested that programmes which can deal with the young person on an individual basis and offer the skills or intervention that they require while allowing them to see the harm that their actions have caused victims and the wider community are ones that can truly help the young person. They enable them to take 134

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responsibility for their behaviour, reintegrate them back into their community and provide reparation to their victims. There are a number of ongoing restorative justice schemes in the UK that address both adult and young offenders and there have been evaluations conducted to examine their effectiveness (see Crawford and Newburn, 2003; McKenzie, 2006).All of them have found that the three Rs mentioned earlier (reparation, reintegration and responsibility) have been achieved through restorative justice, and, moreover, that there has been a reduction in reoffending of between 30% and 50%. More recently, however, Shapland et al (2011) conducted a £7 million government-funded seven-year research programme looking into restorative justice. The evaluation found that in randomised control trials of restorative justice with serious offences committed by adults: • the majority of victims chose to participate in face-to-face meetings with the offender, when offered by a trained facilitator; • 85% of victims who took part were satisfied with the process; • restorative justice reduced the frequency of reoffending, leading to £9 of savings for every £1 spent on restorative justice; and • there was a 27% reduction in reoffending (Restorative Justice Council, 2011). What has become evident from the research on restorative justice with young offenders (McKenzie, 2006) is that in order for it to have an impact upon the young offender, there has to be a degree of victim and community participation and that this requires public engagement and understanding.

Restorative justice and sex offenders Responding to sexual offending, especially child sexual abuse, is an often complex, controversial and difficult process for the government and the CJS. This is partly because of the variety of diverse understandings of and reactions to child sexual abuse by separate actors or groups in society (McCartan, 2012b). These disjointed discourses have resulted in an understanding of child sexual abuse that is somewhat detached from the reality of the offender, particularly in regard to paedophilia, leading to poor societal understanding, emotional and restrictive responses, reactionary politics, and media misdiagnosis. Consequentially, sex offenders are a highly stigmatised population, not only in the UK, but globally (McCartan, 2009, 2012c). Offenders are only too aware of public hostility (Kemshall et al, 2011a), a factor that is further 135

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exacerbated by the current sex offender disclosure schemes in England, Wales and Scotland (Kemshall et al, 2011a). This often means that full reintegration is difficult to achieve in practice. As a result, responding to sex offenders has become confined to the most socially acceptable response, which more often than not is punitive and not rehabilitative. In the UK and internationally, there is not a wide variety of restorative justice programmes with sex offenders (McAlinden, 2010). In addition to being the exception and not the rule, examples of restorative justice with sex offenders in the UK are also not equally distributed across the country, and even when they are, this is not done so consistently. There are three clear examples from the UK that we will discuss here, Assessment Intervention Moving On (AIM), Stop it Now! and Circles of Support and Accountability (CoSA). AIM, which is a project based in Greater Manchester, aims to help young people in the CJS who have committed sexual offences (AIM, 2012).The project seeks to address many aspects of the young offenders’ lives and sexually abusive behaviour, including their aetiology, impact and prevention of the sexually problematic behaviours. This area of sexual violence is particularly difficult to work on as communities, child services and the CJS often struggle to work together; especially in terms of the reintegration of offenders (Schlade, 2010). One of the ways in which AIM does this is through restorative justice programmes, whereby they arrange face-to-face meetings (ie Mediation, Family Group Meetings, Restorative Conferencing and/or Referral Orders) between the offender, victim and their respective carers. While AIM itself reports positive results from this process (Henniker and Mercer, 2007), there needs to be a greater evaluation undertaken of the project and its work; especially given that a doubly vulnerable victim (youth and victims of sexual violence) and offending (youth and victims of sexual violence) population is at stake. This adds its own problematic dimension to the process of rehabilitation. Stop it Now! takes a very different approach to sex offender rehabilitation, reintegration and management by focusing on public, professional and offender education (McAlinden, 2010; Stopitnow. org.uk, 2012). The aim of Stop it Now! is to better educate society regarding the realities of sexual offending, which therefore, in turn, means promoting a realistic understanding of who sexual offenders are and what they do. Stop it Now! works with communities through schemes like ‘Parents Protect’ across the UK and the administration of the Scottish version of the limited disclosure scheme. As a result, the agency is not restorative justice-oriented in the same fashion as AIM because its orientation is not towards offender–victim dialogue, but 136

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rather towards community and societal dialogue on sexual violence and helping to change the way that we understand and respond to sexual violence. One of the ways that Stop it Now! has done this is through its sister company, the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, which initiated the first CoSA in the UK in the early 2000s (Hanvey et al, 2011). CoSA is a form of restorative justice with sex offenders. It is more closely aligned to concepts of reintegrative shaming (Braithwaite, 1989) rather than the victim–offender paradigm espoused by AIM or the educational approach promoted by Stop it Now! CoSA is an organisation that provides assistance to sex offenders in the community, usually as a result of the sex offender being reintegrated back into the community post-sentence (Hanvey et al, 2011). CoSA started as a faith-based organisation in Canada in the 1990s and came to the UK in the early 2000s, and, since then, has spread across England and Wales. The project seeks to offer sex offenders a circle of approximately six lay people with whom they discuss their offending and reintegration and seek positive life modelling. Research on CoSA in the UK is limited and has worked with small samples. Existing results do seem to indicate that there are benefits attached to the programme, which results in reduced reoffending in some offenders, increased social skills and socialisation, as well as the identification of potential reoffending and the ability to respond appropriately in relation to high-risk members (Bates et al, 2012). The reintegration of sex offenders back into the community – any community, but especially the one where they committed their offending – is difficult. Although restorative justice could help with this, there needs to be a clearer, broader and more integrated approach across the UK. This point is echoed by the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), who argue that sex offenders need rounded rehabilitation both in prison and in the community, with an essential part of this being the need for increased social capital (Mann, 2011). NOMS recognises that they are not necessarily in the best position to achieve this and need help from external, community-based agencies, like those that offer restorative justice techniques (Mann, 2011).Arguably, this move towards external organisations must be done cautiously and with the correct provisions made so that offenders, and victims, can be handled appropriately (McCartan, 2012a).

The impact of restorative justice on victims From the previous discussion, it is clear that restorative justice has a place within society and that it may or may not be something that we 137

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(the community, victims and offenders) can buy into. In order to get a local community, or wider society, to appreciate that restorative justice has something to offer in terms of ‘punishment and rehabilitation’, there needs to be concrete evidence that it is effective. The existing evidence suggests that restorative justice is effective in providing social control, reducing recidivism and saving money, but there is a question mark over whether it truly meets the wants and needs of the victim. It has been argued that the CJS has tended to ignore the wants or needs of the victim and has assumed that the victim’s interests are the same as the wider public’s, which are served by the Crown (Johnstone, 2002). In reality, the needs of victims far outreach those of the public (Zehr, 1990). The integration of a victim perspective within the CJS has evoked considerable debate among academics (Crawford, 2000a). The feasibility of using restorative justice as a method that gives victims and the community a voice within a CJS that is ‘intrinsically bound up with state coercion and is not necessarily the appropriate cradle of redistributive justice’ (Crawford, 2000a, p 10) has been well documented (Crawford, 2000b; Shapland, 2000; Johnstone, 2002; see also Ashworth, 2000, p 185). This also places the victim movement in the spotlight as there is some confusion in so far as greater penal severity and integrating the victim perspective ‘seem to go hand-in-hand’.As McKenzie (2005, p 190) has argued, ‘working under new managerialism philosophy of “efficiency, effectiveness and economy” the victim perspective is caught up in the same “auditable performance” outcomes as the rest of the players in the criminal justice system’. Through the use of restorative justice, both professionals and the state tend to look at victims in a distinctive light. The question that is still paramount is whether victims are satisfied with their involvement with restorative justice.The simple answer, compared to the traditional justice system, is ‘yes’ (Crawford and Newburn, 2003; McKenzie, 2006). Therefore, the evidence emerging from research and the experience of restorative justice seems to suggest that it is a process that offers an alternative to traditional criminal justice and social control, allowing and encouraging community engagement, victim participation, offender reintegration, and responsibility, while reducing costs and recidivism. This suggests that the public can be effectively engaged in offender reintegration and public protection schemes, highlighting the role that communities can play in the CJS and that engaging with offenders needs to be a holistic, integrated response involving more than statutory agencies.

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Conclusions Restorative justice seems to lend itself almost incidentally to the Coalition government’s emphasis on the ‘Big Society’, greater community engagement and the ‘rehabilitation revolution’.This is not because of a progressive, liberal attitude to crime control and justice, but rather because of a climate of harsh austerity measures. Cuts in the criminal justice budget mean that there is a high degree of reliance of the government on the public and voluntary agencies, community groups and committed citizens for the reintegration, as well as potential management, of offenders in the community. Public engagement with offenders and the CJS generally, and specifically through volunteer schemes, shows that cross-sections of the public want to help exoffenders reintegrate back into society. This will ultimately help reduce reoffending by providing positive, rather than negative, social capital and, in doing so, highlighting the positive aspects of desisting from crime. It is important to emphasise that community engagement should not be seen as a quick and cheap fix to the problems raised by offending. There are many factors that have to align for restorative justice to work effectively. Instead of the Big Society and community engagement being a cure-all – for prison overcrowding, high reconviction rates (especially with youth offenders) and the need to educate and engage the public more on offending and criminal justice – in reality, this approach could create a perfect storm for offender management. There is a real possibility that this approach could lead to increasingly negative public reactions and a potentially fractured CJS that is unable to respond effectively to the demands placed upon it. This chapter has focused on the importance of community engagement as a mechanism for improving public understandings of crime, especially in regard to youth and sexual offences/offenders. As the chapter points out, there needs to be improved social engagement between offenders, the public, practitioners/professionals and the state, with one of the best ways of doing this being knowledge exchange through public criminology (Loader and Sparks, 2010). This has been reflected in the authors’ subsequent practice: via the setting up and running of an Economic and Social Research Council-funded knowledge exchange network between professionals, which was then disseminated through publications, a website and events to the public (McCartan et al, 2012); through their engagement with school children and their teachers on matters relating to sexual violence (Fenton et al, 2013); and though public lectures (McCartan, 2013).

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References Aebi, M.F. and Delgrande, N. (2009) ‘Council of Europe annual penal statistics – SPACE I’, Table 2. Available at: www3.unil.ch/wpmu/ space/files/2011/02/SPACE-1_2009_English2.pdf (accessed 21 May 2012). AIM (Assessment Intervention Moving On) (2012) ‘Assessment Intervention Moving On’. Available at: www.aimproject.org.uk/ index.php/home/about/background/ (accessed 28 May 2012). Alcock, P., May, M. and Rowlingson, K. (2008) The student’s companion to social policy (3rd edn), Chichester: Blackwell Publishing. Ashworth, A. (2000) ‘Victims’ rights, defendants’ rights and criminal procedure’, in A. Crawford and J. Goodey (eds) Integrating a victim perspective within criminal justice, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. Bates,A., Macrae, R.,Williams, D. and Webb, C. (2012) ‘Ever-increasing circles: a descriptive study of Hampshire and Thames Valley Circles of Support and Accountability 2002–09’, Journal of Sexual Aggression, vol 18, no 2, pp 335-73, first published 22 February 2011 (iFirst). Bazemore, G. and Walgrave, L. (1999) ‘Restorative juvenile justice: in search of fundamentals and an outline for systematic reform’. in G. Bazemore and L.Walgrave (eds) Restorative juvenile justice: repairing the harm of youth crime, New York, NY: Criminal Justice Press. Braithwaite, J. (1989) Crime, shame and reintegration, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cameron, D. (2010) ‘Government launches Big Society programme’, 18 may. Available at: www.number10.gov.uk/news/big-society/ (accessed 18 August 2011). Crawford,A. (2000a) ‘Introduction’, in A. Crawford and J. Goodey (eds) Integrating a victim perspective within criminal justice, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. Crawford, A. (2000b) ‘Salient themes towards a victim perspective and the limitations of restorative justice: some concluding comments’. in A. Crawford and J. Goodey (eds) Integrating a victim perspective within criminal justice, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. Crawford, A. and Newburn, T. (2003) Youth offending and restorative justice, Cullompton: Willan. Daly, K. (2001) ‘Conferencing in Australia and New Zealand: variations, research findings, and prospects’, in A. Morris and G. Maxwell (eds) Restorative justice for juveniles, conferencing, mediation & circles, Portland, OR: Hart Publishing. Fenton, R., McCartan, K.F., Rumney, P. and Jones, J. (2013) Sexual violence in the school project, Atsa Forum.

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Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and self-identity; self and society in the late modern age, Cambridge: Polity Press. Hanvey, S., Philpott,T. and Wilson, C. (2011) A community-based approach to the reduction of sexual reoffending: circles of support and accountability, London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Harding, J. (1992) Victims and offenders: needs & responsibilities, London: Bedford Square Press. Heiner, R. (2008) Deviance across cultures, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Henniker, J. and Mercer, V. (2007) ‘Restorative justice: can it work with young people who sexually abuse?’, in M. Calder (ed) Working with young people who sexually abuse: taking the field forward, Dorset: Russell House Publishing. Home Office (2001) Citizenship survey, London: Home Office. Home Office (2003) ‘Prison statistics England and Wales 2002’, Home Office, CM 5996. Available at: www.archive2.official-documents. co.uk/document/cm59/5996/5996.pdf (accessed 18 May 2012). Howitt, D. (1995) Paedophiles and sexual offences against children, Chichester: Wiley. Johnstone, G. (2002) Restorative justice: ideas, values, debates, Cullompton: Willan Publishing. Kemshall, H., Dominey, J. and Hilder, S. (2011a) ‘Public disclosure: Sex offenders’ perceptions of the pilot scheme in England. Compliance, legitimacy and living a “Good Life”’, Journal of Sexual Aggression. Available at: www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13552600.2 011.603062 Kemshall, H., Mythen, G. and Walklate, S. (2011b) ‘Decentralising risk: the role of the voluntary and community sector in the risk management of offenders’, paper given at the British Society of Criminology annual conference, Northumbria, 3–6 July. Kitzinger, J. (2004) Framing abuse: media influence and public understandings of sexual violence against children, London: Pluto. Loader, I. and Sparks, R. (2010) Public criminology?, London: Routledge. Mann, R. (2011) ‘Circles and treatment: compare, contrast, complement’, paper given at Circles UK annual conference, Birmingham, October. Marshall, T. (1996) ‘The evolution of restorative justice in Britain’, European Journal of Criminal Policy and Research, vol 4, no 4, pp 21–43. Maruna, S. and King, A. (2004) ‘Public opinion and community penalties’, in A. Bottomley, S. Rex and G. Robinson (eds) Alternatives to prison: options for an insecure society, Cullompton: Willan.

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McAlinden, A. (2010) ‘Restorative justice and the reintegration of high risk sex offenders’, in K. Harrison (ed) Dealing with high-risk sex offenders in the community: risk management, treatment and social responsibilities, Cullompton: Willan, pp 133–58. McCartan, K.F. (2009) ‘Paedophilia: the actual vs. the constructed? Is a change of terminology needed?’, ATSA Forum, vol XXI, p 2. McCartan, K.F. (2011) ‘Public and practitioner attitudes towards the limited disclosure of sex offender information scheme in use in the UK: a Northern Irish & Welsh perspective. Early Career Research Grant 2010/11: research summary’, unpublished report to the University of the West of England, Bristol. McCartan, K.F. (2012a) ‘The management of sexual offenders in the community: austerity, engagement, interaction and the “Big Society”’, Prison Service Journal, vol 201, pp 39–43. McCartan, K.F. (2012b) ‘Professionals’ understanding of government strategies for the management of child sexual abusers’, Probation Journal, vol 56, pp 124–37. McCartan, K.F. (2012c) ‘Sex offender registration as a “worldly approach” to offender management: a review of “The registration and monitoring of sex offenders: a comparative study” by Terry Thomas’, ATSA Forum, vol XXIV, p 1. McCartan, K.F. (2013) ‘Community engagement around sexual offending: understandings and responses’, paper presented to the Robina Institute, University of Minnesota Law School, Minnesota, USA. McCartan, K.F., Kemshall, H. and Hudson, K. (2012) ‘Public disclosure of sex offender information’, ESRC Knowledge Impact Grant.Available at: www1.uwe.ac.uk/hls/research/sexoffenderpublicdisclosure.aspx McKenzie, N. (2005) ‘Community youth justice: policy, practice and public perception’, in J.Winstone and F. Pakes (eds) Community justice, Devon: Willan. McKenzie, N. (2006) ‘Youth justice family group conferences: do restorative measures prevent re-offending?’, British Journal of Community Justice, vol 4, no 3, p 37. McQuail, D. (2005) Mass communication theory (5th edn), London: Sage Publications. Ministry of Justice (2011) ‘Youth justice’.Available at: www.justice.gov. uk/downloads/publications/statistics-and-data/mojstats/yjb-annualworkload-data-0910.pdf (accessed 9 October 2011). Ministry of Justice (2012a) ‘Prison population figures’. Available at: www.justice.gov.uk/statistics/prisons-and-probation/prisonpopulation-figures (accessed 18 May 2012). 142

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Ministry of Justice (2012b) ‘Youth justice statistics 2010/11 England and Wales.Youth Justice Board/Ministry of Justice. Statistics bulletin’, 26 January. Available at: www.justice.gov.uk/downloads/statistics/ youth-justice/yjb-statistics-10-11.pdf/ (accessed 21 May 2012). Muncie, J. (2009) Youth and crime (3rd edn), London: Sage. Restorative Justice Council (2011) ‘Ministry of Justice evaluation of restorative justice’. Available at: www.restorativejustice.org.uk/ resource/ministry_of_justice_evaluation_of_restorative_justice/ (accessed 20 May 2012). Roberts, J. (1992) ‘Public opinion, crime and criminal justice’, Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, vol 16, pp 99–180. Schafer, S. (1970) Compensation and restitution to victims of crime, Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith. Schlade, J. (2010) ‘Enhancing community collaboration to stop sexual harm by youth’, in K. Harrison (ed) Dealing with high-risk sex offenders in the community: risk management, treatment and social responsibilities, Cullompton: Willan, pp 174–92. Shapland, J. (2000) ‘Victims and criminal justice: creating responsible criminal justice agencies’, in A. Crawford and J. Goodey (eds) Integrating a victim perspective within criminal justice, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. Shapland, J., Robinson, G. and Sorsby, A. (2011) Restorative justice in practice, London: Routledge. Sprott, J.B. and Doob, A. (1997) ‘Fear, victimization and attitudes to sentencing, the courts, and the police’, Canadian Journal of Criminology, vol 39, no 3, pp 275–91. Stopitnow.org.uk (2012) ‘Stop it now!’. Available at: /www.stopitnow. org.uk/ (accessed 28 May 2012). Towl, G.J. and Crighton, D.A. (2010) Forensic psychology, Chichester: BPS Blackwell. Umbreit, M. (1994) Victim meets offender, the impact of restorative justice and mediation, Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press. Wachtel, T. (1999) ‘Breaking down barriers’, paper presented at the Third International Forum on Family Group Conferences, Winchester, Hampshire, April. Walgrave, L. (2001) ‘On restoration and punishment: favourable similarities and fortunate differences’, in A. Morris and G. Maxwell (eds) Restorative justice for juveniles, conferencing, mediation and circles, Portland, OR: Hart Publishing. Weitekamp, E.G.M. (1999) ‘The history of restorative justice’, in G. Bazemore and L.Walgrave (eds) Restorative juvenile justice: repairing the harm of youth crime, New York, NY: Criminal Justice Press. 143

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Wood, J. and Gannon, T. (2009) Public opinion and criminal justice, Collumpton: Willan. Yankelovich, D. (1991) Coming to public judgement: making democracy work in a complex world, New York, NY: Syracruse University Press. Youth Justice Board (2011) ‘Annual report and accounts 2010/11’. Available at: http://yjbpublications.justice.gov.uk/Scripts/prodView. asp?idproduct=498 (accessed 21 May 2012). Zehr, H. (1990) Changing lenses, London: Herald Press.

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Chew ’em up or throw ’em up? Disorganised responses to interpersonal(ity) disorder and social disease Christopher Scanlon and John Adlam

Introduction In this chapter, we ask how we might open up and maintain the ‘Agora’ or ‘marketplace’ as a public and social space that might allow for more inclusive conversations about the deeply troubled, troubling and troublesome dynamics that are at the heart of our divided and fragmented communities.To achieve this requires necessary translation of the often obfuscating and obscurantist, exclusive academic languages in which such lines of enquiry are ‘researched’ and ‘disseminated’ into a more accessible public language. The Social Sciences in the City™ seminars in the Tart Café in Bristol; London’s ‘pub philosophy’ Big Ideas (see: http://www.bigi.org.uk/); and The Station (see: http://www. thestation.uk.com), a forum that, with our colleague Dr Joanne Carlyle, we also offer in London – all are some examples of such attempts at such translation, alongside the very many other café scientifique (see: http://www.cafescientifique.org/) and open space discussions that are increasingly ‘happening’ across the world. We are aware that in posing our question in these terms, we are also offering a challenge to the power and (self-)perceived elitism of the established order, within which ‘the academy’ is centrally embedded. In this sense, we are seeking to deface its currency and to invite greater outreach from these centres of learning to the general public, who are far too often the objects of study rather than co-producers of knowledge and understanding about themselves. On the other hand, we are also mindful of how the young and/or the disaffected organise themselves in hybrid spaces within emerging social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter and refute academic or journalistic attempts to ‘theorise’ or ‘philosophise’ them. The academy must not merely ‘outreach’; it must 145

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invite a renegotiation of its own terms of engagement. In the terms of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière (1991), it must practise ‘intellectual emancipation’.

Psychosocial dynamics of membership and refusal in public–private spaces In this chapter, we rehearse and develop our previous writings in order to explore ideas about groupishness (Bion, 1961), membership and participation and to raise questions about how better to understand our social and collective apprehension about those who take up their membership of the world by refusing to join in (Scanlon and Adlam, 2008, 2011a, 2012). Our assumption is that these issues are of concern to us all, because if ‘they’ do not join in, then there cannot be a meaningfully cohesive ‘we’ for any of ‘us’ to join in with. Our specific focus will be on ‘the homeless, the dangerous and the disordered’ and how to relate to the real as well as the imagined offensiveness at the heart of their essentially anti-social positions without becoming offended. In our discussion, we will offer as a ‘mutative metaphor’ (Cox and Thielgaard, 1997) the story of the ancient Cynic philosopher Diogenes the Dog (Cutler, 2005; Navia, 2005; Scanlon and Adlam, 2008, 2011a), a homeless and dangerously disorderly man who came into conflict with a shameful society that sought to shame him, and, in particular, of his subsequent encounter with Alexander the Great: a soldier, schooled at ‘the groves of academe’; the founder, and funder, of the greatest library of antiquity; and the most powerful man in the world. Our story begins around the year 400bce in Sinope, an occupied territory; the shame that Diogenes was expected to feel came as a result of him being found to have been defacing the currency of the occupier. The discovery of this counterfeiting operation forced him to flee into exile. Legend has it that he consulted the oracle at Delphi on his journey and was puzzled when it was suggested that his future task was to deface the currency. Having already involved himself in a more literal counterfeiting operation, he came to understand that the oracle was proclaiming that his destiny was to deface the political currency of the metropolitan city-state (Scanlon and Adlam, 2011a). In his homeless state, he travelled the world and from Delphi, he came to Athens, and later to Corinth. In these cities, he famously took up residence in his barrel, or pithos, in the Agora (marketplace), a place that allowed for philosophical discourse and a promise of a meeting of minds: that public–private space where ‘public solutions are sought, negotiated and agreed for private troubles’ (Bauman, 2000, p 39). In 146

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Greek culture at that time, a certain level of hospitality was afforded to the itinerant and eccentric in the ‘Agora’: that part of the town that usually lay near the site of the temple of Metröon the mother-god. Diogenes was always associated with dogs, an animal that was strongly associated with shame(lessness) in ancient Greek culture. He came to be known as Cynic (dog-like) and his philosophy, Cynicism (doggedness), which was expressed in various ways, was to refuse accommodation from societal systems that he regarded as fundamentally untruthful and hypocritical. The view from his barrel was that he was neither a part of society, nor completely apart from it and so was philosophically and socially in his proper place; that is, the only place available to him. From his barrel, he maintained a questioning and challenging stance towards the society that surrounded him and his protest took the form of a parrhesiastic (truth-telling) running commentary on the hypocrisies inherent in the relationships between people and how they were played out in the social world (Foucault, 2001). For example, when seen carrying around a torch in broad daylight, he explained that he was in search of ‘one honest man’ – an image beautifully evoked by Seamus Heaney (1987) in his poem The haw lantern: ‘sometimes when your breath plumes in the frost It takes the roaming shape of Diogenes With his lantern, seeking one just man’. On one occasion, when found masturbating in his barrel, Diogenes is supposed to have said that he ‘wished it were as easy to relieve hunger by rubbing an empty stomach’. To have to meet one’s own need and try to soothe oneself in similar ways are perhaps forms of refuge to which we all retreat in one way or another and from time to time. On another occasion, he was found kneeling before a statue with his begging bowl and when asked what he was doing he replied that he was ‘practising disappointment’ – perhaps this too is a very useful skill for the homeless and the disenfranchised, should they come knocking at our door. Diogenes seemed to understand that if people were offended by him, this was not his problem, but if he was offended by what he saw in the world around him, this was his problem and his task was to engage with this offensiveness truthfully and to manage himself within this engagement as best he could. His was a lonely borderline existence that was neither in nor out: an inherently anti-social, dangerous and threatening position that was both criminal and liminal. This powerful combination of social challenging and Cynical enquiry comes into focus in Diogenes’ encounter with Alexander the Great, who is said to have sought out Diogenes in his barrel when Diogenes (dangerously) refused an invitation, or perhaps a demand, to join 147

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Alexander at a public function. Upon meeting Diogenes, Alexander, himself a pupil of Aristotle and schooled in the formal philosophy of his time, was so impressed, by both Diogenes’ insights and the parlous state of his living conditions, that he asked if there was anything he could do for him. The latter replied from his barrel, in terms familiar to anyone seeking to offer ‘help’ to the ‘hard-to-reach’: ‘Yes – you can step aside because you are blocking my light’. This powerful political and philosophical statement was rooted in refusal. A refusal, first, to be shamed by the physical state that he had, in part, chosen for himself, and, second, to accept the laws of a hypocritical society and so to provoke reflection on the limitations of those laws. This utterance was, of course, also a profound and powerful philosophical defacing of the historical and political authority represented by the ‘greatness’ of Alexander. Alexander, a peerless man who valued friendship above all things, is supposed to have been so impressed by Diogenes, and perhaps also so wounded by being refused, as to have declared, almost tragically, that if he were not Alexander, he would be Diogenes.After all, it could be thought that they both wanted the same thing: to live together in a peaceful world. It was only their means of working towards that end that were different: Alexander’s metropolitan vision was of a unified world, pacified by his enlightened leadership, where scholars might read of his great deeds in his great library; whereas Diogenes’ cosmopolitan world would be built upon a philosophy of reciprocal tolerance and understanding. We might therefore imagine Alexander as the metropolitan academician, staking his colonising claim upon the freedom of thought of Diogenes the wandering Cynic, cosmopolitan poet/philosopher of the streets: an offer to help him. Diogenes and Alexander perhaps recognised in each other some kind of wary identification, but also that their two positions were mutually exclusive, so that they must exist in an irreconcilable relationship of hostile interdependency forever after. This encounter, then, offers us an archetypal image of a psychosocial refusal that is at the same time clinical and societal, personal and collective. It stands as a paradigm for all encounters between ‘the system’ and ‘the homeless’, ‘the dangerous’ and ‘the disordered’, who, unlike Diogenes (and other parrhesiasts such as Mahatma Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Socrates, John the Baptist, St Thomas a Becket, the prophet Mohamed or ‘the historical Jesus’ [Crossnan, 1992]), cannot more clearly articulate their protest. Standing in opposition to these latter-day homeless, dangerous and disordered Diogenes, Alexander comes to represent both the might and the impotence of the citizenry and its institutions. So, another 148

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question we might pose is what it to become of us when our authority is disregarded and our currency defaced by them. If we stand in Alexander’s shoes, do we follow one impulse, to force Diogenes to emerge from his barrel and deal with the dangerous and endangered ‘real world’ – and to deal with it on our terms, not his? Do we seek, as with other ‘troublesome priests’, to be rid of him through metaphorical (or literal) assassination? Alternatively, do we pass by on the other side of the street and try to take no notice of him, beyond being mindful of our own personal safety, and leave him to freeze to death in a doorway?

