PhD despatches: "The Away Day"

The PhD away day is, I hope, becoming a fixed event in the academic calendar for PhD students in Sociology at the University of York. The first event took place last year, where a department professor, Paul Johnson, gave a talk on the different CVs that PhD students will be expected to produce for their first academic appointments. After this, there was an event planning discussion which ended in me organising a series of lectures for PhD students in Sociology and Women’s Studies  (you can see the great selection of speakers across 2014/15 here and here).

This year’s away day took much the same form but with one notable difference – the presence of Women’s Studies PhD students in addition to those of us from Sociology which added to the numbers and diversity of research. The day started with a fairly informal first hour in the morning. We spoke about our research in small groups for ten minutes at a time, which each person sharing a little information before we were all hurried along to a different group to speak again. A useful first exercise to warm us all up for a day of talking, particularly given the helpful presence of some early career researchers who interjected with their own experiences. It was also a nice way to meet some of the Centre for Women’s Studies students.

"so what's your research on?" - photo from UoY Sociology blog

 

Other segments included a talk from Andrew Webster about writing a thesis and making it pack a punch (ie. having some kind of impact). His talk, inimitable in style, was quite compelling (particularly since he gave a way a trick of the trade – as an external thesis examiner, he reads the abstract and the bibliography before he reads any other part of the thesis).

Another small group session in the afternoon on the topics of teaching/research balance, writing up, and data collection gave some of the junior PhD students a chance to hear from the advice of those further along the path to completion, though I think the ‘writing up’ session would have benefited from a day to itself given the amount of questions and discussion points that us finalist PhDs also had. Given the breadth of relevance for the topic, it is certainly something to consider in some more depth for the future.

A big thank you to Dr Wes Lin and Alison Taylor for organising the event. You can read the official account of events on the UoY Sociology blog, which the photo also came from, here.

University of Kent Law School - AHRC "Regulating Time" event

N.B., text copied from University of York Department of Sociology blog.

I invited to speak last week at an event at the University of Kent organised between Kent Law School and SATSU here at York. This was a workshop exploring the issue of temporality as it pertains to the creation of regulation (broadly conceived). 

In amongst papers about indigenous epistemologies of ownership and the US's electronic mortgage registration system (MERS), the importance of Greenwich Mean Time in the British imperial project of maritime sovereignty and modernity, I was asked to talk about issues arising from my own thesis. 

My paper explored how the public umbilical cord blood bank contends with the regularly updated professional standards intended to regulate the clinicians who use the collected tissue. The collection managers must anticipate future clinical need, typing and diagnosing tissue beyond current clinical expectations, and regularly appraising older stock. This anticipatory logic, as I call it in the paper, demonstrates the temporal rhythm of a repository of tissues collected in the past, maintained in the present, and of potential use in the future. 


See more info here: http://www.kent.ac.uk/law/time/index.html

2015 York Sociology PhD Lecture Series

Over Christmas, I've been putting together the next series of PhD lectures. The poster is below.

Although two speakers are from the University of York's Department of Sociology, one contributor is based in the Centre for Women's Studies this time. If you're interested in speaking in the series, please do drop me a line. 

Four steps for writing an academic book review

How to write a book review... Well, first of all, should you be writing a book review? The simple answer would be "yes". The more in-depth answer would be, "if you have the time to spend on reading a book not directly related to your work, then yes, because…"

• it shows a willingness to get something committed to the page
• it bulks out an empty-looking publications list 
• it’s a collegiate thing to do; book reviews are a good guide for others trying to locate relevant literature (plus, when I was an undergraduate, book reviews helped me to get my head around dense texts that I didn’t “get”)
• you generally get to keep the copy after you’ve reviewed it.

I’ve reviewed a few books, and thought it might be useful to explain how I approach a book review in a few steps.

Step one – Get the book
If you want to review a particular book, you can approach a journal to source it for you. In my experience, if they feel the book is relevant to the journal remit then they will access a review copy for you and send it your way.  I wrote a review for Sociology after I approached them and asked them if they could get me a copy of the book. Some journals publish a list of the titles they have available for review. For instance, Political Studies Review maintains a record of all the books and the person to contact to get hold of the copy.

Step two – Read the book
Seems obvious, but I generally skim-read books for relevant chapters to my work (I’m doing a PhD. Time is sparse!) However, if you’re committing to the page an in-depth critical review of somebody else’s work, do them the honour of reading it all. I generally try to read it as fast as I can, underlining every time the author explicitly makes an argument and annotating anything I find interesting. If I can find all the arguments quickly when I flick back through, it makes the writing the review a fairly quick process.

(source) 

Step three – Draft the review
This is the hardest part and it requires you to basically cut down an entire manuscript onto a page of A4. I recently reviewed a book for the Sociology of Health and Illness. The guidelines they give are straight forward:

"A successful book review has three main functions: description, analysis and appraisal."

You needn’t go chapter-by-chapter through the book. You can focus on one or two, or just draw out a couple of key arguments that re-appeared through the text.  There are a few key things to remember to include, and it might get knocked back to you for editing if you don't put these in.

