Author Archives: Guy Collender

Revealing the horrors of state violence at Law on Trial

Leave a reply

This post was contributed by Guy Collender, Communications Manager in Birkbeck’s Department of External Relations.

The severity and frequency of incidents of state violence, including deaths in police custody and the provocation of protestors by the authorities, are disturbing. These excesses need to be exposed and warrant discussion, and that is just what happened as part of this year’s series of Law on Trial lectures about scientific evidence. The graphic and shocking session, entitled ‘State violence under the microscope’, was held at Birkbeck on Thursday 19 June.

Dr Nadine El-Enany, Lecturer in Law at Birkbeck’s School of Law, began by charting the historical roots of state violence and the justifications used for it. She referred to the Peterloo massacre of 1819, when 11 people were killed and more than 500 were injured following a cavalry charge to break up a 60,000-strong meeting in Manchester about political reform (suffrage for all men). El-Enany explained how the doctrine of unlawful assembly developed in three trials following the massacre, how large crowds were assumed to be treacherous, and how public order offences, rather than high treason, came to be used to prosecute protestors.

She described how this assumption that crowds are an “inherent danger” continues today, and how this perception underpins the law as the state tries to depoliticise protest and maintain the status quo.

Referring to the protests in 2010 against rising tuition fees, El-Enany spoke about how the police practice of kettling – confining protestors to a limited area during a protest – proves counter-productive as it can lead to violence.  She said: “Heavy-handed policing has been shown to increase, rather than decrease, disorder.”

Dr Chris Cocking, from the University of Brighton, spoke about psychological theories of crowd behaviour and reiterated how police tactics can backfire. Aggressive actions, such as charges and kettling, treat the crowd as one group, and provoke the crowd to respond as one group. He said: “Indiscriminate public order tactics unite previously disparate crowds into opposing police action and create a self-fulfilling prophesy of escalating conflict.” Cocking described how disorder occurs, not because of violent intent, but because of a clash of legitimacy between two groups, namely the police and the crowd.

Harmit Athwal, of the Institute of Race Relations, spoke about research underway to investigate the deaths of 400 Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) people in police custody, prison and immigration detention. She referred to the importance of scientific evidence and independent post-mortems during inquests to challenge the official version of events and the initial views of pathologists in controversial cases. Athwal said: “Scientific evidence is important as it offers an alternative narrative to blaming the victim.”

Dr des Eddie Bruce Jones, Lecturer in Law at Birkbeck’s School of Law, continued by highlighting BME deaths in police custody in Germany, where there is no system of inquests. He focused on the horrific case of Oury Jalloh – a Sierra Leonean asylum seeker who burnt to death in a police cell in Dessau in 2005 while he was shackled to a mattress. No forensic fire examination was conducted, the right questions about how the fire started were not asked, and the lack of an inquest meant that there was no forum to discuss how the death occurred.

The shocking examples and frank exposition of state violence presented by the speakers generated many questions, highlighting once again the School of Law’s interest in social justice and debate.

Listen to the audio recordings of the speakers at the event.

Share

The Great War: the conflict that transformed London

Leave a reply

This post was contributed by Guy Collender, Communications Manager at Birkbeck.

Front cover of Zeppelin Nights: London in the First World War by Professor Jerry White

War is a complicated phenomenon invariably associated with new experiences. It is often accompanied by novel methods of killing, widespread social and economic change, and can be the catalyst for progressive trends as well as death and destruction.

All of these factors were part of the Great War, and they were described in vivid detail at the book launch of Zeppelin Nights: London in the First World War by award-winning historian Professor Jerry White.

The lecture at Queen Mary, University of London, on 8 May was the first event in London at War – a month-long series of talks, walks and workshops organised by the Raphael Samuel History Centre.

Positive developments

White, of Birkbeck’s Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, explained how life in the capital changed for ever, including for the better, because of the war. He referred to the economic boom linked to the war effort, the “unprecedented” demand for labour, “revolutionary opportunities” for women in the labour market, the end of Victorian levels of poverty, and the shift towards manufacturing in the capital’s western suburbs.

White emphasised that the war was an “important transformative moment” for London. Advances made at this time, such as the role of women in the workplace, were never reversed.

He said: “London, almost overnight, became a different place. Its day-to-day life was transformed by entering into the war. Many of these impacts on the Londoners of the First World War were transient, but some of the effects of it, I think, were deep-seated and some of them we are living with still.”

The militarisation of London

The outbreak of war on 4 August 1914 was met, as White described, by enthusiasm on the streets with throngs of people in Whitehall, and outside Buckingham Palace and town halls in the capital.

Although not on the frontline, the war, as White showed,  permeated public consciousness in London. The capital, being both the heart of the British Empire and the centre of an extensive rail network, was “part of the killing machine of war.” Soldiers passed through London en route to, and from, the Western Front, munitions were manufactured in the capital’s factories, and wounded soldiers were treated in its hospitals – both at recognised hospitals and houses of the rich that became officers’ hospitals. Following the outbreak of the battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916, the number of casualties arriving in London increased markedly.

White read from his new book and shared many captivating accounts about the Great War written by contemporary Londoners, including the nurse and writer Vera Brittain. She wrote:

“Day after day I had to fight the queer, frightening sensation – to which, throughout my years of nursing, I never became accustomed – of seeing the covered stretchers come in, one after another, without knowing, until I ran with pounding heart to look, what fearful sight or sound or stench, what problem of agony or imminent death, each brown blanket contained.”

First air raids

For the first time, during the Great War, London came under attack from Zeppelins (referred to in the book’s title) and German bombers.

The first bombs were dropped on the capital by Zeppelins in May 1915, and by 1917, German aeroplanes, including the Gotha and Giant, were launching destructive raids. The worst disaster to befall London during the war was the bombing of Odhams Printing Press in Long Acre, which led to 38 deaths. Such raids presaged the greater destruction of the Blitz in the Second World War.