Structural violence and the traumatising society Pity would be no more, If we did not make someone poor: And Mercy no more could be If all were as happy as we. (William Blake [1795] ‘The human abstract’, from Songs of Experience) We begin this next section at a macro-level, in which we examine the ordinary violence of societal projections onto the homeless, the dangerous and the disordered. Gilligan (1996), using an epidemiological analogy, describes violence as like a disease, within which he makes a distinction between structural and behavioural violence. The latter, the interpersonal violence perpetrated by an identifiable individual (or subgroup), he sees as always taking place in the context of the former, that is, within the formal structures and strictures of our sick society. Žižek (2008) later pursues a very similar line, distinguishing between ‘subjective’ interpersonal violence and ‘systemic’ violence, which he defines as ‘the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems’ (Žižek, 2008, p 1). He goes on to point out that if we were more mindful of this systemic violence, we would then perhaps be less startled when interpersonal violence manifests itself. Interpersonal violence and social disorder does not come out of ‘thin air’ – it only appears to. If we begin to see that ‘we-the-included’ have need for power differentials and relative deprivation in order that we can have a better sense of our own well-being in relation to ‘them-the-excluded’, then we must accept the reason for this interpersonal and social violence by understanding how humiliating and costly it is for people to live in relative poverty compared to their near neighbours (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009; Dorling, 2010). The people whose plight we are 149

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concerned to highlight are those who, as a result of their incapacity to manage themselves within these complex shameful and shaming dynamics, become psychosocially dis-membered and unhoused. In these unhoused and dis-membered states, then, it is not too difficult to understand why some, perhaps reflecting a desire to be back inside something, find themselves seeking to ‘unhouse’ others through burglary, robbery or arson or to dis-member through violent assault, rape and murder. Gillligan writes that in his extensive experience of working with dangerous offenders in the US prison system, he knows of no serious act of violence ‘that was not provoked by the experience of feeling shamed and humiliated, disrespected and ridiculed and that did not represent the attempt to prevent or undo this “loss of face” no matter how severe the punishment’ (Gilligan, 1996, p 110). Jordan (1996), addressing the problem of social exclusion from a socio-economic perspective, reaches broadly similar conclusions. His starting point is to observe that although individuals are at their most vulnerable when they have fewest personal capacities and social resources, they are, nonetheless, able to manage themselves and contribute usefully to a society that is prepared to invest in offering effective protection and meaningful opportunities to participate. What these analyses have in common is the idea that the deterioration of living standards of the poorest members of society is inextricably linked to the unwillingness of anti-democratic groups, comprising the more advantaged members of society, to share our commonwealth. On the other side of this defaced coin, many in these overlapping categories of ‘outsider’ are also unable or unwilling to join in and so come to occupy the border-country of our communities. Giving up the painful grievance that is an expression of their sense of unhousedness and psychosocial dis-memberment is the last thing that they are able to contemplate, because to do so would be to face the unbearable grief and sense of shame that underlies it. Thus, our attention is drawn not simply to the homeless, the dangerous or the disordered, but to the relationship between us and them and the thought that there is nothing so reassuring for the occupier of the big house as the beggar at the gate (Luke 16: 19–31).

Housing unhoused minds and bodies: the disorganised response to the refusal to join in It should not, therefore, be much of a surprise to discover that workers charged with the delivery of health and welfare services to distressed 150

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people frequently themselves become (dis)stressed and burned out (Maslach, 1981) while the teams, agencies and organisations in which they work become ‘disorganised’ (Hopper, 2003, 2012; Dartington, 2010; Ballatt and Campling, 2011;Adlam et al, 2012).This is particularly true when these organisations are working either with high levels of client disturbance or within highly (dis)stressed or (dis)organised social contexts. In the current (and any realistically imagined future) socioeconomic climate, it is inevitably both.The group analyst S.H. Foulkes suggested that all such interpersonal disturbance could be understood as a failure of communication in, and by, the group, with the implication that ‘the whole community must take a far greater responsibility for outbreaks of disturbing psychopathology generally’ (Foulkes, 1973, p 225). Honig (1996, cited in Hoggett, 2005, p 183) describes ‘dilemmatic spaces’ as opening up when conversations about things that do not fit together, or that contain inherent contradictions and antinomies, must take place and when actions are demanded that will inevitably disappoint someone. This is the day-to-day experience of living and working with ‘the homeless’, ‘the dangerous’ and ‘the disordered’. Elsewhere, we have suggested that the German word Schwellenangst – that intense anxiety that is on or at the threshold or the doorway – expresses succinctly this set of relations and is particularly apt when considering how best to think about these dis-membered states of unhousedness (Scanlon and Adlam, 2012). In this state of anxiety, individuals and subgroups feel trapped at, and by, the boundary between inside and outside and are unable to move significantly one way or the other. In their personal and interpersonal painfulness, and in their psychosocial disturbance, these entrapping modes of relating become a painful double bind. For the ‘homeless’ and the ‘housed’ alike, this is to be caught between the contradictory societal demands that we be ‘decent and hard-working’ and a very deep-seated worry that there is not enough to go round. In our own work, we have observed how, as a result of complex group and organisational dynamics that parallel and reflect the societal attitude highlighted earlier, teams working in these dilemmatic spaces find themselves torn between opposing, contradictory and oscillating impulses and responses. In our commentaries, we join with Young (1999) and Bauman (2000) in making use of Levi-Strauss’s (1955) metaphorical attempts to categorise our relationship to ‘otherness’ in terms of two fundamental types of response: the ‘anthropoemic’, meaning the ‘vomiting out’ of difference; and the ‘anthropophagic’, the abolition of difference through ingesting, devouring and or coercively 151

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assimilating the irritant so that it no longer rubs. One response to the psychosocially dis-membered is to force or coerce them out of their places of refuge and into a proper accommodation; but this oscillates with the opposite desire, to ignore them completely (Scanlon and Adlam, 2011a, 2011b, 2012). In the former case, in which there is often a perceived threat to society (us) from ‘the dangerous’ other, the anthropophagic response includes an overuse of statutory powers, such as mental health legislation, ‘preventive detention’ and criminal justice disposal, while the latter, more anthropoemic, response is often associated with an underuse of such powers, such that ‘the homeless’ other who is little or no threat to ‘us’ is left uncared for and the real danger that they present to themselves goes seemingly unnoticed. They are left out in the cold until the violence that is at the heart of their attacks upon themselves is eventually turned outwards and they become ‘dangerous’, or until they are forced out of their barrels and into what they may experience as a more or less empty institutional conformity – or until they die. Given the power and pervasiveness of these psychosocial dynamics, it should not be too surprising that our welfare institutions often thoughtlessly mirror wider social prejudices in institutionalising evermore elaborate ways of excluding such people from our services and from our minds. It is no more surprising than the ‘ordinary ways’ in which those of us with ‘homes’ lock ourselves into alarmed houses in socalled gated communities, with ever-more heavily guarded perimeters (although we might wonder who is more ‘alarmed’: the house or its inhabitants). We struggle to understand the needs of ‘outsiders’ and our own need for there to be such outsiders because concepts like ‘evidence-based practice’,‘cultural integration’,‘successful resettlement’, ‘safe and secure disposal’, ‘treatment and rehabilitation’, ‘proper accommodation’ and other ideas about what constitutes a positive outcome are predicated upon our assumptions about ‘dangerousness’ and ‘social security’ rather than any more meaningful inquiry into what the dis-membered might understand about feeling ‘endangered’ and ‘insecure’. Viewed from this perspective, it is never only the homeless who find themselves struggling to articulate their fear and loathing of their dependency needs, it is all of us. Of course, depending upon the nature of the stress, and the ways it impacts upon us in our differing personal, social and professional roles, it might be possible for some of us to reflect upon some of these things some of the time, while others of us, at any given time, are less able to do so. Too often, as citizens or as workers, our individual and social minds break down under the strain 152

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and it can become unthinkable for us to give up a grievance that has become an expression of our own incapacity to be governed (or to govern ourselves) because to do so would require us to face up to the underlying feelings of helplessness.This, in turn, would lead to the aw(e)ful conclusion that we are, indeed, all in it together and that we must look to each other for help and support.

Incohesive social defences against anxiety Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world … The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity … (W.B.Yeats [1920] ‘The second coming’) Individual workers and teams working with traumatised and dismembered people in such traumatised organisations, like the wider community from which they take their authority, necessarily find themselves caught up between espoused notions of ‘helping the poor’ and the current situation in which all such help is rationed, conditional and socially controlled.This leads to day-to-day dilemmas and conflicts about how to make sense of these dynamics.As would-be helpers, they come to feel a sense of helplessness that is both a real and an imagined threat to their effectiveness, and their demands that their anxiety be housed within their teams and organisational structures become ever-more urgent as they come to recognise that they are fighting an unwinnable battle. In these circumstances, patterns of relating begin to emerge that affect a team’s capacity to organise effectively as they oscillate between more aggregated or more massified patterns of incohesion (Hopper, 2003, 2012). More aggregated patterns of relating typically lead to situations where as team members and citizens, we experience ourselves as more atomised, monadic and nomadic, increasingly distanced and alienated within ourselves and from our communities. In Hopper’s terms, this increased individualism becomes one polarity of a socially organised defence against helplessness, rooted in our experience of our community’s failure to contain our anxiety.These aggregated patterns of relating then suck us into an every man for himself, ‘lone ranger’ mentality, where the dynamics of growling self-interest and protectionism prevail.This often involves us in taking up an essentially ‘anti-authority’ position in relation to the primary task of our social responsibilities to each other, and there are inevitably strong undercurrents of disagreement and unexplored 153

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differences and hostilities that inevitably get played out. On one side of these disagreements, some of us, filled with passionate intensity, enact a powerful identification with the anger of the ‘alienated outsider’ and take up shifting roles as victim, perpetrator or rescuer, often in ways that aggressively try to deny our own sense of vulnerability. Alternatively, on another side of the split, some of us, perhaps more identified with the ‘detached bystander’ position, end up lacking conviction and become cynical and dogged as we try to exercise a prerogative to avoid all emotional connection with our neighbours, friends and with the life of the community. At other times, and in other situations, our families, social groups and communities become overly adhesive in ways that bring forth the emergence of more ‘massified’ patterns of relating. At such times, and in these places, a kind of pseudo-morale is presented that is rooted in the ‘mad idea’ that our survival relies upon ‘sticking together’, and, again, there is something essentially anti-authority, as well as gang-like, about the relational patterns that emerge.These are often characterised by a pervasive, even if unspoken, hostility towards a jointly imagined ‘persecutory’ organisation within which the family, the neighbourhood or the ‘community’ is inadequately ‘housed’ and from which they become increasingly isolated. There is something essentially conservative about these masses, as if in this state, we experience ourselves as representing a threatened way of life, or work that must be preserved at all costs. This often indiscriminate, outwardly directed hostility then serves to protect the group or team from a more reality-based appreciation of their shared helplessness and from knowing about the very real restrictions and limitations within which we must all live and work. In such states of incohesion, the task of thinking about how best to house and re-member un-housed and dis-membered people, whether they be clients, professional helpers or fellow citizens, is lost to the conversation. In the aggregated patterns of relating, the individual member is in danger of becoming unhoused from their teams, neighbourhoods and communities, and in the more massified patterns of relating, it is the subgroups (teams, neighbourhoods or communities) that are in danger of becoming unhoused and disconnected from the wider organisational and social structures (Hopper, 2003, 2012).

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Some concluding remarks Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. (Santayana, 1905) In this chapter, we have proposed the story of Diogenes as a metaphorical way of conceptualising the problems of the homeless, the dangerous and the dis-ordered. We have suggested that it is very often the case that although such people are often experienced, by others, as ‘threatening’, they are also those who experience themselves as most ‘threatened’. We have also suggested that the individual who is forced, or perhaps chooses, to take up his/her membership of the group, community or social world in these ways, like some of our greatest philosophers, poets and prophets, is trying, albeit somewhat inarticulately, to tell us something about the profoundly hypocritical, discriminatory and damaging values of the dangerous and endangered world in which we all live and work. We have proposed the image of Diogenes the Dog as both an ancient and modern archetypal representation of that which we see as a truly Cynical attitude and a properly political refusal to accept this political and social currency. Part of Diogenes’ appeal was, perhaps, that he was personable enough to be tolerated, perhaps even liked. However, it is probably also true that, in some ways, he lived in more tolerant times, because unlike contemporary equivalents, such as Alexander Masters’ (2006) Stuart or Alan Bennett’s (1989) eponymous Lady in the van, it is not reported that Diogenes became subject to any anti-social behaviour order (ASBO) or ancient-world equivalent, nor that the metropolis felt so concerned about local house prices as to have arranged for him to be forcibly evicted and his barrel fumigated or destroyed, nor, like some of the more articulate Cynics described earlier, was he assassinated or judicially executed. Nonetheless, Diogenes’ barrel is a dangerous container that unquestionably contains a discomfiting knowledge of all sorts of unpleasant social realities. However, like Pandora’s box (pithos), it also contains, somewhere near the bottom perhaps, a message of hope and a hospitable invitation to join in conversations with ‘the unhoused’ and ‘the dis-membered’ through which we might all better understand something about the unhousing, dis-membering and traumatising states that we are living in.

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References Adlam, J., Aiyegbusi, A., Kleinot, P., Motz, A. and Scanlon, C. (eds) (2012) The therapeutic milieu under fire: security and insecurity in forensic mental health, London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Ballat, J. and Campling, P. (2011) Intelligent kindness: reforming the culture of healthcare, Glasgow: Royal College of Psychiatrists. Bauman, Z. (2000) Liquid modernity, Malden: Polity. Bennett, A. (1989) The lady in the van, London: London Review of Books. Bion, W.R. (1961) Experiences in groups, London: Routledge. Blake, W. (1977) The complete poems, London: Penguin Books. Cox, M. and Theilgaard, A. (1997) Mutative metaphors in psychotherapy: the aeolian mode, London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Crossnan, J.D. (1992) The historical Jesus: the life of a mediterranean Jewish peasant, San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins. Cutler, I. (2005) Cynicism from Diogenes to Dilbert, Jefferson: MacFarlane Publishers. Dartington, T. (2010) Managing vulnerability: the underlying dynamics of systems of care, London: Karnac. Dorling, D. (2010) Injustice: why social inequality persists, Bristol: The Policy Press. Foucault, M. (2001) Fearless speech, Los Angles, CA: Semiotexte. Foulkes, S.H. (1973) ‘Group analysis’, in L.R.Wolberg and E.K. Schwartz (eds) Group therapy: an overview, New York, NY: Intercontinental Medical Book Corp. Gilligan, J. (1996) Violence: reflections on our deadliest epidemic, London: Jessica Kingsley. Heaney, S. (1987) The haw lantern, London: Faber. Hoggett, P. (2005) ‘A service to the public: the containment of ethical and moral conflict by public bureaucracies’, in P. du Gay (ed) The values of bureaucracy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Honig, B. (1996) ‘Difference, dilemmas and the politics of home’, in S. Benhabib (ed) Democracy and difference: contesting the boundaries of the political, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hopper, E. (2003) Traumatic experience in the unconscious life of groups: the fourth basic assumption: Incohesion: Aggregation/Massification or (ba) I:A/M, London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Hopper, E. (ed) (2012) Trauma in organizations, London: Karnac. Jordan, B. (1996) A theory of poverty and social exclusion, Cambridge: Polity Press. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1955) Tristes Tropiques, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

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Maslach, C. (1981) Burnout: the cost of caring, New Jersey, NJ: PrenticeHall. Masters, A. (2006) Stuart: a life backwards, London: Harper. Navia, L. (2005) Diogenes the Cynic, New York, NY: Humanity Books. Rancière, J. (1991) The ignorant schoolmaster: five lessons in intellectual emancipation, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Santayana, G. (1905) The life of reason.Volume 1, reason in common sense, New York: Charles Scribner. Scanlon, C. and Adlam, J. (2008) ‘Refusal, social exclusion and the cycle of rejection: a Cynical analysis?’, Critical Social Policy, vol 28, no 4 (Special issue: Psycho-social Welfare), pp 529–49. Scanlon, C. and Adlam, J. (2011a) ‘Defacing the currency? A groupanalytic appreciation of homelessness, dangerousness, disorder and other inarticulate speech of the heart’, Group Analysis, vol 44, no 2, pp 131–48. Scanlon, C. and Adlam, J. (2011b) ‘Who watches the watchers? Observing the dangerous liaisons between forensic patients and their carers in the perverse panopticon’, Organizational and Social Dynamics, vol 11, no 2, pp 175–95. Scanlon, C. and Adlam, J. (2012) ‘Disorganised responses to refusal and spoiling in traumatised organisations’, in E. Hopper (ed) Trauma in organisations, London: Karnac. Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. (2009) The spirit level: why more equal societies almost always do better, London: Allen Lane. Young, J. (1999) The exclusive society, London: Sage Publications. Žižek, S. (2008) Violence, London: Profile Books.

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Resilience Paul Hoggett

My personal interest in the subject Why is it that some people can endure incredible hardships over a long period of time and yet still retain their spirit and optimism? And why is it that some individuals and groups can ‘bounce back’ from sudden crises whereas others collapse, go into decline or enter a malaise? The answers to these kinds of questions took me to the study of resilience – the ability of individuals, groups and perhaps whole communities to adapt to adversity and, in some ways, continue to flourish. In this chapter, I will draw upon research on resilient individuals and resilient systems to offer some thoughts about the psychological and social factors that appear to contribute to our capacity to withstand poverty, violence, family breakdown and other hardships. As an academic, I have worked in the area of social policy for many years and have been particularly interested in the relation between class, poverty and community. Resilience was an idea that appealed to me because it drew attention to what poor people have, not to what they lack, so it offered an alternative to all those dominant accounts, supported by all main political parties in the UK, that demonise people who need to draw upon the support of the state for being inadequate, idle, feckless and irresponsible. Besides being an academic, I am also an experienced psychoanalytic psychotherapist working intensively with individuals on a one-to-one basis, sometimes over several years. This gives me enormously privileged insights into the struggles of individuals to move on in their lives and the nature of human strengths, but also some of the ways in which we can be our own worst enemies. This has helped me to appreciate that there are internal factors that can make us vulnerable and undermine our capacity to behave resiliently. Putting these two roles together – academic and psychotherapist – I have been able to use my interest in resilience research in a number of ways. For example, the resilience of workers operating in stressful environments became an important theme in a research project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council on the dilemmas facing 159

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front-line public service professionals (Hoggett et al, 2006). And I have run workshops for several community and care organisations where we have explored the relationship between resilient staff and resilience in service users. Some of my postgraduate students focus on resilience, for example, on what enables some adults to have passed through the care system and not only to have survived, but in some ways to have flourished (Guest, 2012). A final role that I have, and one that I am developing more at the present moment in time, is as a citizen concerned about the issue of climate change. I have recently become Chair of the Climate Psychology Alliance, an umbrella body that aims to bring together counsellors, psychotherapists and psychologists of a range of different persuasions so that we can deepen our understanding of human responses to climate change, and particularly our collective passivity in the face of one of the greatest threats that nature has ever faced and certainly the greatest that ‘hom saps’ have faced. If it was not for the resilience of nature and the ecosystems that comprise it, the 0.7°C temperature rise of the 20th century would have already resulted in untold havoc.

Two traditions of research: psychological and ecological Resilience seems to be on the lips of every policymaker and politician these days, an idea whose time has come. In fact, a brief search of the Internet will reveal earnest professional discussion forums on subjects such as family resilience, organisational resilience, community resilience, resilient leadership and so on.The concept of resilience is also currently central to a diverse range of British policy initiatives and grassroots movements, from civil defence preparations to the fight against poverty and the work of Transition activists organising in response to the twin threats of ‘peak oil’ and climate change. In this chapter, I will focus primarily on a body of research and practice relating to resilience that has emerged in developmental psychology, which has begun to have major impacts on social policy and social work. However, there is a second body of resilience research, as long-standing as the first, but running in parallel with it, with, until recently, very little intercourse between the two. The origin of this second tradition lies in the study of ecosystems. It focuses upon the properties of complex adaptive systems, particularly their self-organising capacities, and is probably most closely linked to the pioneering work of C.S. Holling (1986). Like the first tradition of research, it has started 160

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to have a major influence on other policy areas, informing, for example, some current theorisations of global markets, inter-organisational networks and the organisation of civil society (Gunderson and Holling, 2002). While the first tradition partly focuses upon adaptation to adversitiesin individual lives, such as bereavement, abandonment and abuse, the second tradition has focused upon different kinds of risks and system shocks, such as natural disasters, the effects of rapid climate change and, increasingly, political/economic risks such as war, terrorism and economic crises. Recently, the two traditions of research have begun to converge, as policymakers have looked for a way of thinking that is relevant to an age of risk and austerity.As a consequence, resilience has now become a key policy concept. It is central to UK emergency planning, where it is defined as ‘the ability to detect, prevent and if necessary handle disruptive challenges’ (see: www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/ukresilience [accessed 22 March 2013]). As the incidence of climate-related disruptions (storms, floods) increases, this emergency planning function has begun to overlap with preparations for climate change adaptation, and in this area of overlap, the concept of ‘community resilience’ has recently begun to flourish. Indeed, the legacy of C.S. Holling is such that the concept of resilience is central to thinking about adaptation to climate change and has been adopted, for example, by the Transition Movement (Hopkins, 2009).The final link in the chain is the connection increasingly being made between climate risks, poverty and austerity. Given that I am a social policy researcher and psychotherapist who is also active around climate change, it seems an appropriate opportunity to explore these two traditions of research and what they might tell us about personal resilience, on the one hand, and system resilience, on the other.

