Tag Archives: Birkbeck 200

Bernard Crick: A Political Education

By Joanna Bourke, Professor Emerita of History, Birkbeck, University of London and author of Birkbeck: 200 Years of Radical Learning (OUP, 2023).

Bernard Crick

Bernard Crick at the Annual George Orwell Memorial Lecture (JSTOR)

Bernard Crick was one of the most distinguished British political scientists of the twentieth century and a self-proclaimed polemicist. He established the Department of Sociology and Politics at Birkbeck in 1972 and was its Chair until he took early retirement in 1984. In those thirteen years, Crick transformed Birkbeck’s intellectual and political character, leaving behind one of the most respected Politics Departments in the country.

Crick was born in 1929 and died in 2008, at the age of 79. He studied Economics at University College, London, before moving to the LSE to complete his doctorate, awarded in 1952 and published in 1958 under the title The American Science of Politics. It was a critique of the behaviourist streak of American politics. Although he taught in many American universities (including Harvard, McGill, and Berkeley in the 1950s), his first permanent academic posts were at the LSE and then the University of Sheffield. In 1972, however, he was appointed to Birkbeck to establish the college’s first Department of Politics and Sociology.

Crick was thrilled to be appointed at Birkbeck. He had been commuting to Sheffield from London for years and was relieved to be back in his home-city. He was also a strong supporter of adult education, believing that it was important for students of sociology and politics to have practical experience in the ‘real world’. One of his early messages after arriving at Birkbeck was to inform prospective applicants that ‘candidates from a first degree into which they came straight from school will not usually be considered’! He also thought that adult students improved the entire learning experience. Crick always argued that a university ‘should be a creative sharing, not a departmentalisation of learning’, as he put it in Political Thoughts and Polemics (1990).

For Crick, politics was ‘ethics done in public’. This aphorism was another way of saying that he was an enthusiastic advocate of the unity of theory and practice. This was why, during his editorship of The Political Quarterly, he made it into a leading forum for debate about political theory as well as practice. The entire raison d’être of academic politics was to forge an engaged citizenry. Indeed, the fate of democracy lay with people’s civic literacy, which is why Crick was dismayed by the profound political ignorance of most Britons.

Not surprisingly, Crick was a pragmatist. ‘Real’ politics was messy. It had to deal with the vast diversity of competing and conflicting interests, as well as being unpredictable, which is one reason Crick argued against the ‘scientistic’ behaviourism of many North American schools of political thought. His emphasis was on politics-and-society, rather than political science, with its emphasis on abstracted data rather than social values and meaning. Effective politics involved negotiating, compromising, and seeking consensus. In other words, the world of politics was about reconciling differences. As Crick wrote in 1971, political science had to be ‘aware of the inextricable relationship of theory to practice and hence the need for political relevance’. He quipped that ‘the world may not need political science… but political science needs to be relevant to the world to be profound as a discipline’.

Crick refused to identify with doctrinaire partisans of either the Left or Right but contended in In Defence of Politics that political scientists should ‘argue only for relevance’, retaining an ‘independent-minded critical engagement’ rather than an ‘uncritical commitment or loyalty to party’. When he was asked by one Derbyshire miner who had read his books, ‘Ay, I gets all that; but does thee not believe in anything, Professor lad?’, Crick responded by saying, ‘I am a democratic socialist’. Probably more tellingly, however, is the story that Crick was delighted when one interviewer called him an ‘extremist at the centre’.

The book for which Crick was most proud was his biography of George Orwell, published in 1980. It was the first major study of Orwell and was a best-seller. Crick donated royalties from the hardback version of this book to establish the George Orwell Memorial Trust. He also founded the annual Birkbeck Orwell Lecture and Orwell Prize for political writing. He could frequently be heard reciting Orwell’s famous aphorism: ‘What I have most wanted to do… is to make political writing into an art’.

