Category Archives: Institute for Social Research

Racial integration in US cities

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

How racially integrated are US cities today? Are they more integrated today than previously? An insightful presentation at Birkbeck by John Logan, Professor of Sociology at Brown University, paints a complex picture.

Using New York City as an example, Prof Logan argued that cities in the United States have always been segregated to some extent. While in the early 1900s only 1% of the city was African-American, other recent immigrant communities such as Russian Jews and Italians were confined to specific parts of the city. By the 1920s, poverty and the persistence of Jim Crow laws in the southern US forced many African-Americans to seek better lives in urban centres in the north. This “great migration” of the 1920s saw the creation of “black ghettoes” such as Harlem in New York city.

In the 1920s, New York City’s index of dissimilarity for African-Americans was about 0.7 (0 being the most integrated, 1 being the most segregated). This index hovered between 0.8 and 0.9 for most of the 20^th century, and this level of segregation of the African-American community continues today. The civil rights era and the passage of fair housing laws did little to change this level of segregation.

Prof Logan then compared this level of segregation of African-Americans with the Italian and Russian Jewish communities. In the early 1900s both these communities lived in specific areas – Italians in Greenwich Village and Russian Jews in Lower East Side. Many of the African-Americans who migrated to New York City were from different social classes – while some did blue collar jobs, others could be identified as middle class. Italians, by and large, performed manual labour and many dropped out of school. Similarly, the Russian Jewish population mostly did working class jobs, and came to be closely associated with the garment industry. Both these communities had higher indices of dissimilarity than African-Americans in the 1920s but the indices for both communities fell rapidly to about 0.3 by the 1990s. Prof Logan argued that both these communities were able to integrate rapidly by virtue of gradually being identified as “white”.

Moving on to segregation today and its relation to class, Prof Logan looked at the social and racial make up of neighbourhoods today. While it’s assumed that African-American people lived in African-American neighbourhoods because they were poor, what Prof Logan’s data shows is that racial segregation occurred regardless of class. Meaning that poor white people lived amongst other poor white people and poor African-American people lived in poor African-American neighbourhoods. Comparing the data across classes presents an even more complicated picture: the average poor white neighbourhood had less poor people than the average rich African-American neighbourhoods.

Switching to segregation in education, Prof Logan’s data showed that schools were even more segregated than neighbourhoods. The majority of African-American children went to African-American majority schools while the average white student went to white majority schools.

According to Prof Logan, the traditional model of viewing changes in racial composition of neighbourhoods has been the “Invasion and Succession” model: African-Americans enter a neighbourhood resulting in an exodus of white people (white flight) until there is a majority African-American population. Recent demographic data about immigration of Asian and Hispanic population reveals a different pattern. It was found that in neighbourhoods that start off as all white and into which Asian and Hispanic populations begin to settle, and then into which the African-American population migrated, there was no white flight. These neighbourhoods resulted in what was referred to as “global neighbourhoods” in urban areas. According to Prof Logan this is having an impact on the meaning of race for white populations in the United States today.

The Cultural Relevance of Psychoanalysis: a Lecture by Professor David Bell

Leave a reply

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

Sigmund Freud wrote Civilization and Its Discontents between the two World Wars in 1929. Here, he posed questions such as why we are unhappy or why we act so destructively against others and often against our best interests. Surely, these were questions that came to mind in the aftermath of a devastating war that had cost so many lives and in anticipation of another human catastrophe that was beginning to show long before 1933. One can debate whether Freud delivers satisfactory answers to these questions in his book. But perhaps this says more about the world we live in than about Freud.

Professor David Bell, Training and Supervising psychoanalyst of the British Psychoanalytic Society and Visiting Professorial Fellow in both the Birkbeck Institute of Social Research (BISR) and the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities (BIH), gave a highly stimulating lecture on some of the issues tackled by Freud. As he explained, the premise that Freud’s thoughts are based on is that people seek happiness, or at least, try to diminish unhappiness. However, this proves rather difficult as civilization necessitates the repression of the fundamental drives: sexuality and aggression. It is the latter that is at the core of Civilization and Its Discontents. For Freud, men have to inhibit natural aggression in order to form groups that guarantee survival. In order to live in a functioning society we have to supress this part of our nature. Humankind exchanges happiness for security, Freud writes. What happens though is that the aggression suppressed takes up residence in the superego, where it is turned towards the self and so becomes a source of internal persecution . David Bell further pointed out, here drawing on Freud’s work on group psychology, that in order for the group to survive the individuals in the group have to suppress the natural aggression/hatred they feel towards others in the group. However this aggression does not disappear but is channelled externally, that is towards hated ‘others ‘ who are not part of the group So far, so Freud.

