22: Discussing Islamophobia in Peterborough

I helped to organise an event held in Peterborough last week and billed as a ‘fact finding’ visit looking at the issue of Islamophobia. I am very grateful to colleagues from Peterborough Race Equality Council and from University Centre Peterborough whose hard work made the event a success.

Peterborough is only 50 miles north from Cambridge -  the city where I live and teach - but it is a very different place with a very different history. Peterborough expanded rapidly under the post war New Towns programme. Although much of the manufacturing industry established in that era has now contracted, the city enjoys a rare combination of a large working class and low levels of unemployment. Peterborough has been shaped by a series of inward migrations. Recently it has been the hub of East European mobility into East Anglia. The sizeable Muslim population in Peterborough is largely but not exclusively the result of earlier waves of migration from Pakistan and East Africa. Peterborough Race Equality Council was established in 1973 and was one of the first in the UK. As this suggests, the city is is a good example of the development of a particular type of 'race relations' framework in which local policy-making, policing and politics involves frequent talk of distinct ethnic or religious communities and consultation with leaders of those communities.

A second piece of context is more surprising. A version of this event was planned last year but (through a series of developments I cannot detail here) was prevented from going ahead. The rationale for this (in my opinion daft) decision was that, in the run up to a planned march by the English Defence League in Peterborough, any discussion of Islamophobia, even in a closed event for undergraduate students, was deemed too ‘controversial’ and provocative.

The core of the event that took place this year was a panel of local experts and community leaders tasked with considering the impact of anti-Muslim prejudice on life in Peterborough. Panel members included the Director of Peterborough Race Equality Council, a Chief Inspector of Cambridgeshire Police (whose responsibilities intriguingly combine neighbourhood policing and preventing extremism), a local councillor, a member of the Association of Muslim Police, and representatives from two of the largest mosques in the city. Topics covered included last year’s EDL march, the role of negative media coverage in provoking anti-Muslim sentiment, and the dilemmas posed when trying to balance freedom of expression with respect for cultural difference.  Informal breakout groups allowed the lecturers and students who made up most of the audience to meet and question panel members and provoked lively debate that continued over lunch. Following the meal some of us visited the 3,000 person capacity Faizan-e-Medina Mosque (below) and met with two Imams based there.

I am proud to be associated with this event and I hope that my colleagues and the panel members who generously contributed to it will forgive me a little critical reflection on what went on.

An issue underlying much of the panel discussion related to the validity and clarity of the notion of Islamophobia and in particular of the argument that prejudice framed or coded in terms of religion had superseded or trumped other forms of racism. As the panel contributions illustrated, the Islamophobia concept has real purchase when discussing the rhetoric of the EDL, the logic of the war on terror, or the continual, negative portrayal of ‘Muslims’ in much of the media. But quite how, when and why these processes impact on everyday life chances is often unclear. One suspects that the most tangible local consequences of these developments has been the firming up of Muslim identities and institutions; a process also paradoxically fostered by the priorities and cash of New Labour's Prevent initiative.

A question that did not get asked during the panel discussions was: what is lost when we stop talking about racism in general in favour of Islamophobia in particular? At points, for example, panel members contrasted the injustice of blaming Muslims en masse for terrorist atrocities with supposed more equitable treatment of Irish migrants during the era of IRA bombing whereas (as Mary Hickman and others have pointed out) the parallels between the two eras and two minority group experiences are striking and revealing.

There was an intriguing moment during a small group discussion I witnessed when a student argued that the majority of white British people were not hostile to Islam per se but to any organised religion. Now this argument might itself merit deconstruction but it is an interesting one none-the-less. For the community and religious leaders who donated their time to the event, Islamophobia is a problem best addressed through education about the tenets and practices of Islam. As Oliver Roy has argued, however, this approach often misses the point. How compelling, for example, is the argument that Westerners should not be hostile to Islam because its doctrines are similar to those of Christianity?

