Category Archives: Arts

OLH reopens applications to flip subscription journals to open access

The Open Library of Humanities (OHL) is accepting expressions of interest from subscription journals. 

A book open with pages flicking towards the right

The Open Library of Humanities is currently accepting expressions of interest from subscription journals in the humanities seeking to move to a gold open access (OA) publishing model without author-facing charges (‘diamond’ OA).

The Open Library of Humanities is an award-winning, scholar-led, gold open-access publisher of 28 journals with no author-facing charges. The publishing platform is funded by an international consortium of libraries who have joined OLH in their mission to make scholarly publishing fairer, more accessible, and rigorously preserved for the digital future. OLH’s mission is to support and extend open access to scholarship in the humanities – for free, for everyone, forever.

The reopening comes following the generosity of OLH’s higher-tier supporters in enabling the OLH to expand its portfolio of 28 peer-reviewed open access scholarly journals, and the invaluable ongoing support received from the over 300 member libraries and institutions that make this work possible.

OLH welcomes expressions of interest from journals interested in flipping to gold open-access without author-facing charges, and which meet the following requirements:

  • Must be peer-reviewed
  • Has been established for at least five years
  • Currently funded through a subscription model
  • Journal is based in a humanities discipline
  • Has an international editorial board

OLH also welcomes areas within the humanities not currently covered by its existing journals, and expressions of interest from international, multilingual, and learned society journals, although all expressions of interest will be considered. Initial expressions of interest and exploratory conversations may be made without commitment. Shortlisted expressions of interest will then be invited to make a full application.

“We are delighted to be able to launch this initiative to help make scholarly research more openly accessible. By supporting more subscription journals to transition to open access, we aim to ensure the open availability of knowledge as broadly as possible, as per our charitable aims and core mission”, said Dr Rose Harris-Birtill, Acting Director of the Open Library of Humanities. “These criteria are in place to help create savings for library budgets, to stimulate the commercial business sector to adopt new models for open access scholarship, and to ensure the highest journal quality for our supporting members.”

Journals wishing to join the platform should fill in the expression of interest form. For institutions and libraries who would like to contribute to helping OLH continue this vital work, please contact Paula Clemente Vega.

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Five ways museum work is classed (and what we might do about it)

Dr Samantha Evans was awarded her PhD, ‘Struggles for Distinction: class and classed inequality in UK museum work’, from Birkbeck’s Department of Organizational Psychology in November 2020. She won the Phillip Pullman Prize for Best Thesis in the School of Business, Economics and Informatics. She is currently a Research Fellow at UCL and will be moving to Royal Holloway as a Lecturer in Organisation Studies in October 2021. In this blog, Dr Evans highlights key findings from her PhD, in an update from her first blog, posted in April 2018.

Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow

The recent appointment of George Osborne as Trustee of the British Museum generated a great deal of controversy within social media. Apart from being architect of policies which cut museum funding, his appointment exposes the realpolitik of power and money in a high-profile cultural institution. It also raises questions about work behind-the-scenes of the museum: who can get in and get on, and how might social class matter?

My doctoral research examined these questions, adapting Pierre Bourdieu’s theory and using secondary data, focus groups and interviews. This is a summary of my findings.

  1. Museum work is hierarchical and exclusive

Specialist curatorial knowledge, particularly in a national museum, has greater prestige than other roles. This may not seem surprising; this knowledge is seen to distinguish museums from other fields.  However, it does mean other forms of knowledge – audience-focussed, practical, technical, and commercial – play second fiddle and runs counter to attempts to position museums as inclusive. It is the exalted nature of these positions, that contributes to their being competitive and out of reach for many, requiring costly qualifications and working for low or no pay.

  1. Museum work is changing but is still exclusive

The status of curatorial work is however being challenged by the competitive funding environment. Museums need new sources of income, and such skills are increasingly being sought. This is not without controversy. The furore over the Tate’s recruitment of a Head of Coffee illustrates this. Such changes highlight that knowledge hierarchies are not fixed. However, at present, it is only the very top echelons (what Bourdieu would call a ‘field of power’) where the rules of the game are being changed, as can be seen in the appointment of museum directors from other sectors (from politics and online retail) and of course, George Osborne.