Karl Marx, as David Bell argues, offers, somewhat surprisingly, a similar explanation for human unhappiness. Marx bases his argument on political (and not libidinal) economy when he states that the achievements of the capitalist mode of production have their price: they lead to human misery and alienation.

But how does this all relate to aggression and the Freudian death drive? The second part of David Bell’s lecture was dedicated to the hegemony of the free market and its consequences for the subjects who live under it. David Bell argued here that the logics of the market capture the very registers of the death drive: capitalism attempts to destroy all forms of non-capitalist forms of life and brings a numbing of sensibility and thought. An interesting two-fold distinction that Professor Bell made between what he called manifest and latent violence was helpful. Based on Slavoj Zizek’s notions of ’objective’ versus ‘subjective’ violence, Bell explained that it is often the manifest aggression that is in our consciousness. (He illustrated this with a series of newspaper covers that show a student kicking in a window during a protest). The underlying violence leading to that act (e.g. the inequality and poverty the market creates), however, tends to remain unseen and unthought-of. A psychiatrist by profession, Professor Bell drew attention to the violence that neo-liberal agendas do to the national healthcare system. Here, patients turn into “clients”, “service users”, and in the very near future very likely into “customers”. The danger here is that “customers” cannot claim a right to health care. Even psychoanalytic practice itself, so Prof Bell, is in danger of being contaminated by the market form, for example when it does away with some of its key tenets to ‘satisfy’ the customer-patient.

But does capitalism really swallow up everything? One person from the audience challenged this assumption by stressing political activism as well as other everyday life practices that are at the edges of capitalism. David Bell made clear that he does not think that the market has hegemonized all spheres of human life. There is hope to be found, precisely in resistance and alternative ways of relating to others. The discussion went on for another hour and generated many insightful critical thoughts. I am sure that many of the participants will come to Prof David Bell’s last lecture in this series on 12 June at Birkbeck to take up and continue the debate.

Using Narratives to Study Social Change

Leave a reply

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

“The narrative is present at all times, in all places, in all societies; the history of narrative begins with the history of mankind; there does not exist, and never has existed, a people without narratives.” (Barthes)

It is such a great feeling to leave an event and want to tell everyone you meet about what you just heard. The BISR, “Using Narratives to Study Social Change” was one of such events. Chairing was Professor Sasha Roseneil who started with a recollection of the first talk in the late 1980s by Molly Andrews, professor at the University of East London. It was at the end of the talk that I believe everyone in the room could understand Sasha’s words, “I left feeling so inspired, that I too could be and want to be part of the sociology world.”

Professor Andrews started her presentation with a basic conceptual framework; the opening slide was of a photograph of St. Paul’s Cathedral, littered with tents and political signs, a sight known to many of us familiar with the Occupy movement in London. From there she said that Occupy was one example (of many) in which the importance of political storytelling was evident, to participants and researchers alike.

Professor Andrews’s talk was split:

Part 1:Talking about Politics
Part 2: Contested Histories
Part 3: Retrospective Memories of a Critical Moment

But it was the political narratives, which Professor Andrews says highlight the complex relationship between micro and macro stories that she is interested in and for which her research is well known. Professor Andrews generously shares data from her PhD where she interviewed activists who were 75-90 years-old now and by whom she was greatly inspired. She muses at those who had told her she would “grow out of demos”, she laughs saying, “I don’t think so, looking around and often being inspired to see any older people around”. Professor Andrews’s stories of friendships brought about through intensive narrative research were highlighted when she fondly remembers speaking at the funeral of one of the activists she spent a great deal of time with while interviewing.

One of the most incredibly inspiring aspects of this talk, and I am not sure whether this was intended, was that most of this data, was about women who made huge sacrifices for social change and justice. This is always a breath of fresh air where most focus is on men during this time.