Crick was an individualist. He was not a ‘team-player’; nor was he a particularly effective administrator, although he was a keen advocate for early career scholars he admired. Labour politician David Blunkett, who studied under Crick, put it well when he called Crick a ‘character…. a one-off’. During his tenure at Birkbeck, Crick promoted the highest scholarship and teaching. The Department he created in 1972 continues to flourish and to ensure that political writing is relevant and rigorous, as well as an art.

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Barbara Hardy and Literary Scholarship

By Joanna Bourke, Professor Emerita of History at Birkbeck and author of Birkbeck: 200 Years of Radical Learning for Working People (OUP, 2023)

Barbara Gwladys Hardy was a distinguished literary scholar, who spent most of her career at Birkbeck. She was famous for being one of the UK’s foremost experts on the nineteenth-century novel, but her work included critical analyses ranging from Shakespeare to modernism. Amongst many others, she wrote on George Eliot, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Dickens, W. M. Thackeray, Daniel Deronda, Thomas Hardy, Dylan Thomas, James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, and Ivy Compton-Burnett. She was also an accomplished memoirist, as well as a writer of poetry, fiction, and drama. She was President of the Dickens Society and Vice-President of The Thomas Hardy Society.

Hardy was a glamorous academic. She was socially gregarious, feminist in her outlook, and politically leftwing. As a young person, she had even joined the Communist Party for a short time. Her early life had been difficult. In her autobiography Swansea Girl, Hardy revealled her pride in being Welsh, but also her family’s financial struggles. They were poor:  her father was a sailor whom she rarely saw while her mother worked in an insurance office. From a young age, it was clear that Hardy was intelligent. She was sent to the selective (‘posh’) Swansea High School for Girls, where teachers complained that she was mischievous. When Higher Education beckoned, she chose to go to University College, London, where she was awarded a BA in 1947 and an MA two years later. By 1951, she could be found at Birkbeck, employed as an assistant lecturer. She was appointed to a Chair in English literature at Royal Holloway but, after five years, returned to Birkbeck in 1970s as the first Geoffrey Tillotson Professor of English Literature.

Hardy’s texts are ‘personal, impassioned and particularised’, as she admitted in a volume of her collected essays. As she insisted in Tellers and Listeners (1975), she believed that ‘nature, not art, makes us all story-tellers’. When she turned to James Joyce’s The Dubliners, she contended that ‘like all great works of art, [it] is about itself. Its stories are about telling, listening and responding to stories’. She understood narrative in a broad sense, including stories, gossip, dreams, secrets, and lies. Narrative was primarily an ‘act of mind transferred to art from life’, she once explained. Indeed, this was the impulse that led Hardy to turn away from ‘theory’: she belonged to the empirical tradition of English criticism.

Hardy’s reputation can be gauged by numerous prizes and other accolades thrust upon her. In 1962, the British Academy awarded her the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for her magnum opus, The Novels of George Eliot (1959). This was the book that not only launched her career but also forced literary scholars to take the nineteenth century novel seriously. Then, in 1997, her novel London Lovers won the Society of Author’s Sagittarius Prize and she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2006, she was made a Fellow of the British Academy. She retired in 1989, and was succeeded in her Chair by the equally distinguished literary scholar, Professor Isobel Armstrong.

Hardy loved working at Birkbeck. Her lecturing style was bold and entrancing. She would swish into class wearing long William Morris-type dresses and, for an hour without break, would attempt to convey some of her enthusiasm for literature to her class. She was renowned for never referring to notes during lectures. This was a deliberate decision stemming from a searing experience when, during the very first lecture she ever gave in front of a class, she had the misfortune to be ‘inspected’. The Inspector later commended her teaching but criticised her for looking down at her written text too frequently. From that time, she ensured that she prepared meticulously for her classes, but appeared in lecture-halls paperless.