Personal resilience I first became interested in the topic of personal resilience many years ago when reading Primo Levi’s disturbing and moving books about his experiences of the concentration camps. Almost inevitably, I imagined myself into the situations he described – the transportations, the first few days (which, for Levi, were the critical days that decided whether you died quickly or not) and labouring in the intense cold of a Polish winter. How would I have survived? Would I have had what it took to get through that hell? Later, I became aware of a growing interest in these kinds of things in sociology, the sociology of extreme situations,

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situations that Stan Cohen and Laurie Taylor (Cohen and Taylor, 1992) argued were maybe a metaphor for everyday life in late capitalism. I had started my career in community mental health, working in a community project in Battersea, which, at that time (the 1970s), remained largely a poor, white, working-class district of London. Even back then, we heard local GPs talk about the ‘valium tonnage’ that was dispensed, mostly to women, in neighbourhood surgeries.We tried to develop something we called ‘social action psychotherapy’, an approach to working with people’s suffering that recognised both its personal character and its structural causes. As a young middle-class professional, I soon realised that what was remarkable about local women (men hardly ever used our service, the stigma being so great) was not the levels of mental ill-health, but their resilience. How long would people like me have survived in their circumstances, and not just survived, but survived with some kind of spirit intact, like many of the women we saw? Adversity comes in different shapes and sizes, but the key question remains: what enables some people to survive such adversity and, on occasions, not only survive, but to lead rich lives in spite of it? This is the question of resilience – what is it and what contributes to it? In unequal societies such as Britain, we have become used to thinking of the poor in terms of a set of personal attributes that they somehow lack. This is sometimes referred to as a ‘deficit model’ of welfare, a lens through which the have-nots are construed as a social problem – dependent, feckless, with low expectations, narrow horizons, little taste (in food, music, clothes, etc) and so on. The idea of resilience throws out a challenge to this approach. It asks: how would you (the politician, policymaker, media pundit, social researcher, journalist, etc) survive on £12,000 per year or less, living on an isolated public housing estate that lacks basic services? Not only how would you survive, but how would your sense of hope and self-belief survive? And when we ask these kinds of questions, we begin to realise what strength many of those who live in poverty have. So what is personal resilience? Well one thing is clear, it is not some kind of universal quality that someone has that will see them through any kind of adverse situation.The setting or context is crucial. Someone who might be tremendously resilient when working long hours in a stressful working environment like the city may quickly crumple when faced with the prospect of living with a chronic and enduring illness. Or a quality such as the capacity to be in touch with your feelings, which may contribute enormously to the resilience of a middle-class child faced with multiple bereavements, may contribute negatively 162

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to the resilience of a child in a tough inner city environment where children have to quickly learn to keep their feelings to themselves. So, just because someone shows resilience in one situation does not mean that they will show it in another. But if resilience is situation-specific, this means that it may also vary across time. In other words, a resilient child may not become a resilient teenager, and a resilient teenager may not become a resilient adult.We do not carry resilience with us as if it were some kind of resource in a rucksack that we can pull out when required. So, it probably follows that none of us can ever quite be sure how we will respond to different kinds of adversity – bereavements, the loss of life chances that comes with redundancy or educational failure, poverty, civil strife, forced migration, illness, and so on. Indeed, it is even more uncertain than this, we might cope with the death of a loved father quite easily but the death of a mother may throw us into a prolonged period of mental turmoil.This is the problem with a lot of the psychological research on resilience: it deals with big numbers and general patterns and therefore tends to assume that a loss is a loss is a loss. But it is not; the loss of a job will mean one thing to one person but something quite different to another. Human beings are infinitely variable and it follows that the meanings that we attach to events (meanings that determine how we experience them) also vary enormously. So, for example, an event that most of us might experience as enriching and life-affirming might throw some people into a state of shock and enduring disequilibrium. People who over many years have developed a deep conviction that they are basically bad people can be traumatised by events, such as the birth of a grandchild, which most of us would think of as good. For such people, what is most terrifying is the realisation that they are loved and valued, an idea that threatens to destroy the sense of self that has secured them over many years. Moreover, the meaning we attach to events does not only vary according to individual life histories, we will share particular meanings with groups that we identify with according to our age, gender, sexuality, religion and so on. For example, in some Asian cultures, loss of job involves intense shame, a piercing emotion that can make such losses potentially traumatic. So, if resilience is something to do with responding to adversity, it is clear that what we experience as adversity varies both individually and culturally. One common definition of resilience is ‘positive adaptation to adversity’ (Luthar et al, 2000). As I said earlier, when thinking about people whose lives are condemned to poverty, what is amazing is not just that they survive in conditions that many middle-class people would find impossible, but that they very often manage to keep their spirit. So, 163

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this would sound like an example of positive adaptation. But this idea of positive adaptation takes us into tricky territory.A lot of the research on ‘outcomes’ looks at the risks that a child was exposed to and what eventually happens to them as an adult. If they had a tough childhood but nevertheless managed to have a reasonable education, get a steady job, have a family and so on, then these are all seen as signs of good outcomes. But, again, if you have a close look at the detail of people’s actual lives, then concepts like ‘risk factor’ and ‘positive outcome’ tend to disintegrate in your hand. Running away from home, for example, would almost universally be regarded as a risk factor and yet, for some children, this may not be the case.‘Home’ may conceal a family culture of abuse in which all adults are complicit and into which the children have been drawn. In such settings, a child may repeatedly run away without knowing why, it is just that at some unthought level, the child ‘knows’ that something is not right. If a child is not able to think about some of the experiences that they are subjected to, then the experience that cannot be thought will be embodied or enacted. The child may develop physical symptoms, such as anorexia, or they may ‘act out’ what they cannot think by repeatedly running away. Society tends to blame behaviours like running away, stealing, fighting and so on rather than trying to understand what might be being said. According to the great post-war psychoanalyst and paediatrician D.W. Winnicott (1975 [1956]), antisocial behaviour is a sign of hope; through it, the child demands that their environment takes notice of them. Colleagues of mine in a residential community for children who have repeatedly absconded or proved impossible to contain elsewhere once said to me: “it’s the quiet children that you worry about, not the noisy and difficult ones”. But if what constitutes a risk factor is problematic then ‘positive outcomes’ are no less so. For example, teenage pregnancy is often thought of as a negative outcome and yet, for many young women, having children, even when there is no man around, can be a lifesaver. It can give an abused or unloved girl something to fight for, and, for many young women, it provides an identity that can be one of the most significant and enduring in their lives. For very disadvantaged children, thriving at school, getting qualifications and then career opportunities are often regarded as good outcomes, which send the child on an altogether different trajectory to those who show little interest in education (Rutter, 1989, p 31). But it might equally be true that the focus and determination necessary to get an education is a way of shielding the individual concerned against depression so that their educational resilience is bought at the cost of their social resilience. 164

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In other words, positive outcomes in one domain may be achieved at the price of negative outcomes in another. There is a great danger that the language of positive and negative adaptation smuggles in a set of cultural norms about what is desirable or undesirable or ends up simplifying what are always complex lives. Rather than impose ‘expert’ definitions of resilience, some current research focuses upon individuals’ own definitions of what it is and what they think has contributed to it or detracted from it in their own lives (Ungar, 2011). When people talk about their own experiences in this way, interesting things emerge.The role of belief systems, for example, can be very important. Political and/or spiritual belief systems can provide individuals with a life narrative and set of meanings that become a vital resource. Many individuals who have had awful childhoods, ones filled with violence or rejection, may nevertheless hold on to the idea that ‘someone’ is looking out for them. This someone might be a god or just some less tangible sense of a benign presence. My own belief is that the capacity to hold on to this idea is often unconsciously linked to an earlier experience of love in an otherwise apparently loveless world, and here the role of grandparents, teachers and, sometimes, for children who have been brought up in care institutions, cleaners and cooks can be crucial where parents have failed them. I think this is about the capacity for hope, based upon the belief in the existence of something benign, something not to be confused with ‘glass half-full’ optimism and so-called positive thinking. More ‘political’ belief systems can also play an important role, particularly those that can provide individuals with a narrative that helps ‘explain’ their circumstances in a way that sustains their dignity and recognises the injustice (Weiner and Kuperminz, 2001). This can be a tough call and my clinical experience suggests to me that if the sense of injustice continues to burn strongly and is associated with a strong sense of ‘complaint’ and victimisation and a very black and white view of the world (which might have political dimensions to it), then, in the long run, the bitterness that accompanies all of this undermines the individual’s resilience. Values seem to contribute importantly to resilience, all depending on how you hold them; if they are gripped too tightly and become rigid, then they may be a sign of an underlying lack of resilience, but held firmly, they can act as a compass as we negotiate the conflicts and dilemmas that are inherent to life. So far, I have discussed what we might call the ‘internal resources’ (hopefulness, values) that can contribute to resilience, there is much more research evidence concerning the external resources that can contribute. Not every one of the factors that I am going to mention 165

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will apply to every individual; again, we have to allow for human complexity and diversity. One important external resource that came out of early research on women and depression was the presence of someone to confide in (Brown and Harris, 1978).This will often be a close friend, but may not be. One of the paradoxes that researchers often encounter is that people are often more ready to confide in strangers, who are clearly different to them in terms of religion, gender or age, than in people who share the same background.The idea that ‘it takes one to know one’ or that ‘like will trust like’ is not borne out by the repeated experience of researchers that, for example, working-class or black respondents will speak more freely to middle-class and/or white researchers. Counsellors, mentors, teachers, GPs, and so on can be an important public resource in this sense. Social networks can also be an important external resource, providing both support and opening up opportunities that can put the individual on to a new life trajectory. But this can depend upon an individual’s capacity to ask for and make use of help, something captured in a lovely study of teenage girls on a northern housing estate called ‘Making the most of what you’ve got?’ (Thomson et al, 2003). As I have intimated already, another important group of external resources contributing to resilience are those we associate primarily with government and public services. Public health is crucial here – diet, clean air and water, safe environments – but also the crucial role of health visitors, play workers, care assistants and, for many members of faith communities, local religious leaders. We know from the life histories of people living in poverty or who have been through the care system that teachers and social workers, where they have the time to establish a relationship with a child (something that can by no means be taken for granted these days), can also be an important external resource. In isolating internal from external resources, and speaking in terms of life trajectories and so on, I am inevitably simplifying what in terms of an individual life is a far more complex phenomenon. In individual lives, linear cause-and-effect processes rarely apply. Strengths suddenly melt into vulnerabilities, clear trajectories dissipate into a myriad of irregular and indistinct pathways, chance or accident comes along in unexpected ways, decisions and actions multiply unintended consequences, and so on. This has led many contemporary researchers on resilience to abandon the whole idea that resilience can be captured in terms of static properties either of the individual or of the social networks that they inhabit. Instead, it has become increasingly common to think of resilience as a process.

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I sometimes find it difficult to get my head around the idea of resilience as a process. Michael Rutter has probably done more than any other to explore resilience from this perspective. Rutter (1989) imagines the individual as engaged in constant transactions with life, sometimes responding to events as they come along, sometimes initiating events. An event such as the loss of a job or meeting a new friend can be distinguished from episodes, such as becoming a mother for the first time; episodes are often, but not necessarily, linked to life transitions. While we can influence events, it is not so easy to shape episodes. For example, the transition involved in moving from active adulthood to old age will typically involve a complex array of different events. Many of these transitions are shaped by the surrounding cultures; they are rarely universal. Moreover, even those who share the same culture may experience different transitions. As Rutter (1989, p 45) notes, ‘not everyone has a career, not everyone marries, not everyone has children’. As we engage in these transactions with life events and episodes, we draw upon our internal and external resources, and these resources have, in turn, been shaped by past experiences, but not in a simple cause-and-effect way. To cite Rutter again: the impact of some factor in childhood may lie less in the immediate behavioural change it brings about than in the fact that it sets in motion a chain reaction in which one ‘bad’ thing leads to another, conversely, that a good experience makes it more likely that another one will be encountered. (Rutter, 1989, p 27) There is much truth in this, but chain reactions are still linear, albeit in complex, looping ways. In my experience, human lives are more full of paradox, contradiction and the counter-intuitive than even complex linear models can entertain. To illustrate, imagine Isobel in her mid-60s, who finds herself waking regularly at 3.00 in the morning with anxious thoughts going round and round in her head, thoughts about ageing and vulnerability. As a single parent, Isobel had become a very competent person, with developed practical and intellectual capacities, and this has contributed enormously to her resourcefulness. There was virtually nothing that she could not do, from mending her car to negotiating the complex visa systems of the central Asian republics she loved to travel through for her holidays. This competence had been part of her strategy for coping and had contributed enormously to her resilience in her adult life. Moreover, it had become part of who she was, part of her identity. But at 3.00 167

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in the morning, she now found herself besieged by anxious thoughts about her failing powers – because competence, being in control, was central to her sense of who she was, the ageing process was threatening her very sense of self. Isobel’s resourcefulness made her children chary of offering support to her as she got older. She had often been rather impatient with lack of confidence or vulnerability in her own children and would not accept help easily from them now that the tables were starting to turn.What once had been crucial to her resilience had now become a new source of vulnerability. As Rutter (1989, p 46) notes,‘to an important extent the past helps to determine the present’. If we think of Isobel as a complex bio-psychosocial system, then we can see how the capacity of this system to adapt to changes in the environment can vary across time – that successful adaptation at one moment may lay the foundation for system rigidity at a later point.And there may be a difference here between human systems and non-human ones. As human beings, we often seem to invest considerable energy in staying the same because change threatens loss, grief, despair and terror. In my experience as a psychotherapist, individuals do not learn from experience in a gradual way, we spend much of our lives not learning from our mistakes but repeating the same behaviours over and over again. Change involves the acceptance of loss, that is, it requires us to give up cherished beliefs that we have about ourselves and others. For some individuals, this is unbearable, and, like Isobel, rather than adapt to new realities, they adhere increasingly rigidly to what they know as problems accumulate all around them. Many people I see are besieged by anxious thoughts that gather like an insect cloud around their heads intimating catastrophe.

Ecological resilience I want to switch tracks now for a while to look at research on resilience in ecological systems because there are many parallels and some differences. As I mentioned earlier, the classic work here has been undertaken by Buzz Holling in his study of complex adaptive systems in nature.What Holling has found is that ecological systems also change in non-linear ways: long periods of stability are followed by crisis and the flipping of the system from one stable state to another. For example, as spruce-fir forests mature in North America, the increased foliage reduces the efficiency of budworm-eating birds and as the budworm population multiplies, the trees are prone to extensive budworm attacks, leading to considerable defoliation and tree death (up to 80%), including death via forest fires, which are much more likely given 168

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the accumulation of tree debris during the mature phase. Far from budworm attack or forest fire being a catastrophe, such disturbances provide the condition for system renewal; indeed, it is often misguided human attempts to prevent such disturbances that really threaten the ecological equilibrium. Holling argues that it is precisely during the phase of destruction that the possibilities for novelty are maximised. After a forest fire, new plant species will find it much easier to colonise an area, enhancing diversity and the possibility of new combinations and connections. The study of ecological systems also reveals that resilience is not necessarily an ideal in itself. Holling sees resilience as the capacity of a system to experience disturbance and still maintain ongoing functioning. Researchers inspired by his work have set up the Resilience Alliance, an international network focusing on research in social-ecological systems (see: http://www.resalliance.org/). Ecological systems vary in terms of their strategies for dealing with external disturbance. Some, like semi-arid savannah, adapt passively by constantly evolving to meet each change. Others, such as kelp forests, can moderate the variability of ocean currents and waves, in other words, they develop what Holling calls ‘connectedness’, that is, the capacity to control their environment to some extent. If you think of the insect and animal world, then this capacity to control the environment is only demonstrated by a few species – ants and termites, for example, and, among mammals, the beaver. But then, of course, there is us, homo sapiens. There is a growing recognition that we have asserted so much control over our environment that the term Anthropocene has been coined to describe our present geological era, one that arguably began with the Industrial Revolution, an era from which the indelible imprint of mankind will be left for millions of years to come. This is the crucial paradox, as a species, we have demonstrated remarkable resilience over thousands of years by adapting actively rather than passively to environmental disturbance. But this propensity to exert ever-more control over the environment has, over the last century, begun to generate new and escalating man-made disturbances. First came pollution, then collapse of biodiversity and now climate change. For a while, it did seem that we were learning to adapt. It seemed that we had learnt that if something was causing pollution, then the best way to stop the pollution was to stop the activity that caused it. The insecticide DDT, for example, first came into widespread use as a successful way of curbing malaria and typhus before being adapted as an agricultural insecticide. Rachel Carson’s book Silent spring rang the alarm about the destructive impact of DDT on wildlife and, potentially, 169

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on humans too. The public outcry led to the banning of DDT in the US in 1972 and gave a huge impetus to the development of the modern environmental movement. But with climate change, we seem unable or unwilling to stop the activity (emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, particularly coal and oil) and seem to be increasingly set on the idea that we can control the effects of carbon dioxide emissions by what are called ‘geo-engineering’ solutions. To give an example, one idea into which serious money is now being put involves the creation of a giant sulphur aerosol in the upper atmosphere that, it is argued, would reflect the sun’s radiation back into outer space thus reducing global warming. One gasps at the likely unintended consequences of such an attempt to exert further control over the environment, and will further controls then be applied to these unanticipated effects? If so, one guesses that the Anthropocene era is likely to be pretty short-lived. If resilience concerns the capacity to absorb disturbance, then we seem to be doing the very opposite at the moment – generating disturbance rather than absorbing it. As a psychotherapist, this reminds me of the idea of pathological functioning, where an individual’s difficulties have become largely selfmade. As I said at the beginning of this chapter, I have become very wary of discourses that pathologise others, particularly those who are weaker than those doing the pathologising. Nevertheless, I wonder if there is still not value in using the term to apply to the functioning of systems that generate the conditions for their own destruction. As a therapist, I find that when someone is behaving in a self-destructive way, they often resent the person (ie the therapist) who tries to point this out to them. I think something similar is happening in the political sphere at the moment with the issue of climate change. The latest research indicates how the warming of the Arctic has weakened the operation of the jet stream in the northern hemisphere, which means that weather systems are much slower to change (see: http://abcnews. go.com/blogs/technology/2012/04/climate-change-swing-votersaffected-by-weather-not-denialists-says-analyst/). Such entrenched weather systems were particularly pronounced in 2012, with prolonged heat waves in the Midwest of the US and Eastern Europe and a record-breaking wet summer in the UK. But the more public figures like George Monbiot point out what is happening, the more they are hated. This is ‘shoot the messenger’ stuff.

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‘Resilience thinking’ To summarise,‘resilience thinking’ encourages us to think systemically and therefore to understand the connectedness of all things. Control of complex systems is simply not possible and attempts at control generate more and more unintended consequences, with things spiralling out of control, leading to a crash. Resilience thinking also draws attention to strengths and capacities rather than deficits and weaknesses. It encourages us to think twice before making negative judgements: not every insect infestation brings irredeemable destruction to a forest, not every child tearaway is adapting negatively to their environment. By forcing us to question the limits of our ability to control and our preconceptions about good and bad, resilience thinking places us in a humbler position, just one influence among many, for whom failure is as probable as success. For policymakers and practitioners, ‘resilience thinking’ is relevant and timely. Once we understand that policy failure is as likely as policy success and that policymaking is a craft that cannot be reduced to a set of mechanical requirements, then the limitations of top-down control, an approach that has dominated British government since the early 1980s, might be realised. It is easily overlooked, but the system of British government is more centralised than virtually any other Western European state (Travers, 2011). At times, it is as if everything that was once known, for example, that effective policymaking is always a top-down/bottom-up phenomenon (Barrett and Fudge, 1981; Mintzberg and Waters, 1985), has now been forgotten. As the diversity of elected local authorities and the great mass of arm’s-length public service delivery agencies and partnerships diminishes under the torrent of central controls, this directly undermines the resilience of British governance. As climatic, economic and other adversities multiply, it becomes increasingly vital that the hegemony of centralism is challenged. References Barrett, S. and Fudge, C. (eds) (1981) Policy and action: essays on the implementation of public policy, London: Methuen. Brown, G. and Harris, T. (1978) The social origins of depression, London: Tavistock. Cohen, S. and Taylor, L. (1992) Escape attempts: the theory and practice of resistance to everyday life, London: Routledge.

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Guest,Y. (2012) ‘Reflections on resilience: a psycho social exploration of the lifelong impact of having been in care in childhood’, Journal of Social Work Practice, vol 26, no 1, pp 109–24. Gunderson, L.H. and Holling, C.S. (eds) (2002) Panarchy: understanding transformations in human and natural systems, Washington, DC: Island Press. Hoggett, P., Mayo, M. and Miller, C. (2006) The dilemmas of development work, Bristol: The Policy Press. Holling, C.S. (1986) ‘The resilience of terrestrial ecosystems: local surprise and global change’, in W.C. Clark and R.E. Munn (eds) Sustainable development of the biosphere, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hopkins, R. (2009) ‘Resilience thinking’, Resurgence, vol 257, pp 12–15. Luthar, S.S., Cicchetti, D. and Becker, B. (2000) ‘The construct of resilience: a critical evaluation and guidelines for future work’, Child Development, vol 71, no 3, pp 543–62. Mintzberg, H. and Waters, J. (1985) ‘Of strategies deliberate and emergent’, Strategic Management Journal, vol 6, pp 257–72. Rutter, M. (1989) ‘Pathways from childhood to adult life’, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, vol 30, no 1, pp 23–51. Thomson, R., Henderson, S. and Holland, J. (2003) ‘Making the most of what you’ve got? Resources, values and inequalities in young women’s transitions to adulthood’, Educational Review, vol 55, no 1, pp 33–46. Travers,T. (2011) ‘Trapped in a vortex of centralism’, Local Government Chronicle, 27 September. Ungar, M. (2011) ‘The social ecology of resilience: addressing contextual and cultural ambiguity of a nascent construct’, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, vol 81, no 1, pp 1–17. Weiner,A. and Kupermintz, H. (2001) ‘Facing adulthood alone: the long term impact of family break-up and infant institutions, a longitudinal study’, British Journal of Social Work, vol 31, pp 213–34. Winnicott, D.W. (1975 [1956]) ‘The antisocial tendency’, in D.W. Winnicott (ed) Through paediatrics to psycho-analysis, London: Hogarth Press, pp 306–15.

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Part Three Applying Social Science in the City™ and beyond

Introduction to Part Three Stella Maile and David Griffiths In the concluding part of the book, we address the different ways in which social science engages with publics beyond the confines of the academy. What does social science represent for those in community and youth work or for individuals facing the challenge of teaching and learning in an inner city school? What, finally, have our own students learnt from the direct experience of undertaking social science in the community? The first contribution,‘Social science and severely troubled children – working in partnership, working in and on relationship’, by Cummins and Thomas, outlines a public engagement initiative involving social scientists at the University of the West of England and the Mulberry Bush School in Oxfordshire, which works with highly disturbed children. While focusing on the practical, collaborative character of their work with the school, the authors also emphasise the distinctive intellectual traditions in British sociology and Northern and Central European approaches to social pedagogy, which they drew upon in their work. As with other contributors in this volume, the authors propose a broadly psychosocial understanding of individual and collective behaviour. In this perspective, the role of attachments to others and the inner world of the individual are foregrounded.While registering this broad orientation to the social as a psychically invested space, Cummins and Thomas note a shift in their work from a publicly engaged sociology towards policy implementation, as the practical impacts of their particular interventions were formalised and consolidated within a specific institutional setting. Another example of public engagement relating to education with school children is provided in the chapter by Tansy Clark, ‘The professional impact of Social Science in the City’. This is a firsthand, biographical account from a teacher working in a school in an economically and socially deprived part of Bristol.Tansy explores some of the insights and collaborative approaches to research gained from attending the Social Science Café. She links this with the experience of her work with school children living in one of the most deprived areas in Bristol. Overall, this has resulted in a revised approach to her teaching in the discipline of sociology, where she now acts as a ‘coinquirer’ with her students. Social Science in the City has provided her 175

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with a supportive framework and encouraged her in embarking on a PhD in sociology, which is focused on action research. A particular influence noted by Tansy on her work with school children was a presentation at the Tart Café by Hen Wilkinson on the resolution of community conflict. Hen’s chapter, ‘Sharing worlds: managing complex community relationships in challenging times’, provides an account of her organisation’s work and the ways in which different methods may be drawn upon to mitigate some of the social tensions and conflict that surround ‘Communities in Crisis’, especially in the context of funding cuts. A specific focus of Hen’s chapter is the variety of publics that her organisation works with and the interest in conflict as a ‘route of engagement’. Amanda Radix writes from a first-person perspective about her experiences of working in community conflict and the importance of black identity. In doing so, she deploys narrative analysis to uncover aspects of the inner world of the individual that are, at the same time, deeply social in character. She describes the dense interweaving of personal and familial biography with her work with inner city youth in Bristol; the use of narrative holding a particular significance at both a personal, social and professional level. Each contributor shares a concern with publicly engaged professional practice, which is informed, either directly or indirectly, by the input of Social Science in the City. This acted as a focal point for different types of public and as a discursive space in which individuals from a variety of areas of professional expertise could meet and engage in different forms of dialogue.Whether concerned with troubled children, children living in materially deprived conditions or communities riven by conflict, social-scientific insights are an integral part of professional practice and personal experience. The common thread in these chapters concerns the complex and ongoing negotiation of the public domain, an elaboration in which personal issues gain their full weight as integral aspects of a shared social world. In Cummins and Thomas, for example, there is an emphasis upon the primacy of the ‘relationship’ as an integral feature both of the social, public world and the constitution of the individual psyche. In Tansy’s work with school children, the importance of relationships is reflected in a methodological approach to exploring the shared social world of her pupils. Hen’s emphasis upon ‘shared worlds’, albeit ones riven by conflict, opens up a space for a conception of public engagement as a means of recognising the capacities of individuals to bring their skills and personal experience to bear in working within their own communities. Radix’s use of personal narrative in her work 176

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in conflict resolution similarly bears the imprint of the broader social and historical forces of race, colonialism, class and gender. We return to this theme of the articulation of the private, inner world and the broader structures informing the public domain in our conclusion to the book. The two final chapters describe the background to some local community research that was undertaken under the auspices of Social Science in the City. The findings of the Lockleaze project and a student’s reflections upon the learning process involved lead into the Conclusion, which revisits some of the major themes addressed during the course of the book.

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ELEVEN

Social science and severely troubled children – working in partnership, working in and on relationship Anne-Marie Cummins and Jem Thomas

This chapter explores the role of publically engaged social science in the development of a new Foundation Degree in Therapeutic Child Care.This initiative was jointly developed by psychosocially informed social scientists at the University of the West of England (UWE) and the Mulberry Bush School (MBS) in Oxfordshire, a residential educational facility for some of the UK’s most disturbed 5–13 year olds. We discuss the development of the collaboration, the animating social-scientific ideas that informed it, the impact of the Foundation Degree on the school and its work, and the lessons that can be drawn about publically engaged partnership between the social sciences and the world of residential and therapeutic child care.