• the intended audience (and who, in your opinion, would benefit from reading it)
• the main objectives of the author (and whether, in your opinion, they achieved them)
• the main arguments of the author (and whether, in your opinion, they were convincing)
• the breadth of, and kind of, sources/data that the work relies on

Generally, I avoid references to outside texts, but it can be useful to mention the names and titles of a couple of books that you know "fit into" the same canon that the monograph you're reading is trying to establish itself within. You're not reviewing them, so don't spend words on external texts. Mentioning them does help to 'situate' the book though. Journals will differ on whether they want a bibliography to be included.

Step four – Don’t be too brazen in your critique
If it's really that bad, then why are you wasting your time reading it? Sure, if there are ideas you want to wrangle with, that's fine, but you’re not Hannah Arendt yet so don’t feel like you have to throw all your critical weight into a book review. A coherent explication of the points, with some reflection on their value, is the tone that journals seem to look for.

Incidentally, the author of a book I reviewed actually emailed me to thank me for the review, which wasn't scathing, but took some to unpack the ideas she'd presented. It was a big deal because I enjoyed her previous work and so asked a journal to review her book because it's relevant to my field. The fact that we are now in correspondence is a big deal – not least because she agreed to look over a draft of a journal article afterwards.

---

A book review can be a worthwhile thing to do, especially if you're in the midst of your PhD. The free book alone makes it worthwhile, but it can also be a good break away from the intensity of dealing 100% with your thesis. Of course, feel free to add any of your own suggestions in the comments section. Most of all, good luck with your review.

PhD Autumn Open Lecture Series

Over the past few weeks I've been putting together a lecture series for PhD students in our department to "showcase" their research to other PGs and staff who might not be familiar with the work being done in what we affectionately call the "PhD corridor", where we are all lucky enough to share offices and work day-to-day within the Department of Sociology.

I've written at more length on the department blog about the purpose behind the event, and the lectures begin this week with Alex Simpson talking about his research in the financial centre of the UK, the City of London. This will be followed by papers from Piotr Maron on the measurement of male anorexia, and Holly Steel on the "live blogging" of the Syrian conflict.

It's quite a catholic selection of papers, intended to draw out the diversity of PG research in the department, and make our own work visible to the wider university.

From Yokohama ISA Congress, to Tokyo

If you visit University of York Sociology Department's blog, you can read a short piece from me and Alex Simpson about our visit to the ISA Congress in Yokohama, Japan that I've also written about on Largely Hokum here. After we finished our week in Yokohama I was lucky enough to spend a few days in Tokyo. The two aren't far apart, and it was absolutely worth the visit.

Views from the observatory floor of the Mori Art Museum

I would the city is probably one of the most efficient engaging and exhausting that I've ever visited - - and possibly my favourite so far. 

   

These are a few pictures from my few days there between the Yokohama conference and homeward flight to York.

ISA Congress - Yokohama, Japan

The ISA Congress happens once every four years, which is probably why 6087 people visited Yokohama for the week-long event this month. I’d been to the BSA annual conference and thought that was a big event, but it was dwarfed by the ISA.

The ISA is organised into ‘research committees’ which further divide into small panels on specific themes. Research committees are a big thing at the ISA, which I didn’t really understand until I got there. Choosing what you want to attend is best done by locating the broader research committees of interest and then sifting through the numerous and various research projects that people are discussing in the different committee panels. I’m pretty sure that this was the only way to tackle the largest conference program I’ve ever seen (you can download the electronic book, but make some disk space because it’s 10MB and there aren’t even abstracts, which you can download separately if you can find a further 13MB).

The Pacifico Yokohama, right next to the 'second largest sky scraper in Japan'.

My main interests lay in the RC15 Sociology of Health, RC46 Clinical Sociology and RC05 Racism, Nationalism and Ethnic Relations. There were various different presentation approaches, including traditional papers and the briefer and more intimate round table sessions that I was familiar with when presenting my paper at the BSA 2014. My contribution, which was a distributed paper handed out to attendees, was presented in the first of these research committees, at a panel called ‘Collaborative Governance and Healthy Public Policies’.

I was joined by Sam Burgum (Warwick) nd Alex Simpson (York)

I wanted briefly to mention just a few of the many papers I saw over the week of the conference. Here are some tweets and summaries:

Bethan Harries & Laia Becares - RC05 Articulations of Etnicity, Race and Nationhood)
Harries' qualitative research focused on place and how they are racialized? She called this a 'cartography of race in the city' and focused in on the idea of denying racism. Particularly, she talked about how some of her participants experienced what we’d term racism, yet denied that they had been the recipient of it. She raised an interesting question: were some participants possibly worried that they'd offend a white researcher by relaying their experiences of racism from white people. Becares, who spoke on the same paper, discussed the contraints of ‘measuring’ racism quantitatively by discussing her use of survey data. The feeling of being unsafe, an experience of verbal abuse or physical harassment that respondents thought had happened because of their ethnicity, religion or nationality were considered to be racist encounters. This obviously raised fundamental definitional questions not least of racism but also race. 

