Stanley Fish (him of interpretive communities) has opined in the NY Times that:

the days when a working-class Brit or (in my case) an immigrant’s son can wander into the groves of academe and emerge a political theorist or a Miltonist will recede into history and legend.

(h/t Maggi Dawn)

This is apparently going to happen because tuition fees are on the up.  And evidently this requires that everyone who opposes the increase must now, like Fish, shout from the rooftops: NO MORE POOR PEOPLE AT UNIVERSITY

Michael Shilliday has a post in response to this refrain over at Slugger O'Toole.  He asks:

Is it really that the policy is regressive, discriminatory and inherently unfair? Or are we having an uninformed debate, lead by party political combatants seeking an easy poll pleaser playing on the fears of people they aren’t giving the whole story to?

The thing is, as Shilliday points out, fees are on the up but they're not upfront.  They will be imposed after graduation.  I'm not saying this is perfect.  I'm not even saying that it's necessarily a good idea.  But I'm absolutely with Shilliday that the least helpful thing to be doing right now is going around announcing doom.  Higher fees may certainly put people off, but this effect can only be magnified by making it a media 'truth' that poor people won't go to university anymore. 

There is a rather reductive political tendency (ahem cough cough Labour party) to assume that lack of money is the sole factor in influencing what marginalised people are able to do.  Putting all the focus here misses out the mass of invisible barriers that serve to lock down things like access to university.  These are things like access to childcare, lack of assistance for mature students, and bureaucratic barriers like who can provide a reference.  There are fears of not fitting in, of not having the 'right' academic habits.  It isn't plain sailing once enrolled either: one of the biggest issues the equity advisers I knew battled was how to help students get their study done when their families neither understand nor sympathise. 

To give credit where it is due, many universities do acknowledge these issues and work to address them.  There are, for example, some fantastic learning support programmes out there.  And this is one reason why Fish's comment jars with me: elitism has decreased.  Rose-tinted glasses for the 'working-class Brit ... wander[ing] in the groves of academe' filter out a previous incarnation of the university system that was far more class-biased than it is now. 

Fees have probably trebled.  It's nothing to applaud.  It is something that now needs to be lived with and the agenda of those who supposedly care about disadvantaged students must turn towards supporting their participation rather than reiterating that they simply can't go.  Being poor in Britain is a constant process of being told that you can't.  Change doesn't happen by having more voices say it. 

I am writing a ghost story. 

It isn't a fictional story.  (Well, at least it isn't in that it's for a journal.)  But it is about me and an experience I had a couple of years ago now. 

I got lost in the woods (this was in West Yorks), and it got dark, and I fell over cobbles and tree roots, and I panicked.  I panicked not just because I was lost, but because every ghost story anyone in the area had ever told me (and people told lots) came flooding into my head.  I was absolutely terrified that, at any moment, a spectre would loom up ahead of me.  I really believed, right then, that it could happen. 

But it didn't and I made it home. 

So it isn't really a ghost story, because there isn't really a ghost.  There's just me, lost and panicking in the woods. 

I'm writing about it because I'm interested in the relationship between the supernatural, history and place.  It was that experience which made me think about how those pieces might be connected.  I'm also rather enamoured of the idea of a historical anthropology that looks at how people in the present experience the past, especially the past beyond memory.  (I will periodically talk about that on this blog because, in my PhD, it's What I Do.) 

Problem is, every time I open the file with the half-finished article in it, I bottle it.  Can't write.  Nothing to say.  (I'm in good company since Tracey's got nothing to say either!)

Although it's less about having nothing to say than being uncomfortable with the whole saying it bit. 

At our Ethnography Forum on Friday, we had a speaker on autoethnography (that is, using yourself and your experiences as data).  I get it, and I get that in this article I'm flirting with autoethnography.  And it gives me the jitters. 

It gives me the jitters because I've been trained to study other people, not to study myself.  It's OK to say how my background or attributes might impact on that study (as a woman I'm not likely to get to the heart of a men-only morris dancing group, for example) but not OK to actually be the study.  It seems my internal what-is-anthropology boundaries have been so well constructed (thanks ANTHRO 721 Method & Theory) that it's proving difficult to hop over them. 

I worry too about my 'right' to speak.  After all, I'm not from West Yorkshire, I'm from New Zealand.  Can I say that from my experience I learnt something about West Yorkshire?  Am I claiming more than I should? 

Lastly I have niggles about it only being one story.  I'm only one person; I'm not a pattern or a generalisation.  I'm used to the idea of talking to a bunch of people.  Talking to one - and myelf at that - can I say anything meaningful? 

Baarnsley's Michael Dugher has a very good post up at Labour Uncut about nudge theory.  The nudge, based on work in behavioural economics, has been a bit of a Cameron flirtation over the past year or so, and it's most recently popped up in Andrew Lansley's health white paper. 

Summing it up, Dugher writes:

The idea is that people can be enticed, instead of being coerced, into making better decisions.  It is, of course, total nonsense.