During the discussion, the idea of “truth” was bought up, how reliable were these narratives? Professor Andrews reminded us that the meaning of truth is a complex one; the key issue is not one of objectifiable facts, but rather the meaning of a particular story, and why it is being told, in other words, the function of the story. This was excellently illustrated by a recollection of a dream one of her interviewees shared with her. The interviewee told Professor Andrews that when she was deciding to break the law in her protests, she dreamt of holding a heavy tray and as it got heavier, she looked under it and saw hands that were not her own, but instead, big, strong hands and she knew, in her heart that she was doing the right thing. This woman’s powerful narrative used the unreal (the dream) in a retrospective way of explaining what did actually happen; and this is what narrative research was interested in.

Professor Andrews also shared some of the challenges of conducting narrative research. Two examples she gave were 1) the challenge of accepting someone’s perspective on their life and not trying to convince them to see things otherwise; and 2); respecting people you interviewed who shared very different views than your own both during and after the interviews.

One thing Professor Andrews said that I will not forget about this method: “We don’t sit around the fire telling stories, but we tell them to make change.”

Recommended reading:

Andrews, Molly (2008) Shaping History: Narratives of Political Change (Cambridge)
Andrews, M (1990/2008) Lifetimes of Commitment (Cambridge)

And forthcoming:

Andrews, M. (2013) Narrative Imagination and Everyday Life

More general readers on Narrative Research:

Riessman, Catherine Koehler (2008) Narrative methods for the Human Sciences London (Sage)
Andrews, M., Squire, C. and M. Tamboukou (eds)(2013) Doing narrative research Second Edition London (Sage)

After “Beyond the Fragments”?

1 Reply

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

A book that brings together over three hundred people on a Friday evening, 34 years after it was first published has truly passed the test of time. Either because its authors have written an extraordinary piece of work, or that our times yearn for alternative forms of political organisation. In the case of Beyond the Fragments, I’d say, it is both.

The publication of a new edition of Beyond the Fragments was hosted by Birkbeck Institute for Social Research. The book’s authors Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal and Hilary Wainwright came together to speak about the ‘after’ and the ‘beyond’ of four-decades of feminist scholarship and political activism. Chaired by Melissa Benn, the authors addressed the fraught question of how to consolidate diverse upsurges of rebellion into effective, open, democratic Left coalitions.

As Professor Sheila Rowbotham explained: “When we wrote Beyond the Fragments we were preoccupied with the process of organising for change. We took a whole of things for granted then that we can no longer take for granted now.” Surely, times have changed since the ’70s – both for the better and the worse. Today, we encounter deepening recession, environmental pollution, growing inequality between women, falling real wages, rising unemployment, continuing sell-off of the NHS, and savage welfare cuts. And, as Lynne Segal pointed out, the politics of austerity are also reflected on an individual level. Living under corporate capitalism gives rise to all sorts of fears and hostilities: fear of economic decline, fear of foreigners, hostility towards those on benefits, fear of weakness and dependency and a sense that we have to be stronger and more competitive if we want to succeed. However, the protests of the last couple of years have shown that there is opposition to the politics of austerity.

And feminism, according to Professor Segal, is on the rise again as austerity hits women first. If the Left wants to succeed, Dr Wainwright emphasized, activism needs to saturate all spheres of political life from grassroots movement to state politics (as recently demonstrated by Syriza in Greece who take legislation and government as a resource to bring about social change).

There was certainly no room for pessimism last Friday evening. On the contrary, the speaker and the participants agreed that new forms of resistance are possible to build stronger bonds of solidarity across class, race, gender and sexuality. Pragna Patel from the Southall Black Sisters (SBS), an organisation struggling for women’s human rights and against gender related violence, stressed that her activism within the SBS was always driven by a desire to be part of a wider left, democratic, emancipatory project. Rosie Rogers’ lively response set the mood for the rest of the evening. She reminded us all of the new exciting ways of engaging in protest, such as UK-wide Stop the Cuts Coalition movement, that require people to work together and to “put their barriers away and stop tribalism”. At the end of the evening, the answer to the question of what is to be done, seemed less complicated than one might have supposed in the first place. All agreed: Come together, mobilize resistance and enjoy the protest.