Equally significant as any theological differences are the assumptions of public and private and about national and religious communities at play. As a range of commentators have argued, ‘secularisation’ in Western Europe might better be understood as the reframing of religion as a private matter that should have no bearing on public issues. Here then private/public is understood in terms of a dichotomy between individual life project and a national civil society. In our breakout groups and at the Mosque there was repeated asking and answering of 'difficult' questions nearly all of which in one way or another counterpoised individual choice and self-expression against religious doctrine: hot topics were free speech, clothing, homosexuality, arranged marriage, marrying out, and rebellious youth. In the world of the tabloids and the EDL Muslims are often absurdly portrayed as wanting somehow to takeover or change British society in general - banning Christmas, calling for Sharia Law and so forth - but as these discussions illustrated well, the most politically sensitive issues arise when  Muslims define ‘privacy’  in terms of what takes place within or outside of their religious community and/or operate with notions of ‘the public realm’ that do not fit neatly within national boarders. A feature of public discourse on migration and cultural identity in Western Europe in recent times has been the ways that supposedly universalistic notions of human rights become part of stories of national belonging that exclude particular groups ("we are tolerant but not of intolerance"). We only only have to look across the Channel to suposedly liberal Netherlands and Denmark to see how invidious this argument can be. This is why we need to keep talking about Islamophobia.

21: The Age of Extremes

The Age of Extremes is a documentary by the independent film-maker Ishmahil Blagrove. It was released in 2010. I was asked to introduce a showing as part of Cambridge Black History Month. These were my opening remarks.

The Age of Extremes does not have a narrator. It does not offer a neat set of conclusions or provide easy answers. On the contrary, much of its value is that it allows a variety of voices to speak and just when you think you know where it is heading (and it verges on polemic) it will take an unexpected turn or make a startling connection. Never-the-less for all its complexity, the film has some unifying themes that are worth highlighting. 

The starting point of the film is the impact on Muslims in Britain of 9/11 and the consequent war on terror and of the invasions of Iraq and war in Afghanistan.  Here the film is on familiar territory by exploring the ‘othering’ of Muslims and their demonization as a group outside of and somehow threatening to mainstream British life. But the film then defies liberal convention. Most retorts to Islamophobia will emphasise the ‘moderation’ of the majority of Britain’s two million or so Muslims, their patriotism, their opposition to terrorism, and their distance from a tiny unrepresentative group of extremists.  Blagrove has instead made a film that often focuses on the very people who are labelled extremists: wannabe taxi-drivers putting their lives back together after a spell on remand on terrorism charges, young women arguing for their right to wear the veil in public, ex-gang members who won’t hear a bad word about Abu Hanza, the boss of a Muslim TV station, a man smiling as he tell us about his two wives and his anti-Semitism and so on.

One of the contributions of the film is then to humanise these people and to show them in a very different light from the usual media portrayal of ‘the extremist’. A question running through the film is ‘what is the truth’?  A recurring theme is the way people featured in it feel strongly that they and other Muslims have been misrepresented by the media. We are left in little doubt that Blagrove believes that the threat of Islamic terrorism has been exaggerated by the powerful for geopolitical purposes. Whether you accept this argument wholesale or not, the film does a good job of showing that to be Muslim in Britain today is to live with a heavy burden of State and media attention.

Another theme of the film is the interplay of the global and the local. People in the film have lives and identities shaped by international events and transnational relationships. This is a film about Bosnia, Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan. It tells us about the influence of the idea of ‘the Ummah’ – that Muslims of all different backgrounds and nationalities are part of the same community. 

But this is also a film about Britain and about what it does or should mean to live in a multicultural society.  It is striking how often people in the film will appeal to their rights as British citizens, the right to self-expression, to wear what they want, to express uncomfortable or unpopular ideas, the right to a fair trial, and the right to recourse against misrepresentation. And it is no accident that the film keeps returning to that quaint British institution Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park.  The film leaves us wondering what to make of this chaotic but vital scene -  is it a testimony to the power of free speech and pursuit of dialogue or just a lot of people shouting at or across each other - an acrimonious dialogue of the deaf?

20: Yuval-Davis: Belonging and the Politics of Belonging

I turned to Nira Yuval-Davis's paper  'Belonging and the Politics of Belonging' (Patterns of Prejudice 40(3) 2006) in search of conceptual clarity as I begin further work on the Technologies of Belonging project with Katharina Schramm and Amade M'Charek. If you are the sort who likes conceptual frameworks (as I am) then you'll find this a worthwhile read.

