What Political Science Can Learn From The Humanities: Blurring Genres [1st Edition] 3030516962, 9783030516963, 9783030516970

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What Political Science Can Learn from the Humanities Blurring Genres Edited by  R.A.W. Rhodes · Susan Hodgett

What Political Science Can Learn from the Humanities

R. A. W. Rhodes  •  Susan Hodgett Editors

What Political Science Can Learn from the Humanities Blurring Genres

Editors R. A. W. Rhodes University of Southampton Southampton, UK

Susan Hodgett University of East Anglia Norwich, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-51696-3    ISBN 978-3-030-51697-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51697-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and ­information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Brain light / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Praise for What Political Science Can Learn from the Humanities “This book offers lots of surprises. Its chapters are deeply and rigorously grounded in several disciplines but the links across them are truly interdisciplinary. [It] offers an ambitious agenda of further scholarship in the burgeoning fields of narrative and linking humanities and social sciences. Some of these unconventional linkages (like autoethnography or architecture) challenge the reader. This insightful and thought provoking collection stimulates creative approaches to both political science and the humanities.” —Mel Cappe, Professor at Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto, Canada; and former Canadian Secretary to Cabinet and High Commissioner to the UK “This admirable collection has long been needed. Dominated by its two editorial contributions, it takes with complete seriousness the long-­needed admonition to teach the social sciences how to use to their advantage and imaginative transformation the methods, materials, and convictions of the humanities. The result is exhilarating and transformative.” —Fred Inglis, Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies, University of Sheffield, UK “What Political Science Can Learn from the Humanities: Blurring Genres is an outstanding work of collaborative scholarship. The editors, Susan Hodgett and R. A. W. Rhodes, are prominent scholars who have assembled an all-star interdisciplinary team of contributors. This study applies analogies and metaphors from the humanities to political science and succeeds across the board. Blurring Genres sets an agenda for engagement of social sciences productively with the humanities that is based on disciplines ranging from architecture and design through comparative literature. The volume accesses a wide range of methods found in the humanities, such as

autoethnography, along with content from fields like photography, to answer significant research questions while simultaneously identifying new and fascinating queries for further consideration. Blurring Genres is a volume that deserves attention throughout academia and even beyond because of its intellectual contributions and ability to inform our thinking about any number of social problems.” —Patrick James, Dornsife Dean’s Professor of International Relations, University of Southern California

Preface and Acknowledgements

The aim of this book is to recover the methods of the Arts and Humanities for the use of political scientists and interdisciplinary area (or country) studies specialists. The origins of this book lie in a series of seminars under the title of ‘Blurring Genres Network: Recovering the Humanities for Political Science and Area Studies’ funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Susan Hodgett took the lead in organising the network and the seminars, which investigated examples of blurring genres, or crossing boundaries, between the disciplines in pursuit of insight into making and remaking theory and practice. It brought together international scholars working on interpretive approaches to Political Science, with experts on Area Studies, to investigate what added value interdisciplinary research teams can bring to traditional research approaches when exploring modern governance. The Blurring Genres Network sought to organise a research field that, to date, has been unstructured, lacking conferences, publications or directly relevant professional associations. The network explored the stories created, evolved and recounted in the implementation of everyday policy-making in the practice of modern government. It brought together learned societies (UK Council for Area Studies Associations, Political Studies Association UK and the Western Political Science Association USA). We organised seven workshops crossing the boundaries between the Arts and Humanities and the Social Sciences on the themes of political studies as drama, as narratives, as history, as anthropology, as literature, as the visual arts and as philosophy (and for more details, see https://app. researchfish.com/awards). vii

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The papers presented at the workshops are the origins of this book. R. A. W. Rhodes took the lead in editing the book. The selection of chapters was guided by the feedback we received on each seminar. Two themes stood out and the audiences returned to them time after time—narratives and the visual arts. It became clear quickly that the study of narratives and meta-narratives (narratives about narratives) was significant for historians, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers and policy-­ makers. The analysis of narratives is a long-standing staple of the Humanities and it became ubiquitous in the Social Sciences in the 2000s. So, this shared theme was neither novel nor a surprise. The sheer novelty of the visual arts in the study of politics probably explains why it commanded attention whether the example is photographs, cartoons or comics, and the workshops covered all three. We were also impressed by Mandy Sadan’s workshop paper on recovering the history of the Kachin people of Burma using photography and video (see also her Being and Becoming Kachin: Histories Beyond the State in the Borderworlds of Burma, 2013). As a result, this collection focuses on narratives and the visual arts. Of course, we could include many more examples of genre blurring. However, if these two examples do not persuade readers that the Humanities give us new ways of telling our political tales, then adding more examples will achieve now. We acknowledge the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (project AH/N006712/1 Blurring Genres Research Network) without which there would have been no workshops and no book. We thank Mark Bevir for organising the workshop on politics as literature at the Center for British Studies, University of California, Berkeley. We also thank the participants at the several seminars sponsored by the AHRC for all their helpful comments and criticisms. Southampton, UK Norwich, UK 

R. A. W. Rhodes Susan Hodgett

Contents

1 Blurring Genres: An Agenda for Political Studies  1 R. A. W. Rhodes and Susan Hodgett Part I Narratives and Politics  31 2 Narrative Ecologies in Post-truth Times: Nostalgia and Conspiracy Theories in Narrative Jungles? 33 Yiannis Gabriel 3 It’s the Way You Tell It: Conflicting Narratives in the 2011, 2015, and 2019 Canadian Federal Elections 57 Sandford Borins and Beth Herst 4 Novels and Narratives: The Pursuit of Forms and Perceptive Policymaking 81 Susan Hodgett 5 Autoethnography as Narrative in Political Studies107 R. A. W. Rhodes 6 Where Is I? Autoethnography in Collaborative Research129 Lee Jarvis, Lee Marsden, Eylem Atakav, and Qudra Goodall

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Contents

Part II The Visual Arts and Politics 151 7 Photography in British Political History153 Sir Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell 8 Architectural Power181 Charles T. Goodsell 9 Design and Politics233 Bruce Brown 10 Persuasive Comics259 Randy Duncan 11 Political Science and the Arts as Allies and Strange Bedfellows: A Chapter in Five Parts287 Catherine Althaus Name Index315 Subject Index323

Notes on Contributors

Catherine Althaus  is a professor in the Public Service Research Group, School of Business, at the University of New South Wales, Canberra, and Australia and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG) Deputy Dean (Teaching and Learning). Before coming to ANZSOG, she spent nine years teaching and researching in Canada, culminating in her position as Director of the School of Public Administration at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. Prior to that, she was a post-doctoral fellow at the Australian National University, and she held several policy posts with the Queensland Treasury department and Queensland Office of the Cabinet. She has been a co-author of popular textbook The Australian Policy Handbook since its fourth edition in 2007. Since 2017, she has been an editor of the Australian Journal of Public Administration. Althaus is a University Medallist and has won several awards, including the 2012 Sam Richardson Award for the most influential article in the Australian Journal of Public Administration and an Australia Day Medallion for service to the Queensland Treasury. Eylem Atakav  is Professor of Film, Gender and Public Engagement at the University of East Anglia where she teaches courses on women and film; women, Islam and media; and Middle Eastern media. She is the author of Women and Turkish Cinema: Gender Politics, Cultural Identity and Representation (2012) and editor of Directory of World Cinema: Turkey (2013). She is the director of Growing Up Married (2016)—an internationally acclaimed and award-winning documentary about forced marriage and child brides in Turkey. xi

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Sandford Borins  is Professor of Public Management at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on narrative and innovation. His 11 books include Negotiating Business Narratives (2018), The Persistence of Innovation in Government (2014), Governing Fables: Learning from Public Sector Narratives (2011) and Innovating with Integrity (1998). He was President of the Canadian Association of Programs in Public Administration from 2003 to 2007 and served as chair of his department from 1990 to 2003. He pursued his undergraduate studies at Harvard, where he graduated magna cum laude and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He holds a master’s degree in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School and a PhD in Economics from Harvard. He writes a blog on public management, innovation and narrative at www.sandfordborins.com. Bruce Brown  is a visiting professor of design at Goldsmiths College and at the Royal College of Art in London. Prior to this, he was Professor of Design at the University of Brighton and the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research. Appointed by the funding councils for England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales he chaired the Main Panel for Arts and Humanities in the UK Research Excellence Framework 2014 and chairs the Creative Arts panel in the Hong Kong Research Assessment Exercise 2020. He has advised international organisations including the Hong Kong Council for Academic Accreditation, the Israeli Council for Higher Education and the Qatar National Research Fund. He chaired the Portuguese government’s Fundação para a Ciência ea Tecnologia Research Grants Panel [Arts] and was invited by the Organisation de Coopération et de Développement Économiques (OECD) to undertake an international review entitled Reforming Arts and Culture Higher Education in Portugal. He is an editor of Design Issues research journal (MIT Press), an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Art and a life fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and of the Academia Europaea. Randy  Duncan is the Ellis College Distinguished Professor of Communication and Director of the Center for Comics Studies at Henderson State University. He has given talks about comics in New York, Paris, Athens, Passau, Toulouse, São Paulo, Belfast and Prague. He is ­co-­author of The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture (2009; 2015) and Creating Comics as Journalism, Memoir and Nonfiction (2016). He is co-editor of the Eisner-nominated Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods (2012) and the companion volume More Critical Approaches to Comics (2020). In 1992, Duncan co-founded the Comics

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Arts Conference, the first US academic conference devoted to comics. In 2010, he won the Inge Award for excellence in comics scholarship, and in 2012 Comic-Con International gave him an Inkpot Award for contributions to Comics Studies. Duncan is co-curator of the touring exhibition Marvel: Universe of Super Heroes and co-editor of the Routledge Advances in Comics Studies book series. Yiannis  Gabriel  is Emeritus Professor at University of Bath where he held a Chair in Organizational Theory for many years. Earlier, he held chairs at Imperial College and Royal Holloway, University of London. Gabriel is known for his work on leadership, management learning, organisational storytelling and narratives, psychoanalytic studies of work and the culture and politics of contemporary consumption. He is the author of ten books, including most recently (with Mats Alvesson and Roland Paulsen) Return to Meaning: A Social Science with Something to Say (2017). He has published numerous articles and maintains an active blog in which he discusses music, storytelling, books, cooking, pedagogy and research outside the constraints of academic publishing (http://www.yiannisgabriel. com/). Of late, he has been developing the concept of narrative ecology and writing about conspiracy theories and nostalgia as elements of posttruth political cultures. Qudra Goodall  is an Economic and Social; Research Council (ESRC)funded PhD candidate and associate tutor at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. Her doctoral research ‘Subjectivities and Everyday Forms of Faith: A Case Study of Convert Muslim Women in Norwich’ is interested in collating the everyday lived experiences of first- and second-generation British convert Muslim women, particularly in relation to subjectivities and models of self and personhood regarding faiths, practices and ethical imagination, which play out across peoples’ life trajectories, including home and working lives, to reveal a more intricate tapestry of contemporary British Muslims. Proposing an alternative approach to reducing people to national, cultural or religious categories, this study aims to deconstruct predefined ‘identities’ and dismantle ­stereotypical and reductionist binaries which permeate current popular and political Islamophobic discourses. Charles  T.  Goodsell is a retired member of the public administration faculty of Virginia Tech in the USA. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Kalamazoo College and MPA, MA and PhD degrees (the last in Political Science) from Harvard University. He taught for 40 years at Virginia Tech

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and previously at Southern Illinois University and the University of Puerto Rico, with visiting positions at The University of Texas, Cleveland State University and Carleton University in Ottawa. His books include Public Servants Studied in Image and Essay (2019), The Case for Bureaucracy (1984, 1985, 1994, 2004 and 2014), Mission Mystique (2011), The American Statehouse (2001), The Social Meaning of Civic Space (2001), American Corporations and Peruvian Politics (1974) and Administration of a Revolution (1965). Born in the year Franklin Roosevelt was first elected, he is working on a study of the early New Deal as the finest hour of American public administration. Beth Herst  is a playwright and independent scholar. She is the co-author of Negotiating Business Narratives (2018). Her play, A Woman’s Comedy (1992), about Aphra Behn, the first English-language female playwright, continues to be performed. She is also the author of The Dickens Hero (1989). She did her undergraduate studies in literature and history at the University of Toronto, where she received the Governor General’s medal, and holds a PhD from the University of London. Susan Hodgett  is Founding Professor of Area Studies at the University of East Anglia (UEA). She is also Director of Area Studies at UEA focusing on identifying, leading and developing research and teaching activity across the Faculty of Arts and Humanities and beyond. She is Sub-Panel Chair of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021 Unit of Assessment (UoA) 25, Area Studies, and was Deputy Chair of the REF 2014 Area Studies Sub-Panel. She was President of the UK Council for Area Studies Associations (2011–2014) and President of the International Council for Canadian Studies. Before becoming an academic, she was General Secretary of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland. She has published widely in such journals as Public Administration and the Journal of Human Development. Her most recent book, with Patrick James, is Necessary Travel: New Area Studies and Canada in Comparative Perspective (2018). Lee Jarvis  is Professor of International Politics at the University of East Anglia, UK. His research on the politics of terrorism and security has been funded by the ESRC, AHRC, North Atlantic Treat Organization (NATO) and others, and published in journals including Review of International Studies, Security Dialogue, International Political Sociology and Political Studies. He is author or editor of 13 books, including Anti-terrorism, Citizenship and Security (with Michael Lister, 2015), Security: A Critical

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Introduction (with Jack Holland, 2015), Critical Perspectives on CounterTerrorism (with Michael Lister, 2015) and Counter-Radicalisation: Critical Perspectives (with Christopher Baker-Beall and Charlotte HeathKelly, 2015). Lee Marsden  is Professor of Faith and Global Politics and Head of the School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies at the University of East Anglia, UK. He is author or editor of seven books, including Religion and International Security (2018), Religion and Conflict Resolution (2012), Doing Political Science and International Relations: Theories in Action (with Heather Savigny, 2011), Media, Religion and Conflict (with Heather Savigny, 2009) and For God’s Sake: US Foreign Policy and the Christian Right (2008). Raymond Newell  is a postgraduate at King’s College London. He coauthored with Anthony Seldon a biography on British Prime Minister Theresa May, May at 10 (2019). He is working on books covering the history of 10 Downing Street and photography in British politics. R. A. W. Rhodes  is Professor of Government (Research) at the University of Southampton, UK. He is the author or editor of 40 books, including The Art and Craft of Comparison (With J. Boswell and J. Corbett, 2019), Network Governance and the Differentiated Polity. Selected Essays. Volume I (2017), Interpretive Political Science. Selected Essays. Volume II (2017), Narrative Policy Analysis (editor, Palgrave Macmillan 2018) and the Routledge Handbook of Interpretive Political Science (edited with Mark Bevir, 2015). He is a fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (UK). In 2015, the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) awarded him its biennial Lifetime Achievement Award for his ‘outstanding contribution to all areas of political science, and the exceptional impact of his work’. Sir  Anthony  Seldon was Vice-Chancellor of The University of Buckingham since 2015 and one of Britain’s leading contemporary historians, educationalists, commentators and political authors. He is author or editor of over 40 books on contemporary history, including books on the last five prime ministers. He was the co-founder and first director of the Institute for Contemporary British History, co-founder of Action for Happiness, honorary historical adviser to 10 Downing Street, a member of the Government’s First World War Culture Committee, Chair of the

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Comment Awards, a Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the President of International Positive Education Network (IPEN), patron or on the board of several charities, founder of the Via Sacra Western Front Walk and executive producer of the film Journey’s End. He was a transformative Head for 20 years, first of Brighton College and then of Wellington College. He appeared on the Desert Island Discs in 2016. For the last 15 years, he has given all his money from writing and lecturing to charity.

List of Figures

Fig. 9.1 Fig. 10.1 Fig. 10.2 Fig. 10.3 Fig. 10.4 Fig. 10.5 Fig. 10.6 Fig. 10.7

Four orders of design ‘The Carlyle Group 1’ page 94, panel 5. (Source: Used with permission of Seth Tobocman. Originally published in Bush Junta (2004)) We the People page 4, panels 5, 6, and 7. (Source: Used with permission of Neil Cohn. Originally published in We the People: A Call to Take Back America (2004)) ‘Democracy in Fallujah 1’ page 31, panels 1–4. (Source: Used with permission of Seth Tobocman. Originally published in World War 3 Illustrated # 36 (2005)) ‘Democracy in Fallujah 2’ page 29, panel 3. (Source: Used with permission of Seth Tobocman. Originally published in World War 3 Illustrated # 36 (2005)) ‘Democracy in Fallujah 3’ page 29, panel 5. (Source: Used with permission of Seth Tobocman. Originally published in World War 3 Illustrated # 36 (2005)) ‘The Carlyle Group 2’ page 89, panels 3–6. (Source: Used with permission of Seth Tobocman. Originally published in Bush Junta (2004)) All-Atomic Comics page 22, panel 7. (Source: Used with permission of Leonard Rifas. Originally published in AllAtomic Comics (1976))

241 274 275 276 277 278 279 281

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List of Photographs

Photograph 7.1 Photograph 7.2 Photograph 7.3 Photograph 7.4 Photograph 7.5 Photograph 7.6 Photograph 7.7

Photograph 7.8 Photograph 7.9 Photograph 7.10 Photograph 7.11 Photograph 7.12 Photograph 7.13 Photograph 8.1 Photograph 8.2 Photograph 8.3

Queen Elizabeth I, by an unknown English artist, Oil on panel, circa 1588 Walpole is shown seated in the robes of the first lord of the Treasury, with his garter ribbon, badge, and star proudly displayed Winston Churchill (1941). Source: Photograph by Yousuf Karsh, Camera Press London Margaret Thatcher leaving Number 10 in tears in 1990 Labour leader Ed Miliband’s battle with a bacon sandwich at a London cafe, May 2014 Bodies lie in front of the Dunker Church on the Antietam Battlefield, 1863 Photograph of Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald with Margaret Bondfield, the first female member of the Cabinet and Minister for Labour in the government of 1929–1931 A meeting of the British Communist Party, Earls Court, London, 5 August 1939 Aneurin Bevan speech, Trafalgar Square, 1956 Hitler addressing a group of admiring followers after breakfast in a cellar John Major and Gemma Levine Ted Heath moves to Number 10 Boris Johnson on Election Night The Colorado State Capitol, built in 1886–1908 Missouri’s Capitol seen from across the Mississippi The Kansas State Capitol, built in 1866–1906

158 159 160 161 162 164

166 167 168 169 175 177 178 184 185 186 xix

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List of Photographs

Photograph 8.4 Photograph 8.5 Photograph 8.6 Photograph 8.7 Photograph 8.8 Photograph 8.9 Photograph 8.10 Photograph 8.11 Photograph 8.12 Photograph 8.13 Photograph 8.14 Photograph 8.15 Photograph 8.16 Photograph 8.17 Photograph 8.18 Photograph 8.19 Photograph 8.20 Photograph 8.21 Photograph 8.22 Photograph 8.23 Photograph 8.24 Photograph 8.25 Photograph 8.26 Photograph 8.27 Photograph 8.28 Photograph 8.29 Photograph 8.30 Photograph 8.31 Photograph 8.32 Photograph 8.33 Photograph 8.34 Photograph 8.35 Photograph 8.36 Photograph 8.37 Photograph 8.38 Photograph 8.39 Photograph 8.40 Photograph 8.41 Photograph 8.42 Photograph 8.43

Florida’s new ‘male genitalia’ Capitol 187 The Empire State Plaza’s Agency Buildings 188 The Cincinnati City Hall, constructed in 1888–1893 189 The upside-down pyramid in Tempe, built in 1969–1971190 Mississippi’s ‘New’ Capitol, constructed in 1901–1903 191 New York State Capitol as seen from Empire State Plaza 192 The Connecticut Capitol, designed by Robert Mitchell Upjohn 193 One of the ‘Merci Train’ boxcars still remaining 194 The Statue of Liberty replica in Wyoming 195 South temple front in West Virginia State Capitol 196 The half-ton main portal in West Virginia 197 St. Paul City Hall elevator entry door 198 New York State Capitol elevator entry door 199 Entrance to Mississippi Governor’s Office before 1903 200 Entrance to Mississippi Governor’s Office after 1903 200 Entrance to Office of the Illinois Governor 201 Entrance portal to Oklahoma State Senate 202 Entrance portal to Colorado State Senate 203 Rotunda floor seal in Minnesota Capitol 203 Louisiana House of Representatives 204 New York City Board of Estimate chamber 205 Arkansas Senate members-only lounge 205 Rhode Island House deal-making room 206 Arkansas Capitol rotunda ceiling and chandelier 208 Texas State Capitol rotunda seen from above 209 Staircase in Arkansas Capitol rotunda 210 Second floor landing in Iowa Grand Staircase 211 Façade of Illinois State Capitol, built in 1868–1888 213 British House of Commons 214 French Chamber of Deputies 215 Arizona House of Representatives 216 Michigan state senator at work in Chamber 216 Santa Rosa City Council Chamber 217 Gavel and sounding block at Louisville City Hall 217 Mace in South Carolina House of Representatives 218 South Carolina State Senate Sword of State 219 Huey Long’s Louisiana remote voting monitor 220 New Mexico Capitol security control room 220 Lynchburg City Hall escape route 221 Hidden door in Office of New York Governor 222

  List of Photographs 

Photograph 8.44 Photograph 8.45 Photograph 8.46 Photograph 8.47 Photograph 8.48 Photograph 8.49

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Brigham Young Statue in Utah Capitol rotunda 223 ‘The Patriot’ statue in Idaho Capitol rotunda 224 Site of Washington’s relinquishment of command in Maryland225 Texas State Capitol restored newel post 226 Violet Oakley’s mural in Pennsylvania Senate Chamber 227 Mormon Meteor III race car in Utah Capitol Crypt 228

List of Tables

Table 1.1 Table 3.1 Table 3.2 Table 3.3 Table 3.4 Table 3.5 Table 3.6 Table 3.7 Table 3.8

Orientations to political research Structuring fables, 2015 Canadian federal election Type of ad, 2015 Canadian federal election Policy issues discussed, 2015 Canadian federal election Narrating voice, 2015 Canadian federal election ads Use of music, 2015 Canadian federal election Basic tonality of ads, 2015 Canadian federal election Ad view counts and totals, 2015 Canadian federal election Five most-viewed ads by party, 2015 Canadian federal election

11 67 68 69 70 71 73 74 75

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CHAPTER 1

Blurring Genres: An Agenda for Political Studies R. A. W. Rhodes and Susan Hodgett

Introduction Blurring genres involves analogies and metaphors from the Humanities. Geertz argues ‘theory, scientific or otherwise, moves mainly by analogy’ and increasingly these analogies are drawn from theatre, painting, and literature. We thank John Boswell, Jack Corbett and Jenny Fleming for their comments on an early draft. A few sections of this chapter draw on Rhodes (2017) and Boswell et al. (2019). We thank Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press respectively for permission to use this material. Finally, we thank our contributors for their willing cooperation and for providing the chapter summaries used later. We have tweaked the summaries to highlight our themes, but the authors provided the first draft. R. A. W. Rhodes (*) University of Southampton, Southampton, UK e-mail: [email protected] S. Hodgett University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. A. W. Rhodes, S. Hodgett (eds.), What Political Science Can Learn from the Humanities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51697-0_1

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We no longer see society as a machine but ‘as a serious game, a sidewalk drama, or a behavioural text’. With this shift to the analogies of game, drama, and text, the Social Sciences are no longer burdened by naturalism. They can escape the idea that ‘the human sciences should strive to develop predictive and causal explanations akin to those found in the natural sciences’ (Bevir and Kedar 2008: 503). As a result, social scientists are ‘free to shape their work in terms of its necessities rather than according to received ideas as to what they ought and ought not to be doing’ (Geertz 1983: 21). We do not live in auspicious times for such intellectual adventures. Universities have become big business. They have products to sell— degrees and research skills. If your subject is unpopular and does not attract students, beware. If your research has no obvious application or grant income, switch fields. With few students, no grants, and an interest in only curiosity research, it might be wise to consider a change of profession. The driving ambition of this book is to defend the intrinsic value of studying the Humanities and the Social Sciences. We do not deny the importance of instrumental reasons but insist that they have become too dominant. Market value is not the only relevant consideration. So, auspicious times or not, this book asks, ‘what are the implications of blurring genres for political studies, a phrase that encompasses both the discipline of Political Science and Area Studies?’ The first step in mapping a different research agenda for political studies that draws on the Humanities is to define genre blurring and to describe where we are now. We describe the dominant intellectual trend affecting all British Universities over the past four decades—neoliberalism in the guises of marketisation and managerialism. Two consequences follow—the mainstreaming of research and the search for relevance. The case for blurring genres is an opportunity to withdraw from this instrumental rationale and reclaim the intrinsic value of the Humanities and Social Sciences; to reject the air of ‘gloom and doom’ surrounding the Humanities (Belfiore 2013); to counter the unrelenting pressure for marketisation and relevance; and to make politics human. Shared trends in Political Science and the New Area Studies (NAS) identify the space for working with the Humanities. There is a common concern with interpretive approaches, and qualitative methods that focus on the meaning of human action, fieldwork or thick descriptions, narrative analysis, historical contingency, and plausible conjectures. We suggest an ambitious agenda built on four values shared by the Humanities and the ‘soft pure’ Social Sciences; empathy, enlarged thinking, edification, and the examined life.

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What Is Genre Blurring? Genre blurring refers to both genres of thought and genres of presentation. We introduce each in turn. Genres of Thought This phrase refers to such genres of thought as hermeneutics, structuralism, neo-Marxism, and interpretive thought (Geertz 1983: 21). Denzin and Lincoln (2005) itemise feminist, ethnic, Marxist, post-structuralist, cultural studies, and the several personality theories. We do not deny that some political scientists draw on some of these genres of thought but genre blurring, whether one refers to genres of presentation or of thought, does not today preoccupy mainstream academics. They are much more a feature of the Humanities (see, e.g.: Lodge and Wood 2008 [1988]). As Bevir and Rhodes (2016: Part 2) show, several theories common to the Humanities have a toehold in Political Science. Area Studies traditionally eschew such overt theorising, of which more in a moment. These theories include all the examples just given with various forms of interpretive theory prominent. According to Turnbull (2016: 383–386), the advantages of interpretive theory include its ‘whole analytical approach, from its philosophical basis through to methodologies’; its concern with the social construction of policy and problems; and the use of narrative analysis. We use interpretive theory and methods as the running example of a genre of thought in the Humanities that has much traction in Political Science (see Bevir and Rhodes 2003). We start with the bold and contentious claim that the interpretive approach encourages creativity. Creativity sits uncomfortably with the strict procedures of naturalism, although many scientists concede that inspiration comes from elsewhere and that scientific procedures rationalise an insight arrived at by other means (Polanyi 1958; Watson 1970). Natural scientists would seem more laid-back on these matters than their Social Science counterparts who fear creativity may be sacrificed on the altar of rigour. As Kagan (2009: 217) observes, ‘the rigor of the investigators’ methods, rather than the theoretical significance of the investigation, has become the more important criterion’. Similarly, Collier et al. (2010: 197) write that naturalist procedures may ‘sharply narrow their substantive research questions, thus producing studies that are less important’. They identify a conflict between ‘the methodological goals of improving

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descriptive and causal inference’ and ‘the objective of studying humanly important outcomes’. No such concerns in the Humanities. The logic of abduction—of puzzle solving—encourages imagination, even intuition, because it encourages a search for new connections (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow 2012: 26–34). The logic of moving iteratively between an inductive reading of the data and a deductive reading of the literature is not, however, an invitation to a free-for-all. In the Humanities as elsewhere: all scholarly and scientific inquiry is governed by broadly similar canons of accuracy and precision, of rigour in argument and clarity in presentation, of respect for the evidence and openness to criticism. (Collini 2012: 62)

The term ‘the humanities’ therefore refers to: That collection of disciplines which attempt to understand … the actions and creations of other human beings considered as bearers of meaning, where the emphasis falls on matters to do with individual or cultural distinctiveness. (Collini 2012: 64, emphasis added)

The common aim is to: explore what it means to be human: the words, ideas, narratives and the art and artefacts that help us make sense of our lives and the world we live in; how we have created it and are created by it. The Social Sciences seek to explore, through observation and reflection, the processes that govern the behaviour of individuals and groups. Together, they help us to understand ourselves, our society and our place in the world. (British Academy 2010, p. 2)

It encompasses the disciplines of architecture, literature, history, anthropology, classics, languages, music, philosophy, religion, and the visual and performing arts. As convenient shorthand, we use disciplinary labels, but our concern here is with the genres of thought used in those disciplines. Genres of Presentation One person’s stylish writing is another one’s indigestion, but political scientists do not pay enough attention to the way we present our work, and

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its intelligibility is at stake. Geertz (1983: 19–20) encourages us to present research as if it is a game, a drama, or a text. He gives several examples including, baroque fantasies presented as deadpan empirical observations (Jorge Luis Borges), parables presented as ethnographies (Carlos Castaneda) and epistemological studies presented as political tracts (Paul Feyerabend). We need to ‘improve our prose’ and ‘decrease our dullness’ (Anderson 2016: 162). In various subfields of Political Science, there is a blurred line between fact and fiction; for example, in political biography, political history, and political ethnography. Storytelling is of key importance for all of them (see, e.g.: Van Maanen 1988; Cronon 2013). To borrow phrases from Boswell and Corbett (2015) when reporting research, we need a broader palette, so we can paint with the brushstrokes of an impressionist painter. Or, more prosaically, we need to write better, and to do so we can seek to learn from novels and the fine arts (see King 2010). Different traditions prize different styles of prose or modes of presentation. In the humanist tradition, there is appetite for rich descriptive detail and creative evocation of the context under examination. In the naturalist tradition, the format and formula are often tighter, more prescriptive, and more linear. Our personal inclination is towards evocation. To evoke is to call forth images of people and places; to persuade readers that they know these people and have been to these places: ‘the mode of storytelling is akin to the novel or the biography and thus fractures the boundaries that normally separate social science from literature’ (Ellis and Bochner 2000: 744). The goal is to wed storytelling with analysis in a way that is artful, creative, engaging and above all, evocative (and see Boswell et al. 2019: Chap. 7 for a more detailed discussion). Sword (2012: vi and 4) concludes that too many Social Science academic papers are ‘badly written’ and ‘unreadable’ and the phrase ‘stylish academic writing’ is an ‘oxymoron’. The Humanities are a potential source of fruitful advice on the arts of presentation and perhaps persuasion.

Context The first step in exploring the potential for blurring genres and to identifying an alternative agenda is to map where we are now. To do that we need to describe the dominant intellectual trend affecting Universities over the

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past four decades—neoliberalism.1 Against that broad backcloth, we need to explore the implications of neoliberalism for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Neoliberalism Neoliberalism is ‘a set of epistemic commitments’ with ‘a specific vision of the role of knowledge in human affairs’ in which ‘the market always surpasses the state’s ability to process information’. A prime ambition of neoliberalism is ‘to redefine the shape and functions of the state, not to destroy it’ (Mirowski 2009: 417, 435 and 436). For British government, this neoliberal policy had several strands and many names, including marketisation, corporatisation, and managerialism (and see Brown and Carasso 2013 for a primer on the marketisation of higher education). Marketisation focuses on competition between Universities for students and treats degrees as commodities. Managerialism measures and regulates staff performance in this regime. These interdependent political ideas shape the current research environment of British Universities. The reforms began with Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and the government scrapping subsidies on overseas student fees. They paid full cost fees, which were significantly greater than the fees for domestic students. The trend had begun. Later years saw a continuing switch from government grant to fees for domestic students first by introducing top-up fees in 1998, followed by variable fees in 2006, and full fees in 2012. The second set of changes saw an expansion of tertiary education with a corresponding increase in both Universities and student numbers. The Further and Higher Education Act 1992 abolished the binary divide between Polytechnics and Universities and Polytechnics became independent Universities. There are now 132 Universities in the UK. According to the National Office for Statistics, in 1992, there were 984,000 people aged 18–24 years in full-time education. In May 2016, there were 1.87  million, or about one in every three persons, aged 18–24 years.2

1  We use the UK as our running example because it is the university system we know best but neoliberalism’s effects are not specific to the UK. 2  See: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/livebirths/articles/howhasthestudentpopulationchanged/2016-09-20. Accessed 22 March 2019.

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There was no commensurate increase in staff and the staff student ratio worsened from 10 to 1 to 17 to 1. The third major set of changes occurred in 1986 when the funding for teaching and research was separated. It foreshadowed greater selectivity in allocating research funding, and national regulation of that funding in the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). It transmuted into the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in 2014.3 The key developments in the 2000s were further marketisation and more regulation, this time of teaching. The crunch document was the Browne Report (2010) Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education, which treated higher education as a commodity to be sold in an open market. It proposed a full cost fee regime with students taking out loans to cover both fees and maintenance. It was a ‘tipping point’ that replaced a statist model of higher education with a ‘self-regulated market’ in which students’ choice drove the system (Brown and Carasso 2013: 178 and 179). Everything was for sale, and the government agreed (DBIS 2011). To parallel the REF, we had already the Higher Education Quality Council (HEQC) which begat the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) which works with the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) to run the teaching excellence framework (TEF).4 It awards gold, silver, or bronze medals to Universities depending on the quality of their teaching. We hesitate to introduce these acronyms because they will be out of date all too soon. For example, as we write, HEFCE has been abolished and replaced by the Office for Students and Research England. But the alphabet soup illustrates the world we have created. The nadir of this trend is league tables; for example, the Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings. University managers almost literally slaver over such tables in their desperate desire to be in the world’s top 100, even though such tables and their underlying metrics have so many shortcomings they are virtually meaningless (see, e.g.: Johnes 2018 and Marginson 2014). But what are the implications of marketisation and the regulatory regimes for the Humanities and the Social Sciences?5  See https://www.ref.ac.uk/. Accessed 29 January 2020.  See: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/teaching/what-isthe-tef/. Accessed 29 January 2020. 5  For a more deatiled discussion of the consequences of recent refroms see Collini 2012 and Warnock 1989. 3 4

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The Challenge for the Humanities and the Social Sciences There are two consequences stemming from marketisation and managerialism that are relevant to this chapter’s discussion: mainstreaming research and the search for relevance. Mainstreaming We are creating ‘#newbreed political scientist’. The new generation is technically proficient, substantively narrow, and lacks acuity. We live in an era ‘with an extreme degree of specialisation’. We encourage new entrants to the profession not only to specialise but also ‘to publish as many papers as possible’. They are encouraged to write journal articles, not books, and there are templates for such articles. These structures are confining. For example, if you are reporting ethnographic fieldwork that relies on a thick description of people and events, you have limited space for that description. Too much space is taken up with what other people have said (the literature review and references) and with how you did it (methodology and appendices), not with what you did (findings and discussion). It is not a template, it is a straitjacket. The consequence is a stream of narrow, technical papers that have ‘neither practical utility nor theoretical significance’ (Kagan 2009: 257 and 260). Mainstreaming is tunnel vision by another name. An example of the mainstream academic is ‘The Weasel’, who wanders the departmental corridor telling everyone about the high impact factor of the journal in which he has just published and the competitive research grant he has just won: The Weasel was only interested in himself and getting promotion as fast as he could. He had no interest in teaching … He had no interest in supervising postgraduate students other than using them as extra hands to collect data for him and swell his research output … Finally, the Weasel had no interest in his colleagues in the School. They were either obstacles to his progress or simply stepping-stones along the way to higher things … The Weasel did believe that you are your CV and nothing more. (Sparkes 2007: 531–532)

Of course, The Weasel is male and, equally obvious, the portrait is overblown, but everyone knows someone who resembles the Weasel. The neoliberal university sowed the seeds of such individualism and reaped the Weasel. Neither sees this development as a problem because the Weasel

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gets promoted and the university gets publications and research grants. Weasel is an example of conformity to the system and to the wishes of senior management. It is hard to believe that the greats of the Social Sciences would conform to such mainstreaming. Some of Max Weber’s sentences are article length! Indeed, under this regime, it is hard to believe there will be greats ever again. Blurring genres is a plea for non-­conformity, for wilful, self-invented, and curiosity-driven iconoclasts. Relevance Within REF, there is now a call to increase the impact of research. Impact refers to ‘an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia’.6 It refers not only to the effects of research already completed but also to grant applications, which must demonstrate their future impact potential. This focus encourages academics to search for problems that can be solved rather than tackle problems that are interesting or challenging or can best be addressed by degree. It is the latest instance of the longstanding clamour for ‘relevance’ by the Social Sciences and the Humanities. The response from academia has been essentially compliant. For example, in reply to the question about the uses of the Humanities, such peak associations as the British Academy claim they are useful for the goals of business, science, and individual careers. Thus, the British Academy (2004) spells out in some detail how the Humanities contribute to economic prosperity, well-being, and public policy as well as their more obvious contribution to cultural and intellectual enrichment and education. British Academy (2010) repeats these claims with updated examples. In short, these bodies adduce instrumental reasons to defend the Humanities and Social Sciences. Another answer to the question of what use are the Humanities appeals to their intrinsic virtues. For example, Kronman (2007: Chap. 2) proposes a ‘secular humanism’ in which the Humanities help us to answer the question of ‘what living itself is for’ (p. 39). It prepares students ‘to meet the personal, ethical and social challenge of life’ (p. 41). It introduces them to ‘the alternative views of life’s purpose and value that ought to be weighed as they struggle to define life’s meaning for themselves’ (p. 42). Socrates

 See: https://re.ukri.org/research/ref-impact/. Accessed 10 December 2019.

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argued the unexamined life is not worth living.7 The Humanities can be an exercise in striving to understand oneself, so life acquires meaning. A third more trenchant answer, rejecting the first two answers, claims that: the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said … diminishes the object of its supposed praise. (Fish 2008b; see also Fish 2008a: 154)

In the neoliberal climate, the case for the Humanities is made mainly on instrumental grounds. Some have tried to claim that economists ‘persuasively argue’ they can measure intrinsic value (Arts and Humanities Research Council 2010: 6). On closer inspection, it transpires that the economists (Bakhshi et al. 2009: 9) reduce intrinsic value to the public’s willingness to pay. We accept there is a need to justify public spending on the Humanities and Social Sciences. We agree there are sound instrumental reasons for such spending. However, the intrinsic reasons for studying the Humanities and Social Sciences can fall by the wayside in the current neoliberal intellectual climate. The case for blurring genres is an opportunity to withdraw from utility and reclaim the intrinsic value of the Humanities and Social Sciences. In the rest of this chapter, we make the case for this intellectual shift.

An Intellectual Agenda When the national disciplinary exercises such as the REF encourage the mainstreaming of research to a common template, we argue for unconventional forms of engagement with broad critical agendas. When the call is for impact, we argue for room for the examined life, empathy, enabling conversations, and edification. We defend the intrinsic, not the instrumental, grounds for political studies.

7  See: Plato The Apology of Socrates 38a 5–6. Available at: http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/ apology.html. Accessed 28 February 2019. See also Nussbaum (1985).

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Trends We begin by looking at current trends in Political Science and Area Studies to determine where they overlap with the Humanities. We seek to find the common ground that could sustain fruitful exchanges. At first glance, Kagan’s (2009: Chap. 1) characterisation of the Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and the Humanities would suggest irreconcilable differences. For example, we expected ‘US political science’ to be ‘the primary point of reference’. For many, the ambition of the Social Sciences is the ‘prediction and explanation of human behaviours. In the Humanities, the ambition is ‘an understanding of human reactions to events and meanings’. Boswell et al. (2019: Table 1.1: 22) characterise the difference as follows: However, Kagan (2009: 174) also notes that the problems explored by the Social Sciences are constrained by their historical context and: social scientists who try to escape history because they do not wish to be classified as humanists who can never be certain of their inferences are fleeing from the places where the richest treasures are buried.

He points out that the Social Sciences must ‘accept the serious limits each context imposes on an observation and the importance of the agent’s history’. And here lies the common ground with the Humanities. Interpretation of the human experience lies at the heart of the Humanities endeavour. It explores how we both create our world—in language, literature, art, and music—and are in turn created by the world we inherit. Table 1.1   Orientations to political research

Naturalism

Orientation

Sensibility

Logic of justification

Influenced by the Natural Sciences

Humanism Logic of discovery

Methods

Plural: but a preference for quantitative analysis. Influenced Plural: but a by the preference Humanities for qualitative analysis

Goal

Analytical Products of focus analysis

Generalisation Isolating and prediction variables

Causal inference

Thick description

Complex specificity

Webs of meaning

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Political Science Political Science lives on the boundary between Social Sciences and the Humanities. Its roots lie in philosophy and history but recently ‘US political science’ would be ‘the primary point of reference’ for political scientists worldwide. UK Political Science is no exception; it ‘has strong links with and affinities to the US discipline’ (ESRC 2007: 8). There are several surveys of the state of the discipline of Political Science (see: Barry 1999; Bevir and Rhodes 2007; Goodin and Klingemann 1996; Goodin 2009). We focus on the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Report (2007) because its findings are based on a survey of, and extensive consultation with, the British profession. US Political Science is seen as empiricist and naturalist; it is a micro, quantitative, formal, and empiricist craft (see, e.g.: Goodin and Klingemann 1996; Goodin 2009). The first distinctive characteristic of UK Political Science is that it draws on ‘distinctive and valuable contributions come from elsewhere’ and ‘has particularly strong links to European networks’ (ESRC 2007: 8). A second characteristic of the UK Political Science is the ‘primary attachments of scholars … to sub-disciplines rather than some larger, overarching discipline’ (ESRC 2007: 11). There are many sub-disciplines and the influence of interpretive theory grows in some of them. In British politics and political behaviour, interpretive theory is conspicuous for its absence. In political theory and political philosophy, there are pockets with a longstanding interest. In comparative politics, those scholars who undertake fieldwork engage with the interpretive approach. In the study of international relations, in the guise of constructivism, it is commonplace. In public administration, it is a minority interest, although in public policy there is now an established European cadre. So, it is plausible to conjecture that, although naturalism may be an embedded practice in the study of Political Science, the interpretive approach has healthy roots in Britain with a larger and growing community of European scholars. A third characteristic of UK Political Science is its ‘comparative weaknesses’ in research methods. Worldwide, Politics Science has ‘developed increasingly sophisticated and rigorous methodologies’ especially in quantitative analysis and formal modelling (ESRC Report 2007: 7). However, the ESRC Report (2007: 13) found ‘an impressively broad consensus’ that UK Political Science was weak on both ‘quantitative methods’ and ‘formal, statistical, modelling and game theoretic method’. Most important for this book, it concluded that there were also weaknesses in both

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qualitative methods ‘after the fashion of social anthropology’ and ‘language-­based areas studies’. The brief characterisation of Political Science identifies the space for working with the Humanities. Those sub-disciplines sympathetic to interpretive approaches, and seeking to broaden their knowledge of qualitative methods, have an obvious incentive to blur genres. Collini (2001: 299) claims that mainstreams or dominant paradigms create a ‘patterned isolationism’ that marginalises areas of inquiry which do not ‘fit’. At best, these alternative theories and methods sit alongside, and at worst outside, established disciplines and departments. Blurring genres is a potential counter to such isolation among the sub-disciplines of Political Science. It encourages an active pluralism that draws in the marginalised and isolated. Cowling (1963: 209) considers naturalist Political Science ‘an impossibility’; ‘political explanation exists … as philosophy and history, and nothing else’; and the Social Sciences ‘when looked at critically, dissolve into these two disciplines: and if they do not, they have not been looked at critically enough’. Cowling overstates the case. Nonetheless, blurring genres turns away from Political Science towards not only history and philosophy but also the rest of the Humanities, to a Political Studies broadly conceived.  he New Area Studies T Historically, social scientists have had a field day criticising Area Studies. It was lambasted either for its close links with US intelligence agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency, and the mission of keeping the world safe from Communism, or for being apologists for British colonialism. Its intellectual agenda also commanded little respect. Its links with language studies and history and cultural studies meant that it was more like the Humanities than Social Science. Lambert (1990) argued that ‘[a]n area specialist [is] someone who devotes all or a substantial portion of his or her professional career to the study of another country or region of the world’. Suggesting that Area Studies is what area specialists do, he posited that Area Studies specialists ‘tend to be with a broad region of the world, for narrower and narrower geographic specialization, moving from world region to country to section of the country’ (Lambert 1990: 714; see also Rafael 1999). The standard mantra from Social Science critics was that Area Studies was overly preoccupied with culture, history, and description and failed to create theory. Thus, Bates (1996: 1–2) crushingly observed, ‘within the academy, the consensus has formed that area studies has failed to generate scientific knowledge’ (see also Bates 1997). It has failed to do

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so because it is ‘overly concerned with the description of cultural details and historical specificities at the expense of comparative and generalising research’. It was ‘less rigorous […] eschews the building of scientific knowledge and the crafting of broader generalisations for mere description and worse, storytelling’ (White 2000: 165). In short, it is idiographic not nomothetic; of the Humanities, not Social Science. By 2007, however, this conventional critique was itself under attack. Graham and Kantor (2007: 1) rejected the view that Social Science was characterised by theory building, mathematics, rigorous methods, falsifiability, replicability, and scientific approaches while Area Studies limped behind, badged as descriptive, cultural, historical, or contextual. They dismissed the idea that ‘the best social analysis comes from a single cognitive approach, one that incorporates mathematics, quantitative methods, and replicability’. Rather, they argued that ‘the best social analysis should incorporate several different cognitive styles of which the method relying on mathematics, quantitative methods and reproducibility is only one’. Clowes and Bromberg (2016: 7) espouse a different cognitive style. They claim that NAS focuses on the ‘self-perception and subjectivities … of ordinary people’. It includes ‘the actions and perceptions of non-elite communities’. It promotes ‘inter-area comparison … based on rigorously gathered, authentic facts’. Finally, it ‘respects the subjectivities and complexities of people in particular cultures’. The shift is dramatic. They move away from language specialisation and geo-political constructs such as African Studies or Canadian studies. In their place they talk of ‘imaginative geography’ (Said 2003) or ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 2006) or the symbolic space that defines a community’s identity (Clowes and Bromberg 2016: 9). In a similar vein, Hodgett and James (2018a: 4 and 2018b: 172) laid out their agenda for NAS. They aimed ‘to understand peoples, cultures and places comprehensively and comparatively’. The ambition was to bring together the global and the local, focussing on the ‘lived experience, interpretive approaches and emotional subjectivities’ (Hodgett and James 2018a: 7). They reject the geographical silos of Area Studies, calling for studies of the local in global context, context-based methods, and interdisciplinary research (see also Milutinovic 2019). They want to combine ‘breadth of explanation and depth of understanding’ (Hodgett and James 2018b: 176). The call is for ‘analytic eclecticism’ (Hodgett and James 2018b: 179, all emphases in original).

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A year later, Milutinovic (2019) in his Rebirth of Area Studies: Challenges for History, Politics and International Relations in the 21st Century outlines the different interpretations of Area Studies in the new millennium. His appeal argues that ‘Area Studies should generate questions that no single discipline can ask’ (2019, 16). It is metaphorical, offering an ‘intensity of insight’ as a meta-discipline. It exists within ‘a field of theoretical innovation and experimentation in which questions are asked, conceptual vocabularies posed and new perspectives tested’. For Milutinovic, and his contributors, twenty-first-century Area Studies is a mobile and dynamic field ‘forging interactions and interdependencies with other fields of knowledge, transforming their …assumptions, received orthodoxies and theories, and rebuilding conceptual frameworks’ (Milutinovic 2019: 17). There is a clear convergence among these advocates of a reoriented Area Studies, and the NAS agenda is an invitation to interdisciplinary, interpretive work. In the next section, we identify the overlapping themes that facilitate blurring between the Humanities, Political Science, and Area Studies. Overlapping Themes Interpretive theory is the bedrock of the overlapping themes between Political Science, NAS, and the Humanities. Five concepts are central to this overlap: meaning, thick descriptions, narratives, historical contingency, and plausible conjectures. Meaning Interpretive Political Science focuses on the meanings that shape actions. As the distinguished philosopher Charles Taylor (1971: 45) observed: We need to go beyond the bounds of a science based on verification to one which would study the inter-subjective and common meanings embedded in social reality … this science would be hermeneutical in the sense that … its most primitive data would be a reading of meanings.

As we noted earlier, the Humanities also ‘explore what it means to be human: the words, ideas, narratives and the art and artefacts that help us make sense of our lives and the world we live in’ (British Academy 2010: 2). Once the commitment to naturalism is put to one side, there is much common ground.

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Thick Descriptions Interpretive Political Science practices the ‘extended case method’ (Burawoy 1998) to describe ‘complex specificity in context’ (Wolcott 1995: 174). The Humanities particularise, that is, ‘mount arguments from particulars and highlight and give narratives to the singular’ (Parker 2013: 56). Area Studies are idiographic. Thick descriptions are a shared starting point. Narratives Some care is necessary when using the term narrative because it has become a common term in the twenty-first century and throughout the Humanities. It comes in many guises; for example, autoethnography, life history, oral history, memoirs, and storytelling (see Czarniawska 2004 for a survey of narratives in the Social Science). At their simplest, narratives have a setting, characters, a plot, and a moral and that is how the authors in this book use the term. However, it is possible to go a step further and treat narratives as explanations. For example, Jones et al. (2014: Chap. 1 and pp. 40–41) advocate using narratives to test hypotheses; they use naturalist scientific methods to analyse socially constructed policies. In sharp contrast but with the same explanatory intent, Bevir (2006: 285–287) uses narrative to explain actions by specifying the beliefs and desires that caused the actions and practices. People act for reasons, conscious and unconscious, and these reasons explain their actions. Narratives are the way the interpretive approach explains actions and practices. Crucially, both use narratives to explain not just describe. Historical Contingency A central tenet of Interpretive Political Science is that human action is historically contingent or situated. We ‘cannot explain social phenomena adequately if we fail fully to take into account both their inherent flux and their concrete links to specific contexts’ (Bevir and Kedar 2008: 506). Agents can still choose whether to retain or reshape their inherited beliefs and practices. Such agency is creative and not fixed by rules. Individuals use local reasoning consciously and subconsciously to reflect on and modify their contingent heritage. However, the way actors exercise agency is not unlimited, but situated in ‘webs of meaning’ (Bevir and Rhodes 2006: 4–5, 7–9 and 18–19). Areas Studies has long been criticised for providing idiographic histories. Yesterday’s weakness is becoming today’s strength as jaundiced eyes are cast on naturalism’s generalising ambitions.

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Plausible Conjectures Some claim that the difference between the Humanities and Political Science is that Humanities focus on the unique (idiographic) while the Social Sciences seek generalisations (nomothetic). However, within Political Science many would sympathise with the claim that ‘predictive theories and universals cannot be found in the study of human affairs’ (Flyvbjerg 2006: 224). If Political Science begins to doubt its fiction about law-like generalisations, then the idiographic Humanities entertain the thought that ‘generalizations allow us to focus on what is shared and common’ (Levine 2017: 636). Both search for patterns and could find common ground in plausible conjectures; that is, general statements that are plausible because they rest on good reasons, and the reasons are good because they are inferred from relevant information (paraphrased from Bourdon 1993). The Humanist Alternative Blurring genres is about creating a new, shared map and we believe an ambitious and challenging map can be built on the following four values. • Empathy—‘a thoroughgoing revision of our understanding of what it is to open … the consciousness of one group of people to … the life-form of another’ (Geertz 1988: 143). • Enlarged thinking—that ‘knows how to transcend its own individual limitations … [and] cannot function in strict isolation or solitude; it needs the presence of others “in whose place” it must think, whose perspectives it must take into consideration, and without whom it never has the opportunity to operate at all’ (Arendt 1977 [1961]: 220–221). • Edification—finding ‘new, better, more interesting, more fruitful ways of speaking about’ politics and government (Rorty 1980: 360). • Examined Life—questioning ‘current understandings of … ends … to generate uncertainty and surprise, to open up for the students a new understanding of value …’ and ‘by undertaking this … ambitious and elusive task … the humanities can make a really worthy and distinctive practical contribution’ (Nussbaum 1985: 26–27). Empathy, enlarged thinking, edification, and the examined life are worthy goals in any walk of life but they have no obvious economic value and

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are unlikely to bring large research grants to a university.8 But they are values shared by the Humanities and the ‘soft pure’ Social Sciences. These values provide the basis for cooperative work beyond the procedures and aspirations of the ‘hard-pure’ Natural Sciences and the ‘soft applied’ search for relevance and impact (and see Becher and Trowler 2001: 36 for more on these categories). These values underpin the ability of the Social Science and the Humanities to: remind the society of its contradictions, articulate salient emotional states, detect changing cultural premises, confront their culture’s deepest moral dilemmas, and document the unpredictable events that punctuate a life or historical era. (Kagan 2009: 231)

The American poet Wallace Stevens (1957: 163) observed that: The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.

Our exquisite truth is that we know that our values are fictions, yet we believe in them willingly. For Wallace Stevens, ‘to study and understand the fictive world is the function of the poet’ (Stevens 1957: 167). It is also the function of a scholar and it is our ambition in this book because we believe that the novelist and the playwright provide a better guide for the political scientists than the work of the physicist.

The Chapters In Part I, we group the chapters on the topic of narratives. In Part II, we group the chapters on the visual arts. Both topics figured prominently in our Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Blurring Genres Research Network seminar discussions. It would have been prescient if we had planned to organise the chapters around the distinction between genres of thought and genres of presentation. We did not, but happenstance smiled on our endeavours. The chapters in Part I draw on genres of 8  We are aware that his book is in danger of biting the hand that feeds. The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) did fund our seminar series. But the trend is clear. The model is the large interdisciplinary research teams common to the Natural Sciences.

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thought. The chapters in Part II draw on genres of presentation. The distinction is not absolute, but the emphases are clearly different. Part I: Narratives and Politics; Genres of Thought In Chap. 2, Yiannis Gabriel argues that different political cultures are characterised by their individual narrative ecologies. By analogy to natural ecologies, narrative ecologies are spaces where different narratives and counter-narratives emerge, interact, compete, adapt, and die. Specific political cultures may have narrative ecologies comparable to narrative temperate zones, narrative mono-cultures, narrative deserts, narrative jungles, and so forth. Post-truth political cultures rely on certain core narratives that include endless warnings of crisis and imminent catastrophe, strings of purported traumas, insults and victimhood, a cacophony of conspiracy theories, and an all-encompassing nostalgia for a golden past that represents everything that is resented in the present. Nostalgic narratives and conspiracy theories are then analysed as central components of populist political landscapes akin to narrative jungles, capable of migrating and colonising other political institutions and fora. In a similar way, the author argues that concepts and theories migrate from narrative and organisational studies to political theory and other genres whose boundaries become blurred. In Chap. 3 on ‘It’s the Way You Tell It: Conflicting Narratives in the 2011, 2015, and 2019 Canadian Federal Elections’, Sandford Borins and Beth Herst develop a narrative-based model for political communication in election campaigns. The chapter demonstrates how narrative analysis enhances our understanding of the essential role of the party leader in election campaigns. Political parties develop a heroic fable about the relationship between their leader and the electorate and an ironic fable about the relationship between the leader(s) of their opponent(s) and the electorate. This model was conceptualised during the 2011 Canadian federal election and applied to English-language political advertisements posted online by the three major parties in the 2015 Canadian federal election. The narrative characteristics of the ads (fable employed, narrating voice, background music, and basic visual tonality) demonstrated significant differences among the three parties’ narrative strategies. YouTube view counts were used to determine the effectiveness of individual ads as well as the overall campaigns. The chapter shows how narrative analysis can feed into mainstream Political Science.

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In Chap. 4 on ‘Novels and Narratives: The Pursuit of Perceptive Policymaking’, Susan Hodgett examines the possible role of novels in helping us to better understand peoples and places. It takes as its foundation, and by way of example, Raymond William’s novel The Fight for Manod (1979), a story of Welsh development and policymaking made personal, to discover the incipient contribution of storytelling to the deficient art of policymaking. The novel is examined through the lens of new ideas in literary criticism, especially Caroline Levine’s (2015) work on Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. It suggests that by adding the research methods of literary criticism to the toolbox for policy analysis; and by considering the benefits of broader interpretation of forms in a Political Science; we can achieve a more profound understanding of citizens’ experiences by undertaking political studies and so bringing policymaking and analysis closer to the life-lived. In Chap. 5 on ‘Autoethnography as Narrative in Political Studies’, R.  A. W.  Rhodes combines ethnography, autobiography, literature, and Political Science. Autoethnography refers to using self-reflection to explore anecdotal and personal experience and connecting this experience to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings. However, political scientists are holding out against autoethnography that is, they avoid the personal, especially the emotional aspects of their lives. The chapter is an example of a genre of presentation unusual in Political Science. It is written in the first person about personal experiences, drawing on popular culture to evoke the author’s emotional state. It tells the story of how its author first failed and then succeeded in getting a PhD. It then reflects on the personal, political, and university implications of the story. It suggests five lessons for political scientists who need: To be wary of detachment and accept that every research project is personal by keeping the self and lived experience central to research. To confront emotions, stress, and relationships in fieldwork. To be more critically self-aware—reflexive. To explore the self in administration, research, and teaching. To become better writers. In Chap. 6 on ‘Where is I? Autoethnography in Collaborative Research’, Lee Jarvis, Lee Marsden, Eylem Atakav, and Qudra Goodall explore what autoethnography means in collaborative research projects involving teams of researchers. It is another excursion in exploring presentation because

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the chapter takes the form of an annotated conversation. Autoethnographic research—by its nature—centres the experiences, perspective, interests, and voice of its individual (though situated) subject, not on groups. How do the contexts, dynamics, and interests of research partners shape, complement, or undermine the interests and reflections of autoethnographic researchers working towards collective goals? The researchers were members of academic staff at a British university and a participant filmmaker who was responsible for producing an original filmic intervention on the theme of British Muslim Values. The chapter’s conversational content explores questions of power and interests in collaborative research on a contested and controversial contemporary topic; British values and their relationship to Islam. The chapter’s conversational form foregrounds the multiplicity of voices within participatory research of this sort, drawing attention to wider dynamics of intellectual agreement, disagreement, interruption, and uncertainty. It places the personal at the heart of the analysis. Part II: The Visual Arts and Politics: Genres of Presentation Part II foregrounds different ways of presenting data in that many chapters use photographs, cartoons, and extracts from comics to develop their arguments. Given that the UK has the excellent British Cartoon Archive dedicated to the history of British cartooning, and the massive photography collection at the National Archive, it is perhaps surprising that greater use is not made of such material.9 In Chap. 7 on ‘Photography in British Political History’, Sir Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell examine the role of photography in British politics, from the first photograph of a British Prime Minister in office to the dramatic events of the 2016 EU referendum. They deploy 13 historic photographs taken over the last 160 years and decipher just how photography has changed the political landscape by capturing unique moments that other mediums fail to convey. They focus on British prime ministers. They discuss how the artistic nature of photography, one which tells us more about the subject than the artist, enhances visual understanding of the past. It can teach us more about the candid realities of political history than previous mediums. They explore also the impacts of major 9  See https://www.cartoons.ac.uk/ and https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-withyour-research/research-guides/photographs/. Both accessed 21 January 2020.

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photographical developments on politics, from the advent of pictorial journalism to colour printing to social media. They discuss the use of photography by press and politicians to shape political narratives, and the impact it can have on public perception of events. It is an excellent example of a novel form of presentation for political studies. In Chap. 8 on ‘Architectural Power’, Charles Goodsell argues that producing fine architecture is a fine art. How citizens perceive the design of government buildings is at the heart of politics because such prominent and lasting physical features constitute the locale of official governing and become central public images of what governing is about. The term ‘architectural power’ refers to how these structures can have significant influence on citizen attitudes towards the regimes that occupy them. On the one hand, the effect can intimidate citizens and construct authoritative obedience. On the other hand, they can ingratiate citizens and support sentimental allegiance. The former is regarded as ‘hard’ power and the latter ‘soft’. These dual outcomes are examined in detail in photographs of 39 state capitols and city halls in the United States. Factors studied are horizon prominence, ground footprint, physical height, external facade, entry portals, governing chambers, ritual spaces, and displayed objects, all standard topics in architecture that are rarely the concern of Political Science. Blurring genres not only foregrounds novel forms of data—photographs—but unearths new topics. In Chap. 9 on ‘Design and Politics’, Bruce Brown argues that, although design is a relatively young profession emerging with the Industrial Revolution, it rose to prominence throughout the twentieth century. At first, it was concerned with the design of tangible artefacts having utilitarian purposes. In the consumer boom following two world wars domestic goods were then styled to shape and reflect the aspirations and desires of new mass audiences. Towards the end of the twentieth century a growing disenchantment with capitalist monopolies, coupled with the rise of personal computing and mobile smart technologies, changed the focus of design. It shifted the design of tangible artefacts to the design of intangible systems. Now, design is everywhere, embracing all those intangible systems and processes that govern the conduct of daily life. Nowadays, we talk about the design of business, of cities and nations, of cultural identities, of publics, of corporate responsibility, and, of democracy. Design is at the heart of political studies. In Chap. 10 on ‘Persuasive Comics’, Randy Duncan argues that the convergence of printing technology, caricature, and sequential visual

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narrative produced new mediums of communication—the comic strip, the comic book, and the graphic novel, known collectively as comics. Because comics are generally considered to be popular culture entertainment readers let down their defences and are more susceptible to persuasive messages. Most political scientists have not given serious consideration to comics even though in recent decades, comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels made noteworthy contributions to political discourse. The persuasive power of comics lies in the processes of encapsulation, composition, layout, and closure which both create comics and decipher them. Political scientists can use this persuasion schema to reveal the persuasive strategies employed in comics and by the governments that sponsor them, especially in times of crisis such as the Second World War. In short, comics are a valuable source of data and key components of the symbolic landscape of present-day politics. In Chap. 11 on ‘Political Science and the Arts as Allies and Strange Bedfellows’, Catherine Althaus asks what relevance do pub choirs, comedy, or flashmobs have for Political Science and Area Studies? This chapter proposes ways in which the creative arts, and associated embodied practices, help policy practice and theory. It uses case studies of public servant executive education training to argue that the arts inspire positive change by, for example: (a) promoting practical policy innovation through open mode thinking strategies and somatic practices; (b) revealing new knowledge to be deployed by practitioners and theorists; (c) improving leadership processes through attention to concepts and practices of performance; and (d) surfacing new ways of framing policy challenges and achieving conflict resolution. For some time, Arts’ metaphors have blurred into modern policy and Political Science texts. This chapter concludes that a return to the substantive connective tissue between the creative arts and Political Science— beyond metaphor—is not only warranted, but desirable, a theme that could be generalised to the whole book.

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Conclusions One of the more obvious advantages of blurring genres is that it directs attention to unconventional sources of not only of theory but also of data whether drawn from architecture or comics. That said, although the diversity in genres of thought in the Humanities inspired this collection, blurring genres does not require (say) an interpretive epistemology. It can also contribute to core topics in Political Science such as elections, as Borins and Herst show in their analysis of Canadian elections in Chap. 3. In a similar vein, Randy Duncan suggests in Chap. 10 that political scientists can learn important lessons from studying comics about the arts of persuasion, especially the specific techniques comics creators use to influence and persuade readers. It can also contribute to Applied Social Sciences as Althaus argues in Chap. 11, claiming that using the creative arts in executive education promotes practical policy innovation, reveals new knowledge, and identifies new ways of framing policy and its challenges. Others have also identified equivalent instrumental grounds for drawing on the Humanities. According to Goodsell and Murray (1995) there are five possible bridges between Political Science’s sub-discipline of public administration and The Arts. The latter can contribute to public administration theory; identify and animate ethical values; bring to life the pathos and humanity of individual leaders; influence the climate of opinion around policy; and enliven and deepen teaching in the classroom (see also Waldo 1968). We have no quarrel with these several claims beyond their modesty. Although we are not hostile to instrumental arguments for blurring genres, we insist that there is a need to go further and identify the intrinsic reasons for blurring genres. We argue that such blurring promotes empathy, enlarged thinking, edification, and the examined life. The instrumental rationale is important but too dominant in the neoliberal university of the twenty-first century. Market value is not the only criterion for judging the value of a subject, a person, or a state. As we said at the outset, the driving ambition of this book is to defend the intrinsic value of studying the Humanities and the Social Sciences. The case for blurring genres is an opportunity to do so. In Chap. 5, Rhodes draws several intrinsic lessons for political scientists from the practices of autoethnography; for example, it encourages a wariness of detachment, sees research as a lived experience, confronts emotions and stress in fieldwork, and places a premium on reflexivity.

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We have also seen that there are many ways in which to present data. Both chapters on autoethnography illustrate an unusual genre of presentation. If such first person, reflexive, evocative material is a tad too esoteric, the photographs and comics in Part II offer a straight forward way of improving the ways in which we tell our stories. And these examples by no means exhaust the available repertoire. However, any new methods presentation will require changes in the publishing norms of Political Science journals. Insisting that authors use the third-person because it communicates an air of detachment, even scientism, encourages authors to write in the passive tense and discourages them from finding their own voice or accurately reporting the lives of others. There is a long way to go in decreasing our dullness. In sum, we see no need for a rhetoric of gloom to surround the Humanities. Rather, we see many opportunities for collaboration with the Social Sciences and to counter the marketisation and demand for relevance. We identify a human way of working.

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PART I

Narratives and Politics

CHAPTER 2

Narrative Ecologies in Post-truth Times: Nostalgia and Conspiracy Theories in Narrative Jungles? Yiannis Gabriel

Recent political developments, including the Brexit referendum, the election of President Trump and the global rise of populist movements, as well as the increasing use of ‘post-truth’ to capture the mood if not the culture of our times have all drawn attention to the power of narrative in shaping and even deciding political events. Increasingly, narratives are understood not as stories told about politics, but as vital political resources that lie at the heart of political developments and even define these developments. Coming up with a compelling narrative, one that grips the hearts and minds of people, is increasingly viewed as a sine qua non for political I would like to thank my dear friend, Larry Rosenthal, who has spent a lifetime studying every kind of right-wing ideology, current and movement, for his close reading and wise suggestions that helped me greatly in preparing the final draft of this chapter. Y. Gabriel (*) University of Bath, Bath, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. A. W. Rhodes, S. Hodgett (eds.), What Political Science Can Learn from the Humanities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51697-0_2

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success. Thus, in spite of wide-ranging disagreements about the scale, nature and character of narratives, many commentators are in agreement that successful political campaigns rely on narratives that manage to give voice to the political experiences of the masses, mobilize them and turn them into political action. These narratives may amount to short pithy stories, lost and forgotten old myths or even a single word or slogan. Sometimes a single word can evoke a narrative as suggested by the highlighted words in ‘Make America Great Again’ or ‘Get Back Control’. Narratives, of course, do not exist in a vacuum, but emerge out of political realities and in relations of competition, collaboration and cross-­ fertilization with other narratives. Many political narratives emerge as counter-narratives in opposition to narratives seen as master or hegemonic narratives, which they seek to challenge, qualify or subvert, not least by casting them as representing the interests of those in power. Such counter-­ narratives generally claim to be attempts of the powerless or marginalized to make their voices heard, to place their stories on record and to challenge the uncontested hegemony of master narratives. Master narratives, for their part, may ignore such counter-narratives or alternatively may seek to neutralize, accommodate, discredit or silence them in many different ways (Bamberg 2004; Frandsen et al. 2016; Gabriel 2016). The dynamic of narrative and counter-narrative can be observed in many spheres of social activity, including politics, business, journalism and art. It can also be observed in academic discourses where new approaches are cast as counter-narratives challenging the hegemony or mainstream theories and concepts. In this chapter, I will qualify this argument by suggesting that counter-narratives and master narratives need each other. Like Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, without a counter-narrative a narrative can hardly be recognized as a master narrative. Counter-narratives for their part need master narratives to test themselves and eventually to gain recognition and credibility. In this way, populist counter-narratives, like those articulated by Trump, Victor Orban or advocates of Brexit needed the master narratives of globalization, free trade and so forth in order to establish themselves as serious and potentially hegemonic political alternatives. The very identity of political movements, like populist movements we are witnessing currently, can thus be derived from an opposition to an enemy, the ‘other’, and consolidated through a particular counter-narrative. This chapter proposes that narratives and counter-narratives are features of narrative ecologies. In line with Geertz’s argument (1983) that informs the spirit of this book, narrative ecologies can then be viewed, by analogy to natural ecologies, as spaces where different narratives and

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counter-narratives along with their plot lines, their characters and their affective and symbolic resonances, emerge, interact, compete, adapt, develop and die. In this way, I hope to persuade the reader that the concept of narrative ecology is infinitely subtler and suppler than the rather crude but widely used notions of ‘narrative polyphony’ or ‘plurivocality’ which fail to acknowledge the complex ways in which different narratives engage with each other, whether as symbiotic, antagonistic, parasitical or emphatically indifferent. Within particular ecologies, narratives and counter-narratives confront each other but also depend on each other for sustenance and virility, like different populations and species inhabiting the same ecosystem. Like elements of natural ecosystems, narratives and counter-narratives are not constrained or limited by formal borders, national, cultural or organizational and can cross from one domain to another. In the political arena, for example, the narrative genre of conspiracy theory may migrate from the domain of the extreme right which has been its traditional home to gain ground or even colonize centre or left political positions. Narratives from one narrative ecology can and do colonize other narrative spaces, they grow, they shrink and may eventually die. This chapter will concentrate on the narrative ecologies of post-truth politics, highlighting some key narratives that have come to dominate our times, chief among them being nostalgic narratives and conspiracy theories.