The collaboration and its background Residential child care in the UK, much like residential care in general, is uneven in quality and does not have uniformly high standards of training and qualification (College of Social Work, 2012). This is very unlike the situation in many parts of Europe, where training to graduate or postgraduate level in ‘Social Pedagogy’ is a recognised minimum qualification. We discuss what is meant by social pedagogy in more detail later. For now, suffice it to say, ideas about the need for residential care to address the whole child and for staff to engage in sustained professional reflection are not a large part of thinking of either existing training or management thinking, and, as a result, most staff are not well supported in their work. Only the most troubled of the UK’s 67,050 looked-after children end up in residential facilities (DfE, 2012). Often, there have been multiple failures in their care – both familial and statutory – before they arrive 179

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in residential facilities.While there are minimum national standards to which care staff must be trained, as a rule, it is rare to find organisations that ‘go the extra mile’. The ‘extra mile’, in our view, delivers training that is based on a profound understanding of what such children have experienced and need, and a profound understanding of what staff working with such children might experience and need in order to do this work and do it well. MBS is an exception to this general rule and we were privileged to work collaboratively with the school in order to develop the first UK Foundation Degree in this field. The collaboration draws on 60 years of MBS experience as an established and expert authority in therapeutic child care and fresh ideas in the British social sciences – about social pedagogy, systemic work, the value of reflection and the idea that community life is in itself therapeutic. These ideas were incubated (and integrated) from within a tradition of sociology at a post-1992 university informed by several intellectual antecedents: • addressing the whole child: a specifically British approach to and understanding of the European tradition of social pedagogy; and • the need for sustained professional reflection: a psychosocial understanding of the complexity and interrelatedness of the social and psychic aspects of group life and their relationship to individual experience. These antecedent ideas were pursued in relation not just to the children, but also the staff group who care for them and who are subject to the same emotional ‘logic’ set up by trauma and abuse. As a staff group, we were trained in a sociology that had drawn heavily on European thought – the ‘classics’ of Marx, Weber, Durkheim and their various 20th-century successors like Habermas, Foucault or Bourdieu. In developing this collaboration, though, we found that the particularly British traditions of sociological thinking were the most helpful. In particular, the sociological and psychoanalytic thinkers of the post-war years – Titmuss, Wilmott,Young, Dockar-Drysdale, Bowlby, Townsend, Bott-Spillius and others – proved an invaluable resource. We now go on to explore how and why the collaboration happened and what each party brought to the partnership before going on to look at the impacts that this collaboration has had – both for us, the school and the field of residential child care in general. Our particular institution sees itself as a ‘Partnership University’. Its strapline is ‘Better Together’.This is fully illustrated in this collaboration, where the partnership exceeded the expectations of both parties. 180

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In 2006, MBS approached us with a view to having an existing training course validated by an external body so that care staff and teaching staff might have access to qualifications above and beyond the scope currently offered by NVQ (National Vocational Qualification) level 3. For many residential care staff, this also meant that they would have access to higher education for the first time – something that fits very well with the widening participation agenda in higher education. ‘Above and beyond’ is an important qualifier. This would also mean opportunities to validate a degree programme that explicitly recognised a culture of reflection and group learning and an opportunity to link a community of practice with a community of scholarship (Wenger, 1998). What did we offer? By 2006, we had a nationally and internationally established research centre in psychosocial studies. Psychosocial studies is by definition interdisciplinary and draws on psychoanalysis and social science (broadly defined) to understand real-world social problems both ‘under the surface’ and as social and political realities. This made us attractive to the school for three reasons: first, our sympathy with psychodynamic and psychoanalytic thinking (several members of the Centre are also practising therapists); second, we offered expertise and experience in innovative research methods, particularly those valuing reflection and reflective practice; and, third, we could offer expertise in group and organisational dynamics and had successfully run Master’slevel courses on this in the past (in addition to an ongoing national journal in this field). All of these things chimed with the preferred practice values of the school and offered opportunities for ‘refreshing’ practice in light of current academic developments. After a fairly lengthy period of preparation, the Foundation Degree was launched in September 2008 and the first cohort graduated in July 2010. In retrospect, this long lead-in time was an important space for working relationships to develop between the two sides of the partnership. It also gave us plenty of time to plan ways in which the curriculum could be enhanced by visiting scholars from the university and ways in which the expertise of MBS staff could be drawn on to bring experience of front-line practice to undergraduates studying childhood and childhood disorder.

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Other examples of successful collaborative ventures five years in • UWE staff delivering ‘whole-school’ training events at MBS on the topic of ‘resilience’. • Teaching on each other’s courses and programmes. • Joint continuing professional development, including reflection groups on the psychodynamics of teaching and learning and an open forum for the development of knowledge exchange. • Appointments at the school of UWE graduates who had studied the MBS-inspired course on childhood disorder offered by the School of Sociology. • National recognition (in November 2012) for the partnership in the National Training Awards. This prize is awarded for exemplary practices in training that produce outstanding benefits to trainees and their organisation and explicitly recognised the importance of the partnership as key in securing this. • A new joint project lobbying the Department for Education to create an integrated long-term strategy for raising national standards of training in residential child care. This project proposes using the work-based learning Foundation Degree we jointly developed as a national prototype.

Thus, what began as opportunities to allow practitioners to update their academic knowledge and allowed academics to join in reflection on key problems in this sector has begun to ‘nudge’ into a policy direction. We might say that, in Burroway’s (2005) terms, we are slowly shifting from (in the broadest sense) public sociology to policy sociology. We discuss this in further detail later.

Animating ideas Addressing the whole child: a British approach to and understanding of the European tradition of social pedagogy Social pedagogy is a term unfamiliar to many child-care practitioners in the UK; it is a profession that is particularly well established in Northern Europe – Germany and Denmark especially. It is possible to undertake training in social pedagogy, which is different from either social work training or normal teacher training, though, of course, it overlaps with both. It has strong parallels with youth and community work training in the UK and also with teacher training, especially training for ‘special needs’ teaching. Nevertheless, and that is the point to these workshops and of the research projects begun under the last government, there is something distinctive in the European approach. 182

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If we look at the training for social pedagogues in those countries, like Germany or Denmark, with well-established traditions of social pedagogy, we find parts of the curriculum and training that would be surprising, say, to a British social worker – for instance, music or sport. The pedagogue has to engage with enthusiastic, energetic children and these are ways to do it. However, without understating the importance of that kind of work, the emphasis from UWE in its collaboration with MBS has been on the psychosocial aspects of social pedagogic work, aspects that derive from a particularly British tradition of social and psychological thought. The ‘psychosocial’ is very hard to define but is partly based on the view that, in recent years, psychology has lost sight of the role of the social in its approach to mind and brain and that sociology has also been guilty of a sort of reductionism – as if you could read off the contents of someone’s life experience from their social position. Part of what has created the ‘psychosocial’ is just the recent history of those two main disciplines. But there is also another factor, which might be called ‘the relational turn’, an interest in relationship for its own sake and a recognition that relationship cannot be reduced to something else. There are several aspects to psychosocial work in a social pedagogic setting; important theoretical elements include attachment and projection. Attachment Social pedagogy is a job – as stated earlier. Social pedagogues in Germany and Scandinavia work in schools, in kindergartens, in residential child care, in church-based youth work, in counselling and family therapy settings, for courts, and in children’s participation programmes. Increasingly, they also work with the elderly. If there is any one psychosocial theme that somehow comes to the fore in all these settings, it is attachment. In particular, a lot of social pedagogic work takes places in areas or contexts where the children and adolescents display severe attachment problems, and MBS is a preeminent example. But even where that is not necessarily the case – a nursery school or a hospital children’s ward, for instance – attachment issues have to be at the fore. The originator of attachment theory, John Bowlby (1953, 1969, 1979), would have said that attachment theory was primary for anyone dealing with children in any context, since human attachment was, for him, the primary human drive.The history of attachment theory is surprisingly recent: it had a few predecessors before the Second World War – Ian 183

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Suttie in Scotland, Imre Hermann in Hungary – but attachment theory has mostly been a post-war, English and American development. It is perhaps not surprising that its roots coincide with the huge urban renewal and rehousing policies in post-war Britain and with the sociological concern with community and neighbourhood associated with it. The disruption to family life of child evacuation policies and the different disruptions to family caused by demobilisation fuelled both attachment theory and careful sociological studies of parenting and family breakdown. Bowlby’s (1969, 1999 [1982]) main work, Attachment and loss, came out in three volumes in 1969 (2nd edn, 1982), 1973 and 1980. Subsequent key developments include Mary Ainsworth’s (1967) Infancy in Uganda, Mary Main, writing mostly in the 1970s and 1980s, and Daniel Stern, Mary Target and Peter Fonagy, all working now. The core claim of attachment theory needs little repetition. It is that all children, from birth, seek out a secure attachment to a caregiver. Where they are successful in making secure attachments, then they have, in Bowlby’s (1988) words, a ‘secure base’ for a widening exploration of their world, both physical and social. But whether they have such a secure attachment depends above all on the caregiver’s behaviour. Attachment is not an equal or reciprocal relationship – it is the caregiver’s behaviour that most shapes the child’s attachment style, not genetics or their personality. Neglected children, maltreated children and children with a disturbed primary caregiver will develop an insecure attachment style. Mary Ainsworth identified two such insecure or anxious styles – avoidant and ambivalent/resistant – and Mary Main (Main and Solomon, 1986) added a third – disorganised (or ‘disoriented’).The avoidant child treats strangers much the same as their primary caregiver and shows little response at the caregiver’s departure or joy at return. The child makes little contact and no effort to maintain it. Not surprisingly, these qualities echo a caregiver who makes little or no response to the child’s distress and is encouraging of independence (and discouraging of crying). The ambivalent or resistant child is likely to cling to the caregiver, show distress on separation and anger or indifference on the caregiver’s return. The child is very concerned with the caregiver’s availability, is not welcoming of a stranger and angrily resists contact with the caregiver if and when successful in getting contact.As you might expect from the child’s ambivalence, the caregiver is marked by inconsistency: sometimes being appropriately ‘present’ and sometimes neglectful.The disorganised child has no consistent attachment pattern and shows contradictory, disoriented behaviour (immobility, rocking, approaching but backwards). The disorganised child has, of course, a frightening 184

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caregiver, now intrusive, now withdrawn, now hostile or maltreating, and so on. Prior and Glaser (2006) have estimated that about 65% of children in the UK have secure attachments and about 35% insecure. One of the key findings of attachment theory is the power and persistence of attachment patterns. Crucially, what is laid down in the first two years has a tendency to affect subsequent schooling and adult behaviour. Indeed, it has been suggested that the same four patterns of attachment can be found in adult sexual relationships. Attachment patterns can and do change but the persistence of insecure attachments and their consequences are among the key things that social pedagogy has to deal with. At the very least, sensitivity to the attachment issues is what is demanded of anyone working with children – and the more they are separated from their caregivers or the more they have inadequate care, the more that is the case. Projection It is because the child dealt with by the social pedagogue very likely has an insecure attachment that the second crucial psychosocial theme emerges: projection. Like attachment, projection has produced a substantial literature, and like everything else in the psychosocial field, it is open to a number of definitions and variants. The first aspect of projection is widely known and well understood by anyone working with children, namely, the pattern of earlier attachments will get transferred on to you, the social pedagogue.These patterns can be quite complex. It was Nancy Chodorow (1978) who pointed out that a child with a bad attachment to her mother will seek mothering in and from her father, if they have one. If they successfully find it there, they will subsequently seek out the mother in other significant male figures. This kind of projection, basically a transference projection, consists really in the merging together of the image the child has formed or is forming of you, the social pedagogue, with the internal image they have of someone else; or more than one someone else. In the Chodorow example, the image of an idealised mother, the ‘good’ part of the responsive father and the male therapist have all been merged together. But this underestimates the more difficult aspects of projection. Projection is a defence in which things that the child does not want to recognise in him/herself, or does not want to be, are projected. There is always a refusal in it. A common example in the literature is when we think that someone wishes us ill, so we are ‘justified’ in hating them. This is the psychological mechanism that sociologists and historians 185

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think is at work in racism or in witchcraft accusations: ‘I hate him (or feel guilty about him); I don’t acknowledge it; I project it; so I believe he hates me; so I am justified in hating or hurting him’. In the complex world of the social pedagogue, this can become: ‘I, the child, hate him (person A, not present); so I hate him (person B, present and available for hatred) because he “is” person A by projection; I can’t acknowledge this; so I believe person B hates me (by second projection); so I am right to fear, mistrust or hate person B’. Melanie Klein, in her oddly named theory of projective identification, takes this further still (Klein, 1986). A small child, a baby or an inarticulate older child has no way of communicating except by projective processes.This is a normal part of the mother–baby relation; the baby feels anxious and communicates that directly to the mother, who deals with that anxiety in the same way that she deals with her own. So, in Klein’s view, the child will rid him/herself of unwanted feelings by successfully dumping them, projecting them into the carer. Projective identification, if you like, as projectile vomiting! Klein makes a distinction, often repeated, between projecting onto and projecting into. It is not always clear what she meant by that, but from the standpoint of the social pedagogue, it is very clear. There is quite a big difference between being demonised or idealised by a child and remaining undisturbed by that and, on the other hand, having powerful feelings evinced internally by the child’s projective behaviour.As a result, the ‘ordinary’ experience of bad behaviour, acting out, idealising, manoeuvring and so on can provoke extreme anger, a wish to hurt the child, sudden sexual desire or whatever in the social pedagogue. The important thing is not to see these as reactions that need to be controlled, but to see them as primitive communications – projections – that need to be understood. So, my exasperated rage is his hatred, projected; my sexual desire is her disturbed attachment, projected. In classical Freudian theory, there is some ambiguity about whether what is projected is an image or something, a feeling say. But, as Laplanche has pointed out (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973), it hardly matters: one is about not wishing to know something; the other is about not wishing to be something. So, both have to go elsewhere. Then it becomes the pedagogue’s job to recognise what is not known and to experience what the other does not want to be. In sum, what is perhaps especially ‘British’ in these approaches is staying close to practice and a bottom-up approach to theory. Early British sociology, much like these psychoanalytic approaches to childhood disorder, stressed an empirical and practice-based knowledge arising from deep engagement with the everyday social and psychic world, which is pragmatic rather than just theoretical. This British186

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inflected vision (and version) of social pedagogy is one of the key contributions that we consider has come from our partnership.

The need for sustained professional reflection: a psychosocial understanding of the complexity and interrelatedness of the social and psychic aspects of group life and their relationship to individual experience The distinctive MBS approach was established in 1948 by Barbara Docker-Drysdale, a pioneering British psychoanalyst who, along with Anna Freud and John Bowlby, crucially influenced the development of child psychotherapy in the UK. In common with other practitioners, she stressed the inner world of the troubled child and, in particular, the value of doing this within a community or therapeutic environment.The inner world of some children, she maintained, was such that they could not, at least at first, thrive in a family environment, requiring instead community-based treatment.This makes the capacity for group-living and the capacity to reflect on group-living key to the therapeutic task of the school. In this section, we explore the role of the group, learning to be in the group and the importance of reflecting on the group. As we have seen, the need to recognise and experience what the child cannot recognise or experience for him/herself leads to the other key psychosocial theme: reflection. The social pedagogue just has to have the space in which to stand back and reflect on the thoughts and feelings invoked in them and what they mean. A simple, fictional illustration: two girls are doing very well; their staff team feel very good about their progress and, of course, therefore, about themselves. Soon, they think, the girls will be able to leave and return to normal schooling. Then there is a critical incident. One of the girls unexpectedly attacks a staff member. The incident escalates and the other girl joins in, kicking and spitting. The staff team are dejected but, above all, they are angry – the little bastards have really let them down.There is a staff group reflection process; angry feelings are expressed.Then someone notices that the day the incident occurred was Mothers’ Day. Suddenly, the incident looks different.The staff team’s disappointment and anger can be seen as the children’s disappointment and anger with their indifferent mothers. Behind the act is a communication, simple but very effective. All is not well; we are not ready to leave, our situation is not normal. In training social pedagogues, perhaps the most important part of the training is the systematic reflection on practice. Certainly, we have built it into the courses we have helped to design. And, of course, the reflection 187

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on critical incidents is of particular value. The habit of working with and from one’s own emotions is not one that comes easily; at least, not to all people. The feeling has to be noticed, it has to be named and it has to be construed. It is worth noting here that continental social pedagogy in Germany grew out of a religious movement called Pietism in the 17th century, one key element of which was facilitated group reflection, which went hand in hand with a refinement of emotional vocabulary (Clark, 2006, p 125).There is no doubt that the task of constant reflection on engaged emotion and lived experience is intensely difficult and subject to many mistakes and failures. The programme developed between UWE and MBS builds in processes of supervision designed to facilitate reflection. What we want to emphasise here, though, is the need for that to be a group process. The recommendation that the reflection is not an individual one, but a group one as well, is not, or not just, because that provides more and better scope for reflection, but because the social pedagogic processes are group processes. At one level, this is quite simple, social pedagogues work in institutional settings: residential care homes, schools, Kindergartens, hospitals; all of them complex, often ‘total’, institutions, with their own dynamics and tensions. But, even more to the point, social pedagogy, as the name implies, is about learning and unlearning. Unlearning is clear: unlearning old habits and patterns that are harmful to the self; personal transformation and development. But learning? What is that? Cognitive, psychological models of learning obscure the point that it is, above all, about coming to be a part of a group. If you learn French well, then what you are learning is to get by in France. It is not just that you learn to be a member of the group; rather, it is that that is what learning is. Learning is the process of successfully becoming a part of a group, whether the group is a juvenile gang or the House of Lords.The social pedagogic process is therefore about working with someone else to help them, and yourself, be part of something bigger. Here, the significance of the school or the residential care home becomes really amplified. Living successfully in the community that is the school is the learning process that allows the child to become, in turn, part of something bigger still. Learning to manage time frames, eating together, maintenance work (washing up!), turn-taking, sharing and so on, all just are the processes of learning to become a member of that community and the basis of wider citizenship. Perhaps the original source of social pedagogy was August Hermann Francke’s orphanage in Halle, founded in 1695. It was a feature of 188

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that orphanage and school that the children’s days had a detailed timetable, divided between lessons and periods of individual leisure. Not surprising to us, but probably the first time that a divide between public, collective work time and private, individual ‘me time’ had been institutionalised. Learning to manage the timetable is also learning to manage the work–leisure boundary and the us–me boundary. Of course, groups have their pathologies. In the psychosocial frame, these were most highlighted by Wilfred Bion (1961).These pathologies include, famously: excessive dependence on a leader, who carries all hopes; the creation of ‘pairings’ that are supposed to be productive in ways that are unrealistic; the adoption of fight/flight patterns of thought that cannot engage; or, since Bion, pathologies of individualism, either promoted narcissistically or suppressed totally. All of this, again, can be dealt with only by a systematic and collective process of reflection, which is itself open to the same potential pathologies, so must be facilitated from outside.

Impacts and lessons So, what can be learnt about this collaboration and the impacts that it had on us and on our partners? One of the things almost immediately reported to us by our colleagues at MBS was an improvement in wholeschool functioning. It was as though the containment offered by the Foundation Degree programme offered a similar function for staff, which, in turn, provided a further level of containment for the children. The number of violent and critical incidents with children decreased and managers reported that therapeutic care staff in training had more confidence in their own judgement – meaning that they felt able to challenge, take initiative and offer leadership. Word about the programme has spread and MBS has been regularly approached by other organisations and individuals wishing to take a place on the programme. It has been recognised across the sector as a pinnacle of excellence and awarded Sector Endorsement by the Children’s Workforce Development Council, as well as winning the 2012 National Training Awards. UWE, MBS and other universities have recently formed a Universities Residential Child-Care Practice Advisory Group. The model of the Foundation Degree has been suggested as an appropriate practice model to raise standards in the sector and a paper has recently been submitted to the Department for Education. This group was formed as a response to national concerns about the safety and welfare of looked-after children in residential provisions. Following the Rochdale 189

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sexual abuse scandals, in deep recession and with ongoing austerity and deficit-reduction measures likely to be in place for 20 years, there has never been a more appropriate time to press for improvements in training for staff in residential child care. What began as a ‘public sociology’ engagement for us is thus becoming ‘policy sociology’. The lessons for the staff involved in working with MBS have not only been about the actual programme and the advantages (and practical problems) of public engagement.They have also prompted considerable reflection within the staff team about the nature and commitments of sociology as a discipline. As we have said, most of the staff were trained in a sociology that had drawn heavily on European thought, but we found that the particularly British traditions of sociological thinking were the most helpful (Titmuss, Wilmott, Young, Dockar-Drysdale, Bowlby, Townsend, Bott-Spillius). The significance of a distinctively British sociology has been commented on elsewhere (Halsey, 2004; Bulmer, 2009 [1985]) but was hugely endorsed by the work undertaken in this collaboration. When the first stirrings of sociology in the UK began in the second half of the 19th century, they were strongly linked to social policy, social problems and the city. The work of the collaboration between us and MBS felt like a revival and a continuation of that tradition. References Ainsworth, M. (1967) Infancy in Uganda, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins. Bion, W. (1961) Experiences in groups, London: Tavistock Publications. Bowlby, J. (1953) Child care and the growth of love, London: Penguin Books. Bowlby, J. (1969) Attachment and loss:Vol. I:Attachment, London: Hogarth. Bowlby, J. (1979) The making and breaking of affectional bonds, London: Tavistock Publications. Bowlby, J. (1988) A secure base: clinical applications of attachment theory, London: Routledge. Bowlby, J. (1999 [1982]) Attachment and loss: Vol. I: Attachment (2nd edn), New York, NY: Basic Books. Bulmer, M. (2009 [1985]) Essays in the history of British sociological research, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burrowoy, M. (2005) ‘For public sociology’, American Sociological Review, vol 70, no 1, pp 4–28. Chodorow, N. (1978) The reproduction of mothering: psychoanalysis and the sociology of gender, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Clark, C. (2006) Iron kingdom: the rise and downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947, London: Allen Lane. 190

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College of Social Work (2012) ‘College of Social Work briefing for Lord Listowel re House of Lords debate, Oct 12th 2012’. Available at: http://www.collegeofsocialwork.org/uploadedFiles/TheCollege/ CollegeLibrary/College_press_releases_and_press_statements/ LordListowelBriefingTCSW19Oct2012.pdf (accessed 11 March 2013). DfE (Department for Education) (2012) ‘Children looked after by local authorities in England (including adoption and care leavers) – year ending 31 March 2012’. Available at http://www.education.gov.uk/ rsgateway/DB/SFR/s001084/index.shtml (accessed 11 March 2013). Halsey, A.H. (2004) A history of sociology in Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Klein, M. (1986 [1946]) ‘Notes on some schizoid mechanisms’, in J. Mitchell (ed) The selected Melanie Klein, London: Penguin Press. Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J.-B. (1973) The language of psychoanalysis, London: Karnac Press. Main, M. and Solomon, J. (1986) ‘Discovery of an insecure disoriented attachment pattern: procedures, findings and implications for the classification of behaviour’, in T. Braxelton and M. Yogman (eds) Affective development in infancy, Norwood, NJ: Ablex, pp 95–124. Prior, V. and Glaser, D. (2006) Understanding attachment and attachment disorders: theory, evidence and practice, London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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The professional impact of Social Science in the City™ Tansy Clark

Introduction This chapter explores the impact of Social Science in the City on my insights and practice as a teacher in a city school and as a postgraduate student pursuing research on the experience and meaning of poverty in a part of the inner city. My attendance at the Social Science in the City seminars, prior to registering for a PhD, provided me with social contact with others interested in and involved in social research. I shall reflect upon and discuss in-depth the value of such public engagement initiatives for my own professional practice, in particular, the importance of being informed about a range of critical social issues, backed up by academic research – topics that have ranged from thinking about the way we might deal with an increasingly ageing population to the insights gained from presentations focused on managing community conflict, including facts about urban realities and tensions on the ground that affect the students in the catchment area in which I work and the pressures they encounter outside the school gates. I shall also discuss the relevance of these talks for my own interest in pursuing social research in the inner city.

Overview My professional career path has taken a significant change in the last year and a half. When I started attending Social Science in the City seminars, I was a sociology teacher at an inner city school and now, sometime later, I have a multiple identity as a teacher, voluntary youth worker and PhD student researching youth transitions/poverty in my school catchment area. I would like to chart this transition and acknowledge how Social Science in the City has supported and inspired this development and diversification of my career path. As a result of my attendance, I have been able to improve my insights in 193

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the discipline of social science, enrich my teaching and reflect deeply upon the deprivation issues facing my students. Consequently, I have begun my doctoral research with confidence and the support of other experienced scholars in the local academic arena.

Beginnings of an inner city teaching career I began my teaching career four and a half years ago. I completed my professional training at Exeter University, which placed me in a private school for my teaching practice. During this time, I experienced the contrast between my own state schooling and the highly privileged surroundings in the minor public school in Somerset. On completion of my training, they offered me a job teaching there, but I declined; I always had a strong sense of social justice and felt that I wanted to work in the state system in the city. The first job that I took in Bristol was at a city academy, where I was catapulted into a school where funding was desperately needed to try and placate the massive social and economic deficit (Lister, 2004). Over 50% of students receive free school meals, compared to a national secondary school average of 14% (see: www.suttontrust.com/our-work/research/item/rates-ofeligibility-for-fsm-at-the-top-state-schools/). The area of Lawrence Hill is the most deprived ward in the South West and in the top 10 of the most deprived areas in the whole of the UK. Since 2002, those who are claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance rose from 18% to 20%, compared to 9% across the UK (Bristol City Council ward profile, 2008; see: https://www.bristol.gov.uk/WardFinder/pdfs/lawrence-hill-profile. pdf ). Housing consists mainly of former and current council housing and many high-rise developments and Victorian terraces. Since 2001, the ward received £50 million worth of funding for community regeneration under the New Deal for Communities initiative, which has now come to an end. My training in the private sector in no way prepared me for the challenges of the inner city classroom, and my first year of teaching was a sink-or-swim affair in terms of behaviour management in extremely challenging circumstances (Ferri, 1976). In addition, I was given the daunting opportunity in my first year of setting up the small sociology department. I began with two students who were halfway through the A-level, and since then, I have managed to expand the department to about a hundred students who are studying the GCSE and A-level. Teachers at the school are under constant pressure to deliver improved results year upon year and target grades often seem totally unobtainable. In the sixth form, students need strong literacy 194

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and independent research skills in order to have a fighting chance of gaining an A-level and continuing on to further education. In many cases, the students come very poorly equipped and teachers have to spend much time teaching the basics of essay-writing and note-taking in an already squeezed amount of curriculum time. I found out very quickly that the subjects that I taught have a particular resonance with the young people I work with. Social inequality and poverty is a key topic at both the GCSE and A-level, and during this unit, the students are very keen to see the current figure of the relative poverty line. When shown this figure, it is not difficult to detect on their young faces that their parents’ income will be hovering around that point. One does not have to scrape the surface very deep to recognise the difficulties that the students face in their daily lives, many of them are not able to afford school trips, which often have to be cancelled on account of a lack of financial backing from parents (Smith and Noble, 1995). Teachers have to draw on funding from elsewhere so that students only have to make minimal contributions to such excursions. On non-school uniform day, students still come in wearing their school attire as they are embarrassed to wear their often shabby casual clothes. More recently, I took on a project about their community and was saddened to hear about how many students were unhappy about the crime that they felt blighted their area. In particular, they mentioned drug abuse as something that concerned them. “My area is just trampy”, said one year 11 girl during a discussion. When I asked them to rate their area out of 10, the figures they gave were depressingly low. Students often stay at school long after the lessons are over, with the caretakers and cleaners trying to get them to leave. One senses that the safety and familiarity of the school building is more enticing for some than going home. During the education module in both GSCE and A-level sociology, discussion often centres on the percentage outcomes of different groups of students according to gender, class and ethnicity. Our school has a GCSE pass rate of 34%, compared to 61% nationally. A simple exercise on school league tables in Bristol provides them with the knowledge that their school is second from the bottom.The question would then naturally ensue: “Why us? I thought this was a good school”. I would then try to explain the factors that affect differential educational achievement and it always seems to be very much about their lives.