Students and colleagues enjoyed her company. She was very different from her predecessor as Head of the English Department. This was Geoffrey Tillotson, Head between 1944 and 1969. As a tall, lean, ascetic-looking Yorkshireman, Tillotson was a master of irony, bordering on sarcasm. ‘Do not omit to be literate’, he wrote in his immaculate italic handwriting when a student left out an apostrophe. One of Tillotson’s favourite aphorisms was ‘Criticism, trembling with sympathy, cannot but be ruthless!’. In contrast, Hardy was warm and keen to listen as well as speak. One of her students recalled how, one minute, she was laughing loudly with them in the refectory; the next, indignantly railing against gender inequalities. Despite her literary erudition, she was as comfortable debating about whether The Archers (a radio soap opera) was ‘just melodrama, or something more subtle’ as she was unpicking the narrative structure of the Divine Comedy. Although Hardy loved dinner parties (she was a great cook and entertainer) and enjoyed lively discussions, she often joked that one of the chief advantages of working at Birkbeck included ‘a perpetual and automatic alibi for declining unwanted invitations’ to social events: lecturers simply had to say ‘Sorry, I lecture in the evenings’. This excuse also gave Birkbeck lecturers a ‘plausible excuse’ for watching films in the mid-afternoon or even simply ‘lingering over coffee’. More seriously, in 1964, she told The Lodestone (the Birkbeck students’ journal) that the most significant advantages of working at Birkbeck were intellectual. Because academic staff taught in the evenings, she maintained, there is still a goodish chunk of daylight time for research and writing, and the boon of having students who already know the facts of life. This is probably helpful in subjects like psychology… but in teaching English literature it is splendid never to encounter the kind of student who once asked me (in a full-time college) why Othello and Desdemona couldn’t just have talked the whole thing over.

Of course, Hardy continued, there were some disadvantages as well. Birkbeck students could be ‘maddeningly opinionated’ and there was the perennial problem of booking adequate teaching rooms. But these ‘crumples in the roseleaf’ were ‘mere fleabites’.

Barbara died in 2016, aged 92. She is remembered for her incredible scholarship and literary sensibilities. As she contended in Tellers and Listeners, ‘The good teller and the good listener are loving and truthful, aware of each other, as parents and children, friends and lovers, courteous strangers, novelists and readers’.

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Cecil Alec Mace, Founder of the Birkbeck Department of Psychology

By Joanna Bourke, Professor Emerita of History at Birkbeck, University of London and author of Birkbeck: 200 Years of Radical Learning (OUP, 2023).

Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, visiting Birkbeck’s Department of Psychology in 1953. Also present are Dr. Fuchs (Chief Technician) and Professor C. A. Mace (founder and Head of Department)- JSTOR image library

Cecil Alec Mace was the first Professor of Psychology at Birkbeck. He was known for his work as an industrial psychologist, as well as his thoughts on causality, the ‘mind-body’ problem, logic, behaviourism, self-identity, and the emotions. He was especially witty when addressing the question: ‘Must philosophers disagree?’, which, he quipped, was guaranteed to result in a room of philosophers spiritedly disagreeing!

Psychology was not Mace’s first choice for a career. When he attended the University of Cambridge, it was to study for Holy Orders. He soon switched to moral philosophy, highly influenced by analytical philosopher G. E. Moore and industrial psychologist Charles Samuel Myers. After academic positions at the University of Nottingham, St. Andrews University, and Bedford College, he joined King’s College London.

Mace’s route to Birkbeck was circuitous. Before the 1940s, psychological studies in the colleges of the University of London were part of a philosophy degree. Since Birkbeck did not have a Professor of Psychology, Birkbeck students took their two compulsory psychology papers at King’s College, under the tutorage of Francis Arthur Powell Aveling. With the start Blitz, all colleges in the University of London except Birkbeck fled the city for less dangerous localities. Aveling, however, was left behind and enthusiastically accepted an invitation by C. E. M. Joad, who was Head of Philosophy at Birkbeck, to transfer his teaching of psychology to Birkbeck’s premises.

