Category Archives: Social Sciences History and Philosophy

Challenges for Environmental Studies in a changing world

Professor Sue Brooks reflects on the current challenges faced by geographers and environmental managers as we see continual changes to our environment.

Environmental Change

Our constantly changing environment presents many challenges and opportunities for research and education in the Higher Education sector. Climate change is rarely out of the news, issues of environmental pollution and food security have never been more prescient than during the current COVID-19 pandemic, and our collective impact on wildlife will surely be highlighted by an ongoing unprecedented crash in visitor numbers to Areas of Outstanding National Beauty, Sites of Special Scientific Interest and Special Areas of Conservation. One area presenting particular challenges to Geographers and Environmental Managers is that of understanding rates and mechanisms of coastal change under accelerating sea level rise and changing storminess, whether that be through changing storm intensity, magnitude or direction of travel with respect to coastal orientation.

Retreating Cliffs

Understanding coastal and environmental change is something our undergraduates at Birkbeck, studying for BSc degrees in Geography, Environment & Sustainability, are encouraged to engage with throughout their programme. The first question we address is the extent to which our environment is changing. Taking the coast as an example, we can use aerial and ground-based Earth Observation data to develop feature layers for successive periods of time which can be compared and overlaid to assess and quantify change. Take the retreating cliffs of Suffolk shown in Figure 1, where the changing feature is the clifftop edge.

Figure 1: The retreating cliffs at Covehithe Suffolk (7 May 2018) showing evidence of rapid retreat and high process energetics

These cliffs at Covehithe, Suffolk are retreating very quickly as evidenced through the close proximity of the path to the edge, the clean face of the near-vertical cliffs and

Figure 2: Quantifying shoreline retreat rates over historic and contemporary timescales, using historical maps and aerial photographs. Shorelines are digitized from maps and aerial photos and superimposed on a reproduced 1948 map (shoreline dates from 1947). Red dot indicates the area of figure 1, and solid black line indicates region of detailed shoreline change analysis.

the clifftop edge vegetation indicating instability and the presence of cracks. But how fastare these cliffs retreating? We can address this question by looking at Ordnance Survey historical maps, in this example dating from the 1880s and 1940s. But we can also overlay aerial photos from more recent years, here we use 1993, 2000 and 2010. Expressed in meters of retreat per year (ma^-1), the average retreat from 1883 to 1947 was 2-2.5 ma^-1 for the cliffline emphasised in bold in figure 2. Ongoing research as part of the BLUEcoast NERC-funded project has quantified a total retreat of 94m between 1993 and 2018 (25 years), at an average annual rate of 3.76 ma^-1. The impact of recent high magnitude storms, such as “Beast from the East” and the 2013 North Sea surge reveals as much as 10-12 m of retreat can happen in single events.

Coastal Barriers

Retreating cliffs cannot return to their original locations. They provide a vital source of sediment that is pumped into the nearshore zone during episodes of high retreat and then is recirculated to create mobile barriers elsewhere. This highlights their importance to coastal management and the need to have sound process understanding for future planning. Behind the shoreline barriers diverse habitats thrive, routeways can be maintained and coastal communities are protected. A good example of a shoreline barrier is Blakeney spit, North Norfolk, shown in figure 3.

Figure 3: The Blakeney shoreline barrier, North Norfolk showing extensive areas of protected low-lying land behind the barrier. Also shown is an extensive washover feature that resulted from the surge on 5 December 2013 (maximum recorded water levels of 6.30 m ODN (Ordnance Datum Newlyn = approximately mean sea level). Retreating cliffs at Weybourne can be seen in the far distance. (photo: 23 July 2019).

Given sufficient sediment, barriers can grow with sea level rise to be able to withstand to an extent future challenges from storms. However, the largest, intense storms create barrier washover, rollover and breaching. These processes set the shoreline back and can lead to extensive flooding of the back-barrier. The coast exists in a finely balanced state between sediment sources (cliffs) and sinks (barriers), and the processes that connect them. Going forward we need to understand these sources and sinks, their changing locations and their interplay with habitats and communities. Management of coasts requires us to consider the processes that generate and deposit sediment and move it from place to place. At Birkbeck, our Programmes in Geography, Environment & Sustainability include modules that will enhance understanding and skills to address these issues. Consider applying if you want to learn more about our fascinating environment, the way in which it is changing and how to plan for future change.

Sue Brooks is a Professor of Coastal Geoscience in the Department of Geography.

She convenes 3 modules on the BSc Programmes in Geography, Environment & Sustainability:

Introducing Natural Environments (level 4), 2. Environmental Processes (level 5) and, 3. Storms Seas and Rivers: Hydrology in the field (level 5).