I'm definitely with him on the need, sometimes, for state intervention.  But the main thing I don't get about all of this nudging carry-on, is how it's supposed to work alongside current government plans. 

Let me explain.

The nudge, to use the term from the Thaler and Sunstein book which started it all, is based around "choice architecture".  This is quite a precise art of tinkering about with things to encourage people to make more 'rational' (economics apparently finally having discovered that people aren't) choices.  (Note that this buys entirely into the language of choice.)

A quick pop over to the nudge blog gives a few examples: smaller wheelie bins so that people put less rubbish in them; cellphones that beep at you to take them off the charger; opt-out health check-ups.  This stuff is on a minute scale, but it has to be: most of the choices a person has to make during an average week aren't huge.

And this is where I don't get it.  Choice architecture necessitates choice architects.  Plural: tinkering with minute choices is not broad brush-stroke stuff for one bloke in a Whitehall office.  So, who are these people going to be?  And, with the public sector and local government budgets being slashed, who is going to be paying them? 

It's all well and fine to say "we're going to nudge people", but unless parliamentarians and their spies support staff are going to be personally redesigning wheelie bins and laying down speed bumps the "we" who is going to be doing the nudging seems non-existent (as Kath & Kim would say) "at this late stoige". 

So what do you think to the nudge, then?

This is the second post in a series of blogging the-conference-paper-I'm-not-giving.  For the background, you can read the first post here. 

In North and South, after resigning from the CofE priesthood, Mr Hale takes his family - Mrs Hale, Margaret and servant Dixon - to the growing industrial town of Milton-Northern.  Most commentators read this as Manchester, where, after all, Mrs Gaskell herself lived.  But it doesn't really matter; we're given all the information we need in the name: a mill town in the North.  (And this generic character makes it useful to me for my work on West Yorkshire.) 

Relocating to a grimy, sooty, smelly mill town after the pastoral delights of sweetly southern Helstone proves a shock, to say the least.  Margaret's contrast between idyllic Helstone and gloomy Milton is one of the book's central "North and South" contrasts.  Margaret looks at industrialism and believes that something has gone terribly wrong.  She laments the loss of the rural. 

Such feelings were certainly shared by many.  As British socialism developed over the proceeding half century, one strong strand of thought located the answers to its critique of industrial capitalism in (a certain reckoning of) the rural past. 

Two of the most (to me) fascinating figures in this were Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) and William Morris (1834-1896). 

Earlier this year I finally read Sheila Rowbotham's superb biography of Carpenter (quite probably the first middle-aged British man to wear socks with sandals).  He was an amazing figure, not just in his sandals, but in his whole philosophy.  Briefly a CofE priest, Carpenter gave it up, chucked academic life in, and became a socialist and gay rights campaigner who (generally) practiced what he preached.  For a large chunk of his life lived on the rural outskirts of industrial Sheffield growing veg, skinny-dipping and that sort of thing. 

Famed for his Arts and Crafts designs, Morris also advocated a socialism that celebrated crafts over machines and, in his 1890 novel News From Nowhere, envisaged a post-revolutionary agrarianism.  (He kept his clothes on, though I'm not entirely sure where he stood on the socks-with-sandals question.)

In the 19th century, this 'rural past' position maintained a following within socialist circles.  By the 20th, its advocates would be dismissed as 'cranks'.  That's where I'll be heading, Margaret Hale still in tow, in my next post in this series. 

In the week the Home Office took a break from its usual work of charging like a wounded bull to tweet:

contribute your views to our consultation on how we can best reduce the number of students who come to the UK

(h/t to Anton Vowl)

As it turns out, I'm in an excellent position to give some advice on this.  I'm carrying out research on contemporary Britain; research it would make a lot of sense to do at a British university.  But I'm doing it at The University of Melbourne.  I am, in Home Office terms, a success story. 

Firstly, a few statistics.  In 2008/9 there were 368,970 non-UK students (this includes EU students) studying at UK universities.  Of these, 183,385 were postgraduates.

It's these postgrads (are you listening, Home Office?) that I'm going to focus on.

The postgraduate research and learning community, along with the academic community in general, is a mobile one.  Students and staff will move to follow supervision, interests, specialisations, funding, security, facilities and culture.  (It's these things, rather than proximity to what I'm studying, that make Melbourne a brilliant choice in my case.) 

If the Home Office wants to stop student movement, it's these things that it should look to.  The most effective policy for making sure overseas students don't want to study in the UK is simply to make UK universities unattractive internationally. 

Excellent work has already been done in slashing international scholarships.  Given the vitality of postgraduate research, making admissions dependent on who can pay rather than who has the smarts is a clever step towards reducing the UK's competitiveness. 

More good work is happening to reduce academic job security, and this can be hastened by increasing the move to managerialism.  If the most talented academic staff are driven elsewhere, this will in turn reduce the UK's competitiveness when it comes to supervision and specialisation. 

With the best staff and students instead working away in up-and-coming overseas universities, the UK's competitiveness when it comes to academic culture will be reduced dramatically. 