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A desire to research As the sociology students turn to the textbook, a description of the features of material deprivation is clear.Yet, just outside the classroom windows stand the tower blocks of Barton Hill, where overcrowding and poor living conditions are commonplace (Coates and Silburn, 1970). It is theory coming to life, their life. Needless to say, I often found it hard to discuss these issues with students, anxious that it may disempower them rather than be a source of insight and inspiration. Experience has helped me to teach in an empathetic and sensitive way, but I felt that I needed to engage with others on this matter. I was working as the only specialist in the department and I wanted to get a wider perspective on the issues that were so pertinent to my students.The only sociologists were them and me. I was the only adult in this equation. I was craving some input from the research community as talking to these young people about issues that they faced every day was a big responsibility and I was the only release valve. I sensed that the insights of sociology meant a great deal to the young people in Lawrence Hill. I wanted something to be growing out of the situation, a piece of research about their lives and ways to improve their life chances. I spent a great deal of time reading other studies on poverty in order to improve my subject knowledge (Pryce, 1979; Macdonald and Marsh, 2005). In many ways, the studies seemed so similar to my school catchment area. This was the time when I realised that a potential research project in the area could be of real benefit to these young people. I put the question to them one day in the classroom, “If I did a piece of research in Bristol, which area should I study?” “This area, Miss”, they all chorused back immediately. This response from the young people helped crystallise my ideas about my research intentions. It would give them a voice and allow them to become co-inquirers into issues facing their own community (Beresford et al, 1999).

New possibilities at Social Science in the City At this point, I joined Social Science in the City and it allowed me to meet and exchange ideas with other social researchers and academics. I always applied to go to conferences to meet other sociologists, but there were often not sufficient funds in the school purse to facilitate this opportunity. I arrived for my first seminar held in the Tart Café, which has a Parisian air about it. It was nice to see that people were enjoying cake, coffee and the odd glass of wine. The atmosphere was 196

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relaxed yet focused and the talks would start without delay. At the first few talks, I was slightly nervous to start conversations with others afterwards, who seemed to have so much more experience than I. But as the events went on, the faces of attendees became more familiar and conversation flowed between us about their research projects and differing professions. Throughout the series of seminars, Stella, who convenes Social Science in the City, introduced me to lecturers and researchers at the University of the West of England (UWE), some of whom I had known of during my undergraduate days. Often, the group would go on for dinner after the talks and this proved to be a really fruitful time for me in getting to know other lecturers in the wider academic community. I derived immense enjoyment in reflecting and discussing the themes and ideas that had arisen during the seminars. I also found it fascinating talking to them about how their research careers developed and the projects they had been involved in. I was also able to discuss the possibility of gaining some experience as a visiting lecturer at UWE. It was as though I was meeting with a group of people who were very like-minded role models. From the start, those I met gave me a great deal of encouragement to start my research and this enthusiasm and expertise gave me the boost I needed to take the next step and apply for the PhD. The talk by Hen Wilkinson had particular resonance for me in my professional role. As part of the community resolve project, Hen talked about her work in my catchment area and how community conflict is rationalised and resolved. I was aware that her team had done some work at my school and it was not until the talk began that I became fully aware of the workings of this initiative. The talk illuminated many issues that teachers discuss in the staffroom every day: violent behaviour both inside and outside of the school gates; ethnic tensions; and tumultuous family relationships.These realities have an exponential impact upon the lives of students and their educational outcomes and it was an invaluable opportunity to be able to discuss these. Nearby, Stapleton Road, where many of my students live, has one of the highest rates of gun and knife crime in the country. Only last week, one of my students in year seven said that he had witnessed a man being shot and killed outside his home. As a teacher who does not live in the area, it is very hard to know how to react and deal with such information. Many times in the classroom, the students and I had discussed how they might react if faced with someone being physically threatening towards them. Every time we discussed this, my students would largely give the same response: “I’d whack ‘em back”. Fighting fire with fire 197

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seemed to be the way that they rationalised a conflict situation.When I asked them about who had told them to do this, they invariably said that it was their parents (West and Farrington, 1973). Through extended discussions at Social Science in the City, we were able to identify and explore this dichotomy of ideals in which I, as a typically middle-class teacher, had a set of norms and values that were in contrast to a population who have survival techniques to cope in a harsh environment. The ability to reflect and discuss this situation helped me see the context and constraints under which my students live more clearly. The language of the teacher and the pupil is often so different, being deeply embedded in subjective experience. Hen’s seminar tackled the critical question as to how teachers can understand issues around conflict from the point of view of the student, facilitating constructive discussions with young people about their interactions with others in the community. The training raised my awareness of shortcomings in imposing a mainstream value system on students and then wondering why it does not work. As an experienced teacher using advanced behaviour management techniques, one can instil clear boundaries in the classroom and order prevails; however, as teachers, we often wondered why many of our students were very disorderly when they leave the school gates. Brushes with the law are commonplace and police tags are often seen on our young people in school. The talk identified a number of factors at play here: increasing levels of domestic violence, drug use, experience of racism, material deprivation, overcrowding and a lack of safe spaces for children. Hen’s work allowed vital reflection upon how different cultural groups communicate when things are going well and also when they are going badly. Although it was a project going on in my own school, I did not know the nature of its endeavour until the café talk. This gave an opportunity for the exchange of ideas and experiences of a teacher working with the pupils and the expertise of someone working both inside and outside of the school in relation to the conflicts that they face. This is a very powerful tool for opening a mutually beneficial dialogue that informs my understanding of the social landscape in which I work every day. In this way, it explores critically important issues and allows me to work with young people with the insight and academic reflection of experts in the field. Consequently, I was inspired to undertake wider reading on conflict resolution and acquired several practical techniques to use in the classroom (Braithwaite, 1992). Another aspect of Social Science in the City that has been of great benefit is the reading group.The location of the meetings is often in the centre of town in a café by the river. Many a sunny evening has been 198

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spent by the water discussing different social science texts.This forum allowed another space of informal knowledge exchange with other academics and social science students. It complimented my reading as it allowed me to learn about topics from the perspective of others, to ask questions about aspects of the concepts and ideas that I sought to clarify and explore. I always came away from the meetings feeling re-energised as it allowed me to get excited about the possibilities for new avenues of research and collaboration with others. When you are the only subject specialist in a school, it can be isolating, so a chance to meet up with others is essential, yet rarely possible due to time constraints at school. I found the whole experience very inspiring as it allowed me to link up with other people in the field that I would not otherwise have met. Social Science in the City has an ethos of growth and inclusion, where one can explore possibilities in their own social science career by sharing ideas in an informal environment.This arena is not solely made up by established academics, but by interested parties and those on the fringes of the discipline, such as classroom teachers looking to further their subject knowledge or those in the first phases of their research. I find that research outside the academic community can sometimes be a lonely path and the group has provided with me with the beginnings of a network of support and inspiration. Since I work full time, it is very difficult to attend lectures and conferences, yet Social Science in the City seminars being held during the evening allows me to attend regularly. Consequently, when I attended supervision meetings at university, I found that I was getting to know the staff members in another context and this further increased my confidence in my studies. As my research progresses, the dialogue between the students and myself has become more open about the effects of poverty on their lives (Beresford et al, 1999). Recently, a young girl said in my class: “I know we are just getting by”. My research has allowed me to understand the language of poverty, which is a difficult one to speak: hard for the researcher, yet harder in a different ways for the researched. I feel that I have been greatly assisted by the wider academic community in Bristol, who have a wealth of experience in studying sensitive issues. I believe that Social Science in the City facilitated the development of the wide network of support that continues to be an inspiration to me in my teaching and research.

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References Beresford, P., Green, D., Lister, R. and Woodward, K. (1999) Poverty first hand: poor people speak for themselves, London: Child Poverty Action Group. Braithwaite, R. (1992) Violence: understanding, intervention and prevention, Oxford: Radcliffe Professional Press. Coates, K. and Silburn, R. (1970) Poverty: the forgotten Englishman, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Ferri, E. (1976) Growing up in a one-parent family: a long term study of child development, Windsor: NFER. Lister, R. (2004) Poverty, Cambridge: Polity Press. Macdonald, R. and Marsh, J. (2005) Disconnected youth? Growing up in Britain’s poor neighbourhoods, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pryce, K. (1979) Endless pressure: a study of West Indian lifestyles in Bristol, Harmondsworth and New York, Penguin Smith, T. and Noble, M. (1995) Education divides: poverty and schooling in the 1990’s, London: CPAG. West, D. and Farrington, D. (1973) Who becomes delinquent?, London: Heinemann.

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Sharing worlds: managing complex community relationships in challenging times Hen Wilkinson Most of the time, most of us manage to steer a reasonably safe course through our interactions, like a sanitised version of bumper cars. But from time to time, we find ourselves facing a situation, a set of beliefs or an entrenched negative expectation that we cannot manoeuvre around safely and peacefully. How do we manage the collision that follows? British cities are becoming increasingly diverse, with rapidly changing demographics across the country as a result of rising population turnover and global connectivity (Dennett and Stillwell, 2008). This brings with it serious challenges for communities, as well as national and local governments, around maintaining positive relationships between individuals and groups in the face of growing demand on shrinking resources, while building cohesion across increasingly separate and sometimes polarised value bases (Minority Ethnic Network, 2011). These are not new issues, but they are current and pressing ones, as the 2011 riots in Britain highlighted. This chapter looks at the emergence of Community Resolve, a Bristol-based social enterprise and charity that uses a distinctly different approach to community or public engagement than that of many larger and mainstream bodies, both in the variety of Bristol ‘publics’ it works with, and in terms of how it manages relationships both externally – with service users, other agencies and so on – and within the organisation itself.The focus on conflict as a route of engagement is innovative for a British city, and is based on the view that equipping people to manage their daily tensions in a harmonious way underpins the success of a raft of other social policy, such as education, housing or employment. In particular, the organisation is engaged in thinking about the power structures that allow or disallow engagement, and has worked on linking the status networks in the city that impact upon individual, group and community conflict at both a relational and a structural level. 201

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The chapter is written from my particular perspective as a conflict practitioner of 20 years’ standing and founder of Community Resolve. In addition, I have been increasingly interested in the role of ‘bridge’ between academic theory and actual practice around conflict work in the UK, and a number of influential thinkers – especially practitioner-academics – have helped form the direction of our work in Bristol, influencing the methods we use to create movement in blocked relationships and personal trajectories. These include, for example, working with a deeper sense of our multiple identities and contradictory impulses – how family values are mixed with individual interests and experiences, how we are influenced by wider societal norms and narratives, or how we are inspired and paralysed by our experiences, fears or collective trauma.

What is Community Resolve? Since Community Resolve’s formation in 2003, it has promoted the importance of approaching community conflict in a positive and skilled manner in order to build strong and resilient communities. Although people shy away from the term ‘conflict’, preferring to think of it as something that happens overseas rather than on our own doorsteps, naming it for what it is allows the possibility of doing something about it, and of looking at the contexts – historical, social and institutional – that surround each and every conflict. We approach this work through a number of different routes, developed according to need and demand. Our interventions range across: targeted one-to-one and group work with young people aged 8–25 on the edge of or involved in criminality; research and then community-building with poorer and marginalised white communities, including work on ongoing conflict between local residents in those areas; training for adults across the city in conflict management skills, including teachers, council workers, police officers, voluntary sector workers and parents and residents; and providing links into some of the hardest-to-engage community networks in central Bristol. Recognising that communities, institutions and societies are made up of individuals, we are interested in finding ways to bring those who have found themselves on the edges of society – as so many of the rioters felt themselves to be – back into a productive relationship with themselves and those around them.

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“You gave me space to think” T, 23, first contacted us when agoraphobic and suicidal. Our mentors visited her at home and encouraged her to attend Fridays@Mill, our open-access, all-day session for marginalised young adults aged 19+.When she did, she was directed towards a free Reiki treatment. At first, she was reluctant – “skunk is my Reiki” – but afterwards said: “it gave me a space to just be still and think”. She returned regularly, having further Reiki treatments and engaging with our wider pool of mentors and opportunities.After attending one of our ‘entrepreneur’s talks’ by a local businessman – “he inspired me” – she released a new music video. She now has a cleaning job – her first sustained piece of employment – and is engaging with a number of other new projects. (March 2012)

T’s transformation, as with so many in Community Resolve’s 10-year history, is about trust. T had been in freefall for a while – a serious drug habit, long-term unemployed – so what made the difference in our engagement with her? Why did she open the door to our mentor, and to new possibilities? Something was safer about this route than the many others that she had surely been offered before, at school, at the Job Centre or by social workers. T called our mentor because she knew her from the community, from family, from birth – she trusted her not to blame or judge her, to understand how her situation had come about. Our mentor, P, is in her late 20s, of mixed parentage and with children of her own. T opened her door to P because she brought food and understanding. In the following days,T left her house and came to our open session because she had been invited, because she was confident that she would be properly seen and cared for.When T arrived in the space, P encouraged her towards a completely unknown activity – Reiki – which she refused without even thinking. The only reason she shifted was because she was talking to P, someone who understood her reluctance and who had the language and the approach to unlock it. In part, that required a degree of insistence, with the innate confidence to know when to push and when to pull back. Public engagement here, then, is about finding the right people for the job – and they are not necessarily the ones with academic qualifications or university degrees. As we focus relentlessly on IQ as a measure of ability and societal usefulness, we hugely underestimate the value of what the Greeks called phronesis, or practical wisdom, of all people of all ages. In so doing, we sideline the special gifts of millions of people, making them feel disempowered and less than valued. This simple case study demonstrates how easily a different paradigm of 203

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public engagement opened the door that ‘professionals’ had found locked and bolted.

The Bristol context While many cities in the UK are affluent, they all contain areas of deep poverty, which are often overlaid, though not always, with the highest ethnic mix – both structural issues. Bristol is an affluent city, with one of the highest levels of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) outside of London, and yet is highly divided and unequal. Some 12% of its population live in areas among the most deprived 10% in England, including two central Bristol areas in the most challenged 1%. Minority communities from a wide range of nationalities and faiths make up 30% of the central Bristol population – one local secondary school recently counted 60+ first languages among its students – and these areas (sitting on low land flanking the M32 motorway corridor from the M4 into the centre of the city) have disproportionately high levels of child poverty, unemployment, crime and health problems, and low levels of educational attainment and poor housing. Up the hills – literally – the almost universally affluent and white families live a life completely apart. Figure 13.1 illustrates the linkage between poverty and anti-social behaviour in Bristol, mapping the information gathered at a series of free training courses in Group Conflict and Young People that Community Resolve delivered to adults across the city, which were subsidised by Bristol City Council’s Children and Young People’s Services. These training sessions were attended by hundreds of teachers, social workers, youth offending teams, parents, residents and others, who were asked to tell us about areas of repeated, ongoing anti-social behaviour that they knew of, from drug dealing and harassment, to graffiti or crowds of youngsters drinking and making noise. This map shows that information – and as you can see, all the areas they highlighted (with the exception of an ‘up yours’ presence outside City Hall) are in the poorest 10% of the city, several areas of which are the poorest in the country – lighter areas are Bristol’s hills, and darker areas the flat land by the M32 (Bristol City Council, 2010). In response to this information, Community Resolve has been leading a project since late 2010 that engages and supports marginalised young Bristol men (and sometimes young women), primarily from AfricanCaribbean, Somali and dual heritage backgrounds, living in central Bristol. Many of those we work with are caught up in criminality, on the edges of offending or struggling to maintain a clear sense of identity 204

Southmead BS5/10 Manor Farm, Upper Horfield BS16 Thicket Avenue BS5 Easton BS5 Lower Easton BS2 Lower Ashley Rd BS1 College Green, Central Library BS4 Newquay Rd BS13 Fulford Rd Whitchurch Park/Hartcliffe

Reported ASB/drug dealing from adult training

Figure 13.1: Anti-social behaviour reported in training, mapped onto Bristol’s 2007 Indices of Deprivation

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and aspiration while living in some of Bristol’s most disadvantaged communities. We have provided a combination of safe space, free home-cooked food and an opportunity to build trust relationships with adult mentors. At two drop-in centres, one either side of the M32, we encourage those who attend to take up self-development, training, education and employment opportunities, while recognising that in order to take these forward, many of those we work with need a ‘mentoring+’ model of support – accompaniment, encouragement and ongoing one-to-one mentoring for up to six months or more. T and others, including those on the edge of offending and street conflict, would no more have thought of trying Reiki than flown to the moon, but by offering free Reiki sessions, the project is accessing a deeper layer in many of those who are most at need of a little peace. One mentor from the project described young and older adults “queuing down the street” to get a treatment, with one young 17-year-old Somali man talking of how “It gets rid of stress, makes you completely relax, clears the head, gives me time to think – it’s better than sleeping pills and I’ll be back again”, and another 40-year-old black Bristolian telling us how it reduced his road rage. Growing up either side of the M32, a large number of young men and their families, and especially those of African-Caribbean heritage, have been affected by, or part of, violent street conflict for generations. This dynamic has expanded over the last 10 years to include young men from the rapidly expanding Somali community in central Bristol, but is also present in other white communities elsewhere in the city.These young people are often loosely termed ‘gangs’ by those in authority – schools, council, youth offending teams, police – a term we challenge as too often used as the lazy and thoughtless labelling of young men cornered by their circumstances. As a result of our challenge, this term has now been dropped in Bristol by the police and the council – at least for now, and in public, and is used only for the most clear-cut large-scale criminal group activity. Here, then, is the engagement with two publics around this one area of work – younger marginalised community members and the agencies who are supposed to work for all residents in the city but have limited knowledge of or access to these communities. By collecting voices from one group through action research carried out by community members and then passing this back to the agencies in the very words given to us, we open up a channel for voice and influence. In addition, we actively work on the relationships between these two groups, through creating opportunities for building understanding and dialogue, as well as sitting on key strategic committees 206

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Reaching the ‘hard to reach’ The impact of building such a highly diverse staff, sessional workers and volunteer team cannot be overestimated.The organisation is led by people from groups that are often seen as ‘hard to reach’ (although as one wryly observed, ‘Hard to reach for whom?’), many starting out with very few qualifications (if any) and even less confidence after a lifetime of growing up in minority population groups. If we had the funding, we could double our workforce overnight, as people are drawn to work with our model of respectful working and structured creativity. The Reiki at Mill and Docklands is delivered by another Community Resolve worker, an extremely experienced Reiki Master and conflict practitioner, who, for five years, has developed and run our 1+1 Project, bringing isolated Asian women out of their shells and homes. She too grew up in Bristol, within the Sikh community, but is in her early 50s. She brings to her work extraordinary insight and compassion, developed in part through her own long and, at times, troubled journey, including two marriages, each with their trials and tribulations. She is typical of Community Resolve workers, who all live in Bristol, most in the diverse inner city, and many of whom grew up locally.This is deliberate, as we aim to recruit from local communities, looking for people with a deep commitment to and knowledge of their local area, as well as an understanding of internal community dynamics and a personal connection to families, businesses and local organisations.We are not interested in professional qualifications – in fact, we see these as a potential barrier to engagement, as those who consider themselves ‘professionals’ too often feel that they know best, or are more focused on their own long-term careers – but we are looking for particular qualities: a lack of judgement; high levels of self-awareness and an interest in developing the self further; an openness and honesty; and a passion to transform what have often been challenging life experiences into support for others in the same boat. Our core team of trained and experienced workers are from a range of Bristol ethnicities, including white, Somali, black, Sikh and Muslim backgrounds. Most were born, educated and currently live in central Bristol. This team of 24 part-time and sessional workers, only one of whom is full time, provide a hugely impactful modelling of cooperation as they work together across the city with adults and young people, delivering training, facilitation, mediation, group work and mentoring. Our diversity provides an essential community ownership and removes the suspicion of ‘parachuted-in’ assistance, as well as giving us a unique insight into the needs and challenges of local people across a range 207

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of backgrounds. The organisation has grown directly out of the firsthand experiences of local community members, which has informed our delivery patterns and initiatives, and is invaluable in a city that is experiencing one of the highest rates of demographic change across the country. Once we recruit people, we invest heavily and continuously in their training and line management. This involves group and individual training, both around conflict-related topics – facilitation, conflict skills and mediation – and others, such as drug and alcohol awareness, domestic violence, mental health issues, or preparing CVs. Each of our workers is encouraged to develop a project that speaks to their heart, and we commit to providing the infrastructure – administration, funding support, evaluation and reporting structures, and so on – that allow them to build on their ideas. As the interview in the following box with our senior youth conflict worker shows, this ‘resource-intensive’ management approach reaps extraordinary and lasting rewards. One worker’s experience of the organisation What brought you to Community Resolve in the first place? I attended a ‘gangs’ course exploring relationships between young people organised by Community Resolve in 2003. I was making a film about the divisions between Easton and St Pauls’s young people at the time.The course really made me think that I wanted to do a similar thing. I wanted to be that guy in my community who could share some skills around conflict with the young people. Give me some examples of high points of being involved in the organisation. Working in a diverse team with people very different to me but very passionate about their communities. Watching the project grow and being part of that growth – at first, our staff team of four sat round one table with one phone and one computer – now there’s a team of 24+. As the years have gone by, being more proactive with community issues and being able to respond as issues arise, we’re getting more and more status to come in and work. What’s been challenging? Working in the office – I’m not an office person, always avoided that – so getting used to policies, challenging my academic skills – it’s been great to develop that. Creating links within schools, as schools don’t always recognise problems on the ground, such as gang affiliations. Challenging teachers’ stereotypes around young black people has also been hard – too often, young people are handpicked

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Sharing worlds for gang workshops in schools from one community only, when this affects all young people. In what ways have you grown personally? I’ve got a broader understanding of conflict as something that’s always around you but I never realised it. In the past, I dealt with it in my personal and professional life from one extreme to the other – over the top. I have learnt to verbalise/talk about my issues in a middle way. I’ve also increased my understanding of how organisations work, developed as a facilitator and am able to engage with young people and adults from all backgrounds. Best moments? The prison work touched me. Young guys experiencing so many horrific things in their life … listening to their stories, using our conflict exercises and seeing how they realise how their mindset was, how they got into trouble, how their environment affected them and how they wanted to change. Before, they didn’t really have any understanding about how they got caught up in their environment. It’s good to open their eyes just a little bit wider.