  1. Museum career paths are rigid AND insecure

For everyone else, there is a powerful discourse that museum careers are built on dedication to the field. This is reinforced by the specialised and geographical division of museum work which means there is limited opportunity to move, buoyed by a fear of being shut out should one leave the sector. Alongside this, museum work, like other sectors, is increasingly precarious, and individuals rather than institutions, are encouraged to take on the precarity of the market, by being flexible, enterprising and resilient. This puts pressure on everyone, but particularly for those with less capital, unable to demonstrate both dedication and afford their rent.

  1. There is limited attention on the museum worker

In an embattled sector, the focus has been on collections or audiences with less attention paid to the needs of museum workers. This is reflected in both policy and museum studies research. Where the workforce is considered, it is often as a vehicle for developing the sector, rather than a consideration of what we might call ‘good work.’ The lower status of management, viz-a-viz curatorial knowledge, make skills in people management less valued. And many small museums do not have the capacity to support, coach, or develop their staff.

  1. Museums are ‘classed’ too

Not all museums are equal. National museums have distinct privileges over and above other museums. They receive funding direct from central government, have a mandate to lead the sector, and an ability to capitalise on their status (attracting well-connected Trustees, high visitor numbers, TV deals).  Whilst some museums can sit at the same table, few can become a ‘national’. As such it creates a them and us divide, legitimised by nationals having the ‘best’ collections. These distinctions need critical scrutiny; collections often come from money, and their value is not neutral. From this lens, the appointment of George Osborne can be seen to reinforce such distinction, in effect upholding a classed system.

What can we do?

The pandemic offers an opportunity for museums to collectively rethink the skills they need, the way roles are designed, and how knowledge is valued. There is a need to develop inclusive career paths in and across sectors, creating partnerships, and to emphasise skills in “worker care” as much as “collections care”. National museums, funders, and universities have power and hence a responsibility to invest in this work.

There is more to this story. I am happy to give a talk, discuss solutions and hear your thoughts @samisatwork or Samantha.l.evans@ucl.ac.uk.

 Further information

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Public Engagement Awards: Dr Sophie Hope and Jenny Richards – Manual Labours: The Building as Body

This is the fourth in a series of blogs showcasing the Birkbeck 2020 Public Engagement Awards winners and highly commended participants. This project was announced the winner of the category ‘Engaged Practice’.

Manual Labours: The Building as Body is part of the long-term project Manual Labours, which explores physical and emotional relationships to work. This particular iteration took the Nottingham Contemporary as a case study and focused on the ‘(un)complaining body’ in relation to the architecture of the workplace. Research questions included:
– How do aspects of the building (storage, lighting, air, access routes) make staff feel?
– Where is the building hurting, blocked-up, suffering, sore, seeping, neglected?
– What impact does a complaining building have on a complaining body?

Since 2013, Dr Hope and Ms Richards (Independent Artist, Curator, Researcher, Partner of the Manual Labours Project) have been exploring physical and emotional relationships to work by carrying out workshops and interviews with different workforces (including cultural workers, commuters, call centre workers and complaints workers). For this phase of the research, they were invited by workers in a public cultural organisation to deliver a workshop on working conditions. At their request, they returned to work with them over a period of two years, responding to their needs to explore their workplace in a critical way. This was an iterative process where the research was driven by the content of the workshops. This collective investigations of the building became a useful reflexive and supportive space for staff to share their experiences and identify aspects of the organisation that they wanted to change. Thus, the project provided an experimental, well-needed space to reflect on the experience of work from different perspectives. The workshop format allowed people to meet from across the organisation and share experiences of their workplace, fostering conversations that otherwise were difficult to have. One of the creative outcomes of this project, the Manual and Wandering Womb Mobile Staffroom/Kitchen remain in use by the staff, and is so popular that it has its own booking system.