The first useful distinction Yuval-Davis draws is between belonging ( an emotional sense of home and security) and a politics of belonging: her argument being that belonging only becomes articulated and politicised when under threat. Hence consideration of belonging and the politics of belonging brings us back to core themes of psychoanalysis (e.g. anxiety), social psychology (e.g. conformity), and sociology (e.g. anomie and alienation).

Yuval Davis begins her paper by highlighting the different levels at which analysis of belonging should take place.

"People can 'belong' in many different ways and to many different objects of attachments. These can vary from a particular person to the whole of humanity, in a concrete or abstract way; belonging can be an act of self-identification or identification by others, in a stable, contested or transient way. Even in its most stable 'primordial' forms, however, belonging is always a dynamic process, not a reified fixity, which is only a naturalized construction of a particular hegemonic form of power relations." (p199)

She differentiates three analytical levels at which belonging is constructed (constituted might be a better term):

1) Social location . This is people's place in the intersection of divisions of age, class, gender, ethnicity and sexuality.
2) Identifications and emotional attachments. Yuval-Davis views identities as "stories that people tell themselves and others about who they are (and who they are not)"(p202) and highlights the interplay between narratives of self and narratives of group. These stories have a particular emotional charge in times of threat and insecurity.
3) Ethical and political values. Belonging is also about the ways in which social locations and identifications and attachments are valued and judged.

Yuval-Davis begins her discussion of the politicisation of belonging thus:

" John Crowley defined the politics of belonging as  'the dirty work of boundary maintenance'. The boundaries that the politics of belonging is concerned with are the boundaries of the political community of belonging, the boundaries that separate the world population into 'us' and 'them'." (p204)

For Yuval-Davis this politics is not just about the continual work that hegemonic powers put into maintaining and reproducing community boundaries but is also about the on-going challenges to those boundaries by other political actors. In discussing this politics she draws a distinction between contestations of community membership and citizenship and contestations of associated status and entitlements. These two politics often come together around the nation state as power apparatus and imagined community (e.g. in debates about migrants right of settlement or in access to welfare) but, as Yuval-Davis points out, the links between nation and community are highly ambiguous and a feature of contemporary politics is continuing attempts to draw distinctions between formal membership of the nation and other measures of belonging and entitlement. Yuval-Davis wrote this paper in the aftermath of the 7/7 London atrocities and cites the ensuing public debate as to how to interpret the formal and cultural Britishness of the suicide bombers as an example of the potential for questions of 'belonging' to generate emotional and political heat.

As Yuval-Davis points out apparently nebulous debates about community membership often relate to all too concrete issues of citizenship rights and duties, spatial rights (i.e. the right to enter and remain in a territory)  and entitlement to legal and economic protection. These issues are being reframed not just by migration but by a wider set of developments associated with globalisation, changing international relations and neoliberal reforms of work, welfare and the military. Thus:

" When it comes to membership's rights and responsibilities in the arena of the politics of belonging, the duties involved become much more ephemeral and actually become requirements,  rather than mere duties. The central question here is what is required from a specific person for him/her to be entitled to belong, to be considered as belonging, to the collectivity." (p209)

Each of the levels of belonging described by Yuval-Davis earlier in the paper - social location, identification and attachment, and ethical and political values - can become politicised requisites of belonging. This to me is one of the big contributions of the paper: to firstly recognise that in many settings the requirements of belonging have been both ramped up and made more complex. Yuval-Davis is right to focus on the ways that  contemporary political projects articulate requirements for belonging may encompass common descent, common language, common religion, and common political values. Hence projects may also vary in the degree of fixity and permeability they assume and allow:

" Requisites of belonging that relate to social locations  - origin, 'race', place of birth - would be the most racialized and the least permeable. Language, culture and sometimes religion are more open to voluntary, often assimilatory, identification with particular collectivities, Using a common set of values, such as 'democracy' or 'human rights', as signifiers of belonging can be seen as having the most permeable boundaries of all ." (p209)

But as Yuval-Davis points out this apparent difference in openness and permeability can be deceptive. This is a powerful insight deserving further development not least because it echoes many of the best analyses of the changing forms and focus of racialised discourse which explore the long running capacity of 'race' to stand for the fixed and the plastic at one and the same time.