Making the theory–practice link At Community Resolve, we believe that community-building requires an embracing of complexity – quite different from the simple narrative of authorities/governments, who aim to produce a ‘universal’ approach they can work to and evaluate. Anyone working in communities knows that this is unrealistic and, in itself, creates conflict: ‘the Asian community’ means what exactly? ‘Local people’ – who are they? The word ‘community’ itself – is that geographical? A community of interest? Or a virtual community? Unless we find approaches that sit happily with the complex, chaotic nature of people, and very diverse people at that, we are going to struggle. Conflict workers generally take the position that in this complex world, a clash of worldviews is inevitable – and conflict is therefore integral to human existence and can in no way be avoided. Nor is it necessarily a bad thing, indicating as it does where something is not working right, and needs attention. The important part is not the conflict, but the impact of that conflict – how it is experienced and dealt with, whether it is addressed as a positive opportunity and catalyst for change and growth, or seen as a threat. Community Resolve’s work has been highly influenced by emerging conflict transformation theory and practice, which focuses on rebuilding society in the aftermath of violent civil conflict. It has generated some 209

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fascinating insights, including the importance to work long-term on two simultaneous approaches: the building of relationships between estranged or indifferent neighbours or groups at the same time as identifying and altering structural inequalities, rooted in systems, power bases and decision-making processes that are slanted towards one group over others (which generally means the mainstream white population, and, arguably, white professionals, who dominate decisionand opinion-making in Britain). Influential for us all has been the understanding that all conflicts – from the interpersonal to the international – have their contexts.These may be invisible, but they are highly impactful – the hidden unnoticed discourses perpetuated by the ‘haves’ about the ‘have-nots’; ways that direct and indirect racism are dealt with; the unequal distribution of wealth, opportunity and aspiration; the accessibility of institutions.This frame suggests that conflicts are rarely about ‘personality clashes’ or irrational fear and dislike, but are more related to where individuals or groups are placed in a power hierarchy, and what opportunities they have to change their circumstances.T’s story illustrates this beautifully. Such understandings have released many of our workers from a life story of feeling unseen and irrelevant. By looking at what drives conflict that is out of sight – culture, values, beliefs, power relations, gender – we have a set of lenses with which to understand our own experiences, as well as with which to unpick the hidden dynamics of any conflict, whether interpersonal, family, group or national. Narrative approaches in therapy and mediation have been steadily gaining attention over the years of my practice, and the concept of ‘storying’ our lives is compelling to most of us in the organisation. It draws attention to our tendency as humans to select/create a story that works for us, and highlights that there are many aspects of our interactions that are jettisoned, as not fitting into our preferred version. If we accept that idea, we are released to be able to re-story our lives, revisiting the interactions that we have discounted and using them to create a new ‘story’ of any given situation (Winslade and Monk, 2000). This is liberating at a personal level, as well as useful at a professional one. While we may not all be experiencing large-scale violence and death in our UK communities, many are living in fear.We suggest that scaled-down conflict transformation approaches, understandings and strategies work well as a proactive approach to community relations at a local level. Ideas of ‘engaging with and transforming local relationships, interests, discourses and, if necessary, societal structures’ (Dudouet, 2006), for example, emphasise the importance of working with local people to transform their own conflict situations rather than relying 210

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on the skills of ‘experts’ and/or neutral ‘outsiders’ to come and fix problems that arise. Working with an awareness of culture difference Pay explicit attention to: • questions of culture in preparatory research, including culture/power perceptions and language capacities; • cultural differences between yourself and those involved in the conflict – explore the implications of those differences, both in terms of what is respectful to those involved and of what will be needed in addressing the conflict; • the ways in which women are affected by and can have an impact on the conflict; • the role of power in the conflict, assessing the likely impact of proposed action on changing power dynamics; • the extent and limits of one’s own power and responsibility – do not use language to dominate, be open about your own values and goals, be wary of your motivations and need or desire for power; and • processes for feedback, monitoring, reflection, evaluation and adjustment in relation to all aspects of practice. Source Francis, 2004

There are many influential thinkers and practitioners that have informed our work, including John Paul Lederach’s (1995, 1997, 1999, 2005) writings and thinking, or that of theorist/practitioners such as Michelle LeBaron and Diana Francis, who stress that those working in culturally diverse settings need to take into account distinct cultural responses to conflict (Francis, 2004; see also the box above). John Galtung’s (1996, pp 196–210) theories of violence are also very useful, making the distinction between conflict (as opposing views) and violence – which he talks of as ‘direct’ (physical, verbal, in the room, on the surface),‘cultural’ (rooted in any individual’s specific upbringing, as well as their subsequent life experiences) and ‘structural’ (the societal systems and structures that frame our lives and opportunities). Think of the scapegoat figure/s in a family, or a despised group in society – gypsies and travellers, for example. It is easy to see how the family/ society discourse/narrative/label becomes fixed, hard to root out, and then informs every aspect of subsequent interaction in an ‘out-of-sight’ way.This links to my interest in current social constructionism, such as the work of Ken Gergen (1991), for example. Gergen is challenging the very foundation of our thinking about self and other, the separating 211

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out of those two entities. He asks: is there such a thing as an individual that exists beyond language, or are we in constant creation, co-creation, responding in each interaction to the circumstances around us? And, if the latter is the case, what are the opportunities for reinventing our relationships (seen as less fixed than previously)? In fact, a lot of things seem less fixed that they used to be; neuroscience talks about the building, renewal, ongoing creation of neural pathways – ‘a leopard can’t change its spots’ is no longer good enough when trying to shift responsibility – and now it turns out that DNA can change too, with specific genes turning themselves off and on according to our physical surrounding, the specific ‘ecology’ of our existence. So, this idea of dynamic process is threaded through our entire lives, from physical being to interaction with self, other and our surroundings.These ideas mirror those inherent in conflict transformation approaches, which differ from ‘conflict resolution’ in that they acknowledge that conflict is more a dynamic, ongoing process of social change and adaptation than one-off resolution – a transformation of both relationships and structures that hold conflict in place, which may be invisible; if you like, creating new conflict pathways – fresh societal DNA – to enable us to deal with conflict in a new and more informed, responsive way for our new realities.

Conclusion Community Resolve is exploring a similarly dynamic route to public engagement, aiming to use a complex, multi-textured approach that addresses the tensions at the edges of our worlds and experience.While our methods are constantly in development, with a tailored programme to fit each new situation, we are increasingly confident about the conceptual framework of our approach, rooted in both theory and practice, and the importance of the principles that underpin our ethos. Many of those who engage with our projects are seen as unreachable by mainstream authorities, but flourish within weeks of working with a local person they trust. We feel that the nature and potential of our engagement is different to that of other organisations, and especially those delivering mainstream services, by: respecting local knowledge and wisdom over ‘expert’ ideas; being willing to try and fail, seeing ‘mistakes’ as the route to deeper understanding; and operating from a position of inclusive non-judgement, open to changing our ways to fit the needs of those we work with, rather than expecting them to change to meet ours.

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Over the next few years, we anticipate developing our ideas further on a national and international stage, through training Community Organisers across the country, teaching and training from primary age to retirement, and linking with projects internationally to share good practice and innovative ideas. References Bristol City Council (2010) ‘It’s all about the here and now: youth street violence in Bristol’, Community Resolve report for Bristol City Council, Bristol. Dennett, A. and Stillwell, J. (2008) ‘Population turnover and churn: enhancing understanding of internal migration in Britain’, Population Trends, vol 134, pp 24-41. Dudouet, V. (2006) ‘Transitions from violence to peace – revisiting analysis and interventions in conflict transformation’, Berghof Report no 15, Berlin: Berghof Research Center for Constructive Conflict Management. Francis, D. (200) ‘Culture, power asymmetries and gender in conflict transformation’, in A. Austin, M. Fischer and N. Ropers (eds) Berghof handbook for conflict transformation, Berlin: Berghof Research Center for Constructive Conflict Management. Galtung, J. (1996) ‘Cultural violence’, in Peace by peaceful means, Oslo/ London: PRIO/Sage Publications, pp 196–210. Gergen, K.J. (1991) The saturated self: dilemmas of identity in contemporary life, New York, NY: Basic Books. Lederach, J.P. (1995) Preparing for peace: confliction transformation across cultures, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Lederach, J.P. (1997) Building peace: sustainable reconciliation in divided societies, Syracuse: USIP. Lederach, J.P. (1999) The journey toward reconciliation, Herald Press. Lederach, J.P. (2005) The moral imagination: the art and soul of building peace, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Minority Ethnic Network (2011) ‘The impact of the economic downturn on BAME education services’, May. Available at: http:// www.rota.org.uk/webfm_send/32 Winslade, J. and Monk, G.D. (2000) Narrative mediation, San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.

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FOURTEEN

Talking about personal experience and its relationship to social inequality across the generations Amanda Radix

Introduction It is through interaction with other people that we learn more about ourselves. This has been a beneficial aspect of my work as a conflict worker in Bristol. I have been fortunate enough to accompany people as they embark on an intimate journey to make changes to their lives, in order to overcome difficulties of belonging, coping on limited resources or dealing with the anxieties that surface when inhabiting a new way of life. I have learnt much about myself as a direct result of my work. I could not have foreseen how much this would affect me and this would not have happened unless I was exposed to such varied facets of the human condition at such difficult times in people’s lives. I also took insights from a Master’s course, which drew on and encouraged the application of social-scientific knowledge in a community setting. This lent further support to my learning, observations and professional practice; I utilised new theories that I was previously unaware of, by implementing them in my work, by feeding my findings back to tutors as did others, creating a culture of active contribution through lively discussion, and an open acceptance of failure as part of success.. What I was not expecting was to find new words to describe old feelings, transitory existences between states of mind.To learn why my experiences, which were often quite similar to those of the people I worked with (although sometimes 30 years apart), were influenced not just by the human condition, but by the external physical environments and social systems and processes we had been exposed to and, in our different ways and to different degrees, shared.The application of socialscientific insights gained from my Master’s also assisted me in gaining new insight into dilemmas surrounding strategies of self-protection 215

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and personal interest, and the preservation of collective interests and values.These are the very topics that were governing both my personal story and my everyday working life. This enabled me to highlight my observations on the impacts of difference through the experiences of ‘established’ and ‘newcomer’ immigrant communities and root them in theory. Articulating the indescribable is what my study meant to me.

My work Ultimately, the privilege of my work is that I am given the opportunity to assist in exploring and creating change, led by people in the community. This is done in many ways, but the most effective occur simply through the act of storytelling, the power of which has always affected me. My role is to ask individuals about their current story and to separate the facts from the emotions. Although there is a feminist literature that highlights the importance of subjectivity, especially for women, to convey something of structural and cultural oppressions, I believe that it is also important to explore narrative constructions and their relationship to more objective (however culturally infused) aspects of experience. A way of grounding the story in some objectivity can remind individuals of how things were different before and could be again. To glean further facts through questioning – facts that we often omit or deem to be unnecessary – helps create a detailed story, hopefully with different perspectives. Through my observations, both personal and professional, I am looking to explore the impact of oppressive societal structures on individuals, families and communities. Through the vehicle of storytelling, I will seek to recognise the long-lasting effects they have on conflicts affecting individuals, in some cases, directly influencing the emergence and adoption of an identity formed as a result of injustices that get passed down, like a tradition or an heirloom, from one generation to another. I will be using the stories and experiences of both myself and my parents to gain a cultural, historical and political context, as well as to compare and contrast these experiences with the present day, enabling us to see ways in which the past has affected the modern-day dynamic. This is a particular way of doing social science in the community, in my work and in my own life – a way of exploring and providing further reflections on the forms of social injustices we carry in us, helping us move through and beyond them, to something that feels acknowledged and owned.

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Why storytelling? Stories are very much a part of our everyday lives and they can enable versions of reality and fantasy to become real. Depending upon the story, this can reap both positive and negative effects. Stories are purposeful; we recount stories for a reason.What is the purpose of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves or about others? And what happens if we change them? Stories may be thought of as ‘documents of life’ (Plummer, 2000) and they can convey the deeper histories and experiences of whole communities.The stories of my parents and my relationship with them are carried in me and written about in a book about public engagement and social science – for me, the importance of sharing stories is the way in which they have been framed by the things that social scientists investigate: structural inequality, social exclusions, racism and the meaning of all of that for lived lives, the choices we make . My parents’ story and my own narrated memories are part of who I am and the work I have chosen and my writing here. I shall begin, then, with my own stories and stories told to me.

Mum’s story and my story I had to fill in an Equal Opportunities Form. Mum was asking me what I would class myself as. She said “I always put Human Being”. She did not see why she had to categorise herself in that way. “People are always trying to make us look smaller than we are, like we’re in the minority”. I said: “I was going to put Black British”. I said that I would never put English as I did not think that English people would see me as English. She said: “You are English, you were born here and so you are English”. I got quite upset and asked how she would define herself,“I’m Trinidadian”, she said with pride, very sure of how she felt. I was jealous of her certainty about who she was and so I got angry: “It’s alright for you, you know where you come from, you’re accepted there”.We fell silent. She looked at me confused. I did not understand how she felt and she did not understand me. This raised the question: where do I belong? What was always imparted to us (my brother and I) as children was the importance of doing well, to fit in, to be the best that we can be, not just because that was a good thing to do, but specifically because ‘people’ were not expecting us to do well. Expectations and pressures were high. The idea of bringing shame upon the family name was paramount and this shadow of an imaginary eye was prevalent and, in many ways, positive in terms of conformity, but I was acutely aware 217

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that my peers from different/mainstream backgrounds did not have the same constraints. They thought about and approached life very differently. This was my first sense of injustice; an injustice that many of my friends or age group (teens) did not have to think about. I often wondered what it would be like to be free of my thoughts, their thoughts, my parents’ thoughts. I was confident and happy, had lots of friends, and had a good childhood, but, ultimately, we lived with an underlying sense of fear. This sounds similar to most teenage childhoods but with one major difference: if people find out that you were all like the others – the stereotype – this would confirm to them who you are. And, somehow, if they were right, it would confirm your deepest, darkest fears: that you were, in fact, worthless. Stereotypes are created by part myth and part truth. Individuals can either buy into a story or seek to change it. It takes some time, maturity or encouragement to empower a person to change a story that appears to be already written for them. Often, you are given a story about your community. The stories you have from the inside and from the outside often differ but can make up different aspects/perspectives of a story. How much you take on, believe or buy in to can shape your personality, your thoughts and your actions.

Dad’s story and my story Dad came from a large family; he was the eldest of 12. He often talked about the hardships he suffered. His grandmother (his main carer) and himself would often go hungry in order to feed some of the younger children. A strong sense of responsibility was instilled in him and he took this very seriously. The story that sticks in my mind was about him struggling to fulfil his duty as the man of the house where he grew up in Grenada. He heard that there were jobs going as a bank teller in town; it would bring in a good income for the family, he was more than capable and it was a respectable job. He went for an interview, which he thought went well. A few days later, he was told that he was not right for the job but that if he sent his younger sister, she would get the job. The bank tellers were all fair-skinned, and although she was doing well at school, she was advised to leave school early and be the main provider of the family. This had a deep effect on Dad and hurt him more than he could say. My father’s experiences as a young man in Grenada, and recounted to me, spurred him on to leave home and search for better prospects abroad – an experience so typical of the migrant – but it was also a precursor to similar experiences he had here when he arrived in the UK. This story helped explain to 218

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me just who my father was, what had shaped him, the values that he held dear and why they were so important. He always lived his life in a way that gave him pride in himself. He did this through working hard, giving his children the best education possible, being honourable and reliable, and, ultimately, treating everybody he met as an equal and with respect, no matter what their background. Perhaps that sounds sentimental because he was my Dad. Writing about his experience of racism and thinking about social-scientific explanations of them adds further poignancy and understanding in his absence (he died last year).

My story I remember talking to a friend about travelling away and returning home. Like many, I’ve always liked the excitement of travelling abroad. I love the feelings of newness, other cultures, other traditions and food, and different climates. And while that is all-consuming, there comes a time when you just cannot wait to get home. But it has been a long journey in itself to finally experience that feeling of wanting to get home. But whose home? The journey that held the most trepidation for me was a visit to the birthplaces of my parents, Trinidad (Mum) and Grenada (Dad), for the first time. You always imagine that you will be accepted where your parents come from; that you’ll be welcomed with open arms to the place your Mum and Dad called home. But the sad fact is that you stick out like a sore thumb, and there begins the realisation that you do not belong anywhere. Definitely not in the way you wanted or first understood. Sociological investigations into such experiences might describe my experience as diasporic (Hall, 1990), an identity that lies between two or more places – between the old and the new – a typical condition of the migrant, the refugee. My friend listened and said:“The thing is, although you are black you are quintessentially English”. “No, I’m not”, I said. I might appear so on the surface, but, beneath, all my thoughts, feelings and perceptions are coloured by a view that stems from something that is other, not the norm or mainstream. We talked for hours and I could not articulate what I needed to say, not even to myself, but it made me realise that I had always had this sense of being different and I could not remember not feeling this way. So, who and what makes me who I am? What is it that makes my experience of growing up in the UK as a child of the 1970s and 1980s so different from my white English counterparts? I remember having conversations with my parents about playing with other kids:

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“You can’t be friends with everybody!! Some children will play with you one day and not the next but that will pass. Some won’t play with you because of the way you look. You just have to ignore them and find someone who will.” The words of warning did not stop there: “Some adults also won’t like you because of the colour of your skin”. I don’t remember the words being said but I knew that I was to stay away from men with a shaven head and tattoos. That made it really simple in 1979, but what about the others? So, my experience was of a willingness to communicate how human I was in spite of my most obvious physical difference, my skin colour. Being human meant copying and doing the same thing as someone who is accepted/popular. I eat the same things as you, talk the same way you do, laugh at the same things you do; all the while hiding the things that come naturally to me, the way I pronounce words, and fundamentally the way I express myself. Trying not to draw attention to my differences, not telling or sharing with you my language, food, music, dress code, religion, was because of a fear of ridicule and rejection. This induces a feeling of relief at being able to adapt and a feeling of shame at having to be two people. The feelings of difference are a significant feature of my childhood and enter into my observations of what happens to others regarded as and treated as ‘different’ in the community; my experiences from childhood appear to be mirrored in the experiences of others I work with. Now, sociological insights can be gained from the stories that connect us intergenerationally and across the countries we might travel. I, they, us have our journeys, our experiences of difference, of being made to feel different, of grappling with finding that sense of belonging.

Applying Social Science in the City™: a vignette from my work Inner city Bristol, and, in particular, Easton, has one of the most diverse areas in the UK and while you would say that the area and the people have a long history of absorbing new cultures brought in from other places, other countries, it is always a shock when new communities are introduced or thrust into this established environment.The pattern of resistance is often the same, although the triggers for conflict may be different, including rumour and myth. Here are some common sentiments gathered from working in the area: “They’re [Roma gypsies] taking over the play park”, “the children don’t go to school”, “they 220

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steal”,“they’re intimidating”;“They’re [Somalis] always spitting”,“they don’t have to pay business rates – that’s why they’ve taken over all the shops”. From 2003 to 2011, the young men we worked with at a local project mainly came from the emerging Somali community and the established Black British and Dual Heritage communities. All expressed a feeling of difference, but the effects this had on them were varied. The main issue for the new Somali young men was their very urgent need to fit in and assimilate into a society that so vehemently appeared not to want them.The earliest signs of rejection came at a grassroots level and were based in comments on blackness. As a worker, I witnessed the very quick trickle effect from the top down as a result of a need to allocate resources, and, therefore, the need for sometimes unhelpful categorisations was borne out of an urgency for structural support, such as housing, business and medical services. Identity was important not just in terms of heritage, but, particularly for the already established African-Caribbean community, also in a political sense, that is, that traditions, religions and language are not shared by newcomers. The application of the terminology ‘Black’ gives the impression of a homogeneous community, when, in fact, there are very different traditions, religions, languages and heritage between those from the African-Caribbean community and those newer arrivals from, say, Somalia/Somali Land. Ultimately, the settled communities saw themselves as being in direct competition for resources with the newcomers, including competition for funding, jobs, support for new businesses, communal spaces, housing and so on. Territorial feelings gradually filtered down and were played out in classrooms across the city, where pupils were encouraged to discuss their identities and where young Somalis were told “You’re not black”. Unintentional as it was, the effect was to construct a clearer definition for some of what or who they were,‘black’, and what or who they were not. So, who decides whose identity? The experiences of liminality are synonymous with the identity issues faced by teenagers. Being a teenager is often fraught with uncertainties, the very foundations of beliefs and values are continually shifting as they become challenged by others.This can leave the adolescent, rather like those who live between cultures, in a state of psycho-social limbo while they decide which parts of their old identity to shed and which new aspects/attributes/ beliefs to absorb and develop. For the Somalis, the question remains: ‘Who am I? Who am I if not Black and not White?’ For the Black British, the questions were: ‘Who are they?’, ‘Why do people think we’re are the same?’,‘Are we?’,‘What are we not?’.These 221

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struggles to establish identity through making others ‘not’ have been described by some writers on colonialism and racism as ‘estranging’ or ‘othering’ through a process of attempting to create more secure identities for themselves. There will always be someone trying to find a way to fit in, even if they do not assimilate, and there will always be someone who laments the life that was, when they felt more certain about their standing or what life may hold. Newcomers bring uncertainty and people often do not like change unless it is of their own making, but, at the same time, as the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman says, they encourage us to raise questions, to think afresh about the nature of things, in this way, to herald something that is potentially exciting and fresh, a different perspective to the rut we can get ourselves into (Bauman, 1990).

Oppressive structures We talk about oppressive structures when referring to systems or faceless organisations. But, in my experience, the structures that are equally as restrictive, if not more so, are the physical structures of a building.This was confirmed during my work with a community in Bristol, whose landscape is dominated by tower blocks that accommodate a large part of the community. This area’s history is synonymous with a life expectancy 15 years lower than the national average, low employment as far back as three generations and a close-knit community with a deep distrust of anyone who is not from there. The area had a long history of ‘agency fatigue’; people were tired of being the focus of many organisations, both statutory and voluntary, who promised to work with residents to improve their way of life and prospects and to introduce or improve opportunities. The most pressing needs of the families there were repairs to the existing flats. Many wanted larger and better housing facilities to be built on land surrounding the block and for their family members to have fair access to both old and new accommodation in the area. And yet, in spite of these pressing structural issues – which are tied up with housing policies, particularly privatisation and the selling off of council accommodation, and the poor maintenance of properties due to the reduced priority of funding – the greatest perceived barrier to families’ well-being seemed to be bound up with a preoccupation with an influx of immigrants. I was called in to do partnership work with other trusted local community support workers. After several group meetings, I was invited to help unpick specific structural issues involved in recurring conflicts between different members of the 222

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community. People were struggling with noise levels, leaking pipes and miscommunication over the use of the laundry room. Their angriest feelings were directed at things that could be physically repaired, for example, soundproofing, maintenance of pipes or something systematic like a better laundry rota or a better, fairer system for housing. But where people’s daily living conditions involved struggles over basic physical resources, it seemed easier, at a surface level, for them to vent their frustration on one person; somehow, they came to be blamed for the issues that were being inflicted upon them by the physical dilapidation of their surroundings. Newcomers are an easy target as we perceive their arrival to mean that we will miss out in some way, whether this is real or perceived. When talked through, they could see that there were things that were impacting on them due to physical or invisible design. However, it is nowhere near as satisfying to vent your anger at a building or a system with no face, where there is no response. Our grievances need to be literally embodied, somebody needs to contain them and think about them, respond to them in some way, or at least recognise and understand them. The point of the group work I was involved in was to create a safe space for people to hear and explore their conflicts, as well as a place for people to meet and get to know each other. In the physical building of our new housing estates, we have systematically built out or forgotten the communal spaces: the places where people gather to share difficulties, get a load off their chest and realise just how similar we are. It is important to state that we cannot force these communal gatherings; it’s best when it’s organic – but it has to be an option if we are to give it capacity to take place.

Conclusion The power for change is in the person. But you can use the story as a tool. If you change the story, you change yourself.Will you change the structure? Maybe not, but you may change how it affects you. How can we use storytelling as a vehicle for change? Stories are rich sources of data because, from a sociological point of view, their telling provides us with information about the sediments of injustice and pain, which need to be heard, thought about and engaged with by the listener and the reader. Stories in the community – the gathering of stories and working with stories – represent a unique way of applying social-scientific understanding to communities that are often in crisis. In their telling, listening, reading, working and

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re-working, stories are a form of public engagement. Stories are a rich tool for personal and social change. References Bauman, Z. (1990) ‘Modernity and ambivalence’, Theory, Culture and Society, vol 7, pp 143–69. Hall, S. (1990) ‘Cultural identity and diaspora’, in J. Rutherford (ed) Identity, community, culture, difference, London: Open University/Sage. Plummer, K. (2000) Documents of life 2: an invitation to a critical humanism, London: Sage.

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Social research, community engagement and learning through partnerships: a collaborative project Stella Maile, with Grace Aciro, Bethany Addicott, Laylee Arfsarpour, Joe Fitt, Georgia Leonard, Michael Nash and Annabelle Wilson

This chapter outlines some preliminary focus group research conducted at a tea party and a lunch. The purpose of the research was for community agencies to gather information about the health and advice needs of older people living on a council housing estate in Bristol. Another aim, and the focus of this discussion, was to capture some memories and experiences of older people living on an estate, since they are the carriers of living social histories and can tell us something about the deeper dimensions of the estate’s changing identity. Residents seem to be grappling with dilemmas surrounding the expression of their needs and hopes. These include the dilemma of retaining and representing feelings of pride and hope for community renewal in the light of positive community initiatives in the area; hope that is also associated with nostalgic memories and narratives of the estate at its best. However, in the current climate of public spending cuts, they are also struggling with under-resourcing and ineffective or problematic local policies in the face of rapid social change.There is a strong desire to connect with and understand newcomers to the area, including young families, migrants and refugees and the different cultures they bring, but many feel that they need support in terms of adequate amenities and more responsive councillors who really listen and act on their suggestions, which are derived from long experience of the area. A whole range of people were involved in this project, from the residents themselves to community workers, volunteers from Social Science in the City, and social science students from the University of the West of England (UWE) (for details, see the Acknowledgements). The chapter presents some findings from this collaborative effort, a 225

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project that, in itself, reflects a concern to reach out to, connect with, learn from and understand the feelings behind community development in the face of rapid social change. This preliminary research project was funded by Quartet and UWE’s Better Together Fund. It involved a focus group, tea-table discussion followed by another, smaller focus group discussion over a fish-and-chip lunch. Both events were organised in partnership with an Advice Centre, a local National Health Service (NHS) Trust, students and members of Social Science in the City.

Background to the project The estate was built in the late 1940s at the end of the Second World War on the back of inner city slum clearances. It represented a modernist post-war vision of public investment in social housing, leisure, community and educational facilities for working-class people. Early photographs of the estate convey something of what now seems like a distant and radically alternative social vision. In many ways, the identity of the estate has changed markedly from when it was first built. There have been changes in housing provision and demographic changes, including those relating to shifts in ethnic composition and the employment status and age of the residents. Since privatisation and the selling off of council houses, social housing is allocated to the hardest-pressed families, including the long-term unemployed and refugees and asylum seekers. There are more people claiming disability allowances and long-term unemployed on the estate. Relatedly, mortality rates are higher on the estate than for the city as a whole. Wilkinson and Pickett (2010, p 51) argue that ‘inequality … is a powerful social divider’, corrosive of the fundamental trust that members of communities need to work cooperatively together. From the perspective of community development workers in the area, the challenge is that there has always been mistrust from local residents of the city council, and this has been a hurdle for engagement and getting things done.The area has been in and out of a number of regeneration projects, including neighbourhood renewal; however, these have not been constant. Funding has been sporadic and projects have come and gone, leaving the community to disengage from activities as they do not know when they will be withdrawn. Community workers have also drawn attention to the challenging nature of work in an area where aspirations are low. One of those challenges is to inject pride into the area, raise aspirations and to involve people in the positive campaigns and activities that are emerging in the area, including plans for the development of the central square around 226

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which the estate is built, exhibitions focused on celebrating the area and other initiatives directed at raising awareness of the services and advice that are available to local residents. A fresh fruit and vegetable stall and the introduction of a community cinema were also set up as a response to some of the feedback from the first focus group. There is much commitment and hard work of community workers and a relatively small, core number of individuals who are engaged with local community activities. It is difficult to engage people who may feel disempowered. The focus group inquiries described here are regarded as an attempt to contribute to a spirit of engagement and understanding.The Advice Centre has offered support to the community for over 25 years and is one of the few organisations whose work and commitment has generated trust. They often take a lead role in initiatives for the local community and, along with another dedicated health community worker, they sent out 100 invitations, 70 of which were accepted, to a tea party roundtable focus group discussion.The tea party was followed, nine months later, by a focus group lunch involving a smaller group of 20 people selected from the first group. Through discussion (Morgan, 2002), the focus group can offer opportunities for people to share their experiences and their needs within their community or to generate a ‘collective testimony’ (Madriz, 2003). Testimony is informed by affect, as well as myths, narratives, shared dreams and ideals as these mediate experiences of the harder ‘facts’ of an area. Plummer (1995) highlights the importance of narrative inquiry for exploring what is shared, as well as points of disagreement and dissonances, which are part of the daily fabric of community life and society: ‘a textured but seamless web of stories emerging everywhere through interaction: holding people together, pulling people apart, making societies work’ (Plummer, 1995, p 5). Stories may hold people together and pull people apart. Some stories are told and some are or not.