White then ended his presentation where he began, with accounts of jubilant people in the streets, but now he was talking about the celebration of the armistice on 11 November 1918 rather than the pro-war feeling of summer 1914.

Share

This post was contributed by Guy Collender, Communications Manager at Birkbeck.

Professor Mark Mazower, of Columbia University, and Marlene Hobsbawm, Eric Hobsbawm's widow, at the reception following Mazower's lecture at the History after Hobsbawm conference.

Professor Mark Mazower, of Columbia University, and Marlene Hobsbawm, Eric Hobsbawm’s widow, at the reception following Mazower’s lecture at the History after Hobsbawm conference.

If evidence were needed of Eric Hobsbawm’s widespread and profound impact upon the study of history, the speakers assembled at the History after Hobsbawm conference provided cast-iron proof.

The gathering of such high-profile historians was testament to Hobsbawm’s influence upon the discipline, particularly his emphasis on the importance of social and economic history. It reiterated his ability to broaden horizons, inspire individuals, and, in some cases, generate dissent.

Familiar to students and scholars because of their seminal works, high-profile speakers at the three-day event included :

Mazower – one of Hobsbawm’s former colleagues at Birkbeck – delivered the opening lecture at the conference organised by Birkbeck in association with Past & Present. He described Hobsbawm (1917-2012) as an “inspirational figure” who “loved” Birkbeck  – an institution committed to adult education without the class snobbery that retarded the development of social history elsewhere.

Transforming history

Mazower charted the progression of Hobsbawm’s career and the simultaneous, and often related, transformation of the discipline of history. He explained how Hobsbawm was one of only four historians when he joined Birkbeck’s History Department in 1947, decades before the discipline became the professionalised and globalised profession it is today.

The audience on 29 April at Senate House heard how Hobsbawm’s participation in the International Congress of Historical Sciences in Paris in 1950 led to long-standing ties with French intellectuals, and subsequent cooperation between two prominent social history journals: Annales, and Past & Present. (Hobsbawm was one of the founder members of Past & Present in 1952). Mazower quoted the leader of the Annales School, Fernand Braudel, writing about Hobsbawm in 1968: “In my opinion he is one of the most important historians in the present world.”

Hobsbawm’s emphasis on social and economic history, and his internationalism were mirrored by the expansion of History departments, the increase in social history, and the emergence of world history and area studies in the 1970s and 1980s. Mazower added: “Hobsbawm was, in many ways, at the very centre of some of the critical intellectual and institutional developments of the discipline for several decades.”

The future of history

Professor John Arnold, Head of Birkbeck’s Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, encouraged the audience to think about current trends in the study of History, and, in Hobsbawm’s words, “dream forward.” He referred to “Eric’s extraordinary impact on the study of history” and encouraged argument, discussion and debate over the next two days of the conference. The conference speakers and delegates certainly rose to the challenge. Read more about the conference online on the History after Hobsbawm blog:

Share

Exploring psychoanalysis with Dr David Bell

1 Reply

This post was contributed by Ceren Yalcin, an intern at the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research.

Following his popular lecture series about psychoanalysis, Dr David Bell, Visiting Fellow in the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research (BISR) and the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities (BIH), answered questions at a special session for students and the wider public. The event was designed to address issues that might have remained unclear, and it generated a lively discussion with participants from various academic and professional backgrounds.

The following account does by no means provide an exhaustive summary of the event – it is rather a selection of questions and answers that I personally found most insightful.

Question 1: Did psychoanalysis retreat to the clinic?

Answer: It should be emphasised that psychoanalysis is a body of knowledge about the  mind and not “just” a form of treatment. Treatment is the application of psychoanalysis within a clinical context. The British Psychoanalytic Society, for example, has created an outreach committee in the last ten years. It is involved in the annual Psychoanalysis and Film programme. The Society also has an applied section with psychoanalysts, academics, and literary critics. Over the last ten years, the Society has put a lot of emphasis on showing that psychoanalytic thinking can be very relevant to understanding other spheres of social and cultural life.  (Those interested in this question, might find Stephen Frosh’s (2010) book “Psychoanalysis Outside the Clinic” useful).

Question 2: How does psychoanalysis understand the ‘the normal’ as opposed to ‘the abnormal’?

Answer: Psychoanalysis finds the normal in the abnormal. It sees abnormality as a perversion of normality, as revealing what is immanent inherent (is this right?)  in all of us. As Freud beautifully puts it, a breakdown is like a crystal smashing. If you drop a crystal it fragments but it does not fragment along random lines. It sheers along the lines of force that are already within the crystallized structure. In other words, the shattering shows inherent(?) immanent forces within the crystal like the breakdown.

Question 3: What is transference and why is it important in psychoanalytic treatment?

Answer: The concept of transference is not just relevant for the psychoanalytic setting (i.e. the consulting room). As Freud states, it occurs in classrooms when students develop feelings about their teachers or their peers who become like their siblings. The original metaphor Freud used to describe transference was that of a template.

We carry around templates and mould the objects around us to fit into templates. All of us have our particular tendencies. Some of us tend to idealise people, some of us tend to denigrate people, some of us tend to see things in people that other people do not see. We all invest significant people around us with powerful feelings that have their origin in our past.

These templates, called internal objects, exist within us and we project them on to other people. In the clinical setting the patient projects onto the analyst. The analyst tries to maintain neutrality without asking ‘why are you treating me like this?’. On the contrary, the analyst lets transference develop in order to understand the patient’s internal objects. Those interested in transference might want to read Freud’s papers “On Transference Love” and “The Dynamics of Transference”.

Share