Further information

Study BSc Geography, Environment & Sustainability at Birkbeck

The sports shoe: from field to fashion

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Dr Thomas Turner writes on the hidden deeper, roots of sneaker fashions and obsessions; the subject of his PhD in History at Birkbeck, which he has now turned into a book.

Sports shoes are an inescapable part of modern fashion. We see them everywhere, from the sports field to the catwalk, the classroom to the battlefield. Comfortable, convenient, inexpensive, and accessible, for many of us shoes that have roots in sports are our go-to everyday footwear. The big names – adidas, Nike, Puma, Reebok, Under Armour – have some of the most widely recognised and well-established brands in existence. Alongside them an array of smaller, more niche companies flourish. It amounts to an industry worth billions of dollars, a truly global enterprise with design, manufacturing, and sales spread around the world.

Sales are one indicator of the popularity of this type of footwear, but recent years have also seen the growth of a rich and diverse culture around sneakers. Global communities of obsessive sneakerheads and collectors now connect the worlds of art, design, music, fashion, and popular culture. Yet these groups only reflect a wider appreciation for athletic footwear. Whether they were Dunlop Green Flash, adidas Samba, Puma States, Reebok Classic, Nike Air Max, or Yeezy 350, many of us remember our old shoes with nostalgic warmth, and almost everyone has a particular model that magically transports them to a specific time and place. In this respect, sports shoes have developed a cultural significance much greater than other forms of footwear or clothing.

I got my first pair of adidas in the mid 1980s, when I was in primary school. I thought they were fantastic. I have had countless pairs since then but my fascination with sports shoes has only grown. It was this that led, eventually, to my first historical writing on the subject. Studying at Birkbeck for an MA in Social and Cultural History, in spring 2005 I had taken a course organised by Professor Frank Trentmann on the history of consumption. I wrote my end-of-term essay on the adidas Superstar, a 1960s basketball shoe that in the 1980s became closely associated with hip hop and the New York rap group Run-D.M.C. The essay did well and later formed the basis of a proposal for a part-time PhD on the broader social and cultural history of sports shoes. My goal was to uncover the hidden, much deeper, roots of sneaker fashions and obsessions. I wanted to establish how sports shoes had come to be as they are as objects, but also to investigate the ways in which people in the past had thought about them. This meant finding how sports shoes were perceived and portrayed by makers and consumers, but also how they were integrated into popular fashions and cultures away from the sports field. Crucially, it meant looking at a broad sweep of global history, from the mid 19th and to the early 21st Century, and considering sports footwear against a changing landscape of society, sport, fashion, industry, and technology.

Thomas Turner

I began work on the PhD in late 2006 and finally completed it in autumn 2012. Throughout, I benefited from the supportive environment in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, whether it was advice from my supervisors or the encouragement of fellow PhD students struggling with their own projects. With the viva a surprisingly pleasant memory and the thesis submitted to Senate House, in 2015 I set about transforming the PhD into a book for a more general readership. I secured a deal with Bloomsbury, and in the years afterward juggled the book project with teaching, professional work, and other academic research and writing. The final result, The Sports Shoe: A History from Field to Fashion, expands on my PhD to tell the transnational story of sports footwear over 150 years. With 160 archive images, it moves from the tennis courts of the 1870s to the streets of 1980s New York to the global advertising campaigns of the 2000s. It is inevitably a very personal story, documenting and sharing my own love for this type of footwear, but it demonstrates that the humble sports shoe is one of the most culturally rich and economically significant products of our time.

The Sports Shoe: A History from Field to Fashion by Thomas Turner is published by Bloomsbury, £30.00

The food politics of Brexit

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Dr Alex Colás and Dr Jason Edwards discuss the crucial place of food and drink in the Brexit negotiations, and how they could impact domestic and international politics. They are authors with Jane Levi and Sami Zubaida of Food, Politics, and Society: Social Theory and the Modern Food System (University of California Press), which will be launched at a reception on 13 December. Find out more and book your free place here.

Whatever the outcome of ongoing Brexit negotiations, one conclusion is abundantly clear: food and drink are critical to this process, and more widely to both domestic and international politics. This is most obvious in relation to the UK’s food security. With just over 30 per cent in value terms of Britain’s just-in-time food supply coming from within the European Union, the UK’S food security is likely to be compromised. A recent authoritative report warns that Britain’s nutritional and political stability could be undermined by price volatility, sharpening inequalities and erosion of public trust following Brexit. Far from being an anecdotal sideshow, the effects of the divorce on Britain’s food economy are starting to become apparent in both the agricultural and hospitality sectors, so dependent on EU labor.