Exciting paper from @GKBhambra on @isa_sociology modernities panel today: "the histories we acknowledge shape the contours of the concepts"
— ros williams (@roswillz) July 14, 2014

It's thanks to the power of Twitter, which was overdrive for the week of the conference, that various papers, panels and streams were advertised and live-tweeted.  


Saeid Yarmohammadi – RC46 Clinical Sociology
Focusing on Iran, Yarmohammadi’s paper explored the difficulties of implementing clinical sociology as a field of study in Iran and advocated its potential uses in the country. The paper presented research regarding the hegemonic position of other disciplines over Sociology - a 'dominance of other fields of science'. No Iranian sociologists or humanities scholars are included in international lists of influential academics. Along with this, Yarmohammadi discussed the role of ideology in Iranian government - with the prevalence of religion, sciences (including sociology) aren't given space to contribute to problem solving. The paper moved on to explore the difficulties of implementing clinical sociology in Iran, where the field is 'emergent' compared to its near century-long history in other countries such as the US. Siginificant overcoming of this obstacles would be needed for Iranian sociology (and clinical sociology) to have a more significant input in the future of the country.

Poignant data from Baptiste Godrie today at #ISA2014 Sociology of Health stream @isa_sociology pic.twitter.com/yOtYyiqGN7
— ros williams (@roswillz) July 18, 2014

Vanessa Blondet - RC46 Clinical Sociology
The paper analysed posters for public health issues such as breast screening and obesity. Blondet noted, for instance, that obesity campaigns focused on the urban middle class and not the working class neighbourhoods or underpriveleged suburbs. Why were rural and working classes excluded? The presumption was that they move around more, and yet there is a prevalence of higher risk practices and obesity in these very demographics. The paper used survey data to demonstrate how the messages embedded in these posters and their accompanying TV advertisements had indeed percolated into the population, but that very few who recalled them had actually implemented the advice. Of the method of trying to address an entire nation through one campaign, Blondet stated quite poignantly that 'by addressing everyone, it finally speaks to noone'.

Margaret Kelaher:aboriginal groups' involvement in collab gov on pub health "A lot more red dots than yellow" #ISA14 pic.twitter.com/gHsQ4nrLsR
— ros williams (@roswillz) July 19, 2014

It was brilliant to travel to Japan for the ISA. I met a number of people working in really engaging areas, and got an insight to the huge array of research going on just outside of my own remit of study. Of course, it was also an opportunity to meet up with old friends - I hadn't even realised Dharmi Kapadia and Gareth Thomas would be there. The Welcome and Farewell Parties were well-attended, and I bumped into lots of people who I'm more accustomed to seeing in the cloudy North of England.

Before the ISA Farewell party with Sam Burgum, Alex Simpson, John Holmwood and Gurminder Bhambra

Visualising data, nodes, and themes in NVivo

After transcribing and coding a lot of interviews on NVivo 10, I ended up with a ton of 'nodes', which I think of quite simply as themes I've found in different pieces of texts from different sources. Linking them together means the nodes are a good place to start to gather material from different sources that point in the same direction. Quotes from individuals and segment from policy documents can be gathered together under them. 

But I ended up with a lot - and it remains to be see whether there were too many. But I did code all my data, and I doubt that all of these could be squeezed into my thesis. The question then became: how do I deal with all these nodes that are linked. So I borrowed my office mate Holly's book 'Qualitative Data Analysis with Nvivo' and went to the visualisation section which gives a brief run through of how to do a simple version of what I set out below.

This post demonstrates how I turned my nodes into a relational map.

That is, how I went from this:

 To this:

You'll need to have a few nodes - but you can also do this with sources, if you're trying to find less thematic links or map things out.

STEP BY STEP GUIDE

(1) On the left column, selectied the Models tab and right click in the large right hand field to set up a 'New Model'. The below textbox appears. Give it a name. I called mine 'Tester'.

(2) Next, you'll need to populate the large grid that appears when you open your new model. On the top menu bar, you should have the choice to 'Add Project Items' if you've activated the Model tab (as per the below picture). Select your nodes, or some sources. Or a mixture of a few. The purpose of this is to visualise the relationship between different things. This can be between different 'kinds' of items.

(3) Below is what appeared when I selected some items (files sourced from the parliamentary Hansard, some minutes from All Party Parliamentary groups, a PDF or two and a couple of nodes). You can see the different elements by the symbols appearing with the name on the item's shape. The little blue ball items are nodes. 

Although the shapes of different 'kinds' of items are different to begin with, you can change them as the next step explains.

 (4)

Right-clicking the item will allow you to change its shape (double clicking it will also allow you to change the colour, which groups nodes in the model and, as per the rightmost field, allows you to 'hide' grouped items, but I've not shown this here).

Changing the shame of these items can be useful. I used circles for little nodes (perhaps a common idea, or an item people talked about a lot), diamonds for bigger issues, and rounded rectangles for big themes that I imagined would be 'hubs' for circles and diamonds.