Narrative Ecologies in Our Times Different historical periods with their specific social, political and cultural landscapes can be viewed as having distinct narrative ecologies, emerging out of life’s conditions, problems and concerns. As with natural ecosystems, different narrative ecologies may display greater or lesser fragility, may contain greater or lesser diversity and may entail greater or lesser competition and conflict, again possibilities that are ironed out by the notion of narrative polyphony. Some ecologies, like those of authoritarian systems and regimes, may be dominated by a single dominant narrative which stamps out any alternative in a pitiless manner. These can be said to resemble narrative monocultures which obliterate other narratives as undesirable parasites. Opponents become ‘traitors’ or ‘enemies of the people’, demonized rather than argued with; in fact, the elimination of all traitors, saboteurs, nay-sayers and other undesirables are core features of the dominant narrative. By contrast, narrative cultures in pluralist societies

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may accommodate a multitude of narratives with a wide range of characters and plot turns, sometimes taking notice of each other, frequently testing themselves against each other but rarely seeking to annihilate each other. These may be said to resemble narrative temperate zones where many diverse species and populations find ways of existing and even thriving side by side. Some narrative types, myths and archetypal symbols like David overcoming Goliath or Icarus flying too close to the sun, may cross many cultural and geographical boundaries and endure over centuries in many different narrative ecologies. Other narratives may be found for short periods in very specific ecologies where conditions are suitable for them. Like other historical epochs, our times are characterized by certain narrative types that dominate our cultural and political spaces. The digital revolution has spawned new genres of narrative and micro-narrative (like the tweet, the ‘share’, the comment, the ‘like’, the ‘friend’ and the ‘follower’) and redefined some of the older ones (like ‘the story’, the ‘news’, the ‘scandal’, the ‘crisis’, the ‘row’ and the ‘voice’). Some types of narrative have undoubtedly prospered on the back of social media and technologies that favour their multiplication and proliferation. One of the characteristics of these narrative patterns is their sudden explosive growth (‘going viral’) and relatively short life-spans. In the days when the printed word was dominant, it was sometimes claimed that ‘yesterday’s news is today’s chip paper’. In today’s digital world, the vast majority of yesterday’s narratives vanish into the digital ethersphere. Many leave no residues whatsoever, but some may leave traces that may be resuscitated and even prosper at some future point. A few narratives or micro-narratives may dominate the ecosystem for a period only to disappear after possibly having spawned other narratives or counter-narratives. Another characteristic of the narrative ecologies of our time is the exponential growth of what many authors now call ‘bullshit’ (Spicer 2017; Davis 2017; Ball 2017; Frankfurt 2005). Bullshit is not just meaningless words but an unending stream of empty verbiage, hype, buzzwords, clichés, tedious puns and double entendres, self-referential parodies, witticisms, platitudes, banalities, half-truths and outright lies which neither speaker nor audience seriously expect or demand that they should represent reality in some accurate way. The growth of bullshit, aided and abetted by the digital revolution, is one of the factors that have prompted some commentators to characterize our times as post-truth (Ball 2017; Davis 2017; Knight and Tsoukas

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2018). This term was formally recognized and further popularized when the Oxford English Dictionary declared it their word of the year in 2016, defining it as ‘circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’. A crucial and maybe defining feature of post-truth is the blurring of any distinction between factually or scientifically grounded statements and mere opinions, stories or indeed narratives. Thus a sophisticated political commentary, a statistical analysis of voting patterns, a manifesto, a slogan, a speech and a ‘sound-bite’ all become ‘stories’, more or less persuasive, more or less interesting but having no special claims to truthfulness. It is not just that the level of lying and misinformation has reached new heights in our times, but it is claimed that the public no longer seems to care about the distinction between lies and truth (D’Ancona 2017), including ‘scientific truth’.1 A narrative is accepted as ‘truthful’ in as much as it resonates, or as it ‘feels’ truthful which may amount to little more than it accords with the preconceived ideas or wishes of the audience. And in as much as it feels truthful to large aggregates of people such a narrative becomes a powerful political resource. While there are many disagreements as to whether post-truth, along with its fake news,2 alternative facts, bullshit and so on (Mair 2017), is something genuinely novel, the narrative ecologies of our times are dominated by certain types, easily discernible in the traditional media, the social media but also casual conversations and interactions. These can be said to include: • endless warnings of crisis and imminent catastrophe, including a variety of ‘scares’, such as privacy scares, food scares, health scares and travel scares; • images of ecological and social devastation; • an unending string of purported traumas, insults and victimhood; 1  The question of what counts as scientific truth has been the subject of many heated philosophical and sociological debates. The wider public, however, at least in the past, has had no difficulty in distinguishing between the authority of science and other types of authority. In conditions of post-truth, scientific statements are approached as just another set of narratives or stories that may be contested, for example, by counter-narratives based on ‘personal experience’. See Gabriel (2004). 2  Fake news may include deliberate distortions by politicians, journalists, experts and others, hoaxes, vacuous talk and hoaxes aimed at confusing, deflecting attention from other stories, and bot generated statements (tweets, postings, etc.) that are entirely fabricated.

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• a cacophony of conspiracy theories, scandals and fake-scandals; • a constant stream of celebrity babble, gossip and theatrics; • a sustained chatter on choice, voice and identity, often linked to images of rampant consumerism and ‘glamour’; and • an all-encompassing nostalgia for a golden past that represents everything that is resented and regretted in the present. The speed with which various narratives grow and eclipse other narratives in our times is such that its narrative ecology may be viewed as a jungle where numerous species and types grow without plan or design and desperately compete for the light of publicity. In such an ecology, particular narratives may grow in breadth and popularity by going viral and then disappear just as suddenly, swallowed up by other narratives or by their own counter-narratives. All the same, as we shall argue presently, political narratives in our times may also be found in relatively peaceful cohabitation and accommodation as one would expect in a narrative temperate zone, where a plurality of interests, voices and ideas may be rehearsed, heard and respected. One notable feature of post-truth times is that language itself, including the power of specific words, their distortions, corruptions and proscriptions, is a regular character in many narratives, including various jeremiads on political correctness or the struggles of different groups to discover their voice and identity (Kakutani 2018). Language is credited with the ability to create truthfulness through its ability to ‘do things with words’ that support both the production of ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’. As Knight and Tsoukas suggest (2018: 8), ‘truth is not so much a correspondence with reality as enacting a socially acceptable drama that resonates with an audience’. Constructing and communicating a compelling narrative in such circumstances is far more effective as a political resource than either an ‘appeal to brute facts’ (which can be readily denied psychologically as well as materially) or an appeal to well-worn narratives of the past that have lost their allure and credibility.

The Rise of Populism and Its Narratives If ‘post-truth’ was the word of the year in Oxford 2016, Cambridge hailed ‘populism’ as its own word of the year for 2017. Treating words as new-­ fangled celebrities and casting dictionary compilers as juries in lexicographic Academy Awards could itself be a feature of the narrative ecologies

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of our times. Tellingly, the spokesperson of the Cambridge University Press noted that populism is a word that has assumed worldwide significance ‘as populations and their leaders across the world wrestle with issues of immigration and trade, resurgent nationalism, and economic discontent’. The Cambridge Dictionary defines populism as ‘political ideas and activities that are intended to get the support of ordinary people by giving them what they want’ and notes the ‘mainly disapproving’ way in which the term is frequently used. As a character in post-truth narratives then, populism is often portrayed as an unruly, ill-behaved and unwelcome guest at the party of liberal democracy, one that threatens not only its decorum but potentially the very existence of the party itself (https://www.cam. ac.uk/news/populism-revealed-as-2017-word-of-the-year-by-cambridgeuniversity-press). If populism is often a term of disparagement and abuse in political debates, political theorists and scholars have sought to clarify its meaning in an attempt to assess its significance in current political developments. Important questions depend crucially on how populism is defined and articulated—questions like ‘Can populism fuel progressive movements and social reforms?’ ‘Can there be populism allied to a left-wing ideology as well as to a right-wing one?’ and, perhaps most crucially, ‘Is populism a threat to democracy or can it help revitalize it?’ Some commentators argue that populism accounts for the rise of diverse movements and parties of both right and left, like the Five Star Movement in Italy, Podemos in Spain and the Swedish Democrats. More conventionally, populism has been cast as the driving force behind the unexpected triumphs of Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election and of the Brexit advocates in the UK’s referendum on membership of the European Union. While the ambiguities of populism are currently the subjects of intense debates (e.g. Mudde 2014; Aslanidis 2016; Brubaker 2017; Schumacher and van Kersbergen 2016; Pappas 2014; Rosenthal 2018; Stavrakakis and Katsambekis 2014; Stavrakakis 2014; Stavrakakis et al. 2017), most scholars have moved beyond the ready equation of populism with demagoguery, false promises and mob psychology and ‘use populism as a set of ideas focused on an opposition between the people (good) and the elite (bad)’ (Mudde 2018). This core opposition goes back to Laclau’s (2005) influential book, On populist reason which argued that populism is founded on a fundamental antagonism between the people (or the ‘nation’ or the ‘silent majority’) as the underdog which is oppressed by dominant elite (or oligarchy). This often builds on existing or escalating economic

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inequalities and/or unequal access to and a lack of representation in the political process. Different groups feel that their voices are not heard and their identities are marginalized. Recent examples are the ‘left-behind’ populations in the wake of liberalized trade, people and capital flows in the de-­industrialized North of the UK and the Rust Belt of the USA, who voted in large numbers for Brexit and President Trump respectively. Populism draws on these real issues to construct a narrative of the people, oppressed and exploited, rising up against the corrupt elites. In many contemporary variants of populism, the fundamental antagonism between the people and the elites extends to an antagonism between the natives set against various aliens, such as migrants and refugees or minority groups and ‘deviants’ who are ‘othered’ as parasitical and undesirable (Gabriel 2012; Stokes and Gabriel 2010). In contrast to the open frontiers of the neo-liberal order, populist counter-narratives seek to defend frontiers, physical, political and economic, and reclaim control over movements of people, goods and cultures. Populism has become a major feature of the narrative ecologies of politics in our times, sometimes obliterating earlier antagonisms, sometimes resuscitating moribund narratives or revitalizing dormant ones. Above all, populism has placed centre-stage the axiomatic dualism between ‘us’ and ‘them’, the irredeemable war between forces of good and those of darkness. Insults, allegations, exaggerations and untruths of every kind become legitimate ways of bolstering the interests of ‘the people’ against the elites and the outsiders. This populist counter-­ narrative depends for its sustenance and vigour on having a dominant narrative to attack, a narrative ostensibly defended by the elites and their patsies, journalists, academics and pundits of every sort. If right-wing populism targets cultural and political elites, left-wing populism, epitomized in the USA by the campaign of Bernie Sanders, often target financial elites and multi-national corporations and shape their counter-narratives in opposition to those of the neo-liberal financial order. A crucial aspect of populist counter-narratives is their claim to represent not just a silent majority, an entity invoked by Richard Nixon a long time ago as ostensibly supporting his Vietnam policy (and rediscovered by Trump) but of a silenced majority, one that has been systematically ignored, gagged and rendered voiceless. Thus in a paradoxical way, populist narratives have embraced free speech as a core element, regularly deploying it as a justification for making various allegations and claims, including patently untruthful ones. Any attempt to silence opinion, for example as hate speech or as instigating violence, is seen as an infringement of the

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right to free speech which is enshrined in the US constitution. Narratives of extreme polarization, however, are not restricted to those identified by populist causes and mentalities. Instead, they suffuse many political discourses, including those of liberal and centrist tendencies, who inevitably cast populists and their supporters as at best irrational and misguided and at worst bigoted or ‘deplorable’ (the word used by presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to describe many of her opponents’ supporters which did incalculable damage to her 2016 campaign). Needless to say that such attributions reinforce the narratives of ‘liberal elites’ patronizing and oppressing the masses. The extreme polarization into good and bad, friends and foes, that characterize post-truth ecologies has tended to favour certain types of narrative that rely on idealization, vilification and the simplification of complex and nuanced situations. It has thus favoured certain narratives that resist falsification and are in some ways self-inoculating against direct attacks, which find in post-truth a hospitable environment and become prominent features of its narrative ecology. Two of these types of narrative are nostalgic narratives and conspiracy theories, both of which thrive in different ways in periods of rapid change, uncertainty and confusion. They both very firmly cast themselves as counter-narratives and challenge the hegemonic orthodoxy. Thus, nostalgic narratives challenge the stories of progress and improvement by celebrating the past as being superior to the present in those matters that count; conspiracy theories, for their part, challenge received narratives proffered by experts and uncritically accepted by the masses, by counter posing alternatives that are both plausible and iconoclastic. Furthermore, as I will show in the discussion that follows, both nostalgic narratives and conspiracy theories hinge on the tropes of betrayal and fall, determined to apportion blame and responsibility for such calamities. It is not surprising, therefore, that nostalgic narratives and conspiracy theories often merge with or cross-fertilize each other.

Nostalgic Narratives The resurgence of nostalgic narratives thriving in uncertain and confusing times has been a significant feature of the narrative ecologies of this century. Such narratives hark back to a ‘golden age’ of stability, order and comfortable prosperity and have been associated with the rise of populist movements across different countries. These regularly evoke memories of

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past grandeurs and glories, as implied by Trump’s promise to ‘Make America great again’. Similarly, the UK’s vote to leave the European Union was, in the words of the then British Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable, ‘driven by nostalgia for a world where passports were blue, faces were white and the map was coloured imperial pink’ (https://www.libdemvoice.org/vince-cable-on-today-this-morning-56910.html). The word ‘nostalgia’ originated in medicine as a term that sought to medicalize a complex of emotional and behavioural disturbances. It was coined by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer in 1688 to describe the morbid symptoms of Swiss mercenaries who spent long periods away from home. The term combined the Homeric Greek word ‘nostos’ meaning homecoming and ‘algia’ or pain and was used to signify acute or morbid homesickness, a sense it still retains in some European languages. Until the nineteenth century, nostalgia was seen as a peculiarly Swiss sickness and only in the early part of the twentieth century was it de-medicalized, and later still that its aim of returning home was supplanted by a longing to return to the past. Although place continues to be an important ingredient of nostalgia, nostalgia is now widely viewed as a bittersweet yearning and longing for the past. This can be experienced at an individual, a group or a national level and can find expressions in stories and narratives, reminiscences, artistic and cultural representations as well as various individual and group practices, including festivals, pilgrimages and reconstructions. It is an emotion that has fuelled large areas of consumption, including the heritage and museum industries, large swaths of the cultural industries including film, music, advertising and the fine arts as well as various ‘styles’ like retro and vintage. It is also an emotion that regularly assumes political forms, firing up various nationalist dreams but also fuelling different community, workplace and other struggles. But what kind of past is nostalgia endlessly fixated to? The nostalgic past is quite distinct from the historical past, it is a past seen through rose-­ tinted glasses, a past that is highly idealized and devoid of any flaws or blemishes. In fact, the nostalgic past positively eschews any encounter with the work of historians who may qualify or undermine it. The nostalgic past can involve struggle, strife and suffering provided that these can be viewed as serving a higher purpose or being crowned by a happy end. For this reason, nostalgia must be seen as a par excellence mythoplastic emotion, one from which myths and legends spring as expressions of collective fantasies, giving voice to deeper and often unconscious wishes and desires (Samuel and Thompson 1990). It is for this reason too that nostalgia is

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more likely to reflect the discontents of the present rather than the contents of the past, a point on which most researchers agree (e.g. Daniels 1985; DaSilva and Faught 1982; Davis 1979; Gabriel 1993; Ivanova 2000; Murphy 2009; Werman 1977). And it is for this reason that the foci on which nostalgia fixates can give us deep insights into those elements of the present that cause discomfort, anxiety and distress, elements that may easily be brushed aside or overlooked through defensive routines, like denial or rationalization. This is what makes nostalgia a particularly useful instrument for the study of political phenomena. To an idealized past, nostalgia stubbornly juxtaposes a present that is almost invariably found emaciated, impoverished and lacking (Davis 1979). Whether at the individual or the collective levels, nostalgia always selects its terrain so that the past, dressed up and embellished, will triumph over the present. While nostalgia creates a glowing past, it also affirms that this past is forever gone, a ‘world we have lost’, separated from the present through a radical discontinuity, a symbolic watershed, which cannot be undone. This may be a political landmark, a technological development or a set of changing social circumstances. Many nostalgic narratives are thus narratives of loss, yet the emotion of nostalgia is quite distinct from feelings associated with mourning and grieving. Nostalgia, unlike the emotions of grief, guilt and sorrow associated with mourning, is not a means of overcoming or managing a loss; instead it seeks to compensate for it and make up for ongoing current discontents and frustrations. In contrast to mourning and grief which may lead to extreme expressions of ‘profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings’ (Freud 1917: 252), nostalgia restores a degree of self-esteem and interest in sharing one’s experiences with others. This is its chief restorative quality: the ability to make a ‘has been’ into a ‘somebody’ again, by means of a narrative that casts him/her as part of the golden past. Having been a member of a community’s or a nation’s golden age restores some of the self-esteem undermined by a subsequent fall (Brown and Humphreys 2002, 2006; Gabriel 1993; Strangleman 1999). Thus, by providing a bedrock of loving memories, a life worth lived and a source of meaning, nostalgic narratives help people endure their current malaise. In recent times, a different type of nostalgia, distinct from the sentimental or elegiac varieties described above, has attracted scholarly attention, especially at the level of nations and regions. Following the fall of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe there were widespread reports

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about the rise of ‘nostalgia for real socialism’ (Velikonja 2009), a retrospective utopia of the socialist past as a time of order, solidarity, justice and stability. This nostalgia frequently assumed a strident aggressive quality, often aligned with a yearning for a ‘strong leader’, capable of restoring order and bringing back the glories of the past (Boym 2001; Marsh 2007). Ivanova (2000 63) explicitly contrasts what she terms cultural nostalgia associated with a ‘desire to bring order to the chaos that developed as a result of the abrupt historical change in the structure of life’ and aggressive nostalgia maintained by a ‘persistent desire to remain in the past, to forcibly bring that past back’. Narratives of this aggressive nostalgia have in recent decades become a feature of many different parties, movements and nations. While they assume slightly different shapes and nuances in different countries, they always extol a heroic national past free from the dominant afflictions of the present, economic, political, demographic, ideological or technological. This aggressive nostalgia easily assumes xenophobic and chauvinistic qualities. It does not recall a past through rose-tinted glasses, but rather seeks to resurrect the mythological past, by force if necessary (Gabriel 2016). Aggressive nostalgic narratives have been important in various liberation and anti-colonial movements which resurrect national heroes and martyrs from a nation’s distant past to inspire new generations of heroes and martyrs. In the twentieth century, both fascist and Nazi movements spawned their aggressive nostalgic narratives, which, at least in the case of the Nazis, fed an exterminationist ideology seeking to rid the country of parasites and traitors (Friedländer 1997). Unlike sentimental nostalgia which fixates on a past that was lived and remembered fondly and tenderly, aggressive nostalgia resurrects a past ostensibly lodged far deeper in the unconscious memory of the folk, a past of racial and cultural purity, populated by heroes and other archetypal characters, like those who populate Richard Wagner’s music dramas. This aggressive nostalgia is even more likely than sentimental nostalgia to cement social bonds of belonging and community (Bennett 2018; Boym 2001; Sedikides and Wildschut 2018) in the face of a threatening other (Smeekes 2015; Smeekes and Verkuyten 2015). In the USA, aggressive nostalgia drives what Murphy (2009) describes as the jeremiads of the Christian Right, narratives that constantly draw attention to the current decline of the nation when compared to the greatness and the promise of the past. What gives these narratives their aggressive quality is a persistent attribution of blame to an idea or a practice that

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is held responsible for the decline and fall—for example, the ‘sexual revolution’, the legalization of abortion, the ‘explosion’ of the welfare state, feminism—and a strident call for repentance and return to the old values and practices. Thus, the American jeremiad is a counter-narrative consisting of idealization of the past and lamentation of its abandonment in opposition to the presumed master narratives of modernity, multi-­ culturalism, free-thinking, liberalism and permissiveness. Aggressive nostalgic counter-narratives seem tailor-made for populist, nationalist and xenophobic ideologies. Right-wing, nationalist organizations and political parties, from Greece’s New Dawn Party to the Leave campaign during Brexit, are rich in such narratives. But it should not be thought that nostalgia is the exclusive preserve of the right, mainstream, populist or extremist. The figure of ‘working class hero’ as well as images of class solidarity and militant workplace struggles from the past can be powerful prompts for left-leaning sentimental nostalgia (Lawler 2014; Slutskaya et al. 2016) as can various struggles, local and national, community and urban (e.g. Kasinitz and Hillyard 1995; Strangleman and Roberts 1999). Thus, as a political emotion, nostalgia in both its sentimental and aggressive modes, can fuel narratives that inform political decisions, sustain political identities, create boundaries of ‘us’ and ‘them’ and inspire political action in many different forms. The narratives of both aggressive and sentimental nostalgia inhabit narrative ecologies in which an idealized past of purity, authenticity, community, self-reliance and heroism confronts the hegemonic narratives of late modernity—multi-culturalism, diversity, cultural and sexual equality, intellectualism, urban sophistication and so forth. However, while sentimental narratives seek to offer solace for the discontents of today, the chief aim of aggressive nostalgic narratives is to accentuate or exacerbate these discontents, by persistently maligning the present from the perspective of a mythical past. Thus, while sentimental nostalgic narratives are tales of loss, aggressive nostalgic narratives are tales of betrayal and fall. It is not surprising, therefore, that these narratives often merge or cross-fertilize with another type of narrative that hinges on betrayal and fall and is thriving in today’s narrative ecologies, conspiracy theories.

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Conspiracy Theories Conspiracy theories are narratives, par excellence. They are narratives with storylines that challenge and dismiss received explanations and official accounts of events by proffering alternative plots. Effective conspiracy theories combine iconoclasm with plausibility, fancy with factuality and absurdity with logic. The range of conspiracy theories is formidable—they include the ‘denial’ of particular events, like the Americans landing on the moon, the Nazi holocaust or climate change; the reinterpretation of an accident as the result of a conspiracy, like the death of Princess Diana; the re-attribution of an event or a catastrophe to a different agent from the accepted one, like attributing the attacks of 9/11 to the Mossad or the CIA or the assassination of John F. Kennedy to various nefarious agents. A particularly important type of conspiracy theory is the sort that attributes designs for global domination to particular groups of people or secret societies, like the Free-Masons, the Illuminati, the Jesuits or the Jews. Thus, the notorious forgery ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, which has been resurrected in our times and was instrumental in the wave of Anti-Semitism that swept Europe in the twentieth century, was presented as evidence that Jewish leaders conspired to take over the entire world through control of financial, media and other institutions and generalized moral corruption. As with nostalgia, conspiracy theory can define entire historical periods, notably those characterized by purges and witch-hunts, like Stalin’s Moscow show trials in the late 1930s and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade in the early 1950s. In such instances, conspiracy theories, far from being counter-narratives, establish themselves as hegemonic narratives dominating the narrative ecologies of their time. More often, however, conspiracy theories emerge as counter-narratives seeking to puncture or debunk official accounts and explanations and seeking to account for failure or adversity by appealing to various invisible and dark forces. Like nostalgic narratives, conspiracy theories address the past but, unlike nostalgic ones, they express no yearning for its return. Also, unlike nostalgic narratives, conspiracy theories are not averse to historical research and to factual verification. Quite the contrary—many of them would appear to be obsessed with factual minutiae which are invoked in establishing the holes, discontinuities and contradictions of official narratives in order to mount a frontal assault on them. Thus, deniers of the American

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lunar landings scrutinize minutely NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) photographs to demonstrate their lack of authenticity and establish that they were all products of studio photography. All the same, conspiracy theories are difficult, if not impossible, to puncture by appeal to factual evidence alone: contrary evidence is easily dismissed as evidence of the great powers behind the conspiracy. Conspiracy theories have attracted a considerable amount of scholarly attention. The rise of the internet and social media have provided both conspiracies and conspiracy theories with fertile new grounds on which to hatch and disseminate. In general, there is widespread recognition that there is a great public fascination with conspiracies or at least with exposing and unmasking them. In the ground-breaking essay ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’, written at the height of the Cold War, Richard Hofstadter (1964) argued that conspiracy theories have been a feature of American political life since the revolution, linked to an endemic paranoia, fed by mistrust, anxiety, anger and suspiciousness. The paranoid style, he argued, is a powerful force in politics and amounts to a fundamental vision of history, not as progress, but as a Manichean struggle between good and evil. This battle to the death, which immediately recalls the battle between ‘the elites’ and ‘the people’ noted earlier, emerges as a counter-narrative to the narratives of political pluralism, compromise and institutionalized conflict resolution. The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms— he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional). (Hofstadter 1964: 85)

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Hofstadter did not deny the existence of actual conspiracies, nor did he dismiss a priori the paranoid style as hostile to factual evidence, claiming that ‘style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed and advocated than with the truth or falsity of their content. I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric’ (77). While acknowledging the pejorative qualities of the term paranoid and suggesting that the term has a ‘greater affinity for bad causes than good’, Hofstadter envisaged the paranoid style as being capable of serving good purposes as well as bad, supporting truth as well as lies. A more trenchant critic of conspiracy theories, Karl Popper (1945) argued in The Open Society and Its Enemies that such ‘theories’ are not merely unscientific but a threat to democratic institutions and a feature of totalitarian thinking. Popper claimed that conspiracy theories and paranoid scenarios feed totalitarianism and are direct threats to democracy. The twin ideas that conspiracy theories are not liable to scientific validation by evidence to facts (they will incorporate any fact as a feature of conspiracy and cover-up) and that they harm democratic public life have set the terms for most of the scholarly debates on conspiracy theorists. These have divided commentators in two opposed camps, implacable critics and equivocal defenders of conspiracy theories. Implacable critics sustain a rationalist critique of their content and a public interest critique of their implications. Such theories, they argue, are irrational, unscientific and damaging (see, e.g. Aaronovitch 2010; Clarke 2002; Keeley 1999). They are peddled by nutters, fantasists or indeed conspirators themselves who stand to gain financially, politically or symbolically. In recent times, however, a more equivocal argument (a counter-narrative?) on conspiracy theories has also started to take shape. In a world full of real conspiracies, secrecy and concentration of power, a suspicious state of mind may be quite justified. In such a world, systematic doubt and scepticism, far from being signs of mental disorders, may be sensible responses to various visible and invisible attempts at deception and manipulation (Basham 2001). Aren’t scientists themselves doubtful and sceptical when facing orthodoxy? Equivocal defenders of conspiracy theories have argued that, far from being unscientific, these theories share many features of science—attention to detail, a questioning attitude, an unwillingness to be fobbed off by ad hoc explanations and a belief in everything having a cause. Thus Raikka (2009) rejects both the epistemological and the public trust objections to conspiracy theories, noting that science (like conspiracy theory) often suffers from limited falsifiability and offering strong arguments to the effect

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that conspiracy theories are both liable to correction and to eventual decline and dismissal. Similarly, Pigden (1995: 3) directly turns Popper’s argument against itself by suggesting that ‘the belief that it is superstitious to posit conspiracies is itself a superstition’. In a similar vein, Locke (2009) views conspiracy theories as features of a rationalized discourse, informed by ‘the same logic that produces the sciences of general social analysis’ (582). An interesting twist to these defences of conspiracy theories is offered by Dean (2002) who argues that the surfeit of information available in the age of the internet and social media, far from bolstering democratic accountability, blurs the lines between fact and story, producing ‘suspicious subjects ever clicking for more information, ever drawn to uncover the secret and find out for themselves’ (16). The proliferation of conspiracy theories on the internet is the result of this suspicious attitude bred by the increasing instability of facts, a symptom rather than the cause of the erosion of trust in reality and rational discourse, in other words the ability to resolve disagreement through careful scrutiny of material evidence and reasoned argument. In contrast to the views of implacable critics of conspiracy theories, equivocal defenders tend to dismiss absolute separations between fact and story but also between theory and story—scientific theories share many qualities with narratives and cannot be differentiated sharply from them. They both offer explanations and may compete in the same narrative spaces or narrative ecologies (just as Darwinism and creationism do). The narrative qualities of conspiracy theories, the qualities that make them more or less effective as explanations, that enhance their plausibility and appeal, have been less widely discussed than their epistemological or political status. Dismissing a narrative as a conspiracy theory, a favourite political trope today, seeks to foreclose democratic discourse and demonstrates an unwillingness to engage with alternative narrative lines. As such, it is not conspiracy theorists that represent a threat to democracy, argues Schreven (2017), but those who seek to delegitimize others and deprive them of their voice by casting them as conspiracy theorists. While conspiracy theories have a long history, in our times they have colonized large sections of the internet and can be found in every political colour from extreme left to extreme right. Populist leaders like Trump have embraced the narrative of conspiracy as one of their favourite genres. For example, he spearheaded the patently deceitful ‘birther’ hoax aimed at undermining the legitimacy of former President Barak Obama. But conspiracy theories also seep into left-wing thinking, for example, in seeking

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to account for Trump’s election and for the Brexit result as products of conspiracies involving Vladimir Putin, the social media and nefarious forces.3 Casting somebody else’s argument or opinion as a conspiracy theory has become itself part of the narrative ecology of post-truth. In this way, we now have the strange situation where climate scientists warning of global warming are accused of being conspiracy theorists by the very conspiracy theorists who deny climate change. What is maybe new in contemporary conspiracy theorizing is the casting of the ‘establishment’ itself as the source of all conspiracies. The wide-­ ranging resurgence of the word ‘elites’ in popular and populist discourses, allied to adjectives like ‘liberal’, ‘corrupt’, ‘self-serving’, and so forth, is an indication of the strength of this narrative and its potential political ramifications. The fact that this narrative can be adopted by Trump in his attack on the Washington establishment, the Leave supporters in their opposition to Brussels as well as Westminster, but also Podemos and Syriza in their opposition to native elites is an indication of its versatility. All in all, conspiracy theories, like nostalgic narratives, have embedded themselves into the narrative ecologies of our times. Both narrative genres show considerable versatility in crossing political boundaries of left and right; they both demonstrate considerable resilience in the face of material counter-evidence and they both challenge received opinions and views proffered by experts, scientists and authoritative pundits. Both become accommodated in a vocabulary that casts the people as patronized, manipulated, oppressed and disregarded by the elites. Both are supported by deep-seated resentments, anger and injured pride and both converge in their quest for guilty parties to blame for current ills and discontents. They are together capable of fuelling witch-hunts, scapegoating and xenophobia. They both make use vocabularies of betrayals, punishments, insults, injuries, injustices, exclusions, underappreciation, abandonment and neglect. And it is for these reasons, that both nostalgic narratives and conspiracy theories have become key engines of populist discourses.

3  I am not proposing here an equivalence, moral or epistemological, between right- and left-wing conspiracy theories in US politics—merely that conspiracy theories prosper in the narrative ecology of US politics, assuming many different forms, more or less susceptible to falsification.

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What Political Science Can Learn from the Humanities: Blurring Genres This chapter has made use of a concept from the natural sciences, that of ecology, to investigate the role of narratives in politics, and in particular their configurations in the context of widely discussed contemporary phenomena, namely the rise of populism and post-truth. By drawing on a metaphor from the natural sciences, I proposed that, far from coexisting willy-nilly as elements of a polyphony, narratives behave like elements and populations of natural environments, competing, reinforcing, supporting, undermining, mutating and cross-fertilizing each other. Natural history also helps us understand why narratives and counter-narratives frequently rely on each other to galvanize themselves and thrive. In line with Geertz’s suggestion that ‘theory, scientific or otherwise, moves mainly by analogy’, we proposed that narrative ecologies, like natural ecologies, may have varying degrees of diversity, resilience and flexibility. The analogy can be stretched further by arguing that the narrative ecologies of different political arenas fall into patterns not dissimilar to those of natural ecologies. We may then envision some of them as narrative temperate zones where many different narratives can coexist, narrative monocultures which seek to eradicate all narratives apart from a core totalizing narrative, narrative deserts in which very few narratives can be identified which generally take little notice of each other, narrative jungles when a profusion of narratives engage in a ceaseless struggle for predominance and so forth (for a full account of different narratives ecologies, see Gabriel 2016). Nostalgic narratives and conspiracy theories, I argued here, are critical political narratives of our times. While we encounter them in many different guises across nations and across the political spectrum, populism would appear to be their natural habitus. As features of the narrative ecologies of our times, they both display a resistance to empirical falsification, a readiness to attribute blame and an unwavering propensity for Manichean dualisms of good and evil. The digital revolution and social media have provided an effective machinery for the creation and the propagation of such narratives, consistent with a post-truth politics. In light of this, we may suggest that the narrative ecologies of our times are veering towards narrative jungles where an immense proliferation of stories, scenarios, plot lines, allegations, fantasies, fictions, half-truths and untruths are constantly

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fighting it out to capture the limelight for however brief a spell. All the same, at least countries with long-established institutions of liberal democracy may defend the principles of tolerance and dialogue where a plurality of narratives along with their plot lines, characters and symbolic and emotional resonances can establish themselves and enjoy a relatively peaceful coexistence and dialogue in temperate narrative ecologies. In such countries, it is of course the institutions along with the principles of liberal democracy that the populist-nationalist right has demonized. Yet, there is evidence that these institutions, the press, the courts and civil society, are beginning to make a stand against the surge of right-wing populism and its counter-narratives by defending the liberal principles of justice, reasoned argument, truthfulness and tolerance of difference. It may well be that many countries, under the current revival of populism, find themselves at the narrative border between the jungle and temperate zone. In such countries, seeking to counter the mushrooming narratives of a jungle with well-groomed narratives of a temperate zone may not seem to be a very promising endeavour. Whether the jungle will encroach the frontiers of the temperate zones must be an open question as must the possibility of widespread desertification.

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Samuel, R., & Thompson, P. (1990). Introduction. In R. Samuel & P. Thompson (Eds.), The Myths We Live By (pp. 1–22). London: Routledge. Schreven, S. (2017). Conspiracy Theorists and Organization Studies. Organization Studies, 39(10), 1473–1488. Schumacher, G., & van Kersbergen, K. (2016). Do mainstream parties adapt to the welfare chauvinism of populist parties? Party Politics, 22(3), 300–312. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354068814549345 Sedikides, C., & Wildschut, T. (2018). Finding Meaning in Nostalgia. Review of General Psychology, 22(1), 48–61. Slutskaya, N., Simpson, R., Hughes, J., Simpson, A., & Uygur, S. (2016). Masculinity and Class in the Context of Dirty Work. Gender, Work and Organization, 23(2), 165–182. Smeekes, A. (2015). National Nostalgia: A Group-Based Emotion that Benefits the in-Group but Hampers Intergroup Relations. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 49, 54–67. Smeekes, A., & Verkuyten, M. (2015). The Presence of the Past: Identity Continuity and Group Dynamics. European Review of Social Psychology, 26(1), 162–202. Spicer, A. (2017). Business bullshit. London: Routledge. Stavrakakis, Y. (2014). The Return of “the People”: Populism and Anti-Populism in the Shadow of the European Crisis. Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory, 21(4), 505–517. https://doi. org/10.1111/1467-8675.12127 Stavrakakis, Y., & Katsambekis, G. (2014). Left-wing populism in the European periphery: The case of SYRIZA. Journal of Political Ideologies, 19(2), 119–142. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2014.909266 Stavrakakis, Y., Katsambekis, G., Nikisianis, N., Kioupkiolis, A., & Siomos, T. (2017). Extreme right-wing populism in Europe: revisiting a reified association. Critical Discourse Studies, 14(4), 420–439. https://doi.org/10.108 0/17405904.2017.1309325 Stokes, P., & Gabriel, Y. (2010). Engaging with genocide: the challenge for organization and management studies. Organization, 17(4), 461–480. https://doi. org/10.1177/1350508409353198 Strangleman, T. (1999). The Nostalgia of Organisations and the Organisation of Nostalgia: Past and Present in the Contemporary Railway Industry. Sociology-­ the Journal of the British Sociological Association, 33(4), 725–746. Strangleman, T., & Roberts, I. (1999). Looking through the Window of Opportunity: The Cultural Cleansing of Workplace Identity. Sociology, 33(1), 47–67. Velikonja, M. (2009). Lost in Transition Nostalgia for Socialism in Post-socialist Countries. East European Politics and Societies, 23(4), 535–551. Werman, D. (1977). Normal and Pathological Nostalgia. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 25, 313–320.

CHAPTER 3

It’s the Way You Tell It: Conflicting Narratives in the 2011, 2015, and 2019 Canadian Federal Elections Sandford Borins and Beth Herst

Introduction: Developing and Applying a Model of Election Narratives By the end of the 2015 Canadian federal election campaign, the Liberal Party of Canada had posted 52 English-language advertisements on its YouTube channel, the New Democratic Party had posted 43, and the Conservative Party of Canada had posted 40. Total views, counted between the launch of each ad and Election Day, amounted to almost 14 million in a campaign that ended with more than 16 million ballots being cast for the three major parties (Elections Canada 2015). Attention clearly was paid to these ads in an online setting. This chapter discusses a

S. Borins (*) University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] B. Herst Toronto, ON, Canada © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. A. W. Rhodes, S. Hodgett (eds.), What Political Science Can Learn from the Humanities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51697-0_3

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contemporary form of political participation—visiting and sharing ads on social media—using a new approach, the study of narrative. The premise underlying Borins’s 2011 book Governing Fables is simple: representations of politics and governance circulating within popular culture often serve as templates for how we perceive and interpret public sector actors and institutions, at times consciously, at other times less so. Governing Fables proposes that we often import those structures from popular culture forms like movies and television series, or print media (memoirs, biographies, novels, and histories). The German media scholar Monika Suckfüll has written of the ways our “lifelong socialization and learning process relating to the media” conditions us in a range of “modes of reception,” teaching us not just how to respond but what to look for (Shimamura 2013: 324). Governing Fables argues that life-long immersion with media also shapes the means we use to observe, represent, and interpret the world around us, what film scholar Carl Plantinga calls “the patterns of salience we impose” (Plantinga 2009: 48). Specifically, Governing Fables analyses sets of professionally authored narratives in both print and film—extended, complex, and imagined structures, produced with conscious aesthetic as well as informational intent— representing different spheres of public sector activity. These include the educational system and educational reform, crisis management and political leadership, the public service, electoral politics and governance, and the judicial system. Working inductively, Borins identified recurring or dominant “fables” within each set, a shared structure of narrative functions, positions, assumptions, values, and preferred meanings that inform individual configurations of characters, actions, and plot events. While each text had its own unique story, plot, and set of characters, many could—and did—share a common structuring fable. Borins proposed a typology for these fables that takes as its point of departure the fact that public sector narratives necessarily involve both an individual protagonist (or a group of individuals functioning collectively in that role) and an explicitly defined institutional or societal context. An individual text’s plot would activate a series of challenges to, or crises deriving from, that context. The protagonist’s responses (choices, actions, values, goals, and motives) would affect both her/their personal story and the larger context in which it is embedded. These assumptions yielded a basic matrix of four distinct fables: the heroic, the ironic, the sacrificial, and the tragic. For the purposes of this chapter, these can be defined simply in terms of relative outcomes. In the

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heroic fable (upper left quadrant of the matrix), both the protagonist and the institution/society triumph. In the ironic fable (lower left quadrant), the protagonist prevails by exploiting the institution/society. The sacrificial fable (upper right quadrant) sees the institution/society triumphing at the expense of the individual, while the tragic fable (lower right quadrant) results in detrimental outcomes for both. To cite two key examples from Governing Fables: the popular American television series The West Wing instantiates the heroic fable in episode after episode as President Josiah “Jed” Bartlett overcame personal and national challenges to preserve his principles, his reputation, his administration, and the safety and prosperity of the nation. In contrast, the landmark British comedies Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister offered weekly iterations of the ironic fable, showcasing venal politicians and obstructive bureaucrats scheming, manoeuvring, and engaging in outrageous hypocrisy to advance their personal agendas at the expense of good governance and the national interest. Governing Fables analysed a range of contemporary political and bureaucratic narrative texts from the US and the UK, both fiction and non-fiction. All fit readily within the matrix. The last chapter of Governing Fables speculated about applying the four fable framework to narratives used by practitioners in election campaigns. It hypothesized that: Incumbents campaigning for re-election construct a narrative to fit the upper-left hand quadrant of our analytic matrix, along the lines of “our country has done well over the last four years, while I have grown in stature as a leader, and this will continue in the next four years.” … An opposition party will present a lower-right quadrant narrative of both national weakness and the leader’s loss of energy, hope, or optimism. One could also develop campaign narratives for both incumbents and challengers that would be associated with each of the other quadrants. (Borins 2011: 255–256)

While Governing Fables was in the production process in spring 2011, we observed a federal election campaign which our analytical approach seemed to fit perfectly. Three distinctive and dramatic narratives emerged about the leaders of the three major parties. Two of these were narratives developed by the party about itself, the third was a counter-narrative promulgated by an opponent. The aspect of the election campaign we watched most closely for the expression of these narratives were the political ads shown on network television and posted on YouTube.

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The Conservative Party of Canada’s (CPC’s) narrative about themselves was situated squarely in the upper left (heroic) quadrant. Their key claim about the country was that, under their leadership, it weathered the challenge of the global economic recession and emerged with its economic institutions in relatively good shape. The second part of the narrative concerned Prime Minister Stephen Harper as a protagonist. He had governed as a pragmatist doing what was necessary to stimulate the economy and had also become a global statesman as well as a national leader, all the while being a middle-class piano-playing hockey dad. One of the CPC’s key ads, simply entitled “Stephen Harper,” combined patriotic images (the flag, a fly-past over Parliament hill, and a child with a face-painted maple leaf) with images of Stephen Harper visiting war memorials, at work in his office, at the summit of the leaders of 20 of the world’s largest economies (G20) held in Toronto in 2010, and with his family.1 For New Democratic Party (NDP) leader Jack Layton, the challenge of personal renewal occurred on a much more elemental level than mere ambition. When the campaign began, he was ailing, fighting prostate cancer, and recovering from hip surgery. But he managed to project himself as engaged, self-confident, and regaining his health despite the demands of a national campaign. His personal story reinforced the NDP’s policy narrative. The NDP campaign also staked out the heroic upper-left quadrant, combining policies to benefit the country—more spending on popular programmes like training doctors and nurses and improving public pensions—with Jack Layton’s story of personal renewal. The NDP ads blended the two narratives of policy and personal renewal seamlessly, shifting from policy—“I will fund more doctors and nurses and strengthen your pension”—to personality: “you know I’m a fighter. And I won’t stop until the job is done.” For emphasis, Layton often waved aloft the crutch from his hip surgery.2 The CPC began running attack ads against Liberal Party of Canada (LPC) leader Michael Ignatieff soon after he was chosen in 2009 under the rubrics “Just Visiting,” “Arrogance,” and “Not in it for You.”3 Focusing on his absence from Canada of over 30 years, the Conservatives 1  Unfortunately, this ad is no longer posted on YouTube. A comparable ad that remains is “Our Country” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rEkFG5MNTk). 2  An NDP ad still available online is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-6j64iDDSA. 3  Many of these ads are available on YouTube under rubrics such as “Michael Ignatieff Just Visiting” or “Michael Ignatieff Arrogance.”

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claimed that he had returned only to satisfy personal ambition. The second leg of the argument was that Ignatieff’s policies of introducing a carbon tax and increasing the value-added tax would hurt the electorate economically. The CPC’s attacks on Ignatieff epitomized the ironic fable—personal gain for the protagonist combined with pain for the electorate. In the election, the Conservatives won a majority (166 seats); the NDP, with 103 seats became the Official Opposition for the first time; and the Liberals, with only 34 seats, finished third for the first time. In his political memoir Fire and Ashes (2015), Ignatieff recognized the effectiveness of the Conservative ads: I’d gone out into the wider world to make something of myself, and I’d come home because I wanted to serve. The Conservatives went right at the narrative of homecoming and turned it on its head: I was a carpetbagger, an elitist with no fixed convictions, out for myself and not for Canadians.4

From Cases to Data Impressed by the fit between the heroic and ironic fables and the narratives about the three major party leaders in the 2011 election, we decided to take a more detailed and rigorous look at election narratives in the 2015 federal election from the standpoint of our analytic model. Our first step would be to outline the narratives each party was promulgating about itself and its leader and about its opponents and their leaders. These outlines would be based on observation of the election campaigns in their totality, including platforms, advertising, speeches, and leaders’ debates. Then we would look at how these narratives were presented in election ads. We made this methodological choice because election ads, whether broadcast or online, have a demonstrated effectiveness as tools of political persuasion, as discussed in Johnston’s (2017) review article on the effects of election campaigns on voter choices. Political advertisements are not only linguistic artefacts, however. They are also miniature (30–60-second long) films and, therefore, visual and aural narratives. Film theorists pursuing a “cognitive/perceptual” or “neurocinematic” approach are increasingly focusing on the interplay 4  Ignatieff’s pre-political career was as an author, broadcaster, and educator, in effect a public intellectual. The CPC’s ads turned the strength of his narrative into a weakness.

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between film’s “direct appeal to sight and hearing” (Plantinga 2009: 112), its narrative structures, and its elicitation of an emotional response (Plantinga 2009; Shimamura 2013). Though ads are not feature films, they undoubtedly draw upon some of the same primary representational resources, including music, lighting, visual design or mise-en-scène, cinematography and editing, and, most fundamental of all, human figures speaking and moving. They also invoke familiar narrative structures to frame their specific issue, policy, or “message” content. Parsing the sensory/perceptual and the narrative dimensions of the ads, and the interactions between the two, can enlarge our understanding of these ads as a distinct mode of political communication. We would go to YouTube for ads because it has become the pre-­ eminent repository of moving-image political advertising. Major political parties regularly post their election ads, both those released on broadcast media and those released online, on their YouTube channels. They also post links on their websites to the ads on their YouTube channels. Millions of viewers watch political ads on YouTube. YouTube tracks and posts view counts which, as will be discussed below, provide an approximate measure of the impact of both individual election ads and a candidate’s overall campaign. The research methodology would involve coding the narrative characteristics of the ads posted by the major parties in the 2015 federal election. This approach would be achievable within a modest budget in which student research assistants would be gathering ads on YouTube, coding them, and then performing data analysis. A more thorough—but unachievable within our budget—approach would also have been to use broadcast logs to find and code every ad broadcast during the election campaign. The point of departure for our analysis is the premise that political advertising typically draws on the heroic and ironic fable structures, positioning the party leaders, the parties, or a conjunction of the two, as the protagonist, with the experience of the nation as a whole, or key subsets of it (“the middle class,” “working parents,” and “families”) occupying the position of social context. The incumbent party seeks to activate two versions of the heroic fable: one in which the leader’s manifest leadership skills, policies, and positive personal qualities have benefited the designated contextual groups, the other in which the leader’s personal growth in office, usually depicted as a result of the grave and unexpected national or international challenges faced, has resulted in (and been reflected by) benefits to the nation. The version of the ironic fable the incumbent party

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presents is straightforward: the competing leaders’ personal inadequacies are reflected in risky or misguided policies resulting in negative outcomes and inevitable future decline for the nation if the opposition leader achieves her personal goal of winning power. Opposition parties necessarily invert these structures and timelines, recasting the recent past to highlight individual or collective missteps, failed, flawed, or unfulfilled policies, and markers of national (or representative) decline or disadvantage, with more of the same to come. Their heroic fable will present similar structural propositions to that of the incumbent party, with the difference that the positive outcomes are all prospective, projected into the future as inevitable results of their candidate’s victory and their candidate’s personal “story.” The quantitative results for the 2015 Canadian federal election were generated by coding the entire set of 135 English-language ads posted on YouTube by the three major Canadian political parties, including 47 that preceded the official start of the campaign on 1 August.5 The CPC, as it had done to Michael Ignatieff, began airing attack ads as soon as Justin Trudeau became leader of the LPC in 2012. The Liberals, rather than keeping silent, as had been the case when Michael Ignatieff was leader, launched a special fundraising campaign to finance their own counter ads. Both sets of ads preceded the campaign proper. Scholars and commentators have dubbed this increasingly common form of political advertising “the permanent campaign.” Sandford Borins and a research assistant coded the ads using a set of inductively derived categories, with 90 per cent inter-coder reliability that was consistent for all items coded. In coding the ads for their activation of the heroic or ironic fable, we further refined the fable variants into seven possible configurations. We discuss these configurations in more detail below. Certain basic markers were coded including the day ad was posted and its total view count to 19 October 2015 (Election Day).6 We also included the categories most frequently analysed in mainstream political science research on political advertising: whether the ad was positive, 5  Funding constraints precluded our coding French-language ads. Even if funding had been available, the configuration of the campaign in Quebec, where four major parties were fighting for francophone votes, placed it beyond the scope of this project. 6  We tracked the parties’ YouTube channels daily and coded ads as soon as they appeared. For each party we developed a spreadsheet with the rows in the order in which the ads were posted (i.e. earliest at the top). We coded the view counts for all ads on the evening of October 18.

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negative, or contrasted leaders and/or parties, and the policy issue(s) addressed. Finally, as a first attempt to address the sensory nature of the advertisements’ chosen medium, we coded a small number of visual and aural features. These included the voice or voices delivering the verbal content as distinct from visual text, the presence and type of music, and the overall colour palette. This coding represented our first definition and application of these categories and was deliberately modest in scope. The Parties’ Fables Before considering the coding results, it is necessary to outline the competing fables structuring individual party advertisements, that is, the set of narrative propositions repeatedly activated by each campaign about its leader, its party, and its opponents. We used a recursive process of observation and induction to define these, including in our analysis not just advertisements but also official party platforms, campaign literature and print media (signs, postcards, and leaflets), online presence besides advertisements (websites), candidates’ speeches, and their televised debate performances. Our goal here was to identify the core premises informing specific narrative instances. In the 2015 campaign, the CPC’s heroic fable positioned Prime Minister Stephen Harper as an experienced economic manager who had successfully steered Canada through the Great Recession, balanced the budget, and cut taxes. Because the 2011 campaign focused on his pragmatic response to the Great Recession, the 2015 campaign focused on the subsequent achievements of a balanced budget and new tax cuts. Tacitly conceding his less than dynamic personality and rather chilly public persona, Harper was portrayed as a mature, careful steward of the nation’s prosperity, and therefore as a serious leader, a statesman, a bulwark of Canada’s internal and external security. The implicit structuring equation of economic prosperity and national security was encapsulated in the party’s ubiquitous rallying cry: “Protect our economy.” The CPC’s main ironic fable clearly defined the threat to be defended against. Justin Trudeau was inexperienced, immature, and temperamentally unsuited to lead a nation. A Liberal government under Trudeau would produce economic disaster, social chaos, and decreased national security. Specific instantiations of the ironic fable would often take very personal forms: Trudeau’s past marijuana use, his privileged childhood, his dilettantish catalogue of jobs, and ultimate pre-political career as a

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high-­school teacher, even his hair. In contrast, the CPC’s ironic fable concerning the NDP’s Thomas Mulcair was more purely ideological, though still treating the economy as a self-evident synecdoche for the condition of the nation as a whole, and economic policy as an index of temperamental fitness for office or lack thereof.7 Mulcair thus figured as an unregenerate, doctrinaire socialist, anti-trade, pro-carbon tax, in thrall to outmoded political philosophies (socialism) and economic models (tax-and-spend), a different form of threat to national (economic) security. The LPC chose to centre its heroic fable on Justin Trudeau as a different kind of political actor: contemporary, concerned, and positive, an agent of “real change” as the party’s platform slogan promised. Positioning Trudeau as a leader for the twenty-first century, this fable capitalized on Trudeau’s slightly uncanny youthfulness and energy, his rather unconventional route to political life, and his obvious comfort with popular cultural forms and idioms. The “real change” being offered operated on multiple levels. Trudeau was a new kind of politician with a twenty-first-century vision, unlike either Harper or Mulcair, positioned here as unimaginative and hide-bound practitioners of politics as usual, timorous guardians of the status quo. Trudeau’s obvious athleticism unfairly but effectively underlined his generational message, reinforcing his difference from the greying and slightly doughy Harper and the equally greying and decidedly portly Mulcair. His government would represent a real change from the corrupt, cynical Conservatives, would serve the interests of the vast majority of Canadians (i.e. the middle class), and would not be afraid to adopt bold policies of raising taxes and running a temporary deficit to invest in public infrastructure. These latter were a direct rebuke to both Harper’s insistence on conservative economic orthodoxy and Mulcair’s hedging promises to balance the budget throughout his entire mandate while still pursuing socially progressive policies. Despite entering the election as the Official Opposition, the NDP still struggled to frame a heroic fable that could transcend the dichotomy of “neither/nor,” that is neither Conservative nor Liberal, neither the corrupt and heartless Harper nor the jejune and fiscally reckless Trudeau. It seized on Mulcair’s 30-year history of social commitment and public 7  Despite the appearance of recovery to robust health that he projected in the 2011 campaign, NDP leader Jack Layton died of cancer within four months. Layton was replaced as leader by Thomas Mulcair, the party’s deputy leader, Quebec lieutenant, and shadow finance minister.

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S. BORINS AND B. HERST

service as a lawyer and provincial cabinet minister, framing him as first and foremost “an experienced public administrator,” both pragmatic and socially progressive, capable of providing affordable change (expanded public funding for childcare) without raising taxes or running a deficit. The NDP emphatically framed an ironic fable, consistently positioning Harper and the CPC as corrupt and in thrall to corporate Canada, while also challenging the effectiveness of the Prime Minister’s economic stewardship. As leader of the Official Opposition, Mulcair’s parliamentary attacks on Harper had been both tenacious and stinging. Negative campaigning could therefore be seen as in some sense a continuation of Mulcair’s, and the party’s, newly defined brand as the Official Opposition. Results The structuring premise of our analysis assumes that political advertisements are a distinctive sub-genre of public sector narrative and as such, they can be classified within our taxonomy of public sector fables. We found that they instantiate variations of the heroic or ironic fable, but not the sacrificial or tragic fables. We speculated in Governing Fables that political parties could deploy the sacrificial fable about their own leader and the tragic fable about an opponent. It turned out that these three parties did not. We begin with seven configurations of the heroic and ironic fables that were coded. Hero denotes a fable focusing solely on the party’s leader and his or her relationship to the electorate. It might involve an encapsulation of a personal or political biography, an encounter with or testimony from a representative citizen, family, or social group, or sequences of interaction with an enthusiastic crowd, accompanied by either a recapitulation of past, or a promise of future, benefits for individuals, communities, or the nation. Ads instantiating the heroic fable incorporated one or more of these themes in no clear pattern, so we did not attempt to code them as such. For the ironic fable, however, the coding revealed three distinct variants. Knave positions an opposing candidate as in some measure tainted or corrupt, perhaps motivated by personal ambition and/or personal gain, implicated in scandals, or in thrall to special interests. In contrast, fool characterizes its target as well-meaning but naïve, inexperienced, or misguided (or all three) and therefore likely to make bad decisions and enact harmful policies, albeit with the best intentions. Mistaken policy presents a past or promised policy as harmful. The association may be less with

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specific politicians than with the opposing party and/or ideology more broadly, with the policy presented as a symbol of larger failings. The final three configurations involved compound ads that used both the heroic fable and each of the three variants of the ironic fable. Referring to Michelle Obama’s aphorism in the 2016 US presidential election, “when they go low, we go high,” any election campaign involves both “going high” about one’s own leader and “going low” about one’s opponents. Our interest here is in how each party balanced between the two. What are their relative frequencies and which of the various configurations of the ironic fable does the party deploy? Table 3.1 shows the use of the different variants of heroic and ironic fables by the three parties. Considering the use of pure and compound “heroic” fables, as well as the variants of the ironic fables, one significant difference is immediately apparent. Forty per cent of the CPC’s ads employed the “fool” version of the ironic fable, directed at Justin Trudeau’s inexperience and naïveté. These ads repeatedly recycled a soundbite of Trudeau’s assertion that under a Liberal government’s proposed economic policies the budget will “balance itself,” framing it as proof of Trudeau’s incompetence in financial management and therefore unfitness for office. Only 30 per cent of the Conservative Party’s ads employed the “heroic” fable, either featuring Stephen Harper alone or contrasting him with his opponents and their parties. Both the LPC and the NDP deployed the “heroic” fable more often, and the ironic variants (“knave,” “fool,” and “mistaken policy”) less often in total. Neither attempted to position the leaders of the other parties as “fools,” but there are clear differences in approach between the Table 3.1  Structuring fables, 2015 Canadian federal election Fable

CPC

LIB

NDP

Hero Knave Fool Mistaken policy Hero and knave Hero and fool Hero and mistaken policy Total N

15% 11 40 19 0 4 11 100% 40

33% 17 0 4 8 0 39 101% 52

20% 25 0 7 18 0 30 100% 43

Source: Party ads posted on their YouTube channels coded by co-author and research assistant

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two. The Liberals employed the “heroic” fable significantly more often (33 per cent of their total ads compared to the NDP’s 20 per cent) and used the “knave” variant of the ironic fable, with or without a “heroic” contrast, less often (25 per cent compared to 43 per cent). The LPC also used the compound “hero and mistaken policy” fable more often (39 per cent compared to 30 per cent). In other words, the Liberals were focusing on Justin Trudeau as leader, featuring him respectfully critiquing mistaken policies. The NDP were more often attacking other party leaders as “knaves.” Given the heroic and ironic fable structures, we would expect virtually all the advertisements to focus on party leaders (their own, their opponents’, or both). In fact, one or more party leaders were mentioned by name in all but one of the 135 ads. One implication of this trend is that campaigning now focuses on the party leaders more than their respective platforms and will continue to do so in the future, ensuring many more iterations of the heroic and ironic fables. Analysis of election advertising within political science has traditionally focused on whether ads are positive, negative, or contrast leaders and/or parties. Given the findings already outlined relating to the significant differences in the use of “heroic” versus “ironic” fable variants, we would expect their markers to align with ours, and they do. Table 3.2 shows the distribution of positive, negative, and contrast ads for the three parties. The CPC is clearly the outlier, with 63 per cent of their ads wholly negative. The LPC and the NDP are comparable to each other, with the majority of both parties’ ads using the contrast format. For the remainder, the Liberals offered twice as many positive and half as many negative ads as the NDP. But the difference between the fables in Table 3.1 and the categories in Table 3.2 is that the former provides more information about the nature of the negative messages sent. Similarly, in the 2011 election Table 3.2  Type of ad, 2015 Canadian federal election Type of ad

CPC

LIB

NDP

Positive Negative Contrast Total N

20% 63 17 100% 40

29% 15 66 100% 52

14% 28 58 100% 43

Source: Party ads posted on their YouTube channels coded by co-author and research assistant

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campaign, the nature of the CPC’s ironic fable about Michael Ignatieff is what mattered, not the mere fact that it used negative ads. A clear outline is beginning to emerge. The Conservatives consistently, at times heavily, favoured the most negative option in their choice of fable (“fool”) and the orientation of the ad as a whole. The Liberals equally consistently chose the most positive, least dismissive approach, with the NDP mixing the two, though with a bias towards relatively more negative characterization of opposing leaders and overall tone of ad. In light of the strongly negative tenor of the Conservative’s advertising, it is somewhat surprising to consider that 70 per cent of their ads took the economy as their topic or issue, in particular taxes, the deficit, and economic growth (see Table  3.3). The CPC had made Prime Minister Harper’s financial management the cornerstone of his “heroic” persona. There were certainly unexploited opportunities here for positive, “heroic,” or compound “heroic/ironic” narratives, like those used in 2011, that would have modulated the heavily negative overall tone of their advertising choices. Liberal advertising also focused heavily on the economy (54 per cent) though significantly less than the CPC, while the NDP made it the focus of only one-third of their ads. In fact, the second largest Table 3.3  Policy issues discussed, 2015 Canadian federal election Policy issue

CPC

LIB

NDP

Economy Security Terrorism Corruption Democracy Marijuana Climate change Diversity Veteran care Income splitting LGBTQ rights Tax credit increase Pensions Quality of primary education Other N

70% 13 13 13 3 10 0 0 0 0 0 3 0 0 0 40

54% 2 0 12 10 0 4 4 2 2 2 2 0 2 4 52

33% 5 2 16 12 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 30 43

Source: Party ads posted on their YouTube channels coded by co-author and research assistant

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percentage of NDP ads (30 per cent) falls into a catch-all category of “Other” that proved particularly vexatious to code. “Other” NDP ads included depictions of Mulcair assuming the mantle of previous NDP leaders, most notably Jack Layton; announcements of the time and place of rallies; and statements by the NDP’s campaign chair on behalf of its “truth team” attempting to rebut LPC and CPC attacks. The first of the sensory dimensions (visual and aural) of the ads is their choice of narrating voice, which is shown in Table 3.4. Liberal ads used Trudeau himself as narrator approximately two-thirds of the time, almost always in some form of direct address to the camera and frequently in close-up. Here, too, Trudeau’s luck in the genetic lottery worked in his favour. The implication of the choice seems clear. The LPC identified in Trudeau its best asset, the “face” of the “brand.” It was only natural to establish him as the voice of that brand too. In sharp contrast, Stephen Harper supplied the narrating voice for less than one-quarter of the CPC’s ads. This may well have been a tacit recognition of the dramatic decline in Harper’s personal popularity in the months leading up to the campaign. A full 48 per cent of the Conservatives’ ads employed an anonymous voice-­ over narration. In three-quarters of these instances, the voice was male (35 per cent of total ads). The predominance of male voices may have been in deference to the party’s traditional strength among male voters. The ads were literally talking “man-to-man.” It may also have been designed to underscore the structuring heroic fable of Harper’s (and the party’s) experience, authority, and maturity, all characteristics still culturally coded as male. In contrast, the LPC used voice-over in only 10 per cent of its ads. Table 3.4  Narrating voice, 2015 Canadian federal election ads Narrating voice

CPC

LIB

NDP

Anonymous male voice-over Anonymous female voice-over Graphic Own party leader Other party leader Other politician Citizen(s) Total N

35% 13 0 23 3 3 23 100% 40

4% 6 19 62 2 6 0 99% 52

4% 13 18 38 0 20 7 100% 43

Source: Party ads posted on their YouTube channels coded by co-author and research assistant

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Once again, the NDP falls somewhere in the middle. Its ads used Tom Mulcair as narrating voice 38 per cent of the time. Only 17 per cent of NDP ads used voice-over narration and here the gender choice reversed that of the Conservatives. Two of the party’s most popular ads, based on view counts generated, employed male voice-over to narrate blistering attacks on Harper and the Conservatives. Given Mulcair’s proven prowess in strident attacks during parliamentary question period, he might well have supplied the voice, but this would have undermined party strategists’ efforts to soften a persona often characterized as angry. Narrating voice is, of course, not the only possible aural component of the ads. Music can play a very significant role. It is important to note that the physiological response known as “auditory entrainment” or “the frequency following effect” in which a listener’s heartbeat, brain waves, and other physiological functions synchronize with the rhythmic patterns of the sounds she is hearing can be activated by quite simple sound elements (Plantinga 2009: 131). And these unconscious and spontaneous physiological responses, in turn, can trigger emotional and cognitive responses. Brader (2005) utilized psychological testing to demonstrate that the manipulation of musical and visual cues accompanying political ads has a measurable effect on the emotional states of voters. All three parties made extensive use of music in their election advertising (see Table 3.5). The LPC was the clear leader in this regard. Only 6 per cent of their ads did not contain music elements. The NDP and CPC rate of use was almost identical, with 16 and 17 per cent of ads respectively not using any musical elements at all. All of the music used would fall in the category of programme music, that is to say music composed or selected to interact with the ads’ visual and verbal elements. Such music Table 3.5  Use of music, 2015 Canadian federal election Type of music

CPC

LIB

NDP

Upbeat Ominous Humorous Calm No music used Total N

7% 32 15 29 17 100% 40

68% 4 15 8 6 101% 52

47% 12 16 9 16 100% 43

Source: Party ads posted on their YouTube channels coded by co-author and research assistant

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may closely and obviously underscore content (martial music for issues of defence, military spending, or national identity), provide ironic counterpoint, or work more subliminally to evoke consonant mood, atmosphere, or feeling. It is when we consider the types of music chosen that strong— and by this point in our analysis—quite predictable differences emerge. For coding purposes, we proposed four very broadly defined categories. We defined “upbeat” music as characterized by major key and quick tempo, increasing in volume or pace throughout the ad. “Ominous” music was slow-paced and in minor keys. “Humorous” music employed devices like plucked violins, bassoons, and musical suggestions of laughter, while “calm” music created a low-key, meditative, or “new age” effect with little variation in tempo. All three parties overwhelmingly deployed music to underscore the structuring fable and tenor (heroic/positive and ironic/attack) of specific ads. “Upbeat” music was heard in only 7 per cent of Conservative ads. Given the high proportion of negative ads instantiating the ironic “knave” fable aired by the CPC, it is not surprising to find that roughly one-third (32 per cent) used “ominous” music, while a further 15 per cent employed “humorous” music to underscore satirical attacks. “Calm” music was consistently used to accompany ads featuring Stephen Harper and these amounted to 29 per cent. This musical choice presumably was felt to be the appropriate soundtrack for the message of stolid, dependable competence the party was seeking to convey. The Liberals made the strongest and most consistent musical statement, with 68 per cent of their ads using “upbeat” music, most often in ads showcasing Justin Trudeau. The NDP was considerably less “upbeat” (47 per cent) and had a higher percentage of ads using the “ominous” mode (12 per cent vs. the Liberals’ 4 per cent). Our expectation regarding basic colour palette was that it would conform quite closely to the results of the coding for music. Considering three, very rudimentary categories (“dominant bright,” “dominant dark,” and “bright/dark”), we anticipated a noticeable difference between CPC and LPC dominant palettes. Table 3.6 shows that the Conservatives and the Liberals employed a dominant bright tonality almost identically (40 and 42 per cent, respectively). The NDP was the outlier here, preferring a bright palette only 9 per cent of the time—a rather odd choice for a party whose theme colour is bright orange, but certainly in keeping with its “darker” message. Use of a dominant dark tonality was almost identical between the CPC and the NDP (55 and 56 per cent), with the Liberals at a much lower 29 per cent. While the LPC and the NDP frequently

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Table 3.6  Basic tonality of ads, 2015 Canadian federal election Tonality

CPC

LIB

NDP

Dominant bright Dominant dark Bright/dark Total N

40% 55 5 100% 40

42% 29 29 100% 52

9% 56 35 100% 43

Source: Party ads posted on their YouTube channels coded by co-author and research assistant

combined elements of both bright and dark palettes (29 and 35 per cent), the CPC did so in only 5 per cent of its ads. The colour palette did align quite predictably with the fable being instantiated: dominant bright for versions of the heroic fable and dominant dark for variants of the ironic. And it is interesting to note that the CPC’s predilection for a single dominant tonality mirrors its tendency to avoid compound fables, preferring instead unitary instantiations of “hero,” “knave,” “fool,” or “mistaken policy.” The coding and analysis we have been considering offers a variety of perspectives on what differentiated CPC, LPC, and NDP filmed advertising posted to YouTube during the 2015 Canadian federal election campaign, both in terms of recurring narrative structures and specific visual and aural components. Parsing these differences, it is possible to lose sight of the one thing the 135 ads indisputably had in common: the goal of gaining viewers as a means of gaining votes. Election research has begun to incorporate social media tracking as a means of forecasting election outcomes. Hutchison (2015) found that Justin Trudeau was leading the other party leaders in Twitter mentions just before the election. He took this finding as pointing to a probable LPC victory. Ceron et  al. (2017) used the frequency of statements on Twitter of willingness to vote for a party, of support for a party, or of criticism of a different party to forecast the outcomes of several elections, including the 2016 US presidential election. They found that statements on Twitter very accurate, sometimes more so than standard surveys of voter intentions. Reasoning analogously, we hypothesize that the popularity of a political party, measured by the total YouTube view count for its ads relative to its competitors, will predict the likelihood of it winning an election. YouTube provides a view count for every video posted. It tries to ensure that view counts are the result of pure viewer choice rather than views initiated by robots by waiting until a

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Table 3.7  Ad view counts and totals, 2015 Canadian federal election Party

Total party ad views (000)

Total party ad views as percentage total ad views

Top five party ads as percentage of total ad views

CPC LPC NDP Total

1851 9666 2468 13,985

13% 69% 18% 100%

9% 43% 15% 67%

Source: Party ads posted on their YouTube channels coded by co-author and research assistant

video has been watched for 30 seconds to add it to the count (YouTube 2018; Beck 2015).8 The view count totals noted in Table 3.7 certainly support the hypothesis of a correlation between social media popularity and voter preferences. Liberal ads gained 69 per cent of the 14  million YouTube views of all English-language ads for the campaign, with the NDP receiving 18 per cent of all views, and the CPC trailing at 13 per cent.9 What is more, the top five LPC ads (based on view counts) alone represented 43 per cent of total ad views. Considering the five most-viewed ads for all three parties, the LPC’s fifth most-viewed ad easily surpassed the CPC’s top ad and three of the NDP’s top five. Taken together, the top five ads of the three parties accounted for 68 per cent of all ad view counts, a dramatic confirmation of the Pareto principle, or “80-20 rule.” A small number of ads gain traction. The majority of the others fade away. Considering the five most-viewed ads of each party, we once again see striking differences between the CPC and LPC, with the NDP predictably showing less clear-cut patterns (see Table 3.8). All of the most-watched CPC ads employed the “fool” variant of the ironic fable targeting Justin Trudeau. None of them featured Stephen Harper as the narrating voice. Interestingly, only one (“Justin: Budget”) used ominous music and three of the five employed a dominantly bright tonality. Yet the tenor of the ads is undoubtedly negative, modulating from alarmist (“Justin: Budget” and “Justin: Marijuana”) to sardonically dismissive (“The Interview”).