Yuval-Davis illustrates her argument by looking at the changing terms of political discourse and policy making centred on Britain's black and Asian minorities.  She traces the shift from the colour and descent based anti-immigration racism of Enoch Powell, through the emphasis under Thatcherism on identification with nation (think Norman Tebbit's cricket test), through to New Labour's requirement that migrants sign up to common values that encompass both commitment to a specific national community and to supposedly universalistic notions of human rights.

The paper does us a particular service by making strange New Labour's recent rejection of multiculturalism and the ways it illustrates the odd conjuctions of universalism and particularism at play in early twentieth century politics and policy-making on 'race' and migration. We should be careful, however, to talk of absolute discursive shifts since a striking feature of the politics of belonging seems to me to be the continuing slippage between apparently distinct registers of descent, culture and values in representations and requisites for belonging.

One final gripe is that Yuval-Davis makes the helpful distinction between belonging and a politics of belonging early in the paper but beyond this largely discusses the latter and the expense of the former. Yes there is a connection between individuals' emotional attachments to locale and group and the discursive politics of belonging but Yuval-Davis only scratches the surface of that relationship.

19: Star: This is not a Boundary Object

One price a sociologist often has to pay for her/his work becoming widely taught and cited is that it does not take long before people stop considering what you actually wrote but instead start referring to what they think you wrote. Giddens' and Beck's work on risk society,  Strauss' grounded theory, and Bourdieu's concept of 'cultural capital' are all examples of the way in which teachers, students and researchers are happy to cite concepts as a shorthand with little consideration of the subtleties of the original. Thus at worst 'risk society' comes to equal 'we live in a dangerous world' and 'grounded theory' comes to mean 'making it up as you go along'. Is Susan Leigh Star's concept of the boundary object in danger of going the same way? This was certainly a concern of Star herself before her untimely death in 2010.

In 'This is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept' (Science, Technology and Human Values 35(5) 2010) Star offers an account of the development of the boundary object concept and its use and potential misuse since. While not attempting to do justice to the richness of the paper, I think it is helpful to draw out what I think is the nub of Star's argument.

When Star (with Griesemer) first used the concept of a boundary object in 1989 it was to understand "a sort of arrangement that allow different people to work together without consensus." By the time she wrote Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences (with Geof Bowker in 1999) she was interested in the 'scaling up' of boundary objects - how multiple boundary objects and systems of boundary objects grow (or do not grow) to 'boundary infrastructures'. Thus for Star discussion of boundary objects became inseparable from discussion of standards and infrastructures.

Academic discussion of boundary objects tends to emphasise their interpretive flexibility and the capacity/requirement of different users to actively give them different meanings in different settings. But Star argues, interpretive flexibility is only part of the story (otherwise pretty much anything could be considered a boundary object). Two other dimensions need to be considered alongside the mutability of objects. The first of these is that the form of the objects is not random but instead emerges out of information and work process needs and arrangements of the groups that use them. The implication here is that we should be asking why objects are the way they are rather than simply wondering at their mutability. The second dimension is that while there are moments of uncertainty and flexibility in the usage and interpretation of objects this is part of a dynamic process that also includes moments when use is well-structured and tailored to particular settings.

For Star the boundary object concept is most helpful when different users are connected together by a degree of formal organisation and/or infrastructure and actively work together (i.e. something much stronger and concrete than, for example, the notion that a flag can mean different things to different groups in society). Thus the boundary object's flexibility and shared structure "are the stuff of action". Boundary objects  'move up' into standards and boundary infrastructures (of which digitalised information systems are often great examples). Star (with Karen Ruhleder 2006) described the characteristics of such infrastructures as:

- they are embedded in other structures social arrangements and technologies
- they are transparent to use
- they have reach and scope across time/space
- they are learnt as part of a community of practice
- they plug into other infrastructures and tools in a standardised fashion
- they are built on an installed base
- they become visible on breakdown
- they become fixed in increments not globally

The continual (often hidden) work of maintaining such infrastructures entails moments of vagueness and moments of specificity; boundary objects facilitate the movement between those two kinds of moment. Hence categories in digital information systems are both standardised and codified and also incomplete and inconsistent in their use.

