Category Archives: Humanities and Social Sciences

Public Engagement Awards: Dr Brendan McGeever, Professor David Feldman and Dr Ben Gidley – Facing Antisemitism: Politics, Culture, History

This is the sixth 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 ‘Transforming Culture and Public Life’.

Facing Antisemitism is a new short course taught at Birkbeck that explores the sources, development and contemporary forms of antisemitism. It is open to students, the public and organisations. In 2019 the Labour Party enrolled its key staff on the course.

This project has been shaped directly by current research: Professor David Feldman’s Boycotts Past and Present (2019, Palgrave); his forthcoming The History of the Concept of Antisemitism (Princeton University Press, 2021); his essay ‘Toward A history of the Term of Anti-Semitism’ in The American Historical Review (2019); Dr Brendan McGeever’s new work on antisemitism and the left (Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution, CUP 2019) and Dr Ben Gidley’s Turbulent Times: the British Jewish Community Today, Continuum, 2010. Additionally, the three investigators are writing articles and a new monograph based on the module.

Facing Antisemitism draws on history and the social sciences to answer questions such as: how can we recognise and define antisemitism? How does it relate to other forms of racism? How widespread is antisemitism? Where does it come from? Why does it persist? What is the impact of antisemitism on Jews? What is the relationship between anti-racism and antisemitism?

The research underpinning this course is directly relevant to Labour because over the last four years, the Party has found itself at the centre of public controversy about the nature and significance of antisemitism. This has been unprecedented: antisemitism now sits at the centre of British political debate like never before. The subject is explosive and controversial, but one that is poorly understood. By engaging with Labour in this way, Dr McGeever, Prof. Feldman, and Dr Gidley hoped to provide key figures in the Party with the concepts and knowledge to make better judgments about antisemitism. In turn, this project provided the former with a valuable opportunity to take their research in a classroom setting to stimulate change and engender new ways of thinking about an urgent problem of our time.

Birkbeck congratulates Dr McGeever, Prof. Feldman, and Dr Gidley on their exciting project, as well as on being selected as the winners in this year’s Public Engagement Awards in the category ‘Transforming Culture and Public Life’.

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

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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’.

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Public Engagement Awards: Professor Matthew Davies – Layers of London

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

Senate House Library 1932 to 1937 by Nathaniel Telemaque, available on Layers of London

Layers of London is an online digital mapping project which is engaging thousands of people across London and beyond with the history and heritage of the city, creating valuable heritage assets, and facilitating via public engagement and crowdsourcing the creation of significant new digital heritage content. Layers of London has sought to engage with many different audiences across London, with the overriding objective to make a difference to the engagement with – as well as the understanding of – heritage via their active participation in projects and content-creation. Audiences have included school pupils; institutions – such as borough archives and libraries who have significant heritage assets as well as deep roots into their communities via engagement and participation; – and different and varied individuals, communities, and groups across the 32 boroughs, reflecting London’s rich ethnic, linguistic, social and economic mix. This project specifically targeted those areas where engagement with heritage has been limited, restricted, or underrepresented in narratives of London’s history.

The huge scale and scope of Layers of London, as well as its unique methodologies, meant that new approaches had to be developed. Of course, the engaging, interactive website played a key role is fostering engagement: it was specifically developed in such a way as to allow heritage content to be created and added easily, with straightforward guides for volunteers and users. Promotion via social media, workshops and events likewise proved highly successful, with Layers of London now counting over 11,000 contributions from the public. Direct engagement activities were also essential, as they allowed the project to recruit volunteers, discover new community groups to work with, and to empower and equip individuals and communities alike to research and curate their own histories. Ad hoc events targeted specific areas, themes, or communities that Professor Davies and the project team felt were underrepresented, such as some of the outer boroughs, LGBTQIA+ groups, migrant communities, or groups involved in recording particular kinds of heritage (such as pubs, housing estates).

The tremendous effort and skill needed to establish and run such a valuable and successful platform was commended by the Birkbeck Public Engagement network, that was proud to recognise Professor Davies’s work with an Award in the category ‘Collaboration’. We warmly congratulate Professor Davies and the Layers of London team, and we thank them this outstanding contribution, in the area of Public Engagement and beyond.

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‘A world turned upside down: COVID-19, urban poverty and older people in Chennai, an Indian metropole’.

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Dr Penny Vera Sanso, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Geography reflects on the COVID-related suffering that will be detrimental to Chennai’s poor.