8  There has been some political science research using YouTube view counts, for example, Ridout et al.’s (2015) study of the determinants of view counts of ads in 2010 US Senate races. 9  Demographics may also explain this result, in that the CPC is traditionally stronger with older voters who are less likely to use the Internet.

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Table 3.8  Five most-viewed ads by party, 2015 Canadian federal election Party Ad

Date

Views (000)

CPC The interview 5/25/15

502

Justin 4/15/13 judgement Justin budget 5/5/14

318

Justin experience Justin marijuana Escalator

04/15/13

141

05/05/14

122

LPC

9/1/15

Real priorities 11/1/13 Focused on you You are the economy Channel change NDP Enough

192

3030 1235

Fable

Narrating voice

Music

Colour

Ironic (Fool) Ironic (Fool) Ironic (Fool) Ironic (Fool) Ironic (Fool) Contrast (H/MP) Contrast (H/MP) Contrast (H/K) Contrast (H/MP) Contrast (H/K) Ironic (K)

Actors

None

Bright

Voice-over (Male) Voice-over (Female) Voice-over (Male) Voice-over (Female) Trudeau

Humorous Bright

Upbeat

Bright

Trudeau

None

Dark

Trudeau

Upbeat

Bright

Voice-over (Female) Trudeau

Upbeat

Bright

None

Bright

Voice-over (Female) Mulcair Voice-over (Male)/ Mulcair Voice-over (Female) Voice-over (Male)

Ominous

Dark

6/7/13

618

10/13/15

559

4/28/13

555

7/14/15

638

I’m ready Performance review

9/4/15 9/11/15

567 479

Heroic Contrast (H/K)

Not working

8/7/15

246

Stop TPP

10/11/15

220

Ironic (MP) Ironic (K/MP)

Ominous

Bright

Humorous Dark Humorous Dark

Humorous Dark None Bright

Ominous

Dark

Ominous

Dark

Source: Party ads posted on their YouTube channels coded by co-author and research assistant Note: H heroic fable, K knave, MP misguided policy

The Conservatives’ most-watched ad appeared on 25 May 2015, a full two months before the start of the campaign. “The Interview” featured a group of actors portraying a human resources (HR) team evaluating Justin Trudeau’s “resume” and noting the many disqualifications for the job he was seeking. The dialogue is occasionally amusing, but the tone is unmistakably patronizing: “People, being Prime Minister is not an entry level

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job.” “When has he ever had to make a tough decision?” And the ad ends with a one-two punch: “I’m not saying no forever,” the tough but fair younger female member of the team says kindly, “Just not now.” “Nice hair though,” a middle-aged man in glasses adds. By Election Day, the ad had collected more than half-a-million view counts. To paraphrase a familiar adage: ironic is easy, heroic is hard. The CPC was unable to devise a single instance of the “heroic” fable that achieved anything like the view counts of “The Interview.” A companion ad, “Proven Leadership,” also posted on 25 May 2015 showed Harper working at his desk and narrating in second-person voice-over the demands of the job: “Most of the decisions you have to make in this job are hard ones … You don’t have the luxury of ignoring problems or only making popular choices.” The lighting is dim, clearly evoking lonely hours of nocturnal toil. The music is subdued and vaguely “classical.” The ad closes with Harper literally turning off the lights and closing the door on the darkened office while his voice-over intones “On a good day, you get to go home feeling that you’ve lived up to the job.” While the intended message was presumably a variation on the CPC’s theme of Harper’s gravitas, maturity, and self-control, in contrast to the lightweight Trudeau’s impulsivity and recklessness, the carefully measured statements, the deliberateness of Harper’s cadences, the very dimness of the lighting, and that final deprecatory exit line, could equally be received as an illustration of Harper’s, and the party’s, narrowness of vision and failure of imagination for itself or the nation: governance as overtime. The ad achieved just under 42,000 views. The early failure to find a “heroic” narrative form for Harper—which the CPC had done in 2011—would be repeated throughout the 2015 campaign. Four out of the five most-watched LPC ads, in sharp contrast, feature Justin Trudeau as the narrating voice as well as the main visual presence. All five were “compound fables,” three employing the “hero/mistaken policy” structure, the other two the “hero/knave.” Four of the five used a predominantly bright palette. Three employed upbeat music, the other two, no music at all. Once again, the basic pattern is a party identifying its primary asset (Trudeau) and his most effective representational modes (heroic fable and “positive” visual and aural associations) and consistently deploying them to best advantage. Equally importantly, through use of compound fables, the Liberals found an effective way to incorporate criticism of the CPC without diminishing Trudeau’s “sunny,” positive persona or the overall affirmative tenor of their ads. Indeed, balancing Trudeau’s

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“hero” fable with his serious critique of policy, not personalities, arguably burnished his status and worked as a tacit rebuke to the dismissive, even disrespectful tone and content of the CPC’s ads. The most popular Liberal ad during the campaign itself was “The Escalator,” posted on 1 September 2015. In the seven weeks to Election Day, it garnered over three million view counts. The ad employs an effectively simple visual and kinetic metaphor for ten years of economic stagnation under the Harper government. Trudeau is seen in a daylight-filled atrium, walking up an escalator. “This is what’s happening to millions of Canadians,” he tells the camera, “under ten years of Stephen Harper.” The escalator stops and Trudeau stands, noting the inadequate policies proposed as solutions by both the CPC and the NDP. As he outlines his proposals to “kick start the economy” and help the middle class, the escalator starts, fast-paced music begins, and Trudeau steps purposefully up and off the escalator to stride towards the camera, affirming “That’s real change.” This bright, action-filled sequence could not have formed a stronger contrast to the images of a sedentary Harper in a dimly lit room ruminating over the difficulties of the job he was ostensibly eager to retain. The 30-second narrative encapsulates many of the LPC’s signature advertising elements: bright tonality, positive message, critique of policy but not individuals, motion, upbeat music, and the personable and enthusiastic young leader front and centre, sharing his vision with the camera. NDP advertising narrative never succeeded in finding a consistent form or tenor, as both the CPC and LPC did. Its five most-watched ads (three of which attracted considerably more views than four of the CPC’s) each employed a different fable structure. Only one of the ads featured Tom Mulcair alone as the narrating voice, the other four being split between female and male voice-over narration. The dominant tonality of the ads was unequivocally dark and three of the five ads used music we characterized as ominous. These choices arguably underscored, or at least were consonant with, the message of prudence and balance the party was seeking to promote. What the ads failed to find were effective ways to register the more positive (i.e. “bright”) socially progressive vision and values traditionally claimed by the NDP. In many ways, the real beneficiaries of the NDP’s most-viewed ads, four of which were strongly critical of the Conservatives, were the Liberals. While the NDP and Tom Mulcair were providing the negative commentary, the LPC could maintain its “sunny ways,” which the NDP itself admitted in its review of the 2015 campaign (New Democratic Party 2016).

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It is worth noting that all five of the CPC’s most-viewed ads and three of the LPC’s aired before the beginning of the official campaign, in some instances, years before. The Liberals were determined not to repeat the mistakes of previous leader Michael Ignatieff who allowed Conservative attack ads to go unanswered. But even here, the LPC was careful not to stray too far from the “heroic” narrative fable and the positive/upbeat/ bright modes it would consistently employ. The LPC campaign amply demonstrated Michelle Obama’s aphorism, while the NDP were caught somewhere in the middle.

Conclusion: Approaching the 2019 Election10 Employing the four-quadrant framework of political fable structures has been a fruitful approach to categorizing and analysing the narratives political parties use to frame their messages of persuasion and attack. It facilitated a qualitative analysis of the messaging of the 2011 campaign and produced the detailed multi-dimensional dissection of the 2015 campaign provided here. Although this framework is not intended to be either prescriptive or predictive, the YouTube view counts we tracked did indeed align with the ultimate outcome, demonstrating clearly which structuring fable delivered most effectively in 2015. The message for academic analysts and practising politicians that emerges from this chapter is that election campaigns should be built around narratives in which party leaders are the protagonists and there are consequences for the electorate. Politicians must develop a compelling heroic personal narrative for themselves, a devastating counter-narrative about their opponent(s), and they must strike a balance between the two that is appropriate to the electorate’s mood. Where a campaign’s narrative expertise comes into play is in digging into a candidate’s life history to find challenges that were overcome (especially if the candidate is female or visible minority) as well as exemplary achievements and present them as predictors of effective leadership in the future. And that same narrative expertise would be employed to find words and deeds in an opponent’s life history that create a counter-narrative of character flaws and failed decisions that foreshadows disastrous leadership in the future. Platforms are, of course, an essential component of election campaigns, but in our view, it is the narratives in which party leaders are the protagonists that give the details of a platform coherence and meaning that resonate with voters.  The paper was completed in March 2019, six months before the 2019 election.

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Every campaign represents its own unique confluence of personalities and issues. Every campaign, therefore, will present narratives that draw on different dominant fable structures and that instantiate them in differing ways. The 2019 Canadian federal election campaign will likely bear little resemblance to 2015. An incumbent Justin Trudeau will be facing new opposition party leaders who are younger than him: Andrew Scheer (CPC) and Jagmeet Singh (NDP). With the inevitable baggage of disappointments, broken promises, missed opportunities, and scandals that comes with governing, the Liberal Party’s narrative choices will necessarily need to accomplish very different messaging objectives. Many key campaign issues were either peripheral or not thought of four years ago: protecting Canada against the vagaries of the Trump Administration’s erratic approach to trade, security, taxation, alliances, and international institutions; immigration policy and the challenges of self-identified refugee claimants; and the adequacy of carbon pricing as a response to the imminent threats posed by climate change. Similarly, the social media strategies of all three parties will need to respond to the very different environment in which they will be forced to operate. In 2015, the parties posted ads (on YouTube and other platforms) and waited for voters to find them. The 2016 US Presidential election and Brexit campaigns demonstrated a much more aggressive approach. Political parties and interest groups “pushed” content, particularly on Facebook, to voters they identified as receptive. Foreign actors, too, employed still more aggressive tactics, promoting manifestly false claims to precisely targeted recipients. We can, therefore, expect the three parties to be much more proactive in their social media messaging in 2019, and it is already clear that interest groups on both the right (Canada Proud) and the left (Lead Now) will be energetic social media presences. Unfortunately, we must also expect foreign actors to engage, likely including Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and the US. All this narrative activity will yield an even richer cache of material for analysis. The methodology outlined and applied here is one possible means of doing so and one that we believe can offer unique insight into the story that will find its ending on Monday, 21 October 2019. Acknowledgements  Research funding was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (grant number 435-2016-0146) and research assistance by Simran Manghirmalani, Karen Hu, and Adam McGrath. The UK Arts and Humanities Research Council funded Sandford Borins’s participation in the Blurring Genres seminar.

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References Beck, M. (2015, May 12). What’s a Video View? On Facebook Only 3 Seconds Versus 30 on YouTube. Marketing Land. Retrieved March 13, 2019, from https://marketingland.com/whats-a-video-view-on-facebook-only-3seconds-vs-30-at-youtube-128311. Borins, S. (2011). Governing Fables: Learning from Public Sector Narratives. Durham, NC: Information Age Publishing. Brader, T. (2005). Striking a Responsive Chord: How Political Ads Motivate and Persuade Voters by Appealing to Emotions. American Journal of Political Science, 49(2), 388–405. Ceron, A., Curini, L., & Iacus, S. (2017). Politics and Big Data: Nowcasting and Forecasting Elections with Social Media. New York: Routledge. Elections Canada. (2015). Forty-Second General Election. Official Voting Results, Number of Valid Votes by Political Affiliation. Retrieved February 20, 2019, from http://www.elections.ca/res/rep/off/ovr2015app/41/table8E.html. Hutchison, A. (2015). Can Twitter Data Be Used to Predict Elections? Retrieved February 20, 2019, from http://www.socialmediatoday.com/technologydata/adhutchinson/2015-10-17/can-twitter-data-be-used-predict-elections. Ignatieff, M. (2015). Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics. Toronto: Vintage. Johnston, R. (2017). Campaign Effects. In K. Arzheimer, J. Evans, & M. Lewis-­ Beck (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Electoral Behaviour (pp.  709–732). London: Sage. New Democratic Party. (2016). Campaign 2015 Review. Retrieved February 26, 2018, from http://xfer.ndp.ca/2016/-Debrief-Report/Campaign2015ReviewReport-EN-Final.pdf. Plantinga, C. (2009). Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ridout, T., Fowler, E., Branstetter, J., & Borah, P. (2015). Politics as Usual? When and Why Traditional Actors Often Dominate YouTube Campaigning. Journal of Information Technology and Politics, 12, 237–251. Shimamura, A. (Ed.). (2013). Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. YouTube. (2018). How Video Views Are Counted. Retrieved February 23, 2018, from https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2991785?hl=en.

CHAPTER 4

Novels and Narratives: The Pursuit of Forms and Perceptive Policymaking Susan Hodgett

This chapter considers how we might think about policy interventions in the twenty-first century and, in particular, how we can eschew the methodological strait jacket recommended by Political Science while bringing the benefits of the broader research methods of the arts and humanities more common in Area Studies. In considering the current situation in Political Science, the use of the term science indicates a preference for the methods of the natural sciences in attempting to shed light upon people, polities, policy and the pursuit of politics. As an academic who previously worked in party politics (as a senior party administrator), using positivist approaches as the pre-eminent means to understand the way things are in the minority world proved startlingly insufficient. This chapter addresses these concerns and considers three issues. Firstly, it contemplates the common modus operandi in Political Science over recent decades. Secondly, it engages with recent conversations in the field of literary theory (and, in particular, the work of S. Hodgett (*) University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. A. W. Rhodes, S. Hodgett (eds.), What Political Science Can Learn from the Humanities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51697-0_4

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Caroline Levine) to contemplate what we might learn, and how we might benefit, from undertaking a wider and deeper investigation of the complex world in which we live. This includes, for example, the use of multiple forms of knowledge and context derived from literary theory for effective understanding of people, politics and policymaking. Thirdly, it takes one example of a novel telling a tale about the collisions involved in implementing policy on rural development in Wales—in Raymond Williams’ 1979 The Fight for Manod. It reflects on what we might learn by viewing this narrative through the lens of Levine’s new ideas on Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy and Network. Finally, the chapter argues that going forward we must strive to find enhanced, and deeper ways, to understand the experience of our citizen’s everyday lives. It suggests that adding literary criticism to our panoply of tools in the blurring genres research toolbox can help us to address that aim by doing political studies better.

The Current Limitations of Political Science Political Science has been described as ‘the systematic study of governance by the application of empirical and generally scientific methods of analysis. As traditionally defined and studied political science examines the state and its organs and institutions’ (Roskin 2019). The subject of this chapter is the functioning of the state and its policymaking, applications and evaluations; and how these processes might be usefully expanded by blurring genres and considering what literary criticism might add to our understanding. The chapter speculates that Political Science is missing a trick by limiting its investigations to the approaches of the natural sciences and the assumption that people, to whom policy is applied, may be studied like inanimate objects. Such questioning is not new. Back in 1988, Gabriel Almond wrote a commentary for the American Political Science Association entitled ‘Separate Tables: Schools and Sects in Political Science’. The article was a state of the union address for the discipline concerning its health and its history. Almond wrote that various sects and schools within Political Science sat at separate tables in his imaginary ‘political’ dining room. Diners gravitated to tables with those with whom they shared a mindset. Tables were crowded with supporters of hard left or hard right ideologies, and soft, or hard line, methods (from Geertz’s thick description on one side to Public Choice theorists and hypothesis-driven computational modelling on the other). Even those of the moderate soft-left or soft-right

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variety enthusiastically protected their ‘island[s] of vulnerability’ (1988: 828). According to Almond, while the majority of diners sat in the ‘cafeteria of the center’ (1988: 830) nonetheless the room was subject to an ‘uneasy separateness’. Clear and contrary factions existed, and a wide chasm divided those stubbornly welded to conflicting ideologies and methodologies. In this horizon of disagreement, Almond felt it necessary to ‘scold…the profession for its backwardness’ (1988: 828). This chapter revisits his observation that Political Science has taken on the organizational and methodological attributes of science—research institutes, large-scale budgets, the use of statistical and mathematical methods and the like. [And, while] Political Science has prospered materially … it is not a happy profession. (Almond 1988: 829)

Over the intervening decades, Political Science has remained divided about ways of knowing and how best to understand the workings of politics, policies and polities. Despite the fact that the discipline has greatly increased in number, the view that ‘the uneasiness in the Political Science profession is not of the body but of the soul’ (Almond 1988: 828) remains apposite. Subsequently, ideas about how to do Political Science evolved. The positivist mantra that Political Science can be undertaken without regard for the history or culture in which it is situated has been challenged. Kelly and Maynard Moody (1993: 135) tell us that views on policy increasingly recognise the importance of symbolism, interpretation and argument. The primacy of objective, inductive and scientific methods has reduced since Popper offered up theories of falsification in 1959 in search of ‘facts’. The significance of values, as opposed to facts, for greater understanding grows—especially in the realm of policy analysis. The emergence of post-­ positivist ideas stresses the importance of history and the contribution of narratives. MacIntyre’s (1984) declaration that history and action require each other is now widely acknowledged. Policy, so understood, emanates from our personal webs of belief—the experience of each becomes imperative in our ability to understand the other—and of course policy interventions. Values so enter the realm of our individual and collective understandings and ‘the poetic and the political are inseparable; science is in, not above, historical and linguistic processes’ (Clifford 1986: 2 quoted in Kelly and Maynard Moody 1993: 137). Political Science, which during the twentieth century, struggled to establish itself as a social science by

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privileging the methods of the natural sciences, increasingly, in the twenty-­ first century, appreciates looking beyond these approaches. In recent years, languages and linguistics have become central to how we comprehend the societies in which we live. The British Academy has noted that over 300 languages are spoken in London; and that these ‘are essential for employability, trade, business … the economy, security, diplomacy … soft power, research, social understanding and cohesion’.1 The Academy’s Lost for Words report emphasises the weight of languages and linguistics in everyday life in forming relationships, mutual cultural understanding, the working of trust and networks and facilitating cooperation across borders as well as within societies (2013: 8). Attached to language acquisition is the acknowledgement of the need to translate cultures within and between societies and the importance of cultural renewal.2 Values and norms impact upon the individual narratives of our lives—and the lives of others. In such circumstances [w]e [become] active coauthors, not sole authors of our own narratives, sharing this position with the authorship of history or of those who share or have roles in our narratives as we have roles in theirs. (Kelly and Maynard Moody 1993: 136)

The Contribution of Literary Theory to Form and Function in Politics and Policy As language and linguistics have moved to the fore considering the traditional uses of the arts and humanities, including literary criticism, helps us understand what this chapter is moving towards. Literary criticism facilitates greater knowledge through allowing the public to reevaluate a work from the original text by ‘the bringing of literary works to the public’s attention’ (Britannica 2019) while, at the same time, presenting a fuller understanding of that literature to the wider society. Some have understood this role as necessary to human freedom (Sartre 1947); others believe it to be the means to reconcile politics with the arts and humanities (Trilling 1  British Academy Briefing (2019) On Languages see https://www.thebritishacademy. ac.uk/sites/default/files/BA-Language%20Briefing_A4%20Web%20final.pdf accessed 28th December 2019. 2  See information regarding translating cultures 2019. https://ahrc.ukri.org/research/ readwatchlisten/features/in-conversation-with-professor-charles-forsdick/accessed accessed 28th December 2019.

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1950). Many consider literature a necessary part of social and political debate in democratic countries—outlining local conditions and expectations of common norms and values. The urgent challenge to understand our struggling democracies in the twenty-first century reminds us that the ‘finest critics have never paid much attention to the alleged boundaries between criticism and other types of discourse’ (Britannica 2019). Literary criticism can therefore be a useful tool for allowing moral and cultural reflection about current politics and policy. Challenging the traditional twentieth-century arts and humanities versus social science dichotomy has thrown up new ideas on how to better understand our modern, complex and divided societies including the ‘multiplied … potential interfaces between literature and other disciplines’ (Frow et al. 2019: 1). Pre-eminent amongst the researchers developing this line of thinking is Caroline Levine. By critically examining literary theory and considering how methods are related to culture and norms, Levine challenges the accepted wisdom of the methodological and disciplinary divide. She has much to say about political priorities. In search of inspiration as to how to address the common political problems of our age, including climate change, privatisation of the public good and the rise of ethno-nationalism, Levine looks for the means to make social change happen for the better (2019: 255–256). While accepting that shared values in the academy cross over the humanities-social science boundary, she examines common disagreements about how to fix societal inequities and growing inequalities. Her seminal book Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015) contemplates political explanations for the current first world malaise by examining arguments from both Marxists and Poststructuralists. The former because of their concern with capitalism as the basis of all social structuration, and the latter, with their resistance to forms and the belief that structure itself is domination. Levine’s radical contribution is to challenge the belief that any one order (gender, race, nation, class and economy) organises all others—observing that sometimes they work together— although this is not always so. In search of political action, Levine looks for ‘openings for change when structures do not reinforce each other’ (2019: 256, emphasis added). To this end, she moves from social science’s concerns with large-scale revolutions to the local, often small, structures necessary for collective life and an available means to justice. She comments [f]rom what I can tell, humans have never had collective life without orders and regulations: spaces for shelter and gathering, appointed times for work

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and food and rest, procedures for decision-making. In this sense, the polis cannot do without distributions and arrangements. (Levine 2019: 256)

It is to distributions and arrangements that Levine turns to consider the contribution that literary criticism may make to an expanded discipline of politics. Here she examines collisions of forms en route to a more just society. By interpreting forms as both constraining and enabling forces she offers a new concept of affordances—seeing each criterion as at once excluding or shutting in (e.g. a disadvantage) and, at the same time, providing advantage; for example, safety or security in the enclosed space. Levine’s insight is to recognise the double-edged nature of a criterion— like the bureaucratic imposition of a health service number on every citizen, having the positive effect of ensuring that they receive services including healthcare and education. Liming (2017: 661) has summarised Levine’s contribution as ‘methodological self-reflexivity’ by considering how criticism and critics spin out new stories from beyond a simple narrative. In this view, critics at once interpret the formal structures that ‘buttress the operations of social existence and … create those structures anew’. In drawing this to our attention, Levine considers the influence of the social upon the literary form. Liming sees the importance of this contribution as a formalist method that merges aestheticism,3 new criticism4 with political power and situatedness (see Rohlfing et al. 2003). So, Levine reincorporates criticism with politics for a more effective working, a wholeness, offering us a means of bridging between literary criticism and the historical, the social and the political. Her concept of forms encompasses shapes, configurations, ordering principles, patterns, repetitions and differences (bearing a close relationship, as Bozovic (2017: 1182) suggests, to design theory). Levine uses five basic categorical claims to explain how forms work—embracing ideas on constraint, difference, intersection, portability and political application. For Liming (2017: 662) the most 3  Aestheticism, late nineteenth-century European arts movement which centred on the doctrine that art exists for the sake of its beauty alone and that it need serve no political, didactic or other purpose. https://www.britannica.com/art/Aestheticism Accessed 20th December 2019. 4  New Criticism is a post-World War I school of Anglo-American literary critical theory that insisted on the intrinsic value of a work of art and focused attention on the individual work alone as an independent unit of meaning. It was opposed to the critical practice of bringing historical or biographical data to bear on the interpretation of a work. https:// www.britannica.com/art/New-Criticism Accessed 20th December 2019.

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important of these is portability as she acknowledges Levine’s contribution to ‘the interchangeable swapping of conceptual and material forms’ with the newness of her ideas. In this way, Liming (2017: 663) reveals that Levine’s work enjoins both superficial appearance and social meaning, allowing socio-political consequences to flow from the scrutiny of text. Berlant has dubbed this ‘taking seriously the seeing of selves and worlds as continuous’ (quoted in Liming 2017: 666). Levine’s contribution, therefore, has had an additional benefit by appreciating that narrative does more than just tell a story—it exposes the impact of sequencing and timing in considering the way that forms come together—meet—and produce results (Sandler 2017: 1227). Furthermore, it is prescient to acknowledge that Levine’s resurrection of forms reminds us that ‘ordering principles lie within forms as well as between them’; so, the approach contemplates already established relationships as well as new ones (Tucker 2006: 93). Importantly Levine’s work directly addresses the personal and the political. Writing in New Literary History she notes that the job of humanists is to ‘reveal how a huge range of practices and values take place across different cultures and time periods’ (Levine 2017: 633). The humanities do this, she tells us, by being sceptical of generalisations through mounting arguments of the particular and offering narratives to the singular. Singularity in this interpretation is not about the one, more about instances of strangeness that shed light upon common expectations or dominant systems. Singularity is thereby disruptive to oppressive norms in politics and leans in favour of the experience of the individual. As such, thinking outside this box allows scholars to challenge dominant systems and unsettle well-entrenched regimes. While Levine recognises the importance of such an approach, her political leanings remain clear: I am no longer convinced that freedom is the only or even the preeminent value. I … argue … that beginning with more collective values, such as mutual care, inclusiveness, fairness, and equality, will call for generalizing claims and methods. (Levine 2017: 635)

She argues therefore that disruptions will not produce the necessary changes modern societies require—and that new forms of design and organisation for, and beyond, the humanities are necessary saying:

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[t]he hardest and most urgent political tasks facing us now are ones that singularizing methods will not help us to resolve: how to support collective life—the challenge of living together in groups, sometimes in very large numbers—crowds, cities, coalitions, ecosystems, the planet. If we insist that humanists always and only particularize, then we leave the tasks of building social life on a large scale to the social and natural sciences and to government and business. (Levine 2017: 635)

Levine turns to literature for help, not as a simple means of disruption, rather as a form of realism. Her extensive knowledge of Victorian novels from Jane Eyre to Bleak House is presented side to side with her analysis of television series including The Wire to ‘give a better account of how the structuring of a social world works’ (Levine 2019: 258). Such narratives ‘describe[s] the interaction of social forms more truthfully, more persuasively than much … theory’. For Levine, the advantage of such stories is that the long fictional multiplot narrative does not need to isolate only two institutions or forms for analysis—rather they can ‘afford the tracking of many operating forms at once’. So, in her thinking, The Wire, or indeed a novel, may shed light on what is happening both inside the story—the plot for the characters involved—while, at the same time, telling us about conditions outside that plot in the real lives of the collective society beyond the actors and the novel themselves. For Levine, the mistake made by Political Science (and many theorists) is to believe that to achieve social progress, we must prioritise large-scale deep structural change. Rather, Levine argues we must prioritise small local changes for effective restructuring of the polis. Thus, through examining local space and resources (congressional districts to sewage systems!) we can view forms as open rearrangements or redistributions in search of a just society. Literature, she reasons, can contribute to the redesign and rearrangement of non-aesthetic forms for ‘the value of literary studies lies not in our objects but in our methods’ (Levine 2019: 259). These literary methods can be applied to the common objects of social science research, including prison systems, climate change, racism or social inequalities. This broadened view of what we need to know includes arrangements of ordering, patterning or shaping literary and political forms and offers a ‘portability’ which can be ‘picked up and moved to new contexts’ (Levine 2015: 77). Crucially,

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instead of assuming that social forms are the grounds or causes of literary ones, I suggest that both social and aesthetic forms have affordances5 and that they carry these structuring capabilities with them across contexts. (Levine 2015: 77)

Frow et al. (2019: 2) see Levine’s work as offering four broadly complementary formal structures that can be taken, on the one hand, as the organising principles of literary texts, and on the other, as a set of more general ‘patterns of socio-political experience’ that inform social institutions. Within the structures several forms operate at once and, with disruptions, multiply and compete. Most notable are the classifications making up the title of her influential book Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy [and] Network … forms that cross back and forth between aesthetic and political domains—structural patterns as familiar to social theorists as to literary critics. (Levine 2015: 78–79)

Thus, Levine reveals, it is the constant crossing over of the disciplinary boundaries that makes our daily experience subject to shaping by powerful forms (including, e.g. religion, law, work or medicine). In this way our everyday lives become organised, and pulled apart, by overlapping forms in many varied scales (domestic or institutional) each with a different and sometimes coercive power (Levine 2015: 79). The Need for New Research Methods Levine’s work has made clear the need for new research methods demonstrating the understanding of complexity in the social and technological workings of our societies today. As our lives become increasingly virtual, mediated by others including technology, corporations and governments, the predictability and unpredictability of how we live becomes ever more convoluted. At the same time, the ability to manage the deluge of information we are subject to becomes more of a challenge. Frow et al. (2019) have argued that in such circumstances we must seek out structures in our world from socially ordered patterns—as well as texts (verbal and narrative) and rhythms (fictional or real). This becomes urgent as 5  Levine defines affordances as the means to consider not only what a form may do but also its latent potentiality. See Levine (2015: 6).

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formal structures do not carry with them any predetermined consequences … [and]the politics of formal analysis is … more complex than much contemporary theory is willing to grant. (Frow et al. 2019: 2)

Social scientific theory is currently insufficient. Limiting what we know, particularly in regard to policy to quantitative data constrains what we can perceive or understand. Ignoring what more we might comprehend if we examined the full significance of forms (including other types of writing) proves short-sighted. Levine’s discernment is to suggest that rather than worrying about what form evidence takes when we think about what to include, we should track the form of content with the ‘organising principles that encounter one another inside as well as outside the literary text’ (Levine 2015: 16, italics added). Structures become important if they are prior to the text and, at the same time, interact with the actual textual structures. In this way, fiction becomes influential upon facts themselves and upon our ways of knowing. Model Thinking Levine has offered a challenge. She observes [w]hat we need now … is a set of methods to make sense of the ways that forms, both aesthetic and social, cross paths, making and remaking life as they move, and a willingness to imagine how forms might be used to progressive ends and which new, more just forms … take the place of those that dominate and oppress us now. (2015: 79)

Surveying the traditional singularising research methods of the humanities, which includes close reading and historicising, Levine considers the uses of each and how they might best address political problems. To do this she suggests, ‘a reading practice that involves designing generalizable political models for the common good’ (Levine 2017: 636). She calls this ‘model thinking’. The concept of form makes this generalising method possible because [p]olitics is the work of giving shape to collective life. Political struggles are constantly waged over spatial boundaries: who controls this land, this household, this water? Disputes routinely arise over the arrangement of time. (Levine 2017: 638)

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Within these forms (shapes, configurations, ordering principles, patterns, repetitions and differences) other matters will necessarily be addressed including political arrangements, hierarchies, power and who gets what. Through such mediums, Levine argues, collective life will be ordered and patterned; and particular forms will bring with them capacities or affordances which can travel across contexts (2017: 639). Levine’s desire to leave behind the traditional boundaries of the humanities can be seen through her political motivations: [i]f it is true that the polis always depends on organizing forms, if similar forms can appear in multiple times and spaces, and if forms have general properties that they carry with them wherever they go, then it follows that we can make predictions about how political forms will work wherever they take shape. We can then put that knowledge to use to design better forms for collective life. Rather than understanding our best work as seeking out irreducible bearers of strangeness, we humanists would strive to understand the generalizable affordances of multiple forms, and from that knowledge we would begin to participate in imagining and building fairer, more egalitarian forms for collective life on the large scale. (2017: 640)

Her call to breach the methodological boundaries aims to achieve better living conditions with equality and sustainability for the many (Levine 2017: 641). Her notion of model thinking encourages the contemplation of ideas from the humanities moving across media and scale. A model, whether imaginary or real, is useful in the ‘aesthetic, scientific and social domains’, to test out sculptures, genetic interactions or engineering projects (Levine 2017: 643). That models cross-domains, whether material or social, imagined or constructed, designed or redesigned proves helpful in the real world. For Levine, models are … useful because they deliberately abstract relationships so that we can grasp those relationships apart from their details. In this sense, models are the opposite of singularities. They allow us to understand forms at work. That is, by detaching shapes, orders, and arrangements from particular contexts, they allow us to play out the affordances of forms, especially in their interactions with other forms. (2017: 643)

So, models open new vistas, comparing the incomparable in different scenarios never previously imagined—in miniature or at full scale—drawing on history and cultures. They exist, Levine tells us, ‘[f]or the purposes

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of designing forms for collective life … allow[ing] us to envision scenarios in which political forms, each with a limited number of affordances, encounter one another’ (2017: 643). Levine bravely makes the leap from the humanities to the political putting the methods of the arts to the use of the polis. And she applies her new ideas to the knotty problems of food distribution, manufacture, labour working patterns, worker’s rights, the provision of services including water, waste removal, clean environments and the delivery of vaccines and healthcare (Levine 2017: 646). She uses the double-edged nature of her concept of affordance to contrast the negativity of worker’s routines versus the positivity of that predictability (in pay and time). Her concept of affordance offers potential impact for forms—rather than asking what forms do, she considers ‘what potentialities lie latent—though not always obvious—in aesthetic and social arrangements’ (2015: 6–7). In this way she speculates on the political by considering the contribution that literature can make to the creation of human rights policies today (e.g. on housing and safety regulations) using William Morris’ writings of yesteryear. For Levine, literature indispensably contributes to the ‘imperfect, constraining, necessary work of crafting the forms of public life’ (2017: 651). This chapter contributes to this direction of theoretical travel by considering the contribution one novel can make in thinking about development through the lens of literary theory and forms in search of a more effectively crafted and perceptive policymaking.

A Novel Interpretation of Welsh Development Levine’s insight is profound. Calling for a new account of politics, and of relations between politics and literature, she makes an interesting suggestion. Rather than seeking to unearth forms inside the literary text we must look beyond for ‘forms of … content, the many organizing principles that encounter one another inside as well as outside … the literary text’ (16) (italics added). Going outside the traditional literary analysis Frow et  al. (2019: 2) tell us that texts themselves can be seen as ‘social situations, where multiple forms cross and collide, inviting us to think in new ways about power’ (Frow et  al. 2019: 3). Using such intuitions, this chapter points towards the application of Levine’s boundary crossing ideas to Raymond Williams’ novel on development in rural Wales. We understand The Fight for Manod (1979) as a novel influenced by social forms each bringing their logic to the story. And, this may work with and against the

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literary form (Levine 2015: 42) producing unexpected political conclusions from the encounter for, as she tells us, ‘aesthetic and political forms may be nested inside one another … each … capable of disturbing the other’s organizing power’ (Levine 2015: 16–17). Reading Manod in the twenty-first century and at a time of severe unpredictability in the UK allows us to place the experiences described by Williams in historical and economic frames and to project them forwards to today’s twenty-first-­ century society of austerity and instability. In this way, the novel offers a story of potential development, and the characters themselves suggest more than irrelevant fiction. They present, if we are open to seeing, portents about damage done to Welsh communities, insights into loyalties and feelings of belonging (and exclusion) which today we might dub identity politics. Moreover, by using the research methods of the arts and humanities, by closely reading The Fight for Manod, we can experience the structure of feelings poured out by Williams as he created his heroes, villains and victims in his Welsh world. Importantly too, we can be warned of where not to venture when we next contemplate intervening through policymaking in Wales—a country that continues today to be scared by poverty, unemployment and liminality. Through such careful and attentive reading, we can see that boundaries between fact and fiction are messy and that we benefit from considering them together rather than apart. Such affordances, using Levine’s term, offer an expanded hermeneutics, taking us nearer to political studies and away from the ossifying strait jacket of contemporary Political Science. Mixing up forms in this way from without and within texts offers a wider feeling frame—a feelingful development (Hodgett and Cassin 2012), which increases the possibility of success in our policy interventions. Through such creative ways of knowing, we strive to find a public administration with ‘the imagination to create a new sense of the world that enlarges our knowledge and [our] sympathies’ (Bevir 2011: 191). Forms at Work in The Fight for Manod Using Levine’s concept of forms the shape of The Fight for Manod revolves around a policy decision: whether government in Whitehall, using European funding, will build (or impose?) a new city in a rural backwater of Wales. The book is configured around central characters—two academics sent to investigate whether the valley should be developed or left to its current decline and long-term underdevelopment. Matthew Price is a

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middle-aged lecturer in economic history: a local, social historian of Wales who is used to working with the traditional measurements of academia. Peter Owen is a younger, more radical Sociologist living outside, but brought up in Wales. One benefit of crossing the boundary between literature and politics is that the novel lays bare difference, the importance of ordering principles as well as the nature of pre-existing relationships. It does, what Levine sets out to do, offer us a bridge between literary criticism, the historical, the social and the political. The story of Manod makes plain the importance of sequence and timing and collisions with other forms of knowledge. And Levine raises our awareness—to look for unintended consequences resultant from clashes of forms and well as the expected intended.6 Most important, the narrative fulfils one of Levine’s most significant claims that it ‘give[s] a better account of how the structuring of a social world works than a lot of theory does’ (2019: 258). Each character has a respective function: Price suggests the possibility of coherent and meaningful policy change for development and a brighter economic future for Wales; Owen demonstrates why this change is necessary for the mountainous geography. We understand each in terms of the other; Owen is the younger and necessary counterpoint to Price. The older man (Price) embodies the difficulty in addressing what Welsh development is for, or whose interests it serves. Using Levine’s schema his patterning reflects his ideology and his experience. His conscience, his Welsh identity and his sense of place conflict with his university career and his expertise on how to do development. He battles to reconcile these ideas as he struggles to apply accepted development principles to a place and a people he knows and loves. Yet his view of the value of developing Manod is ultimately, and against all the odds, optimistic. A brighter (industrial) future for Manod is still possible for Price. But repetition as a form proves significant as Levine suggests it would as both Owen and Price are conflicted on the central issue of whether or not to push for developing Manod—nerve-wracked over government motivations and who, in the end, would benefit? The author’s (Williams’) angst is clear to see as he presents the case, with Owen asking Price: (Owen) ‘You believe in all this?’ (Price) ‘I’ll do it.’ 6  Levine in chapter one of Forms (2015: 8) outlines the importance of collision between differing forms leading to ‘unexpected consequences, results that cannot always be traced back to deliberate intentions or dominant ideologies’.

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(Owen) ‘But keeping clear of the crap … this new city kick … Leave the new out of it. It will be a few housing estates looking down at a few factories.’ (Price) ‘Has the alternative future collapsed completely?’ (Owen) ‘Yes … until power has changed at the centre [there will be] no communities at all.’ (Williams 1979: 73) The conversation between the characters is interspersed one feels with the ordering principles of the novel’s author. A well-known Marxist, Williams demonstrates his angst as his collective social impetuses differ from motivations emanating from Whitehall. And, as Levine has suggested, the ordering principles of the novel lie within the forms of the author, his characters and their ideologies as well as between them, so the novel speaks to its audience through time about the concerns of the author, the leading characters (the academics) and the motivations of government. For example, Owen’s cynicism about Whitehall’s plans to develop Wales is clear. As a radical Sociologist, he questions their purposes. Who will profit from the application of English plans for developing the principality? The rural people of Wales, the corporations subsidised to do the inward investment, the London government offloading English social problems? The ordering of political forms demonstrates the import of portability as the younger Sociologist exhibits a profound scepticism of the English, the metropolitan, the upper classes and those from away. And while the notion of telos is central to the view of a new city at Manod, Owen demonstrates that it is seen as dystopia by some characters—and we assume the publics that they represent. Price fears the metropolitan elite will ruin Welsh communities and individual lives. Literature, Levine has told us, can contribute to the redesign and rearrangement of non-aesthetic forms, which can be made and remade. Seeking to remake the situation in Manod is the novel’s other important character Lane, a humane and intelligent Whitehall civil servant, who commissioned the academic work on Manod. Lane appreciates the need for regional development in Wales so people need not leave their homes in search of work. Yet he avoids hypocrisy by telling the academics that a new Manod would serve a further, and one suspects, more important, purpose of providing a better environment for the jetsam of old English cities now ‘breaking down’. The portability and policy interventions the novel suggests seem problematic throughout as Williams presents disillusioned

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Welsh characters resenting their role as salvation for multiple English social and political problems. Lane lays out the issue [w]hat the local people want is … small local developments, improving not altering the kinds of place they’ve got used to. But then even for that they need money, and to get the money frankly, means having to fit in with what other people want, which is planned dispersal on a big enough scale to make the investment economic. At the two extremes that’s the basic problem: two quite different views of what needs to be done. (Williams 1979: 13)

Levine has suggested that literature through its consideration of forms can address the implementation of political arrangements, hierarchies, power and who gets what. In the novel, Lane as the Whitehall mandarin knows that those making the decisions in London see the project built on numbers alone. And he intimates, but does not say, that despite a claim of objectivity—the numbers are selected for short-term political imperative. We see the cost of policy in the narrative and the novel made human. Yet a challenge comes from the big hearted, sympathetic civil servant (Lane) when he asks Price, to change the report written about Manod, ‘back from paper, to the human issue it began as’, to make it ‘a lived inquiry’, so ‘taking with you, in yourself the two worlds you belong in, the two Manods’ (Williams 1979: 14). The respective duties and interests of academia, politics and cultural identity collide, as Price imagines, ‘the world of arrangements beyond him; of things happening, planned, brought about, without people ever being told’ (Williams 1979: 17). The novel demonstrates the lack of agency of ordinary people in Wales, which becomes the foundation of antagonism to future development. Such insights demonstrate how and why Williams’ fictional story of Manod reveals the real-life force of the place and the people who live there. Williams, through his dialogues and detailed characters, lays bare the dilemmas of development in a rural and peripheral community forgotten by the metropolitan elite. He demonstrates collisions lived. The value of this story is his orchestration of an inquiry into the structure of feelings of the publics represented in the novel, the academic investigators, the Welsh communities made from economically vulnerable people and the Whitehall policymakers weighing up whether to bother to undertake the development of a liminal Manod. In Williams’ novel, all of Levine’s forms: whole, rhythm, hierarchy and networks are exposed. Made plain are the serious misunderstandings of the periphery by the core who ‘deliberately let … the whole area run …

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down … to get [them] … to that state, depressed and desperate’ (1979: 34), so they cannot afford to say no to government priorities. Demonstrated is the dismissal of rural community values as insufficient by the bureaucracy with its collective disinterest in how policy impacts upon people’s lives. Policy, Williams comments, implemented by public servants ‘withdrawn and held back; the detail of human contact barely dealt with, in a few learned responses’ (1979: 36). Learned responses dictated by a faceless and careless bureaucracy that ‘can wring your neck like they’re doing you a favour’ (Williams 1979: 33). This novel, Williams reveals in a caustic aside, is not about change for the valleys or improvement of their quality of life but rather cancellation. One can see, for the Cambridge don such circumstances breed nothing but publics overwhelmed by disillusion. The novel offers us an insight into the Welsh community. One, diminished, demolished and disheartened. And beside them, well-motivated academics juggling competing demands and deeply buried loyalties. The novel The Fight for Manod demonstrates what Levine has argued that literature contributes to the ‘imperfect, constraining, necessary work of crafting … forms of public life’ (2017: 651). And more it addresses her supposition that the models with which literature may work can be predicted forwards, enabling us to say something about how things will be today as well as how they were yesterday. In this way, the historicising process can offer relevant insights for the present. The central concern of The Fight for Manod is the many dimensions of how Williams represents the unresolved issues regarding the development of the region. The ethics of development for rural communities are manifest in the mix and remain relevant today. As too is distance. How closely is the author himself involved in what he writes or in the story he creates? Can Williams see the issue of developing Manod objectively (or not)? Can he, as author, stand outside the question of the future of Manod and let the plot evolve in a dispassionate way? Can he ignore his Welsh emotions, his love of place and people and his stubborn dream of a better Welsh future? Inglis, in the author’s biography, thinks not: There was always the mountain. The path led past the house up to the field gate. Just inside the field was the old iron trough for the cattle, brown and dark with heavy rust, the hedge running away south along the flat of the field until the steep rise started at the foot of the mountain. The first stretch was always heavy and swampy …. In after years Raymond Williams used to say that he had never dreamed of any other landscape. (1995: 16)

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And, in The Fight for Manod (97), Inglis (1995: 17) reveals Williams’ alter ego to be Price: Fifty-odd years after the little boy trotted behind his father and mother on a Sunday when they walked over the boggy field and turned up on to the dry path, the alter ego Williams invented for himself in two novels says to his difficult, spikey disciple, It only comes occasionally. Some particular shape: the line of a hedge, the turn of a path around a wood, or in movement some-times, the shadow of a cloud that bends in a watercourse …What I really seem to feel is these things as my body. As my own physical existence… [a]s if I was them through them, not feeling about them.

Here we see the importance of the Welsh novels for Williams as a mechanism for making evident who he is, his whole person, his whole character. Williams’ Welshness is all encompassing, seeping into every aspect of his being, his love of education, his Marxist search for greater equality, his admiration of the local, the countryside, the community and the people. Such dispositions of resilience and attachment suffuse his writing both theory and literature. It marks him out as a different academic and novelist; one evidently and completely Welsh. And, as Frow et al. (2019) have commented on Levine’s work, we see revealed a view of the self and the world as simply continuous. At the beginning of The Fight for Manod (Williams 1979: 8), we are exposed to Williams’ (and his alter egos Price’s) loyalties allied with his historical concerns. Lane, the Whitehall mandarin, rings the academic to ask for help in redirecting and writing a better report on Manod for consideration by the Whitehall bureaucracy: (Lane) (Price) (Lane) (Price) (Lane)

‘I called you, particularly, because a problem’s come up and I’d value your advice. Can I tell you about it…? ‘I don’t know. Yes.’ ‘Well, does the name Manod mean anything to you … In the Afren valley. Welsh border country. Your part of the world, am I right?’ ‘Yes, I know that Manod … It’s about forty miles from where I grew up’ ‘I was sure you’d know it. Up here of course, it’s not primarily a place. It’s a name, a codesign, perhaps even a symbol … it’s

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not a city but a chaos … It could never have been easy. It reached a kind of deadlock, just from its own difficulties. Then for years it simply got lost: a change of Minister and then a change of Government. Like you, I expect, we all supposed it was forgotten. Just another new world indefinitely postponed.’ ‘Due to lack of interest, tomorrow has been cancelled.’ Manod’s come up again … by a rather unusual route. And since I have to give some advice, well—may I put it frankly?—I feel the need for a different mind. Somebody who’s not been in on it yet who would know what it’s about. I mean really about.’ ‘I see. Yes. But you don’t have to ask me if I’m interested in Manod. It isn’t a matter of choice.’

This dialogue reveals Williams’ conceptualisation of the London centric view of Wales as ‘not primarily a place. It’s a name, a codesign … a symbol’ (Williams 1979: 8), a ‘deadlock’ (1979: 13). We feel his opinion of why the project of Manod failed previously—from its own difficulties—the fault perceived by London—as lying with Wales. While the new city scheme gets lost as Minister’s change, the future of the people of the valleys, so unimportant in the capital, is indefinitely postponed. No one, reading such prose, could doubt Williams’ closeness of connection to place and people. The characters in the novel enliven the author’s representation of Welsh history, of life in the valleys and the importance of duty to all. In his conversation with Lane, Price (as Williams) admits that he has no choice but to be interested in Manod, almost against his better judgement. Concern for Wales and its communities cannot be abandoned. It is impossible to abandon himself. In Manod, Williams explores the inner life of his characters: the representations they make to themselves and their justification of their individual positions on the future of the place. His characters’ voices—the representations they make to one another—can be core and consistent (Owen is always Owen); or different to different constituencies. Lane has received an interpretation of policy from above but seeks out Price (as someone who knows what Manod is about trying to influence him on a personal level). In the discussion between them we witness different perspectives through subtle changes in focus, the ‘position or quality of consciousness through which we “see” events in the narrative’ (Abbot 2008: 233). And, at the same time, as Levine has suggested, a major advantage of literary criticism becomes evident, bridging literature to the political.

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We are aware of Williams’ view of Welsh history, its exploitation by its larger neighbour and the fight for Manod and the principality. The story is historicised. Throughout we feel Williams’ perspective on Welsh development precisely because of the diverse ways in which policy and the policy processes are interpreted and represented by the central characters: as utopia, as dystopia and (disingenuously) as ‘lived inquiry’. One of the most striking insights Williams’ work provides is the challenge of making policy take account of both past and future. Development, he tells us, is a tussle between ‘the heaviness of a known past: a green past in which lives have been lived and completed, and … this unfinished everyday living or … this outline of a future’ (1979: 38). Williams challenges traditional views of development as formal, mechanical and industrial. Price feels part of the landscape; his body-with-land represents, ‘a material continuity in which there are no breaks’ (1979: 98). In Wales, Williams reveals ‘there’s … a pure idea, a pure passion, for a different world … [i]n [peoples] religion, in their politics. It’s never been cynical, not ever resigned. It’s been a dream, if you like, but a dream of a country’ (1979: 98, italics added). So, in Manod Williams offers a dream-of-­ possibility, of the best that might be done for a people and public, rather than means-end planning done piecemeal, or worse, to an ill-fitting London recipe. Even the civil servants acknowledge this truth. Price’s undoing in the novel comes when he makes a last impassioned appeal to the London Minister about the development project Manod could be. Price begs him to consider the people, their needs and their future, ‘their losses and pains of change’ (Williams 1979: 193), the will of Manod’s citizens; as well as the ‘storms that have blown through [Wales] with their origins elsewhere’ (1979: 193). Immediately, Price suffers a second heart attack. Later, he tells his wife he does not regret his work on Manod; indeed, he can think of nothing else. It was not the strain of the new, rather, the ‘terrible pounding of the old’ (1979: 196) that defeated him. Through this simple comment Williams reveals his frustration at the treatment of Wales by central government over generations. We see the same themes transposed upon the Westminster mandarin tortured by his responsibly for Price’s affliction. Lane visits him in hospital and recalls the final meeting on development—on the future of Manod: There you were still talking to them, about new kinds of community, new social relations … Well, I saw it suddenly, as a kind of heroic absurdity, Heroic … because at all times and in all places you keep saying the same

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thing, and the right thing. But absurd … because of its wild incongruity. Saying it there, to them, and as if you had only to say it. There within that last, disastrous and quietly spoken carve-up, that final operation of the prevailing forces and the decisive priorities. And within it … you just sat there, stiffly, and you were talking, still, as if it was the beginning of the world. (Williams 1979: 202)

Lane’s view of Price’s heroism shows that he sympathises with what needs to be done for Manod. Yet it demonstrates the David and Goliath nature of the struggle—lowly academic versus the power of Whitehall departments, their Ministers and their pragmatic, hard, political priorities. Morality may be on Prices’ side, but the central problem lies in the impossibility of his vision. The threading of the fabric of the old order onto the new, in the face of inescapable dilemmas: The pressure for renewal … to make its way through a land and through lives that had been deeply shaped, deeply committed, by a present that was always moving, inexorably into the past. And those moments of the present that could connect to a future were then hard to grasp, hard to hold, hard to bring together to a rhythm, to a movement, to the necessary shape of a quite different life. (1979: 206–207, italics added)

Price fails once more in his attempt to persuade Whitehall and Westminster to invest in Manod. Yet the rich intermingling of multiple interpretations and representations in the book display common values between the academic and the bureaucrat as Price and Lane sense a tantalising solution never quite within their grasp. Williams’ sense of distance-­ as-­ author creates sustained plural perspectives throughout the novel—apparent from his account of contemporary events, their historical contexts and his vision of possible future realities for the valleys. Williams’ prose is vehement, containing rich factual detail that we see and feel, what Williams-as-person believes would be the best outcome for Manod and its fragile populace. Envoi The aim of this chapter has been to consider whether the knowledge that novels offer us present insight into people and place before we initiate policy and consider only numbers. Adopting the methods of the arts and humanities through a close reading of The Fight for Manod introduces the

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means for a modern mandarin to get inside the heads of locals to understand their suspicions, their desperations and their loyalties. With such historical insight, policy initiation and creation become easier, more enlightened—as does the possibility of finding a policy that fits place. Could such a route align with the necessary modern mantra of co-­ production of knowledge? Can the arts and humanities work with, rather than outside or beyond, the insights of social science? Williams’ novel on Welsh development suggests that it can. And, as Milner (2010: 4) intimates, Williams was very aware that ‘[t]he primary methodological implication would … be an insistence on setting literary texts … in their social contexts’. Williams’ Fight for Manod offers a wealth of consideration of policy consequences for the lives of real people. We feel, we understand, the personal quandaries of each character—the older, optimistic academic, the younger, cynical researcher and the well-intentioned but ultimately impotent civil servant constrained by his political masters. Through Williams’ eyes we appreciate the cost of these decisions, both to those who make them and to those subject to their consequences. He presents the challenges for each character—the hero (Price), the villain (Lane) and the victims (the ordinary people of Wales). With startling clarity Williams confirms that the possible development of Manod comes at a cost; each character damaged by involvement. Yet, he assures us that they grasp tightly to ‘a hard rut of hopes deferred’, as Price proclaims, in search of ‘human content’ (Williams 1979: 11). In the author’s persona, we hear a shared suspicion that development will never become more actual than vision and that, in the end, ‘only the plan is real’. A weary resignation suffuses Williams’ portrayal of the reduced life and living in rural Wales, and his scholarly insight suggests who, or what, may be to blame for the deprivation. In a devastating aside, he puts his thoughts into the older academic’s mouth. What we need to achieve development, Price proclaims, are ‘statistics turned back into people’; publics made real. Unlike traditional social science, inside the novel we are privileged to have the time and the space to survey the careful weighing up of the making of decisions by policymakers. We understand the motivations of the Westminster mandarin and the academics he engages. We have the time to review the consequences for Welsh culture, its rural, unsophisticated people—and the foreign ways of life—far from thought in the fast-moving metropolis. Within the covers of Manod Williams reveals the flinty grey,

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hard-edged lives of the everyday communities in the valleys; literature as realpolitik. Williams’ novel offers a vibrant sense-making of what it is like ‘being there’ (NicCraith and Hill 2015), to be of the valleys, and from this place. Though Williams, as an adult lived a privileged Cambridge life, we sense his Welsh allegiance—his belonging. What this novel demonstrates, which statistics cannot, is that those allegiances are not irrational nor passing. They are not facts. Rather, they are informed deliberations, ‘structures of feelings’ borne from lived experience. History, context and interpretation laid bare. Levine’s work on forms and her direction of travel indicate a line of thought encouraging a move beyond the blurring of genres outside the limits of the arts and humanities into the practical, the social and the political. Williams’ Welsh nation reflects Levine’s whole; her bounded space and totality. Levine’s rhythm includes temporal experience because literary studies pattern time—and Manod paints a vivid picture of the quality of life in the valleys in the 1960s and 1970s. Both approaches allow the layering of the social, political and the aesthetic to organise and disorganise the experience of history. Hierarchy including class, race, sexuality, gender, bureaucracy and institutions compete against the other, subverting logic and promoting unpredictability. As in Manod characters and institutions evolve, collide and suffer, yet the argument over whether Manod will develop carries on—unresolved—into the future. Williams’ novel demonstrates Levine’s last form of networks—the communications that connect us to texts or objects (to, e.g. transport, industry, money or government). We see the national and international ways of working of academia and Whitehall contrasted to the closed, local ways of being and the depression brought on by the absence of agency in local communities. A detailed historicising, combined with a close reading of The Fight for Manod, allows us to undertake our policy interventions with increased confidence. We perceive what has gone before, we dodge the potholes where policy failed, we offset cynicism by offering insights into populations who have experienced too much disappointment. Illustrating how such methods have worked in other genres Levine notes that multiple forms, literary and social, can structure text (which may pre-exist, organise the writing and beyond and bring with them their distinct organising principles). Such processes and hierarchies are clear in The Fight for Manod in the power relations between civil servant Lane (his political masters), the two academics and the deprived Welsh communities. Networks,

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pre-existing and new, are revealed, as Lane seeks out Price, and Price works with Owen. Good and personal motivations seek better professional outcomes; fiction mirrors everyday life beyond the novel—ultimately unsuccessfully. Williams’ novel brings to life a particular time and place amid an era of frustration, dependence and lack of hope. It presents a literary, social and political battle for minds, hearts and imaginations fought in the 1970s but still continuing. Levine’s concepts of forms and affordances allow us the opportunity for a detailed analysis of how things were then and remain today in liminal places. Our foray into Williams’ The Fight for Manod indicates that life experience does not stop at policy intervention. Literature and its stories can open our structure of feelings to the pains and the pleasures of everyday life in the mountains and valleys of Wales, and reveal the capacity to affect the political as well as the social in the lives of ordinary people. Morton (1988: 616), in a review of The Fight for Manod for The Nation, framed what we might expect from Williams [his] writing is hard to classify—most of his work combines elements of literary criticism, cultural criticism and social history. [A] disregard for the normal disciplinary boundaries was a matter of principle: He was an enemy of the division of labor, from the ‘separation between mental and manual labor, between administration operation, between politics and social life.’

So Morton concludes ‘it isn’t surprising that [Williams] devoted so much of his energy to the writing of novels—the least abstract literary form, the form that brings us closest to life as it’s lived’. The closest to life as it is lived is our aim for successful policy intervention. Finding the means to create new methods for the third decade of the twenty-first century is one of the challenges of this book. Williams’ The Fight for Manod benefits from being viewed through the lens which Levine offers. She broadens our understanding, by widening the definition of literary form to include social arrangements. Such changes will doubtless have methodological consequences, and significant benefits, for [t]he traditionally troubling gap between the form of the literary text and its content and context dissolves. … [and] [f]ormalist analysis turns out to be as valuable to understanding socio-political institutions as it is to reading literature. (Levine 2015: 2)

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By considering the arrangements of the elements closest to life and common in all forms we must pay attention to the aesthetic as well as the social. By acknowledging Levine’s insightful notion of affordance (and the latent potentialities within all forms), we have a mechanism to broaden theory to consider not only the intended consequences of deliberate policy interventions but the unintended consequences of collisions. In this way, policy analysis has a vital new weapon in its armoury and literary criticism has found a role in politics.

References Abbot, H.  P. (2008). The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Cambridge University Press. Almond, G.  A. (1988). Separate Tables: Schools and Sects in Political Science. Political Science and Politics, 21(4), 828–842. Bevir, M. (2011). Public Administration as Storytelling. Public Administration, 89(1), 183–195. Bozovic, M. (2017). Whose Forms? Missing Russians in Caroline Levine’s Forms. PMLA, 132(5), 1181–1186. Britannica. (2019). Retrieved September 2, 2019, from https://www.britannica. com/art/literary-criticism. British Academy. (2013). Lost for Words: The Need for Languages in the UK Diplomacy and Security. London: The British Academy. Clifford, J. (1986). Introduction: Partial Truths. In J.  Clifford & G.  Marcus (Eds.), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (pp.  1–26). Berkeley: University of California Press. Frow, J., Hardie, M., & Rich, K. (2019). The Novel and Media: Three Essays. Journal of Language, Literature and Culture, 66(1), 1–15. Hodgett, S., & Cassin, M. (2012). Feelingful Development: Redefining Policy Through Interpretation. British Journal of Canadian Studies, 25(2), 267–286. Inglis, F. (1995). Raymond Williams. London: Routledge. Kelly, M., & Maynard Moody, S. (1993). Policy Analysis in the Post-Positivist Era: Engaging Stakeholders in Evaluating the Economic Development Districts Program. Public Administration Review, 53(2), 135–142. Levine, C. (2015). Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Levine, C. (2017). Model Thinking, Generalization, Political Form and the Common Good. New Literary History, 44(4), 633–653. Levine, C. (2019). Not Against Structure But in Search of Better Structures: A Response to Winifred Fluck. American Literary History, 31(2), 255–259. Liming, S. (2017). Fantasies of Form. Criticism, 59(4), 661–666.

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MacIntyre, A. (1984). After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Milner, A. (2010). Tenses of Imagination: Raymond Williams on Science Fiction, Utopia and Dystopia. Bern: Peter Lang. Morton, B. (1988). Healing Divisions. The Nation, 247(17), 616–622. NicCraith, M., & Hill, E. (2015). Relocating the Ethnographic Field: From “Being There” to “Being there”. Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, 24(1), 24–62. Rohlfing, K. J., Rehm, M., & Goecke, K. U. (2003). Situatedness: The Interplay Between Context(s) and Situation. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 3(2), 132–156. Roskin, M. (2019). Political Science. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Retrieved November 27, 2019, from https://www.brittannica.com/topic/ politcal-science. Sandler, S. (2017). Rhythms, Networks: Caroline Levine Meets Susan Howe and Marina Tsvetaeva. PMLA, 132(5), 1226–1231. Sartre, J. P. (1947). What Is Literature. London: Methuen. Trilling, L. (1950). The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books. Tucker, H. (2006). Tactical Formalism: A Response to Caroline Levine. Victorian Studies, 49(1, Autumn), 85–93. Williams, R. (1979). The Fight for Manod. London: Chatto and Windus.

CHAPTER 5

Autoethnography as Narrative in Political Studies R. A. W. Rhodes

Introduction Autoethnography appeals to me for three reasons. First, of late, I have been interested in blurring genres; in exploring new ways of doing political science (Rhodes 2017). This chapter combines ethnography, autobiography, literature, and political science. Second, I near the end of my career and feel a need to reflect on my academic journey; to make sense of it. Third, autoethnography places a premium on writing. As Sword (2012: vi and 4) comments, too many academic papers are ‘badly written’ and ‘unreadable’ and the phrase ‘stylish academic writing’ is an ‘oxymoron’. At best, we adopt ‘a style-of-no-style’ (Van Maanen 2010: 241). However,

R. A. W. Rhodes (*) University of Southampton, Southampton, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. A. W. Rhodes, S. Hodgett (eds.), What Political Science Can Learn from the Humanities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51697-0_5

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autoethnography blurs the boundaries between biography and literature, opening opportunities to experiment with genres of presentation.1 The chapter is an extract from an autoethnography of a career (Rhodes 2021). It describes my take on autoethnography, identifies different ways of telling my story, and offers some considerations on how autoethnographies are relevant to political science. I begin with my story.

The D.Phil. EXTERIOR—The Sheldonian Theatre, Broad Street. The Kings Arms. Framed photographs as wallpaper. Clutter. Stale cigarette smoke. Real ale. I wander into the pub. Dazed. In shock. I sit in corner. I drink a pint. I know the viva was a disaster. Just not sure what that means. I walk to station. I fear the worst. The backstory to my shock and misery lies in that professional rite of passage known as the doctorate, variously referred to as either the D.Phil. or Ph.D. Most people take three or four years and pass with minor revisions. I made a much bigger meal of it. It is a story of my quest to be awarded a doctorate, during which I had to overcome the monster of my examiners or academic gatekeepers. The first point to note is that my doctorate was, like most such tomes, a crashing great bore. It was a comparative study of the decision-making process in Oxford City Council and Oxfordshire County Council. Many people fall asleep before they finish reading the title. I thought it was pioneering. I took recent developments in American political science—known as behaviouralism—and applied them to the study of local government in England. I interviewed extensively, including such grandees as Baroness Janet Young (1926–2002)—a pillar of the Conservative Party establishment and (then) the leader of the city council. It was less an interview and more a lecture by her. The Treasurer of Oxfordshire County Council threatened me with libel action because I claimed he ‘sat on the fence’ 1  I would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council (Grant No. AH/ NOO6712/1) for supporting the Blurring Genres seminar series. This chapter arises out of discussions at these seminars. See https://www.ulster.ac.uk/faculties/arts-humanities-andsocial-sciences/schools/applied-social-policy-sciences/research/blurring-genres. I must also thank John Boswell, Jack Corbett, Jenny Fleming, and Susan Hodgett for their advice on the first draft. A draft was presented to the panel on ‘Notions of Narratives in Troubling Times’, Political Studies Association International Conference, Cardiff, 26–28 March 2018. I thank the participants for their advice and comments.