18: Blencowe: Rethinking Contingency and Racism

I have published previously on the changing politics of race and science (see here) and on the unsatisfactory role that 'biology' plays in standard sociological accounts of racism (see here).  Unsurprising perhaps I enjoyed Claire Blencowe's paper given at HPS, Cambridge 'Biosociality to feminist-eugenics: rethinking contingency and racism in twentieth century sociological science'.

As I have done, Blencowe highlights the ways in which the assertion that there is no biological basis to race and the contrary assertion that race is socially constructed and contingent seem to offer both an anti-racist panacea and a foundational myth for the sociology of group difference. She rightly argues that these assertions depend on a narrative in which new social sciences knowledge about the variability, plasticity and agency of human life is counter-posed to the early twentieth century era where a biologically deterministic eugenics resting on notions of fixed, naturalised difference held sway. While in no way belittling the atrocities committed in its name, Blencowe argues that this narrative misses much about the appeal, discourse and practice of eugenics.

Blencowe's paper is first and foremost a reading of Foucault which seeks to rescue his concept of biopower. This concept is often mobilised in ways that suggest it belongs exclusively to recent developments - in particular the ascendancy of the new life sciences  (I am guilty as charged on this I think). Blencowe reminds us that for Foucault biopolitics was central to Western modernity as it developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Foucault's account of this biopolitics focuses on vitality, security, health, sexuality, reproduction etc. in ways that are positive, energetic, and creative. Following from this Blencowe argues that it is wrong to caricature eugenics either as biologically deterministic or as politically and socially conservative. Eugenics  was part of the assertion of authority by the bourgeoisie (often initially through class racism and later though nationalism). And although it is often remembered and derided for its associations with totalitarianism it was intimately connected to the emergence of liberal democratic government.

Blencowe further problematises an easy association between conservatism and eugenics by reminding us of the many ways in which eugenics celebrated the potential for social and biological development. It involved a moralising stewardship of society by experts whose authority in part lay in a quasi-spiritual aesthetics that gave purpose to life, portraying biology as a domain of flows, connections and transformations. Thus, for example,  first wave feminists who pioneered family planning such as Marie Stopes or Charlotte Perkins Gilman were inspired by (racist and class racist) eugenics that saw evolutionary life force as a new morality.

The misreading of the past of eugenics raises questions about the analysis of the present. Nikolas Rose and others (OK let's be honest including me) like to suggest that current life science is novel - and often by implication politically benign - because it emphasises the contingency and malleability of the biological. But Blencowe suggests that denouncing past eugenic thinking on race (or gender) and biology as deterministic, fixed or naturalising misses the point. The evils of eugenics fed off excitement with the potential to refashion and improve, just the kind of rhetoric that drives much contemporary bioscience. Blencowe also suggests that we need to question the innocence of sociological affirmations of the contingency of race: why is this an intrinsically anti-racist stance? is our constructionism that different from eugenic enthusiasm for biological transformations? This got me thinking about the ways in which 1990s British sociology of identity sought out and lauded 'the hybrid' and condemned/dismissed  'ethnic absolutism' only to see this rhetorical move appropriated by twenty first century racism. Most challenging of all I think is Blencowe's conclusion that sociology needs to reappraise its routine celebration of contingency and malleability; sometimes our role should be instead to show what is determined and what is necessary.

Blencowe does the usual Foucauldian thing of implying a historical periodisation of social changes but then denying that is what she is doing - she is anxious to avoid discussion of phases in biopolitics. From my perspective this is a shame since there is something distinctive in the workings and significance of contemporary bioscience. If this distinctiveness does not lie in its emphasis on contingency then we should look elsewhere in, for example, its accomodation with individualisation, the changing State, or in the place of science in globalised capitalism.

16: Castells: the Future of Capitalism

Largely by coincidence, the weekend following the horror show of the Comprehensive Spending Review saw an interesting series of events in my home town all focused on the future of capitalism.