The consequences of Britain’s withdrawal from the EU go beyond the high politics of summitry, increasingly appearing in the everyday lives of UK residents, touching on issues like national and regional identities, public health, fisheries and agriculture, commodity supply chains, fast food workers, food standards and changing consumer tastes. Products like Stilton, Arbroath Smokies or indeed Scotch whisky, all currently listed by the EU as having Protected Designation of Origin or Geographical Indication, are expected to retain this status only if there is a UK alignment with European regulations, and will otherwise have to apply as a ‘third country’ producers. The great British institution of the Friday night curry is also affected by Brexit. During the 2016 referendum campaign, leading Brexiteers secured the support of the Bangladesh Caterers Association – a major organisation representing the sector – with the promise that leaving the EU and ‘taking back control’ of immigration would ‘save our curry houses’. Two years on, representatives of this emblematic sector of the country’s catering industry say they are disappointed that the final Brexit deal is likely to offer EU citizens preferential access to the UK labour market. News headlines have equally highlighted the public health and food safety dimensions of Brexit as farmers and consumers worry about the prospect of chlorine-washed chicken, hormone-treated beef or genetically-modified organisms entering the UK food chain through trade deals with countries outside the EU.

All of these concerns have an extensive history in British and continental politics. In our new book Food, Politics, and Society we take the long view and argue that in fact questions of food prices and international trade; cuisine and identity; state regulation of food and drink; or the public health and environmental consequences of different food regimes have been central to the development of western social theory since the eighteenth century.

Classical political economists such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo and their eminent critic Karl Marx should to different degrees be seen as theorists of food politics. Food is key to Smith and Ricardo’s famous accounts of rent and comparative advantage, while the importance for Marx’s work of the agro-ecological concept of ‘metabolism’ has recently been expertly recovered by Marxian scholars. Closer to our times, theories of nationalism, the public sphere, class or gender have emphasized the centrality of food and drink to the reproduction of these social phenomena.

It is useful to place the ongoing policy debates and political disputes surrounding the food politics of Brexit in wider historical and sociological perspective because food and drink have been of critical importance to European geopolitics in the modern age. In the nineteenth century, ‘Gastronationalism’ played a significant part in the formation of national identity in major states like Italy and France, and the invention of national and sub-national food cultures remains a feature of politics across Europe (an activity, somewhat ironically, much supported by the EU). But modern national food cultures have been shaped by a more-or-less conscious mimicry or rejection of other food cultures. The traditional British distaste for garlic – a French predilection – developed at the same time as a public eating culture massively influenced by French ideas of culinary technique and table service. The ‘revival’ of British food over the last twenty years is in fact far more of an invention shaped by foreign food developments, such as the Slow Food movement originating in Italy.

At the same time, the struggle to define national cuisines within states has often mirrored deep divides along lines of class, gender, and ethnicity. Brexit is – or has become – more than a disagreement over the economic costs and benefits of EU membership. It has expressed underlying conflicts in modern British society, and these conflicts are reflected in contending visions of what British food is and should be. Post-Brexit, British Gastronationalism is likely to be reinvented once again. As one restaurant critic recently put it: ‘In a post-Europe landscape, we’ll drink only Denbies red wine from the vineyards of Dorking and eat fish and chips off fancy plates while listening to vintage Arctic Monkeys’.

Alex Colás and Jason Edwards teach in the Politics Department at Birkbeck College and convene the Birkbeck Food Group. Get free tickets for the launch reception on Thursday 13 December where discount copies of Food, Politics, and Society: Social Theory and the Modern Food System will be on sale.

How should we talk about white majorities?

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Eric Kaufmann, Professor of Politics, argues that we need to talk about white majorities and do so with understanding in his new book, Whiteshift.

Across the West, anti-immigration populists are tearing a path through the usual politics of left and right. Immigration is remaking Europe and North America; over half of American babies are non-white, and by the end of the century, minorities and those of mixed race are projected to form the majority in most Western European countries. The left-right distinction is being overshadowed by a culture war pitting whites who dislike diversity against those who embrace it. Ethnic transformation will continue, but conservative whites are unlikely to exit quietly; their feelings of alienation are already redrawing political lines and convulsing societies across the West.

Drawing on detailed and extraordinary survey, demographic and electoral data and enriched with illustrative stories, Whiteshift explores the majority response to ethnic change in North America and Western Europe. Eric Kaufmann, a leading expert on national identity and ethnic change, calls for us to move beyond empty and partisan talk about national identity and open up debate about the future of white majorities. He argues that we must move past the dominant storyline of ever-increasing diversity to enable conservative whites and liberals alike to see a positive future in “whiteshift” – a new story of majority transformation through intermarriage that can help lift anxieties and heal today’s widening political divisions.

Professor Kaufmann has been researching immigration, religion, and national identity for over twenty years. A native of Vancouver, British Columbia, he was born in Hong Kong and spent eight years in Tokyo, and is now Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London. His previous books include Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? and The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America.