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over one decision. Nothing came of it. I had an early introduction to the ups and downs of fieldwork. I was then and remain a man of enthusiasms. Neither grandee paternalism nor threats of libel action dampened them. I was enthusiastic about my doctorate. Unfortunately, my examiners were not—and here lies a subsidiary story about appointing examiners. My supervisor was Jim Sharpe (1930–2010) of Nuffield College, Oxford. Sir Norman Chester (1907–1986) was the Warden of Nuffield. Jim was also the research director of the Royal Commission on Local Government in England 1966–1969, chaired by Lord Redcliffe-Maud (1906–1982). Afterwards, Maud became Master of University College, Oxford. Both expressed an interest in my work, so Sharpe felt obliged to invite them to be my examiners. It is a tight network at Oxford. In other words, there was no external examiner from another university, which is the normal practice. For me, it was a disastrous error of judgement on Sharpe’s part. Both examiners were exponents of traditional public administration, dismissive of the new behavioural fad in political science. To make matters even worse, I had published an article criticising the report of the Royal Commission (Rhodes 1974). According to Sharpe, Maud had read the article and was not amused. Off to a good start then! I submitted my thesis in October 1971 and the oral examination took place on 22 November in Warden Chester’s murky office with his pen and ink portrait by David Hockney—also a Bradford lad like myself—on the wall. It was a stilted, offhand, and brief affair. I had no idea what they thought about my thesis, but Sharpe said they would want some revisions. So, I waited, and waited. Months went by. Eventually I got some vague comments that provided no clear guidance but Sharpe ‘interpreted’ the document and gave me some concrete suggestions. I undertook some extensive revisions with one qualification. I could do nothing to make it into the traditional public administration thesis preferred by my examiners. The theory and the quantitative analysis made it irredeemably behavioural. I resubmitted my revised thesis and my second oral examination was set for 21 February 1975. Between times, I received an invitation from Ivor Shelley, the reviews editor for Public Administration, to review Lord Redcliffe-Maud and Bruce Wood, English Local Government Reformed. Fearing to accept, I sought the advice of my boss, Professor John Stewart. The review could not appear in less than six months, so John advised me it was safe to accept the invitation.

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I thought then, and I think now, that Maud’s book is a shoddy piece of work because it neglected much of the relevant political science research. I said as much and attached a list of references to support my opinion. Nevil Johnson (1929–2006), the editor, not the reviews editor, wrote back telling me they did not publish references with reviews, and I would have to delete them. He suggested several other revisions, most of which toned down the review but did not change the overall thrust. Embarrassingly, Johnson’s letter also included, by mistake, an exchange of letters between Shelley and Maud in which Maud asked if ‘someone serious’ was writing the review. Shelley replied that ‘unfortunately’ they had asked Rhodes already. I laughed, but the smile was soon wiped off my face. I sought John’s advice again. He said accept only the revisions you agree with and tell Johnson that if he does not accept this version you will publish it elsewhere with an account of what happened with Public Administration. Johnson accepted the review. Now I get to the unpleasant, even distasteful, sting in the tail. On the train from Oxford to London, when travelling with Maud, Johnson showed him the typescript of the review. My mood at the time is there for all to see in my choice of music. I listened to bed-sitter troubadours who mused on the meaning of life and the faithlessness of women. I wallowed in Cat Steven’s Tea for the Tillerman (1970) and Teaser and the Fire Cat (#1971). With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, I can see that self-pity influenced my choice of songs. I formed a lifelong love for Leonard Cohen. Songs of Leonard Cohen (1968), Songs from a Room (1969), and Songs of Love and Hate (1971) were played relentlessly on my B&O equipment. Even the contrast between my expensive Hi-Fi equipment and these lonely, desolate songs reinforced my mood. It is better to be miserable rich than miserable poor because miserable rich gives better sound quality. I cannot listen to Cohen’s song ‘Joan of Arc’ without returning instantly to the early 1970s. Cohen’s nickname in the UK might be ‘Laughing Len’ but it is an ironic label, and no one was laughing. I was battling, and there were days when people and events did get me down. For the second examination, Chester stood down. Given that he would never agree with my approach, his decision was commendable. INTERIOR—An Oxford College, stone walls, high ceiling, austere decor, and dusty light. Everyone wears black gowns. The scene is reminiscent of William Frederick Yeames picture ‘And When Did You Last See Your Father?’ Maud commandeers the

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examination. Sir Kenneth Wheare, former Rector of Exeter College but retired, is also present. He never speaks. Maud asked me to summarise my revisions. I did. He said thank you, and that was it. He did not ask me any questions. The examination was over in less than ten minutes. I walked to the Kings Arms in Broad Street. The bad news took several months to arrive. I was awarded a B.Litt. not a D.Phil.—they failed me. I thought my academic career was over. The review was published in the Spring issue of Public Administration (Rhodes 1975). For much of this time, I was numb. I could not allow myself to think it was all over. When not numb, I was afraid. What would I do next? What could I do? Bruce Springsteen sings in ‘The River’ (1980), ‘Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true or is it something worse?’ It is a rhetorical question. It is something worse. John Stewart, head of the English local government side of the Institute of Local Government Studies (INLOGOV), saved me. In today’s university, my contract would not be renewed because you must hold a Ph.D. In 1975, it was preferable, but not compulsory. Stewart recruited me to the British local government side of INLOGOV.  I soldiered on and my emotional stance was that I would not let the bastards get me down. By 1982, however, I had to rethink. I was invited to a workshop at the University of Bielefeld, Germany, on ‘Guidance, Control and Evaluation in the Public Sector’. My former supervisor, Sharpe, was there, and in high dudgeon. The University did not invite him to give a public lecture, although it invited Christopher Hood, then a junior colleague, to do so. I learnt that the University could not issue an invitation because a Fellow of an Oxford college was not a professor and, even worse, Sharpe did not have a Ph.D. The lesson was clear. I would have to write a second doctorate. At the University of Essex, staff could submit already published work for a D.Phil. The articles or chapters had to link to one another. You could not submit a medley of topics and you had to write an introduction explaining the links and summarising the collective findings. I had six linked chapters, but I was a couple of chapters short for a coherent, integrated collection, so I wrote the ‘missing’ chapters and compiled a thesis on ‘Understanding Intergovernmental Relations: theory and practice’. There were nine chapters, all published or accepted for publication. I published three chapters after the thesis was accepted. I wrote the extra material and compiled the Ph.D. in 1985. My examiners were Professors Andrew Dunsire and Kenneth Newton and they passed it the same year

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without a viva and without any revisions. A decade after the debacle of my Oxford D.Phil. I repaired the damage. I was duly accredited. Unknowingly, I was also ahead of my times. The doctorate as a set of articles is now common, although the rule is commonly four articles not my eight. For many years, I thought I was the wronged party. My class prejudice saw Maud as the archetypal villain. Where he saw himself as an ‘optimist’ (Redcliffe-Maud 1981), I saw self-satisfaction. He was upper class, haughty, and arrogant, speaking in a Received Pronunciation ‘accent’—I insist it is an accent, not the correct way to speak. It took me a long time to realise I was my own worst enemy. The Northern lad with a chip on his shoulder and a gruff Yorkshire accent shouted ‘hit me, hit me’. I can scarcely complain if people took up the invitation. The story of my D.Phil. illustrates my early struggles with the power structure of academia. Universities are hierarchies staffed with many gatekeepers. My examiners were gatekeepers to the profession and I was excluded because I was ‘not the right sort’. I continue to believe they failed to discharge their duties properly. They had a responsibility for fairness and transparency. There is also a requirement for some degree of empathy. If I displayed a provincial brashness, surely they had enough experience to allow for that and focus on the work and not the presentation. There were to be many more gatekeepers. I held many of them in the same esteem as Redcliffe-Maud. My disdain showed, and it did not help my career. If the Ph.D. was the gateway to the academic profession that is no longer its main function. As universities became overtly big business—money has always mattered—so degrees have become commodities to be bought and sold on the open market. Governments around the world send their more promising public servants to British universities to get a Ph.D. It is their passport to the next rung on their career ladder. Such ‘students’ are motivated and self-disciplined. They cope with the practice of research methods. They are good at fieldwork because they have excellent access to their governments back home. Unfortunately, they have no background in the social sciences. They have read little and few cope with theory. The problem is compounded because they write in English, their second language. The supervisor is not introducing a novitiate to the profession but, in effect, holding the student’s hand to get them their degree. For example, I would prescribe focused and limited reading lists and specify the theoretical approach they would use, keeping it as simple as possible. I have no objection to anyone bettering himself or herself. I wish the public

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servants whom I taught all the best in their careers. We keep in touch. Nonetheless, I cannot help but reflect on the irony that the degree that caused me so much heartache is now a commodity for sale. Telling the story of my D.Phil. was a big step for me. For years I never discussed it. It was a black mark on my career. I was ashamed of my failure. I became more comfortable talking about it after I breezed through my Essex D.Phil. The story shows my bloody-mindedness. I needed to accept that my troubles arose, not because I was young and provincial but because I was a dickhead.2 With such acceptance, there was no point in thinking of myself as a victim, as I did for many years. I need to put the experience in the past and ‘get on’—a phrase used by my parents in the face of any troubles. Much went wrong during my career. I was often the cause of my own troubles. Through it all ran this determined streak of ‘I will not let the bastards get me down’. I had found my calling, and no one was going to take it away from me. My expectations about what I could and could not achieve were often unrealistically low, but I never doubted that I had found my way through life. I knew I wanted to become a scholar. I still love Leonard Cohen. It turns out he does have a sense of humour. It is one of the more engaging features of his later work. The tone is dry and self-mocking. Any doubting Thomas should listen to ‘Tower of Song’ (1988) and ‘Stages’ (2015). Old dogs can learn new tricks and my new trick is writing analytical autoethnography.

Evocative and Analytical Autoethnography I dislike the term ‘autoethnography’. It is another cumbersome neologism and my discipline has too many already. On occasion, the phrase ‘personal narrative’ is used as a synonym but autoethnography is the established term.3 It refers to the use of self-reflection to explore anecdotal and personal experience, and to connecting this story to wider cultural, political, 2  With apologies to TISM’s song ‘All Homeboys Are Dickheads’ on their CD, Machiavelli and the Four Seasons (1995). 3  On autoethnography generally, see Adams et  al. (2014), especially Chapter 6 for an extensive bibliography, Anderson (2006), Chang (2008), Denzin (2006), Ellis (2004), Ellis and Bochner (2000), Jones (2005), Krieger (1991), and the symposium in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 35 (4) 2006. On autoethnography and working in a university, see Humphreys (2005), Richardson (1997), Sparkes (2007), and Smith (2013). On autoethnography and political science, see Burnier (2006). On thematic analysis, see Braun and Clarke (2006). On plots, see Booker (2005) and White (1987).

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and social meanings and understandings (Ellis 2004: xix). An autobiography is the story of one person’s life, often in chronological form. It will focus on people and events but not the author’s interpretation of his or her life in its wider socio-cultural and political context. Autobiographies rarely draw on the social sciences to explain and analyse events whereas I use social and political theory to identify themes in my career, which I link to broader trends in British society. Autoethnography is a form of discursive invention, in which experiences and their meanings—as well as the subjects of those experiences—are created or produced through the research process (Jarvis 2009: 19–22). As Ellis (2004: 13) points out, political scientists are ‘still holding out’ against autoethnography. She means that political scientists avoid the personal, especially the emotional aspects of their lives. Little has changed in the intervening years. However, Ellis espouses ‘evocative autobiography’. To evoke is to call forth images of people and places; to persuade readers that they know these people and have been to these places. In evocative autoethnography, ‘the mode of storytelling is akin to the novel or the biography and thus fractures the boundaries that normally separate social science from literature’ (Ellis and Bochner 2000: 744). The authorial voice is ever present. The text is written in the first person. The author is as much subject as the ostensible subjects. There is much scope for textual experimentation. Analytic autoethnography shares some of these aims. According to Anderson (2006a: 378), the key features of analytic autoethnography are: (1) complete member in the social world under study, (2) analytic reflexivity, (3) narrative visibility of the researcher’s self, (4) dialogue with informants beyond the self, and (5) commitment to theoretical analysis.

There would be some debate over the first four features—there is always debate—but there is a major disagreement over the fifth feature. Those writing evocative autoethnography reject this aspiration.4 Ellis and Bochner (2006: 436 and 438) dismiss Anderson’s version (2006a) as ‘aloof ethnography’ searching for a ‘master narrative’. Their version focuses on ‘how we should live and brings us into lived experience in a feeling and embodied way’. They call this lived experience the ‘ethical 4  See the exchanges between Anderson (2006a) and (2006b) with Ellis and Bochner (2006) and (2016): Part 1, Section II.

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domain’ and they take people there ‘through story, characters, emotion, and dramatic and narrative plot’ (Ellis and Bochner 2006: 439). But I do not refuse to abstract and explain. I seek to generalise, that is, to have my ‘small facts speak to large issues’ (Geertz 1973: 23). My goal is to wed storytelling with analysis. I share Anderson’s (2006a: 375) commitment to ‘an analytic research agenda focused on understandings of broader social phenomena’. I seek to marry idiographic particularity—an autoethnography that evokes my beliefs, emotions, and practices—with an analytic research agenda that speaks to large issues. I seek to write an autoethnography that is plausible; that is, it agrees with known facts and experiences and produces general statements. Such statements are plausible because they rest on good reasons, and the reasons are good because they are inferred from relevant information (paraphrased from Boudon 1993). In this chapter, I tell one short story about my D.Phil. It is part of a book in which I develop several of the themes only touched on in this story (Rhodes 2021). My aims are both personal and analytical. I want to chart the twists and turns of my research and writing and the ways in which it intersected with my personal life. I identify the broad themes running through my career that are of relevance to such big issues as the role of the university in Britain today. I have presented some autobiographical material about my academic career and I use this story to invite the reader to engage with the events, private and work. My personal experiences are in the foreground and I use my stories to make sense of my world. My location is the university. My career is that of a professor. I self-identify with other scholars and I am a full or complete member of the academic profession.

Writing Before writing my story, and the book of which it is a part, I had choices to make about how I was going to tell my tale. Van Maanen (1988: 35) declares that ‘there is no way of seeing, hearing, or representing the world of others that is absolutely, universally valid or correct’. He uses the term ‘tale’, ‘quite self-consciously to highlight the presentational or, more properly, representational qualities of fieldwork writing’ (Van Maanen 1988: 8 and 14). The emphasis falls on writing up fieldwork that has an ‘inherently story-like character’ and authors have ‘inevitable choices’ to make about how they will present their findings (Van Maanen 1988). He identifies three ways: realist, confessional, and impressionist.

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Of these the several ways of telling the tale, the impressionist seems most suited to writing an autoethnography. Impressionist tales take the form of a dramatic storyline, with a fragmented treatment of theory and method, because they focus on characterisation and drama. Impressionist tales ‘highlight the episodic, complex and ambivalent realities that are frozen and perhaps made too pat by realist or confessional conventions’. Their accounts are ‘as hesitant and open to contingency and interpretation as the concrete experiences on which they are based’ (Van Maanen 1988: 119; see also Boswell and Corbett 2015). Hayden White also invites us to consider the many modes of emplotment, that is, ways of assembling a series of historical events into a story with a plot. He identifies four ‘modes of emplotment’: romance, tragedy, comedy, and satire. Each mode has its associated tropes or figures of speech used for artistic effect. The choice of mode and tropes prefigures both the story (and its plot) and, therefore, the explanation (White 1973: chapter 1; and 1978: chapter 2). Lacking a shared technical language, politics and history rely on familiar figures of speech (or ordinary language) to create meaning; on the metaphorical use of words. So, historians (and political scientists) ‘constitute their subjects as possible objects of narrative representation by the very language they use to describe them’ (White 1978: 94–95, emphasis added). Finally, Booker (2005) identifies seven basic plots: overcoming the monster, rags to riches. The quest, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy, and rebirth. The ‘quest’ and ‘voyage and return’ are well suited to fieldwork. Writing an autoethnography accentuates the need for good writing and, therefore, highlights the need to make the several choices I have outlined.5 Fiction The prospect of writing an autoethnography encouraged me to think about my reading. I have a taste for crime fiction and my favourite present-­ day authors include James Lee Burke, James Ellroy, Richard Stark, and Fred Vargas. Any devotee will note some similarities across age, gender, 5  I do not know of any guide to writing political science or comparative politics (but see Boswell et al. 2019). On writing social science, see Becker (2007), Mills (1970: 215–248), Sword (2012), and Wildavsky (2010: chapter 10). Sword (2012: chapter 3) provides a guide to some 100 style guides as well as providing her own excellent advice.

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and nationality. Most have a direct, bordering on staccato, style of writing, notably Ellroy and Stark. Others have an offbeat, even hyperreal, quality—notably Burke and Vargas. I found the direct stark prose of Scandinavian Noir near enough to my academic writing style for me to try to emulate it. Of course, the Scandinavian work had antecedents in American noir but it was Scandinavian Noir that tipped me over into experimenting with how I wrote. I draw on these influences in my writing. I use crisp catchphrases such as ‘from government to governance’ to grasp the reader’s attention. I sprinkle the text with musical allusions to leaven the mix (see below). I include personal anecdotes—I am present in the text and not an impersonal, detached commentator. I write in the first person and the active voice. For everyone, good writing involves making equivalent choices. How do my favourite authors tell their story? What narrative devices do they employ? For example, in Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the narrator is the murderer, although the reader does not know it until the end. It will take only a few minutes to make a few notes on how the author told the story. My plot in the D.Phil. story is overcoming the monsters who were my examiners. Also, most crime authors sustain the reader’s interest by using ‘incidentals’. Inspector Salvo Montalbano is a gourmand and Andreas Camilleri litters the books with descriptions of Sicilian food. My incidental is rock music. In other words, I look at the skeleton of any book and, by performing an autopsy, I become more aware of the options available for my writing. There are several books providing tips on how to write. I like the advice from science fiction writers such as Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison, Hell’s Cartographers (1975), and crime writers such as Elmore Leonard 10 Rules of Writing (2007) because they never lose sight of the reader. There is more ‘serious’ literary advice than anyone could possibly read; see, for example, a classic like E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1927). My preference is Stephen King, On Writing (2010). He is insightful and fun, and he litters the text with aphorisms such as ‘to write is human, to edit is divine’. The examples matter less than the injunction to be self-conscious about narrative structure and style and learn from everything you read. What is the difference between fiction and what we do? If we look at historians and the craft of biography, they deploy the arts of rhetoric and persuasion and look to writers of fiction for inspiration:

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Biography is mainly a form of storytelling, a literary form which is generically as close to the novel as it is to history. Confident too that it is not just the boundary between fiction and non-fiction which has become less clear as a result of advances in critical understanding of the nature of texts, but the whole notion of a biographical fact, some biographers try deliberately to free themselves from the tyranny of the documentary record. (St Clair 2002: 222)

Writing an autoethnography also walks this boundary: There is no absolute difference between the way a social scientists writes and the way a more ‘literary’ author tackles a similar topic. … An informed understanding of genres and styles of literary or academic representation … form a useful part of the ethnographer’s craft knowledge. (Hammersley and Atkinson 2007 [1983]: 192–193)

The main difference is that social scientists seek to explore the link between data and concepts. My aim when writing is ‘to master, explain, grasp’ while ‘caring and empathizing’ for other people in my life and work and recognising that we are all actors in the same play (cf. Ellis and Bochner 2006: 431). In exploring the link between data and concepts, I distinguish between linear-hypothesis writing (e.g. Wildavsky 2010: 10–12) and abductive-­ evocative writing (e.g. Schwartz-Shea and Yanow 2012: 26–34, 46–49). I practise linear writing when I follow a plan in which topic follows topic in an orderly sequence. This style of writing lends itself to hypothesis testing and to writing academic articles; it is economical with words. Abductive-­ evocative writing fits existing parts together. It reasons from an observation or a puzzle looking for an explanation of that observation or puzzle. I search for the internal logic, for the order, as I write. This style of writing lends itself to writing books. When I sat down in my study in Tasmania in 2008 to write up the fieldwork for the book that became Everyday Life in British Government (2011), I was in a mild panic. I had been an ‘artificial person’ (Wolgast 1992: 1), or Head of Department then Director/Dean, for five years. Daily life was a procession of committee and one-to-one meetings, which encouraged a short attention span. I wondered if I could sit at the computer and concentrate for eight hours a day. Then there were the interviews and the fieldwork notebooks. On Day 1, they seemed a formless

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mess, more intimidating than informative. The organising principle was ‘start at the top of the pile, and work your way down’. I put the material in date order and starting reading making notes as I went along. I could start writing also because I knew I would use the interpretive theory I had developed with Mark Bevir. Its sensitising concepts were beliefs, practices, traditions, and dilemmas and they helped to structure the first read through. I knew my methods were a variant on classical ethnography. I could write the theory and methods chapter. But what to do about the fieldwork? There was no list of chapters beyond that invented for the book proposal. There was no plan. Only themes and topics identified from reading and rereading the fieldwork. I wrote it in sections. The first section was a day in the life of a public servant because the public servant’s diary structured the description. As I wrote, as I tried to stand in the shoes of the minister and his public servants, themes became plain. One observation was the practice of some ministers of avoiding decisions for the pomp and circumstance of office. It led to the notion of the ‘the appearance of rule’ as a public exhibition of governmental authority. Some metaphors were revealing such as describing the entourage around the minister as a court. The analogy with a jigsaw is apt. I was putting pieces together while looking for the bigger picture. I started with the observations and tried to find the most likely explanation of why people did what they did. At times, I plotted backwards, trying to work out how I got to where I was. At times, my writing ‘plan’ was like M.  C. Esher’s lithograph of the continuous Penrose staircase. In sum, I practised abductive reasoning. Music Music has always been the backcloth to my writing since my postgraduate days. Living in a college, you listened either to your own music or to the music emanating from the rooms all around you. I opted for my music, with The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and The Kinks my pet favourites. My Social Science Research Council (SSRC) grant was a boon without which I could not have pursued postgraduate study, but it did not extend to purchasing many records. I averaged about six a year, excluding birthday and Christmas presents. Music remains the soundtrack to my work and my collection has grown to more 2000 LPs and CDs. In the story, I comment on the music to which I was listening because it captures my moods at that time.

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Music serves several functions other than enjoyment and background noise.6 As Wetherell (2015: 161) comments, ‘Music helps to reveal the run of the mill affectivity of everyday social life and moments of extraordinary social drama’. It provides a parallel narrative to the verbal or oral narrative highlighting emotions, relationships, and experiences. It provides an affective narrative that reveals hidden dimensions in everyday life and our relationships with others. Anybody who experiences jealousy will find that ugly emotion expressed in Elvis Costello’s, I Want You’ and in lines such as ‘It’s the thought of him undressing you or you undressing’.7 In short, music is ‘a device for the reflexive process of remembering/constructing who one is, and a technology for spinning the apparently continuous tale of who one is’ (De Nora 2011: 63). I pepper my story with the songs that have meaning for me beyond the intentions of their creators. There are many books on the craft of writing. The aim of this chapter is not to add to the list. Rather I seek to broaden our conception of what is involved in writing and encourage us to look for guidance beyond the bounds of social science—for example, in novels. In addition, by including music, I seek to encourage the use of more varied narrative devices such as this incidental.

Considerations: What Can We Learn from Autoethnographies? As Sparkes (2007: 522) would have it, I offer an autoethnography ‘for your consideration’. But what themes warrant consideration? My reflections fall under the headings of personal lessons, lessons for political science, and lessons for universities. Personal Lessons There are obvious links between autoethnography and my work on interpretive political science because both share a concern with meaning (see Bevir and Rhodes 2003; Rhodes 2017). There is a shared focus on dilemmas. One theme in my story is academic privilege and gatekeeping. I was 6  I would like to thank Janet Boddy for her advice on, and suggested reading for, this section on music. 7  The track is on Blood and Chocolate (#16 1986) and there is a live performance at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGZC2h5VVA8.

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‘gatekept’. Now I am a gatekeeper. I was a student. Now I am a supervisor. How have my early experiences informed the way in which I approach both gatekeeping and supervision? There is also the question of how this experience shaped me personally. This failure did not undermine my self-confidence and turn me into a victim, although I did rail against the cruel world for a time. The dilemma was how I responded to the inevitable setbacks in any life. Should I battle on and try to change my academic standing or move sideways into (say) management training for local government officers. Cumbria County Council did offer me a job and a lot more money. Is the D.Phil. a key point in my career that helps me to understand the rest? Or did my Yorkshire upbringing, and six years attending the local equivalent of Dotheboys Hall, instil the bloody-mindedness that got me through the ups and downs of my career? How does my understanding of that event shape my beliefs and actions and the ways in which I make sense of the world? However, the most important lesson to be learnt from autoethnography is that the goal of the detached, impersonal, and objective political scientist is illusory. We are not scientists in white coats in laboratories studying inanimate objects.8 We are living, breathing human beings bringing our beliefs and lived experience to bear in human research settings. The search for knowledge is a personal search inextricably intertwined with how we understand who we are and our purposes in life. The investigative procedures of the natural sciences are an aid to logic and collecting evidence, but no more. They are no substitute for self-awareness, creativity, and authenticity. Lessons for Political Science Burnier (2006) suggests autoethnographies keep the self and lived experience up-front and centre in research. Fieldwork typically has many ups and downs. As Wood (2007: 141) comments ‘inadequate attention’ is paid to the ‘emotional dynamics’ of fieldwork. One day you are walking the tightrope between insider and outsider. Next day you are the complete bystander, left behind in the office to twiddle your thumbs, wondering 8  It is not germane here, but I am also prepared to defend the proposition that the work of natural scientists is similarly shaped by their beliefs and lived personal experiences. See Polanyi (2013 [1962]) and Watson (1970).

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how long your exclusion will last. You play many roles and it is a strain. You make mistakes, unintentionally changing people’s behaviour. You are presenting yourself in the everyday lives of other people and you become part of their lives. You have to manage your emotions and your relationship with others. Autoethnographies push such issues to the forefront of your narrative. It blends the personal and the scholarly. This standpoint rejects the project to professionalise political science by the research councils with their accredited training degrees and strategic priorities, and the government with its regulatory regimes such as the Research Excellence Framework (REF). ‘#newbreed political scientist’ may be ‘professional’, but the emphasis on micro, quantitative, formal, and empiricist studies limits horizons. Instead, I enter a plea for the practice of fieldwork and engagement with all those who practise politics, whenever and wherever. I can sit in my study or the library for as long as the next person but at some point, I want to be in the field. I welcome the social interaction and the emotional kick from the uncertainty that surrounds any encounter. I am not a Sheldon Cooper confounded by the social expectations of other people. They may be hell, but I can cope. I have never understood why those who specialise in survey research engage a company to administer the questionnaire for them and never go from door-to-door themselves. I would want to engage with at least some of my respondents to see the facial expressions and to hear the silence as they ponder the reply. Their responses are not only crosses in a box but also the accompanying body language. Detachment is not objectivity but loss of information. The second lesson concerns reflexivity. I had paid lip service to the notion in the past but it was never a central theme in my work. I dabbled. That is not enough. As Hammersley and Atkinson (2007 [1983]: 14–15) point out ‘the reflexive character of social research … is not a matter of methodological commitment, it is an existential fact’. So, ‘rather than engaging in futile attempts to eliminate the effects of the researcher, we should set about understanding them’: There is an obligation placed upon practitioners to scrutinise systematically the methodology by which findings, their own, and those of others, were produced, and, in particular, to consider how the activities of researcher may have shaped these findings. (Hammersley and Atkinson 2007 [1983]: 236)

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There is no ‘may’ in later editions of the book. Critical self-awareness is essential and autoethnographies place the author at the centre of the analysis. Balancing engagement, detachment, and critical self-awareness is never ending. Yet, there is no alternative to trying—it is life as we know it—and autoethnographies discipline the author to become critically self-aware. Finally, the craft of writing is at the heart of autoethnography, blurring boundaries between social science and fiction and creating ‘factions’. Ellis (2004: 332) says: All ethnography is interpretive and thus is fiction, ‘something made’, ‘something fashioned’ … the distinction between novelists and ethnographers is blurry rather than sharp.

So, autoethnography follows such conventions of storytelling as creating characters, describing places, and spinning plots. This chapter is the beginning of my response to that challenge. Lessons for Universities My dream was to become a scholar but changes in university management, and my role as a manager in the corporate university, shaped my journey. The changes rung by corporatisation are clear from the changing standards of what constitutes a doctorate; its commodification. The tensions between scholarship and corporatisation have become more acute over the years. The ways in which I responded to this dilemma also changed but the dilemma persisted. The dilemma was most acute when I held a managerial position. According to Wolgast (1992: 1), ‘artificial persons’ are those who ‘speak and act in the name of others, (who) can commit and obligate them’. Thus, artificial persons are followers of orders. They toe the line. They speak in support of institutional procedures and organisational rules. They are not then ‘responsible’ for their effects on human lives (Smith 2013: 191). This fate is certain for Heads of Departments. I do not have the space to describe my working life as a Head of Department. However, I sat across the desk from people whom I was moving on and out. I saw the disbelief and shock in their faces. I was the object of their anger. I pushed the tissues across the desk for the colleague in tears. It was painful. I hid

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behind an icy shell and tried to distance myself from the emotion. I did not empathise because to do so would make me emotionally vulnerable. I became and remained Professor Steely. The question I asked myself afterwards was why I was doing this job. Did I make a mistake in supporting the neoliberal reforms of university through, for example, my participation in the REF? Do the neoliberal reforms of British universities threaten my beloved tradition of scholarship? Did the universities lose comprehensively the battle with neoliberalism? The answer to all three questions is a resounding ‘yes’. Marketisation fostered competition between universities for students and treated degrees as commodities. The competition for grants and positional goods such as promotion fuelled competition between colleagues. Managerialism fostered measuring and regulating staff performance. I did not see that we were snowballing down a hill to evermore harmful competition and regulation. There was nothing I could do to stop it. Such regulation was the spirit of the times. Neoliberal ideas were here to stay. However, I did not need to embrace it as enthusiastically as I did. Not for the first time, I was torn between the serious work of research and publications and helping to run my discipline and my university. Always, I thought I could make a better fist of managing the profession or the department than the current incumbents. I did do a better job, but it was a distraction from my scholarship. Above all, I had not joined the university to wreck other people’s lives yet I was, in effect, firing people and ruining their careers. When I went home, I brooded about what I had done. I did not shrug it off and get on straight away. I was struggling with my identity as an artificial person. I realised all too slowly that the work involved in managing the university counted for little to me: In a desk I had come across some of my father’s old engagement diaries of the Forties and the Fifties. Endless ‘meetings’ fill the day. Civil servants drift in and out. Lunches. Virtually indistinguishable from my own. What’s the point? Nothing to show for it at all. He will be remembered only for his writings and his contribution to scholarship. (Alan Clark 1993: 37 on his father, Sir Kenneth Clark, emphasis added)

I needed to stick to my version of the cobbler’s last and turn out the best research of which I was capable. That was the way to garner academic respect and, I have come to believe, standing with practitioners. My

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attempts at writing autoethnography crystallised my years as an artificial person and my ill-advised support for the neoliberal reform of universities. After 2008, I became, and remained, a researcher and a writer. Reflecting on the self encourages breaking down the boundaries between the personal and research. It also injects the self into administration and teaching. It acts against compartmentalising one’s lived experience in a university.

Conclusions Autoethnography is not without its limits (see Campbell 2017; Wall 2008). First, it encourages the diary disease of way too much self-centred detail. My solution is to get friends and colleagues to read the text, to tell me what to cut, and I take their advice. Second, there are limits to anyone’s capacity for reflexivity. I have much sympathy with Watson’s (1987) prayer, ‘make me reflexive—but not yet’. Like everyone, I struggle to balance engagement, detachment, and critical self-awareness. It is equivalent to the search for the Holy Grail—always out of reach. Third, reflexivity is not enough if the focus is on research methods and the influence of the observer on the findings. It must encompass also positionality, as it is in known in social science jargon. This term refers to the ways in which race, class, gender, religion, nationality, and sexuality shape identity. All too often we are unaware of these influences because they are the taken for granted assumptions of our everyday life. Finally, autoethnography poses a challenge to the conventional canons of social science research about transparency and reliability of data. The Data Access and Research Transparency (DA-RT) protocol wants researchers to make their data publicly available so other researchers can determine whether the evidence supports the analysis.9 It is a problem for me with my elite research because access hinges on my guaranteeing the anonymity of my respondents. It is a problem with autoethnography because I am the evidence. I am honour bound to note the limits of an autoethnography, but such an acknowledgement must not obscure its virtues. Autoethnography encourages political scientists: To be wary of detachment and accept that every research project is personal. To confront our emotions, stress, and relationships in fieldwork. 9

 See https://www.dartstatement.org/. Last accessed 7 June 2019.

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To be more critically self-aware—reflexive. To explore the self in administration, research, and teaching. To become better writers. I am encouraged by the experience of writing this chapter. I will write more autoethnography. There is much to explore. You have been warned.

References Adams, T. E., Holman-Jones, S., & Ellis, C. (2014). Autoethnography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Anderson, L. (2006a). Analytic Autoethnography. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35, 373–395. Anderson, L. (2006b). On Apples, Oranges and Autopsies: A Response to Commentators. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35, 450–465. Becker, H. S. (2007). Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bevir, M., & Rhodes, R. A. W. (2003). Interpreting British Governance. London: Routledge. Booker, C. (2005). The Seven Basic Plots. Why We Tell Stories. London: Continuum. Boswell, J., & Corbett, J. (2015). Embracing Impressionism: Revealing the Brush Strokes of Interpretive Research. Critical Policy Studies, 9, 216–225. Boswell, J., Corbett, J., & Rhodes, R.  A. W. (2019). The Art and Craft of Comparison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boudon, R. (1993). Towards a Synthetic Theory of Rationality. International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 7, 5–19. Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using Thematic Analysis in Psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3, 77–101. Burnier, D.  L. (2006). Encounters with the Self in Social Science Research. A Political Scientist Looks at Autoethnography. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35, 410–418. Campbell, E. (2017). Apparently Being a Self-Obsessed C**t Is Now Academically Lauded: Experiencing Twitter Trolling of Autoethnographers. Qualitative Social Research, 18(3), Art. 16. https://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-18.3.2819. Chang, H. (2008). Autoethnography as a Method. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Clark, A. (1993). Diaries: In Power 1983–1992. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. De Nora, T. (2011). Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Denzin, N. (2006). Analytic Autoethnography, or Déjà Vu All Over Again. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35, 419–428.

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Ellis, C. (2004). The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel About Autoethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Ellis, C., & Bochner, A.  P. (2000). Autoethnography, Personal Narratives and Reflexivity: Researcher as Subject. In N.  K. Denzin & Y.  S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of Qualitative Research (2nd ed., pp. 733–680). London: Sage. Ellis, C., & Bochner, A. P. (2006). Analyzing Analytic Autoethnography. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35, 429–449. Ellis, C., & Bochner, A. P. (2016). Evocative Autoethnography: Writing Lives and Telling Stories. New York: Routledge. Geertz, C. (1973). Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture. In C.  Geertz (Ed.), The Interpretation of Cultures (pp.  3–30). New  York: Basic Books. Hammersley, M., & Atkinson, P. (2007 [1983]). Ethnography: Principles in Practice (3rd ed.). London: Routledge. Humphreys, M. (2005). Getting Personal: Reflexivity and Autoethnographic Vignettes. Qualitative Inquiry, 11(6), 840–860. Jarvis, L. (2009). Times of Terror: Discourse, Temporality and the War on Terror. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Jones, S.  H. (2005). Autoethnography: Making the Personal Political. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Qualitative (3rd ed., pp. 763–791). Sage. King, S. (2010). On Writing. A Memoir of the Craft (10th Anniversary ed.). New York: Scribner. Krieger, S. (1991). Social Science and the Self: Personal Essays on an Art Form. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Mills, C.  W. (1970 [1959]). The Sociological Imagination. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Polanyi, M. (2013 [1962]). Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. London: Routledge. Redcliffe-Maud, J. (1981). Experiences of an Optimist: The Memoirs of John Redcliffe-Maud. London: Hamish Hamilton. Rhodes, R.  A. W. (1974). Local Government Reform: Three Questions. Social and Economic Administration, 8(1), 6–21. Rhodes, R. A. W. (1975). Review of Lord Redcliffe-Maud and B. Wood, English Local Government Reformed (Oxford University Press, 1974). Public Administration, 53(1), 85–87. Rhodes, R.  A. W. (2017). Interpretive Political Science. Selected Essays, Volume II. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rhodes, R. A. W. (2021). It’s Alright Mum, I’m Only Professing: An Autoethnography of a Career.. Forthcoming. Richardson, L. (1997). Fields of Play. Constructing an Academic Life. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

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Schwartz-Shea, P., & Yanow, D. (2012). Interpretive Research Design: Concepts and Processes. London: Routledge. Smith, B. (2013). Artificial Persons and the Academy: A Story. In N.  P. Short, L.  Turner, & A.  Grant (Eds.), Contemporary British Autoethnography (pp. 187–202). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Sparkes, A. C. (2007). Embodiment, Academics and the Audit Culture: A Story Seeking Consideration. Qualitative Research, 7, 521–550. St Clair, W. (2002). The Biographer as Archaeologist. In P. France & W. St Clair (Eds.), Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography (pp. 219–234). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sword, H. (2012). Stylish Academic Writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Van Maanen, J. (1988). Tales of the Field. On Writing Ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Van Maanen, J. (2010). A Song for My Supper: More Tales of the Field. Organizational Research Methods, 13, 240–255. Wall, S. (2008). Easier Said than Done: Writing an Autoethnography. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 7(1), 38–53. Watson, J. D. (1970). The Double Helix. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Watson, G. (1987). Make Me Reflexive – But Not Yet: Strategies for Managing Essential Reflexivity in Ethnographic Discourse. Journal of Anthropological Research, 43, 29–41. Wetherell, M. (2015). Trends in the Turn to Affect. A Social Psychological Critique. Body and Society, 21, 139–166. White, H. (1973). Metahistory. Baltimore, John Hopkins Press. White, H. (1978). Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. White, H. (1987). The Content of the Form. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Wildavsky, A. (2010). ‘Rationality in Writing: Linear and Curvilinear’, in his Craftways: On the Organization of Scholarly Work. Second enlarged edition. London: Transaction Publishers, pp. 9–24. Wolgast, E. (1992). Ethics of an Artificial Person: Lost Responsibility in Professions and Organisations. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Wood, E. J. (2007). Field Research. In C. Boix & S. C. Stokes (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics (pp.  123–146). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 6

Where Is I? Autoethnography in Collaborative Research Lee Jarvis, Lee Marsden, Eylem Atakav, and Qudra Goodall

The research underpinning this chapter was funded by an innovation award under the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Partnership for Conflict, Crime and Security Research (PaCCS), reference AH/N008340/1. We gratefully acknowledge the UKRI Partnership for Conflict, Crime and Security Research for their support for this research, and all those who participated in the project as filmmakers, focus group participants, interviewees, project partners Gary Stanley, Wendy Whitham and their colleagues at BBC Voices, and David Galbreath and his team at the PaCCS. Many thanks also to attendees at the 2017 and 2019 annual conferences of the British International Studies Association, and contributors to the University of East Anglia (UEA) Qualitative Research Methods Forum, and to the editors Susan Hodgett and Rod Rhodes for their helpful and generous feedback on earlier drafts of this paper. Any errors remain, of course, our own. L. Jarvis • L. Marsden • E. Atakav (*) • Q. Goodall University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. A. W. Rhodes, S. Hodgett (eds.), What Political Science Can Learn from the Humanities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51697-0_6

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Introduction Autoethnographic research—at a minimum—centres the experiences, perspective, interests and voice of its individual (though situated) subject (Brigg and Bleiker 2010; Ellis et al. 2011). Its increasing popularity as a method for qualitative research within and beyond the humanities reflects, inter alia, an increasing concern with the parochial, the micro- and the particular, as well as a growing attentiveness to, and demand for, reflexivity in research (Anderson 2006: 373; see also Solomon and Steele 2017). In this chapter, we discuss a recent research project which combined autoethnographic film-making with focus groups and semi-structured interviews. The chapter in itself is not autoethnographic. Rather, it is an attempt to reflect on a project employing this approach within an interdisciplinary, mixed methods framework. Taking our cue from related projects (Atakav et al. 2020; Batty et al. 2018), the chapter proceeds via an annotated conversation amongst the research team. As demonstrated below, this conversational form helps to foreground the multiplicity of voices and interests within a collaborative project of this sort, pulling attention to examples of intellectual agreement, disagreement, interruption and uncertainty that emerged as the research evolved.1 Our project—British [Muslim] Values: Conflict or Convergence?—ran between 2016 and 2018 and included a team of three academics at the University of East Anglia working with participant researchers from Muslim communities within the East Anglia region.2 The project sought to respond to the growing prominence of ‘British values’ within political and media discourse (Jarvis et  al. 2019), asking how this may have impacted individuals and communities that remain relatively peripheral in national debate. Specifically, we set out to answer three questions. First, how are discussions of British values, and their relationship to Islam, understood, experienced, negotiated and contested in ‘everyday’ life? Second, how important are geographical or demographic factors such as gender, age, ethnic origin, or sect in these understandings, negotiations and contestations? Third, how would Muslims in the UK recast political and public discussion around the place and role of Islam and Muslims within the UK? 1  As discussed later, the conversation was recorded in July 2019 and the text has been edited for ease of reading. 2  Further information on the research, including an end of project report, can be found on the project website: https://britishmuslimvalues.wordpress.com.

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To answer these questions, the project employed three methods. First— and of greatest relevance to this chapter—was the production of original films by participant researchers recruited from the relevant communities. As detailed further in the conversation, this experimentation with a form of analytic autoethnography (Anderson 2006) involved providing film equipment and training to these researchers, and asking those researchers to story, create and edit a short film of 8–10 minutes in length. As indicated by the information sheet given to the participant researchers (see below), the brief for these films was kept deliberately broad, emphasising the participants’ own experiences, understandings and perceptions of British values and their relationship to Islam: The research aims to investigate: (i) what ‘British values’ means to different Muslim individuals across East England, (ii) how ‘British values’ relate to Islam, and, (iii) how discussion of ‘British values’ affects Muslim individuals and communities. This will be done via a series of short video documentaries, focus groups and interviews. You are being asked to produce a short video documentary based upon your own understanding and experiences around the above questions. If you do decide to take part, you will be given this information sheet to keep and be asked to sign a consent form and to complete a participant questionnaire. If you decide to participate, you are still free to withdraw at any time and without giving a reason. All of the data we collect will be kept securely in accordance with the University of East Anglia research ethics framework. The documentary you produce is yours to design, structure and edit as you feel appropriate given the project’s main questions. The participant researchers were selected for their membership of, and access to, Muslim communities within the East Anglia region. The project’s partners—Norwich-based BBC Voices—provided essential support and training to participants in film-making and editing skills. Upon completion of the films, the project team ran eight semi-­ structured focus groups with Muslim, non-Muslim and mixed attendees. The groups focused upon four deliberately open questions: (1) What does the term ‘British values’ mean to you? (2) How do you feel when you hear people talk about ‘British values’? (3) What does the term Muslim values mean to you? (4) How do you think ‘British values’ relate to Muslim values? Attendees were also asked to reflect on short clips from three of our films. The project’s final stage involved semi-structured interviews with the participant researchers, as well as selected individuals in the region such as representatives of local mosques.

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The conversation that follows explores key challenges and dynamics of our experiment as viewed retrospectively by the three academic researchers and one participant film-maker. It enquires into the value of autoethnographic methods for collaborative projects, exploring how research contexts, dynamics and interests shape, complement or undermine the interests and reflections of participant researchers invited to produce autoethnographic reflection. The topics of our conversation include: • Our initial expectations and hopes for the project • Power relationships in a project involving academics, participant researchers and community members • Challenges of recruitment and retention in a project on such a contentious political issue • Complicating socio-political contexts, including the UK’s counter-­ radicalisation strategy, Prevent,3 which imposes safeguarding duties on higher education researchers. The conversation took place via a Skype video call in the summer of 2019. This use of technology obviously shaped our discussion, as did a co-authored set of discussion points circulated via email beforehand. These structural conditions notwithstanding, the discussion ends up fluid and evolving with frequent examples of us talking past and over each other, repeating or ignoring the comments of others, and returning to our own personal interests and priorities. In this sense, we hope, it both captures and reflects dynamics encountered on projects such as ours. The conversation has been edited for readability and is interspersed with italicised interjections offering clarification or wider reflection.

3  Prevent refers to the UK’s counter-radicalisation strategy, first introduced in 2003 as part of the government’s wider counter-terrorism strategy: CONTEST. Prevent—which is under review at the type of writing—has a pre-emptive function, seeking to intervene before terrorist activity becomes manifest. It has been widely criticised, not least, because of fears it contributes to the stigmatisation of specific minority communities and because of its spread across socio-political domains from education to health and beyond. For a critical overview, see Baker-Beall et al. (2014).

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Autoethnography, Participant Researchers and Collaboration: An Annotated Conversation Aspirations and Ambitions Lee J: When we began thinking about the project, there was, certainly in my view, a hope that working with members of different communities, encouraging reflection on and engagement with experiences of everyday life, has some broadening value; a hope that this would add a richness and breadth of perspective around this theme of British values and their relationship with Islam. And that this would also potentially have value for some sort of critical engagement: that by showcasing the plurality of perspectives and experiences of ‘British values’, you open up new points of entry for critiquing dominant or established constructions of this phrase and the relationship between Islam and British values. So, my hope, I guess, was that distributing cameras to members of communities to document and to produce films would throw up interesting things that are often hidden. Our outputs—the films—would not be solely verbal or linguistic and might therefore also be a little more interesting than outputs produced through more traditional methods. One of the things that became clear, and the last thing I’ll say for now, is that many of the films we received did something a little bit different, which saw the participant researcher working as an interviewer, rather than as an autoethnographer as we had anticipated. Not all of them and lots of participants I think did both at different stages. But that was something that I hadn’t foreseen or expected and perhaps could have done. So, I’ll leave it there for now. Lee M: I think that last point was useful, we just didn’t see, because we left it very open-ended, how people would approach the project. Then there’s a power relationship in that we were handing out the cameras, that we were asking people to do a certain task. So, I guess there’s that power imbalance in terms of expectations about what the researchers were thinking, what we were going to be looking for. But, in giving them a lot of scope, without being too prescriptive, then new power relationships emerged between the person in front of and behind the camera. If they decided to do an interview, certainly, then how that relationship between the participant and interviewees, all of those taking part in the filming, developed is of interest.

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So, that was an interesting development. I think there are issues also in terms of our ethnicity; I think that creates a slight power imbalance. We’re all white middle-class people asking people from different backgrounds to do things. So, that’s a power imbalance. I think our intentions were for our participant researchers to be able to produce something that was bottom up, rather than top down. I think it succeeded through not being prescriptive. But we were dependent on the contacts that we made, and we didn’t make enough contacts, so we experienced real difficulty in reaching out to some of the Muslim communities in the region. Where it worked most effectively, I think, was in Norwich. I think in Bedford and Luton, we were going through intermediaries who were our brokers, essentially, in terms of finding access to people. Then there’s a different kind of dynamic and representation between the Luton videos and the Norwich videos, and of course we couldn’t get into Ipswich at all, which was disappointing. The gatekeepers were the power brokers and revealed only what they chose to reveal through the way they structured their interviews or through more personal reflections and experiences. We also experienced a real challenge in getting participants and in successfully recruiting a gender balance, a regional balance and a mix of Sunni and Shia respondents. Two researchers dropped out of the project which created further challenges—including one who carried out filming in North Africa and his spiritual journey without referencing British Muslim values or indeed returning the camera. We had our own thoughts and ideas but this project was never about us, it was to provide a platform for Muslim citizens to express their perspective on British Muslim values. The project’s original design involved the production of eight discrete films: two for each of four locations—Norwich, Luton, Bedford and Ipswich. Although we finished the research with double this number of films, we were less successful than expected in recruiting and retaining participant researchers beyond Norwich itself, where the research team is based and has the greatest existing network of contacts. A range of recruitment initiatives were attempted including online advertisements, advertisements in specialist publications, leaflet drops, snowballing through community contacts, radio requests, and social media activity (see Jarvis et al. 2019). Eylem: I agree with you. At the heart of our research is agency. We wanted, with this project, to complicate or pluralise dominant conceptions, through engagement with subjugated knowledges around British values. To do that we wanted British Muslim individuals to create their own media, thereby offering different perspectives to the discourses that

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dominate the media and politics. Our primary aim was to offer some kind of agency to Muslim individuals through which we might interrogate more theoretical concepts around identity and cultural belonging and ethnicity. But we were doing that through the production of original media. I remember us starting our conversations and at the stage of writing up our research proposal, and I think this is a good moment of reflection in that regard, because we started off by saying there might be a gender divide, we’ll have two female and two male participants from each town: Norwich, Ipswich, Luton and Bedford. But we had to shift our own aims accordingly when people weren’t there; when we couldn’t reach sufficient participants. As Lee M was saying, reaching out to individuals was difficult. Opening your academic research to wider audiences and not just informing the public, but also getting the public to engage with your research and participate within it, is a challenging task for everyone, I think. As one of our participant researchers, what’s your view on this Qudra? Eylem’s intervention illustrates some of the challenges of collaborative and interdisciplinary research. Eylem—a Professor of Film, Gender and Public Engagement in a School of Art, Media and American Studies—is the first person to have mentioned media explicitly. She positions media as central to the project’s aims, complementing—but differing from—the above interventions which situate the project’s engagement with media as a means (towards better or differently understanding socio-political ends), rather than an end in its own right. As the conversation progresses below, Eylem returns to this focus, referencing her own identity as a film-maker. Eylem’s use of ‘subversion’ is also more explicitly political than the earlier reflections which emphasise the rendering contingent of established conceptions of ‘British values’ (through amplifying peripheral voices) rather than challenging such conceptions. It might also be noticed that Eylem—the first female to speak to this point and an expert on gender and Islam—is also the first person to reference gender. As she notes, the project’s initial construction had attempted to integrate gender into the project design, aspiring for male and female film-­ makers in each of the four locations. Qudra: I think the biggest thing that stands out, from my perspective, is the interrelationship between the academic, the researcher and the participant. I found that dynamic interesting, methodologically and conceptually. As you mentioned already, what you planned and what you hoped for the project, turned out a little different. It wasn’t you doing the autoethnography, it was the participant researchers. Or at least that’s my understanding of it. I think it must have been hard as you had to hand

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over creative agency to us in some respects. And like you said Lee M you left the project brief quite open, so there was a lot of room for manoeuvre within the project’s parameters. As a participant researcher on the project, Qudra’s involvement was different in at least three ways to the academics who have spoken above. First, temporal, whereby she joined the team subsequent to the project’s initial design and development. Second, structural, given her role as a participant researcher tasked with producing original autoethnographic content. And, third, social, as a member of one of the communities with whom we were keen to work. Since working on the project, Qudra has secured funding to pursue a PhD at the University of East Anglia on the everyday experiences of converted Muslim women in East Anglia. Qudra: Autoethnography can come in lots of different forms, either through interviews or storytelling or as in some of the films, which were more a set of images or visual art. But it was the participants themselves who were doing the autoethnography. From the perspective of my own film, due to my positionality as a participant and as a researcher, I engaged critically with the project’s core themes. Whereas some of the other participant researchers did not, I think. However, that in itself throws up interesting questions about the methodology, in that how do you analyse someone else’s autoethnography? What sort of tools can you bring to the analysis of such personal approaches to a controversial subject such as ‘British values’? So, it does seem like there were divides that were hard to traverse at different stages of the project, such as the film’s initial design, its implementation and then its editing, which were all done through the participant researchers. I just wanted to ask a question about recruitment, you’ve talked about how you wanted to subvert dominant discourses and I think that’s clear in the project’s design. But do you think the issues with the Prevent policy4 and the socio-political issues surrounding it prevented dialogue with Muslim communities in particular cities? From my perspective it felt like the elephant in the room, that those might have been the things that held it back, I’m not sure?

4

 Please see note 3.

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Research Contexts Eylem: It’s interesting because I was listening to the interviews that Lee Jarvis had done with our participant researchers, including your own interview Qudra. One theme that recurred in all the interviews was that Muslim individuals were finding it challenging to reach out to other Muslims to be part of this research project. Lee J: I think the socio-political context—including the increased securitisation of Islam and Muslims—is vitally important, and I think there’s a risk that this had a selective function at a couple of levels. On the one hand, it potentially meant we ended up working with individuals who felt sufficiently empowered as to be unaffected by programmes such as Prevent, and the security brought on by such a detachment likely has diverse class-­ based, gender-based and other dynamics to it. Alternatively, it’s also possible that we ended up working with individuals who were essentially supportive of the Prevent agenda and the community cohesion discourse and so forth: individuals who were therefore willing to take part in the project. Certainly, in some of the films from Luton and Bedford in particular, there was a strong performative aspect to them, where people were speaking quite openly about a love of Britain and a love of British values. Lee M: When Lee J and I visited a mosque in Bedford and we were knocking on the door, trying to get in—you can’t get into any of these Islamic centres, because, understandably, they are all locked up and security conscious—within a minute or so of arriving somebody came across the road straightaway. The Mosque there is part of a Faith Watch scheme,5 whereby religious centres across Bedford, people watch out for them. For visitors, or things out of the ordinary, in order to protect such places. So, it did sort of strike home that clearly the community in Bedford feels threatened, but also supported in the environment. The guy who came across the road to us, an estate agent, a Christian from an Asian background was the broker for our research. But it did sort of strike me at that time, and also in other conversations that we’ve had, that the project is about trying to break away from the stereotypical David Cameron type of approach to British values. That people, more or less, had to make a judgement themselves about whether they wanted to get involved in the project, knowing that it’s so controversial within their own communities. 5  The scheme was launched in 2016 by Bedfordshire police and involved voluntary participation from local religious communities along the model of ‘neighbourhood watch schemes’.

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Qudra: I was just reflecting on some of the ethical challenges of the research and I think in some ways the discussions around these different issues, such as the intersections of identity and how that affected the films that were made, make for an interesting aspect to the project, which provides rich contextual data which can then be threaded through the analysis? Lee J: I’d like to add something to that, because—to reflect back on what Lee M was saying—something else occurs to me. I had several long telephone conversations with potential participants in the project who wanted very, very clear commitments in terms of our statutory duty around Prevent and so forth. Those people ended up not participating because of their concerns they might be endangering the community they were representing and/or because of our unwillingness or inability to give them the sort of commitment they were looking for. The project was characterised by multiple false starts in which prospective film-makers lost enthusiasm or ability to participate in the research. Two potential contributors attended our training session in film-making, before disengaging from the project (one with explanation, one without). Many other potential contributors disengaged following initial email or telephone communication. But what I think comes out of some of the things that you’ve all been saying is the tension I experienced between, on the one hand, seeing this project as a way of discovering and empowering marginal voices or subjugated knowledges, and I find that normatively appealing. On the other hand, thinking about these projects as radically inventive or constitutive: approaching these films not as revealing or reflecting or discovering perspectives, but as creating them. There is an important difference here. In the first instance, I think it’s the person that’s making the film, whereas in the second instance it’s the film that is making the person or the subject. Through representing oneself as Muslim, or marginalised, and so on, one—in part—reproduces oneself as Muslim or marginalised. So, I wanted (and I still want) the project to do both of those things, but I don’t know whether they are compatible. In fact, I don’t think they are. I want it to do one of these things for normative reasons, but I want it to do the other because that fits more with my meta-theoretical commitments. That’s one of the tensions in our research, I think. This tension, in part, reflects different epistemological standpoints. The first approach sees research methods such as autoethnography as a potential route to discursive discovery in which hitherto hidden experiences or forms of knowledge might be encountered. Such experiences or perspectives may then

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complicate the apparent necessity or self-evidence of existing discourses, paradigms or practices (Foucault 1997: 7). The latter, in contrast, approaches research such as this as a form of discursive invention, in which experiences and their meanings—as well as the subjects of those experiences—are created or produced through the research process itself (see Jarvis 2009: 19–22). Here, producing a film on British values ‘as a Muslim’ also involves and contributes to the (re)production of oneself ‘as a Muslim’. Similar questions and tensions can be seen in contemporary literature on the role and importance of the ‘everyday’ and ‘vernacular’ within (global) political life (Bubandt 2005; Jarvis and Lister 2013; Stevens and Vaughan-Williams 2016; Jarvis 2019). Eylem: I think it’s important to add different kinds of images to the existing vocabulary of images around what it means to be Muslim in the UK, what ‘British values’ means. But also, it’s important to acknowledge that we specifically chose film as opposed to anything else. I completely agree with you on that one, and that brings us neatly to this question of whether our project was genuinely autoethnographic and how, and in what ways? For this project, we specifically chose film, as opposed to any other media. Perhaps if we had followed a different methodological approach—say recording a series of anonymous interviews on a voice recorder—participants might have been a little bit more revealing. But when it comes to being filmed, filming oneself, filming people you know and doing so in ways that prioritise your own personal experiences, that creates risks and perhaps even dangers. In that regard, some might think it makes you quite vulnerable, because you’re not just audible, you’re visible. Qudra: There seemed to be a divide between the different actors in the project, between the academic researcher, the participant researcher and the others brought in by participant researchers on the films that were made. From my initial involvement, I had in mind the type of outcome I wanted to achieve with my film. So as soon as I started putting the proposal together, I was instigating a kind of critical approach to the problem. I enjoyed that process, it was a cathartic experience being able to ask questions both of myself and of my contemporaries. I think I was lucky in that I had great access, whereby I could ask my friends and the people I had connections with, who were open and passionate about talking about these issues. That said, I did have a few reservations, because it was a film and those involved, including myself, would obviously be visible. Even now, I still

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worry that they might be uploaded to YouTube, which might create some kind of comeback? Because me and my informants might be saying something that other people might not accept? That brings up lots of ethical issues, and I was aware of them when starting out on the project and collecting the data. I guess because you did follow-up interviews with us, the participant researchers, you were able to analyse those elements yourselves. This exchange offers another example of the different emphases brought to the project by members of the research team. Lee J’s focus is primarily academic, effectively asking what is the status of the knowledge produced on this project. Eylem returns to the importance of the medium in which we were working: film. Qudra’s focus, in contrast, is on the integrity of the methodology employed (was it autoethnographic?) raising issues around ethics and researcher safety that emerged in her experience as a participant researcher. Eylem: I think that distinction is important, because the final films themselves may not all have been autoethnographic despite our effort to experiment with this approach. It’s interesting, because it is film, it has more power to travel more quickly than a quotation in a journal article or a book chapter, although, of course, there might be exceptions to this. Because it’s film you’re ‘out there’, visible, and that’s the moment which I find fascinating, from a film-maker perspective. All the research and all those things that you do, and the ethical clearance forms you fill and consent forms that you fill, it becomes just a piece of paper, and the reality is far more sophisticated than suggested by those kinds of paperwork. Lee M: In terms of the autoethnography, I think Qudra’s was probably the clearest example of what is expected. Layla’s films tended to employ an interview format that allowed other people to express their views, but in a fairly sort of controlled way, in a controlled environment. Mo’s film could be taken at lots of different levels, but that was definitely one of the most esoteric films that we had. By the project’s conclusion, four participant researchers had produced a total of 12 short films. Muqaddam Malik’s film juxtaposed commentary from three Muslim individuals who live and work in Norwich, with footage from the region. In his film, British values are depicted as worthy of examination, in part, as a mechanism through which through to understand issues such as racism and multiculturalism. Mo Ameen’s film had no spoken narrative, instead juxtaposing verses from the Qur’an with imagery from Norwich, including footage of the Cathedral and the Castle. Contiguities between these verses and expressions of religious values within the city’s (Christian) architecture are prominent, as is the (often violent) history of Britain’s

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relationship with Islam. A participant researcher from Bedford, Lila Begum, produced several short talking-head films, in which members of local Muslim communities are engaged in discussion on these topics. Qudra Goodall, a second-generation Muslim, whose Irish and British parents converted to Islam, juxtaposed music and images with conversations with friends to discuss the meaning of British and Muslim values to convert Muslim women in Norwich. Lee M: Yes, I think I could dig out a lot in terms of why he did that and what that’s saying about him and his experience of—well not being British but living in Britain. So, I think it’s a mixed bag, you know: Qudra probably could feel more of what we were expecting, but in not setting strict parameters or guidelines for participant researchers then you are never sure exactly what you are likely to end up with. This is what made the project innovative and risky. Then that’s the risk you take, and we can now draw on what we were presented with, in working with expert partners such as BBC Voices. The editing process can have a significant impact on the story told. What makes for a good and entertaining or informative film does not necessarily provide the best research data. There could have been, and I think in some cases there was, a second guessing by the participant researcher about what constitutes an acceptable film for the project, and an acceptable view of British Muslims that would show ‘them’ in the best possible light. There was little attempt to deconstruct the term ‘British Muslim’ in any of the films or to question whether this is a meaningful construct in the first place. We emphasised making a film and the qualities of good film-making to encourage people’s thinking in terms of life story: my personal experience, my community and thinking how can we present this in a way that’s going to look good on screen. The participant researchers were provided with professional training on producing and editing film footage by our project partner BBC Voices. Given the project’s emphasis on a ‘bottom-up’ exploration of Muslim understandings of the British values/Islam relationship, editorial control over the films was given over to the participant researchers. Lee J: That’s an interesting point, I think, because a more provocative question might be: were the films that were made for this project successful or good autoethnographies? And there would be different criteria that we could use to discuss and to evaluate that: aesthetic, political, intellectual and so on. But in terms of the broader question, lots of the films I think had a story-based or a narrative aspect to them, which is something that runs through a lot of autoethnographic work. Most of them, I would

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say, used personal experience explicitly or implicitly as a way into discussing wider social, political, cultural dynamics and events. So, I think that, in a way, we could make an argument along those lines. Autoethnographic work is almost always collaborative, in that people often use it as a method to reflect on and engage in discussion with other people. So, it’s rarely atomistic: one person’s thinking about only themselves. I think the visual aspect of it that Qudra brought up earlier, and Eylem brought up, is interesting too, because film definitely does create other things, it enables a reflection on the non-linguistic aspects of these things, and it gives a richer tapestry of perspective maybe. There is, of course, a growing academic literature on the appropriate ways to evaluate autoethnographic, narrative and related work (compare, for instance, Wall 2008; Naunes 2015; Callahan 2015).

Collaboration with Partners/Public Engagement Eylem: One thing that I picked up on what Lee [Marsden] said is about working with BBC Voices, I think it would be good for us to reflect on for colleagues who may be thinking about engaging with different organisations to do their research projects. What kind of challenges were there for us that we envisaged, and we didn’t envisage? Obviously, the project offers an opportunity to critique dominant representations [of ‘British values’], but at the same time we worked with one of the institutions [the BBC] that contributes to those dominant representations. And, you know, even though the training we offered wasn’t necessarily about the content of the films, our partners were involved with the editing, which is perhaps the heart of film-making. Qudra, did you want to add anything to that about your own working relationship with BBC Voices? Qudra: I think again that brings up such interesting questions. As I’d never done any kind of film-making or editing before, there was an element of having to hold up my hands and trust the BBC’s point of view. At one point during the editing process I had two people editing films alongside myself, to save time and resources. Although they checked in with me, they were choosing the best parts of the dialogue, the parts which had the most impact. So it was interesting to see what analysis they too were doing—which brought in potential biases—or the aspects they thought would be more provocative. In that way they too became a key part of the research process—I think I probably would have needed about six months

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to work out how to use the editing programme as well as the creative process otherwise. For me, it was a collaborative relationship with the BBC, which was amazing, I felt I got so much out of it. However, this obviously added extra ‘outside’ elements to the process. Eylem: In terms of the method we chose to use, would you have been happier if we had said ‘just go and film your life with your mobile phone, and we don’t even need it to be edited’? It would be interesting for others to find out whether there can be other methods that they could use than this? Qudra: I suppose, had I done it with my mobile phone it would have been a different kind of video, similar to sticking a Go Pro on my head and just walking around documenting my interactions. Whereas the way I approached it was much more like a research project because I wanted to go out and interview people and bring in their voices as well as my own. I was reluctant to put myself out there, or rather on screen, but quickly realised that that wasn’t going to be possible. In that I realised that in order to do the best job I could it had to go through me. However, I guess if you’d just said, ‘Use your mobile phone, let us know what it is to live your life?’, I think it would have been interesting to see what came out of that. Lee J: Well I guess it brings us back to that power relationship question, doesn’t it? I mean we were negotiating with participant researchers because of their access to communities; and negotiating with BBC Voices because of their skills and knowledge about film-making and journalism. So, in terms of power, there are imbalances of expertise and authority and knowledge, and we—as the academic researchers—were deferential, I think, at times to BBC Voices and also to participant researchers. Which is not to say I think that was inappropriate. But there’s also another aspect that, I’m going off topic here, but one of the things that kept coming back to me through the research was a sense of indebtedness. A sense that we were relying on favour a lot of the time, and we were asking a lot of people who we didn’t know how to produce things for us, while we were not giving much back in return. And that, I think, creates a dynamic or power relationship of sorts as well. The other thing that came back to me when someone was speaking just now is, we’ve not spoken about the fact that this was a funded project, and so the other big elephant in the room is the funding body: the AHRC.

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I suspect we wouldn’t have got funding for this project if we hadn’t proposed working with such an unpredictable set of methods, because that was explicit in the call for funding. The project was funded under the Conflict Theme of the cross-research council Partnership for Conflict, Crime and Security Research. The specific call to which we applied encouraged ‘the development of innovative, adventurous, higher risk, interdisciplinary research’.6 Lee J: This particular project wouldn’t have happened without that effort at methodological and interdisciplinary experimentation, I think. From my perspective, I have no academic expertise in faith or religion, so I wouldn’t have been able to do anything in this area alone. Similarly, I have no experience of working with film or through film, and very limited experience of writing about film and images. I wouldn’t have had access to the communities with whom we were working, or the skills to train people to produce their own film content. So, from my point of view, this sort of project had to be collaborative. And I don’t think that’s unusual: it would be a rare individual that had that range of skills and knowledge and expertise, so I think collaborative knowledge, or collaborative work, is essential for certain kinds of research project and research questions. For me this would be one of them, I think. Lee M: I think it’s been a real benefit to the whole project, the idea of collaboration, not just between researchers and across disciplines, but also collaboration with participant researchers. People from diverse backgrounds, with different research specialisms and disciplines. The mix of academic and non-academic participants added something we would have been unable to achieve going off and trying to attempt to interview and reach out to communities on our own as individuals. There was also a pay-­ off in terms of adding value to our researchers through providing some practical film-making experience, with BBC training, that they could add to their CV. Qudra: I just wanted to add that I think the collaborative aspect was successful and ran throughout all stages of the project, from working with yourselves as the project leaders, and working across disciplines, as well as with outside organisations like the BBC, and indeed the other participant researchers.

6   The original call can be accessed via: https://www.paccsresearch.org.uk/news/ proposals-sought-two-new-funding-calls-conflict-theme/.