It was a bold move, but, when Aveling died the following year, his lectures were taken over by Mace. Like Aveling, Mace was as much a philosopher as a psychologist—indeed, he served as President of both the British Psychological Society as well as the Aristotelian Society. At Birkbeck, however, Mace was responsible for enabling Psychology to be granted its own disciplinary status, separate from philosophy. By 1944, the Philosophy and Psychology Departments had become separate Departments, with Mace acting as Professor of Psychology for seventeen years until he retired in 1961.

Mace had interesting thoughts on the use of incentives in the workplace. He argued against the notion that workers were primarily incentivized my money. Rather, they had a ‘will to work’. Along with Bertrand Russell, Mace contended that ‘belief is central to any analysis of the mind’. He also reflected on how Cartesian concepts might be replaced by ‘psychosomatic’ concepts ‘in which the person is thought of as a being – a single being – who has both bodily and “mental” (or psychological) attributes and whose “experiences” are psychosomatic’. He believed that this would greatly help in physician/patient relations. Well before it became fashionable, Mace was curious about cybernetics and information theory. He was also passionate about the role of both philosophy and psychology in war. During the First World war, he had been a pacifist and, as a consequence, spent that war at Dartmoor prison where he studied the psychological effects of imprisonment. During the Second World War, he was Secretary of the Council for Assisting Refugee Philosophers.

Mace’s thoughts on the ‘psychology of study’ were important in the way he approached his classes at Birkbeck. Mace argued that too much attention was being paid to memorization, contending that the mind (similar to the stomach) ‘must take its meal in moderation’. Students benefitted most from lectures if they spent the time listening, rather than frantically jotting down notes (which, he wittily added, should only be contemplated when the professor ‘has a fit of sneezing’).  This was compatible with Mace’s ‘performative approach’ to teaching. He was an accomplished lecturer, giving his students highly stylized performances on subjects as diverse as the psychology of study, scientific management, the structure of the mind, mental deficiency, and logic. He was reported to have described his philosophy of teaching as ‘All one can do is think aloud, and hope that some of it will brush off’.  When Mace died in 1971, The Times reported that he had been responsible for creating ‘the biggest and best-known psychology department in the country’.

Cecil Alec Mace

Oil painting of Cecil Alec Mace, unknown artist, Birkbeck image collections: Birkbeck history BH0119

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Francis Ravenscroft and the Survival of the London Mechanics’ Institution

By Joanna Bourke, Professor Emerita of History, Birkbeck and author of Birkbeck: 200 Years of Radical Learning for Working People (OUP, 2023)

Francis Ravenscroft

The London Mechanics Institution (LMI, now known as Birkbeck, University of London) had many founders. Five deserve special mention. Obviously, there is George Birkbeck, physician and philanthropist, who lent his name and status to the fledging college and led it from 1823 to 1841. There are also Joseph Clinton Robertson and Thomas Hodgskin who, as editors of the Mechanics’ Magazine, sent out the initial invitation, inviting people interested in workers’ education to meet at the Crown and Anchor Tavern. Radical politician Francis Place and political and legal titan, Henry Brougham, are the other two founders of the college.

But one man is often forgotten: Francis Ravenscroft. Technically, he was not a founder. Indeed, when he joined the LMI as an ambitious nineteen-year-old in June 1848, the Institution was already in its twenty-fifth year of existence. However, the LMI was definitely in terminal decline. Founder and president George Birkbeck had died seven years earlier and his son, William Lloyd Birkbeck, had inherited the Presidency. William Birkbeck had different interests to his father. He was frequently absent from governance meetings. The LMI was also a victim of its success. It had convinced the elites of Britain of the importance of education, meaning that numerous other educational organisations and libraries had been established. The LMI found itself competing with thorsands of other ‘literary and scientific’ institutions, as well as government-funded schools. In the early 1850s, there were more than 1,500 evening schools for adults in England and Wales, catering for nearly 40,000 pupils. In London alone, there were 28 different Mechanics Institutes. Student numbers at the LMI had plummeted; it was unviable. As one long-standing member of the LMI’s managing committee later recalled, ‘public enthusiasm’ for the LMI was dying. The Institution was ‘hopelessly in debt, was badly housed, and dirty, and apparently at its last gasp’.