The expectation is COVID-19 will run wild through the high density low-income settlements that Chennai’s poor are forced to live in. This may yet happen. What is happening is a great deal of COVID-related suffering, including excess deaths, deepening impoverishment and changing intergenerational relations that will force some older people into greater dependency and marginalization and others into more depleting economic engagements.

Currently the greatest threat for people living in low-income settlements is COVID-related impacts. How is this possible?

First, India is a highly segregated society. Segregated by class, caste and labour conditions, in which 90% of workers have no rights, most are employed on daily or piece rates. There are few points of contact that would provide person-to-person spread between slum dwellers and the ‘flying classes’ who brought the disease to India on flights from Wuhan, UAE, Italy and so on. Further, the longstanding stigmatization of slum dwellers and low caste people as sources of contagion, which underpins widespread Human Rights abuses in India, meant that the people most likely to be carrying the disease, the Middle Classes, shut off all direct contact with those least likely to have it, slum dwellers.
Second, India implemented a lockdown on the 25 March, when it only had 519 cases, quarantining tourists, banning international commercial flights and suspending train services.
Third, it established Containment Zones for any buildings or areas with one or more confirmed cases. Containment is backed up with targeted testing and tracing. As of 29 April 2020 there were 170 containment zones across India and 1075 deaths. In this no-one can leave their homes: groceries are delivered through government channels. The lockdown and containment are stringently policed, often heavy-handedly.

For most of the urban poor COVID-19 has brought their economic lives to a standstill. Research undertaken in five Chennai slums between 2007-10, including the 2008 international banking crisis, that translated into a significant economic slow down in Chennai, is instructive. Chennai’s labour market is segregated by age, gender and education, and has until now provided considerable economic space for older people, who occupied areas of the economy that younger people had vacated for higher status, easier conditions and better pay.

People on low, insecure, daily incomes do not earn enough to save. There is no question that after six weeks without work everyone in Chennai’s low-income settlements, whose nutritional status would not have been good, anaemia and malnutrition being endemic, will have cut food expenditures to the bone.

Beyond this, the wider context impinges on people’s health and capacity to seek healthcare. Water shortages and temperatures ranging from 34 deg C to 40 deg C contribute to dehydration and heat stroke. Free health services are centrally located, hence inaccessible for most people, while private doctors and medication need to be paid for. All this in a context where male slum dwellers already have a life expectancy of 5 years less than non-slum dwellers, reflecting globally established social gradients in morbidity and mortality.

For the urban poor starvation, non-COVID-19 sickness and deepening vulnerability are currently the greatest dangers they face; these will drive them back into finding work, often servicing those classes and sectors who comprise the current pool in which COVID-19 swims. Hunger will bring the virus to the slums.

In this world turned upside down, the poor are, currently, much more at risk from excess, COVID-related deaths than COVID-19 itself. Loss of health, assets, jobs, housing and the disruption of social and economic networks beyond their settlements are the immediate impacts of lockdown. There will be mid and long term impacts.

At best mid-term impacts will be relatively short lived, requiring greater labour force participation for everyone in low-income settlements – but not the ‘pull your socks up’ participation that neo-liberal economists like to think will raise household incomes. People of all ages and abilities will be forced onto the labour market, lowering pay rates. Older women and men, a higher percentage of whom are already in paid work than are people aged 15-19, will be forced into even more body depleting hours and conditions on less pay, in a context in which age discrimination in employment and wages is well established. Family and kin networks will develop holes due to the underlying health conditions, deepening nutritional deficits and untreated morbidity under COVID-19 conditions and directly from COVID-19 if it spreads through the slums.

Tamil Nadu is a state with a comparatively low fertility rate. COVID-19’s direct and indirect consequences will sharpen the long-term risks of reducing the size of family networks in the context of weak state support.

Older people with small, depleted or no family, with no or inadequate pensions or who have lost work will find their capacity to cater for themselves or to rely on others significantly constrained. They could well become even more tied into impoverished family networks that increasingly depend on older people’s inputs.

There is no getting away from the need for a realistic income for all people over age 60 and a pension programme that guarantees such.

Irrespective of whether COVID-19 finds spreads through Chennai’s low-income settlements or not, excess COVID-related deaths are a certainty. It will be political will that determines whether these deaths and the pandemic’s long-term impacts on people living in low-income settlements will ever be recognized for what they are: the consequence of how India chooses to distribute its risks across society.