Those remaining students still mad enough to cling on by this stage should hopefully be cut adrift by attacks on facilties.  Close the libraries.  Get rid of the computers.  Cancel the journal subscriptions.  Kill the services while at it: health, counselling, chaplaincy, careers. 

By this stage, there will be a trickle-down effect to undergraduate students, many of whom will now stay in their home countries or travel to the new crop of big-name universities who will have by this stage leapfrogged UK instititions. 

And the best thing about this whole plan to reduce international competitiveness is that it will finally succeed in converting UK universities into simple sausage factories for future cubicle dwellers. 

Education schmeducation.  The neoliberal dream will have come true! 

There's been a bit of an anthropological kerfuffle over the American Anthropological Assocation's (AAA) decision to remove a (rather retro) reference to science from it's 'Statement of Purpose'. 

I'm not an AAA member, and it's highly unlikely I ever will be, so I get to look on with bemusement. 

Over at Labour uncut, Kevin Meagher last week had a bash at drawing an analogy between the Lib Dems and the C of E.  Nah.  The Lib Dems are more likely the Methodists of politics. 

But I like this analogy lark, and I reckon anthropology is all a bit Anglican. 

Anthropology, in it's broadest sense, studies people.  About three seconds thought is all it should take to appreciate the nebulousness of this.  Study people?  Which?  Where?  How?  Doing what? 

So anthropology is a big disparate group of scholars affiliated to various universities, professional associations, interest groups and committees all united, however vaguely, by a shared interest in studying people.  (That, and wearing sturdy, comfortable footwear.) 

And like the regular throes of the similarly disparate Anglican Communion over scriptural interpretation, there are regular anthropological throes over how to interpret the idea of studying people. 

Structuralism!  Functionalism!  Structural-functionalism!  Clifford Geertz!  Writing Culture!  "We're not a science!"  "Yes we are!"  Sahlins vs Obeyesekere!  Spats in journals!  Spats in conferences!  Spats in tearooms! 

In anthropology, as in Anglicanism, things can descend to a bicker-a-thon pretty quickly.  Sometimes a good round of combat can help us understand more about who we are and what we want to do.  Other times it can be over something that's just daft as a brush. 

There can be splits, like that between the RAI and the ASA, and there are plenty of interest groups promoting everything from the anthropology of Britain to advocating for gay and lesbian anthropologists. 

Because of how all this to-ing and fro-ing looks to the casual observer, there are periodically fingers pointed by media pundits and sociologists.  Such rumours of demise and announcements of crisis are, in both cases, greatly exaggerated. 

And anyway, the science hardliners could always set up an Ordinariate. 

I'm due to give a paper at the ASAANZ annual conference in Roto-Vegas, but, the finances haven't quite come together for me to be able to make it over there.  The paper's called "Margaret Hale, Industrialism, and the Ancestry of Cranks".  It exists in my head; it's about to exist in a series of blog posts.

Mrs Gaskell wasn't the most creative when it came to titles.  Mary Barton (1848) was about, well, Mary Barton.  And in 1854 she figured her new novel would also be named after it's heroine, Margaret Hale. 

The novel was a Pride and Prejudice for the industrial era.  Mr Darcy became the aloof Northern industrialist, John Thornton; and Elizabeth Bennett, dosed with a political conscience, became Margaret. 

Dickens, who did have the knack of a good title, was serialising the novel for his magazine Household Words.  'Margaret Hale' didn't exactly blow him away.  Rename it, he insisted. 

So Pride and Prejudice became Margaret Hale became North and South. 

Dave Russell has argued that how we think about the North of England today had set by about 1840.  That makes North and South an extraordinarily interesting study of the national divide. 

And I freakin' love Margaret Hale.

Elizabeth Bennett I grew up with.  She was sharp as tacks, had a way with words.  And when, in my teens, a be-wigged Jennifer Ehle brought her to BBC life, she was set firmly as one of my heroes. 

But Margaret Hale does politics.  She's not afraid to have a go at Thornton over how he treats his workers.  She stands up for what she sees as fair, just and good.  She doesn't always get it right, but she throws herself into it.  (Yes, there's also a Beeb adaptation.)

Mrs G had taken a bit of a bashing for Mary Barton.  Many of her readers (and Manchester industrialist acquaintances) evidently found it pretty scathing.  So in North and South she set out to tell a story in which there could be redemption for the industrialist.  Not that industrialism gets off lightly, but, the book really engages with issues for which there are no easy answers.  Margaret Hale comes up against plenty of ethical and political dilemmas. 

David Harvey has an article about intellectual Marxists, workers' rights, car plants in Oxford and Raymond Williams (The link goes to the pdf.  Neat huh?) in which he argues that some of the issues academics are wont to weigh in on are actually best explored in fiction.  He's probably right. 

And if he is, then Margaret Hale is a useful companion for talking about industrial history, about the development of nineteenth-century socialism, and about the North/South divide.  Which is where she and I will be wandering over the next couple of posts.