Ravenscroft was responsible for reversing its fortunes. He enjoyed a meteoric rise within the LMI, impressing the governing committee with his exceptional business and financial acumen. Within a few months of signing up to take classes, Ravenscroft had been elected to the LMI’s management committee; a month later, he was its Chair. As Ravenscroft later admitted at a public meeting, when he was first nominated to become a member of the committee, candidates were required to ‘make a solemn declaration’ that they were at least 21 years old. He wasn’t. ‘At that time I was in the eyes of the law an infant – (laughter) – and consequently was not entitled to serve’, he admitted. However, ‘being ambitious I recklessly signed the printed form – (laughter and ‘Oh, Oh’) – and I am pleased to find that the institution has suffered no harm’.

As a young man, Ravenscroft was not an obvious educationalist. He had been raised in a distinguished wig-making family and was expected to follow his father into that business. Ravenscroft was restless, however, and, at the age of fifteen, became apprenticed to a tea taster. After only four months, he quit. This was a serious matter since breaking a five-year apprenticeship could have seen him thrown into Bridewell prison. Fortunately, his parents convinced the master to cancel the indenture.

Ravenscroft then pursued a career in law, being appointed to work for a barrister and then a solicitor for seven years. The solicitor asked him to deal with a case involving ‘a building society in difficulties’ due to ‘the misconduct of the manager and the society being unable to meet its liabilities’. This gave Ravenscroft the opportunity ‘of thoroughly investigating and properly understanding the general routine and intricacies of building societies’. He concluded that, if ‘properly and honestly managed, with resources to meet withdrawals’, building societies could be a ‘safe and profitable investment’. Ravenscroft’s problem was ‘providing a fund wherewithal to pay withdrawals upon demand’. This gave him the idea of also opening a deposit bank linked to the building society, promising that at least three-quarters of the money would be invested in Consols (that is, government bonds), or other ‘convertible securities’. Ravenscroft drew up a set of rules and a prospectus for his ‘proposed new society’, which he then christened the ‘Birkbeck Bank’, due to his admiration of George Birkbeck. At around this time, his father died, which meant that he came into a large inheritance.

Ravenscroft was already taking classes and serving on the managing committee of the LMI by this stage. He believed that his two interests (banking and education) would benefit by being linked. He appointed Directors of the Birkbeck Building Society from his contacts in the LMI. He made the LMI’s President (William Lloyd Birkbeck) the Bank’s President; Andrew Macfarlane, secretary of the LMI, was appointed as Treasurer; William Eward, vice-president of the LMI, was appointed as a Trustee, as was John Rüntz, who ran the Birkbeck School. Ravenscroft even ‘borrowed’ rooms in the LMI’s building for his Bank and the two organisations shared costs by publishing their prospectuses in the same booklet.

As the Birkbeck Bank and Permanent Building Society flourished (within only a few years, Ravenscroft was turning over £20 million a year as a private banker), so too did his support of the LMI. In the words of James C. N. White (Chair of the LMI), ‘we went to [Francis Ravenscroft] whenever we required assistance, and we never went in vain’.

The most urgent problem for the LMI was their need for new premises. The Southampton buildings had been inadequate for decades but, when the governing committee of the LMI sought to raise money for a building through public subscriptions, they met with little support. This was where Ravenscroft stepped in, agreeing ‘to play the part of the Good Fairy’. Ravenscroft ‘personally guaranteed the entire cost of the new building; he also undertook, at a later stage, to obtain an advance from his bank on ‘favourable terms’. He threw his energies into collecting subscriptions for the Building Fund and collected just under £4,000 (that is, around half a million pounds today). Subscribers included royalty, William Lloyd Birkbeck, numerous guilds and corporations (including the City of London), and London’s most prominent citizens, including many of Ravenscroft’s friends and family. The building they acquired was Bream’s Building, located near Fleet Street and formerly the home to publishers and printers. The surveyors boasted that ‘Every part of the building is light: there are no dark corners’. In short, it was perfect for the LMI.