(5) Now you can start to play around with relationships by drawing arrows between different nodes. By doing it in NVivo, the modeller allows the connection between different items to be moved about the page to follow the individual items as you drag their physical position on the page with your mouse:

 

Some of these relationships might move from one to the other, there might be symmetrical relationship, or it could be purely associative. The upper tool bar model tab accomodates for all of these, as the above image demonstrates.

Once you've spent a bit of time on this, you'll end up with a flat map that can help you to 'see' the relationships between what was just a list of different nodes or sources, as below:

Whilst the map is still 'messy' and full of information, what it has been able to do is allow me to think visually about the clustering of different ideas that I've been coming across over a period of weeks. It's helped me to think about the thesis outline, and how I can incorportate the various data (embedded in all of those nodes) physically into a document.

Topologies of Immunity, University of Exeter, April 10th 2014

Last week's fantastic 'Topologies of Immunity' workshop at the University of Exeter began with a keynote from Warwick Anderson (whose new 2014 paper is here, and absolutely worth a read for anybody interested in discussions of globalisation, biovalue and postcoloniality. Anderson's a self-termed 'postcolonial bore', but the paper is anything but boring). His keynote, Getting Ahead of One’s Self, discussed the last part of his new book Intolerant Bodies – A short history of autoimmunity. Co-authored with Ian McKay, the book offers a reflection on the cultural relevance of immunity. As in the book, Anderson's talk argued for a more generous understanding of immunitary logic, inclusive of philosophical and cultural reflections of immunology.

The keynote was held in Building:One's Bateman Lecture Theatre

The talk was a perfect ramp into a lively afternoon of discussion. Chaired by Professor Gail Davies, the workshop began with a lively paper from Jamie Lorimer and Richard Grenyer, that explored methodological issues in how to conceptualise and measure the 'micriobiogeographies' of the biomes we live in. Nadine Levin offered some important thoughts on the normative assumptions of data-intensive scientific work at the intersection of metabolism and immunology ('good' bacteria, and the 'healthy' microbiome.) 

The workshop was also an opportunity for the first outing of a paper Nik Brown and I have put together on the internationalised immunitary regimes of public and private cord blood banking and transplant. Using Roberto Esposito's conceptual work around immunitas and communitas, the paper argues that the cord blood paradigm confounds our current understandings of national solidarism and pernicious, 'selfish' marketisation of human tissue. 

University of Exeter

Astrid Schrader's paper gave a fantastic overview of harmful algal blooms known as red tides, and scientific work done around understanding programmed cell death (the fantastic title of the paper was 'suicidal microbial communities'). The paper toyed with conceptions of the temporality of death, and how we come to understand cells as - paradoxically - committing 'suicide'.

Artist Helen Scalway explored the use of materials in her work. She also touched upon some of the challenges she's been confronted with in understanding, representing, uniting and separating parts, pieces, shapes and movements. Along with an opportunity to see some interesting art (something I never really encounter), the space for an 'artist response' was vital in illuminating the role of metaphor in this discussion. I mean this particularly in regards to the necessary transposition of ideas across vital, political, and material platforms (or topologies), when we discuss immunity.

Nigel Clark's closing remarks tied the event together nicely. Noting that we were all about to exit the room as the singular individuals we'd been on entry, he made it clear that our ideas of flow and globalisation, sharing and hybridity, make very little sense without an appreciation of locality, location and more-and-less material borders. Importantly, he also raised a matter that hadn't been made explicit in any of the papers during the day. Politically, the matters explored here are all very fecund. But what can we do with immunity? What doors are opened and closed by thinking about the world through this lens? The philosophy of immunity is, I think, going to be taking up much of my own conceptual energy for some time to come.

Paper at BSA Race and Ethnicity Study Group Conference 2014 - Mapping the Field: Contemporary Theories of Race, Racism and Ethnicity

The BSA Race and Ethnicity study group conference was held today at Newman University in Birmingham. You can see the full programme of events here.

The two plenary addresses from John Solomos (the now Head of Department at my first university, Warwick) and Nira Yuval-Davis, opened the day with the former arguing that research on migration must more heavily focus on the history of, and sociology of, race and ethnicity. Yuval-Davis argued that, contrarily, migration studies - which she posited started as its own strand - is now gradually moving more toward race and ethnicity studies. They raised some interesting points; Yuval-Davis suggested that we might think of footballer Anelka's recent quenelle gesture as a chance to reconsider what we think of as the boundaries of mimicry and satire; Solomon insisted that university teaching (though less a focus than ever because of the REF) is key in the future development of race and ethnicity studies. It has, he said, made significant headway as it gradually becomes a more defined feature on the sociological landscape through its central inclusion in undergraduate modules.

BSA Race and Ethnicity Study Group Conference 2014

I presented a paper on the Race and Technology panel. You can see the abstract for my talk "Untwisting the cords: exploring the political value(s) of race in British umbilical cord blood stem cell policy" here. I was joined by two other speakers: David Skinner and Sanjay Sharma.