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Eylem: Public engagement was also central to the project. I remember having these preliminary discussions with Lee J and Lee M, around how public engagement encourages academics, and academic research projects to be much more productive. The idea of, truly engaging with people has a lot of value—both academically but also beyond. The wider context here, within the UK, includes the growth of an ‘impact agenda’ within higher education. Researchers are increasingly incentivised to demonstrate and document the effects of their work on non-academic audiences (policymakers, communities, industry, etc.). Lee J: Well Qudra, from your perspective, what were the frustrations or challenges with that sort of collaborative aspect, and with working with us? Qudra: If there were any particular challenges, then perhaps not knowing where the research might be heading was one. Apart from that, I don’t particularly remember any when it came to collecting the data and the process of filming. I felt I could contact you any time, and you were all supportive. On a practical level, working with the BBC was challenging due to the time needed to edit the film and the fact that I needed input to help bring the footage together. But again, I felt supported, which was encouraging and a great learning opportunity. Aside from that, showing the films to an audience and negotiating the debates that ensued was an interesting aspect that I wasn’t ready for. I did wonder whether there might be some kind of comeback from the audience. Suddenly we were outside of our participant researcher bubble, we’d taken the project to the next level and out to the general public. I don’t think I was prepared for that. It felt as if we were at the frontline of the project, and perhaps we, or I in particular, didn’t feel equipped to deal with some people’s strong opinions. Perhaps some preparation for that might have been useful? But it was hard to predict what might come out at the screening. I’ve been asked since whether I expected people to cause some argument? And sadly yes, that was a concern, it doesn’t take much for stereotypical ideas to surface in my experience. From both Muslims and non-Muslims, the issues can be reactive. In October 2017, we ran the first public screening of the project’s films at The Forum in Norwich. Around 70 people attended the event, and subsequent discussion, which demonstrated some of the different ways in which people in the region engage with the term ‘British Values’.7 Three of the  The video-log and reflection by Lee Marsden on the public screening of the films made as part of the project can be accessed on: https://britishmuslimvalues.wordpress. com/2017/11/. 7

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p­ roject’s four film-makers also attended to respond to questions from the audience at the end of the screening. Lee M: And Qudra in terms of the local community, did the leadership of your mosque talk to you about the project at all, did they want to find out what was going on? Were they supportive or just indifferent? I mean I’m thinking of, say, a church, I’m sure the leadership would have something to say if members of the congregation were going off and talking to others in the congregation about politics or Christian values, if you like, or British values. I just wondered what was going on there, if anything? Qudra: I didn’t go through the Mosque, I approached people I already knew and gave them time to decide whether or not they wanted to be involved. While the majority were keen to be involved there were a few people who did not. It felt like people at the Mosque just accepted what I was doing, so there was never any issue with seeking permission. Eylem: I was just going to bring us to a conclusion by asking if there’s anything we didn’t cover that you would like to cover. But I think one big question remains and that might be useful for future researchers, would we do anything different next time? Or could we have done anything different this time in terms of method? Lee M: I think the biggest drawback of the project was not having a practising Muslim as part of the research, I think that would have opened up far more interesting opportunities and discussions. If you are going to do this kind of work, then I think it is important for somebody who is able to get into the communities in which you’re interested. Some of the problems we had in Ipswich were where we simply were not able to get into mosques and Islamic centres. We had useful conversations with shop owners and had to rely on our invitations being passed on to leaders in the community. Although this is speculative, I think that suspicion around the Prevent agenda and so on cultivates suspicion of researchers such as us. Also giving more time to the project, which would have involved a greater amount of time being bought out from other activities. All three of the researchers were busy doing lots of other things, I think that didn’t help. And probably also greater use of the films, which is something we still can do: to have more public showings of these. I guess the success of the project … in one sense it’s already successful and it’s finished. But I think if we’re wanting to change perceptions of British Muslim values then obviously the dissemination of our findings is important. We’ve not influenced policymakers at this stage: we sent out the end of project report and only one MP to date has got back to us on

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it. So yes, we can still influence perceptions and we should be looking to do that. That dissemination, I think, can be continued and increased through public showings of the film and using them as the basis to engage more broadly with Muslim communities outside the east of England. Lee J: I think everything that made the project challenging is what made it interesting. So, this use of cutting-edge methods, collaboration, and collaborating with participant researchers, all of that is what made the project an exciting one. But each of those aspects also made it a difficult project to complete and to pursue successfully. So, I don’t know if there’s a trade-off there, but perhaps the less challenging we had made it, the more pedestrian it would have become. The other thing, I guess, is that the project was interesting because it was so timely, and it was timely I think not only because of Prevent and counter-radicalisation policy, but a whole range of discussions that were going on in Britain around integration, multiculturalism and cohesion. And, of course, quickly after beginning the project, Brexit happened, and that throws another range of dynamics into it. I’m not doing much by way of answering your question here, but one thing that strikes me now is that our findings will likely be read through a Brexit lens. Qudra: I think I have commented on most of the successes and challenges of the project. Ideally, I would love to see a documentary made of the process to help tie all the pieces together. I appreciate now probably better, the process of research projects and their potential for data collection, writing articles, etc. But I would love to see a culmination of the project in a documentary for sure, perhaps involving those who watched it too, but essentially as a way to bring all the different threads together. It still feels timely and current, in reflection of what is happening in the world today regarding everyday forms of racism and misogyny, which are becoming a terrifyingly reality. Eylem: I think it links up what everyone has been saying: we’ve decidedly chosen non-traditional methods of research to focus on this particular project, this particular topic. But what we could have done, and what we can still do, is to use equally non-traditional ways of disseminating research, rather than just publications. I also think we could screen the project films more publicly. I know we’ve been talking about this. Every time I go to a conference to talk about the project or talk to other academics or non-­ academic people about the project, they all want to see the films. If our aim has been to create more diverse images to add to the visual vocabulary on the topic, then we should make them more available. But once the

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research is over, what do we do with that? Does it stop? I don’t think so. And I think there is potential, particularly with film, to make that academic contribution through film, more timeless. It goes beyond time, it doesn’t stop, you can go back to it. And also another power of film, a powerful side of film, is that it travels, so you know, you can’t get people to sit down and read your journal article or book chapter and so on. But with a film you can host events and screenings because people can digest visuals a little differently, if not more easily, than any academic work.

Conclusion In the preceding pages we have sought, as researchers, to describe our experiences in working on a discrete project that took us beyond our prior comfort zones, through exploring new methodologies in which the outcomes and success of our research were firmly in the hands of our participant researchers. Through an annotated conversation, we have sought to reveal the complexities and challenges of working on a mixed method project which centred on autoethnographic film-making: a warts-and-all retrospective of what worked, what didn’t, and what we would do differently. In attempting to foreground the multiplicity of voices in this research, our own voices, and those of our film-makers, often appear discordant as we articulate our own agendas and research backgrounds, previous experiences, and assumptions about what we hoped the research would reveal. The films represent individual approaches and decisions and result in unique portraits of the lived experience of the self-identifying British Muslims who were involved in making the films. The research team with two male non-Muslim political scientists and a female, non-practising Muslim, researcher with an expertise in film and television studies provided an interesting dynamic. The interdisciplinary combination helped the political scientists to engage in a project combining familiar qualitative methodologies such as focus groups and interviews with autoethnographic film-making with which they were unfamiliar. Reflecting on the book’s overall theme about what political science can learn from the humanities, our experimentation with film as a medium to articulate lived experience for minority communities added to the richness of the data produced, enabled individuals’ stories to be told and presented a snapshot of the experience of being a British Muslim in the East of England. It provided a bottom-up approach to these dynamics, combining film production, storytelling and, in some cases, artistic representation of experience and sensibilities.

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Five ‘lessons’ that recur across the above discussion may be of value to researchers considering similar work. First, when working with participant researchers, limiting prescriptiveness in project design and instruction also risks decreasing proximity between the research undertaken and the project’s underpinning aims and ambitions. The trade-off, though, is that this creates opportunities for increasing the authorial agency and creativity of non-academic participants in a project, potentially taking collaborative work in unforeseen and interesting directions. Second, external research partners bring invaluable expertise and experience to collaborative research, although this expertise and experience (along with resources, interests and expectations) inevitably introduces new power dynamics to a project. Third, when researching contentious political dynamics, prior contact with relevant communities and stakeholders dramatically improves the feasibility of a project. At the same time, the mitigating role of resilience, flexibility, and—especially—an openness to serendipity should not be underestimated. Fourth, greater expectations and demands upon participant researchers increase the likelihood of attrition and delays in research production. As does experimentation with innovative or unfamiliar research methods such as—in our case—digital storytelling. And finally, transparency in relation to research ambitions and contexts is vital in establishing trust between researchers and participants, especially where wider socio-political environments risk generating suspicion or mistrust. In the context of our research, the humanities open opportunities for creative thinking, encouraging the creative telling of personal stories through the medium of film. Some of our film-makers and the subjects of their films touched on their own lived experiences growing up Muslim within the UK. Others described differences between life in their countries of origin and the UK. This generates opportunities, at least, for empathy, increased understanding and analytical richness about what (in our case) it means to be Muslim and what it means to be British today.

References Anderson, L. (2006). Analytic Autoethnography. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35(4), 373–395. Atakav, E., Daniels, J., & Velody, R. (2020). Against the Grain: Women Film Practitioners and Theorists Talk Creative Practice and Theory. In A. Piotrowska (Ed.), Creative Practice Research in the Time of Neo-Liberal Hopelessness. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Baker-Beall, C., Heath-Kelly, C., & Jarvis, L. (Eds.). (2014). Counter-­ Radicalisation: Critical Perspectives. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Batty, C., Berkeley, L., & Glisovic, S. (2018). A Morning Coffee in Melbourne: Discussing the Contentious Spaces of Media Practice Research. Media Practice and Education, 19(1), 8–17. Brigg, M., & Bleiker, R. (2010). Autoethnographic International Relations: Exploring the Self as a Source of Knowledge. Review of International Studies, 36(3), 779–798. Bubandt, N. (2005). Vernacular Security: The Politics of Feeling Safe in Global, National and Local Worlds. Security Dialogue, 36(3), 275–296. Callahan, W. (2015). The Visual Turn: Documentary Filmmaking as a Critical Method. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 43(3), 891–910. Ellis, C., Adams, T., & Bochner, P. (2011). Autoethnography: An Overview. Qualitative Social Research, 12(1), 1–12. Foucault, M. (1997). Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College De France, 1975–76. London: Allen Lane. Jarvis, L. (2009). Times of Terror: Discourse, Temporality and the War on Terror. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Jarvis, L. (2019). Toward a Vernacular Security Studies: Origins, Interlocutors, Contributions, and Challenges. International Studies Review, 21(1), 107–126. Jarvis, L., & Lister, M. (2013). Vernacular Securities and Their Study: A Qualitative Analysis and Research Agenda. International Relations, 27(2), 158–179. Jarvis, L., Marsden, L., & Atakav, E. (2019). Public Conceptions and Constructions of ‘British Values’: A Qualitative Analysis. British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 17, 1171–1188. Naunes, S. (2015). Is All ‘I’ IR? Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 43(3), 820–832. Solomon, T., & Steele, B. (2017). Micro-Moves in International Relations Theory. European Journal of International Relations, 23(2), 267–291. Stevens, D., & Vaughan-Williams, N. (2016). Everyday Security Threats: Perceptions, Experiences, and Consequences. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Wall, S. (2008). Easier Said than Done: Writing an Autoethnography. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 7(1), 38–53.

PART II

The Visual Arts and Politics

CHAPTER 7

Photography in British Political History Sir Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell

Introduction History as a discipline sits awkwardly between the social sciences and humanities. Some have considered it a ‘science of the mind’, Collingwood putting forth the case that though the two may differ, this is a result of viewing history as a completed record and science as a process: ‘When both are regarded as actual inquiries, the difference of method and of logic wholly disappears’ (Collingwood et al. 1922). More recent works on the philosophy of history and science contest this. By Popper’s (1962) generally accepted definition of the sciences as fields in which one can identify falsifiable laws and use them to predict future outcomes, history seems closer to the humanities. Questions of historical record can be of a social-scientific nature but are meaningless without the careful use of subjective historical judgements by the historian, unavoidably influenced by the context in which they view the

Sir A. Seldon (*) University of Buckingham (2015–2020), Buckingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] R. Newell King’s College London, London, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. A. W. Rhodes, S. Hodgett (eds.), What Political Science Can Learn from the Humanities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51697-0_7

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historical record. History may be able to predict what type of coin is found in which settlement, but this is not a falsifiable or generalisable law from which we can construct a model. There have been arguments for a modern concept of objectivity in history (Bevir 1994), but the manner in which historians conduct research through source selection and narrative construction is more akin to art than to science. Though history can only be weakly classed as a social science, it nevertheless has much to learn from photography. We explore where both photographs and the methods of photography can be better applied in the study of British political history. Through use of a historiographical framework, which distinguished events from their subsequent study, we find and suggest opportunities for interdisciplinary dialogue between the fields to expand both historical research and the philosophy of history, with reference to British Politics.

Four Levels of History To understand the importance of photographs to history, we need to distinguish four distinct levels of history. Actuality itself—what really happened—can be termed history one (H1).1 We can never revisit or re-experience it: it has gone forever. All we can ever know about it is any evidence that it leaves behind, which includes the memories of those who were present (oral history). This evidence in all its forms—written, oral, and physical—we can call history two (H2). Only the barest fraction of what happened (H1) leaves behind any evidence. Photographs are nothing more or less than H2. Photographs are not comprehensive records of what happened: they are merely partial evidence about it, in a vivid and non-verbal form, which appeals not just to the intellect, but also to the emotions and the imagination. Historians write books, articles and make broadcasts based on H2. We may term what they create history three (H3). It is neither the actuality itself, nor the evidence about the actuality, but a subjective interpretation based upon extant evidence. The study of history (H4) is an altogether different level again. It draws on the work of historians to shape, at different levels of complexity, and with differing focuses, a coherent account or analysis of what has happened in the past. It is this level of history that autocratic regimes try to control, so that their citizens absorb the ‘correct’ 1

 These levels are discussed in Seldon 1988.

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version of history. We might say that we learn history (H4) from history books and programmes (H3) which draw on historical evidence (H2) left behind by history (H1). Photographs play a part at all four levels of history. They can be active agents in H1, where, for example, emotive photographs of the past, perhaps showing the oppression of minorities, stir up people to act prompted by their emotional response to those photographs. Photographs are a valuable source of evidence about the past (H2), albeit often undervalued by historians, as shall see. They are deployed by historians in their writing and broadcasting (H3). Finally, they are used prolifically in the study of history (H4). We now turn to each of these four levels of history to explore how photographs have been used.

Questions Historians Ask About Photographs A photograph is not an end product for a historian, but a starting point, a piece of H2 that requires rigorous questions to be asked of it. First are the primary order questions. When was the photograph created? Can a precise date be given? Was it turned immediately into a positive, or did it remain in negative for some time, and if so why? Who created the photograph, what was their rank and status at the time: where they a professional photographer? Male or female? What was their ethnicity and racial background? Who is represented in the photograph: is it precisely known? Where was the photograph taken, from what angle, in what location, and using what equipment? Finally, what kind of photograph is it: black-and-white, a Polaroid, colour, or digital? Is it part of a film, which is made up of a series of still photographs, or a one-off? We need also to enquire who are those who are making judgements on the photographs, and how might their own biases affect the way the photograph is been portrayed. Next, we move onto the secondary order questions. The most searching of these is, why was the photograph created? Every piece of evidence has been created for a reason. Was the photograph made at the request of the person being photographed, and did they determine the type of image that was made? Or were the photographers themselves the key decision-­ taker? Many photographs are created to deceive, or at least to give a particular impression. What exactly was it? Second, how was the photograph created? This needs to be probed deeply by the historian for the value of the photograph to be ascertained. Was the photograph staged, and has it

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been manipulated? Deceitful photography existed 100 years and more before photo-shopping came in. Finally, what effect did the photograph have? This is particularly important when we assess the capability for some photographs to create new levels of actuality, in a circular process. Photographs are not just the passive by-products of history (H1): they can also be the creators of it.

Historians Distrust of Photographs Traditional western academic historians, following in the traditions of the nineteenth-century Germanic tradition, with Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) the principal influence, revere written documents as the most important source in the writing of history. There has in general been a wariness amongst traditional academic historians of other sources. When writing By Word of Mouth with Joanna Pappworth (Seldon and Pappworth 1983) on the use historians make of oral history, we encountered similar resistance. In the 35 years since writing that book, the history profession has become more open-minded. There is less suspicion of non-­ written sources, but it has far from evaporated. The hostility was wrong on many levels. It discriminated against those in society who did not leave copious written records behind them. It thus disadvantaged working class, ethnic minorities, and women, a reflection in part of the grip over the historical establishment by white Western men, with their preoccupations being the actions of elites, and high politics. Maurice Cowling (1926–2005) of Cambridge University was a high priest postwar of this approach, but more surprisingly, A. J. P. Taylor dismissed oral history as ‘old men [sic] drooling in their beards’. We are left with the suspicion that certain types of traditional historian, who wrote political, diplomatic, military, and royal history, didn’t like to use sources they couldn’t study in archives, and hence they dismissed social and even cultural history, which drew on a wider range of sources, as ‘not proper history’. Their approach accorded documents too much reverence, with the assumption that the written evidence was sacrosanct. However, as we have seen, every piece of evidence was created for a reason, including the most sacred of government or royal documents, and without probing their provenance, one is likely to make errors. Photographs have been a traditional cause of mistrust, in part because the viewer is required to bring their own interpretation to the evidence, hence the loss of control from the traditional historian. We interpret

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photographs in different ways. But, we also interpret letters, diaries, and official reports of meetings in our own subjective ways. To repeat, photographs are just another form of evidence, offering their own particular insights, but with their own health warnings attached.

Intentionality and Photographs The question of intentionality is key for the historian. Did the sitter bring the picture into being, did they pay for it, and did they decide how it was to take place, even including the stance, clothing, and ornaments that they are wearing? The painting of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603) shows a monarch clear about the impression she wanted to create in those who viewed the portrait. It was a weapon of her royal power in the centuries before photography, and when few subjects were able to see the Queen in person, given the physical difficulties of travel. Her intentional impact was to spread awe, which is why she deliberately chose to adorn herself in all the symbols and riches of the monarchy. Nothing is revealed from the face about the character of the sitter: the eye is drawn to the richness of the fabrics and jewels, and only then to one of her naval vessels at the top left, with the naval threat from the Spanish much in her mind (Photograph 7.1). Oliver Cromwell (Lord Protector, 1653–1658) might have told Peter Lely, the Dutch artist, that he wanted to be painted ‘warts and all’. The warts certainly made it on the canvas when Lely paired him. But few sitters are so cavalier about their blemishes. The painting of Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister (1721–1742), is similarly intentional. Again, the sitter has commissioned the image, which is designed to create a very particular impression of his power and authority. Walpole was a master of publicity and self-image promotion, as well as a great manipulator of the press. He was fully aware of the power of portraiture to convey an impression. His face is as inscrutable as Elizabeth’s, his pose almost identical (Photograph 7.2). The first prime minister to be photographed was the Liberal, Lord John Russell (1846–1852), Britain’s 25th prime minister (out of 55 to date). One might justifiably assume that, with the advent of photography, in popular use from the 1840s, we might at last have more objective and revealing images of prime ministers. But 29th Prime Minister (PM) Benjamin Disraeli (1868, 1874–1880), another self-publicist, was quick to realise the potential for photography to enhance his personal power

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Photograph 7.1  Queen Elizabeth I, by an unknown English artist, Oil on panel, circa 1588

against colleagues, and in the country at large, which became even more important with the extension of the franchise in 1867. Few prime ministers were more adept at manipulating photography for their own benefits than 41st PM, Winston Churchill (1940–1945, 1951–1955). Perhaps the most famous image of him was taken in Canada by the photographer Yousuf Karsh in 1941, which has become one of the best-known political photographs of all time. Again, as with Elizabeth and Walpole, the subject is looking directly at us. Karsh claimed that the look of defiance on Churchill’s face was only because he lost patience with his smoking and he strode up to him and took the cigar straight out of his mouth, to his dismay and fury. The gnarled expression became emblematic of Churchill’s spirit of defiance against Hitler and the might of Germany against Britain, still fighting alone. Simon Schama (2015) describes how ‘the portrait of British indomitability’ was a portrait of a

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Photograph 7.2  Walpole is shown seated in the robes of the first lord of the Treasury, with his garter ribbon, badge, and star proudly displayed

peeved leader. But equally, it is possible that Churchill, ever self-knowing, knew exactly what image he was letting Karsh capture (Photograph 7.3). Similarly, Britain’s 55th PM, Boris Johnson (2019–), knew exactly what he was doing when photographed trapped motionless on a tripwire in 2012 when he was London mayor. A talent for self-publicity, and turning adversity to advantage, has almost always been an essential prerequisite for a successful prime minister.

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Photograph 7.3  Winston Churchill (1941). Source: Photograph by Yousuf Karsh, Camera Press London

Far more revealing for the historian are those photographs where there was intentionality from the photographer, but unintentionally from the subject. Such unguarded photographs reveal deep psychological insights into the mind of those on the other side of the lens. Margaret Thatcher, the 49th prime minister (1979–1990) was deeply aggrieved at having to relinquish her position after 11½ years. She believed that her cabinet, including her successor John Major, had plotted to oust her (Moore 2019). She never forgave them, and the last 20 years of her

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Photograph 7.4  Margaret Thatcher leaving Number 10 in tears in 1990

life was full of bitterness against them and the EU cause they espoused. Her anguish was captured in Photograph 7.4 of her in her official car for the last time, with tears streaming down her eyes, and husband Denis by her side. This is not the portrait of a figure leaving with dignity and gratitude, which is what she would have wanted. A similarly powerful and insightful image is of Labour leader Ed Miliband in the run-up to the 2014 local elections, for all the finely tuned manipulation of the media, his minders could not prevent Photograph 7.5 being taken of him eating a bacon sandwich with intense awkwardness. It portrayed not an all-powerful Labour leader, but a hapless and error-­ prone one. Far more remarkable though is how often key figures in political history have escaped being photographed in awkward, compromising, or embarrassing situations. Churchill suffered a major stroke as prime minister in May 1953. His No 10 team, above all Private Secretary Jock Colville and

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Photograph 7.5  Labour leader Ed Miliband’s battle with a bacon sandwich at a London cafe, May 2014

Parliamentary Private Secretary Christopher Soames, connived with the press Lords Beaverbrook, Bracken, and Camrose to keep all news of the stroke, quite incredibly, out of their papers and away from the public eye all summer till he recovered. By the time he appeared at the Tory’s annual conference at Margate in September—after five months without a photo, no clear signs of the stroke were visible. Had a photograph been taken of him with his face and jaw sagging, or in a hospital bed, it would undoubtedly have accelerated the end of his premiership a year and a half earlier than it concluded in April 1955 (Seldon 1981).

Photographs and Actuality (H1) Photographs at their most immediate are part of the actuality of history. They shape future events because of the power that the images carry. Powerful figures throughout history have always known the potency of

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pain. That is why public hangings and executions, and heads placed on spikes, have always been part of the dictionary of fear of autocratic regimes. The arrival of the photograph allowed the images of terror to be more widely promulgated, as a deterrent against those contemplating disobedience. Photographs have changed history. They have goaded people into acting rather than passively accepting their fate. Aerial photography, a technique developed in the First World War, was used by combatants on all sides to inform artillery and infantry about where to attack. Photographs of Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962 propelled Kennedy to take actions that could have precipitated World War 3. At the heart of the seat of power in Britain, Number 10, stands the principal staircase. Henry Campbell Bannerman (35th prime minister, 1906–1908) decided that images of all his predecessors as prime minister, itself a decision prompted by vanity on his part, should line the wall of the staircase. Every significant visitor to Downing Street (mere mortals use the back stairs), when going to the state drawing rooms and state dining rooms on the first floor, pass these images. They are designed to give a specific impression. A short time after they retire, the departed prime minister poses for his or her photograph. The images tell us most about the way that each of the prime ministers wanted to be seen. The incumbent PM walks up and down the staircase several times each day. Subconsciously or more deliberately, they will be shaped by what they see when contemplating their own legacy. Observing the images is a profoundly visceral experience. All PMs think intensely about their legacy. They are aware from day one in power that they will write their memoirs, which they can control, and have official and unauthorised biographies written about them, over which they have less. They all think to themselves subconsciously as they glance at the gallery of their predecessors ‘I’d like to do better than X and to outlast Y’.

Photographs as Evidence (H2) Photographs are a powerful form of evidence that has enhanced the understanding of history immeasurably since at least the 1830s. The saying ‘a picture is worth 1000 words’ emerged in the early twentieth century, meaning that the physical image can convey in non-verbal form profound meaning far more simply than and directly that many words can often do. Photographs need to be seen in this context.

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This section looks at just some of the ways in which photographs have enhanced the understanding of history. Understanding War Those who are dismissive of photographs as evidence should reflect on the benefit of having today photographs of the Greco-Persian (499–449 BC), Persian Wars, the wars of Charlemagne (772–811), or the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). The Mexican-American war of 1847 and the Anglo-­ Sikh war of 1848–1849 are regarded as the first wars to have been photographed. The technology, known as daguerreotypes, using silver-coated copper plate, required the object being observed to be sedentary, and took a long time to process, so action photographs of fighting could not be taken. The first British war to be photographed was the Crimean in 1854–1856, where Roger Fenton was the official war photographer, who arrived at Balaclava in 1854. The first photograph of corpses in conflict was believed to be in the Indian rebellion of 1857. The American Civil War (1861–1865) was widely photographed, and transformed contemporaries, as well as historians, understanding of warfare (Photograph 7.6).

Photograph 7.6  Bodies lie in front of the Dunker Church on the Antietam Battlefield, 1863

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Lack of zoom photography in the First World War meant that close-up images of soldiers fighting were non-existent, a position rectified dramatically by the photography in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and the Second World War (1939–1945). The photography of the Vietnam War (1955–1975), notably by Don McCullin and Tim Page, made a powerful impact on heightening anti-war sentiment, none more so than Nick Ut’s iconic June 1972 photograph ‘napalm girl’. Intensity of Human Experience Contemporary accounts of human experience, the explosion of Vesuvius that covered Pompeii in 79 AD or Caesar’s slaughtering of tens of thousands of Gauls in the Gallic Wars (58–52 BC), take us so far. Photographs allow us though to see the full extent of human terror in the most vivid of ways. Brookes drawings in 1788 of slaves cruelly tied together in the slave ship Brookes in 1788 made a huge contemporary impact but had a fraction of the power that photographs would have done. Indeed, photographs might have ended the depraved practice decades earlier than 1833, when the Abolition Act abolished slavery throughout the British Empire. Had photographs of the Nazi extermination camps filtered out earlier, pressure for international action against them might have mounted. When the photographs did appear—the camps were liberated from January 1945—the world was shocked. Probing Mindsets Photographs allow historians to understand the prevailing mindsets that might have been so taken for granted that no one at the time thought it important to be explicit about them. Attitudes towards those deemed to be inferior classes or races, or towards women, can all be seen readily in photographs. Margaret Bondfield was the first female cabinet minister in Britain appointed by 39th Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald as Minister of labour from 1929–1931. Despite having been chair of the Trade Union Congress beforehand, the photograph below seems to suggest an air of condescension from MacDonald towards her as a woman, as well as an almost apologetic grimace from her. Or is this an over-­ interpretation? Caution: photographs, like documents, can tell us what we want or are conditioned to believe (Photograph 7.7).

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Photograph 7.7  Photograph of Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald with Margaret Bondfield, the first female member of the Cabinet and Minister for Labour in the government of 1929–1931

Challenging Preconceptions Photographs can be effective at challenging preconceived notions and showing reality in graphic form. If a photograph has not been tampered with, it can convey a completely honest and accurate picture of where the

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photographer pointed his lens on a specific day, at a particular time. William Hogarth’s graphic depictions of London, as in Gin Lane (1751), give an indelible impression of what London was like. In a similar way, late Victorian and Edwardian photographs of working-class London give extraordinary insight into the reality of life for the vast majority of inhabitants. Sometimes the faces are smiling self-consciously because the individuals know they are being observed. Often photographs show faces that are smiling when caught unawares, despite the dirt and very obvious poverty. The Communist Party of Great Britain was founded in 1920 and saw its numbers rise steeply after the General Strike of 1926. A common assumption was it was a mass working-class movement. Below is a photograph of a pivotal meeting week before the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. What is most striking is the middle-class appearance of many of the attendees (Photograph 7.8).

Photograph 7.8  A meeting of the British Communist Party, Earls Court, London, 5 August 1939

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Adding Perspective on Major National Moments Photographs can illuminate significant moments in  local, regional, and national history, complementing and adding to written reports. The execution of King Charles I in Whitehall on 30 January 1649 was one of the biggest episodes in royal and political history. Photographs of what happened would have had a profound impact on contemporaries. So too would the guillotining on 21 January 1793 of King Louis XV1 of France. But all major events since the 1840s, at least in Britain, have been captured on film, even if the pictures in the earliest years are not of the highest quality. Photograph 7.9 is of the Labour minister Aneurin Bevan delivering an impassioned speech in Trafalgar Square to protestors against the invasion on 4 November 1956 during the height of the Suez crisis. The photograph gives real insight into the strong feelings that were running at the time against 43rd Prime Minister Anthony Eden (1955–1957) for his invasion of Egypt.

Photograph 7.9  Aneurin Bevan speech, Trafalgar Square, 1956

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Understanding Charisma Historians can write many words about the impact of the most charismatic leaders, but a photograph can uniquely give an insight into how the charisma affects those around the leader. The influence of Jeremy Corbyn was at its height at the Glastonbury festival shortly after his general election defeat in June 2017 with his four-minute speech provoking the response from the spectators ‘O Jeremy Corbyn’. Photographs of attendees at the festival capture the extraordinary impact he had that summer. Few photographs though capture the impact of charisma better than Photograph 7.10 of Adolf Hitler in 1935. We do not know if the picture was posed, but there is much to learn from the vivid faces even if there was intentionality about it.

Photograph 7.10  Hitler addressing a group of admiring followers after breakfast in a cellar

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The Use of Photography by Historians (H3) When conducting research, historians will customarily look at whatever relevant photographs they can find, to stimulate their imaginations, to build up their own understanding of the context, and to see whether any fresh information is to be gleaned from the images. They can see the clothes that the people they are writing about wore, the way they carry themselves, expressions on their faces, and any evident interactions. There is little science about this process. Even the most scrupulously professional historians, at least until the last 25 years, had an amateur or cavalier approach to photographs in their research. Historians adopt different approaches when it comes to using photographs in the books they publish. Normally in academic and highbrow histories, photographs are to be found in clusters together on glossy paper at one or more points throughout the book, depending upon the depth of the pocket of the publisher and the assessment of likely revenue. Only occasionally do the historians refer to the photographs in text, or they assume that the purpose served by the photographs is apparent. We are left with a sense that they are little more than window-dressing, a device, along with a photograph on the front cover, of selling the book. Seldon’s use of photographs evolved over his six books on prime ministers. The first on John Major (Seldon and Baston 1997) has 43 photos in three clusters. In the second book, on Blair, Seldon (2004) began each chapter with a black-and-white photograph, illustrating the theme. By placing them in this way, the hope was to deepen the understanding and appreciation of the reader of each episode. As printing has improved in the last 20 years, it has become easier to display black-and-white photographs to a reasonable quality on a standard page, and several historians have taken advantage of this to deploy photographs and other images at specific points of relevance in the text, rather than indiscriminately elsewhere. The technique has allowed Seldon to display better quality photographs, as in the book on Theresa May (Seldon and Newell 2019). The photograph of her dismay when a member of the audience handed her a mock P45 during her speech at the 2017 annual party conference captures a prime minister falling apart. Photographs are far more common in popular histories. The magazine History Today, founded by Brendan Bracken in 1951, sprinkles illustrations including photographs liberally on its pages. So too does the BBC History Magazine, launched in 2000. We should be wary of reaching the

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conclusion that the photographs are more suitable for the young, than academic and less specialist readers, which explains why they are more common in popular than academic history books. Indeed, authors of academic history increasingly appear to be making the use of photographs in their published works.

The Study of History (H4) Photographs come into their own in the study of history, which extends far beyond the school classroom and university lecture hall, into history society meetings, festivals, archives and record depositories, and historical sites across the country. All are enhanced by photography. Like many teachers, Seldon often introduced a new topic to a class by showing students a photograph and asking them questions about it. Students, whose minds are not easily engaged in reading long paragraphs in textbooks, came alive when they saw photographs, with their imaginations actively engaged. Popular history has found as ready an outlet on television as natural history. The first landmark series on the BBC was the Great War, screened in 1964 on the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the war, narrated by actor Michael Redgrave. Because of the lack of moving film, widespread use was made of still photographs. This documentary was followed in 1973–1974 by another 26-part series, on the Second World War, narrated by Laurence Olivier. Again, full use was made of still photographs aided by much more ubiquitous moving film. Ken Burns, the American film-maker, has made memorable series on the American Civil War (1990), the Second World War (2007), and the Vietnam War (2017) to great critical and popular acclaim. The first documentary inevitably relied exclusively on photographs for its visual impact, but they also formed a large part of the following two series as well. Finally, it may be noted that enhancements and technology, including the remastering of old footage, and the use of colour, can bring the past vividly to life for mass audiences. Celebrated film-maker Peter Jackson was asked to add colour to the celebrated black-and-white contemporary film made of the First World War. Released in 2018, They Shall Not Grow Old reached a wide audience. One of the most striking features to be commented upon was the rotten state of the teeth of many of the soldiers. We can only surmise how future technological enhancements to photographs will bring us back ever closer to the actuality of history itself (H1).

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Photography and Historiography As we have seen, photographs have a great deal of value to add to the study of history. It is not the only contribution photography can make to history: the methods and philosophy of photography provide insight and fresh approaches to the way we conduct and consider historical research, as well as contributing to existing theory in the field. Subjective Interpretation Historians and photographers when capturing objects and events with their respective instruments, the pen or the lens, face remarkably similar situations. They are presented with facts and evidence (typically H1 for photographers and H2 for historians) but the observation and interpretation of them necessarily involves subjectivity. This happens through two mechanisms common to both photographers and historians: selection and presentation. Facts are often avoidable through selection but incontrovertible when presented. A historian studying elections can omit the seats won by a party if they wished to steer the reader’s impression of the outcome but cannot provide the incorrect seat counts without running contrary to a historical truth. Likewise, a photographer unwilling to use Photoshop to deceive the viewer is unable to change the appearance of the party’s leader but can avoid portraying him or her in a certain manner by leaving the photograph unpublished. As historians and photographers can construct a narrative in what evidence they avoid, both shape what the evidence tells us in the material they present. Photography as a discipline is keenly aware of the position that the photographer holds in influencing the picture. Photographers can select the angle of the photograph and to some extent the context in which it is presented to the audience. Nonetheless, they are limited by the H1 circumstance presented to them and the medium in which the photograph is published. To quote Burgin’s influential Thinking Photography (1982) It is the position of point-of-view, occupied in fact by the camera, which is bestowed upon the spectator. To the point-of-view, the system of representation adds the frame.

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Though there are similarities here, the selection of what the audience is presented with is driven by different motives across the forms. Photographers typically choose shots with an instinctive artistic sense, aiming towards a composition that holds some subjective aesthetic quality. These photographs do not hold to a generalisable structure. The often-­ quoted heuristic rules of photography—filling the frame, the rule of thirds—are commonly broken (Ni et  al. 2013). The historian chooses arguments with a sense of ‘completeness’, or internal consistency, often seeking out those which first match their preconceptions. Where history can learn from photography here is in being more explicit about the artistic choices made by the historian when approaching a problem. Historians often treat their own interpretation of events as a truth uncovered that was present before they searched for it, much like mathematicians treat laws. The historical process is an imagination of events, not a reconstruction, with motivations, conversations, and relationships all shaped by an individual historian’s personal interpretation of H2 evidence to tell a story as if it is H1. To acknowledge individual biases, methodology and artistic intention of the author would be of great benefit to the reader when interpreting H3 and H4 histories. Framing and Necessary Involvement The artistic composition of a photograph influences how the viewer perceives its subjects. Histories (textual and visual) possess both overt and subconscious influence on the perception of their subjects. Much like there can be no neutral framing of a photograph, there can be no neutral framing of history. Even minor personal details portrayed by a photograph can majorly affect the perception of those photographs, as the example of Ed Miliband’s lunch demonstrates (see Photograph 7.5). Stuart Hall’s (1984, 252) work on the photography of Caribbean immigrants to the UK touches on this: The evidence which the photographic text may be assumed to represent is already overendowed, overdetermined by other, further, often contradictory meanings, which arise within the intertextuality of all photographic representation as a social practice.

Accounts of history, of which such photographic evidence plays a part, contain the same problems. Much like all photography is necessarily

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intertextual, the observer bringing their own experiences to the photograph, so too is history. History, as a narrative exploration of the past, could find great benefits in explicitly considering the position or point-of-view it bestows upon readers. History could do more to recognise the framing in which it places itself. The tendency for readers to draw parallels between present events and their reading of the past is inevitable. They see current events in a historical light. There is also a tendency for historians to write narratives based on current discussions and affairs, if only subconsciously; they oft noted availability or presentism bias. Such parallels between current events and history can be skilfully woven into fiction as allegory. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible being exemplary in its artistic historical retelling of the Salem witch trials based upon current events. However, we must hesitate to paint in such broad strokes or to allow readers to do so themselves. There is a responsibility to inform the reader about the relevant context of events, but not to over-fit the ‘lessons of history’ to present predicaments. The Burgin quotation above also points towards the importance of an awareness of the power that the photographer holds in the composition of the photograph, creating a ‘coherent’ and ‘decisive moment’. To quote Parry’s (2010) discussion of British press photography: In taking a photograph, the photographer’s message about what is captured within the frame is “this is important” (a notion that is further emphasized via cropping and printing in a newspaper).

Historians, especially those covering modern history, must be aware that they are not just observers but active participants in influencing it through their observations. A book on one prime minister’s failings may change the actions of another. An archetypal example of involvement in photography is Photograph 7.3 in which Karsh removes the cigar before the photograph, supposedly turning Churchill’s expression to a stern glare. We can only speculate on whether Churchill was playing up for the camera, but by removing the cigar Karsh had an impact on the photograph’s composition which in turn benefited Churchill’s reputation in America. The viewer of Karsh’s work is left with a distinct impression; Churchill is a serious man with a stoic, determined countenance. This photograph is highlighted not to cast judgement on Karsh’s involvement in the photograph, but to illustrate that the modern historian must take note of their involvement both in the events they recount and

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in how their work will subsequently be interpreted by other historians and scholars. The interplay between subject and artist, again demonstrated by the photograph of John Major and Gemma Levine conversing (see Photograph 7.11), is not limited to photography. One way in which the subject-artist relationship reveals itself in history is the manner in which historical political movements, people, and moments will often be returned to in the rise of a similar contemporary event. Two recent comparisons have been the political project of the Social Democratic Party reconsidered in the context of Change UK and Michael Foot’s Labour leadership and election defeats in the context of Jeremy Corbyn. These current affairs may change our verdict of the past, but it equally stands that the verdict of the past changes our current affairs. Positive narratives of history enable those wishing to repeat it to spring into action. Negative narratives deter those wanting to avoid the mistakes of the past. An overreliance on historical parallels opens the potential for self-fulfilling prophecies. As argued by Ankersmit (2001), contemporary historians necessarily view events and reconstruct narratives through their

Photograph 7.11  John Major and Gemma Levine

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own experiences and times. Once H1 has passed, there is no way to retrieve the past other than through subjective interpretation. This is not to say that the lessons of photography dictate that historians avoid comparisons between current affairs and historical events. There is immense value in applying expertise of history to new problems and being involved in the shaping of contemporary history, much as the photographer may improve a shot through suggesting to a subject where to look, or the viewer what to look at, but it must be done judiciously. Often the parallels made are wholly misleading, extrapolated from a key feature or superficial similarities. Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May, despite being incredibly distant in style, saw continual comparisons in the news with May dubbed the ‘new Iron Lady’ despite the ideological chasm between the two prime ministers. Plurality of Perspective Though the output of photographers may appear singular, it is anything but. The photographer courts many angles, each presenting something different to the viewer. The historian when interpreting political events must similarly strive to acquire such a plurality of perspectives and understanding to better ascertain the behaviour and motives of all involved. Otherwise there is the danger of making comfortable assumptions about people and events. Where the historian stops searching after constructing their narrative, the photographer continues capturing events after the first image. The evidence which initially attracts historians and draws them to their telling of the story has a disproportionate weight, both in the evidence they consider next and the overall story they tell. The plurality of perspective for photographers can be seen in the image of Heath being captured moving to Number 10 by a plethora of cameras from various angles (see Photograph 7.12). The photographers in the image are in various positions, some mid-­ capture, some paused while considering the framing of their next shot. Each has a different perspective. Each will take a different picture. This feature is shared by the study of history. But there are also questions to be raised about the limits to evidence. Marland (2012) discusses the government’s control of political photography in Canada, with the use of prime minister-friendly handouts given to media companies for them to publish, framing then-PM Stephen Harper in a positive light. Similarly, in the UK, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is

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Photograph 7.12  Ted Heath moves to Number 10

frequently photographed by the Conservatives’ unofficial photographer, Andrew Parsons. When reflecting on images capturing the personal, such as those taken on the night of the 2019 General Election in which we see Boris Johnson celebrate the result of the exit poll (see Photograph 7.13) we must consider that the subject may be conscious of, and reacting in a performative manner to, the camera. Photography’s consideration of the reaction between the subject and camera could be mirrored in history’s consideration of the interviewee. As news’ sites require constant web content to drive articles, this creates an incumbency bias where government can portray strong leadership and officialdom in set piece events. To rely on official sources is to avoid possible negative photographic evidence. Contemporary British politics illustrate the trend. News headlines have increasingly become the reporting of Government statements or positions, where an item which would not otherwise be newsworthy is reported because it comes from a government official. As those studying photography must be cautious in observing the arrangement which frames the photograph, not taking a sample of these

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Photograph 7.13  Boris Johnson on Election Night

photographs as representative of the works of the general political photographer, the historian studying this era of British politics must be careful about interpreting anonymous government briefings as evidence of intention (Rutter 2019).

Conclusion Photography’s and history’s close relationship runs across both their methods and production. British political historians’ current use of photographs leaves opportunity for gains in the increased use and improved integration of photographs in historical publications for both an academic and general audience. Improved photographic literacy and familiarity opens new avenues of historical evidence and scrutiny for the previous century of British politics. The prevalence of photography in modern life, both amateur and professional, makes the opportunities in study even greater for future generations of historians.

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Given the lack of existing literature looking at the interdisciplinary potential and existing research of the two fields, future study in this area holds much potential. There is undoubtedly more to be done to connect the two fields, not only for history to learn from photography but for photography to learn from history. Further blurring of the two genres would particularly add value in considering how the contemporary revolutions in historical research—the rise of digital evidence, social media and big data—reckon with the similar digital-era revolutions in photography.

References Ankersmit, F.  R. (2001). Historical Representation. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bevir, M. (1994). Objectivity in History. History and Theory, 33(3), 328–344. Burgin, V. (1982). Thinking Photography. London: Macmillan International Higher Education. Collingwood, R. G., Taylor, A. E., & Schiller, F. C. S. (1922). Are History and Science Different Kinds of Knowledge? Mind, 31(124), 443–466. Hall, S. (1984). Reconstruction Work: Images of Post-war Black Settlement. In B.  Highmore (Ed.), The Everyday Life Reader (pp.  251–261). London: Routledge. Marland, A. (2012). Political Photography, Journalism, and Framing in the Digital Age: The Management of Visual Media by the Prime Minister of Canada. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 17(2), 214–233. Moore, C. (2019). Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume Three: Herself Alone. London: Penguin Books. Ni, B., Xu, M., Cheng, B., Wang, M., Yan, S., & Tian, Q. (2013). Learning to Photograph: A Compositional Perspective. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 15(5), 1138–1151. Parry, K. (2010). A Visual Framing Analysis of British Press Photography During the 2006 Israel-Lebanon Conflict. Media, War and Conflict, 3(1), 67–85. Popper, K. (1962). Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. London: Routledge. Rutter, J. (2019, October 8). Anonymous Number Ten Briefings Do the Public a Disservice. Journalists Should Stop Reporting Them. UK in a Changing Europe. Retrieved January 10, 2020, from https://ukandeu.ac.uk/ anonymous-number-ten-briefings-do-the-public-a-disservice-journalistsshould-stop-reporting-them/. Schama, S. (2015). The Face of Britain: The Nation Through Its Portraits. London: Penguin Books.

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Seldon, A. (1981). Churchill’s Indian Summer: The Conservative Government, 1951-55. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Seldon, A., & Pappworth, J. (1983). By Word of Mouth: ‘élite’ Oral History. London: Methuen. Seldon, A. (1988). Contemporary History: Practice and Method. Oxford: Blackwell. Seldon, A. (2004). Blair. London: Free Press. Seldon, A., & Baston, L. (1997). Major: A Political Life. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Seldon, A., & Newell, A. (2019). May at 10. London: Biteback Publishers.

CHAPTER 8

Architectural Power Charles T. Goodsell

Introduction This chapter concerns the relation of visual arts to politics in the following way. Producing fine architecture is a visual art. How citizens view government is at the heart of politics, particularly in a democracy. I coined the term ‘architectural power’ as meaning that physical features incorporated in critical public buildings can have significant influence on citizen attitudes towards the regimes that occupy them. The scholarly literature from which this endeavour springs is that of environmental behaviour and design. Its strong adherents contend that human behaviour and the built environment in which it occurs are intertwined so closely that design features can be engineered to achieve predicted conduct. Illustrative consequences of this belief are open schoolrooms, small urban parks, and low-story housing projects. This deterministic position has come under heavy attack, however, since the expected outcomes are often not delivered. A general scepticism then set

C. T. Goodsell (*) Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. A. W. Rhodes, S. Hodgett (eds.), What Political Science Can Learn from the Humanities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51697-0_8

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in that concluded the physical setting is but one factor—and usually a minor one—in determining behaviour.1 Then another school of thought reconsidered the matter and ended up backtracking to some extent. It turned the direction of causation around and asked whether there are fundamental characteristics in human nature that lead to universal tendencies in mankind’s design of the built environment. Examples would be the need for physical survival (the natural defence instinct), the superiority of height (from the experience of childhood), the significance of centrality (unitary focusing in the visual field), preference for the right hand (a common genetic trait), a craving for spirituality (the consciousness of mortality), and a dependence on others’ power (inability of the individual to live alone). These factors, then, influenced the construction of ancient forms of human shelter. Once these universals became embedded in individual developing cultures, they took on a persistence of their own over time. This continuance process is set in motion by a second reversal of causality, whereby repeated use of the forms induces an ever-amplified desire to use them. It is in this intellectual camp that this author operates. A main reason is that when I first began studying the social meanings of architecture I fell under the influence of this school’s principal figure, Professor Amos Rapoport of the University of Wisconsin. On one of my earliest field trips I met with him in his home in Milwaukee, and we have been in touch ever since. His published writings are extensive and have won him a permanent place in social-environmental aspects of architecture.2 One reason the two of us connected so well was our common obsession of going into the world to study it directly. In this first venture, I was beginning field studies of 75 city halls across the country to understand how they designed their deliberative chambers. I had become aware of how Dr Rapoport endlessly sketched his field findings to compare examples from primitive cultures. In my case, I photographed what I saw and talked to all participants and informants I could locate, followed by intensive study and reasoned generalization. I repeated this field methodology when taking on a second more ambitious project, to study as a building type the American capitol in all 50 states. Two books came from this work, and in both I abandoned ‘objective’ variable-oriented social

1 2

 See Gutman 1972; Newman 1972; and Sommer 1974.  Examples of his legacy include Rapoport, 1976, 1977, 1980, and 1982.

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science to interpret political meanings in terms of producing probable behavioural consequences.3 The material that follows draws from these two books and the several years of fieldwork on which they are based. In view of my methodology, the types of architectural power I identify at the end of this chapter are informed interpretations and not proven results. I defend my findings based on their oft-repeated use and the logic of probable or at least possible effect. With the ample photographs I have provided, the reader can evaluate my conclusions. Numbers in parentheses in the text refer to a List of Photographs at the text’s end.

A Striking Edifice Prominence. It is not surprising that houses of sovereignty and centralized power are striking to the eye. Being noticed itself bestows power. A chief method used by capitol builders to make their edifices notable was to place them in a prominent location. Being located on an elevation above surrounding territory is a venerable way to achieve special status. This practice is in accord with the superiority of height principle, whose generic source may be how children must look up to their taller parents.4 There is no end of examples. In ancient times, classical Greece utilized Mount Olympus. Rome had its Capitoline Hill, probably the origin of the word ‘capitol’. One of the earliest American statehouses to be constructed is that of Massachusetts, located on Beacon Hill. The Colorado Capitol, sited on Brown’s Bluff in Denver, is precisely one mile above sea level (Photograph 8.1). Other statehouses were given a prominent location by placing them in a city square (Utah), at a railroad junction (Georgia), or on a pioneer trail (Idaho). The most common such location, however, was on a body of water, usually a major river. Twenty-seven of the present-day capitols are ‘riverine’ in this sense.5 Illustrative waterways are the Mississippi (Louisiana), Kanawha (West Virginia), Susquehanna (Pennsylvania), James (Virginia), Delaware (New Jersey), and Hudson (New York). In the nineteenth century when many of these capitols were built, river traffic was still a major form of public transportation. Moreover, this viewpoint  See Goodsell 1988 and 2001.  See Schwartz 1981. 5  Goodsell, 2001, 17. 3 4

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Photograph 8.1  The Colorado State Capitol, built in 1886–1908

provided a majestic background view of the state’s proud edifice, as in Jefferson City, Missouri (on the Mississippi River) (Photograph 8.2). The Dome. The round upward projection from the top of the traditional capitol is its most notable outward hallmark. The dome attracts the eye because of how the curved form contrasts with the horizontal mass of the building below as well as flat structures nearby. An ancient architectural form, it even predates the famous low dome on the Pantheon in Rome. In Europe, architects transformed this flattened shape to a near hemisphere. This can be seen in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, and Les Invalides in Paris.6 This rounded dome was adopted in America by Charles Bulfinch (its first professional architect) for his Massachusetts State House. When a half century later Thomas Walter designed the US Capitol and Miner Butler and Reuben Clark the California State Capitol, the rounded shape was retained but expanded into a peaked hemisphere mounted on a ribbed circular tholos with colonnaded drum below. This model became the 6

 See Baldwin Smith 1990.

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Photograph 8.2  Missouri’s Capitol seen from across the Mississippi

approximate standard for all statehouses built in the United States in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. (And, in a form of architectural colonialism, in Puerto Rico and Cuba as well.) As rendered in this way, the capitol dome has captured the American imagination as a prime symbol of legislative authority and even democracy itself. It is used constantly in cartoons and television backgrounds. If one likes to exercise some imagination, the structure suggests an anthropomorphic head of sovereign authority, perhaps wearing a helmet. Indeed, the Latin root of the word capital (as over against capitol) happens to be ‘head’; the tall example in Kansas places the head on a particularly long neck (Photograph 8.3). Other Arresting Shapes. Several other states depart from the standard model. Virginia’s capitol was designed by Jefferson from a picture he saw of the Maison Carree in France. Nebraska, North Dakota, and Louisiana pioneered in the 1930s with substituting tall towers for a dome. Delaware’s legislative building recalls colonial times, New Mexico’s takes a drum shape and Hawaii’s resembles an open-air palace. Arizona and Florida

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Photograph 8.3  The Kansas State Capitol, built in 1866–1906

opted to retain their early standard capitols as museums and surround them with low legislative structures on each side of a high executive tower. Edward Durrell Stone’s Tallahassee complex is often mocked as suggesting an erect penis with testicles—an architectural Freudian slip (Photograph 8.4)?

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Photograph 8.4  Florida’s new ‘male genitalia’ Capitol

When statehouses were initially built, as the name suggests, the intention was that they house the headquarters activity of all state officials. As government expanded this of course became impossible. At first supreme courts moved out, followed by bureaucratic agencies and legislator offices. In some states, planners took charge of the situation and created institutional plazas or malls. This is the case in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Michigan, and New  York; the Empire State Plaza in Albany contains numerous imposing structures built de novo on scores of cleared residential blocks in front of the old capitol. The visiting citizen is presented not merely with one house of state but an entire governmental city (Photograph 8.5). There are 20,000 municipalities in the United States, and virtually everyone has a city or town hall. Almost all are nondescript. However, some place their governments in arresting structures. Unlike statehouses, there is no common pattern. Older large cities may boast of a mammoth stone structure built in the style of its time and located in the middle of the original city centre, now run down. Their location and monumentality can be intimidating to the average citizen, as illustrated by the City Hall of Cincinnati (Photograph 8.6). At another extreme, prosperous college

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Photograph 8.5  The Empire State Plaza’s Agency Buildings

towns can seek recognition by doing something radical. Discarding the superiority of height principle, the inverted pyramid in Tempe, Arizona concentrates power at the point of community-ground impact. The point of public entry is at ground level and the council chamber is buried below ground (Photograph 8.7).

Looking Up Close Footprint. As one approaches the state capitols, their size and configuration come into view. The length of these buildings extends 400–500 feet with width in the neighbourhood of 250–300. The constitutional principle of separation of powers is spoken for by differentiated wings, segments, and projections to accommodate various parts of government. The notion of representative government is highlighted by providing ample space for two legislative assemblies—a house and senate—positioned opposite to each other along the structure’s centreline. These spaces are consciously of equal size to capture the duality of bicameralism.

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Photograph 8.6  The Cincinnati City Hall, constructed in 1888–1893

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Photograph 8.7  The upside-down pyramid in Tempe, built in 1969–1971

This combination of size, segmentation, and bicameralism produces a long, relatively low structure divided symmetrically into two parts, joined at the exact centre by a dome rising 30–50 feet above the roof. To give this overall form suitable variety and balance, projections outward are added on each side at right angles from the centre, forming a Greek cross with truncated arms. Lesser side projections occur at the block’s ends, dignifying further the importance of the two legislative bodies. A good example of these traits is the New Capitol in Jackson, Mississippi, constructed in 1901–1903 (Photograph 8.8). Façade. The exterior ‘packaging’ of traditional capitols is carved out of stone—granite, limestone, sandstone, and occasionally marble, with the last more commonly used inside. Prior to steel girders and reinforced concrete, the structure’s weight is borne by the thickness of its walls. This meant that huge amounts of rock had to be transported from quarries. Building sites, often in progress for several years, were crowded with great numbers of blocks laid out on the ground. They were carved in situ by expert masons, assisted in many instances by convicts in the North and slaves in the South. Whatever the monetary and human costs, the

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Photograph 8.8  Mississippi’s ‘New’ Capitol, constructed in 1901–1903

architectural power being projected was intended to embody physical perfection to future generations (Photograph 8.9). The style of the façade’s design varies with what was popular at the time—for example, Classic Revival, Greek Revival, Italianate, Second Empire, Georgian, Beaux-Arts, or American Renaissance. Whatever the choice, the style remains intact on all exterior walls. Nothing can get in the way of creating a unified, bilateral, and perfected image to convey a sense of balance, order, and completeness. Although two American capitols are identical (Montana and South Dakota), variation in styles was the rule and, in some cases, stark uniqueness, as witness Connecticut’s Victorian Gothic masterpiece of 187–1879 (Photograph 8.10). Grounds. Physical objects of one kind or another populate statehouse grounds. Most reflect that state’s culture or history. A ‘Petunia Number One’ oil derrick stands in front of the Oklahoma capitol building. The grave of President Polk and statue of Sergeant York are found in Tennessee. A representation of Napoleon’s treasurer signing the Louisiana Purchase lies outside the Missouri capitol.

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Photograph 8.9  New York State Capitol as seen from Empire State Plaza

An interesting twist in this pattern is that in some cases the same object can be sighted in several states. An archaic railroad boxcar, variously named ‘Merci Train’, ‘Gratitude Train’, or ‘40/8 Box Car’, is one of these. A gift of the French government, these were an expression of thanks for an American Friendship Train organized by journalist Drew Pearson in 1947 to deliver food and medical supplies to war-torn Europe. The vehicles, built originally to carry 40 men or 4 horses, were filled with dolls, clothes, furniture, and ornamental objects donated by over six million citizens of France and Italy (Photograph 8.11). In the years following World War II, the US government faced severe fiscal problems, and the Treasury launched a national savings bond drive for help. To promote the drive, exact replicas of the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia were cast. They were full-size and even sounded the original note (E flat), made possible by not including the famous crack. The bells were offered to all states and 32 accepted them for display. Around the same time, the Boy Scouts of American undertook a parallel programme to stir up patriotism. Copper castings of the Statue of Liberty 8.5 feet high

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Photograph 8.10  The Connecticut Capitol, designed by Robert Mitchell Upjohn

were distributed to states, cities, and counties to display in public places. Many still stand on statehouse lawns. (Photograph 8.12).

Getting Inside The Temple’s Portal. Although all state capitols have utilitarian service entrances, the building’s official front door is generally what architects call a temple front. It is typically located at the centre of the structure’s long side considered to be front-facing. This architectural ensemble is perhaps the most universal symbol of authority in Western culture. It is not confined to government buildings but used on countless banks, churches, and college halls across the land. The form dates to antiquity, having roots in Greek temples and later perfected in the Roman Empire, with some modifications in the Renaissance.7 The temple front is basically a front porch with five components: (1) a rectangular platform or landing that juts out from the mass of the building; (2) six or eight sentinel-like columns, subtly 7

 See MacDonald 1986, 133-142.

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Photograph 8.11  One of the ‘Merci Train’ boxcars still remaining

shaped to appear tall and topped with a sculpted cap; (3) a rectangular roof with entablature that shelters the platform and, above that, (4) a triangular pediment or gable. In many cases (5) a set of side blocks known as podium arms are placed on each side of the stairs leading up from the ground. The river-facing temple front designed by Cass Gilbert for West Virginia illustrates (Photograph 8.13). In a positive light, this extravagant and highly visible architectural device can be seen as outreaching in that it clearly informs the stranger where to enter the building. Nonetheless temple fronts have strong power implications. From a scale standpoint, their size dwarfs the human body. As a passageway, they give the feeling of entering a sacred inner space where authority is wielded while leaving behind the profane world of chaos. Aesthetically the projecting nature is assertive, the columned verticality noble, and the triangular pediment pointing to the sky. Then, once the steps upward have been mounted and the view from the landing absorbed, the remaining act is to push open a large dignified door. The magnificent leaves of the portal at West Virginia’s Beaux Arts statehouse

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Photograph 8.12  The Statue of Liberty replica in Wyoming

are cast from solid bronze and together weigh a thousand pounds, yet open silently on perfectly balanced hinges (Photograph 8.14). Inner Doors to Power. Once within the statehouse, the most immediate environment may be simply a hallway, with ceremonial spaces deeper in the building or upstairs. To get to upper stories elevators are commonly

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Photograph 8.13  South temple front in West Virginia State Capitol

available, and their ground-floor doors provide an initial opportunity for making an impression on the visitor. At the St. Paul City Hall and Ramsey County Courthouse, completed in 1932  in Zigzag Moderne style, the elevator doors bear Native American designs that connect to Minnesota culture and history (Photograph 8.15). Those in the Richardson Romanesque New York State Capitol, completed in 1899, the elevator entrance displays an image of great wealth and power (Photograph 8.16). As the chief executive officer of the state, one would assume that the doors to the offices of the governor would be uniformly elegant. However this is not the case; instead they vary from modest to extravagant, depending on the personality of the incumbent and the internal politics at the time of construction or renovation. An interesting case of the latter is found in Mississippi. The state’s early capitol, now a museum, served from 1839 to 1903. In it, the governor’s office was distinguished along a plain hallway only by five rosettes glued on the lintel above the door (Photograph 8.17). When Governor Andrew Longino was elected in 1903, he insisted that in the New Capitol his office must be signified by an opulent façade facing the second floor of the rotunda (Photograph 8.18). In a

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Photograph 8.14  The half-ton main portal in West Virginia

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Photograph 8.15  St. Paul City Hall elevator entry door

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Photograph 8.16  New York State Capitol elevator entry door

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Photograph 8.17  Entrance to Mississippi Governor’s Office before 1903

Photograph 8.18  Entrance to Mississippi Governor’s Office after 1903

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Photograph 8.19  Entrance to Office of the Illinois Governor

comparable upgrade a century later, the Illinois gubernatorial office located in the back of one wing on the first floor was glorified by a glass wall that closed off the entire wing (Photograph 8.19). Many observers, especially the legislators themselves, consider the capitol as being essentially a legislative house. This logic has led to a tendency to provide grand main entrance doors for the house and senate chambers. In Oklahoma, the upper house is entered by a portal perhaps 20 feet in height, framed by a pair of marble columns with projecting curved pediment overhead (Photograph 8.20). Colorado’s Senate is entered by an even more extraordinary architectural ensemble looking out over the rotunda from above, even more assertive than Governor Longino’s office in Mississippi (Photograph 8.21). Restricted Access. Gaining legitimacy via seductive portals would appear to be the very opposite of restricting access to statehouse places. However, this is not necessarily true. An example is the state seal. Often it is rendered in bas-relief bronze and guarded on all sides by a rope or cable. When outside visitors come across it, they immediately recognize the significance of the setting and never attempt to violate it (Photograph 8.22).

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Photograph 8.20  Entrance portal to Oklahoma State Senate

At session time, outsiders are also forbidden from the actual legislating zone of lawmaking, or what is known as ‘the floor’. Usually they are confined to galleries upstairs. Even for members themselves, specific rules are in place there, such as removal of one’s hat and not standing in front of a member currently addressing the house. In the Louisiana House of

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Photograph 8.21  Entrance portal to Colorado State Senate

Photograph 8.22  Rotunda floor seal in Minnesota Capitol

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Photograph 8.23  Louisiana House of Representatives

Representatives, the limits of the floor are demarcated by a fence (Photograph 8.23). City hall council chambers have similar barriers, although in most cases the public is seated at the same floor level, creating a situation in which the public faces its representatives with some kind of structure separating them. Unlike state legislatures, city councils allow citizen comment to be made during meetings, and for this purpose, a lectern is placed just outside of the fence (Photograph 8.24). A third category of restricted space is truly private. One is members-­ only lounges for relaxation and informal talk (Photograph 8.25). Formal caucus assembly rooms exist in many capitols, physically placed near the floor with one for Republicans and the other for Democrats. Rhode Island is distinctive in that a room essentially empty of furniture is located just off the House chamber for members of both parties to make deals in private just before voting (Photograph 8.26).

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Photograph 8.24  New York City Board of Estimate chamber

Photograph 8.25  Arkansas Senate members-only lounge

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Photograph 8.26  Rhode Island House deal-making room

How High to Look The Rotunda. A seemingly universal human habit is to assume that elevation is a good thing. Being tall is perceived as an asset for men. Corporate executives want their offices on the top floor. Most religions place the deity and afterlife above the Earth. Theories vary on why height is preferred, but in any case, the principle is operative in the construction and design of the capitol rotunda. It is a high, large space located just below the dome—the biggest void in an otherwise quite solidly packed structural mass. In many cases, the space is 60–70 feet in diameter and as high as 75–80 feet, which is made possible by having it protrude upward into the dome. This is made possible by the existence of a hidden load-bearing dome that supports the externally visible dome above. The rotunda ceiling then is the underside of the false dome. Hence it is typically deep and always circular in shape. The tradition is to have this round and often concave surface painted in a particularly striking and colourful way. This rendering contributes to the aura created by the open oculus of the famous

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Pantheon in Rome, whose rotunda interior has long inspired architects. To dramatize the rotunda ceiling even further, an elaborate chandelier often hangs from its centre to illuminate the grand space below (Photograph 8.27). The capitol rotunda is meant to be the most compelling room in the building. Depending on its age and architectural style, the rounded walls are faced with architectural flourishes. The space cuts through all floors of the building, often with observation walkways at each level. This gives a stacked appearance that adds to the perception of height. At each floor, the void can be viewed from a different height, providing multiple angles to witness the scene. Whether standing on the floor or observing from above, one’s own modest size as a human being seems small and inadequate (Photograph 8.28). Symbolically this space is the state’s civic church. It stretches from the hard marble floor below (often with the state seal embedded) to the ideal world shining far above. Except when the legislature is in session, the room is quite empty except for occasional employees traversing the building’s length or groups of visitors wandering about. During sessions, it becomes a dynamic mixing bowl of legislators, staff, lobbyists, and tourists. As a ceremonial space, it is reserved for temporary exhibits or solemn events such as the lying-in-state of a deceased honouree. From the symbolism standpoint, a major ingredient of the rotunda’s power is its absolute centrality. It is located at the exact midpoint of the building. Vertically the space is organized around a line extending from the tip of the dome’s lantern outside, down through the external and false domes, through the centre of the ceiling painting, down the chandelier chain, and into the middle of a basement crypt below ground. Religious historian Mircea Eliade would regard this perpendicular line as an axis mundi, or direct linear connection between the centre of the earth and a point on its surface.8 Grand Staircases. In practical terms, the capital visitor can quickly take elevators to the building’s upper floors. These are, however, largely hidden around corners and not obvious to the newcomer. What is presented visually is a series of broad, sweeping staircases that rise from the rotunda floor. They are generous in proportion and rendered in stone, interrupted on the way up by landings. While ascending one may encounter signs of authority such as statuary or a pair of columns, with the destination ahead 8

 See Eliade 1959.

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Photograph 8.27  Arkansas Capitol rotunda ceiling and chandelier

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Photograph 8.28  Texas State Capitol rotunda seen from above

in the form of a door (Photograph 8.29). The most important upper floor is that on which the legislative chambers are located. In that instance, a handsomely appointed foyer or reception hall is sometimes provided (Photograph 8.30). The staircases are important to our subject in two ways. One is that of impressions placed in the minds of citizen visitors. While these steps are welcoming to navigate the building, they also plant in the mind the notion that what is above is importantly significant. The other is that they serve as a stage on which to display the personification of power. Chamber members can pause on the steps to be observed below and hopefully admired by the citizen throng. Also, they are helpful to catch the attention of the media and locate lobbyists they wish to consult. The Highest Branch. Except for the high-rise statehouses, there are but two or three more stories. Almost always, the legislative branch occupies the highest principal floor. This leaves the remaining levels to the governor and other high executive offices, plus an attic for lesser personnel. In the

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Photograph 8.29  Staircase in Arkansas Capitol rotunda

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Photograph 8.30  Second floor landing in Iowa Grand Staircase

early years, the state supreme court occupied a middle position within the capitol until moving to its own building nearby. This arrangement reaffirms the image that the building is seen by many as primarily a legislative house, somewhat akin to the US Capitol in Washington. An interesting aspect of this ‘highest branch’ pattern is that its architectural power implications arose originally from practical problems of building structure. In the old statehouses that preceded the present-­day capitols, the upper floor was assigned to legislative bodies by physical necessity. Prior to the availability of iron or steel beams or reinforced concrete, placing a large space for a legislative chamber unimpeded by mid-room pillars on a lower level invited collapse of the floors above onto it. Precisely this happened in several states between 1870 and 1883. 9 A second factor emanates from European architectural styles that emigrated to America in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. In accord with the piano nobile concept of Andrea Palladio in his 9

 Goodsell 2001, 81.