In 1866, Ravenscroft was also largely responsible for changing the name of the London Mechanics’ Institution to the Birkbeck Literary and Scientific Institution, commonly known as ‘The Birkbeck’. He could often be seen strolling around ‘The Birkbeck’ in a beautifully-tailored suit of ‘deep blue-black broad-cloth… with a waistcoat cut in a clerical manner, with a row of little buttons on one side, and black velvet skull cap’. Although the relationship between the LMI/Birkbeck had always been a mutual one, Ravenscroft was tireless in his praise of the college. ‘My gratitude’, he maintained, knows no bounds, for it is very largely [due] to my association with the Birkbeck that I owe my success in life. This obligation I can never forget, and the sense of it increases as the years go by. Any efforts of mine, therefore, to promote the interests of the institution I regard as but a poor and inadequate return for the benefits that I have myself received. It was a generous remark from a brilliant and benevolent man.

Ravenscroft served the LMI from 1849 until his death in 1902, 53 years. In 1893, The Birkbeck Institution Magazine quipped that ‘there is only one thing that Mr. Ravenscroft has ever refused to do for our Institution, that is to make a speech’. When asked to, he would reply ‘I am a man of figures, not of words’.

Today, Ravenscroft is known for the company ‘Ede and Ravenscroft’, the famous wig and gown makers, founded in 1689, whose robes Birkbeck students still wear on ceremonial occasions such as graduations. But Francis Ravenscroft deserves to be celebrated not only for building one of the greatest banks of the nineteenth century (later taken over by National Westminster) and creating exquisite gowns, but also for being a great educationalist. Birkbeck owes its continued successes to him.

Francis Ravenscroft on cover of dinner booklet

Breams building

Breams Building, which Ravenscroft helped Birkbeck to purchase- JSTOR image library

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200th Anniversary Birkbeck Effect: Sundeep Donthamshetty, Co-founder of WEGoT Utility Solutions

Following his MA in Intelligent Information Systems from Birkbeck, Sundeep Donthamshetty used his newfound skills gained on the course to found technology start-up WEGoT Utility Solutions, pioneering ways of conserving water in his native India and creating new solutions to the problem of water conservation.

WEGoT designed and developed a ‘smart’ water meter that sends relevant data to the consumer in almost real-time, allowing them to monitor and take responsibility for how much, where and for what purpose they are using water in areas where water conservation presents real challenges. To date, WEGoT has saved over three billion litres of water.

Sundeep studied his Master’s degree part-time while raising his children and credits the course with giving him both the knowledge and confidence to become an entrepreneur.

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200th Anniversary Birkbeck Effect: Tasneem Abdur-Rashid, Author

Creative Writing master’s graduate Tasneem Abdur-Rashid had her novel manuscript rejected by several publishers before she’d even applied to the degree programme. She had no idea why that was the case until she spoke with her Birkbeck tutor, who helped her to cut down the word count and tighten up the subplots and characters. She then had no trouble securing a two-book publishing deal.

Representation in fiction is important to Tasneem. In her debut novel, Finding Mr Perfectly Fine, the protagonist is a British Bengali Muslim. “I want people like me to pick up my book and find characters they can relate to. I think the story transcends culture because finding a partner is a universal challenge.”

Tasneem was the recipient of an Aziz Foundation scholarship, aimed at supporting British Muslims through postgraduate degrees in a range of subjects, which allowed her to succeed at Birkbeck.

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200th Birkbeck Effect: Tony Atcherley – WWII veteran and Legion d’Honneur

A wireless operator in the Royal Corps of Signals during the liberation of France in WWII, Tony Atcherley was awarded the Légion d‘Honneur in 2015, the highest accolade of military recognition.