David Skinner from Anglia Ruskin University presented a theoretical paper that positioned border control technologies and DNA data banks like the UK's Police DNA database as implicitly racialised technologies. For instance, whilst the DNA database might not immediately appear as such, its composition compels us to question its neutrality (it is comprised mainly of black, male DNA). He argued that sociology must move forward, past a concern with what science says about race, to how the technologies that buttress that science enact race. (Not least, I suppose, because the foundations of biosciences often rest on considerably less sexy areas of exploration. I think particularly of Star's call to study boring things in this case! [FYI, none of it is actually boring once you start looking at it].)

The other paper in this panel, presented by Sanjay Sharma, looked toward social networking sites such as twitter, and how race can be performed in these spaces. Based on his paper, the presentation underscored the role of technologies in the formation of subjectivities, and argued that phenomena like blacktags are written, reproduced, and consumed in ways that move beyond our assumptions of a preconstituted black user of the internet. Online platforms are, he argued, techno-cultural assemblages in which groups that can appear congealed and impenetrable, or dispersed and loose, are often attached by thin strands of connection that allow data to travel beyond their originally intended audience and loosen their seemingly coherent meanings.

A great mix of postgrads and professors, coffee and croissants, and everything in between. A brilliantly organised and thought-provoking day.

The weight of responsibility: getting slim and getting fit in a biopolitical milieu

It's been a busy summer and I've not had a chance to post. Partly, that's been because of thesis work; I've been applying for institutional ethics approval and preparing draft chapters for my next thesis advisory panel. It's also been because I've started on something of a health kick, and this certainly merits a blog post.

Over the last few years, a number of new measurement devices have become available as smart phone apps (RunKeeper, MiCoach). iPhones, HTCs and Samsungs are devices most people I know carry around in their pockets throughout the day and rest by their sides at night (I misplaced mine for a couple of days this week and felt thoroughly lost). If you don't have a smart phone, you might have a wristband that records your physical activity. 

In short, if you want to know where you've been, how far you've walked, how still you were in last night's slumber, you can. Download an app, and all this data will be collated. What has emerged within these apps are new methods of self-policing our bodies and our consumption; they are also portals into communities of people can congratulate you on your successes, who will share their own stories of progress.

It's difficult to disagree with philosopher Ian Hacking (How Should We Do the History of Statistics, 1982) on anything, let alone his suggestion that social statistics - which Foucault does argue plays a substantial role in biopolitics at the end of History of Sexuality vol. 1 - is actually the fulcrum around which biopolitics has operated through the last two centuries; it can be located as the key medium through which the state intervened in the populace. But, as has been noted by a number of people (most famously, Nikolas Rose in Politics of Life Itself, 2001), the neoliberal ethos of the individual gathers energy and new technologies - often, biomedical - have become more important. Data and the statistics drawn from them are a prime means through which we can intervene in ourselves.

You can compare one day's movement to the next. You can set goals for how quickly you want to jog 5k, and based on your past data (and, presumably, the gradual increases in speed that other service uses record over time), such devices can estimate how long it will take, based on running x times a week, for you to reach your desired time.

The website that presents data uploaded from your phone, which you run with.

Equally, with weight, you can pop in your current and desired bodily mass, and you'll be given a framework within which to eat, move, and lose or gain.

Either upload data from your phone, or enter it manually onto the sister website

There's a lot to be chewed over regarding the economic terrain from which these new media of recording and suggestion have flourished. These are all privately owned companies, some are start-ups, others injected with cash from venture capital funds. The secret to success, though, seems to lie in exportability of data from one physical device to another through a choice of interfaces. RunKeeper, for instance, runs on Android and iOS, will sync with facebook, and is swift to open its access to new hardware as it becomes available. It would be difficult, then, to understand the individual success of a weightloser or jogger who smashes their BMI or 10k speed goals, without considering the wider success of the market of tools that have come to facilitate the measurement of this singular bodily changes.

So too do we need to think about the role of our key terms of measuring physical change or progress. Calories, it seems, are units within a matrix of individual bodily governance. Knowing that one hasn't exhausted their 2,000 calories-a-day allowance is achieved by checking the information written on the front of a food packet (informed, in part, by governmental energies to police populations, which I've written about here. Also check out these articles: 1, 2) or from new devices like the MyFitnessPal app shown above that will scan your KitKat's barcode and tell you that you really can't eat that today.

It's a really rich area for sociological thought, whether we're concerned with new technologies of self- and state-surveillance, the encroachment and consumption of data in our lives, or in the role of technologies in how we live as people and populations.

upcoming conferences

Just a quick note that there are two conferences coming up soon that are gonna be brilliant.

Firstly, a week today I'll be giving a paper at the PFGS colloquium entitled "Race reified: value and minority ethnicities in the UK umbilical cord blood stem cell bioeconomy". You can get more details on the event here.