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Italian villas by which all art and wealth was placed on the second floor, it became fashionable for architects to make the comparable level of city halls and opera houses as fancy as possible. This idea was directly transferred to state capitols—by more elegant interior wall treatments, floors, ceilings, windows, and doorways, and outside by a strict order of masonry design, with increasing levels of complexity and elegance from ground floor to roof. The Italianate Illinois capitol constructed in 1868–1888 illustrates this point (Photograph 8.31).

Accoutrements to See Chamber Design. We turn now from the power of architecture per se to the power of design, that is, the nature of facilities and equipment in daily use within the built environment. In an essentially legislative house, the design of legislative chambers is of central importance. Here I give special attention to the lower house—although close similarity to the upper house is the usual pattern, occasionally a bit more exaggerated. International comparisons are of value to appreciating their layout. The British House of Commons is designed to pit The Government against The Opposition. The two sides face each other directly from rows of lateral benches—the stage is set for partisan debate and conflict (Photograph 8.32). The amphitheatre design of French Chamber of Deputies, by contrast, delineates a range of pie-shaped ideological splits whose differences on the political spectrum are permanently on view (Photograph 8.33). The American legislative chamber is very different. All members are placed on one floor—either flat or slightly inclined downward towards the front. Members are seated not on benches or in chairs, but at desks. The desks are placed in a shallow curve, with all facing in one direction towards the speaker’s rostrum. A generous aisle towards the front separates the two political parties. It points at what is called the well of the house, overlooked by a set of large benches known as the rostrum. This arrangement separates the two parties but does not keep members from moving about during sessions and conversing with each other. The aisle further suggests that the floor plan is designed not to promote bilateral opposition or fractional ideology, but to place both parties in the position of acting together under the same auspices under speaker leadership. This arrangement does not, of course, prevent bitter disagreement, acrimonious debate, and chamber deadlock; but it does not assume stalemated acrimony as being the main purpose of parliamentary life (Photograph 8.34).

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Photograph 8.31  Façade of Illinois State Capitol, built in 1868–1888

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Photograph 8.32  British House of Commons

The power implications of the chamber’s furniture is, moreover, that legislator duty extends not just to debating and voting but doing actual work. The difference here is the presence of a working desk for each member. At it pending committee business and the problems of constituents can be attended to. File drawers, storage space, a computer, and chair for a secretary can be provided (Photograph 8.35). As for the furniture found in the deliberative chambers of city halls, over the past half-century a popular chamber design has emerged in the United States that is quite different. It is essentially an arrangement whereby seating is arranged in a large circle of rounded daises or benches. In Santa Rosa, California, the public’s sector of the circle is provided its own substantial dais. Citizens are moreover placed in the open without being hemmed in by a railing or wall (Photograph 8.36).10 Political Tools. We conclude this investigation by tracing evidence of power not from architecture or design but from physical objects. One type is the tools of parliamentary rule. A gavel with its sounding block is used  Goodsell 1988, chapter 5.

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Photograph 8.33  French Chamber of Deputies

to control the parliamentary flow of business. The set from Louisville, Kentucky’s council chamber dates from the nineteenth century when George W. Griffiths was Mayor (Photograph 8.37). A symbolic set of parliamentary tools are the mace and sword of state. These date from the Middle Ages as weapons to protect the king. The mace is an elaborately decorated club that at one time was carried by the king’s guards at the front of his processions. Today it is found only in the lower house, formerly the people’s chamber of which the sovereign was

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Photograph 8.34  Arizona House of Representatives

Photograph 8.35  Michigan state senator at work in Chamber

Photograph 8.36  Santa Rosa City Council Chamber

Photograph 8.37  Gavel and sounding block at Louisville City Hall

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Photograph 8.38  Mace in South Carolina House of Representatives

not a member. Hence it is ritually carried from an outside storage cabinet into the house chamber by the sergeant-at-arms each time the house convenes (Photograph 8.38). The sword of state, by contrast, is found only in the upper house, whose ancestor was the council of state, chaired by the king. As it was available to the king’s guards for his protection in any

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Photograph 8.39  South Carolina State Senate Sword of State

situation, it does not need to be brought into the senate chamber because the sovereign’s presence is assumed. South Carolina’s sword of state remains permanently under glass in front of the Senate rostrum (Photograph 8.39). Practical tools for modern-day security also exist. In the Cleveland council chamber a guard post with brass rails is located in the upstairs gallery from which to observe citizens in attendance. During Huey Long’s reign as boss of the Louisiana Democratic machine, he secretly kept tabs on voting in the legislature by means of a remote electric display board in his office (Photograph 8.40). Some statehouses and city halls join other institutions of society in having security people constantly watch the feed of multiple video cameras (Photograph 8.41). Occasionally one runs across the ultimate security tool, physical escape. Secret routes of emergency departure from a room or building are sometimes made available in case officials are physically threatened or attacked. In Lynchburg, Virginia’s city hall the mayor and members of the city council can, if necessary, suddenly exit behind a curtain that leads to a

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Photograph 8.40  Huey Long’s Louisiana remote voting monitor

Photograph 8.41  New Mexico Capitol security control room

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Photograph 8.42  Lynchburg City Hall escape route

stairway to the city hall garage below (Photograph 8.42). In the Cleveland council chamber a hidden door is built into the panelling behind the mayor’s rostrum. The same means of escape exists in the governor’s formal office in New York State (Photograph 8.43). Cultural Tools. A subtler yet still effective means of influence is to associate the building with admired historic persons or acts of the past. The most obvious manifestation of this device is the statute of a founding father. There are many George Washingtons and Abraham Lincolns standing in heroic poses in Northern statehouses around the country. Also local heroes are honoured elsewhere, such as Andrew Jackson in Tennessee, Sam Houston in Texas, and Brigham Young in Utah (Photograph 8.44). Interesting variants on this theme are also encountered, such as a stirring statue of a miner is found in Idaho, a state known for its vast amounts of hard-rock minerals (Photograph 8.45). In Maryland’s capitol, the oldest statehouse still in use, the former senate chamber has been set aside as a museum to commemorate General George Washington’s relinquishment of command of his army on 23 December 1783. He is shown standing in the exact position where he made this Cincinnatus-like statement

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Photograph 8.43  Hidden door in Office of New York Governor

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Photograph 8.44  Brigham Young Statue in Utah Capitol rotunda

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Photograph 8.45  ‘The Patriot’ statue in Idaho Capitol rotunda

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Photograph 8.46  Site of Washington’s relinquishment of command in Maryland

rather than become automatic head of the new republic (Photograph 8.46). Many statehouses contain separate art galleries or parlour-like staterooms that demonstrate appeal to upper-class sensibilities. The visitor finds exhibited in them fine or regional art, expensive carpets, and silver settings from decommissioned battleships. Exotic architectural flourishes also catch attention around the building generally. Examples are elaborate cornice modillions, corbel brackets, and ceiling lights. Especially notable is intricately carved staircase newel posts (Photograph 8.47). Sometime the building’s original workmen deliberately carve a small flaw in such woodwork to prove that frail human beings did the work, not God. In the western states large-scale scene paintings of historic incidents are often found, hanging in prominent places such as legislative chambers. When entering the Montana House, one’s attention is immediately caught by Charles Marion Russell’s 12 by 25 feet ‘Lewis and Clark Meet the Flatheads at Ross’ Hole’, permanently placed behind the rostrum. Back East, the equivalent is splendid murals; Pennsylvania’s Senate chamber is adorned with several magnificent creations of Violet Oakley, the pioneer female muralist active at the turn of the twentieth century9 (Photograph 8.48).

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Photograph 8.47  Texas State Capitol restored newel post

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Photograph 8.48  Violet Oakley’s mural in Pennsylvania Senate Chamber

Not all cultural objects are for upper-class eyes. In Utah, the crypt beneath the rotunda has a racing car on display behind glass. It is ‘Mormon Meteor III’, a sleek machine built in 1937 and raced on the state’s famous Bonneville Salt Flats. Powered by an aircraft engine, it attained a speed of 171 mph (Photograph 8.49).

Architectural Power Differentiated In this chapter, we have encountered many ways in which architectural power has been exercised. Some are obvious, others subtle, and still others covert. What follows is an attempt to make some sense of this complex subject. I do so by differentiating between two types of architectural power. In naming them, I borrow from Joseph Nye’s distinction between ‘hard power’ and ‘soft power’. These refer to two forms of leadership as found, for example, in international relations. Hard power is associated with coercion, i.e. making people or nations do something they would

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Photograph 8.49  Mormon Meteor III race car in Utah Capitol Crypt

otherwise not do by means of threats, promises or force. Soft power achieves its ends by altering the attitudes and desires of others by persuasion and value appeals.11 My meanings behind these labels, although somewhat analogous, are different. With respect to architectural rather than leader power, I distinguish between two ways architects and builders can produce government workplace settings so that occasional visiting citizens (not ongoing building occupants) are convinced that the regime within is legitimate or at least acceptable. Hard power, in this case, is achieved by inducing a sense of awe by projecting (1) clear authority cues or (2) vivid impressions of institutional strength. Soft power, by contrast, appeals to (1) citizens’ sense of place or (2) traits of inherent attractiveness. In sum, Hard architectural power seeks to impose attitudes, while Soft architectural power awakens attitudes. I illustrate from the statehouse and city hall examples discussed above.  See Nye 2008.

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Hard Power. The most important authority cue associated with American statehouses is the dome, which surmounts three-fourths of them. Its round, peaked shape that so attracts the eye when seen on the horizon identifies some kind of sanctified edifice. Its shape and markings remind one of an anthropomorphic helmeted head of government. Then, inside that head, is another great symbolic force, the capitol’s rotunda. This civic church is a vast space that is elaborately decorated from top to bottom. Its grand staircases lead to the level of secular legislative power and its ceiling points to painted representations of an ideal state. The principal pathway to this church from the outside begins with what architectural historians consider the most prominent authority symbol in Western culture, the temple front. Its extra-human proportions and classic GrecoRoman components seize the avid attention of all visitors. Within the building other ornate and outsize portals are found to key spaces, including the legislative chambers and governor’s office. The most vivid aspect of the capitol that projects institutional strength is the overall building itself. In order to stress its importance, it is located on a deliberately prominent location—a hill, transportation route or navigable river. Moreover, its size is arresting. Older statehouses are built of stone, with walls thick enough to bear all vertical weight. This building material creates an aura of permanency over time. Capitols were constructed at great original cost, often over many years using steam power and hand chiselling. While some states have replaced them with modern structures, they sometimes retain the predecessor statehouse as too precious to raze. The architectural style chosen adds to a timeless and special air. It was usual to engage famous architects that could render the building with a façade that would unite its exterior surfaces into a uniform composition befitting a dwelling of sovereignty. The structure’s cross-shaped footprint conveys a sense of fundamental order by its bilateral symmetry, matched extensions, and conspicuous window treatments. As for city halls, these too could attain the same projection of institutional strength in big cities. Soft Power. One way in which existing citizen acceptance of the regimes that occupy government buildings is awakened is how they speak to the human sense of place. After all, it is my state that is being governed from this capitol; and it is my hometown that presents itself by this city hall. Thus, the resident of Tempe, Arizona, can live with its upside downtown hall shaped like an overturned pyramid.

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Then too, government buildings have much to admire on their own terms. Statues of founding fathers remind people of historic origins. Displays of local crafts or industries confirm a sense of cultural identity. Works of art that capture famous incidents in the past strike a prideful chord. Something as refined as a room of state exhibiting fine silver or as down-to-earth as a crypt installation of a racing car can stir excitement. Also, functional components of statehouse design are capable of garnering approval. State legislative chambers are laid out not for conflict or rhetoric but deliberation and constituent service. At the local level of government, the circular council arrangement as a departure to dais segregation is encouraging to members of the public. Parliamentary artefacts like maces, swords of state, remote voting displays, and room escape routes add to the mix of tolerant bemusement regarding American ruling authority. Smart Power? In his book, Nye also coins the term ‘smart power’. This is when both types of power are appropriately utilized together to enhance overall influence. I find this duality notion useful for architectural power, especially in a democratic republic where Hard power is needed to establish regime legitimacy together with Soft power to encourage citizen acceptance of regime rule. Beyond this obvious point, a couple of observations are possible. One has to do with the frequency of individual power signals. On the Hard power side, a democratic republic would welcome fewer capitols like Florida’s and more like Connecticut’s—and more St. Paul elevator doors and fewer New York State. As for Soft power, it would be good to have more roped state seals and fewer hero statues—and fewer escape doors and more round council chambers. Yet these comments are at the very best facetious in that no jurisdiction is going to reconstruct its property on the advice of a professor. Rather, a more useful proposal might be to think creatively about shifting functions around rather than altering physical infrastructure. One possibility would be to give a Hard setting an occasional Soft task and a Soft environment a Hard one. An example would be to hold cheerful holiday celebrations in capitol rotundas and have dead bodies lie in state in circular council chambers. This way, the integration of Hard and Soft is more complete.

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References Baldwin Smith, E. (1990). The Dome: A Study in the History of Ideas. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Eliade, M. (1959). The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Goodsell, C.  T. (1988). The Social Meaning of Civic Space: Political Authority Through Architecture. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Goodsell, C.  T. (2001). The American Statehouse: Interpreting Democracy’s Temples. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Gutman, R. (Ed.). (1972). People and Buildings. New York: Basic Books. MacDonald, W.  L. (1986). The Architecture of the Roman Empire: An Urban Appraisal. New Haven: Yale University Press. Newman, O. (1972). Defensible Space. New York: Macmillan. Nye, J. S., Jr. (2008). The Powers to Lead (p. 2008). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rapoport, A. (1976). Sociocultural Aspects of Man-Environment Studies. In A.  Rapoport (Ed.), The Mutual Interaction of People and Their Built Environment: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (pp. 7–35). The Hague: Mouton. Rapoport, A. (1977). Human Aspects of Urban Form. Oxford: Pergamon. Rapoport, A. (1980). Cross-Cultural Aspects of Environmental Design. In I.  Altman, A.  Rapoport, & J.  F. Wohlwill (Eds.), Human Behavior and Environment: Advances in Theory and Research (pp.  7–46). New  York: Premium Press. Rapoport, A. (1982). The Meaning of the Built Environment: A Non-Verbal Communication Approach. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications. Schwartz, B. (1981). Vertical Classification: A Study in Structuralism and the Sociology of Knowledge. Chicago: University Press of Chicago. Sommer, R. (1974). Tight Spaces: Hard Architecture and How to Humanize It. New York: Prentice-Hall.

CHAPTER 9

Design and Politics Bruce Brown

I would like to suggest that the political sciences and the humanities could productively work with each other in meeting the still unfolding conditions of a twenty-first century. In doing so I will focus on one specific discipline within the arts and humanities that connects to all others—that is, design. If asked to explain the meaning of either politics or design, most people would likely have a clearer understanding of politics than they would design. Similarly, the possibility of an emerging relationship between design and politics in the twenty-first century may, at first glance, seem opaque. Perhaps the most obvious examples of such a relationship can be drawn from the previous century in which the invention of mechanical technologies, able to reproduce designed artefacts en masse, either coincided with, or served to stimulate, major social and political upheaval across Europe. For example, graphic designs by the Russian Suprematist El Lissitzky who produced propaganda posters in support of the Red Army after the Bolsheviks had fought their 1917 revolution; John B. Brown (*) Goldsmiths College, London, UK Royal College of Art, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. A. W. Rhodes, S. Hodgett (eds.), What Political Science Can Learn from the Humanities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51697-0_9

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Heartfield’s antifascist propaganda during World War II and, in particular, his famous image of a dove on a bayonet; Grapus, the Marxist design group, whose posters came to reflect the spirit of the May 1968 student riots in Paris; or the entire history of Polish political posters with, in particular, Jerzy Janiszewski’s 1980 design of the Solidarity logo becoming internationally known. All these examples of tangible images, symbolizing moments of intense social and political ferment, were designed to persuade and unite people behind a common cause by engraving images into collective public memory. In this chapter, however, I will not focus on the tangible products of design, whether objects or images, but on the more intangible processes they use to stimulate action and to influence public opinion. Design sits at the interface between two domains—the internal world of human memory and experience, and the external world of artificial things and systems. Design, as a way of thinking, is intrinsic to the human psyche but, as a distinct profession, it only emerged just over 200 years ago in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Now, the products of design surround us. From the climate-controlled air that we breathe, to the cars and planes that transport us, to the books we read and the films we watch, from the road signs that guide us, to the symbols on the page that you are now reading—we live in a world that is largely artificial by design. Among all other species, human beings are unique in at least two respects—our ability to design long-term memory and our capacity to redesign the natural world. Whereas every other living thing has a past only we humans have history. Our ability to connect isolated events from the past into coherent narratives is unique. Without long-term memory we would live in an ever-­ present moment of now—having no sense of past or identity. Furthermore, and uniquely, we can reconstitute the natural materials of our physical world to make, for example, artificial surfaces on which to conserve and circulate these narratives of culture. From clay and wax tablets, to papyrus scrolls and paper folios, to computer screens and mobile phones we have designed artificial agents on which to imprint and circulate artificial symbols that conserve our knowledge and ideas—all these being the artificial products of design. Overall, these designs serve to reify the abstract world of human thought into physical things that can be shared between people in a concrete form. So, these tangible artefacts of design help to build our reservoir of social intelligence and sustain social cohesion between people. The end goals of design are multifarious. Some have a strictly utilitarian purpose whereas others serve to transmit knowledge or values. For

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example, these could be: to overcome the limits of human anatomy through the design of devices such as bicycles or automobiles that enable our bodies to travel further and faster, or tools that help us to lift heavier weights or exert a tighter grip; to extend the capacity of human memory through forms of artificial intelligence built into designed objects such as computers; to create shelter and security through the design of buildings and cities; to invent symbols and signs that communicate the narratives of a society and help to establish identity; to provide information that helps us to navigate a landscape or a motorway, travel on the underground or use a device; to influence public opinion or the choices people make when deciding how to cast their vote or buy a product. Just as the products of design are ubiquitous, and its end goals multifarious, so is there no universally accepted definition for design. In its earliest stages of industrial production, design could have been described as a plan to make an artefact. Then, as design expanded throughout the twentieth century, it was variously described as, for example, ‘courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones’ (Simon 1996: 111) or ‘the human power of conceiving, planning, and making products that serve human beings in the accomplishment of their individual and collective purposes’ (Buchanan 2001: 9) or ‘the creation of compelling arguments that move people to action’.1 This range of approaches to design spans a shift of focus in the late twentieth century from the design of physical objects to the design of intangible systems. Indeed, our persistent understanding of design is still rooted in an earlier period of mechanical reproduction where design could only be defined through the addition of a qualifying adjective that represented either its professional discipline or material domain, for example, graphic design, industrial design, car design, fashion design, textile design, interior design, architectural design, garden design, kitchen design, and spatial design. Herbert Simon (a social and political scientist who pioneered artificial intelligence and decision making) reframed the end goals of design by proposing a shift away from the production of tangible things to the design of intangible systems. In The Sciences of the Artificial he wrote ‘the intellectual activity that produces material 1  This description of design is from an oral presentation by Tim Fife entitled ‘Exploring if a Design is Good, Beautiful and True’ given at the conference Exp’19—Experience and Principles of Design at Tongji University College of Design and Innovation, Shanghai, China, in May 2019.

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artefacts is no different fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient or the one that devises a new sales plan for a company or a social welfare policy for a state’ (Simon 1996: 111). In this context, he prioritizes design as a stand-alone discipline that is not defined, or constrained, by the types of physical objects it may produce or professional domains to which it belongs. Accordingly, Simon also set out to ‘discover and teach a science of design, a body of intellectually tough, analytic, partly formalizable, partly empirical, teachable doctrine about the design process’ (Simon 1996: 113). His aim was to re-establish design as a serious academic discipline for teaching and research within the University system as distinct from its artisanal origins in the Industrial Revolution where training via a Master was delivered through the trades Guilds. Simon perceived design, as a science of the artificial, that was of equal importance to the natural sciences. There are two factors that underpin, and unite, these various approaches to design. One is the imagination needed to envision artificial environments, systems, or things that either enhance human performance or better the human condition. We now take it for granted that, through design, ‘there is nothing more natural for a human being than the artificial’ (Ong 1998: 14). From the artificial intelligence born out of human memory, from the planes that allow us to fly, to the urban sprawl of neighbourhood communities, to the darkened halls of cinematic life, to the virtual war games played out in imagined space, we have designed, and now live in, worlds that are largely artificial. A second factor of design is its integration of utilitarian purpose and symbolic value. Whereas many everyday products have a practical use they are also designed to ‘send social messages, such as about one’s status, group affiliation and relationship with other individuals’ (Mithen 1996: 174). In this respect the design and circulation of physical objects and graphic symbols has become central to our creation of social intelligence and collective identity. But, often, if not largely, we tend to belittle the importance of design by focusing solely on its physical, or tangible, products and categorizing them as merely utilitarian or decorative. Consequently, I would like to discuss the power of design’s more intangible, rhetorical, qualities to influence mass behaviour and opinion. By this, I mean, for example, its ability to help us make sense of the world, form public opinion, establish someone’s status and power, create individual and collective identities, or govern complex social entities. It is, indeed, the integration of a physical object with a rhetorical purpose that has become characteristic of material culture from the mid-twentieth century onwards, along with the major expansion of design as a systematic profession.

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Richard Buchanan (who knew Herbert Simon when they both worked at Carnegie Mellon University) set out these overlapping purposes of design in a framework entitled the Four Orders of Design (Buchanan 2001: 12), which he continues to refine as the implications for design in the twenty-first century still unfold unfold (Buchanan 2018). Buchanan explains that each of the four orders is ‘a place for rethinking and reconceiving the nature of design. The orders are “places” in the sense of topics for discovery, rather than categories of fixed meaning’ (Buchanan 2001: 10). He goes on to explain that ‘the distinction between a place and a category may appear subtle, but it is profound. It illustrates what I regard as a fundamental shift in the intellectual arts that we employ to explore design in practice and research—a shift from grammar and logic in the early part of the twentieth century to rhetoric and dialectic’ (Buchanan 2018). To better understand this fundamental shift, between the first/ second and the third/fourth orders of design, along with the reference to design ‘Rhetoric and Dialectic’, I would like to first discuss some of the characteristics of design in the first two orders concerned with ‘Signs’ and ‘Things’. The antecedents of Buchanan’s first order of design stretch back to the appearance, some 35,000 years ago, of images painted deep inside caves and the graphic marks or symbols scratched into hard physical surfaces. The sudden appearance of such images and symbols is puzzling given that the neurological structures needed to create them had likely been in place within the human brain for many millennia before that. Clearly, something changed in human consciousness around this moment in time to cause a cultural explosion that set Europe ‘ablaze with the colour of cave art’ (Mithen 1996: 23). Though it is impossible to be certain what stimulated this shift in consciousness—towards the emergence of a modern human mind—the drive to design images and objects that reified abstract memories into some tangible form became the primary focus of human endeavour from that point onwards. Perhaps the first flickers of design thinking came with a conscious awareness that the intangible workings of human memory could be shaped and reshaped—that is, we can redesign ourselves as a part of the natural world. Unlike other organs of the human body, memory can be redesigned so that its biological limitations are enhanced. Before the invention of writing and printing the ability to command one’s own memory was an essential life skill necessary for personal survival and social collaboration. With the invention of writing these first exercises in the design of the

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artificial were described in an anonymous treatise simply titled the Ad Herennium (circa 86–82 bc). Of this text Frances Yates writes: There are two kinds of memory … one natural, the other artificial. The natural memory is that which is engrafted in our minds, born simultaneously with thought. The artificial memory is a memory strengthened or confirmed by training. A good natural memory can be improved by this discipline and persons less well-endowed can have their weak memories improved by the art. (Yates 1992: 20)

Yates (1992) also explains, ‘the ancient memories were trained by an art which reflected the art and architecture of the ancient world, which could depend on faculties of intense visual memorisation which we have lost [my emphasis]’. This underlines the fact that human memory is both highly visual and linked to physical artefacts. However, the assertion that ‘we have lost’ our command of these memories is, as I will later discuss, related to the design of tangible forms of artificial memory that now exist outside the human mind. A first step in this process came with a shift to the nature and purpose of physical objects. Though these were mostly designed with a primarily utilitarian purpose in mind—one that often extended the limits of the human physique in terms of, for example, cutting, hammering, or stitching—they also began to store and circulate information. To achieve this, the surfaces of objects were sometimes designed to carry images and symbols whereas, at other times, the symbolic form of an object was itself designed to convey information or values. Steven Mithen (1996, 174) described this shift by explaining that to simply think of physical objects as: … ‘decoration’ risks belittling their importance. They would have functioned to send social messages, such as about one’s status, group affiliation and relationship with other individuals, just as they do in our own society today. And, of course, these messages need not have been ‘true’; beads and pendants provide new opportunities for deception in … social tactics …

He goes on to say: It appears that all types of artefacts, including those that might appear to be mundane tools … became imbued with social information … In effect the ‘goal posts’ of social behaviour were moved; whereas for Early Humans the domains of hunting, toolmaking and socializing were quite separate, these

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were now so integrated that it is impossible to characterize any single aspect of Modern Human behaviour as being located in just one of these domains. Indeed, as Ernest Gellner stated: ‘the conflation and confusion of aims and criteria, is the normal and original condition of mankind’. (Mithen 1996: 174)

A second step came with the invention of writing as it slowly emerged around 30,000  years after the first cave paintings. The realization that memories of sounds could be linked to systems of symbols that, in turn, conveyed and conserved ideas was transformational in that it created a precise form of artificial memory outside the mind—one that would gradually come to replace our command of natural memory. Though we may take it for granted, or never stop to think about the fact, each visual symbol on the page you are now reading is linked back to a specific sound memory that has been permanently stored in the mind. And, we all possess the same system that links specific external symbols to specific internal memories. If all these precious links between the two domains were destroyed, then the lines you are now reading would be no more than a meaningless array of black squiggles. It is to this degree that we entirely depend on these precious links between external symbols and internal memories to make sense of the world—whether these are symbols for sounds, images, or ideas. During the long period of time, when visual symbols and physical objects were made and reproduced by hand, a gradual integration of form and content was achieved. Just as Mithen (1996) has explained there evolved a complete unity of purpose in the design of physical objects so that their practical utility and symbolic value were integrated. For example, the powerful integration of words and images within mediaeval manuscripts served to communicate belief systems that were central to the social cohesion of a group. However, because bound manuscripts such as, for example, The Book of Kells (800 AD) were produced through highly skilled hand labour; they could only exist in unique editions of one. Here, people had to make long journeys to stand in front of the physical object in order to absorb the official information that it contained. Once engraved in memory this information, now in the form of a personal possession, was there to be consulted throughout a lifetime. In this context the role of design in helping to transport information from a physical object into human memory was to grow in importance. In his treatise on memory Hugh of St. Victor (1096–1141) describes it in the following way:

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…it is a great value for fixing a memory-image that when we read books, we study to impress on our memory through our mental-image-forming power not only the number and order of verses or ideas, but at the same time the colour, shape, position, and placement of the letters, where we have seen this or that written, in what part, in what location (at the top, middle, or the bottom) we saw it positioned, in what colour we observed the trace of the letter or the ornamented surface of the parchment. Indeed, I think nothing so useful for stimulating the memory. (Hugh of St. Victor, cited in Carruthers 1990: 264)

Just as the permanence of such memories could not outlive their individual owners so were the narratives contained in physical manuscripts equally fragile. Of this Elizabeth Eisenstein observed: no manuscript, however useful as a reference guide, could be preserved for long without undergoing corruption by copyists, and even this sort of ‘preservation’ rested precariously on the shifting demands of local elites and a fluctuating incidence of trained scribal labour. Insofar as records were seen and used they were vulnerable to wear and tear. Stored documents were vulnerable to moisture and vermin, theft and fire. (Eisenstein 1983: 78–79)

In response to these conditions—in which the content and form of a manuscript could be easily corrupted—there emerged a gradual invention of technologies for the mechanical reproduction of physical objects that could exist in a single authoritative form—but en masse. This is encapsulated by Buchanan’s second order of design (see Fig. 9.1) where a first step in this process of mechanization came with the invention of printing from movable type, by Johannes Gutenberg circa 1439 in Germany. By enabling multiple copies of books to be produced—so that each one was identical to every other one, in all respects—it served to stabilize the fluidity of oral storytelling and handwritten symbols, also making possible their wider distribution to increasingly greater numbers of people. Printed books were the first form of artificial agent to faithfully carry the thoughts and ideas of one person into the imaginations of many other people. It was to radically change the ways in which we live, educate, and govern ourselves. As learning by reading started to grow so our command of memory began to weaken. Printing virtually destroyed the role of graphic images and symbols as mnemonic devices in favour of new, and permanent, forms of artificial memory located outside the mind. Therefore, the nature of the

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2nd Order

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Problems of Construcon Things

Problems of Acon Acons

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Interacon Design Acvies Services Processes Dialeccal Design Environments Organisaons Systems

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Fig. 9.1  Four orders of design

collective memory in a society started to change. Frances Yates in her account of Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris describes a scholar who: … deep in meditation in his study high up in the cathedral, gazes at the first printed book which has come to disturb his collection of manuscripts. Then, opening the window, he gazes at the vast cathedral …’Ceci tuera cela,’ he says. The printed book will destroy the building … [making] such huge built up memories, crowded with images, unnecessary. It will do away with a ‘thing’ [being] invested with an image and stored in the places of memory. (Yates 1992: 131)

In just 50 years, after Gutenberg established the first print workshop in Europe, around a further 200 presses had appeared throughout Western Europe so that, by 1500, ‘printers’ workshops could be found in every important municipal centre’ (Eisenstein 1983: 12). Some estimates suggest that around eight to twelve million books were produced in the first five decades of printing though it is hard to judge the scale and complexity

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of these editions. Certainly, the limitations of hand-operated printing presses, when combined with the demands of designing and producing complicated editions such as bibles, would constrain the numbers of individual volumes that could be produced and distributed. Although this early period of mechanization saw enormous expansion in the circulation of printed knowledge, it was the impact of the Industrial Revolution that caused its exponential growth. The application of natural power, such as steam, to industrial machinery led to an explosion in the volume of objects and images that could be produced in short periods of time. Friedrich Koenig’s invention of the steam-powered printing press in 1802, for example, made possible the production of over 1000 sheets of paper per hour, printed both sides. This revolutionized the production and distribution of both information and knowledge. This new age of industrial mass production also ushered in what the English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) described as a tyranny of one-over-many. These technologies empowered one person, or a small elite, to circumvent all of the political and social systems of the day to distribute narratives that would influence public opinion and human behaviour en masse. As the Industrial Revolution gathered pace, and the design profession began to expand, the previous integration between an object’s form and its content began to fragment. So, this new age of professional design began to focus on fulfilling a wide range of client briefs irrespective of a product’s potential effects on people or society. The work of design became increasingly agnostic, or apolitical, in its new role as handmaiden to an emerging industrial economy. All of this said, the social and economic progress that was achieved through design and technology in a brief 200-year period spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, brought enormous benefits and improvements to the quality of our lives, welfare systems, and the securities we now enjoy. This period could also be viewed as a short but intense transitional phase that has projected us out of one world order to be resettled in another—a journey into a new world order that is still unfolding before us and settlement yet to come. The willpower and the resources needed to fuel this intense period of social progress, in such a short period of time, came at a cost—one that included greater centralization of power and resources, into the hands of a few who owned the machinery of reproduction, and would then work on behalf of the many. This may seem to continue the Enlightenment idea of a social contract in which rational individuals agree to give up many of their natural rights to a ruling

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authority in return for political stability and other benefits in the social order. It was through the invention of powerful communications technologies and the design of sophisticated communications strategies that this consolidation of power and resources into the hands of a minority was rapidly advanced throughout the twentieth century to accelerate progress. As populations and the dominance of printed communications rapidly expanded through the newer technologies of radio, television, and film, an increasingly smaller number of people gained the power to reach multitudes. This offered the potential for mass persuasion and big investment, as well as raising the spectre of social instability. In response to the increasing complexity of social structures, and to manage the stability needed for social progress, there emerged a view of managing society in which people were seen as simple behaving systems. For example, in The Sciences of the Artificial Herbert Simon sets out to test the hypothesis that the seemingly complex behaviour of any living organism is a result of the environments in which it is located. In this respect he considered, in the following proposition, whether the phrase ‘ants’ may be interchangeable with ‘human beings’ to the same effect: Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behaviour over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves. (Simon 1996: 53)

This signals the beginning of a ‘fundamental shift’ (Buchanan 2001: 10) away from the design of ‘Signs’ and ‘Things’ in Buchanan’s four orders of design towards the design of ‘Thoughts’ and ‘Actions’ (see Fig. 9.1). Whereas Buchanan’s approach offers a new, though still formative, agenda for the twenty-first century—one that is based upon humanistic principles of dignity and respect2—an aim of this first shift in the early twentieth century was to shape people as obedient citizens by treating them as simple behaving systems. Whereas in earlier cultures each person could redesign their own memory resources, over which they retained command, from the early twentieth century onwards this power was transferred to outsiders now having the resources to govern and shape 2  One of many important reference points in Richard Buchanan’s overall philosophy is Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s (1463–1494) Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486) in which the concept of design as a means to shape the human condition may have been given its first point of reference.

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mass public opinion. This power shift was facilitated by several factors: first, a rise in literacy and the demise of visuality. As Victor Hugo noted, ‘such huge built up memories, crowded with images [will be] unnecessary’ (Yates 1992: 131). Second, the invention of artificial memory systems such as books and computers permanently stored memories outside the mind, leading to a condition that Yates described as ‘we moderns who have no memories at all’ (Yates 1992: 20). Last, the design of powerful communications technologies enabled minorities to reach mass audiences with highly persuasive narratives. In the latter case, artificial communications technologies, such as print, radio, and television, were not interactive but one-directional channels of communication that could facilitate the tyranny of a single authority over many obedient citizens. In the early to mid-twentieth century designers turned away from this emerging culture of persuasive rhetoric to focus on the form and styling of products. Because the industrial mass production of images and objects had started to saturate markets with a perplexing range of alternatives, designers were now called upon to influence consumer choice by creating things they might want to acquire. Accordingly, designers started to emphasize the desirability of a product over its usability. This stimulated a heroic period of products styled by a new generation of star designers. In America, designers such as Raymond Loewy and Norman Bel Geddes styled, and restyled, cars, trains, refrigerators, and all kinds of domestic goods. In Europe it saw the emergence of design as form—where, for example, the Bauhaus translated the values of mediaeval guilds into the design of new products that could be machine manufactured on an industrial scale using new materials such as tubular steel (in, e.g. Marcel Breuer’s cantilever chair)—and design as problem solving, through practitioners such as Dieter Rams and Arne Jacobson. All of these objects were designed to work differently, look eternally beautiful, and now, over 50 years later, have become cultural icons displayed in public museums. Perhaps, in all of these instances, such objects were designed to reflect notions of ‘modernity’ and ‘modern’ life at a time of social reconstruction after two world wars. Such design stimulated the birth of a new consumer society—one in which peoples’ wants and desires came before their needs and utility. It is not what people needed to have but what they wanted to acquire—or how they wanted to be seen—that now mattered. As designers began to focus down on the symbolic form of objects another group of people began to explore the intangible effects that design could have on human behaviour and public opinion. This saw exponential

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growth in the numbers of consultants, psychologists, and behavioural economists that started to engage with design. They all wanted to understand, our persistent tendency to make seemingly non-rational decisions when faced with free choice, as well as our endless appetite for distraction, in order to govern the public mind. The acknowledged pioneer of this new approach was Edward Bernays. He was born, in 1891, in Vienna of Jewish parents and the nephew of Sigmund Freud. Shortly afterwards he moved with his parents to America. After the First World War Bernays was sent to work at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 where a controversy arose over his proposed use of propaganda to disseminate American accomplishments and ideals internationally. Of this Bernays later wrote, in his 1928 book titled Propaganda: I am aware that the word propaganda carries to many minds an unpleasant connotation. Yet whether, in any instance, propaganda is good or bad depends upon the merit of the cause urged, and the correctness of the information published. (Bernays 2005: 48)

He was at pains to also assert that the origins of propaganda lay in actions aimed at propagating a faith or a truth. Of this Mark Miller explains that the word propaganda: … had been coined in 1622, when Pope Gregory XV, frightened by the global spread of Protestantism, urgently proposed an addition to the roman curia. The Office for the Propagation of the Faith (Congregatio de propaganda fide) would supervise the Church’s missionary efforts in the New World and elsewhere: ‘They are to take account of and to deal with each and every concern for the spread of the faith throughout the world.’ Far from denoting lies, half-truths, selective history or any of the other tricks that we associate with ‘propaganda’ now, that the word meant, at first, the total opposite of such deceptions. (Miller 2005: 9)

Learning from his war experience Bernays came to believe that an honest use of propaganda could be effectively applied in peacetime too for good purposes. Accordingly, he established himself as a public relations consultant in New York, with a wide range of clients—at the highest levels of politics and big business—including J.D. Rockefeller, Calvin Coolidge, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Eleanor Roosevelt and corporations like Proctor and Gamble, American Tobacco, CBS Corporation (Columbia Broadcasting System), General Electric, Dodge Motors, and

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so on. One of Bernays’ earliest, and most successful, campaigns was Torches of Freedom. It addressed the issue of women smoking, both at home and in public, which was a strict social taboo at the time. Here he linked the image of a cigarette to corresponding memories of the values and ideals of the women’s liberation movement. So, in the mind of each woman a cigarette became their own Torch of Freedom along with its associated values of woman’s emancipation from men and their equality with them. Bernays was acutely aware of the powerful effects of contemporary communications technologies in shaping the mass public mind with the role that both images and objects had to play in this process. He understood also that the rise of literacy through mass-produced books had eroded our capacity to handle visual images and that these new technologies of artificial memory were destroying our power to command the natural memories we possessed. Bernays said: Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man’s rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints. (Bernays 2005: 48)

Ultimately, Bernays (in advance of Herbert Simon) concluded that human beings were indeed simple behaving systems through which ‘the voice of the people … is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and clichés and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders’ (Bernays 2005: 109). In response, he developed a conviction that the proper functioning of an orderly and stable society must be based upon, what some of the leaders of today’s most populous nations would describe as, managed democracy. Bernays concluded there had to be an intelligent elite, charged with the responsibility of managing society’s affairs. He saw it as a responsibility of the few, to manage the collective memory of the many, through the design of propaganda. He said that the: conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible govern-

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ment which is the true ruling power of our country. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society … in almost every act of our daily lives … we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons … who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind … and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world. (Bernays 2005: 37–38)

Joseph Goebbels had read and absorbed Bernay’s book on Propaganda. From this he learned how images and objects could be linked to narratives that could then be locked into mass public memory. Accordingly, a simple graphic image, such as the swastika, could be invested with powerful memories, of national identity and purity of race, and so mobilize a population. These were reinforced through narratives conveyed by, for example, films such as Leni Reifenschal’s Triumph of the Will and grand public spectacles like the Nuremberg rallies (in all of which the swastika was a binding element). In the latter case public architecture, space, and illumination were designed to stimulate the visual memory of an immense Cathedral of Light—the scale and ritualistic nature of such spectacles being designed to invest fascist propaganda with a religious fervour to propagate its ‘faith’ and the ‘truth’. When, after World War II, Bernays was asked how he felt about his books being used as the basis for a destructive campaign against his own Jewish roots he was shocked but repeated his conviction that propaganda was not either good or bad, but could be used for social purposes or misused for antisocial ones. However, as the aftermath of war subsided, and the lies perpetrated by both sides became evident, so did public distrust and cynicism about propaganda grow to the point that it has still not recovered its earlier, more innocent, roots as a propagator of faith and truth. Nonetheless, irrespective of name changes to revive its public image, the underlying principles of propaganda continue to be used down to the present day. Cynicism and distrust of the consumer culture propagated by Bernays and others began to emerge in the second half of the twentieth century. It was accompanied by a charge that, in assuming the role of handmaiden to industry, design had abrogated its social and political responsibilities by concentrating on the form and styling of consumer products, to the exclusion of other moral responsibilities for the effects of such products on individuals and society. One of the early broadsides in this charge—that design was neither apolitical nor value-free—came from the British

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designer Ken Garland with publication of his 1964 pamphlet entitled First Things First and signed by 21 other designers. In this Garland advocated a more humanistic role for design, writing that we: … have been brought up in a world in which the techniques and apparatus of advertising have persistently been presented to us as the most lucrative, effective and desirable means of using our talents … In common with an increasing number of the general public, we have reached a saturation point at which the high pitched scream of consumer selling is no more than sheer noise. We think there are other things more worth using our skill and experience on … we are proposing a reversal of priorities in favour of the more useful and more lasting forms of communication … for worthwhile purposes. (Garland 1964)

On its publication Garland’s pamphlet was backed by the radical left-­ wing MP, Tony Benn, and received significant media coverage, being published in its entirety in the Guardian newspaper and leading to Garland’s appearance on BBC television. A decade later, in 1972, this broadside was to be continued with the publication of Victor Papanek’s Design for the Real World in which he asserted: There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them. And possibly only one profession is phonier. Advertising design, in persuading people to buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, in order to impress others who don’t care, is probably the phoniest field in existence today. Industrial design, by concocting the tawdry idiocies hawked by advertisers, comes a close second … As long as design concerns itself with confecting ‘trivial toys for adults’, killing machines with gleaming tailfins, and ‘sexed-up’ shrouds for typewriters, toasters, telephones, and computers, it has lost all reason to exist. (Papanek 1974: 9–10)

Herbert Simon’s The Sciences of the Artificial (which was published around the same time in 1969) offered a new theory of design that had aims in common with those of Garland and Papanek—each was more concerned with humanistic or social values. However, the approach of Garland and Papanek is tied to a designer’s moral responsibilities and social values in the process of designing tangible things. Simon’s redefinition of design as ‘courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones’ (Simon 1996: 111) steered design into the world of intangible social systems. The twenty-first century has seen a major expansion of design so

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that it is now claimed to be everywhere, embracing all those intangible systems and processes that govern the conduct of daily life. Currently, the practice of design can appear to have few defining edges—seemingly boundless, we hear about the design of business, of cities and nations, of cultural identities, of publics, of democracy, of corporate responsibility, and so on. The point at which Simon published The Sciences of the Artificial came after nearly 200 years of rapid progress once the Industrial Revolution took hold—a period that also saw the exponential expansion of design practices. It was a period in which all the machinery of industrial production and mass communication came into the control of minorities—either individuals or elites and rational individuals agreed to give up many of their natural rights to the ruling authority in return for political stability and other benefits in the social order. One condition through which this could be achieved was a society of obedient citizens in which every individual was a simple behaving system—all shaped by the products of design. Herbert Simon summarized it this way: I have argued that people—or at least their intellective component—may be relatively simple, that most of the complexity of their behaviour may be drawn from the environment, from their search for good designs. If I have made my case, then we can conclude that, in large part, the proper study of mankind is the science of design …. (Simon 1996: 138)

If we were then to substitute the word ‘people’ for ‘situations’ in Simon’s definition of design it would assume a different complexion—that is, everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing people into preferred ones. Though not intended to be interpreted in this way, it nevertheless offers a leitmotif for the evolution of design in the twentieth century. The invention of mechanically powered printing presses around 1800 set in motion a social revolution that was to change the ways in which we lived, educated, and governed ourselves. It also transformed how we were to record, conserve, and circulate knowledge. The rise of literacy, and learning through reading, began to weaken our command of visual images through which long-term memories are formed. Likewise, the invention of forms of artificial memory external to the mind—such as, for example, books and computers—turned us into ‘moderns who have no memories’ (Yates 1992: 20); or, at least, we retain a rich reservoir of memories but

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have lost the power to command them. In this context, the technologies of print, television, radio, and film are all one-way transactional systems that allowed minorities to direct propaganda at a mass audience. John Stuart Mill had rightly observed that the processes of industrial mass production would stimulate tyrannies of one-over-many. However, he also noted that a truly open democracy could bring the reverse tyranny of many-over-one. This condition has indeed emerged nearly 200 years after the first powered printing press with the invention of personal computers, the World Wide Web, and mobile smartphones. Together these technologies have brought a second social revolution of which we are still trying to make sense as it continues to unfold before us. Personal computers have succeeded in collapsing all the previous technologies of print, radio, television, and film into a single platform, owned by one person, who can then link with any other person located in any corner of the globe. They have also enabled any person to design, produce, and distribute information to anyone so breaking the monopolies of small elites and individuals over the supply and transaction of knowledge. Digital technologies, social networks, and mobile smartphones are upending our social fabric by undermining the authority of elites and stimulating new forms of collective action that the French philosopher Michel Foucault described as ‘biopolitical’. An early example of this is the conceptual framework designed by Gene Sharp entitled From Dictatorship to Democracy (Sharp 2010). Sharp designed the content of this e-publication to provide a set of practical, non-violent, actions that could destroy dictatorships. The combination of mobile smartphones and social networks enabled groups of disparate individuals to coordinate their actions around a single agenda through which they could then act with one voice. It was a many-to-one exercise in how-to-topple-your-tyrant—having a powerful impact in resistance movements around the world such as the Arab Spring and in, for example, Angola and Burma, and currently, in Sudan and Algeria. In the brief two centuries between the invention of the mechanically powered printing press circa 1800 and mobile digital networks circa 2000 there has been immense social progress and change. The technological inventions of these two moments in time have revolutionized the ways through which we live, educate, and govern ourselves. They have also changed our command of human memory and how we build social intelligence—often handing this command over to the interests of a minority elite. These two centuries also saw the rise and transformation of design

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from the industrial mass production of tangible things to an agent of more intangible, and complex, social systems that shape the way we experience life. Of course, all these things continue to exist at one and the same time—a new departure or invention does not always displace its predecessor. The interface, however, between our internal world of memory and experience, and the external world of artificial things and systems, is the point at which design operates—mediating between these two domains, hopefully, in our best interests. This is also the point, in the late 1970s, where Richard Buchanan’s ‘fundamental shift’ from grammar and logic in the early part of the twentieth century towards ‘rhetoric and dialectic’ in the twenty-first century (Buchanan 2001: 10) is located (see Fig. 9.1). It is also the point at which Herbert Simon’s neo-positivist approach to design and information processing gave way to a more humanistic view. Of this shift, Richard Buchanan observed that: Dialectic was something that Simon had no time for, because it was much more than information processing. Dialectic involved perspectives, alternative values in conflict, and social processes that were out of Simon’s range.3

In broad terms, Buchanan’s first and second orders of design [grammar and logic] deal with problems of communication and construction. These embrace the constituent elements of design and how we think about or may use them to achieve specific aims. The third and fourth orders (rhetoric and dialectic) deal with problems of action and thought. These embrace the negotiation of aims with others and the arts of persuasion employed by minorities to secure the achievement of such aims—or, as Tim Fife Fife put it, ‘the creation of compelling arguments that move people to action’.4 Buchanan is clear that all of these orders of design continue to exist at one and the same time with the higher order of rhetoric and dialectic serving to integrate all others. To put this another way: whereas much of design’s earlier challenges had to first focus on the invention of tools that could help us to make things, we now have all of the technologies at our disposal to make most anything we want; the real challenge is to ask ourselves what we want to achieve in a fragile world of shifting horizons, then, politically, how we can achieve these goals by design. 3 4

 Richard Buchanan, personal correspondence with the author.  See footnote 1.

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Though it may be possible to anticipate the direction of technological progress over the next five to ten years it is much harder to predict the effects this will have on human experience. Again, Herbert Simon foresaw one such effect of artificial intelligence and information processing when, as early as 1971, he wrote: In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. (Simon 1971: 40–41)

Whereas in the late twentieth century we talked of an Information Age, it is more accurate to say that in the twenty-first century, we live in an Attention Age—it is an age of attention deficit caused by the massive distractions made possible by digital technologies. Human attention is now such a scarce resource that, trying to catch it, is like fishing for gold in an ocean of data. Consequently, capturing our attention has become a highly competitive global industry—commonly referred to as the attention economy. And, once our attention has been caught, data on our actions, desires, and habits is then harvested and monetized for others to make profit from. This condition, simply, makes it increasingly difficult for people to identify choices or take informed decisions about the things that will affect their lives. Throughout the twentieth century the one-directional nature of communications technologies gave elites and minorities the power to treat people as if they were simple behaving systems in order to maintain the stability of increasingly large and complex societies. The openly democratic and interactive nature of twenty-first-century technologies has changed all of this by causing a power shift from a minority to the majority. With the ability to freely harvest, produce, and circulate ideas, people now have the independence to become complex life-worlds—each at the centre of their own knowledge universe. This independence also allows every person to cast a vote, or make a choice, based on what they know. Given the avalanche of reliable and unreliable information that now vies for attention, we should not be surprised, therefore, when the outcomes of public referenda or elections either confound predictions or seem irrational. The fixity of a previous industrial age seems to have been replaced by a digital fluidity that now renders the edges between things

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more liquid—and, hence, capable of movement. For example, the line between an open democracy and mob rule can easily shift just as the border between human memory and actual experience is fluid. As we enter a new age of possibilities and uncertainties it may be fair to ask how, and if, the next generation of designers and leaders will be prepared for the challenges ahead. In many, if not most countries, the school system is driving the subjects that foster imagination and innovation, like design and craft, out of the classroom. In many University design departments, the curriculum does not look to a future in the twenty-first century. Often, it remains narrowly focused on a twentieth-century model of design that has not expanded in line with other forms of social and technological progress. It seems to remain rooted in a culture where the design of the form and utility of tangible things is a value-free activity. Alongside this, understanding for example the design of intangible social systems and the powers of both rhetoric and propaganda to induce action are important topics not often taught or understood. Overall, design courses need to more fully acknowledge that the products of design are not just physical things but human experience—they are the thoughts, choices, and feelings of real people in a social context—and then design the curriculum accordingly. Conversely, there are academic disciplines other than design that, increasingly, appreciate design to be a fundamental agent when seeking to influence opinion, behaviour, social systems, or situations. So, they are building these topics into their curriculum offers in, for example, business and marketing, medicine, patient care, human geography, the environment, and law. This has supported the design thinking movement to expand into areas of social innovation and social process as well as law and the formation of public policy. If politics is, for the sake of this discussion, the good governance of a social or cultural system, along with the complex of relations between people living within it, then the design of actions aimed at achieving this goal must be a priority. One leitmotif of the twentieth century has been the power acquired by elites and minorities—through the design of intangible social systems—to change existing people into preferred ones; that is, to transform autonomous citizens into obedient consumers. This was largely through new communications technologies that empowered controlling minorities to deliver propaganda and rhetoric to mass audiences. In the late 1970s and early 1980s Michel Foucault described these technologies of power as technologies of the self and technologies of the market. Technologies of the self being those ‘tools’ (methods and techniques)

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that people use to redesign themselves to establish personal identity and create self-esteem. Possibly the first technologies of the selfemerged with the design of artificial memory systems through which individuals maintained the power to command those symbols and sayings that made up their own knowledge pool. Alongside this are the technologies of the market—these being concerned with the design and consumption of goods that help people to define what they are or who they desire to be. Indeed, it is the point of intersection between these two technologies—of the self and the market—where the equilibrium between individual and society may be sustained. In the early twentieth century, however, new communications technologies shifted this balance heavily towards the market. Edward Bernays pioneered the use of market technologies to first create then satiate peoples’ inner desires. This was achieved through the design of consumer products conveying symbols of personal identity and status that went beyond an artefact’s utilitarian purpose. Although, initially, there was a need to create new consumer markets (amidst a concern that the capitalist system of industrial manufacture may go bust through an oversupply of goods) these strategies were soon used to exercise power over mass public opinion. Bernays understood that powerful technologies could command mass human memory so concluding that the ‘conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society’ (Bernays 2005: 37–38). Herbert Simon proposed a new agenda for design based on social purpose rather than market drive. This, however, remained consistent with a twentieth-century view of people as simple behaving systems having cognitive limitations that stemmed from their own intellectual capacities and the sources of information through which to make choices. Throughout this period, it became evident that when faced with choice, people demonstrated a persistent tendency to make non-rational decisions. Recent assertions that liberalism is obsolete, that we need illiberal states or managed democracies, all seem to reflect the will of minorities to retain power over the new frontiers of biopolitics opened by interactive social media, mobile networks, and the World Wide Web. By linking all world citizens to all others these new channels of communication have, so far, circumvented all the political levers of power and governance employed in the twentieth century. They also have launched an avalanche of data that— reliable or unreliable—serves to kidnap our attention and distract us. If open democracy is a goal then how people will, in future, make decisions about complex issues over which they may have insufficient reliable

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information is a challenge. Cass Sunstein, who was Head of Obama’s Office for Regulatory Affairs, believed that too much choice would confuse voters. He, and his co-author Richard Thaler in their recent publication Nudge (2009), raised serious questions about the rationality of many judgements and decisions that people make. In response, they re-envisioned the idea of managed democracy as libertarian paternalism. Here they are careful to underline that libertarian paternalism does not involve the coercion associated with propaganda. This said, the systems of propaganda pioneered in the mid-twentieth century continue to operate—but, now, within the dark underbelly of digital networks: … hate and fear are being sown online all across the world. Not just in Britain and America, but in France and in Hungary and Brazil and Myanmar and New Zealand. And we know there is this dark undertow which is connecting us all globally. And it is flowing via the technology platforms. But we only see a tiny amount of what’s going on on the surface. (Cadwalladr 2019)

Parallel to this, however, the technologies of self remain intact with images, objects, and words continuing to embed themselves in human memory and imagination. This said, twentieth-century market forces, and politics, temporarily wrestled the power to command such memories away from individuals into the hands of minorities. It is easy to underestimate the powerful effects propaganda may stimulate or, the seemingly irrational reactions that dormant memories can induce, when some outsider finds the power to resuscitate them through images, songs, or poems of, say, national identity or religion. For example, in his Wolfson lectures at Oxford University Thomas Butler tried to explain why previously peaceful neighbours in Bosnia, Croatia, or Serbia one day turned to slaughter fellow human beings with whom they had previously lived in a state of peaceful coexistence for many years. He wrote: Memory, as transmitted through folk songs, epic poems and oral traditions has the power to destroy empires, as water has the strength to crack stone. Men die for Memory. (Vladimir Dedijer, as cited in Butler 1989: 4)

Freedom and democracy are not inevitable nor are they guaranteed— they have to be fought for. But, the battle is now one of images and imaginings played out in human memory. These are the ancient strategies of propaganda along with dialectic and rhetoric as set out in Richard

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Buchanan’s Four Orders of Design. In this he offers a new, yet formative, strategy for design in the twenty-first century that is based on human dignity and respect. Understanding how the design of intangible social systems—along with the design of tangible images and artefacts—can influence behaviour, and the choices that people make, may bring design out of its apolitical shadows to help shape governmentality in the twenty-­ first century.

References Bernays, E. (2005). Propaganda. Brooklyn, NY: Ig Publishing. Buchanan, R. (2001). Design Research and the New Learning. Design Issues, 17(4), 3–23. Buchanan, R. (2018). Creativity and Principles in the Flourishing Enterprise. Enterprise UX.  Retrieved June 4, 2019, from https://rosenfeldmedia.com/ eux2018/uncategorized/trip-notes-creativity-principles-flourishingenterprise-richard-buchanan/. Butler, T. (1989). Memory: History, Culture and the Mind. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Cadwalladr, C. (2019). Facebook’s Role in Brexit—And the Threat to Democracy. Retrieved July 8, 2019, from https://www.ted.com/talks/carole_cadwalladr_ facebook_s_role_in_brexit_and_the_threat_to_democracy/transcript. Carruthers, M. (1990). The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Mediaeval Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eisenstein, E. (1983). The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garland, K. (1964). First Things First. Retrieved June 23, 2019, from https:// web.archive.org/web/20070701150225/http://www.kengarland.co.uk/ KG%20published%20writing/first%20things%20first/index.html. Miller, M.  C. (2005). Introduction. In E.  L. Bernays & M.  C. Miller (Eds.), Propaganda (pp. 9–33). New York: Ig Publishing. Mithen, S. (1996). The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art and Science. London: Thames and Hudson. Ong, W. J. (1998). Digitization Ancient and Modern: Beginnings of Writing and Today’s Computers. Communication Research and Trends, 18(2), 4–20. Papanek, V. (1974). Design for the Real World (2nd ed.). Herts: Paladin. Sharp, G. (2010). From Dictatorship to Democracy (4th ed.). East Boston: The Albert Einstein Institution. Retrieved June 23, 2019, from https://www.aeinstein.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/FDTD.pdf. Simon, H. A. (1971). Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World. In M.  Greenberger (Ed.), Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest (pp. 40–41). Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press.

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Simon, H.  A. (1996). The Sciences of the Artificial (3rd ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Thaler, R., & Sunstein, C. (2009). Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness. London: Penguin. Yates, F. A. (1992). The Art of Memory (2nd ed.). London: Pimlico.

CHAPTER 10

Persuasive Comics Randy Duncan

For many decades, editorial cartoons have influenced public opinion, legislation, and the fates of politicians. Hopefully the venerable art form will never totally disappear, but its role in political discourse does seem to be diminishing. At the beginning of the twentieth century, US newspapers employed approximately 2000 editorial cartoonists, but by 2010, there were ‘fewer than 40 staff cartoonists, and that number continues to shrink’ (Herb Block Foundation 2011). In June 2019, editorial page director James Bennet provoked a furore when he announced The New York Times will no longer publish daily editorial cartoons in its international edition (the domestic edition seldom publishes editorial cartoons). CNN anchor Jake Tapper (2019) finds the move typical of the Gray Lady’s ‘sneering attitude towards editorial cartooning’ and Jeet Heer (2019) attributes the decision to the newspaper’s ‘sniffy disdain’ for cartooning and ‘the prissiness of a James Bennet’. On the other hand, Bennet’s decision could be indicative of the evolution of drawn political commentary in newspapers and magazines. In 2012, Farhad Manjoo urged the Pulitzer committee to look beyond the ‘timeworn form’ of single-panel editorial cartoons because ‘even the best

R. Duncan (*) Henderson State University, Arkadelphia, AR, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. A. W. Rhodes, S. Hodgett (eds.), What Political Science Can Learn from the Humanities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51697-0_10

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ones traffic in blunt, one-dimensional jokes, rarely exhibiting nuance, irony, or subtext’ (cited in Rothbard 2015). Bennet’s official statement about the decision seems to imply that longer form ‘visual journalism’ (i.e. comics) can ‘express nuance, complexity’ that are lacking in single-panel editorial cartoons. Bennet seems proud of the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning that was awarded to a comic book serialized in 20 parts on the New York Times’ online opinion section and says ‘we intend to do more such work’ (2019). In the twenty-first century, there has been a noticeable shift away from the editorial cartoon and towards comics as a form of drawn commentary on political issues or advocacy for causes. Editorial cartoons and comics are both part of a continuum of cartooning practices. There are a range of cartooning practices on that continuum that have been designated comics because they contain at least two discrete areas (usually bordered panels) of images that are juxtaposed in a deliberate sequence. Because most comics scholars resist applying a precise, and reductive, definition to comics, the boundaries of this range can be fuzzy. Yet, the juxtaposition of multiple panels makes comics a substantially different art form from editorial comics, which, in the vast majority of instances, consist of only one panel. Comics readers must perform closure, ‘creating a whole from fragments’, to various levels (between panels, amongst panels on a page, and between pages) in order ‘to synthesize (or blend) sequences of panels into events, and those sequences of events into an overall story’ (Duncan and Smith 2015: 153–154). Arguably, editorial cartoons and comics are also distinct mediums of communication. Even though editorial cartoons and comic strips were both segments of the newspaper medium they occupied different locations (the editorial page and the ‘funny pages’) and partially discrete audiences (children who loved the comics seldom read the editorial page, and some serious adults who savoured the editorial page might never have glanced at the comics section). Comic books appeared on newsstands alongside newspapers but were obviously a different type of product and were produced by an industry dissimilar from the newspaper industry. The internet and apps have provided new locations for editorial cartoons and comics and somewhat blurred the medium distinctions. Why will this chapter will focus on comics (comic strips, comic books, web comics, graphic novels, and short, but still multi-panel, comics that appear online or in a printed anthology) rather than editorial cartoons? First, the role of editorial cartoons in political discourse has already

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received considerable attention from political scientists and communication scholars. During the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, when comics were not considered respectable enough to study, there were hundreds of journal articles and many books about editorial cartoons. Editorial cartooning was the focus of the Spring 2007 issue of PS: Political Science & Politics, the journal of the American Political Science Association. However, other than a few notable exceptions (Worcester 2017), political scientists have not turned their attention to comics. Second, comics might be more persuasive than editorial cartoons. Ilan Danjoux questions the persuasive power of single-panel editorial cartoons, noting that ‘with no space for discursive reasoning or evidentiary support … cartoons only corroborate or validate suspicions already held by viewers’ (Rothbard 2015). Also, due to their placement on the editorial page and their direct engagement with the political debates of the moment, we know that editorial cartoons are intended to be persuasive messages, and, especially if the message seems counter to our beliefs and values, we are on the defensive and primed to generate counterarguments. By contrast, we let down our defences when we read comics strips or comic books because we consider them to be ‘enjoyable rather than manipulative’ (Turner 1977: 27). Even if a reader modifies an attitude or a belief based on reading a comic, she does not always perceive the change to be the result of an argument made by an external persuader. Because visual arguments are not always explicit they can require greater participation and mental effort on the part of the reader, and thus the visual argument is ‘more of a product of his or her own mind than it would be if the argument were completely explicit’ (Messaris 1997: xviii). Third, comics’ creators, with multiple panels or pages at their disposal, have a more robust toolbox of persuasive techniques than editorial cartoonists. Comics’ creators, whether they be cartoonists (who both write and draw the comic) or collaborators (writer, penciller, inker, colourist, and letterer), can influence the cognitive and affective responses to a comic through strategic choices about what to show (encapsulation), how to show it (composition), and how to present the relationships of panels on the page or screen (layout). It is possible for the comics’ form to be utilized for abstract creations or visual poems, but most comics that contain a political message, whether they be fiction or nonfiction, tell a story. Such comics begin with the cartoonist or writer imagining, often visualizing, a narrative. However, only a

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small percentage of that imagined narrative is shown in a comic. A cartoonist, or writer and artist working together, must select the key moments of the narrative, each of which will be presented in a discrete area of the page that comics theory designates as a panel. Comics pioneer Will Eisner (1985: 309) coined the term encapsulation for this process of deciding what to show within a specific panel. Traditionally, lines have been drawn around panels to create panel borders, but it is not an essential aspect of encapsulation. It should be noted that on the comics page or screen words are images to be seen, and in comics theory the term ‘image’ can refer to both the pictorial and the linguistic elements within a panel. Deciding which words to include in a panel (usually within captions, dialogue balloons, or thought balloons) is also part of the encapsulation process. Each reader creates his or her own narrative by weaving together the discrete panels with inferences about the implied, but not shown, actions or events that occur between the panels. Readers must also make inferences about the functions the images serve in relation to the diegesis. The terms that follow utilize the concept of diegesis, all the elements of the world presented in a narrative, as it has been established in film studies and narratology (see e.g. Neumeyer 2009: 26). Readers should consider whether the images in the panel are to be perceived as something (person, object, or phenomena) present in the world of the story (the diegesis). If so, these are diegetic images. Should the images be perceived as a character’s interior reality (thoughts, emotions, or state of mind) that would not be visible to anyone within the world of the story? If so, these are semi-­ diegetic images. Should the images be perceived as not existing at all in the world of the story (narration, author commentary, or visual metaphor)? If so, these are hermeneutic images. Most hermeneutic images, particularly those operating as visual metaphors, cannot be taken at face value and require some interpretation on the part of the reader (Duncan 2012: 43–54). Most cartoonists, but particularly those attempting to affect the attitudes or actions of their readers, hope that readers interpret each image in accordance with the function the cartoonist intended. Thus, intentionality about image function must be part of the comics creator’s encapsulation process. For comic books and graphic novels, the page can operate as the unit of meaning. Early in the process of creating a comic, encapsulation decisions are made about what to show at the level of the page. Most artists use thumbnail sketches as a way of planning which panels to put on a page.

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Thumbnail sketches are also a useful tool for making decisions about the sequencing, juxtaposition, and relative size of the panels on a page. These decisions about the layout of the page put a structure in place that will influence how readers perceive relationships between the panels on a page and the meanings that might result from those relationships. Encapsulation, layout, and composition are not discrete operations that take place in a strict order; they are enmeshed and interdependent. For instance, even as artists are making their thumbnail sketches for the purposes of encapsulation and layout. They cannot help but make some basic decisions about the composition of the images in the panels. Contemporary comics artists might ‘draw’ in several ways—a pencil, pen, or brush on Bristol board, a mouse to interface with a computer, a stylus to make marks on a tablet screen, or even paint on a canvas. Whatever, the technology, as artists compose the elements within a panel every ‘mark’ has potential consequences for the meanings that will be derived from the panel. The lines with which an image is drawn can affect how readers react to the image. Drawn lines are never expressionless and ‘can’t help but characterize their subject in some way. Straight lines might be considered serious or stern. Curving, flowing lines might be perceived as beautiful or friendly’ (Bertamini et al. 2016: 154). The quality of a line can be altered (delicate, thick, elegant, or jagged) to express an impressive ‘range of moods and emotions’ (McCloud 1993: 126). The quality of the line is usually determined by, or at least compatible with, the mode of representation the artist has chosen. The cartoon mode, following in the tradition of caricature, presents ‘simplified and exaggerated characters’ in a drawn but often ‘unstable and infinitely mutable physical reality’ (Witek 2011: 29). The naturalistic mode presents characters and settings as plausible representations of either the world we know or a fantastic world that adheres (or at least attempts to adhere) to its own rules of magic or laws of speculative science. These modes refer to visual styles and narrative styles that can vary quite a bit in practice and are not always mutually exclusive. The realism of the naturalistic mode can create alienation because the reader can see that the character does not look like her, while the simplification of the cartoon mode can create identification because the reader is allowed see herself in the character. However, too much exaggeration of features in the cartoon mode creates a specificity that marks a character as

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an Other, and exaggeration can further alienation by stressing the imperfections of the other. Comics’ scholar and artist John Jennings believes that in comics ‘the images themselves work better as open ciphers that are filled by the audience’ (cited in Batiste et al. 2018: 12). Aspects of composition such as mode of representation, line quality, panel shape, colour, shading, simulated shadows, angle, distance, and character point-of-view, even when abstracted from any narrative, are likely to evoke some emotional response. When readers connect these aspects of composition to what they already feel or know, the resultant connotations have even more persuasive potential. Some of these contexts are likely to be widely shared, such as an instinctual wariness of the dark, or the association of facial expressions with certain emotions, while other will be based on personal experiences and perspectives. Encapsulation, layout, and composition are the operations a cartoonist must perform in reducing an imagined narrative to panels on pages. However, while comics are reductive in creation, they are additive in reading. As readers deal with elements of composition and of layout, they must also actively participate in the construction of meaning. Marshall McLuhan (1994: 161) recognized this when he classified comics as a cool medium that require audience participation. Comics’ creator and theorist Scott McCloud (1993: 63) borrows from Gestalt psychology to describe this additive process as closure, emphasizing what readers imagine in the gutter, the white space between panels. Building  on McCloud’s ideas and on theories of perception, cognition, and emotional engagement, philosopher Will Simpson (2018: para 27) concludes that comics readers ‘may respond emotionally to either depicted content or to implied content that is available only via the enactment of closure’. Looking at this additive process from the perspective of rhetorical theory, Kathleen Turner (1977: 28) perceives it as enthymematic. While completing a message perceived as argumentation might engage critical thinking, Roland Barthes (1993: 11) believes that if a popular text is perceived to be entertainment one is more likely to employ a mythic thinking mode, drawing on personal experience and perspectives, to complete the meaning of the text.