He graduated with a Certificate of Philosophy at Birkbeck’s then Faculty of Continuing Education in the 1950s. Back then, it was difficult to go to university if you didn’t have the normal background of completing a grammar school education and so on. The only chance anyone had was Birkbeck. It had a fine reputation, and some famous historians were there. It was full of very distinguished scholars.

Tony became a secondary school teacher of English and Religious Studies and then a lecturer at the University of Brighton. After retiring he co-wrote  Hitler’s Gay Traitor: The Story of Ernst Roehm, Chief of Staff of the S.A with Mark Carey. He died in 2017.

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200th Anniversary Birkbeck Effect: Uracha Chatrakul Na Ayudhya, Lecturer in organizational psychology

Uracha Chatrakul Na Ayudhya is a Senior Lecturer in Birkbeck’s School of Business and previously served as an Assistant Dean for Equalities and Diversity.

She has a doctorate and is the assistant dean for equalities and diversity at the School of Business, Economics, and Informatics (BEI) and senior lecturer and programme director of MSc HR management in the department of organisational psychology at Birkbeck, University of London.

Chatrakul Na Ayudhya is co-editing a special issue on “Conceptualising the nexus between macro-level ‘turbulence’ and the worker experience in human resource management” in the journal Human Resource Management Journal (due in 2023).

Her latest article, “The rhetorics of ‘agile’ and the practices of ‘Agile Working’: Consequences for the worker experience and uncertain implications for HR practice” (with Ian Roper and Rea Prouska), was published in the International Journal of Human Resource Management.

Chatrakul Na Ayudhya writes and speaks about unequal working lives and careers, with a particular focus on workers’ lived experience at the intersection of gender, race, ethnicity, immigration status, and nationality.

She draws on critical approaches to concepts of diversity and inclusion.

Chatrakul Na Ayudhya is committed to advancing meaningful diversity and inclusion in the workplace through solidarity and collective action. She is proud to have been named Birkbeck’s Colleague of the Year in 2022.

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200th Birkbeck Effect: Vanessa King, Lecturer in History

Vanessa  has been teaching history in higher and adult education since 1999 for Birkbeck and Goldsmiths Colleges, the Mary Ward Centre and the Workers Education Association. She is a Fellow of the  Society of Antiquaries.

A committed enthusiast for adult education, her specialisms include the history of minority groups in the middle ages and medieval travel. Her published work has dealt with Anglo-Norman ecclesiastical history, and she is currently writing a study of Anglo-Saxon queens.

One of her students says: “Vanessa King was my lecturer on my first two short course modules, studied between January – June 2020. I didn’t feel particularly confident when I commenced on my first course and felt self-doubt as to how well I would be able to cope with studying at undergraduate level, working towards a certificate in History/Archaeology. I shouldn’t have worried as I found Vanessa’s love of the subject matter infectious. The classroom round table set up also enabled everyone who wished to participate, ample opportunity to contribute. I was really pleased with the result of my first term’s assignment and used it as a springboard to improve and develop in my second term. I feel that her teaching style brought out the best in me and helped to foster my love and interest in history and to give me the confidence to continue my learning journey.”

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200th Anniversay Birkbeck Effect: William Temple, President of Birkbeck and Archbishop of Canterbury  

Temple campaigned on behalf of Jews during World War II. Temple responded to the crisis by co-founding the Council of Christians and Jews, dedicated both to helping the persecuted Jews in Nazi Germany and to fighting anti-Semitism in whatever guise.

In one of his 1943 speeches in the House of Lords, Temple spoke about the “extermination of the Jews” in Nazi Germany. He reminded listeners of the parable of the good Samaritan who came to the aid of a wounded traveller by the roadside. “My chief protest”, he began, “is against procrastination of any kind…. The Jews are being slaughtered at the rate of tens of thousands a day…. We at this moment have upon us a tremendous responsibility. We stand at the bar of history, of humanity and of God”.

It was a statement that gives a lie to the view that Britons during the early 1940s did not know about what we now called the Holocaust.

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