Second, Sydney Calkin has put together an international conference on gender and neoliberalism in the post-crisis climate. She's got some great speakers from around the world coming to give papers, and we're all really excited about it so check out the conference website, and come along if you're able.

click on the poster for the conference website, and follow the conference twitter feed here

Britishness, yorkshire, and ethnicity as a "coding bias"

I came across some of CoDE's latest work with the data from the 2011 UK census. I found their look at "Who feels British" really intriguing - the age patterns were especially telling. The website also leads to some workings papers on discussions of the classifications CoDE use, but the 2011 census used the updated ethnicity measures put together by the Office of National Statistics, which you can see the code framework for here. (I've been looking through the British Bone Marrow Registry recently and I'm under the impression that they, like the rest of the NHS, are using the same classification system across the UK for all kinds of treatment).

I've been playing around with ethnicity taxonomies quite a lot recently. They're so influenced by their locality - specificity can be magnified, reduced, or altogether removed depending on the state/institution doing the measurement.

The CoDE "Who feels British" data analysis uses the National Identity dataset. This is framed around participants' alignment with British, English, Welsh, Northern Irish, Other, or combination identities. An affinity to only an "other" identity implies a lack of connection to a sense of Britishness. 

I'm based in York, so I downloaded the Yorkshire and the Humber dataset tabulated by correspondents' ethnicity. In its raw form, census ethnicity data are collapsed into what the ONS calls "level 1" ethnicity as well as the less reductive "level 2". Black, African, Caribbean and Black British are subsumed into a total. Various articulations of whiteness (English, Welsh, Scottish, N. Irish, Irish, Traveller) are calculated as a "total white" statistic, and so on. Strangely, everybody who considers themselves to be "mixed" are absorbed into the contentious category of mixed/multiple ethnicities. So I could have parents from Bangladesh and China, and another person could have a father from Africa and a mother from Europe, and - if we marked ourselves as "mixed" in any way - we would be placed into the same level 1 category as one another.

With the Yorkshire dataset, I used the collapsed level 1 ethnicity data to calculate the percentages of people who considered themselves to be in some way British, English, Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish or Irish. 

More white people in Yorkshire and the Humber think of themselves as British than the other groups.

I only ran some descriptive statistics to illustrate this and, though it's fairly obvious that this would be the case, looking at the population of Yorkshire illustrates the massive disparity by ethnicity:

In the 2011 census, there were 4,691,956 white people, 84,558 of mixed ethnicity, 385,964 who said they were asian, 80,345 black people and 40,910 people classified as 'other'.

Rogers Brubaker calls ethnicity a "coding bias". We can understand this in the same way that Judith Butler talks about matrices of cultural intelligibility.  Skin colour and other differences localised to the body (like normative gender behaviours such as make-up or facial hair) take precedence when we look at the people around us. We recognise race, we recognise gender. It's immediate and we don't need to think about it because it's embedded so thoroughly in our day-to-days.

I imagine somebody's sense of their own Britishness is heavily influenced by how much they believe themselves to represent what they understand to be British. I think the above image illustrates how 'white' Yorkshire is. It's probably not surprising, then, that more white people consider themselves to be British in these parts than do others since it's easier to find examples of white british people in York than it is to find people who are not. It sets ups a normative standard of what britishness is. 

Because of the precedence of race as a signifier of identity, it might well make sense that people who are not white are more likely to distantiate themselves from britishness if the normative british identity in one's locale is (in the coding framework of race) white. 

It would be interesting to compare the sense of Britishness within a locale that had a really different ethnic composition from Yorkshire, and anchor these data in the birthplaces of correspondents too but it took me long enough to code these charts in R-stat as it is. Here's the coding if anybody is interested:

> brit=c(97, 90, 78, 58, 47) 

> names(brit)=c("White", "Mixed", "Asian", "Black", "Other") 

> colours=c("green4", "green3", "green2", "green1", "greenyellow") 

> barplot(brit, ylab="Percentage", ylim=c(0,100), col=colours, las=2) 

> 

> brit2=c(4691956,84558,385964,80345,40910) 

> colours=c("green","blue","red","yellow","purple") 

> labels=c("White","Mixed","Asian","Black","Other") 

> pie(brit2,labels=labels,col=colours)

The bloody frontiers of neoliberalism

The below was originally posted on the Gender, Neoliberalism and the Financial Crisis conference blog here. All of us at York are really excited about the conference. The organiser, Sydney Calkin, has secured international speakers and keynotes that make up an incredible programme of events. Registration is now open, so sign up!

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Mooncups and tampons; two novel inventions to help the menstruating lady in her time of need. These are sanitary devices to aid us in our endless pursuit of female hygiene. Mary Douglas spoke of matter out of place. Where there is dirt, she said, there is a system. The menstrual cycle’s monthly expulsion, though, isn’t just dirt. It’s detested. It’s loathed. Kristeva, Grosz and Martin have all written about this positioning of menstruation as waste, excretion, a symbol of another month of reproductive failure.

Many menstruaters put putrid tampons in scented bags, only to put those bags into a bin. That bin, itself emptied by a specially employed company, is set apart from the standard trash receptacle (this one contains used hand towels that wiped away less egregious detritus). It is subtly tucked away, ensconced somewhere between the toilet and the cubicle wall with a foot pedal so that we don’t have to make contact with it. Menstruation isn’t really spoken about too much. Period product adverts deal in metaphors and euphemisms, colouring everything a benign blue so that we’re as semiotically distantiated from the dirt we’re dealing with as it is possible to be.