Dr Hope and Ms Richards’s work with the staff of the Nottingham Contemporary has also led to practical improvements to their shared kitchen, the refurbishment of the existing small staff room for invigilators and the reformatting of the open plan office. While these were cosmetic rather than structural changes they have led to improved staff communication and wellbeing. The presentation of the Health Assessment to the Board led to staff health and wellbeing becoming a standing item on the Board’s agenda. It has also been reported that there has been a changing attitude to having embedded practice-based researchers in the organisation as this was a first for the staff, demonstrating a new way of working with artist-researchers that can be taken into future work.

Birkbeck warmly congratulates Dr Hope, Jenny Richards, and the Nottingham Contemporary on their outstanding project, which was chosen as the winner in the category ‘Engaged Practice’.

Further information:

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Francisco de Vitoria in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s ‘On the Law of Nations’

Dr Fernando Gómez Herrero, Honorary Fellow in Birkbeck’s Department of Cultures and Languages, explores the historical links between the U.S. and Spain, via England. This article, under the same title as this blog, is featured in its entirety in the book Norteamérica y España: una historia de encuentros y desencuentros.

An American, an Englishman, a Spaniard: birds of the same feather flying together? What binds them together? Why would a noted contemporary public intellectual and politician from the US go to an old-European legacy of the relative periphery of five centuries ago? And how does he go “there”? Are his modern languages skills good enough to do so? What about the Englishman? How does he broker a good deal across the Atlantic? What historical ghost of the Spaniard shows up five centuries after his demise in the Anglo world? The former American Senator for New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) invokes the figure of the Spanish Dominican Francisco de Vitoria (1492-1546), in his fight within and against the imperial politics during the Reagan presidency. And he does it indirectly via the satirical novella titled Scott-King’s Modern Europe (1947) by Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966). The connection is direct between this fiction with Moynihan’s social-science work titled On the Law of Nations (1990). What is going on?

This is thus about the reconstruction of the historical links between Britain (or should I say England?) and Spain, inside the early years of the Cold War. And it is also about recognising the necessity of crossing the Atlantic and “Americanising” some of these findings, hence the connection with the influential figure of US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an Irish-Catholic of Democratic leanings who collaborated with diverse administrations such as Nixon’s and Clinton’s. Moynihan’s argument for international law is Vitorian and utopian and he is exclusively following Waugh whilst quoting from Brierly. How does our good American follow our colourful English man of satirical letters dealing with the figure of Vitoria emerging from the relative marginality of Franco’s Spain, still reaching us today? Two other names of importance: the Englishman J. L. Brierly (1881-1955) and the Spaniard Camilo Barcia Trelles (1888-1977).

This article deals with the historical links between the US and Spain via England. It deals with the history of international law caught up in between English-speaking and Spanish-speaking traditions of scholarship and interpretation. We are dealing with the deemed inspirational “father” of international law in one official beginning, i.e. the Early Modern / colonial European capture of the Americas, mid-1950s in Europe and the 1980s-1990s in the US. Our man of fictional letters (Waugh) misbehaves. Our American man of social-science studies behaves somewhat. The ghost of Vitoria is invoked by the latter to try to put limits to systematic violation of international law by his own imperial country. What lessons are we to learn in our own times? There is more to Moynihan’s neo-Wilsonian visibility of Vitoria on the American side of things than meets the eye, and there is also less. There are virtues -and vices if you wish – in both men of letters. And the significance of the historical sign “Vitoria” starts to go in many directions. This critical evaluation underlines some generalisations about historical links between the Anglo-Atlantic and Spain, which are not yet left behind.

In addressing areas and studies, historiographies and ideologies, the aim is here not to celebrate but to historicise, i.e., to interrogate critically world-area demarcations directly implicated. The task is to reconstruct the ideological interests of diverse scholars and intellectuals, see how they related to each other, or failed to do so, and also cover representative groups (mis-)handling the (im-)possible global history-writing done ever since. English-language and Spanish-language materials share the discussion table and project these voices towards the imperfect future convergence of international law.

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