General recollections: narratives of the past Working in partnership with long-standing community organisations has alerted us as social researchers to sensitivities surrounding the way in which stories are recounted and material is written (even if that material draws out direct quotes from people living in the area), particularly in regard to its significance for community work. There may be tensions between those who are trying hard to retain some sense of the positive experiences of and affection for the estate and 227

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portrayals of the more difficult feelings surrounding the way the estate feels today. It is difficult for residents of the estate to give voice to their grievances with the council since the local press have been quick to represent the area as a ‘lost’ community or as a ‘deprived area’. As one woman stated: “the press take photos of run-down parts of the estate, while positive photos of the estate are rarely taken. The press always gives a negative view, whether through images or words used. As a consequence some feel that they lack the power to make a change.” It is important to register problems but also to highlight the positive changes and potential for further community developments in the area. The complexity of feelings underlying community engagement or disengagement is important to retain.

Two nostalgic narratives: hope and despair The following offers two narrative accounts: one that might be regarded as expressing hope, gratitude and pride in the estate; another conveying a sense of loss and bewilderment. Both are important and it is something that community workers are trying hard to work with; according to Pickering and Knightly (2006), nostalgia may reveal something in the ether that is both melancholic and utopian: Nostalgia can then be seen as not only a search for ontological security in the past, but also as a means of taking one’s bearings for the road ahead in the uncertainties of the present. This opens up a positive dimension in nostalgia, one associated with desire for engagement with difference, with aspiration and critique, and with the identification of ways of living lacking in modernity. Nostalgia can be both melancholic and utopian. (Pickering and Knightley, 2006, p 4) In reference to the narrated experiences of living on the estate from the 1940s, the contrast of the space and airiness of the estate with the small, dark and overcrowded housing of the inner city had remained somewhere vitally important to retain as a kind of optimistic template by which to assess current experiences of change – not as a melancholic longing for the past, but as a sense of gratitude for something not taken 228

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for granted.Another woman described the pleasure gained from having a long garden, and the peace and quiet of living on a hill with wide views. One woman, V, moved there in 1947. She proudly stated that she used to work for the long-closed-down paper-making company ES and Dave Robinsons in Bristol, and remembered the estate as a vibrant place to live in. She said that she still loves the area – the space, the light, the decent people, her garden – and that she would not live anywhere else. V has held onto something good – a vision of the estate had been retained in a sense of pride, belonging and gratitude to the housing that had yielded light, space and a long garden. The narrative can also be regarded as acting as a more nostalgic longing for a passing world and associated feelings of loss. Another woman conveyed the feeling that things were better on the estate years ago, when she was growing up: “We would play marbles on the roads, there weren’t many cars then, it was safe to”, said a woman in her early 60s: “Now, children play on the computer and watch TV and they don’t see each other…. Everyone used to know each other on the road, if you fell over outside someone’s house, they would take you inside and put a plaster on you, no one would think anything of it.” Broader social change, the impact of technology and a world that seems less sociable and inward-focused is projected onto the now-deficient aspects of the estate. Others have expressed concerns about derelict buildings being ignored for long periods and empty spaces being neglected and unused. If there are feelings of abandonment, they may be related, from a psychosocial perspective, to experiences of getting older and feeling marginalised.This might be worth exploring further in subsequent inquiry. We might regard residents as grappling with feelings that may sometimes be bewildering. Affectionate attachments and pride in the area built up over a lifetime sit alongside more difficult elements of life on the estate: a feeling that somehow what is felt to be precious will disappear, be abandoned perhaps or become buried by other entities coming in. There were memories of the square having once been an impressive focal point but which has now become run down, especially since some shops closed. People are anxious about the encroachment of the university onto a local Memorial Ground and football site, as well as bids by a big supermarket chain to take over the area. In contrast to the 229

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remembered halcyon days of the area, where public space and leisure facilities were visible, there was not much in the way of facilities to socialise in now. The metaphors gathered from nostalgic narratives are interesting for the information they convey about deeper feelings and attachments to the area. But we also need to hold onto the ways in which these are framed by sometimes unhelpful policy decisions. For example, in regard to the impact of recent policy changes, the first focus group picked out some of the narratives of decline in regard to under-resourcing of schools, public spaces, leisure facilities (especially for the young), shops and pubs. Also important is the degree to which members of the focus group participate in dominant tropes for imagining and describing their experiences of the area.While there are some concrete facts relating to changing government and local government policies that undoubtedly impact on the area, there are also ways of speaking and thinking that may contribute to feelings of helplessness. These feelings may be associated with what sociologists highlight as the internalised power relations and discourses that position some people as relatively helpless and others as ‘all-powerful’. Balancing public and own perceptions and feelings seems to present dilemmas for those wishing to communicate their experiences without appearing too negative or helpless; questions arise as to how to retain some sense of dignity and potential positive change in the face of the injuries to esteem that some have expressed as coming from ‘bad press’, and to maintain enough motivation to get involved in what is often felt to be an under-resourced area.

A dominant discourse of decline Included in the summary was the idea that the estate had become a ‘dumping ground’ for ‘problem families’, phrases that occurred several times in discussion and were recorded by the note-takers. Researchers gathered together and argued about the sensitivities relating to what some might read as depressing or downbeat. However, these were phrases used in the first focus group and it felt important that they should be brought into the second focus group for further discussion and reflection. Clearly, the phrasing had detracted from the specific details of perceived problems. Those in the second focus group stated that they thought that the phrases were harsh, but there was agreement, however, that there had been some ‘troublesome families’ involved in drug-related incidents and anti-social behaviour living in the area, but these were not the majority. Others felt that the issue of ‘problem 230

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families’ was due to the council not thinking about where families were being placed and the knock-on effects this would have within the area. One resident had lived on the same street for 43 years and relayed his memories of the council sending one ‘problematic family’ to the street, and then another just three doors down, and then another just around the corner and so on. Similarly, when immigration and social cohesion problems discussed in the first focus group were relayed back to the second focus group, there was some disagreement with the perception. It was more a question of under-resourcing and limited facilities, including, for example, the additional pressures placed upon an overstretched GP surgery – in addition to insufficient amenities and public spaces for people to socialise, something not helped by the fact “that everyone keeps themselves to themselves”. Echoing a theme picked up on in the earlier tea party discussion, there was a feeling of the whole area being forgotten, particularly in regard to the needs of families with children. Reporters have been quick to describe such estates as ‘forgotten’ or ‘lost’.Actually, in relation to this, the biggest concerns were centred on children. Again, we can speculate on the interweaving of feelings about ageing (the loss of and longings for youth and childhood perhaps) with some very real physical resource needs.A playground had been built; it was very small and only really catered to very young children. There was concern about safety measures in place to ensure kids’ security. For example, there are no zebra crossings on the square, which is generally quite busy from public and private transport traffic, and the playground fencing was considered weak. Struggling families with children are not helped by a lack of appropriate school provision: the primary school is not considered big enough and there is no secondary education.The closure of the youth club was met with concern from the participants as one of them used to run the youth club in the church and recalled how successful it was at getting the kids off the street and involved in something other than family life. He was also of the mind that it would be a good thing to bring back to the community in a bid to re-establish the close-knit feel that the older residents remember so well and would like to regain. The desires and longings for reconnection are something community workers are doing their best to draw on and facilitate in difficult times. Perhaps there are other ways in which this spirit for engagement could be developed further. We are not all community workers but feel that there may be further opportunities in which our own skills might be helpful in providing further opportunities for reflection and engagement with the complex and deeply held feelings of people living on one estate. 231

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There was hope surrounding organised events in the community hall, involvement in the local community, community workers and the role of the Advice Centre, youth club and local churches. There was appreciation of all of these active and positive developments, highlighted by narrators as vital to a sense of belonging on the estate and worthy of high praise.There was pleasure expressed about the introduction of a cinema club after the first focus group. One of the participants had only just retired and expressed an interest in gaining more information about the community facilities and other possibilities for socialising and being involved. Another is interested in setting up a youth club. There is clearly a perceived need for more public investment and more responsive councillors. In this, we have learned of the importance of providing a coherent and nuanced narrative that does not fall into the trap of encouraging disengagement through self-talk associated with problematic portrayals of the area as simply ‘forgotten’, abandoned, a dumping ground and so on. Community initiatives, which have included the provision of a cinema, the organisation of tea dances, the creation of fresh fruit and vegetable stalls and delivery, and other events, are greatly appreciated but investment in infrastructure and a more responsive council are regarded as vital to the good work being undertaken by people working with limited resources. The question remains as to how those who feel undermined by some of the more aggressive and careless dimensions of local policy can be encouraged to gain a greater sense of their own power.

Conclusions This collaborative partnership inquiry has provided us with rich opportunities for learning. The contribution of older residents of the estate provides an invaluable resource for understanding the broader processes of change in the area, feelings surrounding structural underinvestment and hope in community initiatives on the part of community and church activists. We have also learned of some of the difficulties in developing a shared language of both justifiable indignation surrounding potentially wasted resources (physical space and older people) and heartfelt interest and pride expressed about the area. Bringing in students and staff from UWE was felt by the community workers to raise aspirations in an area that is socially and economically disadvantaged. The interest researchers took in the narrated experiences of local residents was regarded as contributing to a sense of pride. From our point of view, the participants in the research, the insights and experiences of community workers, and a 232

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well-established, highly respected and trusted local Advice Centre have been crucial to our collective learning. References Madriz, E. (2003) ‘Focus groups in feminist research’, in N.K. Denzin and S.Y. Lincoln (eds) Collecting and interpreting qualitative materials (2nd edon), London: Sage, pp 363–8. Morgan, D.L. (2002) ‘Focus group interviewing’, in J. Gubrium and J. Holstein (eds) Handbook of interview research: context and method, London: Sage, pp 141–59. Pickering, M. and Knightley, E. (2006) ‘The modalities of nostalgia’, Current Sociology, vol 54, no 6, pp 919–41. Plummer, K. (1995) Telling sexual stories: power, change and social worlds, London: Routledge. Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. (2010) The spirit level: why equality is better for everyone, London: Penguin.

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A student’s reflections on engaging in social science Five social science students from the University of the West of England (UWE) were invited, as volunteers, to participate in this study to enable them to gain first-hand experience of primary social research methods. Two additional volunteers, from UWE’s Social Science in the City™ Tart Café seminar series also helped with the facilitation and recording of thoughts and feelings of Lockleaze residents. Both volunteers have a background in social work and have been involved in the collation of stories and interviewing of older people in their former professional working lives. Another volunteer, Peter Archer, a freelance journalist with an interest in oral history, also took part in recording experiences.

Training prior to the event As part of their degree at UWE, social science undergraduates are trained in quantitative and qualitative research methods. They were given additional training prior to the Lockleaze event. This included discussion and practice relating to building rapport between researchers and research participants, exploring ethical issues relating to the study, training in verbal and non-verbal communication, and listening and recording skills. Students were trained in interviewing techniques, which allowed for the building up trust, rapport and the elicitation of as much information as possible.They were advised to keep their questions open and to avoid questions that closed down opportunities to reflect. We also discussed matters relating to team-working, the maintenance of role and boundaries relating to that role, and the importance of careful listening and the use of prompts to elicit further information. The students were primed on the aims of the event and were given the opportunity to discuss critical methodological issues as these relate to focus groups, the facilitation of discussion and one-to-one interviewing techniques. The research process is itself a social encounter and the subjectivity and feelings of researcher and ‘researched’ entered into ‘focus group’ discussions and one-to-one interviews. What the student researcher chooses to represent is as crucial as the researcher’s perceptions of 235

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those being ‘researched’. This is the case for all social research but acquires additional dimensions depending upon matters of class, gender, ethnicity and age. In the context of the latter, three of the student researchers were female and two were male. They ranged in age from 19 to 23. During training sessions prior to the event, students expressed their interest in speaking to members of an older generation, this, in itself, giving them opportunities to connect with people they rarely encounter in their everyday lives. For some members of the group, there was a feeling that this represented a loss for the younger generation. There was a keenness to find out about living history and a genuine sense of curiosity and respect for those experiences. By the same token, there was also some anxiety that they might come across as patronising, immature or lacking in experience by virtue of being young and in recognition of the fact that we are living in a culture dominated by preoccupations with youth. During the training session, we all reflected upon our attitudes to older people. We also explored potential perceptions of us, as representatives of a university. The following represents one student’s reflections on his methodology and feelings.

Reflections on Lockleaze tea party by Michael Nash, a second-year undergraduate in criminology The tea party in Lockleaze in June 2011 enhanced my understanding of the research process in the social sciences to a far greater extent than I had imagined it would have. Subsequently, my studies benefited from the experience.There were tangible examples of this before, during and after the event. Prior to the event at the Lockleaze Community Centre, those of us involved in the research met up to discuss the process. Each aspect was covered to ensure that as little as possible could go wrong. The most significant consideration, which impacted my studies the most, was the nature of the relationship between the researchers and the participants and perceptions of expectations and power. We had to be very aware of how the information was received. That is, we were there to ascertain their perspectives on their community and the changes that it has seen. As a result, we had to take a more relativistic approach to the interviews. Relativism refers to the position that no absolute truth or reality exists; rather, ‘reality’ is the result of a process of attaching meaning to events through their subjective interpretation by the individual(s) in question (Robson, 2011). Adopting a relativist approach is a key component of conducting qualitative research, as this allows researchers to gain greater 236

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insight into the participants’ ‘reality’ from their perspectives (Bryman, 2008), how it was constructed and how it is maintained. This further contextualises findings, making them more substantive. Adopting the appropriate mindset, that is, avoiding the pitfall of being ethnocentric (evaluating the opinions and ‘reality’ of the participants relative to one’s own conceptions; see Oliver, 2003), was the most prominent pre-event research experience that I was able to take through to my personal studies. I had to see things from other perspectives, perhaps in ways that I would not ordinarily do so, and be sure not to judge such opinions, which may well differ from mine, against my own belief system. This was a lesson that prepared me well for a particularly emotive qualitative research project that I carried out in the first semester of my second year.The impact of the project on my studies extended to the carrying out of the research itself. During the event is where I felt as though I gained the greatest insight into the research process of the social sciences. After all, social sciences are based on interactions between individuals, and the tea party was where this interaction took place. My conduct, as the researcher, was of the utmost importance, especially when keeping the required relativistic approach in mind, and this fed into the power dynamics of the situation. The power dynamics were the elephant in the room throughout, and, as such, were something that had to be, implicitly, addressed. I did not want to be seen as ‘the boss’ (something that was noted during the meeting the day before the event), as this may have adversely affected the data that I would have acquired. For example, participants may have been more guarded and less willing to divulge information to me, they may have told me what they thought I wanted to hear or may have been less willing to offer more candid answers. If this had occurred, the data and subsequent findings would have proven to be inaccurate. As such, the way I introduced myself, reassured them that I was there for them (not against them) and filled silences or used silence if need be were key in allaying any suspicions that the participants may have had, thus enhancing the quality of the research.This nuanced aspect of carrying out research in the social sciences was something that I did not appreciate prior to the event, and has given me greater empathy for those that carry out social science research. The Lockleaze event has changed the way I look at any research conducted by any researcher. For example, whenever I read a research article, I ask myself multiple questions, such as: what did the researcher have to consider prior to the event? Were there any interested parties pressuring them, and, if so, how might this have affected what I am reading? What consideration was given to the questions and their 237

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delivery? What was the setting of the interview? Why was the setting chosen? How did the researcher go about gaining consent? Asking myself these questions (and many others) stood me in great stead for the research that I carried out myself over the last academic year, as some of them were pertinent to my own projects. After the tea party, we had to reflect upon the data obtained. I was amazed at how differently the same piece of information could sound during and after the event. There were notable contradictions offered by some of the participants, and attempting to reconcile these opposing points was tough. It was at this point that I had to be critical regarding my own influence on what was said. Did I lead the participants? Was I using inappropriate vocabulary? Did I create misunderstandings by being too implicit/explicit? All of these questions, and more, needed to be asked in order to be sure about the validity of the data. Attempting to find any meaningful interpretations in such a diverse range of, sometimes inconsistent, data is very challenging (Robson, 2011). It was quite an intense process, which I was not expecting, but one that was wholly necessary to maintain the integrity of the project (Flick, 2009). The data can only be as good as its interpretation and presentation, which places a high level of importance on how the researcher extracts the data.To say that the researcher has no influence on the data collected in qualitative research may be naive (Robson, 2011). However, I had to be conscious of the potential of interviewer influence when attempting to interpret the data, and be certain that my influence was minimised. Anything more than the bare minimum of external influence on the data obtained would distort the overall findings of the project, and researchers have a responsibility to both the profession and the participants to ensure that does not happen (Bryman, 2008). The overall experience of the Lockleaze tea party research project was invaluable. I was able to anticipate many of the core aspects of the process prior to the event. However, the peripheral issues (before, during and after the event) – such as how the participants would react to me, what I would need to do in order to gain legitimacy (in their eyes) as a researcher, and maintaining the balance of being there in a somewhat informal capacity and yet ensuring that I achieved the goal of the research – were far more difficult to legislate for.The experience this project offered enabled me to truly grasp the nature of conducting primary research in the social sciences, which better prepared for the complex and nuanced requirements of carrying out my own research throughout the following year. I was far less daunted by the prospect of conducting research, and I felt as though I had a tangible experience 238

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to refer to if and when any difficulties arose within my own studies. The Lockleaze event provided me with an invaluable step along the trial-and-error path that is social science research. References Bryman, A. (2008) Social research methods (3rd edn), Oxford: Oxford University Press. Flick, U. (2009) An introduction to qualitative research (4th edn), London: Sage Publications Ltd. Oliver, P. (2003) The student’s guide to research ethics, Berkshire: McGrawHill Press. Robson, C. (2011) Real world research (3rd edn), Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Conclusions: Managing public engagement Stella Maile and David Griffiths

In the Conclusion, we revisit some of the key issues raised in the Introduction and developed throughout the book. In Part One, we outlined how changes within higher education had problematised the idea of the university as a public good, while noting how, at the same time, there are mounting pressures for universities to be more accountable to their putative publics. Public engagement, sifted through a variety of managerialist and top-down approaches, is now a central part of the university’s contemporary mission. Social Science in the City™ pre-dated these developments and developed from a commitment to providing critical spaces for reflection, initially in the context of drastic cuts to public spending as part of austerity politics. In the light of an acceleration of demands on universities to produce impact-relevant research as proof of their economic value to society, we must balance a number of sometimes conflicting demands and priorities. And yet, as we have discussed, and as various chapters in this book convey, there are multiple ways in which universities can be engaged, depending upon people’s values, skills and concerns.We have argued at different points in the book for the importance of encouraging critical reflection about pressing social, political and economic matters, wherever we can.That includes those people occupying strategic management positions as much as those from the most hard-pressed estates. While the origins of Social Science in the City resonate with the classic emancipatory role of public sociology, as outlined by Burawoy – one which includes ‘publics beyond the academy in dialogue about matters of political and moral concern’ (Burawoy, 2004, p 1607) – we must also respond pragmatically to the neoliberal-inflected agendas within higher education that emphasise impact.The reason we believe that this is important is because we believe in the dynamic quality of social life and the creativity and sometimes counter-hegemonic imaginaries of those who bring their own questions, experiences and issues into publically engaged events. Public engagement itself reflects conflicting demands, interests and agendas, both for the increased dissemination of scientific innovation to publics based upon processes of dialogue and empowerment, on the one 241

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hand, but also towards methods of control and increased surveillance, on the other. Discourses of participation and empowerment that are closely associated with conflicting and often incompatible conceptions of public engagement carry a similar semantic ambiguity, denoting at once processes that are initiated from above and movements and impulses emanating from below (Pearce, 2010b). The potential and difficulty of public engagement, for us, therefore, lies in the fruitful gap between these different axes of dialogue and control. How, after all, do we manage to do public engagement, to bring it off in practice? Publically engaged social science necessarily entails a series of shifting relations between us, the ‘sponsors’ (Rowe and Frewer, 2005), and our designated publics. As we noted in the Introduction, a significant question is the relation between expert knowledge and the publics that are mobilised, represented, mediated and developed by that knowledge (Mahony et al, 2010).The constituency or public addressed and mobilised by Social Science in the City was vague at the outset, the assumption being that ‘interested parties’, students, academics, practitioners, activists and interested individuals might gravitate towards an initiative of this sort. Rather than a fixed public ‘out there’, our assumption, following Mahony et al (2010), was that publics are fluid and mobile in character and are assembled at particular points for particular purposes. How this might develop over time was unclear at the beginning of the process, and is, indeed, still an unfolding story. How were publics represented in this particular public engagement initiative? Here, we have to underline the relation between dialogue and control in a public engagement initiative of this sort. At the beginning of the process, most of the initiatives tended to flow from the top downwards. Only after a period of time, when the café had become consolidated as a feature of local life, did the influences and currents emanate from other sources, with suggestions for talks and activities coming from a variety of individuals belonging to different groupings. It is difficult in this respect to talk of specific ‘claims-making’ concerning the putative publics represented by Social Science in the City. Beyond a commitment to address public issues that were of concern to a variety of different groups, we made no specific claims about which publics the social science café was assumed to represent. We were, however, animated by a general sense that we live in unusual and difficult times, in particular, since the 2008 financial crisis and its spillover into the national politics of austerity. How, we were asking, were local people affected by and coping with endangered livelihoods and a general climate of uncertainty?

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The range of topics covered in Parts Two and Three of the book give some indication of the lack of homogeneity in the publics addressed while underlining a set of common concerns and interests in promoting engaged research and fostering professional and political practice. The clustering of chapters in Part Two of the book – into: (1) issues of political and economic concern (the riots, the politics of austerity and the Occupy movement); (2) policy-related issues of an ageing population, redistributive justice and road safety; and (3) a consideration of homelessness and resilience in communities from a psychosocial perspective – reflect both the intellectual interests of the contributors but also their specific area of engagement and activity outside the confines of the university. Part Three, written from the perspective of practitioners in youth work and education, again reflects different intellectual traditions – the therapeutic and psychosocial, action research, and forms of narrative analysis – and also the central role of lived experience in the constitution of broader public issues such as community conflict, racism and inequality. An important outcome of this project has been to underline the role of the imagination in the constitution of the public realm. Publics are not only mobilised and represented (Mahony et al, 2010), but also imagined, in the sense used by Castoriadis (1997) to refer to significations that provide the basis for the constitution of meaning in specific social formations. Taylor’s (2004) approach to modern social imaginaries – which draws upon Anderson’s (1991) work on national imagined communities – emphasises that ‘a public sphere can only exist if it is imagined as such’ (Taylor, 2004, p 85).This is particularly relevant to the discussion of how particular publics come into being. What specific factors encourage or impede the formation of an imagined public as a collectivity with similar interests, aims and identity? At the same time, Castoriadis’ account of the social imaginary as a fluid repository of individual psychic investments in interrelation with broader social significations is of great relevance to those researchers and activists interested in charting the linkages and breaking down the divisions between the private and the public. As illustrated in this book, whether concerned with responses to homelessness, community resilience or the areas of community conflict, racial inequality and emotionally troubled children, the same constellation of imagined and narrated, but also individual and collective, communities and identities are in play. Concerning the diverse publics addressed by Social Science in the City, what processes of mediation were involved? The café-based informal talk was the initial mainstay of the project, although, over a 243

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period of time, this has mushroomed to include workshops, regular reading groups, formal lectures in larger venues in Bristol and student participation in research projects and training in qualitative methods and action research. Not least is the role of the website for Social Science in the City, which keeps individuals informed of future developments and up-and-coming meetings.A selected number of presentations from the café have also been made available on the website. The diversity of the publics addressed by Social Science in the City and the variety of ways in which alternative publics are represented and imagined has meant that no one distinctive public has emerged as a result of our public engagement initiative. This is also very much an emergent, ongoing process, as new constituencies are addressed and networks are formed. Some of the immediate impacts of Social Science in the City are evident in Part Three of the book, either in terms of the influence of specific presentations upon professional practice (Tansy Clark’s chapter) in terms of providing a climate for reflection upon professional practice and forms of engagement, or in making training and research possibilities into local communities available to students at the University of the West of England. To date, we have resisted a formal evaluation of the impacts of our public engagement initiative in terms of a discreet set of outcomes that can be measured, collated and compared across cases. But, increasingly, we also see the virtues of pursuing innovative forms of feedback as part of our own commitment to be reflexive about who might or might not be included in debate. The unique constellation of factors operating within a specific locale is of central importance here. The diversity of publics addressed, represented and imagined within the framework of this specific public engagement initiative also makes generalisation problematic. Another set of questions relates to the impact of public engagement upon the teaching and research of individual contributors. This was explicitly foregrounded in several accounts, for example, Robin Means on his own work in public engagement at the University of the West of England, Richard Kimberlee on his active involvement in road safety issues and so on. In other cases, the effects of public engagement were conceived in more conventional party-political terms, as in Matthew Clement’s analysis of the politics of austerity or in the language of networked activism in Sam Fletcher’s account of the Occupy movement. Practitioners – whether community workers, therapists or teachers – brought their own version of engaged professional practice to the proceedings.As in the delineation of the diverse publics addressed by Social Science in the City, there was a variety of ways in which 244

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public engagement was conceived of and acted upon by individual contributors to this book. In sum, impacts were diffuse, complex and resistant to formulaic reduction and quantification.