This is what makes menstrual blood such an incredibly potent example of the impressive ability of neoliberal energy to turn things so apparently divested of value (at a symbolic, as well as an economic level) into valuable items of exchange.

Certain types of stem cell, potentially useable in a range of therapies, can be retrieved from menstrual blood. As a technique of stem cell sequestration and provision, it’s still in its clinical infancy. Unsurprisingly though, private enterprises in the US already offer to bank your menstrual blood for your exclusive therapeutic use in the future – for a fee! It is a situation saturated with tension, such as moral economies of public and private stem cell banking, and the insurance-like nature of stem cell banking. Nonetheless, it stands as a fantastic example of how bodies (specifically, female bodies) continue to be mined for value in new and remarkable ways that extend beyond the illuminating Marxist critiques offered by Donna Dickenson in the last decade about new reproductive technologies.

The emerging bioeconomies are, as Melinda Cooper argues, inextricable from the neoliberal projects that promulgate them. Here, in the lining of women’s wombs, the contents of their ovaries, and the blood from within their umbilical cords, we see a potentially renewable stock of possible surplus value. This value expresses itself as reproductive capacity at a molecular level, but also as capital that might be amassed from framing such tissues as exchangeable commodities or using them as a basis for new intellectual property.

Young, naked and probably fecund? Hard to be sure as her uterus appears to have been replaced by some blood red roses. (Mena Suvari in American Beauty)

We can pinpoint instances of the deregulation of research into new scientific terrain (in the US, the ban on stem cell research was lifted by Obama in 2009); we might also weave into this narrative a concern for preempting risk by gathering masses of tissue samples in cryogenic vats just in case. Finally, we might remember David Harvey’s claim that one of the most incredible abilities of neoliberalism is its proclivity to ‘roll back the bounds of commodification’. We can see the undeniable confluence of the projects of neoliberalism – growth sans limit – and the biotechnological imaginary that holds at its core a desire to improve human existence, extend corporeal capacities, and simultaneously derive as much capital from the body as is possible to do so.

Cheerios and the incoherence of whiteness

My friend Holly Steel pointed me in the direction of the recent furore over an innocuous new Cheerios advert in which a young girl thinks "heart healthy" cereal gives her reason to pour it all over her dad's chest to ensure his longevity. It's fairly funny, and quite a novel way of getting across the message about cardiovascular conditioning.

Everybody likes to see somebody who looks at least a little like themselves, or someone doing the things they also like to do, on TV. It's one of the most popular media that we have access to. Seeing something not totally disimilar from your life depicted on the screen adds that comforting sense of legitimacy to your actions and your being. For me, it means that the TV people thought there was a big enough audience to appreciate it being there in the first place. Because of this, it gives me a sense - contrived or not - that there are other people like me out there.

"So, this is just a stupid commercial about Cheerios but it means a lot to me. It shows interracial families and their children being normal and cute, not something to gawk at or to question. " - Meagan Hatcher-Mays @ Jezebel

It's simple, and most of the time we don't think about it because generally people can clutch at some kind of claim to being represented on TV.

So when I saw the misguided, malicious comments on the advert's youtube comments, it was horrifying. As Buzzfeed sadly professed, "welcome to 2013 America". It was a firm reminder, on a public platform, that Bonilla-Silva's thesis on racism without racists does not negate the existence of some imbeciles who are explicitly, graphically, hard-core racists. Aside from some of the harmful comments about the young actor who played the child that I find actually too obnoxious to chew over right now, there was this recurring theme that the two comments I captured sum up succinctly:

By the time I'd heard, Cheerios had blocked comments. Still, sufficient people had enough insipid commentary to comment on mirror videos. The source of these screen caps was this version.

So this tumult emerged, unquestionably, because two people of apparently different skin tones were in a relationship with one another and had, as many couples do, progeny. The offence caused to the above commenters are demonstrative of a belief in the existence of Whiteness. Across the body of comments, there's a concern that this Cheerios advert harkens to the de-purification of the White race; of the inability to vocalise oneself as a White person in the politically correct polities of the now. 

Whiteness is an incredibly powerful symbolic category mobilised to 1) differentiate European imperialists from the inhabitants of the land they came upon, and to 2) homogenise a disparate group of people from different European nations for political expedience.

A lot of sociologists write about the contrived category of Whiteness, and it's as alive as an identifier today as ever it has been. The BNP, the EDL; these people cleave to the idea of being White british, distantiated from everybody who cannot or will not claim to be. Is Whiteness a Fanonian performative prompt? Is it 'a negated signifier' that disavows all "raced" subjectivities and allows the White subject to stand sans race? Regardless of whether one considers themselves to be White, it can't be denied that we all live in a racialised milieu. In other words, to be White is not to be without race. It is when Whiteness is ahistoricised - that is, when we pluck it out of its social and political history and pretend as though there has always been Whiteness - that the damage is done. 