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A Brief History of Persuasive Comics It should be noted that this chapter focuses on comics in the Western world, primarily those comics engaging with North American politics. While Japanese comics (manga) contain many of the persuasive techniques discussed later in this essay, they have a distinct history in terms of origins, development, and functions. Using a series of juxtaposed images to tell stories seems to have been one of the earliest forms of human communication. Some comics’ scholars (Perry and Aldridge 1971; Herdeg and Pascal 1972; McCloud 1993), perhaps in a bid for respectability by association, have argued that ancient cave paintings, hieroglyphics, Trajan’s column, stained glass windows depicting the stations of the cross, and the Bayeux Tapestry are essentially comics. However, it was with the introduction of the moveable type printing press to Europe that comics became a recognizable art form and medium of communication in the western world. Relief printing techniques, such as woodcut and metalcut, could be used to print pictures, and they were compatible with the moveable type printing press. Such techniques allowed text and pictures to be printed together on the same page. Scores of broadsides (printed on one side of a large sheet of paper), broadsheets (printed on both sides), pamphlets, and satirical prints employed multiple, related images in ways that qualify them as proto-comics. Scenes from the Bible, natural disasters, violent crimes, and the martyrdom of saints were popular subjects. Broadsides illustrating any sort of violence were popular. A few of them, such as The Tortures of Saint Erasmus (circa 1460), and the gory martyrdom of Carthusians monks (1564), used a series of juxtaposed panels to present a rough narrative and could justifiably be called comic strips. The Protestant Reformation, which might not have been successful without the printing press, sparked plenty of violent conflicts and a propaganda war that raged for centuries. In some instances, the arguments were made almost exclusively by means of pictures. The pamphlet Passional Christi und Antichristi (1521), produced under the supervision of Martin Luther, contains 13 pairs of large woodcut illustrations by Lucas Cranach the Elder, which contrast the holy actions of Jesus with what Luther saw as the corrupt actions of Pope Leo X. Underneath each image ‘theologian Philip Melanchthon and lawyer Johann Schwertfeger provided moralising commentaries’ (Wareham 2019).

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Political commentary in visual form became more biting with the development of caricature, portraits which exaggerate or distort a person’s features. Caricature might have begun in the late sixteenth century in Italian salons, where artists drew comically distorted portraits of one another in a spirit of (mostly) jovial comradery. Perhaps it was the resultant hurt feelings that alerted the artists to the fact that they had stumbled upon an effective weapon for vexing rivals or ideological opponents. Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s 1676 drawing of the supposedly hypochondriac Pope Innocent XI as bony and bed-ridden is an early example of caricature used to ridicule an extremely powerful person (Poseq 2007: 16). From that point on, despite the danger, powerful figures were frequent targets of caricature and visual satire. And one of the favourite targets of the seventeenth century was King Louis XIV of France. Louis burned most of the caricatures he could get his hands on and even burned a caricaturist alive (Goldstein 1989: 90). In 1685, he decreed that all prints had to be submitted to the authorities before being published. However, a form of communication that can be created quickly and at minimal expense is difficult to suppress. Satirical prints were produced in Holland and smuggled into France to be sold ‘under the counter’ (Goldstein 1989: 90; Wright 1875: 357). A few generations later, when the people of France rose up and toppled the monarchy, the ‘citizens’ who ran the country were also rather thin-skinned about being caricatured. Even though the Declaration of the Rights of Man, adopted in 1789  in the wake the French Revolution, advocated freedom of speech and the press, a censor for caricature was also appointed the same year (Caricatures 2010). By the mid-nineteenth century, illustrated broadsides and satirical prints faced stiff competition from illustrated magazines such as Glasgow/ Northern Looking Glass (1825–1826), Le Charivari (1832–1937), Punch (1841–2002), and Harper’s Magazine (1850–). It was the cartoons, and occasional comics, lampooning the rich and powerful in these publications that helped to establish editorial cartooning. When, in the 1870s, Thomas Nast’s satirical cartoons in Harper’s Weekly helped bring down corrupt New York City politician William ‘Boss’ Tweed Nast became a celebrity and the profession of editorial cartooning was firmly established. At pretty much the same time as the modern editorial cartoon was being developed, another cartooning art form made its appearance almost fully formed. In the 1830s, Swiss teacher Rodolphe Töpffer began making multiple page comics to amuse his friends and students. His caricature was

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not aimed at any political target, but rather used for humorous effect in depicting the antics of the foolish or overwrought. Töpffer completed seven comic stories, and at the urging of his friend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, he eventually submitted them to various magazines. Töpffer’s comics were translated and disseminated, not always with his blessing. One of the first proto-comic books in the United States, The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck (1842) was pirated from an unauthorized edition of Töpffer’s Histoire de M. Vieux Bois (1837) that had been printed in England. The 63-page comic book (arguably graphic novel) Journey to the Gold Diggins, by Jeremiah Saddlebags (1849) was an original production but the illustrators, James Alexander Read and Donald F. Read, drew in a style reminiscent of Töpffer. Based on the art style, the pacing, the slapstick humour, and even some plot points, Martin Lund concludes that ‘it would be surprising indeed if Jeremiah Saddlebags in these instances was not directly inspired by the Töpffer plagiarism. At the very least, it appears certain that the album as a whole was inspired by it’ (2014). Rodolphe Töpffer might be considered the father of the comic book, but the production of comic books in his wake was sporadic. It took the popularity of another comic form, the comic strip, to spark the birth of the comic book industry. There had been occasional comic strips on broadsides for centuries and more recently in magazines, but comic strips became a recognized and beloved art form in newspapers. Hogan’s Alley (1895), popularly known as The Yellow Kid, was technically not a strip (sequence of panels) at all, but usually one large, busy panel. However, the comic’s appearance in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World appeared to give Pulitzer an edge in the circulation war with his rival William Randolph Hearst. In 1896, Hearst gave cartoonist Richard F. Outcault a huge raise to produce a Yellow Kid comic strip for his New York Journal. Other, actual comic strips soon began appearing in newspapers. Like Hogan’s Alley, The Katzenjammer Kids (1897) strip portrayed the lives of immigrants and was accessible to immigrants who could not read English. Comic strips proved to have appeal across the socio-economic spectrum and be an important tool for building newspaper circulation. In 1903, the children’s book publisher Cupples & Leon saw the comic strips as a business opportunity and published a collection of The Katzenjammer Kids strips. By 1934, they had published over a hundred 52-page reprint collections (essentially comic books) of a wide variety of comic strips.

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Newspaper syndicates preferred entertaining, inoffensive comic strips and thus one of the few early strips with an overt political philosophy was Little Orphan Annie (1924). Most of the time, creator Harold Gray rather gently promoted a philosophy hard-working, heroic capitalism, but occasionally he used the strip to editorialize against the policies of President Roosevelt and more left-leaning papers would refuse to run that particular strip. Eventually more political comic strips such as Lil’ Abner (1934) and Pogo (1948) became popular. However, their political undercurrents might have escaped the notice of many readers who turned to them for the humour and adventure. The persuasive potential of comic strips and comic books was not fully activated until the advent of World War II. Historian Cord Scott (2014: xi) notes that ‘…as World War II began, comic books became an integral part of wartime propaganda’. Following the debut of Superman in 1938, superheroes became the dominant comic book genre. Those early versions of superheroes were paragons of goodness, and although the phrase would not be introduced until 1942, it was clear that they all fought for truth, justice, and the American way. On the cover of Captain America Comics # 1 the hero is punching Hitler in the jaw. This comic was produced nearly a year before the United States entered the war! Once the United States declared war on the Axis powers comics were enlisted in the propaganda war. Some of this propaganda was a natural by-product of the Manichean nature of the primitive stage of the superhero genre, some was a reflection of the ideology of the comics creators, and some a result of government influence. ‘Comics were clearly regarded as an essential element of the information arsenal by the OWI [Office of War Information]’ (Chapman et al. 2015: 103). Comic strip creators were among the more than 600 artists who received a weekly Letter to Graphic Artists from the OWI (Chapman et  al. 2015: 106). A November 1942 OWI internal memo indicates the attempt to influence content was extended to comic books (Chapman et al. 2015: 105). The OWI also commissioned original comic strips that were carried by many newspapers. According to a December 1942 internal memo from Elmer Davis, Director of the Office of War Information, ‘Cartoons, advancing OWI campaigns, are distributed […] to an average of 1000 newspapers weekly. These include four panels in which humour is used to drive home informational themes, one inspirational cartoon, and a weekly panel, “Kid Salvage”’ (cited in Chapman et al. 2015: 105). Kid Salvage was about a boy who aided the war effort by collecting scrap metal.

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OWI created comics were not confined to home front propaganda. The Nightmares of Lieutenant Ichi or Juan Posong Gives Ichi The Midnight Jitters was developed by the OWI in Brisbane, Australia for use in the Pacific theatre. The 14-page comic book was distributed in the Philippine islands to encourage resistance to the Japanese forces. The protagonist, a Filipino named Juan Posong, constantly harasses the not-too-bright and easily flustered Japanese officer Lieutenant Ichi. Ichi fears the return of General McArthur. It makes use of ‘the “Cult of MacArthur” theme that American propagandists pushed in the Philippines’ (Friedman n.d.). Most of the comics that directly addressed the war, including those created by the OWI, were reinforcing stereotypes of American wholesomeness and the degeneracy of the foreign enemy (Scott 2014: xii). In March 1942, the Office of Facts and Figures, which would be subsumed by the OWI a few months later, issued a report on war-related content in comics strips, including the stereotypes of the enemy: ‘Japanese are fierce, toothy, bespectacled and cruel. German officers are bold, tall, thin-faced, with military stiffness. German soldiers are inclined to be fat, loutish, sloppy, decidedly different from the “typical American boys”’ (cited in Chapman et al. 2015: 110). These visual stereotypes were even more prevalent in superhero comic books. Superheroes had been an effective propaganda tool during World War II, but as patriotic fervour diminished superhero comic books, especially those featuring patriotic heroes, were pushed aside on the newsstands by romance, teen humour, crime, and horror comics. The title Captain America Comics ran until 1949 but was renamed Captain America’s Weird Tales for the final two issues before being cancelled. In 1953, Captain America made a few appearances in anthology comics, and in 1954 his own title was revived for three issues. This version of Captain America is full-throated Cold War propaganda. In Young Men # 24 (1953) Cap refers to communists as ‘the Nazis of the 1950s’. Across the top of the covers of the eponymously titled comics are the words ‘Captain America … Commie Smasher’. Issue # 77 has the cover blurb ‘Striking Back at the Soviet’ and issue # 78 ‘See Captain America Defy the Communist Hordes’. The 50-page comic book Is This Tomorrow: America Under Communism (1947), distributed by the Catechetical Guild, is a detailed scenario of how Communists might gain power and radically change America. By the end of the story, Communist politicians have taken total control of the media, have outlawed guns and religion, and are burning books. However, a couple of text pages at the end of the comic give advice about what readers

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can do to prevent such a future, including ‘You must recognize the Communist Party line in action and separate Communist propaganda from the factual news of the day’. In Threat to Freedom: A Picture Story Exposing Communism (1965) young Leah and Joe ask their Sunday School teacher about communism and he tutors them through a series of lessons designed to reveal the evil of the communist system. The teacher’s narration is accompanied by images of bread lines, executions, and menacing-looking secret police in trench coats. Cold War comics not only warned about Communism, but they were occasionally used as weapons against communist governments. After the Soviet-backed Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional seized power in Nicaragua in 1979, the US Central Intelligence Agency developed multiple strategies for undermining the Sandinistas and bolstering the Contra rebels. One of the CIA efforts was The Freedom Fighter’s Manual (1983), a 16-page comic book that illustrates how ordinary Nicaraguan citizens can commit simple acts of sabotage, such as pulling down phone lines, or make Molotov cocktails for more violent confrontations with the Sandinista regime. During most of the Cold War period comics were also being used by American politicians to show how they supported the values of a free society. Malcolm Ater Productions sold the Democratic National Committee (DNC) on the idea of using a comic book as part of the Truman presidential campaign. When Truman eked out a win and the DNC suggested the comic might have made a difference in a few close states, Malcolm Ater was propelled on a career of producing campaign comics for politicians ranging from Adlai Stevenson to George Wallace (Christopher 2003). From the 1970s on, comics were less likely to be used by politicians and more likely to be used to critique the policies and the character of those who held political power. The counterculture underground comix (with an intentionally alternative spelling) that were distributed in record stores and drug paraphernalia shops during the late 1960s and early 1970s were certainly anti-establishment in that they contained depictions of drug use and sex that mainstream culture would have been shocked to see in a comic book and anti-authoritarian in depictions of police and political institutions, yet direct commentary on political issues was rare. Direct political advocacy, in comic books such as All-Atomic Comics (1976) and Corporate Crime Comics (1977), was more common in the offerings of

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the independent and alternative publishers that followed in the wake of the underground comix movement. The latter half of the twentieth century saw the appearance of intensely political comics. Comic strips such as Doonesbury, Bloom County, This Modern World, and Boondocks harkened back to the biting political satire of nineteenth-century illustrated magazines such as La Charivari. Cartoonists and some activist organizations produced comic books and graphic novels based on ideologically motivated investigative journalism. The way Joe Sacco reports his experiences in the Gaza Strip in the comic book Palestine (1993–1995) personalizes the plight of Palestinians living there and dehumanizes the Israeli Defence Forces. The Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors hired comics professionals and partnered with Eclipse Comics to publish the anti-war comic book Real War Stories (1987). The Christic Institute, a non-profit law firm, collaborated with Eclipse to produce the documentary comic Brought to Light (1989), an expose of some of the CIA’s extra-legal covert operations in Nicaragua. Government use of comics did not end with the Cold War but has continued into the twenty-first century. Beginning in 2005, the US Department of Defense initiated the creation of a number of comic book series encouraging Iraqi children to view the Iraqi police and Special Forces as heroes (Friedman n.d.). In 2007, to teach children about their rights and duties as Afghan citizens, the United States Agency for International Development designed and printed six comic books featuring the Yassin and Kaka Rawoof characters that were already known to Afghan children. Approximately 90,000 comic books were distributed to elementary school across Afghanistan (Press Release 2008). In the Philippines, US Army psychological operations produced and distributed 600,000 copies of the comic book series Barbargsa—Blood of the Honorable. The main character, Ameer, dons a mask and uses his skill at kuntao martial arts to protect innocents from violence perpetrated by Abu Sayyaf insurgents (Magnuson 2008). As the barriers to comics production and distribution have been reduced by technology, political comics have proliferated online. The Nib, founded in 2013, has become one of the leading sites of political comics with a progressive bent and includes traditional comic strips, documentary comics, and reportage comics. Even print comic book publishers have produced more books, such as Bitch Planet (2014–2017) and Captain America: Sam Wilson (2015–2017), with a clear intent to persuade readers to adopt a particular worldview. With the advent of inexpensive

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printing and print-on-demand options even individuals who have a message they want to express can do so in printed comics form. For example, Kwakwaka’wakw activist Gord Hill self-publishes comics, such as The 550  Years of Resistance Comic Book, to provide a historical context for ongoing decolonization efforts in the Americas.

The Uses of Persuasive Comics Some comics support hegemony and encourage acceptance of the decisions of those in power. World War II comics promoted unquestioning patriotism. The comic strip Gasoline Alley (1918–) evinced the wholesomeness of small-town America. Cold War comics not only stoked fears about Communism, but also touted the virtues of capitalism. Some comics question or seek to undermine hegemony. Underground comix defied and mocked conventional morality. As younger, more progressive creators entered the mainstream comic book industry even some superhero comic books began to question ‘the powers that be’. The 1974 ‘Secret Empire’ story arc in the Captain America comic book indirectly criticizes the Nixon administration’s machinations that had undermined democracy, and the 2017 ‘Secret Empire’ event, spanning multiple Marvel comic book titles, presents an American turn to fascism, with a now evil Captain America in the role of Donald Trump and a defeated Iron Man as a stand-in for Hillary Clinton. The most overtly persuasive comics are often supporting a cause or advancing an ideology. In 1957, the Fellowship of Reconciliation published Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, which used the events of the Montgomery bus boycott to teach the tactics of nonviolent resistance. The comic book was widely distributed to churches and civil rights organizations in the South. In Canada, the Graphic History Collective, with support from the Canadian Committee on Labour History, produced May Day: A Graphic History of Protest (2012) to revive interest in International Workers Day. Hugh Rank’s (1976) ‘intensify/downplay schema’ is a useful lens through which to interpret the persuasive strategies and tactics that can be employed in the comics form. Rank (1976: 5) developed his schema as a tool that people could use to be better critical receivers of persuasion and propaganda. He believed that all persuasion employed two broad strategies: (1) intensifying the positive about what you support and intensifying the negative about what you oppose, and (2) downplaying the negative

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about what you support and downplaying the positive about what you oppose. Each of these strategies is enacted using three tactics. For intensifying the tactics are repetition, association, and composition. For downplaying the tactics are omission, diversion, and confusion. Intensifying: Repetition Whether or not to use repetition is an encapsulation decision. Creators of comic books or graphic novels, with many pages and panels at their disposal, can use brute repetition or develop subtle motifs throughout a single work. Comic strips consist of only a few panels per instalment yet the repetition of images over time can still have a cumulative effect on reader perceptions. In his Doonesbury comic strip, Garry Trudeau decided not to show some leading political figures, primarily Republications, as human beings, and instead employed hermeneutic images to metaphorically represent their qualities or actions. Dan Quayle was drawn as a feather floating in the air to indicate he was a lightweight. At first, President George W. Bush was depicted as a giant asterisk, implying that there would always be some question as to whether he won the contested 2000 election. Following the US response to 9/11, Bush was drawn as a Roman military helmet atop a small asterisk. Of course, these depictions are also making use of the tactic of association, but it is through the repetition of these hermeneutic images over years that the associations become strengthened in readers’ minds. It is generally true that repetition only reinforces meanings that derive from associations and composition. For example, in Seth Tobocman’s ‘The Carlyle Group’ comic the title is written on the body of a snake and then 11 more times during the comic a snake, sometimes in a suit, represents the Carlyle Group. Yet, it is only because so many people fear snakes or associate them with evil that the depiction intensifies a negative portrayal of the organization. Intensifying: Association Richards (1936: 35), who developed the Context Theorem of Meaning, claims that ‘what a word means is the missing parts of the contexts from which it draws its delegated efficacy’. The same is true of pictures, and in fact pictures might be an even more powerful way of evoking associations. In Fig. 10.1, even before readers notice the phrase ‘mission accomplished’

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Fig. 10.1  ‘The Carlyle Group 1’ page 94, panel 5. (Source: Used with permission of Seth Tobocman. Originally published in Bush Junta (2004))

in the panel, seeing President Bush in a flight suit evokes that day in 2003 that the President landed on an aircraft carrier that bore a huge ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner. A hermeneutic image, the wad of bills in his fist, implies a more self-serving mission. Based on his study of how wartime propaganda posters and political cartoons have been used to demonize the enemy, social psychologist Sam Keen (1992: 10) concludes, ‘In the beginning we create the enemy. Before the weapon comes the image’. The criminals in the Dick Tracy comic strip were at least odd looking if not grotesque. Comics created during conflict have been used to help create a perception of the enemy as something that must be defeated or perhaps even exterminated. Early 1940s comic books often contained images depicting the enemy as uncivilized (barbaric and savage) or less than human (bestial and vermin). In the hyperbolic world of superhero comics, enemy officers often employed a whip or tortured captives on the rack. Germans had a particular fondness for using a swastika-­shaped branding iron. More recently, in the Bush Junta (2004) comics anthology, Vice President Dick Cheney is depicted as a giant spider and a rat.

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Intensifying: Composition All the aspects of composing a panel—mode of representation, line quality, panel shape, colour, shading, simulated shadows, angle, distance, and character point-of-view—can be used to intensify a positive aspect or a negative aspect of an issue, incident, or person. The middle panel in Fig. 10.2 has no lines around it, marking it as different from the panels on either side, perhaps suggesting that what is represented in the panel is not meant to be perceived as existing in the diegesis in the same way as what is portrayed in bordered panels. In fact, the panel seems to contain an illustrated concept of what is in the character’s thoughts, a semi-diegetic image. The three figures in the panel are shown from a low angle, which makes them seem powerful and threatening. Their faces are obscured by shadow, with only the whites of their eyes visible; they are literally shady characters. The composition intensifies the power and ill-intent of these ‘cynical intellectuals’. A photo-realistic depiction of a character might make that character more distinctive and believable, but marks the character as an Other for

Fig. 10.2  We the People page 4, panels 5, 6, and 7. (Source: Used with permission of Neil Cohn. Originally published in We the People: A Call to Take Back America (2004))

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whom the reader might have sympathy but feel no empathy (Simpson 2018: para 46). Alternatively comics theorist Scott McCloud (1993: 36) posits that simplification can intensify identification and empathy. Comics scholar and artist John Jennings explains he did not want to use a hyper-­ realistic art style for the comics adaptation of Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred because ‘the more abstract a cartoon is, the more people it relates to’ (cited in Batiste et al. 2018: 11). In Fig. 10.3, President Bush is drawn with specific features that make the drawing recognizable as representing a particular well-known person, an Other. The drawings of the civilian casualties in Fallujah are more simplified and abstract. There is nothing that marks them as particularly Iraqi;

Fig. 10.3  ‘Democracy in Fallujah 1’ page 31, panels 1–4. (Source: Used with permission of Seth Tobocman. Originally published in World War 3 Illustrated # 36 (2005))

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Fig. 10.4  ‘Democracy in Fallujah 2’ page 29, panel 3. (Source: Used with permission of Seth Tobocman. Originally published in World War 3 Illustrated # 36 (2005))

each of them is an ‘every person’ with whom any reader might identify. By contrast, the soldiers, particularly in panel three, have no recognizable features, making identification or empathy with them unlikely. Hermeneutic images are significant because they show something that does not exist in the world of the story. These images are often visual metaphors constructed through the blending of concepts and/or personification. For instance, Fig. 10.4 presents a visual metaphor in which the anger of the Americans is meshed with the machinery of war in an anthropomorphic helicopter gunship with an angry sneer. In Fig. 10.5, the gigantic size of the soldier alerts the reader that this is not a scene to be taken literally. A person with a briefcase is standing tall and seems to be defiantly staring into the barrel of the giant soldier’s gun. Yet as people get closer to that soldier their demeanour changes. One person is leaning forward as if bowing or cowering and another is on hands and knees crawling between the soldier’s legs. The composition of this panel intensifies negative aspects of the US military presence in

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Fig. 10.5  ‘Democracy in Fallujah 3’ page 29, panel 5. (Source: Used with permission of Seth Tobocman. Originally published in World War 3 Illustrated # 36 (2005))

Iraq—abuse of power and their seeming demand for the submission of the people of Fallujah. In the fourth panel of Fig. 10.3, the broom is a hermeneutic image that readers are not supposed to perceive as literally present, but along with the phrase ‘time to sweep away the corpses’ it communicates the idea that the US military attempted to hide the civilian casualties in Fallujah. Comic book and graphic novel creators compose not only panels, but also must layout, or in Rank’s terminology, compose pages. The layout choices create various relationships and interanimations of meaning between the panels on the page. One such relationship, contrast, is a powerful tool for making visual arguments. In Fig. 10.6 the celebratory raised glasses in the third panel are a stark contrast to the fear and the grief on the faces in the first two panels. The third panel also contains a jarring contrast with the smoking, recently attacked twin towers between the raised glasses. Downplaying: Omission Comics are reductive in creation; the cartoonist selects only certain prime moments of the narrative to render on the page or screen. There is always more of the imagined narrative omitted than shown. A limited number of the possible elements of a moment make it into a panel’s composition.

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Fig. 10.6  ‘The Carlyle Group 2’ page 89, panels 3–6. (Source: Used with permission of Seth Tobocman. Originally published in Bush Junta (2004))

Some composition choices clearly have persuasive intent. For example, omitting any facial features in the depiction of the soldiers in panel three of Fig. 10.3 downplays the fact that soldiers are human beings. Chantal Catherine Michel (2016: 7) analyses how Joe Sacco’s encapsulation and composition choices in a sequence in Footnotes in Gaza (2009) influence the reader ‘to sympathize with the Palestinians rather than with the Israelis’. While both text and pictures are used to present the Israeli retaliation as ‘an insidious act of cruelty’, the incident to which the Israel Defense Forces are responding, a suicide bombing on a bus that killed 17 Israelis, is presented in such a way that ‘it is very hard for the reader to feel compassion’ (Michel 2016: 6). The bombed bus is shown from a distance and swirling smoke obscures all the windows. None of the dead or injured children are visible. Comics can downplay positive aspects of an opposing view with a straw man fallacy that presents such an incomplete or inaccurate explanation of the ideas that they will be hard to accept and easy to refute. Another

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approach is explaining the opponent’s perspective in such a complex and convoluted manner as to make it incomprehensible. Downplaying: Diversion Simplification is often combined with exaggeration in caricature. For example, in a simple, nonrepresentational drawing the artist might exaggerate an already prominent feature (Nixon’s nose, Obama’s ears, or Trump’s hair). When the exaggeration becomes an attack on the person’s character, it becomes ad hominem and serves as a diversion from the issue at hand. An ad hominem attack on an individual downplays the substance of that person’s ideas and motivations by putting the emphasis on the messenger rather than the message. In the first panel of Fig. 10.3 President Bush has a baby slung over his shoulder. The infant has lost a leg, but still seems to be alive and crying. In the next panel, he is callously holding the baby by its remaining leg. Nowhere does the text label President Bush a baby killer, but the hermeneutic images in these panels clearly identify him as such. Downplaying: Confusion In instances where people or organizations cannot avoid presenting negative aspects about themselves, they can obscure at least some of those negative aspects by making the information difficult to understand. Rank (1976) conceptualized confusion primarily in terms of linguistic tactics such as jargon or doublespeak (statements that sound good but have no clear meaning). At first, it might seem as if there are no visual tactics clearly analogous to these written or spoken tactics. However, because the static fragments of comics only become narratives in the minds of those readers who actively participate in performing closure perhaps a degree of confusion that must be clarified by each reader is an omnipresent aspect of comics, and what makes the art form potentially so persuasive. For example, the panels in Fig. 10.3, like many panels in nonfiction comics, are initially confusing until a reader interprets what is real (part of the diegesis) and what is hypothetical. Because cartoonist Seth Tobocman’s intent for these panels seems to be to convey the Bush administration’s disregard for the lives of Iraqis it serves his purpose to eschew specific statements—did US soldiers execute Iraqi doctors?—and allow a degree of uncertainty, so

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readers can derive meanings based on their attitudes about the Bush administration. Any comic intended to persuade, or influence, is likely to contain most, if not all, of the tactics Rank identified. Several might be employed in the creation of a single image. A brief analysis will demonstrate how multiple tactics can be employed even in a single panel. A single panel from All-Atomic Comics (1976) manifests several operations of comics’ creation and the tactics of Rank’s schema (see Fig. 10.7). The character sitting in the scale is Greedy Killerwatt, a take on Reddy Kilowatt the stick figure ‘spokesperson’ licensed to power companies throughout the United States for most of the twentieth century, and due to that association Killerwatt represents the electric power industry in general. For centuries, from the Egyptian goddess Ma’at to Lady Justice,

Fig. 10.7  All-Atomic Comics page 22, panel 7. (Source: Used with permission of Leonard Rifas. Originally published in All-Atomic Comics (1976))

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scales have been associated with truth and justice, but Killerwatt is perverting the judgement of the scales by suggesting that profit outweighs human life. The composition of this and two dozen other panels in which Killerwatt’s unpleasant facial expressions (vicious, greedy, or gloating) are repeated visually reinforces the idea that he is an unsavoury character. Due to his appearance, dialogue, and his name, the use of Killerwatt constitutes a degree of diversion by ad hominem (not against the fictional character, but against the supporters of nuclear energy). Although this single panel omits the complexities of the nuclear power debate, it is part of a 32-page comic book that provides a great deal of detailed information. However, the omission by straw man fallacy is at work because the minimal arguments for ‘the other side’ are all presented on a single page and the composition of the dialogue, bolding the phrases ‘no human cancers’ and ‘big, complex, powerful, secretive, dangerous’, intensifies negative aspects of nuclear power. This panel can be fully understood only within the context of the entire comic book, but due to the use of intensifying and downplaying tactics, it distils the arguments in the comic into a single image that might have a more lasting emotional impact than most of the text in the comic. Political scientists have studied editorial cartoons for decades, and scholars such as El Refaie (2009) and Ben Nyongesa Wekesa (2012) continue to develop methods for analysing the persuasive techniques in editorial cartoons. Yet most political scientists have not given serious consideration to comics even though in recent decades, comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels have been making noteworthy contributions to the political discourse.

What Can Political Scientists Learn from Studying Comics? Political scientists can learn three lessons from studying comics. First, they can discover the breadth of political advocacy and commentary in comics form that has been below their radar. From the progressive comics anthology World War 3 Illustrated, published since 1980, to The Ladydrawers Comics Collective’s well researched explorations of socio-economic issues, to the political comics of Andy Warner, Matt Bors, Dan Archer, and others published on sites such as cartoonmovement.com and thenib.com, political comics are a fertile field for exploration and explication by political scientists.

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Second, they can come to appreciate the persuasive power that results from the substantial audience participation in the act of reading and involvement in meaning making that is required by the comics form. Editorial cartoons are often simple and explicit, instantaneously force-­ feeding the reader a proposition. However, comics with multiple panels require more closure and function like an enthymeme, an incomplete argument that readers complete by inserting their own beliefs and attitudes. Thus, they feel that they have come to a conclusion on their own rather than having had a claim foisted on them. Third, examining the specific techniques comics creators employ to influence and persuade should give political scientists new perspectives on more familiar forms of visual/textual communication (magazine advertisements, propaganda posters, etc.). While approaches developed for studying editorial cartoons will have some relevance to comics, they do not address the ways in which the comics art form employs encapsulation, layout, and composition, nor the levels of closure readers perform. Hugh Rank’s persuasion schema is an approach that might help political scientists better understand the power of comics and assist readers in becoming better critical consumers of political messages presented in comics form.

References Barthes, R. (1993). Mythologies (A. Lavers, Trans.). London: Vintage. Batiste, S., Boelcskevy, M.  A., & Lewis, S.  K. (2018). Interview with John Jennings, Featuring Alternate and Draft Panels from Kindred: The Graphic Novel Adaptation. The Black Scholar, 48(4), 8–18. Bennet, J. (2019). Twitter / @NYTimesPR: Our Statement in Response…. June 10, 2019, 3:26 p.m. Retrieved June 24, 2019, from https://twitter.com/ NYTimesPR/status/1138210949461159936. Bertamini, M., Palumbo, L., Gheorghes, T.  N., & Galatsidas, M. (2016). Do Observers Like Curvature or Do They Dislike Angularity? British Journal of Psychology, 107, 154–178. Caricatures. (2010). Great Caricatures. Caricatures & Censorship in 19th Century France. Retrieved December 20, 2018, from http://www.greatcaricatures. com/articles_galleries/history/censor_france/index.html. Chapman, J., Hoyles, A., Kerr, A., & Sherif, A. (2015). Comics and the World Wars. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Christopher, T. (2003). Malcolm Ater and the Commercial Comics Company. tomchristopher.com. Retrieved May 13, 2019, from http://www.tomchristopher.com/comics2/malcolm-ater-and-the-commercial-comics-company/.

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Duncan, R. (2012). Image Functions: Shape and Color as Hermeneutic Images in Asterios Polyp. In M.  J. Smith & R.  Duncan (Eds.), Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods (pp. 43–54). New York: Routledge. Duncan, R., & Smith, M.  J. (2015). The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture. New York: Routledge. Eisner, W. (1985). Comics and Sequential Art. Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press. El Refaie, E. (2009). Multiliteracies: How Readers Interpret Political Cartoons. Visual Communication, 8(2), 181–205. Friedman, H. A. (n.d.). Comic Book Psyop. Psywarrior.com. Retrieved February 3, 2019, from http://www.psywarrior.com/PsyopComics.html. Goldstein, R. J. (1989). Censorship of Political Caricature in Nineteenth-Century France. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Heer, J. (2019). Why the Paper of Record Hates Cartoons. thenationa.com. Retrieved June 26, 2019, from https://www.thenation.com/article/ new-york-times-netanyahu-cartoon-bennet/. The Herb Block Foundation. (2011). The Golden Age for Editorial Cartoonists at the Nations Newspapers Is Over: A Report Presented by The Herb Block Foundation. www.herbblockfoundation.org. Retrieved June 26, 2019, from h t t p s : / / w w w. h e r b b l o c k f o u n d a t i o n . o r g / s i t e s / d e f a u l t / f i l e s / hbf2011whitepaper_f1.pdf. Herdeg, W., & Pascal, D. (1972). The Art of the Comic Strip. Zurich: The Graphic Press. Keen, S. (1992). Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination (New ed.). San Francisco: Harper & Row. Lund, M. (2014). Journey to the Gold Diggins, by Jeremiah Saddlebags. Redrawing the New York-Comics Relationship. Retrieved April 18, 2019, from https://wp.me/p47a3t-8u. Magnuson, S. (2008). Comic Book Hero Spreads Counterterrorism Message. National Defense: NDIA’s Business & Technology Magazine, February 2. Retrieved April 8, 2019, from http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/ articles/2008/1/31/2008februar y-comic-book-hero-spreadscounterterrorism-message. Manjoo, F. (2012). Editorial Cartoons Are Stale, Simplistic, and Just Not Funny. Slate.com, April 19. Retrieved June 20, 2019, from https://slate.com/technology/2012/04/political-cartoons-dont-deserve-a-pulitzer-prize-give-onefor-infographics-instead.html. McCloud, S. (1993). Understanding Comics. Northampton, MA: Tundra Publishing. McLuhan, M. (1994 [1964]). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

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Messaris, P. (1997). Visual Persuasion: The Role of Images in Advertising. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Michel, C.  C. (2016). The Art of Persuasion and Propaganda: The Israeli-­ Palestinian Conflict in Comic Books and Graphic Novels. In D. P. Royal (Ed.), Visualizing Jewish Narrative: Jewish Comics and Graphic Novels (pp. 221–230). London: Bloomsbury. Neumeyer, D. (2009). Diegetic/Nondiegetic: A Theoretical Model. Music and the Moving Image, 2(1), 26–39. Perry, G., & Aldridge, A. (1971). The Penguin Book of Comics. Middlesex: Penguin Books. Poseq, A.  W. G. (2007). A Note on Bernini’s Two- and Three-Dimensional Caricatures. Notes in the History of Art, 26(2), 11–22. Press Release. (2008). Uruzgan PRT Distributes Legal Awareness Materials. USAID Archive. Retrieved January 11, 2019, from https://2012-2017.usaid. gov/afghanistan/news-infor mation/pr ess-r eleases/ur uzgan-pr tdistributes-legal-awareness-materials. Rank, H. (1976). Teaching About Public Persuasion: Rationale and a Schema. In D. J. Dieterich (Ed.), Teaching and Doublespeak (pp. 3–19). Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English. Richards, I. A. (1936). The Philosophy of Rhetoric. London: Oxford University Press. Rothbard, S. (2015). A Cartoon Is a Deadly Weapon. The Iris: Behind the Scenes at the Getty. Retrieved June 25, 2019, from https://blogs.getty.edu/ iris/a-cartoon-is-a-deadly-weapon/. Scott, C. (2014). Comics and Conflict: Patriotism and Propaganda from WW II Through Operation Iraqi Freedom. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press. Simpson, W. (2018). Feelings in the Gutter: Opportunities for Emotional Engagement in Comics. ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, 10(1) Retrieved October 20, 2018, from http://imagetext.english.ufl.edu/archives/ v10_1/simpson/. Tapper, J. (2019). Twitter / @jaketapper: The Larger Issue … 10 June 2019, 5:38 p.m. Retrieved June 26, 2019, from https://twitter.com/jaketapper/ status/1138167059253252096. Turner, K. J. (1977). Comic Strips: A Rhetorical Perspective. Central State Speech Journal, 20(1), 24–35. Wareham, E. (2019). Passional Christi und Antichristi. Reformation 2017 at the Taylorian Library: A Bodleian Libraries Blog. Retrieved September 2, 2018, from https://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/taylor-reformation/2016/01/21/ passional-christi-vnnd-antichristi/. Wekesa, B.  N. (2012). Cartoons Can Talk? Visual Analysis of Cartoons on the 2007/ 2008 Post-election Violence in Kenya: A Visual Argumentation Approach. Discourse & Communication, 6(2), 223–238.

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CHAPTER 11

Political Science and the Arts as Allies and Strange Bedfellows: A Chapter in Five Parts Catherine Althaus

Setting the Stage Political science and the arts—defined here as literature, performing arts, visual arts and design studies—are not usually considered natural bedfellows in contemporary western society, either in practice or in theory (although there are, of course, exceptions, including not only this book but also work such as that of Pepin-Neff and Caporale 2018). Often in the policy space, the arts are superfluous to hard-edged economic drivers. Or they are viewed as a luxurious add-on that might help the superstar features of modern political campaigns (hence why politicians love connecting with rock or film stars) but are hardly essential to the lives of citizens or the narrative relating to the importance of austerity to restrain expenditure from the public purse. This conception views the creative arts, broadly speaking, as an ancillary sector of the economy, a part of society for which the political realm should be a patron (see, e.g., Mulcahy and Swaim

C. Althaus (*) University of New South Wales, Canberra, ACT, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. A. W. Rhodes, S. Hodgett (eds.), What Political Science Can Learn from the Humanities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51697-0_11

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1982), rather than a central feature of human existence and the pursuit of the common good. This is not always the case. Aristotle’s Rhetoric praises the virtue of the arts as essential to political life. Indigenous societies treasure the role of storytellings and artistic endeavours as part and parcel of the functioning of their governance systems. Other points in history have seen politics and the arts colliding in radical ways to change the face of human experience. One only has to think of the role of opera in Italian revolution, culture in the overthrow of communism in Poland, LiveAid in the United Kingdom and the United States to raise money for Africa, or the ongoing relationship between culture, media and politics in China. The arts, in other words, have inherent political features. They speak to and for the human spirit and can shape the destiny of individuals, communities and civilisations. It is important to surface some of the features of the arts that render them important to political and policy practice. First, the arts can shape, reveal or influence public opinion. Second, they can mobilise groups and sentiments including into action. Third, they provide outlets for human emotions and physical activity that can be used for particular ends, good or ill. Fourth, they provide powerful memory-keeping functions as well as promote innovation and imagination of new possibilities, different potential futures. Fifth, they provide commentary as well as large-scale sense-making. Finally, between nation-states, there is also a role played by the arts with respect to cultural diplomacy; cultural exchanges can form important components of foreign policy (Mulcahy 1982, 269–301). These are all practical contributions that can be deployed by political and policy processes and highlight the connection between the arts, politics and policy. In addition to practical significance, there are important theoretical links. The arts provide a rich source of knowledge about the human person and societies in and of themselves and as they relate to the world in which we live. This knowledge, in itself, can be used by scholars as well as in tandem with knowledge gained from other sources, to posit and map new ideas about how politics and policy was, is, could and should be. Theoretically then, the arts speak to histories and futures, memory and imagination. The arts also speak theoretically to action. They reveal tactics, motivations and judgements, be they explicit or unconscious. They encourage experience, stories, pictures and communication, as their animating principle or what scientists might call their units of observation or analysis. The arts encourage us to live and to feel and to physically relate

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with each other and our environments and to both enjoy and critique this, just as much as science might prompt us to question and seek to understand why and how. In many respects, then, the arts provide essential information and functions pertinent to the polity and to governance. The plot of this chapter revolves around the question of why the policy and public administration fields have relegated the arts to the backwaters of so-called serious scholarship? Why has economics, law or science dominated the modern focus? Why have we privatised the arts to the personal realm instead of its public face? This chapter suggests the arts are not only fundamental to political life, they also offer a range of functions that serve the practice and theory of administrative and policy pursuits. A return to the arts with their embodied practices and powerful narrative functions are core to policymaking and administrative behaviour.

The Training Scene as a Core Plot Device The actual and potential role of the arts in political science and policy is especially pertinent to the field of training and educating public servants. Most contemporary university degrees in public service education promote curricula devoid of the arts. Policy and public administration are treated as technical intellectual exercises, heavily imbued with analysis, evidence and problem-solving skills development rather than artistic processes, play or emotion. The former is seen as rational, logical and appropriate to the rigours of public scrutiny and accountability rather than subject to the vagaries and fickle irrationalities of human emotion that define the latter. One is serious and credible. The other is not. Some key assumptions, in other words, dominate the training space. Functional association between politics and the arts is not strong. Practitioners and scholars often cannot articulate a link between the two, whereas senior officials can easily see the value in law, economics or management to their administrative roles and policymaking practices. Even if the links can be made, the next hurdle is justifying investment in artistic endeavours. How will the public or, worse, the media view public service training that engages in the arts as opposed to so-called hard skills development? How does one combat inherent scepticism that such training is ‘fluffy nonsense’? Or for training participants themselves, how does one combat the fear that learners will be embarrassed through their participation and that they will not only have a safe space for learning but

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also be able to take away substantive lessons that can be applied in professional practice? Many of these questions arose in the context of reinvigorating a significant leadership programme run by the Australia and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG) delivered to senior officials across Australia, New Zealand and a limited number of Southeast Asian countries. The Executive Fellows Program (EFP) is a flagship programme run by ANZSOG since 2003 based off the highly successful Harvard Kennedy School intellectual frameworks of public value and adaptive leadership developed by Mark Moore and Ron Heifetz. These foundational conceptual frameworks maintained their inclusion as relevant components of the programme but in 2018, a process of reinvigoration took place, based off review of contemporary leadership literature as well as extensive consultation with governments, alumni and other relevant programme stakeholders. The arts and more broadly creativity took centre stage as the programme was renewed for the skills needed in modern practice and the roles that senior public servants will take on (see Dickinson et al. 2018). Senior public sector leaders now must bring their authentic selves into the leadership task; they require empathy, creativity, self-awareness, relationality and connective skills, emotional labour skills, and digital, data leveraging and storytelling capacities. These are required in conjunction with the usual suite of technical expertise, managerial and communication capacities as well as political astuteness, policymaking craft and establishing and shepherding a clear and persuasive strategic vision. While delegation skills are inevitably required to meet the challenges of deploying all this necessary talent, the message is clear from across the leadership literature. Put simply, senior public officials need to bring their whole selves—not just their technical expertise—to the modern leadership task if the challenges and opportunities of the VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity—see Van der Wal 2017) world are to be met (see, e.g., Sinclair 2011; Roberts 2007). For EFP, this meant widening the traditional leadership skillset beyond intellectually targeted analytical, technical and critical thinking modes to also include attention to emotional and physical dimensions attuned to improvisation, innovation, creativity and authenticity. The goal of EFP is to promote the best leadership development to positively stimulate the behaviours and actions of senior officials as they carry out their work and move into deputy secretary and chief executive roles. For 2019, we identified the following eight learning objectives for the entire programme:

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(1) Deepen self-awareness; (2) Increase fluency in a broad range of leadership styles and approaches; (3) Strengthen ability to understand and create public value; (4) Expand professional networks and collaborative capabilities; (5) Grow skills in coaching, listening and giving feedback; (6) Increase capabilities in strategic analysis and complex problem-solving; (7) Understand and lead change more effectively; and (8) Find inspiration to take leadership to the next level. Learning objectives 1, 2, 4, 5, 7 and 8, in particular, resonate with widening EFP towards creative arts and somatic leadership ideas. The leadership literature is not devoid of thinking in this area. Taormina (2010), for example, defends a view of leadership as an art, by which he refers to a set of skills whereby leaders must respond to the demands that historical circumstances place on them. Using this prism of an art referring to a set of skills, it is clear to see connections between the arts and public administration and policymaking literature. In fact, a wealth of texts came to attention. Authors such as Vickers (1965), Hood (1998), Colander and Kupers (2016) use the terminology and metaphor of art to help explain policymaking. Meanwhile authors such as Denhardt and Denhardt (2006) took the link a step further by deliberately exploring the processes of dance as synonymous with the skills and tasks of leadership across business, society and government. Theoretically, then, the public administration field appeared to have an appetite to link leadership, the arts and public administration as a legitimate endeavour. What was not present in the literature, however, was any clear direction on how this might apply to policy and leadership training. Therefore, in seeking to position the arts and creativity at the centre of the programme, the programme co-directors (comprising the existing Director Robin Ryde and myself who had been brought on as co-director by the ANZSOG dean and CEO as part of the reinvigoration process) felt a strong sense of credibility and an intuition of great promise, but we lacked specific instructions on how to convey this legitimacy and knowledge both intellectually as well as experientially. Essentially, we had to turn to the arts, themselves, and use our own imagination and creativity to develop curriculum. Meanwhile, during our consultations in the lead up to designing the programme senior leaders and stakeholders expressed openness to new ideas and new training processes so long as they could be demonstrated to

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improve practice or outcomes. The onus on the training was to demonstrate to learners, and subsequently their employers, that the arts held value for policymaking. If this test was fulfilled, a critical hurdle was overcome. We thus had to exploit our existing knowledge and connection to traditional policymaking processes (and mainstream educational underpinnings) and link it in a demonstrable and meaningful way to the satisfaction not only of the programme participants but also their sponsoring agencies and managers. From both theoretical and practical sources, therefore, we were convinced that there was merit in pursuing the arts as a specific new element of the EFP programme, married to the more traditional and tried-andtested intellectual underpinnings. What we did next was to iteratively and somewhat intuitively build some materials and experiences to be integrated into the curriculum. This was done through a combination of existing knowledge mixed with trialling new ideas using pre-programme pilots. Both of us as programme co-directors had past knowledge using creativity and embodiment in more minor ways through previous programme development and delivery experiences. For example, we had used films and narratology to teach leadership as well as incorporated music, poetry and visual arts techniques and activities into past programme curricula. We used this past knowledge to identify some potential activities and theoretical insights we thought could be applied and be more fulsomely developed out and spread across the entire EFP programme. We carefully gathered and achieved insights through processes of experimentation based off this past knowledge and testing through the pilot mechanism. We recognised that a level of scepticism would be natural to any learner cohort of senior officials, used as they are to leadership being considered an intellectual endeavour and with us faced with what we called the ‘Kumbaya’ stereotype, that is, when built into training programmes, the arts can often be portrayed negatively as sitting around a campfire singing the now somewhat kitschy folk song Kumbaya. To be successful in integrating the arts, we had to demonstrate tangible benefits as well as intellectual foundations. This led to several discrete choices. Choice One: Entire Programme Arts Themed We chose to imbue the entire programme with an arts theme. We had already decided to build the programme as a three-countries-in-three-week experience with an immersive pedagogy, by which we mean learning that

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is outside of the classroom, connected to addressing practical issues and requiring active participation of the learners in the learning. The selected locations were three capital cities: Wellington, Canberra and Singapore. The first two locations were obvious to the Australia and New Zealand setting for ANZSOG and Singapore was selected both for ANZSOG’s existing strong partnership ties with the Lee Kwan Yew School of Public Policy (see Althaus 2016) and for its location in the Indo-Pacific region which is another foundational focus for ANZSOG in its strategic vision to situate it as a leading school of government conscious of its place in that region. Each city played a role in the arts theme selected for the programme. In Wellington, a ‘soft-landing’ approach was adopted whereby participants connected to the arts using a policy lens. The group was asked to explore issues of sustainability, distributive equity and national identity associated with the screen sector in New Zealand and immersed in experiences out and about in Wellington with members of the policy community including the New Zealand Film Commission, New Zealand Story, Weta Digital, Park Road Post, Weta Workshop, New Zealand Creativity Institute, Hobbiton, Tourism New Zealand and the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research, as well as local journalists and screenwriters and officials from across the Ministries of Culture and Heritage; Treasury; Business, Innovation and Employment. This acted as a way to introduce participants to the sector and to begin to connect with the arts self-­ consciously through marrying their technical skills to this area. In Canberra, personal dimensions and connections to the arts were deliberately established including learners beginning to adopt artistic practices. In addition to presenting conceptual framing material that drew in relevant theory, we took participants to the National Portrait Gallery, a theatre studio, and worked with a singer from the Australian Opera to stretch the participants to engage in creative processes that made them experience creative arts processes and to connect with aspects of their own physicality in order to explore different dimensions of leadership beyond purely intellectual activities. In Singapore, policy learning by participants began to assume artistic performance. Participants travelled throughout the city and connected with eight separate immersion exercises spanning the highlights of the ‘Singapore economic miracle’ as well as the underbelly of the city as a transformed body politic (see Tan 2007). They were asked to bring their learnings back to each other and share how to take comparative insights from another jurisdiction with a very different political system and apply it

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back to their home setting, professional endeavours and programme learning. Participants proactively chose to adopt physical and creative performances to enhance the way they presented their learning to each other, a point noted by Singaporean faculty who had been invited to attend the presentations and provide feedback. Each of these three city stages is discussed below. I ndigenous Leadership and the Arts Part of establishing the critical role of the arts as part of leadership in policy and public administration was achieved by turning to Māori leadership practices and knowledge (see Bean 2018; Mead 2016). ANZSOG programmes now turn to Māori leadership concepts and learnings because they are the First Peoples of Aotearoa and their approaches are foundational for any appreciation of leadership in New Zealand. Opportunely, their way of being and doing is intrinsically sympathetic and embracing of the arts as a valid part of ‘doing leadership’. Indigenous leadership is holistic and deeply rooted in protocol, ceremony, relationality and ‘turning to country’ (see Bean 2018; Milroy 2019; Althaus and O’Faircheallaigh 2019). We began the programme with a pō whiri, a traditional Māori custom of welcoming people onto a marae, a sacred meeting place where Māori values and customs are preserved. The pō whiri begins with the karanga, a call given only by women from the tangata whenua (marae hosts), to establish whether the manuhiri (visitors) are friend or foe. The manuhiri must reply with their own karanga and once it is accepted that they come in peace, often including a wero, the throwing down of a challenge, communicated by a male. The tangata whenua then invite the manuhiri into the wharenui (an elaborately carved communal building, considered the heart of the marae), and the sharing of speeches, stories, songs and prayers will begin before sharing food. As part of the pō whiri, learners were required to sing a waiata (song) and to hongi (a traditional greeting to connect tangata whenua and manuhiri) who welcomed us to their land, to their whānau (extended family) and their marae. EFP participants, in other words, had to engage deliberately in song, physical connection, environmental consciousness and unfamiliar experiential and emotional relationality as an invited group, as well as collection of individuals that encouraged them to engage with their whole person and their collectivity in new ways. From the start of the programme, therefore, participants were invited and encouraged to be physical (somatic) and creative in how they connected with ideas of leadership.

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 ellywood Immersion Exercise W To further establish the arts theme, we selected the Wellywood phenomenon in Aotearoa as a case to explore. Wellywood refers to the establishment of a significant movie production industry from the Lord of the Rings movies directed by Peter Jackson (see Hannis 2019). This cemented the New Zealand screen sector on the world stage and spawned a new industry in Aotearoa with significant contributions to its economy and global tourism identity. We built an immersive learning module which required learners to scrutinise the success of the screen sector and the ongoing role of government in that success with a view to ‘giving back’ their analyses to various New Zealand sponsoring agencies who at the time of the EFP delivery were involved in presenting actual policy deliberations regarding the future of New Zealand’s screen sector grant system. It is notable that the Aotearoa-New Zealand agencies who agreed to participate in this immersive module exercised tremendous cooperation and collaboration to work with ANZSOG to develop and deliver a rich experience for all learners that was steeped in real policymaking and which involved managed risk-taking. In starting our EFP programme in Wellington with this exercise, we began to put our learners in the headspace of thinking about the arts, but with their usual policy hats on. They began to experience the leadership challenges of the arts sector and to connect and empathise with the arts in a personal manner but in a relatively non-confronting way. At the close of the New Zealand week we were honoured with the invitation to participate in a poroporoaki (traditional Māori farewell), which acted as a closing ceremony for the time spent in Wellington and, again, invited EFP participants to engage in song, connect with dance and participate in reflection as individuals and as a collective, an experience that moved many to tears, something that was not expected at the outset, but which provided a powerful experience. For the second week in Canberra, we shifted our focus away from organisation and environment contexts of leadership to more personal dimensions. It was in this week that we specifically crafted experiences using the creative arts that we built into the curriculum. We developed an introductory session to explain the rationale behind turning to the arts and somatic leadership as a credible and powerful leadership learning opportunity and we also invited in the intellectual contributions of Australian neuroscientist David Bowser and Canadian alternative dispute resolution and cultural theorist Michelle le Baron. David’s scientific

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justifications of the neuroscience of leadership, combined with Michelle’s rich and tailored learning experiences and theory regarding the body, the arts, culture and leadership carried over our theme from New Zealand into the personal arena with upfront solid underpinnings. Choice Two: Who to Partner with We made some deliberate choices about with whom to partner from the arts sector to design our creative arts sessions. First, we wanted a mix of the arts that tapped into both diverse forms of creativity as well as different expressions of bodily connection. It was important to secure partners who would strike a balance between providing a small, but credible, amount of insight on the relevance of the arts to policymaking but also focus on generating a lived, somatic experience for participants whereby learning would occur through the creative process itself. We also wanted to tap a diversity of human senses. As such, we selected voice, theatre and visual arts as the platforms through which learners would explore creative processes. Choice Three: Right Balance of Links Between Arts and Professional Life The right balance had to be struck between the why of the experience as well as the what. We wanted the learners to just ‘let go’ and experience the arts and to get out of their heads for a time. We would then return to reflect and cogitate later. But we knew they wouldn’t just participate in any activity just for the sake of it. We know that adult learners do not like to be made to feel ‘stupid’ and that we had to have a clear learning contract with them. We thus purposefully established trust and learning safety through our personal connections and bonding from the beginning of the programme, including some preparatory webinars to explain the programme rationale and to answer any questions. Crucially, we supplemented the initial trust compact between ourselves and the participants due to our time spent together as a cohort in a compressed and intense format, but with fun and strong emotions in New Zealand. We also explained to the learners that we as teachers would participate in the activities with them and that it was ok to feel nervous but that we had specifically designed the activities to promote their learning and that we were all in this learning together. Another deliberate mechanism we

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chose to cement the learning safety and trust was to invite very particular creative arts partners into the activities with high credibility and reputation. Hence, we turned to the National Portrait Gallery of Australia, Perform Australia and a vocalist with Australian Opera links. The high reputation of these institutions meant learners implicitly associated with activities with high quality and serious artistic theory and practice and creative credentials. Pilot exercises were developed with these partners and test sessions were undertaken with alumni and interested new learners as well as the ANZSOG EFP team (comprising the programme co-directors, the ANZSOG Director of Government Relations and two professional staff members from ANZSOG responsible in a dedicated manner for EFP logistics and programme delivery). Extensive feedback from these groups along with the partners themselves and the programme directors and ANZSOG staff were fed back into the curriculum design process. We knew by the end of this process that we had achieved activities that had a high chance to resonate with senior executives. There remained a risk that a single or small group of participants might react negatively to the activities, but the instructional team agreed upon a strategy for closely monitoring and acting quickly if necessary to understand and contain any potential negativity. Particularly important was the commitment of the instructional team to the worth of the exercises and learning. The instructional team consisted not only of the programme co-directors but also of a host of other faculty and guest speakers. Each member of this team contributed an array of theoretical and practical content in a variety of process, and central, ways and to differing degrees across the three weeks to support the overall EFP programme. Learners would see through any wavering or lack of authentic commitment between the instructional team and learning engagement would falter. Hence the co-directors spent a considerable time not only selecting the right people for the instructional team, but also explaining the logic of the entire programme, its themes and the adult pedagogy behind the design. While we had no facility or authority to dictate which learners would be nominated to participate in the programme (because programme participants are selected by host jurisdictions and agencies at their discretion, albeit at certain employment levels to ensure consistency of seniority to meet the leadership rank being targeted by the curriculum), we knew that a fair proportion of any learner population would possess creative and artistic interests outside of their professional work and that

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these passions could be tapped for good for the whole cohort. Accordingly, we paid close attention to the biographies of the participants as the cohort became settled and the instructional team was aware of various participants to tap on the shoulder to assist with various activities as necessary. For example, we turned to some participants with vocal and singing and theatre interests to corral the group to prepare a waiata (song) which forms an important protocol component for the final poroporoaki which acts to respond to the waiata of the host iwi. The EFP participants who we called upon had the skills and passion to motivate the whole group and having the waiata come from the group themselves was a powerful group connector. So What? The results of the programme renewal connected to the arts were astounding. The programme overall received the highest evaluation scores in its history and the individual sessions where the arts were employed received some of the highest ratings. The programme and satisfaction of participants, overall, achieved a weighted average of over 4.8 out of 5.0, with 100% of learners indicating they would recommend the programme to a colleague when posed with the question of whether they would encourage others to attend the programme. ANZSOG currently uses this measure along with intelligence gathered from sponsoring agencies as to what they hear back from participants as to the worth of the programme. It also takes note of ongoing enrolment numbers to help indicate satisfaction with the programme of sponsoring agencies. These are somewhat blunt measures used to convey participation experience. They give an indication of satisfaction from participants, but more work is being done by ANZSOG to establish the ongoing application of programme learning into the workplace, including the satisfaction of sponsoring agencies. This work on impact (see Given and Carson 2019) suggests that there is much more to be learned about how programme participants are successful or not in bringing back education and training insights into their professional lives and translating their learning into positive implications for their workplaces and for their policymaking activities. The theory of change is that if we achieve a robustly successful programme, we will contribute to improvements in the action of participants back in their work, with consequent constructive contributions

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to achieving positive impacts in their respective jurisdictions for peoples and communities being served by programme participants. This, obviously, does not constitute a chain of causation, as so many other factors beyond the control of the programme impinge on this theory of change. For example, it relies on what the programme participants bring into the programme themselves in terms of their attitudes and motivations. It relies on the willingness and ability of organisations, and their authorising environments, to allow participants to bring back and implement their learnings. And it relies on participants being able to perform translation of their learnings into professional action. At best, then, correlation and proxy measures might be able to be established but a basket of indicators is needed to get to the nuance of performance that lies at the foundation of executive education such as that provided through EFP. With this basket of indicators concept in mind, it is worth noting qualitative feedback was extremely positive. Learners indicated strong association with the content and creative formats of the delivery, citing personal transformation as well as relevance to workplace and team challenges as they took learnings back into their professional settings. For example, one learner said the programme changed her life. In making this assertion, the learner deliberately connected the arts sessions with policy in their response on the greatest learnings: “I absolutely loved it. I think the thing I loved about it the most is how it pushed you out of your comfort zone in a really safe way. It sort of built up—when you look back at this course, you can see how clever they were and how they got us to work together and what they built over time. You can see it all building up to really influence how we did our final presentations where we pulled in everything from all three weeks. They just manoeuvre you through it in such a clever way and so it really did push you.” “The week in Australia was probably my favourite, and the creative part (the singing activities and visiting the Portrait Gallery), they throw you out of your comfort zone, get you to think differently, get you to challenge yourself,” she said. “Sometimes they talked you through the lessons of it, and other times you had to go away and work it out for yourself. But it became clear and, you know what, it was just so much fun—and we don’t always have fun in our jobs.

For many learners, this outcome was surprising given they were sceptical about the relevance of the course and their anticipated experiences.

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One learner expressly stated that they were sceptical at first saying they were not clear how the sessions related to leadership, but after two days of intensively engaging with culture and arts areas, they not only changed their views but also intended to use some of the strategies in their workplace to promote creativity and team building. How might we explain this result and its consequent implications for persuasive links between the arts and political science?