Revisiting Burawoy A continuous thread throughout the book has been Burawoy’s framework of the ‘four sociologies’ – professional, critical, policy and public – and, in particular, his characterisation of public sociology as a means of engaging with ‘publics beyond the academy’. His depiction of public sociology as reflexive and motivated by political and moral considerations has been a significant influence upon our approach to public engagement. It is important, though, to recall the complexity of public sociology as it: involves different forms of dialogue with diverse publics on a national or local basis; is based upon a broad or narrow platform; or involves more or less active publics mobilising for or against specific issues (Burawoy, 2004, p 1608). In addition, Burawoy differentiates public sociology according to whether it is focused on a narrow, elite social audience or has an organic relation with specific publics that it aims to represent. The chapters in this book stem from a range of social science disciplines and reflect a number of different approaches, albeit that they are unified by a concern with publicly engaged teaching and research.There is, for example, a clear link with social policy in several of the papers (Means, Kimberlee, McCartan and McKenzie), but also evidence of a keen awareness and dialogue with classical sociological theory (Hunt) and the British sociological tradition (Cummins and Thomas). Politically engaged activism of a grassroots kind is another strand to the contributors in this volume, as the chapter by Fletcher illustrates. On the other hand, most of the contributors in Part Three of the book are practitioners, either within education and youth work or the community-based mediation of conflict. A central point that we need to query concerns Burawoy’s juxtaposition of the humanistic, emancipatory role of sociology against economics and politics in particular, which he argues are very much on the side of the market and the state, respectively. In this context, is a public or dialogic social science possible? While a detailed analysis of the foundation, history and internal divisions within the social sciences is beyond the scope and competence of this book, there is a demonstrable overlap in the contemporary ‘matters of concern’ impinging upon social science (Latour, 2005), albeit considerable diversity in terms of theory, methodology and substantive areas of research. 245

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In this context, Law and Urry (2004) have argued for the performative character of social science as bringing particular social realities into being. Multiple possible realities are enacted through social science, through its theory and methods, which are both constructed and real. The categories of class, nation, poverty and population, for example, ‘participate in, reflect upon, and enact the social’ (Law and Urry, 2004, p 392). Not only sociological categories are performative in this sense, but also those in economics (the market model) and in the other social sciences (the delinquent, the homosexual and so on). In other words, Burawoy’s rather rigid division between sociology (as emancipatory) and the other social sciences (as restrictive) may be overstating the case. Rather, what should claim our attention is the common ground of the social sciences as performatively engaged in social life and as potential contributors to creating and imagining alternative realities. Finally, we would like to emphasise two main points concerning the replicability of Social Science in the City. Of paramount importance are the pragmatic issues involved in initiating and developing a public engagement initiative of this sort and registering the sheer good will and, most importantly, the social values and commitments of those colleagues and participants in events. Our second point, though, is to reiterate the role of narrative and imagination in the re-visioning of public–private spaces.We hope, in particular, that the model of extended public debate that we have attempted through the Social Science in the City initiative and in this book will be taken up and developed by other engaged social scientists, activists, practitioners and citizens. References Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, London:Verso. Burawoy, M. (2004) ‘Public sociologies: contradictions, dilemmas and possibilities’, Social Forces, vol 82, no 4, pp 1603–18. Castoriadis, C. (1997) The imaginary institution of society: creativity and autonomy in the social-historical world, London: Polity Press. Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-networktheory, New York: Oxford University Press. Law, J. and Urry, J. (2004) ‘Enacting the social’, Economy and Society, vol 33, no 3, pp 390–410. Mahony, N., Newman, J. and Barnett, C. (2010) Rethinking the public: innovations in research, theory and politics, Bristol: The Policy Press. Taylor, C. (2004) Modern social imaginaries, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Index

Index

A Aas, KF 84-5 ‘academic’ knowledge and research 31-3 action research 33 Adlam, J et al 151 Aebi, MF and Delgrande, N 134 ageing populations demographics 99 public engagement and understanding of 93-5, 95-7 collecting narratives of the past 227-30 engagement ‘messages’ 105-7 social care provisions and concerns 97-101 ageism 97-9 the ‘Agora’ (marketplace) 34-5 psychosocial dynamics of membership and refusal 146-9 AIM project 136 Ainsworth, Mary 184 Alcock, P et al 128 Alexander the Great 147-9 Allen-King, Jill 119 anti-car community protests 118 antisocial behaviours, and resilience 164 anxiety responses 153-4 Apps, P 56 Arnold, Alice 118 Asthana, S and Halliday, J 116 attachment theory 183-5 austerity policies 67-79 background history of 70-7 as ‘moral panic’ 68-9

B ‘baby boomers’ 99-100 and civic engagement 103-4 Badiou, A 68 Baiocchi, G and Ganuza, E 83 Ballatt, J and Campling, P 151 Barksdale, A 83-4 Barnes, M 12 Barnes, M et al 10-12, 23 Barton, H 116 Bauman, Z 34-5, 60-1, 146, 222 Bazemore, G and Walgrave, L 133 Beacons for Public Engagement 6

Becker, H 77 Beckett, A 70-1, 73, 74, 77 Beck, U 5, 61, 119 belief systems 165 Benn, T 73, 74-5 Beresford, P et al 196, 199 Berridge,V and Stewart, J 106 Beyond Left and Right (Giddens 1994) 28-9 Bicycles are traffic too 120 The ‘Big Society’ 102-4, 128, 131 Bion, WR 146, 189 BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service 54 Blackman, T 117 Blake, William 149 Bliss, George 120 Blunkett, David 84 Book ends (Harrison) 32 Bourdieu, P 31 Bowlby, John 183-4 Bowling alone (Putman 2000) 62 Braithwaite, J 131, 137 Braithwaite, R 198 Briggs, D 67-8 Brissette, E 85 Bristol, city characteristics 204-6 ‘Broken Windows’ theory 83 Browne Report (2010) 1-2, 27 Brown, G and Harris, T 166 Bryman, A 236-8 Buchanan Report (1963) 112 Building the National Care Service (HM Government 2010) 97 Bulmer, M 190 Burawoy, M 20-2, 35, 241, 245-6 ‘four sociologies’ 20-2, 245 Burchell, K. et al 6 Burroway, M 182 Bytheway, B 94

C Café Scientifique background rationale 5 concept descriptions 5 extent and scope 5 Calhoun, C 23, 78-9 Callaghan, Jim 71-7 Callon, M 117

247

Public engagement and social science Cameron, David 69, 131 Campaign for the Public University 35-6 campaigning activities 35-6 see also public protest car-free spaces and community engagement 111-21 Carson, Rachel 169-70 Castoriadis, C 32-3, 243 CCTV cameras 84-5 children with severe disturbances see severely troubled children Chodorow, Nancy 185 Christie, N et al 111 civic responsibility 61-2, 103-4 Clark, C 188 Clarke, J and Newman, J 9, 12 Clarke, Kenneth 56 Clark, P 113-14 ‘class war’ 81-2 Clegg, Nick 69 Clement, M 68, 79 Cliff, T and Gluckstein, D 73 co-construction of knowledge 33 see also knowledge exchange Coalition government adult social care funding 101-4 austerity policies 69 the ‘Big Society’ 102-4, 128, 131 on offender punishment and management 128-32 on road transport 111 Coates, D 71, 76 Coates, K and Silburn, R 196 Cohen, S 68-9 Cohen, S and Taylor, L 161-2 Cohen, S and Young, J 68, 72 Coleman, R et al 88 Community care: policy and practice (Means et al 2008) 106-7 Community First Grant 104 Community Resolve 201-13 aims and approaches 202 the Bristol context 204-6 conflict workers 207-9 examples of engagement 203-4 reaching the ‘hard to reach’ 207-9 theory—practice links 209-12 community spirit 61-2 conflict management Bristol-based social enterprises 201-13 theories into practice 209-12 and cultural difference 210-11 work experiences 215-24 consumerism 57-9 Cooke, B and Kothari, U 11-12 Cooper, L and Hardy, S 88 Coote, A 120 248

CoSA (Circles of Support and accountability) 137 Cox, M and Theilgaard, A 146 Crawford, A 138 Crawford, A and Newman, T 135, 138 criminal justice system (CJS), privatisation trends 131-2 criminality 55-6, 62-3 policies towards offender management 128-39 and restorative justice 132-8 Critical Mass (CM) cyclists 117, 120 Crosland, CAR 72-5 Crossnan, JD 148 cultural difference, and conflict work 210-11 Cutler, I 146 cyberspace 35

D Daly, K 132 Darlington, R and Lyddon, D 71-2 Dartington, T 151 Davies, Gavin 74 Davis, A 81 Dawes, S 28, 34 Deem, R et al 28 deficit model of welfare 162 deficit reduction see austerity policies Dennett, A and Stillwell, J 201 Department of Health 97, 104-5 ‘dialogic democracy’ (Giddens) 30-1 Dickens, Charles 78 Dignity for the Elderly Campaign (Daily Mail) 100-1 dilemmatic spaces 151-2 Dilnot Review (2011) 102, 104, 105-6 Diogenes 146-55 disturbed children, partnership working collaborations 179090 DIUS 9 Docker-Drysdale, Barbara 187 Dorling, D 149 Dudouet,V 210-11 Duggan, Mark 53-4 Durkheim, E 59-64

E ecological resilience 168-70 economic crisis background to austerity policies 67-79 and social divisions 54-5 Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) 13, 29-30 education collaborations UWE partnership ventures 182 in social pedagogy 179-90 engagement mechanisms 16-17

Index Engwicht, David 117-18 environmental degradation, neighbourhood responses 119-21 ESCR (Economic and Social Research Council) 13, 29-30 evaluation of public engagement 15-17 criticisms 33

F Facebook 86-7 see also social network communication The fall of public man (Sennett 1977) 61-2 family breakdown 55 Fenton, R et al 139 ‘feral’ generation 55 Ferri, E 194 Firth Report (1987) 101 Fisher, M 82 Flick, U 238 Foot, P 69, 71, 77 Foucault, M 147 Foulkes, SH 151 Fraser, N 11 The Free Association 87 Friere, P 87 funding of higher education and research 2730, 36 social adult care 101-2 The future of socialism (Crosland 1956) 72

G Gainsbury, S and Culzac, N 54-5 Galtung, J 211 gang cultures 54 and labelling 206 Gergen, KJ 211-12 Giddens, A 28-31, 61, 128 Gilleard, C and Higgs, P 103 Gilligan, J 149-50 Gilmore, J 85 Gitlin, T 78-9 Glaskin, M 119 Griffiths Report (1988) 96-7, 101 Griffiths, D and Maile, S 32-3 Group Conflict and Young People courses 204 Guest,Y 160 Gullette, M 97 Gunderson, LH and Holling, CS 161 Gurr, TR 60

H Hall, S 219 Halsey, AH 190 Hamilton-Baillie, B and Jones, B 119

Hammersley, M 15, 23 Hanvey, S et al 137 Harris, A 104 Harrison, Tony 32 Hart, A et al 9, 16 Harvey, D 11, 81-2 Hastings, Max 56 Healey, Dennis 73-6 Heaney, Seamus 147 Heiner, R 129 Henniker, J and Mercer,V 136 higher education collaborations and partnership ventures 179-90 funding models 27-8 political contexts 27-31, 36 and public engagement dimensions 16 evaluation and measurement 15-17 value of public sociology engagement initiatives 193-9 Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) 1, 28, 33 Hoggett, P 151 Hoggett, P et al 159-60 Holling, CS 160-1, 168-9 Holmwood, J 27-8, 30-1 Holmwood, J and Scott, S 22 Home Zones 119 homelessness impact of societal projections 149-50 psychosocial dynamics 146-9 working with 150-3 negotiating social defences 153-5 Honig, B 151 Hopkins, R 161 Hopper, E 151, 153-4 Howitt, D 129 Howker, E and Malik, S 100 Hudig, K 83-4 Hunt, A 104

I impact research 38-9 individualism 61-2 and civic responsibility 61-2, 103-4 and social defence mechanisms 153-4 International Monetary Fund (IMF) crisis (1976) 67-79 internet technologies 35

J Jacobsen, P 118 Jacobs, G et al 114 Jaffe, S 84 Jahan, Haroon and Tariq 63 James, David 37 Jessop, B 30 249

Public engagement and social science Joffe, J and Lipsey, D 96 Johnson, Boris 119 Johnston, A 82 Johnstone, G 138 Johnstone, I 113 Jones, O 35-6 Jordan, B 150

K Kaskie, B et al 103 Kellner, D 35 Kemshall, H et al 135-6 Khalek, R 83 Kimberlee, R et al 111 King, Mervyn 76 Kissinger, Henry 71 Kitzinger, J 127, 129 Klein, Melanie 186 Klein, N 86 Klein, SR 22 ‘knowledge brokers’ 13-14 ‘knowledge exchange’ 13, 33 hierarchies 31-4 ‘knowledge transfer’ 13 Kroll, A 86 Kunst, A et al 115

L labelling 69 Labour party, approaches to 1976 IMF crisis 67-79 Lammy, D 55 Latour, B 245 Law, J and Urry, J 245 Le Grand, J and Bartlett, w 104 Lederach, JP 211 Levi-Strauss, C 151 Lewis, P et al 56 Lister, R 194 Livingstone, Ken 54-5 Lloyd, S 51 Loader, I and Sparks, R 127, 139 Lockleaze Community Centre (Bristol), student reflections 236-9 lone parent households 55 looting, explanations for 54-64 Lucy Faithfull Foundation 137 Luthar, SS et al 163

M McAlinden, A 136 McCartan, KF 131-2, 135, 137, 139 Macdonald, R and Marsh, J 196 McKenzie, N 135, 138 McLaughlin, N and Turcotte, K 22 McQuail, D 128-9 Madriz, E 227 Mahony, N et al 18-20, 242-3 250

Maile, S 10 Maile, S and Braddon, D 29 Maile, S and Griffiths, D 33 Main, Mary 184 Mann, R 137 Marcuse, H 58 ‘marketization of social change’ (White) 87 the ‘marketplace’ see the ‘Agora’ (marketplace); public spaces Marshall, T 133 Maruna, S and King, A 129 Marx, Karl 57 Maslach, C 151 May, Theresa 56 Means, R et al 98, 106-7 Means, R and Evans, S 103 Means, R and Smith, R 95, 98, 104 measurement of performance 15-17 criticisms 33 media influences 128-9 ‘sound-bite’ interactions 86-7 meeting places 34-5 Melia, S 118 Michael, M 7, 10, 14, 18 Miliband, Ed 69 Ministry of Justice 129, 134 Minton, A 84 Monderman, Hans 118-19 ‘moral decay’ 56 ‘moral panic’ and the IMF crisis of 1976 68-9, 74-5 cf. current economic policies 79 Moran, L and Hall, A 57-8 Morgan, DL 227 Mulberry Bush School (MBS) (Oxfordshire) 179-90 multimedia technologies 35, 86-7 Muncie, J 134

N narrative approaches and conflict work 210 and recollections of the past 227-30 to understanding social inequality across generations 217-20 National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement 6 National Offender Management Service (NOMS) 137 Navia, L 146 Neighbourhood Pace Cars 118 neoliberalist perspectives funding of higher education 27-30 and Labour party policies 73-5 Newman, J 11 Norman, J 100, 103 Nuffield Provincial Hospitals Trust 98

Index Nunns, A and Idle, N 86

O obesity, sedentary lifestyles 115-16 Occupy movement 78-9, 81-8 size of protest 81 Occupy Oakland 82-4 offender punishment and management 128-32 restorative justice approaches 132-9 impact on victims 137-8 with sex offenders 135-7 and youth crime 134-5 Ogden, K 1121Adams, J 112 old age public understanding of 93-5, 95-7 collecting narratives of the past 227-30 engagement with care needs provisions 105-7 social care provisions, key concerns 97-101 Oliver, P 237 One dimensional man (Marcuse 1964) 58 oppressive structures 222-3 Orr, K and Bennett, M 34 Osborne, Peter 56 Our mutual friend (Dickens 1901) 78

P ‘pacification by cappuccino’ (Zukin) 87 PACTS 112 Panorama (BBC1) 99 participation barriers and protest movements 81-7 metaphysical 86-7 physical 82-5 ‘participation’ and the public sector, background 10-11 ‘pathways to impact’ 33 Pearce, F 78 Pearce, J 11-12, 22 Pearce, Pauline 57 Peck, J 88 ‘Pepper Spray Cop’ 82-3 performance targets, and public engagement 14-15 Phillipson, C 94-5 Phipps, D and Morton, S 13-14 Pietism 188 Pinn, Ingram 56 Plummer, K 217, 227 police powers, and protest movements 82-5 political alienation 55 pollution, neighbourhood responses to 119-21

Ponting, C 71 power differentials 149-50, 237 Pring, J 119 Prior,V and Glaser, D 185 protest movements barriers to participation metaphysical 86-7 physical 82-5 ‘meaningful’ participation 81-2 Pryce, K 196 psychosocial approaches for severely disturbed children 181-90 to the ‘disorganised response’ 146-55 ‘public/s’ 14, 18-20 public engagement descriptions and definitions 6, 9-12, 13-14 in higher education (overview) 12-17 implementation, funding and research 14-15 measurement and evaluation 15-17 key issues revisited 241-6 and science 6-8 critical perspectives 7-8 and social science 17-23, 245 definitions and terminology 18-20 roles 20-3, 245 public protest barriers to participation metaphysical 86-7 physical 82-5 public sector, participation and dialogue 10-11 ‘public sociology’ 20-3, 245 and social justice 34 see also social science and public engagement public spaces 34-5 psychosocial dynamics of membership and refusal 146-9 withdrawal from 115-16 see also shared space schemes Public understanding of science (Royal Society 1985) 6 Putman, R 62

R REAP (University of Bradford) evaluation model 16 reflexive modernisation 128-9 Reiki, working with the ‘hard to reach’ 207-8 reintergrative theory (Braithwaite) 131 relative deprivation 149-50 Research Assessment Exercise 1 Research Excellence Framework (REF) engagement criteria 14-15 impact statements 38-9 251

Public engagement and social science research funding 27-30 Research and Knowledge Exchange 36-7 residential child care overview of provisions 179-80 partnership working collaborations 180-90 resilience 159-71 ecological approaches 168-70 external resources 165-7 internal resources 163-5 personal reflections 161-8 policy directions and research traditions 160-1 as ‘thinking’ framework 171 restorative justice approaches background and methods 132-3 impact on victims 137-8 with sex offenders 135-7 and youth crime 134-5 Richmond, M 84 Rigby, N and James, P 115 riots and disturbances (2011) see 2011-‘disturbances’ Risk society (Beck 1986) 5 road safety 111-21 evolving participatory strategies 11617 extent of problems 112-16 health implications 115-16 mortality rates 113-14 neighbourhood responses to environmental degradation 119-21 shared space designs 118-19 traffic encroachment responses 117-18 Robbins Report (1963) 27 Roberts, J 129 Robson, C 236, 238 Rogers, D 100 Rose, N 8, 30 Rowe, G and Frewer, LG 9-10, 12, 1517, 242 Rowe, G et al 15-18 Rutter, M 164, 167-8 Ryan,Y 55

S Scanlon, C and Adlam, J 146, 151-2 Schafer, S 132 Schlade, J 136 Schrager Lang, A and D Lang/Levitsky 81-3 Schwellenangst 151 science and public engagement background contexts 6 concept definitions 9-12 critical perspectives 6-8

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Science and society report (House of Lords 2000) 6 Scientists on Public Engagement (ScoPE) report (Burchell et al 2009) 6 sedentary lifestyles 115-16 Sennett, R 61-2 severely troubled children, partnership working collaborations 179-90 sexual offending, and restorative justice approaches 135-7 Shapland, J 135, 138 shared space schemes 118-19 Silent Spring (Carson) 169-70 Sim, J 85 Slack, K 104 Smith, J 84 Smith, N 81 Smith, T and Noble, M 195 social care impact of cutbacks 100-1 new funding models 101-2 and older people key concerns 97-101, 225 personalised care systems vs. social care crisis 101-4 public engagement and understanding 95-7 key ‘engagement’ messages 105-7 role of the ‘Big Society’ 102-4 vs. health care, policy distinctions 95 social constructionism 211-12 social control 129-32 social defence mechanisms, against anxiety 153-4 social exclusion impact of economic crisis 54-5 and political alienation 55 psychosocial dynamics of 146-9 social inclusion practices 37 social justice and the role of public sociology 34 social media see social network communication social movements, and democratic participation 11-12 social network communication and incitement to riot 54 and new forms of public sociology 35 power of the ‘sound-bite’ 86-7 social pedagogy, new education and training initiatives 179-90 Social Science in the City™ initiative background and origins 5, 34-6 background political contexts 27-31 evaluation and measurement 16-17 general aims 33-4, 34-6 engaging with different publics 36-9

Index methods 36-7, 39 participants 36-9 attendees 37, 38 presenters 37-8 professional impact of 193-9 scope of discussions 37-8 student experiences 235-9 venues 36 social science and public engagement 17-23 definitions for ‘the public’ 18-20 knowledge hierarchies 31-4 political contexts 27-31 role of public sociology 20-3, 245 ‘sociology’ Burawoy’s distinctions 20-2, 245 and ‘public sociology’ 20-3, 245 Sprott, JB and Doob, A 129 Squibb, S 85 Starkey, David 54 ‘Stop It Now!’ 136-7 storytelling and conflict work 210 and understanding social inequality across generations 217-20 student fees 1 see also funding of higher education and research student reflections 235-9 surveillance society 84-5 sustainable development initiatives 120 Sutherland Report (1999) 96, 101, 105

T Tahrir Square uprisings 86 Taylor, A and Resnick, S 83 Taylor, C 243 Taylor, S 83 Taylor,V and Raeburn, NC 84 Thatcher, Margaret 70, 76-7 theory of violence 211 The Third Way (Giddens 2000) 29 Thomson, R et al 166 Thorpe, C and Gregory, J 6-8, 11 Toffler, A 28 Tottenham riots 53-4 Towl, GJ and Crighton, DA 127 Townsend, P 98 trade unions, support for wage cuts (1976-) 71-5, 78 Transition Movement 161 Travis, A 54 trust issues 33 Turkle, S 87 Turner, AN 74, 76 Turner, S 22 the 2011 ‘disturbances’ 51-64 explanations for 53-6

classic approaches 56-9 Durkheim’sghost 59-61 individualism and civic responsibility 61-2 reflections on 63-4 Twitter 86-7 see also social network communication Ty, M 84-5

U UK emergency planning 161 UK Uncut 78-9 Umbreit, M 132 Ungar, M 165

V values, and resilience 165 Vauban (Freiberg, Germany) 118 violence, theories of 211 A vision for adult social care (DoH 2010b) 97, 103 Vision Zero (Sweden) 115 Vitale, A 83-4

W Wachtel, T 130 Walgrave, L 132-3 Walking Bus 117-18 Wanless Review (2006) 101-2, 105 Watershed (Bristol) 36, 38 Weber, M 85 Weiner, A and Kupermintz, H 165 Weiss, CH 30 Weitekamp, EGM 132 West, D and Farrington, D 198 West, Steve 37-8 Whitehead, P 73, 75, 77 White, M 87 Why men rebel (Gurr 1970) 60 Wilkinson, R and Pickett, K 35-6, 60, 149, 226 Willetts, David 99-100, 103, 105 Williams, Nigel 37 Wilson, Harold 71 Winnicott, DW 164 Winslade, J and Monk, GD 210 ‘winter of discontent’ 76-7 Winterbourne View 99 Wolmar, C 111 Wood, J and Gannon, T 129 Work, consumerism and the new poor (Bauman 1998) 60 Wright Mills, C 29 Wright, M 120 Writers for the 99%, 85

253

Public engagement and social science

Y Yankelovich, D 129 Yassin, JO 84 Yearley, S 119 Yeats, WB 153 YouGov poll (2011) 52 Young, J 151 Youth Justice Board 134

Z Zehr, H 132, 138 Zizek, S 149 Zuccotti Park (New York) 815 Zukin, S 87

254

The book is organised in three parts: the first encourages the reader to reflect upon the different social and political inflections of public engagement and offers one university example of a social science café in Bristol. The following sections are based upon talks given in the café and are linked by a concern with public engagement and the contribution of social science to a reflexive understanding of the dilemmas and practices of daily life. This highly topical book will be of interest to academics, practitioners and students interested in critical social issues as they impact on their everyday lives.

Stella Maile is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Health and Applied Social Sciences and convener of Social Science in the City at the University of the West of England (UWE). David Griffiths is Associate Lecturer at The Open University in the South West. He is currently researching lifestyle migration amongst Britons living in Berlin.

SOCIAL ISSUES / SOCIOLOGY

ISBN 978-1-44730-686-3

www.policypress.co.uk 9 781447 306863 policypress

Public engagemnet and social science_PPC.indd 1

PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT AND SOCIAL SCIENCE • Edited by Stella Maile and David Griffiths

This original edited collection explores the value of public engagement in a wider social science context. Its main themes range from the dialogic character of social science to the pragmatic responses to the managerial policies underpinning the restructuring of Higher Education.

PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT AND SOCIAL SCIENCE

Edited by Stella Maile and David Griffiths

@policypress

5/2/2014 12:23:02 PM