Like most sociologists, I see race as a social construct articulated in the materiality of existence. Equally, though, I feel that the problem with saying that is that such a statement evokes a sense that somehow the construct must be inherently erroneous or harmful (Yasmin Gunaratnam brilliantly calls this the 'perverse relationship' between what we might see as the abstraction of social constructionist discourse, and the experiential landscape of day-to-day living.) Quite oppositionally, I view race - like gender, class and whatever various modality of human existence in question - as a politically energetic category that, when mobilised with care and thought, can come to quite fruitful and positive ends. It is in the instances of opprobrium when people invoke race language without the requisite introspection that harm is done. Here is one of so many quotidien examples.

Check out Richard Dyer's White for an Orientalist-style critique of white representation in the arts.

Brett St. Louis offers some really exciting engagement with the idea of race as a productive political category.

Ian Hacking on "The Shaping of Autism", University of Leeds

Yesterday, Ian Hacking took to the stage in the Rupert Beckett theatre of the University of Leeds for a lecture entitled “Making Up Autism” which, at the very beginning of his talk, he changed to “The Shaping of Autism”.  The original title, he explained, was a nod to the work he’s done in the area of Making Up People – this essay, written ten years ago now, regards the ways in which people interact with the way in which they are classified. The concern Hacking raised was a semantic one; “Making Up Autism” suggests that perhaps he does not think autism “exists”, that it needn’t be taken seriously, or that it didn’t always exist. This stance is very much incongruent with what he actually argues in the lecture and, more generally, in his writing.

The Parkinson Building, University of Leeds (not actually where he spoke but still a beautiful building). Taken by me.

Hacking discusses Foucault’s analysis of homosexuality which, argued the great French philosopher, came into being as a way to be a person in the nineteenth century. This isn’t to say that men hadn’t been having sex with other men (or women with other women, though lesbianism isn’t something Foucault really talks about) since time immemorial. They certainly were. Rather, the temporally contingent institutionalization of sexuality – its measurement, its naming, its acknowledgement – made possible the existence of “the homosexual”. When I first read Foucault, I found this mind blowing. Like so many of Foucault’s observations, it was so obvious but it was not at all common sense:

“The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species”  (Foucault, History of Sexuality vol. 1)

One of the key things I take from Foucault – something that Hacking has extrapolated brilliantly into other arenas – is one of the most important things that I believe a sociologist needs to keep in mind. There is a social and political agency that can be mobilized in pretty much any identity category. Homosexuality came into being as a way to be a person which is to say that one enacts their sexuality in response to the institution. This stretches way beyond the act of sex. There is a dynamism in the naming that is unmistakably experienced by the person so named. As a gay woman, you’re deemed so because you have sex with other women. But as a gay woman, you might also exist in certain social circles, attend gay-specific events, politicize in ways peculiar to being a gay woman. Being labeled engenders a particularity that is not necessarily policing or limiting. Indeed, identifiers can be embraced in politically powerful ways that might never have even been anticipated by those who developed the initial systems of classification.

 

Ian Hacking in the throngs of explanation. A picture taken from here.

Like Foucault does with sexuality (and many other things), Hacking takes us through an historical exposition of the bringing about of autism as an identifier and as an identity.

People who are close to autism have played a role in the evolution of autism as a concept and experience. He calls these people “PCA” (personally connected to an autistic person). It works as a really interesting category in itself that Hacking exemplifies through the telling of an anecdote. He had been at a conference with psychiatrists who’d argued that it was the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) that shapes autism, if indeed there was any shaping to be done [this has been in the news recently as the fifth DSM is released next week]. How, asked the man, could PCAs have anything to do with its shaping as only one member of the DSM board was personally connected to an autistic person. In response, Hacking said that the DSM wasn’t necessarily the shaping device; “These were just bureaucrats,” he said “who were writing down where autism had gotten to at the moment.” Those who initially brought autism to public attention we not PCAs, but – because “autism is in flux”, that is it is a continually shifting definitional category – PCAs play a very significant role how we come to understand it contemporarily. He went into discussion about Lorna Wing, a psychiatrist with an autistic daughter who initially petitioned to have Asperger’s recognised by the DSM, and who was a founding member of what is now the British National Autism Society.

Hacking mentioned a photograph he’d seen of a child chained to a tree in Somalia who likely had what might be called autism. What "autism" as a recognised categorisation has done is, in many ways, liberate children perceived to be autistic from certain limitations. “Being on the spectrum” is a specific way of thinking of oneself, of one’s students, children, and/or patients. He made mention of the Autism Network International Autreat to help autistic people “live life the autly way”, and of various other avenues that recognition of autism opens up for people. To be classified is, after all, a way of being recognised as part of a particular grouping. The lecture was altogether more dense and comprehensive than this short post would suggest, but it was a fantastic opportunity to hear him speak. 

My father went to the University of Leeds to study engineering and saw the The Who play their (in)famous “Live at Leeds” concert there. Seeing Ian Hacking at Leeds is , I am not ashamed to say, my equivalent.

My parents have a framed version of this poster in their bathroom at home.

Thanks to Greg Radick and Stuart Murray who organised the Ian Hacking event.