On Friday I attend two talks organised by the Department of Sociology at Cambridge University by Manuel Castells the most widely known sociologist of 'the information age'. At the first he reflected on 'the multi-dimensional crisis of informational capitalism'. While the economies of many countries around the world were fundamentally sound or even thriving, Western Europe and North America are facing the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. The contribution of sociology is as ever to move beyond a narrow, mechanistic  economic determinism and to return to the insight that economies depend on social norms, values and institutional arrangements. On one level the current crisis is of course the result of the failure to regulate and manage 'informational capitalism' adequately (Castells provided a detailed discussion of this) but more fundamentally the crisis is about a disjuncture between economic practices, institutional arrangements and cultural values. Thus Western countries now depend on a financial system which no one can trust, control or even fully understand, banks who are highly profitable again but will not lend money to business, and a consumer society in which many people cannot now consume.

According to Castells, we have reached one of the moments in the history of capitalism - like the 1930s and the 1970s - when someone, somewhere has to press CTRL ALT DEL and reboot the system. The capitalism that emerged in the 1940s involved forms of production, politics, institutional practice, State management and culture that would have been hard to imagine in the 1930s. Similarly there can be no return to pre-crash capitalism. Attempts to 'fix' the system either through Keynesian demand management or deficit reduction were doomed in part because of their nostalgia for earlier eras. The key questions is what novel  economic cultures and institutions will emerge out the current crisis.

An important feature of the crisis is a growing 'culture of anger' in the West. This is expressed in the success of the Tea Party in the USA and in a growing tide of  xenophobia and racism sweeping Europe.  While acknowledging their more positive objectives, Castells would also classify many of the left protests again austerity as falling into the same category in that they are driven by resentment of the ending of the old certainties of capitalist societies. A more interesting aspect of the culture of crisis in Castell's eyes is the value shift epitomised by the spread of 'non-commodified life practices' - forms of production and consumption (or 'prosumption') that circumvent individualised market capitalism. These practices are driven by a combination of need (i.e. capitalism is not delivering) and desire (a rejection of the pace, acquisitiveness and individualism of the boom years).

Castell's second talk focused squarely on emerging non-commodified life practices. It centred on the showing a film Homage to Catalonia 2 which was scripted by Castells and gives a flavour of an extensive research project into alternative economic practices in and around Barcelona. The film highlighted a wide range of developments including the rise of consumer and producer co-operatives, new forms of communal living, barter networks, alternative social currencies and ethical finance, urban farming, shared child care and 'free universities' to illustrate prosumption in action. People interviewed in the film were motivated by a vision of life as a creative process and the mantra 'let me be happy with my friends and family'. For Castells the developments explored in the film are at the cutting edge of wider transformation: in the future many may still participate in the capitalist economy but will not make this the centre-piece of their lives. In places like Spain where already 35% of the under thirties are jobless it is clear that the lifestyle of working to borrow to consume is dead. The challenge is how to live a good life, to get along positively in these dramatically changing times.

15: Philo: Budget Deficit: Lets Really Be in This Together

I suspect many in media studies see the approach of the Glasgow Media Group - exposing establishment 'bias' in the way mainstream news media frame current affairs -  as being as out-of-date as red braces or a 'Frankie Says' t-shirt. But with Thatcherism 2.0 about to been rolled out in the form of the Comprehensive Spending Review perhaps its time for a different kind of 1980s revival.

Greg Philo of the GMG has recently himself gained some media attention (for example see above) for his proposal that, rather than massive cuts to welfare, education and other public sector spending, the British budget deficit could be resolved by a one-off levy on the wealth of the richest ten per cent of the population. You can read his original proposal here.

Philo's proposal to 'privatise' the deficit is an example of one way that sociologists can contribute to public debate - not because argument will necessarily win the day but because it helps to shift the terrain over which debt and cuts are discussed. It does this firstly by moving the spotlight onto the wealthy who did so well from the boom before the banking crisis. There is £9,000 billion of private wealth in the UK and £4,000 billion of that wealth is in the hands of the top ten per cent of the population. Just 20% of this £4000 billion would clear the UK deficit!

Philo's second contribution is to question the way in which the debate about the budget deficit is framed by the media. News coverage allows discussion of the causes of the deficit and the pace and focus of cuts but takes the need to tackle the deficit through cuts as a given  (see here for example the BBC website that asks us 'what would you cut and what would you save?').

Having discussed Philo's proposal with a range of people, I think that his final contribution is to reveal the widespread fatalism that assumes the rich will inevitably find ways of avoiding any tax that they do not wish to pay. But surely 'we're all in this together'?