The Melody The creative arts inherently move the focus on leadership away from solely intellectual endeavours towards a holistic approach that encompasses embodied, or somatic, aspects. Essentially, leadership is prioritised as involving the whole human person and not just ‘from the neck up’. This in turn means that the emphasis can shift beyond logic, rationality and cogitation to include emotion, affect, action and experience. Note that a focus on creativity and the arts does not discard—to use colloquial language—the head but adds to the head by recognising the heart and the hands. In pursuing creativity and somatic leadership ideas, the reinvigorated EFP curriculum encourages learners to reflect on several benefits of their engagement with the arts, points that are developing and are being refined over time. These include: Promoting Practical Policy Innovation Through Open Mode Thinking Strategies and Somatic Practices Our contemporary age stresses the complexity of issues and systems that we confront as a global society. The deliberate use of the term ‘complex’ is noteworthy. The issues are not complicated but complex because they involve multi-variate forces, flux, emergence and uncertainty. As Hamill (2013, 224) cogently argues, this key difference between complexity and complication demands different responses. Whereas complicated systems such as building a rocket are technically intricate and demand high degrees of expertise they can be taken apart and put back together again. Complex systems cannot. While a certain amount of technical expertise is required to engage with complex systems, they, instead, demand creativity and innovation. This is because creativity (the generation of new ideas) and innovation (their adoption into practice to produce a positive change)

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thrive in ambiguity and flux and engage with unintended consequences (Hamill 2013). Both technical expertise and creativity and innovation require their own forms of mastery; the practice principle behind populist writer Malcolm Gladwell’s (2008) 10 year or 10,000 hours rule that helps determine success appears to apply across them (see Hamill 2013, 228). However, they are distinct in that one’s technical mastery is focused on predictability whereas the other favours mastery in working with unpredictability. Technical analytical expertise might be framed as relying on closed modes of thinking and examination whereas creativity and innovation are underpinned by open modes of thinking and application (see Chu 2017). The work of John Cleese on creativity (see, e.g., Chu 2017) and design thinking’s three modes of thinking (open, explore and close—see Gould n.d.) suggest that the arts engage in open modes of analysis, problem framing and solution development. Open thinking encourages protagonists to open themselves up to multiple possibilities rather than single-solution approaches. As a result, those who connect with the arts are creatively connected to policy rather than seeing policymaking as a purely technocratic endeavour. Policymaking that turns sympathetically to the arts extends the boundaries of analysis beyond generalisable, population-scaled levels towards personalised, context-specific experiential insights. Blue-sky thinking, iterative prototyping, improvisation, co-creation and empathic connection facilitate different ways of confronting policy challenges and developing solutions. EFP participants directly employed creative strategies to develop new ideas to inform their final applied projects in Singapore where they were asked to present to the cohort their learnings across a range of five policy challenges confronting Singaporean society. EFP participants deployed vocal, visual and dramatic practices and techniques to deliver their message as well as undertake their analysis. The style and substance of their policy innovation shifted between the first week in Wellington and the final week in Singapore. Over time, participants took more risks, felt empowered to experiment in their thinking and presentations and shifted the nature of their analysis towards more memorable, innovative and non-traditional methods and proposals. Their connection to place was tangible and the depth of their policy and community awareness was palpable. Hamill (2013) explains that embodied, or somatic, leadership demands more than self-awareness and rather self-cultivation. His notion of self-­ cultivation includes the integration of ends and means by choosing

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directed goals (actively selecting what kind of leadership I wish to pursue and to what purpose), deliberative practice (which shifts my behaviours towards this chosen leadership) and the healing of past trauma (which shifts barriers to my achievement of this leadership). Perhaps the best description of Hamill’s concept is the saying of Epictetus that he quotes (2013, 37): ‘First, say to yourself what you would be, and then do what you have to do’. This demands taking into account pre-existing knowledge and behaviours and stretching them to new chosen ends with a continual focus on performance improvement and mastery. While many people might undertake a particular practice and repeat it for enjoyment or tension release, this is not deliberative unless it moves beyond automaticity and performing the task for the sake of itself (experience) and towards continuous improvement. Moreover, it requires active attention to purpose, helping the leader move beyond ego-driven self-aggrandisement towards higher ends. Whilst cognitive behavioural therapy is one mechanism which encourages such change, it pays attention only to intellectual dimensions. To fully engage and embed the change one must also move to somatic change. As Hamill (2013, 47) explains, ‘Embodiment is the place of learning where we can do something different, consistently and when under pressure’. It is important to link somatic with intellectual because it draws on both the rational and emotional (which often appears irrational) dimensions to our humanity. Hamill quotes G.K. Chesterton (1961, 3) in this regard who said, ‘The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason’. If we open up policymaking and public administration to somatic insights then we start paying attention to intuition, gut feelings and heuristics in ways that previously we may have scoffed. This is because somatic knowledge tells us that intuition, gut feelings and heuristics represent ‘shortcuts’ that we exercise as we deploy our analysis and judgement. Paying deliberate attention to these shortcuts allows us to potentially shift such shortcuts in new ways, thereby promoting innovation and practical change. In the case of the EFP programme, our introduction of creative and somatic processes to participants opened space to contemplate other ideas and practices. While this requires deliberative practice on the part of participants in a continuing manner to cement change in their professional practice, the possibility of change became a reality, a new possible future if you will, with limitless opportunity to explore new ideas and potential new outcomes both for the participants

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themselves but also the policy arenas and communities they serve. Somatic awareness allows for the slowing down of shortcut responses to enable options for more conscious thought. It also allows for the potential (re)training of shortcuts to new options, hopefully with improved outcomes (Hamill 2013, 88). Revealing New Knowledge to Be Deployed by Practitioners and Theorists Both About Practitioners’ Own Beliefs and Practices as Well as Those of Their Teams and the Communities They Serve The body and its connection to the world is a site of knowledge generation as well as dissemination. Being able to read the signs of place and the body is important for practitioners to potentially gain new insights or confirm ideas or theories gained from more traditional knowledge-generating processes. The cosmology and practice of First Peoples embraces country, particularly the land on which people gather or the specific place from which they hail. For example, in Māori protocol, it is customary to greet one another by conveying your lake, your mountain and your waka in connection with your name and iwi. Meanwhile in Australia, it is appropriate to engage in an acknowledgement of country or, if you are an elder of that place, you might provide the welcome to country if visitors have gathered on your lands. For Aboriginal peoples, the country truly is your ancestors and so to ignore or dismiss country is unthinkable; it literally cuts one off from one’s spirituality, family, knowledge and the world (Graham 2008). Spending time and engaging in practices that promote EFP participant awareness and connection to country is important. We deliberately engage in First Peoples protocols and ceremonies and we also encourage practices that draw attention to the place in which we are learning, focusing on one’s relationality to that place and what place might teach us about how to grow in empathy, community understanding and leadership. Place-­ based leadership encourages people to pay deliberate attention to the contours of the land, listening to the history that it conveys, identifying one’s relationship/s, or not, with the place and feeling and reflecting on what sights, smells, colours, sounds or tastes convey as strengths or challenges to that place. One can begin to identify discord or harmony in the environment as important signals of resilience or pressure points. These can also reflect in one’s inner journey, with place-based reflection and sensation conveying areas within a leader or leadership group which

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demands celebration or attention. The environment can serve as a mirror to one’s own status through the senses. Peace and discord can quickly be detected, and traces of possibilities begin to emerge to help explain or interpret what the senses are conveying. The link between place and the body cannot be underestimated. The emotions that we soak up and express through innate body language speak volumes. If we don’t pay attention to them, we are missing a significant proportion of key knowledge that might assist in leadership effectiveness. Joe Navarro (Navarro and Karlins 2008) is an ex-CIA agent and body language specialist. He maintains that important information and knowledge from our limbic system is conveyed through our bodies implicitly and with great potency. Being able to read this knowledge can be very helpful to leadership improvement, for oneself as well as for others. If a leader can read and positively use their own signals, they may be better equipped to proactively assess emotional knowledge in harmony with intellectual knowledge to inform decision-making and action. For example, a person who becomes aware that they have engaged in ‘freeze’ body language such as eye squinting, feet positioning or similar, can use this knowledge to perform quick self-reflection to identify what might be the fear that prompted the freeze action and engage in deliberate counter activities to calm down the situation or reorient conversations or negotiations to a different topic or away from the threat. Simultaneously, in using body language to help leadership situations in relationship with others—one’s own team or the community that one might be serving—a leader can begin to read and interpret signals from others and engage in deliberate tactics to achieve goals. For example, a leader might review facial recognition and feet positioning cues in a meeting to see if a Minister or a community engagement interaction is receptive to an argument or if the parties are looking for a quick exit from the discussion. If the latter, the leader might choose to delay the discussion to another time and meanwhile triangulate with other information to discover why the receptivity was not present. Navarro and Karlins (2008) are quick to point out that reading body language is neither failsafe nor precise. It is not about suggesting that particular body signals are universal in themselves (in fact many are not only culturally bound but also personality-driven) but rather that leaders have to become adept at establishing baseline body language modalities and, most importantly, patterns of change that arc away from these baselines. It is this change and the sophisticated triangulation of patterns

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of multiple or repeated change signals that constitute the beginnings of body language interpretation. Even then, body language is but a proxy and care should be taken to its use. Nevertheless, the body is a powerful signaller of its emotions and paying attention to these emotions is a profitable avenue for leadership development. For programme participants and for the EFP itself, the site of the body thus becomes an important component of leadership knowledge and progress; it has the power to convey new insights and provide new opportunities to improve one’s own leadership as well as that of others. Improving Leadership Processes Through Attention to Concepts and Practices of Performance The arts are richly attuned to the notion of performance and the power of connection. Artists—of all types and persuasions—are in relationship with their artistic endeavour itself as well as with an audience. This is not unlike political and policy relationships between political and policy actors with constituents and the general public. Politicians have to think about how a particular policy will ‘play’ in the media and in general public debate. Policymakers have to calculate how they will advise and persuade a Minister of certain evidence, or how to frame a problem that is understandable and relevant to a particular community. Speeches, legislation, policy documents, meetings and public events all convey messages that either add or detract from relationships, that either reinforce or change perceptions or that establish or destroy views. Cairney et al. (2016) argue that unlike the use of evidence to reduce uncertainty, this aspect of policymaking is about using persuasion to reduce ambiguity. Using emotional appeals that turn to ‘…emotions, gut feelings, deeply held beliefs and habits’ (Cairney et al. 2016, 399) is as much a part of the policymaking endeavour as having recourse to hierarchies of ‘rational’ evidence to inform problem definition and analysis. Political and policy leadership is thus concerned with performance. Sometimes this requires entertainment, but political and policy performance demands authenticity. While many political and policy actors think carefully about how they will establish authenticity with respect to expertise and evidence, the arts remind us that authenticity requires as much care with emotions if this expertise and evidence is going to hold sway. As mentioned earlier, EFP participants grew and developed over the course of the programme in their attention to performance and their ability to leverage performance

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skills to tell a story that was not only coherent but persuasive and emotionally memorable. They exploited their skills and the bonds they had developed over their time and experiences together to jointly present insights and learnings that they achieved personally, professionally and substantively. They had fun learning through these processes and grew in confidence to trial new ways of gaining attention and establishing credibility in providing advice to each other and to the professional networks with whom they were connected while undertaking the programme activities. From their own accounts, they found this empowering and transformational. Having permission to exercise authenticity challenged many participants to critique the alignment of their roles with their values and many people re-evaluated their career goals and trajectories. Feedback from many participants also demonstrated that they also believed the notion of performance important enough to test back in the workplace and to deploy the knowledge and skills they had gained through the EFP programme with their teams and colleagues. Not everyone was satisfied, however, with how the programme translated the ideas from the sessions back into the professional setting. Several comments from participants conveyed a desire to have the creative sessions do more sense-making and translation for learners back to their policymaking, managerial and leadership demands. Several queried openly why they were engaging in the exercises, even if they found them fun. Not everyone felt capable or empowered to take the learning back and apply it in their workplaces. They would have preferred more of this to be done by the session presenters and by the programme overall and to have more opportunities to practise this during the programme delivery. Some resisted the design of the sessions that threw them into a creative and somatic experience without—in their opinion—enough structure and intention to guide them to a particular outcome or set of prescribed learnings. These comments were received at the end of the second week of the programme at the close of the creative sessions rather than at the finale of the programme. Thus, we witnessed a shift for many of the critics in terms of their assessment of the creative sessions vis-à-vis the overall programme. Some feedback made it clear that learners had reflected on their learnings and had begun to make the translation leap themselves into the workplace setting. By the close of the programme, they had begun to assimilate the entire experience of the programme and had started to piece together the

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overall curriculum design. Some participants conveyed to the co-directors how they had ‘ah-hah’ moments by the close of week three of the programme, understanding why certain activities had been shaped in the way they had. Others openly indicated how their initial resistance to early elements of the programme was converted into understanding by its close and some indicated six months later how they were still assimilating the tools and content that had been conveyed and experienced during the programme. Feedback from sponsoring agencies has not yet been tapped, although ANZSOG plans to begin to do so. Surfacing New Ways of Framing and Addressing Policy Challenges and Conflict Resolution Through Focus on the Substance and Processes Associated with Narrative The neuroscience of narrative tells us that storytelling lights up the entire brain (see Van De Brake 2018). This supposedly explains why human beings are literally moved by stories. We relate to the story itself but also apply it to our own lives and circumstances. Stories thus motivate us towards reflection and action. Whether we embrace or reject the association or application of a story to ourselves, we nevertheless have connected in a relationship with it to some degree. Facts and figures can exist as independent knowledge to some degree in that they need to be explained and bridged to the context of the knower. Narrative, on the other hand, automatically and inevitably reaches into the depth of the knower and their world. Narrative connects. Our emotions—and often our senses— are engaged and not just our intellects. This reality can be extremely powerful for policymaking (see, e.g., Roe 1994; and Borins 2011). Public administrators can use narrative techniques to reframe problems and connect decision makers and affected parties to ways to make sense of what is happening at any given point (see Dickinson et al. 2018 who describe storytelling as a necessary skill for the twenty-­ first-­ century public servant). Narrative also allows diverse stories to surface, thereby facilitating ways to understand why conflict and consensus might be present and how to navigate through such conflict and consensus (see, e.g., the work of Le Baron Duryea and Potts 1993). These are important tools. Collective sense-making and a path forward through emotional and intellectual dimensions of policy are critical to public administration and policymaking success. The ability to establish clearly shared understandings and empathic insights as to how a policy is

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framed and solutions put forward can shift the dial on policy progress. Antagonism can turn to empathy, brick walls can turn to possibilities and ignorance can turn to conversation. The role that narrative plays in this area extends more broadly to the creative arts as well. Links between the arts and human well-being are well documented. Crawford (2018) argues that the arts act as a ‘shadow health service’. Certain forms of music, singing, dancing, museum and gallery visiting, as well as visual thinking strategies present options to be more inclusive, to value diversity, to establish social bonding and connect people together in new ways that they find joyful and life-giving rather than threatening. When creative arts are added to traditional policy analysis, in other words, new options open up and unforeseen opportunities begin to arise that are often unanticipated but positive. While they may not be a solution in themselves, the creative arts can inject powerful medium, or modes of expression and accomplishment, into the policymaking toolkit. This was certainly the case with EFP participants who, upon meeting up with me at events some 6–12 months after the programme, spoke of new ways they were applying their learnings. Many commented on how time was needed to assimilate and reflect on the insights they had gained and how they had begun to translate their knowledge of creativity and embodiment into their policy spheres. A deliberate way EFP attempts to encourage and capture this application by participants of learning into their leadership practice is through a ‘letter to self’ which they compile upon completion of the programme. This letter to self requires each participant to reflect on the insights they have gained over the course of the programme and to make commitments to action in how they will take back learnings and apply them to their behaviours and professional settings. While ANZSOG cannot control what participants do themselves or what their agencies or authorising environments will allow or encourage them to do following the programme, it can provide a memory prompt. Accordingly, ANZSOG sends out a copy of the letter to self to participants around six months after the completion of the programme to remind participants of their commitments, inviting them to see how they have achieved positive change or identify (further) areas where they can apply insights and stretch their practice.

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The Final Curtain We are not the first to note the connection between the creative arts and political science. As The Economist (2018) observed, ‘The boundaries between politics and stand-up comedy are crumbling’. Or to shift the comparison, ‘Music saves more lives than war, so put down your gun and get on the dance floor’ (Ghatourey n.d.). Or, more dramatically, ‘In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets’ (Mekas n.d.). This chapter has explored further the link to the creative arts.1 What is noteworthy from a cursory review of literature from public administration and policymaking in this space is that the contemporary focus of connection between the arts and political science has been on metaphor and analogy. The use by seminal authors of creative arts references to describe and stretch public administration and policy tasks and leadership—such as Vickers’ (1965) and Hood’s (1998) references to the ‘art’ of public management or policymaking, or Denhardt and Denhardt’s (2006) use of the analogy of dance and leadership—are important contributions but they do not extend enough substantively to the type of links conveyed in this chapter. Instead, what is proposed here is that the connection between the arts and political science is not just metaphorical or analogous but substantive. And that it needs to infuse not just our theoretical and conceptual discussions, but our educational practice. This chapter used the experience of an executive-level leadership training programme to explore tangible ways that the arts can contribute and link to political science, especially in the realm of public administration and public policy fields. It established at least four different ways that the arts might be seen to provide important connective tissue to the objectives and practices of these fields towards improved processes and outcomes that benefit society. The themes are: (a) promoting practical policy innovation through open mode thinking strategies and somatic practices;

1  It is worth noting that in 2019, EFP will introduce elements of comedy and dance into the creative arts exercises in Canberra.

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(b) revealing new knowledge to be deployed by practitioners and theorists both about practitioners’ own beliefs and practices as well as those of their teams and the communities they serve; (c) improving leadership processes through attention to concepts and practices of performance; and (d) surfacing new ways of framing and addressing policy challenges and conflict resolution through focus on the substance and processes associated with narrative. These four themes informed the learning and experiences of programme participants which—hopefully—have been carried further into lived application and positive impact in the workplace settings of participants as they engage in senior leadership roles throughout jurisdictions across Australia, New Zealand and in the region. This, indeed, will be the test to begin to establish and track. Plans are in train to formally evaluate the effects of the programme from a sponsoring agency perspective and after participants return to the workplace. Hamill (2013, 159) notes the irony that accompanies most participants in leadership programmes who often seek knowledge and practices that will grant them more control: the ability to get others to do what they want and the ability for themselves to say ‘no’ more often to things they don’t want to do. Rather than continually seeking out more and more ways to gain control, turning to the arts encourages us to let go of control, or at least to be comfortable with it, and seek out ambiguity, uncertainty and novelty as ways to rejuvenate and inspire and grow. This position stands, somewhat paradoxically against the alternative view of the arts which highlights its high attention to discipline, theory, dealing with complexity, striving for excellence, teamwork and intense learning and development springing from mature artists and knowing one’s place historically and striving to achieve a better future. The creative arts have maintained important traditions in the academy as reflected by their presence in some of the most prestigious higher education institutions globally. From the participant evaluation results for the programme, the goal of ‘letting go’ as well as valuing the proficiency of the arts as a meaningful contribution to leadership was achieved in an immediate sense, but ongoing practice and active deliberation is still required. Developing innovative ways to try and track this is an important project that we are embarking on as educators and scholars. The tools and techniques of the arts can be used directly in public administration and policymaking endeavours. The terminology of the

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creative arts is useful for describing what might be possible, but it is also the knowledge and processes of the creative arts that can be deployed. This link is not only warranted but desirable because it offers potential ways to improve the current lives and prospects of societies and communities. Being open to these possibilities takes courage and risk-­ taking and consequently care and concerted attention. Staying isolated within siloes of disciplines, instead of working across disciplinary boundaries in practice settings stifles the options of theorists and practitioners. More robust proof and evidence will undoubtedly be needed, and the example of the case outlined in this chapter is hopefully a step in the right direction towards beginning to mount arguments in favour of an intrinsic and essential collaboration between the creative arts and political science. As such we can move beyond the undisputed significance of rhetoric, important as that is, towards a realm where the creative arts are seen as indispensable to action. If we accept the somatic maxim (Hamill 2013, 183) that ‘we are what we practice’, the arts can become an inspirational part of a multi-disciplinary approach that embraces a suite of knowledge and processes to meet the tasks and opportunities of public administration and policymaking.

References Althaus, C. (2016). Soft Diplomacy or Hard Policy Benefits? Exploring the Value of Cross-Jurisdictional Learning Exchanges in Policy and Public Administration in the Asia-Pacific Region. CMU Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, 3(1), 3–25. Althaus, C., & O’Faircheallaigh, C. (2019). Leading from Between: Indigenous Participation and Leadership in the Public Service. Montreal: McGill-­ Queens Press. Bean, D. (2018). Manurau: A conceptual framework of Māori leadership practice in the New Zealand public sector. Doctoral thesis submitted to the School of Government - Te Kura Kāwanatanga. Wellington: Victoria University of Wellington. Borins, S. (2011). Making Narrative Count: A Narratological Approach to Public Management Innovation. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 22, 165–189. Cairney, P., Oliver, K., & Wellstead, A. (2016). To Bridge the Divide Between Evidence and Policy: Reduce Ambiguity as Much as Uncertainty. Public Administration Review, 763, 399–402.

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Chesterton, G. K. (1961). Orthodoxy. London: Collins. Chu, C. (2017). The Perfect Conditions for Creativity, According to Monty Python’s John Cleese. Quartz. Date Published: 28 February. Retrieved September 10, 2019, from https://qz.com/919351/the-perfect-conditionsfor-creativity-according-to-monty-pythons-john-cleese/. Colander, D., & Kupers, R. (2016). Complexity and the Art of Public Policy: Solving Society’s Problems from the Bottom Up. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Crawford, P. (2018). The Arts Are a Shadow Health Service – Here’s Why. The Conversation. Retrieved September 7, 2019, from https://theconversation. com/the-arts-are-a-shadow-health-service-heres-why-105610. Denhardt, R. B., & Denhardt, J. V. (2006). Dance of Leadership: Art of Leading Business. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Dickinson, H., Needham, C., Mangan, C., & Sullivan, H. (Eds.). (2018). (Re) Imagining the Future Public Service Workforce. London: Springer. The Economist. (2018). The Boundaries Between Politics and Stand-Up Comedy Are Crumbling. The Economist. Retrieved September 30, 2019, from https:// www.economist.com/international/2019/05/18/the-boundaries-betweenpolitics-and-stand-up-comedy-are-crumbling. Ghatourey, R. (n.d.). Search Quotes. Retrieved September 10, 2019, from http:// www.searchquotes.com/quotation/Music_saves_more_lives_than_war%2C_ soput_down_your_gun_and_get_on_thedance_floor./450095/. Given, L., & Carson, L. (2019). Embracing Societal Impact Across Education and Research: A Brief Overview of a Changing Landscape. ANZSOG: Unpublished Working Paper. Gladwell, M. (2008). Outliers: The Story of Success. New  York: Little, Brown and Company. Gould, K. (n.d.). Design Thinking’s Three Modes of Thinking: Open, Explore, Close. The Design Gym. Retrieved September 7, 2019, from https://www.thedesigngym. com/design-thinkings-three-modes-of-thinking-open-explore-close/. Graham, M. (2008). Some Thoughts About the Philosophical Underpinnings of Aboriginal Worldviews. Australian Humanities Review, 2(45), 181–194. Hamill, P. (2013). Embodied Leadership: The Somatic Approach to Developing Your Leadership. London: Kogan Page. Hannis, G. (2019). The Story of Wellywood. How Director Peter Jackson Conquered the World While Remaining in New Zealand. In S.  Mishra & R. Kern-Stone (Eds.), Transnational Media: Concepts and Cases (pp. 229–236). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Hood, C. (1998). The Art of the State: Culture, Rhetoric and Public Management. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Le Baron Duryea, M., & Potts, J. (1993). Story and Legend: Powerful Tools for Conflict Resolution. Mediation Quarterly, 10(4), 387–395.

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Mead, H. M. (2016). Tikanga Māori (Revised Edition): Living By Māori Values. Wellington Aotearoa: Huia. Mekas, J. (n.d.). Quotes. Retrieved September 30, 2019, from https://www. goodreads.com/author/quotes/264204.Jonas_Mekas. Milroy, A. (2019). Indigenous Values for the APS. An ANZSOG Submission to the Australian Public Service Review. Melbourne: ANZSOG. Mulcahy, K.  V. (1982). Cultural Diplomacy: Foreign Policy and the Exchange Programs. In K.  Mulcahy & R.  Swaim (Eds.), Public Policy and the Arts (pp. 269–301). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Mulcahy, K. V., & Swaim, C. R. (Eds.). (1982). Public Policy and the Arts. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Navarro, J., & Karlins, M. (2008). What Everybody Is Saying. New  York: Harper Collins. Pepin-Neff, C., & Caporale, K. (2018). Funny Evidence: Female Comics Are the New Policy Entrepreneurs. Australian Journal of Public Administration, 77(4), 554–567. Roberts, L. M. (2007). Bringing Your Whole Self to Work: Lessons in Authentic Engagement from Women Leaders. In B. Kellerman & D. L. Rhode (Eds.), Women and Leadership: The State of Play and Strategies for Change (pp. 329–360). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Roe, E. (1994). Narrative Policy Analysis: Theory and Practice. Durham: Duke University Press. Sinclair, A. (2011). Being Leaders: Identities and Identity Work in Leadership. In A. Bryman, D. L. Collinson, K. Grint, B. Jackson, & M. Uhl-Bien (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Leadership (pp. 508–517). New York: Sage. Tan, K. P. (Ed.). (2007). Renaissance Singapore? Economy, Culture, and Politics. Singapore: NUS Press. Taormina, R.  J. (2010). The Art of Leadership: an Evolutionary Perspective. International Journal of Arts Management, 13(1), 41–55. Van De Brake, J. (2018). The Science of Storytelling Why We Love Stories. The Startup, September 27. Retrieved September 8, 2019, from https://medium. com/swlh/the-science-of-storytelling-why-we-love-stories-fceb3464d4c3. Van der Wal, Z. (2017). The 21st Century Public Manager: Challenges, Peoples, Strategies. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Vickers, G. (1965). The Art of Judgement: A Study of Policy Making. London: Basic Books.

Name Index1

A Aaronovitch, D., 48 Abbot, H. P., 99 Adams, T. E., 113n3 Aldiss, B., 117 Aldridge, A., 265 Almond, G. A., 82, 83 Althaus, C., 23, 24, 293, 294 Ameen, M., 140 Ameer, 271 Anderson, B., 5, 14 Anderson, L., 113n3, 114, 115, 130, 131 Ankersmit, F. R., 175 Archer, D., 282 Arendt, H., 17 Aristotle, 288 Aslanidis, P., 39 Atakav, E., 20, 130 Atkinson, P., 118, 122

1

B Baker-Beall, C., 132n3 Bakhshi, H., 10 Baldwin Smith, E., 184n6 Ball, J., 36 Bamberg, M. G. W., 34 Bannerman, H. C., 163 Barry, B., 12 Barthes, R., 264 Basham, L., 48 Baston, L., 170 Bates, R. H., 13 Batiste, S., 264, 276 Bean, D., 294 Becher, T., 18 Beck, M., 74 Becker, H. S., 116n5 Begum, L., 141 Bel Geddes, N., 244 Belfiore, E., 2

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. A. W. Rhodes, S. Hodgett (eds.), What Political Science Can Learn from the Humanities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51697-0

315

316 

NAME INDEX

Benn, T., 248 Bennet, J., 259, 260 Bennett, J., 44 Berkeley, L., 130 Berlant, L., 87 Bernays, E., 245–247, 254 Bernini, G. L., 266 Bertamini, M., 263 Bevan, A., 168 Bevir, M., 2, 3, 12, 16, 93, 119, 120, 154 Bleiker, R., 130 Bochner, A. P., 5, 113n3, 114, 115, 118 Boelcskevy, M. A., 264, 276 Bondfield, M., 165, 166 Booker, C., 116 Borah, P., 74n8 Borges, J. L., 5 Borins, S., 19, 24, 58, 59, 63, 307 Bors, M., 282 Boswell, J., 5, 11, 108n1, 116, 116n5 Boudon, R., 115 Bowser, D., 295 Boym, S., 44 Bozovic, M., 86 Bracken, B., 162, 170 Brader, T., 71 Brady, H. E., 3 Branstetter, J., 74n8 Braun, V., 113n3 Breuer, M., 244 Brigg, M., 130 Bromberg, S. J., 14 Brown, A. D., 43 Brown, B., 22, 183 Brown, R., 6, 7 Brubaker, R., 39 Bubandt, N., 139 Buchanan, R., 235, 237, 240, 243, 243n2, 251, 251n3, 256 Bulfinch, C., 184 Burawoy, A., 16 Burgin, V., 172, 174

Burke, L., 116, 117 Burnier, D., 121 Burns, K., 171 Bush, G. W., 273, 274, 276, 280, 281 Butler, M., 184 Butler, O., 276 Butler, T., 255 C Cable, V., 42 Caesar, J., 165 Cairney, P., 305 Callahan, W., 142 Cameron, D., 137 Campbell, E., 125 Camrose, W. B., 162 Caporale, K., 287 Carasso, H., 6, 7 Carruthers, M., 240 Carson, L., 298 Cassin, M., 93 Castenada, C., 5 Ceron, A., 73 Chang, H., 113n3 Chapman, J., 268, 269 Cheng, B., 173 Chester, N., 109 Chesterton, G. K., 302 Christie, A., 117 Christopher, T., 270 Chu, C., 301 Churchill, W., 158–161, 174 Clark, A., 124 Clark, K., 124 Clark, R., 184 Clark, V., 113n3 Clarke, S., 48 Clifford, J., 83 Clinton, H., 41, 272 Clowes, E. W., 14 Cohen, L., 110, 113 Colander, D., 291 Collier, D., 3

  NAME INDEX 

Collingwood, R. G., 153 Collini, S., 4, 13 Coolidge, C., 245 Cooper, S., 122 Corbett, J., 108n1, 116 Corbyn, J., 169, 175 Costello, E., 120 Cowling, M., 13, 156 Cranach, L., 265 Crawford, P., 308 Cromwell, O., 157 Cronon, W., 5 Curini, L., 73 Czarniawska, B., 16 D D’Ancona, M., 37 Daniels, E., 43 Daniels, J., 130 Danjoux, I., 261 DaSilva, F. B., 43 David, 36 David and Goliath, 101 Davis, E., 36 De Nora, T., 120 Dean, J., 49, 118 Dedijer, V., 255 Denhardt, J. V., 291, 309 Denhardt, R. B., 291, 309 Denzin, N., 113n3 Denzin, N. K., 3 Dickinson, H., 290, 307 Disraeli, B., 157 Duncan, R., 22, 24, 260, 262 Dunsire, A., 111 E Economist, 10, 245 Eden, A., 168 Eisenstein, E., 240, 241 Eisner, W., 262 El Refaie, E., 282

317

Eliade, M., 207 Elizabeth I, 157, 158 Ellis, C., 5, 113n3, 114, 115, 118, 123, 130 Ellroy, J., 116, 117 Epictetus, 302 Esher, M. C., 119 F Faught, J., 43 Fenton, R., 164 Feyerabend, P., 5 Fife, T., 235n1, 251 Fish, S., 10 Fleming, J., 108n1 Flyvbjerg, B., 17 Foot, M., 175 Forster, E. M., 117 Foucault, M., 139, 250, 253 Fowler, E., 74n8 Frandsen, S., 34 Frankfurt, H., 36 Freeman, A., 10 Freud, S., 43 Friedländer, S., 44 Friedman, H. A., 269, 271 Frow, J., 85, 89, 90, 92, 98 G Gabriel, Y., 19, 34, 40, 43, 44, 51 Galatsidas, M., 263 Galbreath, D., 129 Garland, K., 248 Geertz, C., 1–3, 5, 17, 34, 51, 82, 115 Gellner, E., 239 Ghatourey, R., 309 Gheorghes, T. N., 263 Given, L., 298 Gladwell, M., 301 Glisovic, S., 130 Goebbels, J., 247 Goecke, K. U., 86

318 

NAME INDEX

Goethe, J. W., von, 267 Goldstein, R. J., 266 Goliath, see David Goodall, Q., 20, 141 Goodin, R. E., 12 Goodsell, C. T., 22, 24 Gould, K., 301 Graham, L., 14 Graham, M., 303 Gray, H., 268 Greedy Killerwatt (comic character), 281 Gregory XV (pope), 245 Griffiths, G. W., 215 Gutman, R., 182n1 H Hall, S., 173 Hamill, P., 301–303, 310, 311 Hannis, G., 295 Hardie, M., 85, 89, 90, 92, 98 Harper, S., 60, 64–67, 69–72, 74, 76, 77, 176 Harrison, H., 117 Hearst, W. R., 267 Heartfield, J., 234 Heath-Kelly, C., 132n1 Heer, J., 259 Hegel, G. W. F., 34 Heifetz, R., 290 Herdeg, W., 265 Herst, B., 19, 24 Hill, E., 103 Hillyard, D., 45 Hitchen, G., 10 Hitler, A., 158, 169, 268 Hockney, D., 109 Hodgett, S., 14, 20, 93, 108n1 Hofer, J., 42 Hofstadter, R., 47, 48 Hogarth, W., 167 Holman-Jones, S., 113n3 Hood, C., 111, 291, 309

Houston, S., 221 Hoyles, A., 268, 269 Hughes, J., 45 Hugh of St. Victor, 239, 240 Hugo, V., 241, 244 Humphreys, M., 43 Hutchison, A., 73 I Iacus, S., 73 Icarus (Greek mythology), 36 Ignatieff, M., 60, 61, 61n4, 63, 69, 78 Inglis, F., 97, 98 Innocent XI (pope), 266 Iron Man (comic character), 272 Ivanova, N., 43, 44 J Jackson, A., 221 Jackson, P., 171, 190, 295 Jacobson, A., 244 James, P., 14 Janiszewski, J., 234 Jarvis, L., 20, 114, 130, 134, 137, 139 Jefferson, T., 185 Jennings, J., 264, 276 Johnes, J., 7 Johnson, B., 159, 176–178 Johnson, N., 110 Johnston, R., 61 Jones, M. D., 16 Jones, S. H., 113n3 K Kagan, J., 3, 8, 11, 18 Kaka Rawoof (Afghan comic character), 271 Kakutani, M., 38 Kantor, J., 14 Karlins, M., 304 Karsh, Y., 158–160, 174

  NAME INDEX 

Kasinitz, P., 45 Katsambekis, G., 39 Kedar, A., 2, 16 Keeley, B. L., 48 Keen, S., 274 Kelly, M., 83, 84 Kennedy, J. F., 46, 163 Kerr, A., 268, 269 King, S., 5 Klingemann, H-D., 12 Knight, E., 36, 38 Koenig, F., 242 Krieger, S., 113n3 Kronman, A. T., 9 Kuhn, T., 34 Kupers, R., 291 L Laclau, E., 39 Lambert, R., 13 Lane, R., 95, 96, 98–104 Lawler, S., 45 Layton, J., 60, 65n7, 70 Lely, P., 157 Leo X (pope), 265 Leonard, E., 117 Levine, C., 17, 20, 82, 85–99, 89n5, 94n6, 103–105 Levine, G., 175 Lewis, S. K., 225 Liming, S., 86, 87 Lincoln, Y. S., 3 Lissitzsky, E., 233 Locke, S., 49 Lodge, D., 3 Loewy, R., 244 Long, H., 219, 220 Longino, A., 196, 201 Lund, M., 267 Lundholt, M. W., 34 Luther, M., 265

M Ma’at (Egyptian goddess), 281 MacArthur, Gen. D., 269 MacDonald, Ramsey, 165, 166 MacDonald, W. L., 193n7 MacIntyre, A., 83 Magnuson, S., 271 Mair, J., 37 Major, J., 160, 170, 175 Malik, M., 140 Mangan, C., 290, 307 Manjoo, F., 259 Marginson, S., 7 Marland, A., 176 Marsden, L., 20, 142, 145n7 Marsh, R. J., 44 May, T., 170, 176 Maynard Moody, S., 83, 84 McBeth, M. K., 16 McCarthy, J., 46 McCloud, S., 263–265, 276 McCullin, D., 165 McLuhan, M., 264 Mead, H. M., 294 Mekas, J., 309 Melanchthon, P., 265 Messaris, P., 261 Michel, C. C., 279 Miliband, E., 161, 162, 173 Mill, J. S., 242, 250 Miller, A., 174 Miller, M. C., 245 Mills, C. W., 116n5 Milner, A., 102 Milroy, A., 294 Milutinovic, Z., 14, 15 Mirowski, P., 6 Mithen, S., 236–239 Montalbano, S., 117 Moore, C., 160 Moore, M., 290 Morton, B., 104

319

320 

NAME INDEX

Mudde, C., 39 Mulcahy, K. V., 287, 288 Mulcair, T., 65, 65n7, 66, 70, 71, 77 Murphy, A. R., 43, 44 Murray, N., 16 N Napoleon, B., 191 Nast, T., 266 Naunes, S., 142 Navarro, J., 304 Needham, C., 290, 307 Neumeyer, D., 262 Newell, A., 170 Newell, R., 21 Newman, O., 182n1 Newton, K., 111 Ni, B., 173 NicCraith, M., 103 Nixon, R., 40, 272, 280 Nussbaum, M. C., 17 Nye, J. S., Jr., 227, 230 O Oakley, V., 225, 227 Obama, B., 49 Obama, M., 67, 78, 280 O’Faircheallaigh, C., 294 Oliver, K., 305 Olivier, L., 171 Ong, W. J., 236 Orban, V., 34 Outcault, R. F., 267 Owen, P., 94, 95, 99, 104 P Page, T., 165 Palladio, A., 211 Palumbo, L., 263 Papanek, V., 248 Pappas, T., 39

Pappworth, J., 156 Parker, J., 16 Parry, K., 174 Parson, A., 177 Pascal, D., 265 Pearson, D., 192 Pepin-Neff, C., 287 Perry, G., 265 Pico della Mirandola, G., 243n2 Pigden, C., 49 Plantinga, C., 58, 62, 71 Plato, 10n7 Polanyi, M., 3 Polk, J. K., 191 Popper, K., 48, 49, 83, 153 Poseq, A. W. G., 266 Posong, J., 269 Potts, J., 307 Price, M., 93–96, 98–102, 104 Pulitzer, J., 259, 267 Putin, V., 50 Q Quayle, D., 273 R Rafael, V., 13 Raikka, J., 48 Rams, D., 244 Rank, H., 272, 278, 280, 281, 283 Ranke, L. von, 156 Rapoport, A., 182, 182n2 Read, D. F., 267 Read, J. A., 267 Redcliffe-Maud, J., 109, 112 Reddy Kilowatt (comic character), 281 Rehm, M., 86 Rhodes, R. A. W., 3, 12, 16, 20, 24, 107–111, 115, 120 Rich, K., 85, 89, 90, 92, 98 Richards, I. A., 273 Richardson, L., 113n3

  NAME INDEX 

Ridout, T., 74n8 Roberts, I., 45 Roberts, L. M., 290 Rockefeller, J. D., 245 Roe, E., 307 Rohlfing, K. J., 86 Roosevelt, E., 245 Roosevelt, F. D., 245, 268 Rorty, R., 17 Rosenthal, L., 39 Roskin, M., 82 Rothbard, S., 260, 261 Russell, C. M., 225 Russell, J., 157 Rutter, J., 178 S Sacco, J., 271, 279 Sadan, M., viii Saddlebags, Jeremiah, 267 Said, E., 14 St Clair, W., 118 Samuel, R., 42 Sanders, B., 40 Sandler, S., 87 Sartre, J. P., 84 Schama, S., 158 Scheer, A., 79 Schiller, F. C. S., 153 Schreven, S., 49 Schumacher, G., 39 Schwartz, B., 183n4 Schwartz-Shea, P., 4, 118 Schwertfeger, J., 265 Scott, C., 268, 269 Seawright, J., 3 Sedikides, C., 44 Seldon, A., 21, 154n1, 156, 162, 170, 171 Shanahan, E. A., 16 Sharp, G., 250 Sharpe, J., 109, 111 Shelley, I., 109, 110

Sherif, A., 268, 269 Shimamura, A., 58, 62 Simon, H. A., 235–237, 243, 246, 248, 249, 251, 252 Simpson, A., 45 Simpson, R., 45 Simpson, W., 264, 276 Sinclair, A., 290 Singh, J., 79 Slutskaya, N., 45 Smeekes, A., 44 Smith, B., 113n3, 123 Smith, M. J., 260 Soames, C., 162 Socrates, 9 Solomon, T., 130 Sommer, R., 182n1 Sparkes, A. C., 8, 113n3, 120 Spicer, A., 36 Springsteen, B., 111 Stalin, J., 46 Stark, R., 116, 117 Stavrakakis, Y., 39 Steele, B., 130 Stevens, D., 139 Stevens, Wallace, 18 Stevenson, A., 270 Stewart, J., 109, 111 Stokes, P., 40 Stone, Edward Durrell, 186 Strangleman, T., 43, 45 Suckfüll, M., 58 Sullivan, H., 290, 307 Sunstein, C., 255 Swaim, C. R., 288 Sword, H., 5, 107, 116n5 T Tan, K. P., 293 Taormina, R. J., 291 Tapper, J., 259 Taylor, A. E., 153 Taylor, A. J. P., 156

321

322 

NAME INDEX

Taylor, C., 15 Thaler, R., 255 Thatcher, M., 6, 160, 176 Thompson, P., 42 Tian, Q., 173 Tobocman, S., 273, 280 Töpffer, R., 266, 267 Tracy, D., 274 Trilling, L., 84 Trowler, P. R., 18 Trudeau, G., 273 Trudeau, J., 63–65, 67, 68, 70, 72–77, 79 Trump, D., 33, 34, 39, 40, 42, 49, 50, 79, 272, 280 Tsoukas, H., 36, 38 Tucker, H., 87 Turnbull, N., 3 Turner, K. J., 261, 264 Tweed, W., 266 U Upjohn, R. M., 193 Uygur, S., 45 V Van De Brake, J., 307 Van der Wal, Z., 290 van Kersbergen, K., 39 Van Maanen, J., 5, 107, 115, 116 Vargas, F., 116, 117 Vaughan-Williams, N., 139 Velikonja, M., 44 Velody, R., 20, 130 Verkuyten, M., 44 Vickers, G., 291, 309 W Waldo, D., 24 Wall, S., 125, 142

Wallace, G., 270 Walpole, R., 157–159 Walter, T., 184 Wang, M., 173 Wareham, E., 265 Warner, A., 282 Washington, G., 50, 211, 221, 225 Watson, G., 125 Watson, J. D., 3 Weber, M., 9 Wekesa, B. N., 282 Wellstead, A., 305 Werman, D., 43 Wetherell, M., 120 Wheare, K., 111 White, G., 14 White, H., 113n3, 116 Wildavsky, A., 116n5, 118 Wildschut, T., 44 Williams, R., 82, 92–104 Wilson, W., 245 Witek, J., 263 Wolcott, H. F., 16 Wolgast, E., 118, 123 Wood, E. J., 121 Wood, N., 3 Worcester, K., 261 Wright, T., 266 X Xu, M., 173 Y Yan, S., 173 Yanow, D., 4, 118 Yassin Rawoof (Afghan comic character), 271 Yates, F. A., 238, 241, 244, 249 Yeames, William Frederick, 110 Young, B., 221 Young, J. (Baroness), 108

Subject Index1

A Abduction, 4 Academic researcher, 132, 139, 143 Adaptive leadership, 290 Ad Herennium (circa 86–82 BC), 238 Advertising, 42, 61–63, 68, 69, 71, 73, 77, 246, 248 Aestheticism, 86 Affordances, 86, 89, 89n5, 91–93, 104, 105 Afghanistan, 271 Agency, 13, 16, 96, 103, 134–136, 149, 187, 292, 295, 297, 298, 307, 308, 310 American Friendship Train, 192 American legislative chamber, 212 American Political Science Association, 261 Analytic autobiography, see Autobiography Analytic eclecticism, 14

1

‘And When Did You Last See Your Father’ (William Frederick. Yeames painting, 1878), 110 Annotated conversation, 21, 130, 133–136, 148 Arab Spring, 250 Architecture power, 212 social-environmental aspects, 182 social meanings, 182 See also American legislative chamber; Capitol buildings; Capitols (design); Empire State Plaza (Albany); Legislative chamber; Municipal buildings; Pantheon (Rome); United States Capitol; State house; Statues Area Studies, 3, 13–15, 81 See also New Area Studies

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. A. W. Rhodes, S. Hodgett (eds.), What Political Science Can Learn from the Humanities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51697-0

323

324 

SUBJECT INDEX

Arts and leadership, 291, 294 and politics, 21–23 public administration/ policy, 24, 291 as ‘shadow health service,’ 308 See also Creative arts; Dance; Design; Humanities; Leadership; Music; Performance; Photography/ photographs; Visual arts Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), 10, 18, 18n8, 108n1, 143 Aspects of the Novel (Forster, 1927), 117 Attention Age, 252 Attention deficit, 252 Australia, 269, 290, 293, 297, 299, 303, 310 Australia and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG), 290, 291, 293–295, 297, 298, 307, 308 Australian Opera, 293, 297 Autobiography, 20, 107, 114 Autoethnography, 78 evocative, 113–115 Rhodes, R. A. W., 20, 24, 108 B BBC History Magazine, 170 BBC Voices, 131, 141–143 Bedford, 134, 135, 137, 141 Behaving systems, see Human beings Behaviouralism, 108 Being and Becoming Kachin: Histories Beyond the State in the Borderworlds of Burma (Sadan, 2013), viii

Bielefeld University, 111 Biography, 5, 66, 97, 108, 114, 117, 118, 163, 298 Bleak House (Dickens, 1853), 88 Blurring genres, see Genre blurring Blurring Genres Research Network: Recovering the Humanities for Political Science Area Studies, 18 Body language, 122, 304, 305 Book of Kells (800 AD), 239 Brexit, 34, 39, 40, 45, 50, 79, 147 Brexit referendum, 33 Britannica, 84, 85 British Academy, 4, 9, 15, 84 British [Muslim] Values: Conflict or Convergence? (research project, 2016–2018), 130 British Cartoon Archive (UK National Archive), 21 British International Studies Association, 129 British values, 21, 130, 131, 133–137, 139–142, 146 See also Islamic values; Values Bullshit (narrative), 36, 37 Burma, 250 C Cambridge Dictionary, 39 Canberra, 293, 295, 309n1 Capitol buildings Arizona State Capitol, 229 Arizona State, House of Representatives, 216 Arkansas State Capitol, 208, 210 Arkansas State Senate, 205 Colorado State Capitol, 184 Colorado State Senate, 201, 203 Connecticut Capitol, 193 Florida State Capitol, 187, 230

  SUBJECT INDEX 

Illinois Governor’s Office, 201 Illinois State Capitol, 213 Iowa State Legislator, 211 Kansas State Capitol, 186 Louisiana House of Representatives, 202, 204 Michigan State Senate, 187 Minnesota State Capitol, 203 Mississippi (early) Capitol (1839–1903), 196 Mississippi (new) Capitol (1903–), 190 Mississippi Governor’s Office, 200 Missouri State Capitol, 185, 191 New Mexico State Capitol, 220 New York State Capitol, 192, 196, 199 Office of New York Governor, 222 Oklahoma State Capitol, 191 Texas State Capitol, 209, 226 West Virginia State Capitol, 196 See also American legislative chamber; Architecture; Capitols (design); Empire State Plaza (Albany); Legislative chamber; Municipal buildings; Pantheon (Rome); United States Capitol; State house; Statues Capitols (design), 22, 188, 193, 212 architectural flourishes, 207 capitols, arresting shapes, 185 cultural objects/tools, 221, 227 dome, 185 façade (exterior), 190, 213 footprint, 188 grand staircases, 207 grounds, 191 height, 206 highest branch, 209 inner doors, 195 restricted access, 201

325

rotunda, 203, 206–210, 223, 224, 227, 229, 230 See also American legislative chamber; Architecture; Capitol buildings; Empire State Plaza (Albany); Legislative chamber; Municipal buildings; Pantheon (Rome); United States Capitol; State house; Statues temple portal/entrance, 193 Captain America comics Captain America: Sam Wilson (2014–2017), 271 Captain America’s Weird Tales (1949–1950), 269 ‘Secret Empire’ event (2017), 272 ‘Secret Empire’ story arc (1974), 272 Young Men (1953), 269 See also Comic strip/book; Comics Cartoons, 21, 185, 259–261, 263, 266, 268, 274, 276, 282, 283 See also British Cartoon Archive (UK National Archive); Comic strips/books; Comics; Editorial cartoons; Visual arts Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 13, 46, 270, 271 Center for British Studies (University of California, Berkeley), viii Chamber of Deputies (France), 212, 215 Change UK, 175 China, 79, 288 Christian Right, 44 City hall, see Municipal buildings Class, 45, 85, 103, 125, 165, 171 Climate change, 46, 50, 79, 85, 88 Cold War, 47, 269–272 Collective life, 85, 88, 90–92 Collective sense-making, 307

326 

SUBJECT INDEX

Comic strips/books All-Atomic Comics (1976), 270, 281 Barbargsa—Blood of the Honorable (US propaganda, Phillippines), 271 Bitch Planet (2014–2017), 271 Bloom County (1980–), 271 Boondocks (1996–2006), 271 Brought to Light (1989), 271 Carlyle Group, 273 Corporate Crime Comics (1977), 270 Doonesbury (1970–), 271, 273 Freedom Fighter’s Manual (1983), 270 Gasoline Alley (1918–), 272 Is this Tomorrow? America Under Communism (1947), 269 Juan Posong Gives Ichi The Midnight Jitters (see Nightmares of Lieutenant Ichi) Katzenjammer Kids (1897), 267 Kid Savage (Office of War Information), 268 La Charivari (1832–1937), 271 Lil’ Abner (1934), 268 Little Orphan Annie (1924), 268 Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story (1957), 272 May Day: A Graphic History of Protest (2012), 272 Nib (online, 2003–), 271 Nightmares of Lieutenant Ichi (Office of War Informaiton), 269 Palestine (1993–1995), 271 Pogo (1948), 268 Real War Stories (1987), 271 Superman (1938–), 268 This Modern World (1988–), 271 Threat to Freedom: A Picture Story Exposing Communism (1965), 270

World War 3 Illustrated (1980–), 282 See also 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book; Captain America Comics; Comics; Counterculture underground comix; Eclipse Comics (publisher, 1977–1993); Proto-comic books Comics campaign, 270 composition, 23, 261, 283 encapsulation, 23, 261, 283 Japanese comics (manga), 265 layout, 23, 261, 278, 283 panels, 261, 273, 278, 280 persuasive power/messages/ techniques, 23, 261 political, 268, 271, 282 See also Comic strips/books; Counterculture underground comix; Editorial cartoons; Proto-comic books; Visual arts Communication textual, 283 visual, 283 Communication technologies, 243, 244, 246, 252–254 See also Printing/printing press; Social media Communist Party of Great Britain, 167 Conflict resolution, 23, 47, 307–308, 310 Conservative Party of Canada (CPC), 57, 60, 61, 61n4, 63–74, 74n9, 76–78 Conspiracy theories, 19, 33–52 implacable critics vs. equivocal defenders, 48 See also Narrative Consumer culture, 247

  SUBJECT INDEX 

Context Theorem of Meaning, 273 Counterculture underground comix, 270 Counter-narrative, 19, 34–36, 37n1, 38, 40, 41, 45–48, 51, 52, 59, 78 See also Narrative Creative arts, 23, 24, 287, 291, 293, 295–297, 300, 308–311, 309n1 See also Arts; Dance; Filmmaking/ filming; Music; Performance; Visual arts Creativity, 3, 121, 149, 290–292, 296, 300, 308 Critical self-awareness, see Reflexivity Crucible, The (Miller, 1953), 174 Cuba, 163, 185 Cultural diplomacy, 288 Culture, 9, 13, 14, 18–20, 23, 33, 35, 40, 58, 83–85, 87, 91, 102, 182, 191, 193, 196, 229, 234, 236, 243, 244, 247, 253, 270, 288, 296, 300 D Dance, 291, 295, 309 Data Access and Research Transparency (DA-RT), 125 Declaration of the Rights of Man (France, 1789), 266 Democracy, 22, 39, 48, 49, 52, 85, 181, 185, 246, 249, 250, 253, 254, 272, 276–278 and freedom, 255 See also Election; Managed democracy; Open democracy Democratic National Committee (DNC), United States, 270 Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (DBIS), 7 Design, 22, 234, 235, 248 courses, 235, 248, 253

327

definition, 235, 249 four orders of, 237, 241, 243 humanistic role, 248 images and objects, 237, 244 industrial, 235, 242, 248, 251 intangible processes/systems, 22, 234, 235, 248 of people, 46, 233, 248, 249, 254, 256 of propaganda, 246, 247 social intelligence and collective identity, 236 tangible artefacts/images/products, 22, 234, 256 See also Propaganda Design for the Real World (Papanek, 1972), 248 Development views of, 100 Welsh, 20, 92–105 Diegeses, 262, 275, 280 Digital technologies, 250, 252 Disruptions (Levine), 87–89 Doctorate, 108, 109, 111, 112, 123 See also Universities Documentary (television) American Civil War (series, 1990), 171 Great War (1964), 171 Second World War (series, 1973–1974), 171 Second World War (series, 2007), 171 Vietnam War (series, 2017), 171 E Eclipse Comics (publisher, 1977–1993), 271 Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), 12 Edification, 2, 10, 17, 24

328 

SUBJECT INDEX

Editorial cartoons, 259–261, 266, 282, 283 See also Proto-comic books 80-20 rule, 74 Election ads, 61, 62, 68, 73, 75 campaign, 57, 59, 62, 69, 73, 79 Canadian Federal (2011), 19, 57–79 Canadian Federal (2015), 19, 57–79 United Kingdom General Election (2019), 177 United States Presidential (2016), 39, 67, 73, 79 See also Democracy; Political ads/ advertising Elections Canada, 57 Empathy, 2, 10, 17, 24, 112, 149, 276, 277, 290, 303, 308 Empire State Plaza (Albany), 187 Emplotment, modes of, 116 Empower, 137, 138, 242, 253, 301, 306 English Local Government Reformed (Redcliffe-Maud & Wood, 1974), 109 Enlarged thinking, 2, 17, 24 Enlightenment, 242 Environmental behaviour and design, 181 Epistemology interpretive, 24 Ethical domain (Ellis & Bochner), 115 European Union (EU), 21, 39, 42, 161 Everyday Life in British Government (Rhodes, 2011), 118 Examined life, 2, 10, 17, 24 Executive education, 23, 24, 299 Executive Fellowship Programme (EFP) curriculum/content, 300 performance skills, 299, 305 See also Executive education; Leadership

‘Exploring if a Design is Good, Beautiful and True’ (Fife, 2019), 235n1 Extended case method, 16 F Fables heroic, 19, 58, 59, 61–68, 70, 72, 73, 76, 78 ironic, 19, 58, 59, 61–69, 72, 74 sacrificial, 58, 59, 66 tragic, 58, 59, 66 See also Narrative; Storytelling; Tales Faith, see Religion Faith Watch Scheme (Bedfordshire Police), 137 Fake news, 37, 37n2, 38 Fallujah, 276–278 Fascism, 272 Fellowship of Reconciliation, 272 Fieldwork, 2, 8, 12, 20, 24, 109, 112, 115, 116, 118, 119, 121, 122, 125, 183 Fight for Manod (Williams, 1979), 20, 82, 92–101 Filmmaking/filming, 131, 133, 134, 139, 142, 145 Fire and Ashes (Ignatieff, 2015), 61 First Peoples of Aotearoa, 294 First Things First (Garland, 1964), 248 Five Star Movement (Italy), 39 Focus groups, 130, 131, 148 Footnotes in Gaza (Sacco, 2009), 279 Formalist method, 86 Forms (of knowledge) collisions of, 94 Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Levine, 2015), 20, 85 Four Orders of Design (Buchanan, 2001), 237, 256 France, 168, 185, 192, 238, 241, 255, 266

  SUBJECT INDEX 

Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (Sandinista National Liberation Front, Nicaragua), 270 From Dictatorship to Democracy (Sharp, 2010), 250 Further and Higher Education Act, 1992, 6 G Gatekeepers, 108, 112, 121, 134 Gaza Strip, 271 Gender, 71, 85, 103, 116, 125, 130, 134, 135, 137 Genre blurring, 1–25, 51–52, 82 instrumental value, 2, 9, 10 intrinsic value, 2 Genres of presentation, see Genres of thought Genres of thought, 3–4, 18–21, 24 See also Hermeneutics; Genres of presentation; Structuralism; Neo-Marxism; interpretive approach/theory Germany, 111, 158, 240 Gin Lane (William Hogarth print, 1751), 167 Glasgow/Northern Looking Glass (magazine), 266 Governing Fables (2011), 58, 59, 66 Grapus (Marxist design group), 234 H Harper’s Magazine, 266 Harper’s Weekly (magazine), 266 Hegemony, 34, 272 Hell’s Cartographer (Aldiss & Harrison, 1975), 117 Herb Block Foundation, 259 Hermeneutic images, 262, 273, 274, 277, 278, 280 Higher education, 6, 7, 132, 145, 310

329

Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), 7 Higher Education Quality Council (HEQC), 7 Historicising, 90, 97, 103 Historiography, 172–178 History levels of, 154–155 oral, 16, 154, 156 See also Historiography History Today (magazine), 170 House of Commons (UK), 212, 214 Human behaviour, 11, 181, 242, 244 Human beings, 121, 207, 225, 234–236, 243, 246, 247, 249, 252, 254, 255, 273, 279, 307 as behaving systems, 243, 246 Humanism/humanist, 5, 9, 11, 17–18, 87, 88, 91 See also Humanities Humanities defined, 2 instrumental value of, 2, 9, 10 intrinsic value of, 2, 10, 24 methods of, 93, 130 shared values, 85 See also Area studies; arts; Humanism/humanist; Genre blurring; Political science; Social science I Identity, 14, 22, 34, 38, 40, 45, 72, 93, 94, 96, 124, 125, 135, 138, 230, 234–236, 247, 249, 254, 255, 293, 295 Ideologies, 39, 44, 45, 67, 82, 83, 94, 94n6, 95, 212, 268, 272 Imagination, 4, 76, 93, 104, 154, 170, 171, 173, 185, 236, 240, 253, 255, 288, 291 Immersive pedagogy, 292

330 

SUBJECT INDEX

Impact factor (academic journals), 8 Industrial Revolution, 22, 234, 236, 242, 249 Information Age, 252 Information processing, 251, 252 Innovation, 15, 23, 24, 253, 288, 290, 301, 302 Intangible processes/systems, see Design Intensify/downplay schema (Rank), 272 Interpretive approach/theory, 2, 3, 12–16 See also Political science Ipswich, 134, 135, 146 Iraq, 278 Islamic values, 144 See also British values; Values Israel Defence Forces (IDF), 279 Italy, 39, 192 ‘I Want You’ (Elvis Costello song, 1986), 120 J Jane Eyre (Brontë, 1847), 88 ‘Joan of Arc’ (Leonard Cohen song, 1971), 110 K Kachin people (Burma), viii Kindred (Butler, 1979), 276 Kwan Yew School of Public Policy, 293 L Ladydrawers Comics Collective (aka ‘The Ladydrawers’), 282 Lady Justice (moral symbol of judiciary), 281 Language, 4, 11, 13, 14, 38, 42, 57, 63, 63n5, 74, 84, 112, 116, 122, 300, 304 See also Body language; Linguistics

Le Charivari (magazine), 266 Leadership, 291, 295, 300, 301 authentic, 290 learning, 295 Māori practices, 294 place-based, 303 practices, 294, 308 skills, 62 somatic awareness/practices, 303 technical expertise, 290 training, 291 training program/impact/ satisfaction, 309 See also Adaptive leadership; Executive Fellowship Programme (EFP); Learning Learning arts, 296, 297 creative processes, 296 Māori, 294 trust/safety, 296, 297 See also Leadership; Pedagogy Legislative chamber design of, 212 furniture, 214 See also American legislative chamber; Architecture; Capitol buildings; Capitols (design); Legislative chamber; Municipal buildings; State house; United States Capitol Liberal Democrats (UK), 42 Liberalism, 45, 254 Liberal Party of Canada (LPC), 57, 60, 63, 65, 67, 68, 70–74, 76–78 Libertarian paternalism, 255 Liberty Bell, 192 Linguistics, 61, 83, 84, 133, 262, 280 See also Language Literacy, 178, 244, 246, 249 Literary criticisms, 20, 82, 84–86, 94, 99, 104, 105 Literary forms, 86, 104, 118

  SUBJECT INDEX 

Literary method, 88 Literary theory, 81, 82, 84–92 Literature, 1, 4, 5, 8, 11, 20, 64, 84, 85, 88, 92, 94–99, 103, 104, 107, 108, 114, 139, 142, 179, 181, 287, 290, 291, 309 LiveAid, 288 London—as lying with Wales. While, 99 Lord of the Rings (movies), 295 Lost for Words: The Need for Language in UK Diplomacy and Security (British Academy, 2013), 84 Luton, 134, 135, 137 M Managed democracy, 246, 254, 255 Managerialism, 2, 6, 8 Māori people pō whiri (welcoming custom), 294 values, 294 Marketisation, 2, 6–8, 25, 124 Markets, 2, 6, 7, 112, 244, 253–255 Mass public opinion/mass public mind/mass behaviour/mass persuasion, 236, 244, 246, 254 See also Propaganda; Public opinion Master narratives, 34, 45, 114 Meaning (embedded in social reality), 15 Media, 37, 46, 58, 62, 64, 130, 134, 135, 139, 161, 176, 209, 248, 269, 288, 289, 305 Memory artificial, 238–240, 244, 246, 249, 254 human, 234–239, 250, 253–255 internal vs. external world, 251 natural, 238, 239, 246 Merci Train, 192, 194

331

Method and arts/humanities, 81, 93, 101 coding, 62 field, 182 mixed, 130, 148 qualitative, 2, 13 quantitative, 12, 14 scientific, 16, 82, 83 See also Extended case method; Focus groups; Literary methods; Historicizing; Participatory research Methodological self-reflexivity, 86 Micro-narrative, 36 Model thinking, 90–92 Modes of thinking, open, explore and close, 301 Mormon Meteor III, 227, 228 Multiculturalism, 45, 140, 147 Municipal buildings, 22, 182, 187, 204, 212, 214, 219, 221, 228, 229 Cincinnati City Hall, 189 Louisville City Hall, 217 Lynchburg City Hall (Virginia), 221 New York City Board of Estimate chamber, 205 Saint Paul City Hall and Ramsey County Courthouse (Minnesota), 196 Santa Rosa City Council Chamber, 217 See also Architecture; Capitol buildings; Capitols (design); State house Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Christie, 1926), 117 Music, 4, 11, 19, 42, 44, 62, 64, 71, 72, 74, 76, 77, 110, 117, 119–120, 141, 292, 308, 309

332 

SUBJECT INDEX

N Narrative analysis, 2, 3, 19 characteristics of, 19, 62 cultures, 35, 42 dominant, 35, 40 election campaigns, 59, 73, 78 neuroscience of, 307 printing/manuscripts, 240 sensory (visual, aural), 70 See also Arts; Autoethnography; Bullshit (narrative); Conspiracy theories; Counter-narratives; Fables; Nostalgic narrative; Master narratives; Meta-­ narratives; Micro-narrative; Music; Narrative deserts; Narrative ecologies; Narrative jungles; Narrative monocultures; Narrative polyphony; Narrative temperate zones; Performance; Persuasion; photography/ photographs; Post-truth; Propaganda; Singular narrative; Political narratives; Storytelling; Tales Narrative deserts, 19, 51 Narrative ecologies, 19, 33–52 Narrative jungles, 19, 33–52 Narrative monocultures, 35, 51 Narrative polyphony, 35 Narrative temperate zones, 36, 38, 51 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 47 National Portrait Gallery (Australia), 293, 297 Naturalism, 2, 3, 12, 15, 16 Natural science, 2, 51, 81, 82, 84, 88, 236 See also Naturalism Nazis, 44, 269

Neoliberalism, 2, 6–7, 6n1 Neo-Marxism, 3 New Democratic Party (NDP), 57, 60, 60n2, 61, 65–74, 65n7, 77–79 New Area Studies (NAS), 2, 13–15 See also Area Studies New criticism (school), 86 New Dawn Party (Greece), 45 New Democratic Party (NDP, Canada), 57, 60, 61, 65–74, 65n7, 77–79 New Literary History (journal), 87 New York Journal (newspaper, 1937–1966), 267 New York Times (newspaper), 259, 260 New York World (newspaper, 1860–1931), 267 New Zealand, 255, 290, 293, 295, 296, 310 Nicaragua, 270, 271 Norwich, 134, 135, 140, 141, 145 Nostalgia, 19, 33–52, 64 types, 41, 43 See also Nostalgic narrative Nostalgic narratives, 35, 41–46, 50, 51 Nudge (Sunstein & Thaler, 2009), 255 O Office for Students and Research England, 7 Office for the Propagation of Faith (Congregatio de propaganda fide), 245 Office of Facts and Figures, 269 Office of War Information (OWI), 268, 269 On Populist Reason (Laclau, 2005), 39 On Writing (King, 2007), 117 Open democracy, 250, 253, 254 Open Society and Its Enemies (Popper, 1945), 48

  SUBJECT INDEX 

Oration on the Dignity of Man (Pico della Mirandola, 1486), 243n2 Ordering principles (forms), 87, 91, 95 Oxford English Dictionary, 37 P Pantheon (Rome), 184, 207 ‘Paranoid Style in American Politics’ (Hofstadter, 1964), 47 Pareto principle, 74 Paris Peace Conference (1919), 245 Participant researchers, 130–137, 139–141, 143–145, 147–149 Participatory research, 21 Partnership for Conflict, Crime and Security Research (PaCCS), 144 Patriotism, 192, 272 Pedagogy, 292 See also Immersive pedagogy; Learning Performance and persuasion, 305 practices of, 23, 305–307, 310 Perform Australia, 297 Personal narrative, see Autoethnography Persuasion downplaying, 272, 273, 278–282 intensifying, 272–278, 282 See also Intensify/downplay schema (Rank); Persuasive power; Propaganda Persuasive power, 261, 283 Philippines, 269, 271 Photographs (historical events and figures) Adolf Hitler, 169 American Civil War (1861–1865), 164

333

Aneurin Bevan (1956), 168 Antietam Battlefield (1863), 164 Boris Johnson, 159, 176–178 British Communist Party meeting (1939), 167 Crimean War (1854–1856), 164 Ed Miliband (2014), 162, 173 First World War, 163, 165 Indian Rebellion (1857), 164 John Major and Gemma Levine, 175 Margaret Thatcher (1990), 161 Nazi extermination camps, 165 Queen Elizabeth I, 157, 158 Ramsay MacDonald with Margaret Bondfield, 166 Second World War, 165, 167 Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), 165 Suez crisis (1956–1957), 168 Ted Heath, 177 Vietnam War (1955–1975), 165 Walpole, 157–159 Winston Churchill (1941), 158, 160 Photography/photographs, 173 and actuality/history, 162–163, 171 and daguerreotypes, 164 and framing, 173 and influence/bias, 155 and intentionality, 157–162 questions to ask about, 155–156 rules of, 173 selection and presentation, 172 See also Photographs (historical events and figures) Piano nobile (Palladio), 211 Plausible conjecture(s), 2, 15, 17 Plots, 16, 35, 36, 51, 52, 58, 88, 97, 115–117, 123, 267, 289–300 seven basic plots (Booker), 116 Plurivocality, see Narrative polyphony Podemos (Spain), 39, 50

334 

SUBJECT INDEX

Policy analysis, 20, 83, 105, 308 consequences, 102, 105 intervention, 81, 83, 93, 95, 103–105 making/innovation, 20, 23, 81–105, 289–292, 295, 296, 298, 301, 302, 305–311 See also Collective sensemaking Policymaking, see Policy Political ads/advertising, 19, 59, 61–63, 66, 71 Political narratives, 22, 34, 38, 51 Political parties, 19, 45, 62, 63, 66, 73, 78, 79, 212 Political science characteristics of, 12 interpretive, 12, 15, 16, 120 and pub choirs, comedy & flashmobs, 23 United Kingdom, 12 United States, 11, 12 See also Humanities; Political studies; Social science Political studies, 1–25, 82, 93, 107–126 Popular culture, 20, 23, 58 forms of, 58 Populism, 38–41, 51, 52 Poroporoaki, 298 Portability, 86, 88, 95 Positionality, 125, 136 Poststructuralists, 3, 85 Post-truth, 19, 33–52 Poverty of attention, see Attention deficit Power hard vs. soft, 22, 227, 230 politics, 86, 270 relationships, 132, 133 smart, 230 Prevent (counter-radicalisation strategy, UK), 132, 132n3, 147

Printing/printing presses, 22, 170, 174, 237, 240–242, 249, 250, 265, 272 Propaganda (Bernays, 1928), 245, 247 Propaganda Triumph of the Will (film, 1935), 247 Protestant Reformation, 265 Proto-comic books Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck (1842), 267 and Bible scenes, 265 Histoire de M. Vieux Bois (1837), 267 Hogan’s Alley (1895), 267 Journey to the Gold Diggins (Saddlebags, 1849), 267 and Passional Christi und Antichristi (Luther, 1521), 265 Yellow Kid see Hogan’s Ally, 267 Public Administration (journal), 109–111 Public opinion, 37, 234–236, 242, 244, 254, 259, 288 Public sector narratives, 58, 66 Public value, 290, 291 Punch (magazine), 266 Q Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), 7 Quebec, 63n5, 65n7 R Racism, 88, 140, 147 Rebirth of Area Studies: Challenges for History, Politics and International Relations in the 21st Century (Milutinovic, 2019), 15

  SUBJECT INDEX 

Reflexivity, 20, 86, 113, 122, 123, 125, 130, 304 See also Methodological self-reflexivity Religion, 4, 89, 100, 125, 144, 206, 245, 247, 255, 269 Remote voting monitor (Louisiana), 220 Renaissance, 193 Research collaborative, 20, 21, 130–149 dissemination, 146, 147, 303 ethics, 138, 140 impact, 9 mainstreaming, 2, 8, 10 relevance, 2, 8 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), 7 See also Research Excellence Framework (REF) Research Excellence Framework (REF), 7, 9, 10, 122, 124 See also Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) Rhetoric (Aristotle, 350 BC), 288 ‘River, The’ (Bruce Springsteen song, 1980), 111 Rome, 183, 184, 207 Royal Commission on Local Government in England (1966–1969), 109 Russia, 43, 79 S Sciences of the Artificial (Simon, 1969), 235, 243, 248, 249 Second World War, 23, 192, 234, 247, 268, 269, 272 Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education (Browne Report, 2010), 7

335

Securitisation of Islam, 137 Self-cultivation (Hamill), 301 Self-esteem, 43, 254 Self-reflection, see Reflexivity Self-reflexivity, see Reflexivity ‘Separate Tables Schools and Sects in Political Science’ (Almond, 1988), 82 Singapore, 293, 301 Singular narratives, 87, 91 Social change/political action, 34, 45, 85 Social Democratic Party (SDP, UK), 175 Socialization/social conditioning, 58 Social media, 22, 36, 37, 47, 49–51, 58, 73, 74, 79, 134, 179, 254 Social networks, 250 Social science instrumental value of, 2, 9 intrinsic value of, 2, 24 See also Genre blurring; Humanities; Political science; Political studies Social Science Research Council (SSRC), 119 Somatic leadership, see Leadership Songs from a Room (Leonard Cohen album, 1969), 110 Songs of Leonard Cohen (album, 1968), 110 ‘Stages’ (Leonard Cohen song, 2015), 113 Statues Brigham Young Statue (Utah Capitol), 223 ‘The Patriot’ Statue (Idaho Capitol), 224 Statue of Liberty (replica, Wyoming), 192, 195 See also Architecture; Capitol buildings; Capitols (design)

336 

SUBJECT INDEX

Storytelling, 5, 14, 16, 20, 114, 115, 118, 123, 136, 148, 149, 240, 288, 290, 307 See also Fables; Narrative; Tales Structuralism, 3 Student riots (May 1968), 234 Sudan, 250 Syriza (coalition of radical Left, Greece), 50 T Tales confessional, 116 impressionist, 116 realist, 116 See also Fables; Narrative; Storytelling Tangible artefacts/images/products, see Design Teaching excellence framework (TEF), 7 Tea for the Tillerman (Cat Stevens album, 1970), 110 Teaser and the Fire Cat (Cat Stevens album, 1971), 110 Technologies of power, 253 Thick descriptions, 2, 8, 16, 82 Thinking Photography (Burgin, 1982), 172 Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings, 7 Tortures of Saint Erasmus (triptych, circa 1460), 265 ‘Tower of Song’ (Leonard Cohen song, 1988), 113 Town hall, see Municipal buildings Trump administration, 79 Twitter, 73 U Understanding Intergovernmental Relations: Theory and Practice (Ph.D. thesis, Rhodes, 1985), 111

Unexamined life (Socrates), 10 See also Examined life United Kingdom (UK), 6, 6n1, 12, 21, 40, 59, 93, 110, 130, 139, 145, 149, 173, 175, 176, 288 United States (US), 11–13, 22, 41, 50n3, 59, 74n8, 79, 185, 187, 192, 214, 259, 267, 268, 270, 271, 273, 277, 278, 280, 281, 288 United States Agency for International Development (USAID), 271 United States Capitol, 184, 211 United States Department of Defence, 271 Universities marketisation of, 2, 124 neoliberal reform of, 124, 125 overseas student fees, 6 top-up fees, 6 See also Doctorate; Quality Assurance Agency (QAA); Research Assessment Exercise (RAE); Research Excellence Framework (REF); Teaching excellence framework (TEC) Utilitarian, 22, 193, 234, 236, 238, 254 V Values Christian, 146 collective, 87 vs. facts, 83 humanist, 87, 248 social, 248 symbolic, 236, 239 and women’s liberation, 246 See also British values; Islamic values; Māori people Visual arts caricature, 22, 263, 266, 280

  SUBJECT INDEX 

and politics, 21–23, 181 See also Architecture; Capitol buildings; capitols (design); Comics; Comic strips/books; Cartoons; Editorial cartoon; Photography/photographs; photographs (historical events and figures); Proto-comics; Filmmaking/filming; State house; Statues W Wales, 82, 92–96, 99, 100, 102, 104 Wellington, 293, 295, 301

337

Wellywood production industry, 295 West Wing (television show), 59 World War II, see Second World War X Xenophobia, 50 Y Yes Minister (television show), 59 YouTube, 19, 57, 59, 60n1, 60n3, 62, 63, 63n6, 67, 68, 71, 73–75, 74n8, 78, 79, 140