Oxford University Press's Blog, page 323

Involving kids in music: a lifelong gift

“My status as a musician hasn’t been a large part of my public identity since the beginning of high school. I took lessons and practiced at home, and that was it. But even that yielded other, more private lessons that my flute seemed to teach me. Those lessons will stay with me for much longer,” says Gina Goosby, one of the young people whose early experiences with music are described in The Music Parents’ Survival Guide. Four years have passed since the book went to press and so we decided to check in with some of them to see how they are doing.

Gina is now a sophomore at Swarthmore College heading toward majoring in Japanese, with a computer science minor. Flute is still part of her life, but she hasn’t joined a college ensemble. “These days, I don’t practice much. Although I still run through fingerings of pieces almost unconsciously all the time. When I do pick up my flute, my fingers still know where to go.”

She started on music at age six with Suzuki violin lessons and switched to flute at age ten. Her siblings do music too: older brother Randall, a violinist, is in his senior year at Juilliard; younger brother Miles, a high school cellist, played with the NYO2 youth orchestra at Carnegie Hall this summer. “Of the three, I was the least devoted to musicianship. In high school, neither my school ensembles nor the Memphis Youth Symphony Orchestra appealed to me as much as my academic work. By my junior year, I put flute aside to focus on school. Even so, having that musical training throughout my younger years has had far-reaching benefits.”

Gina feels that practicing flute “instilled in me patience and, as strange as it may sound, humility. Despite my precocious leanings in many areas of my life, including music, I still had to start slowly and work my way up to faster speeds. There were fingerings I couldn’t get on the first, second, or fifth try. They weren’t like facts and figures in school that I could memorize. I had to work to perfect my technique. And sometimes even then I wasn’t up to scratch.” In spite of—or perhaps because of—the effort it took to master flute, she notes, “I have gained immense personal fulfillment. If I felt stressed or overwhelmed by my work, I would bust out my flute and practice. A familiar piece would give me a well-needed confidence boost and a brain break.” She adds that she has made good friends through music and she studies to music. “Knowing that I too can create music adds to the experience of enjoying music as a listener.”

Kurt Carpenter has also found that playing an instrument—cello, which he started at age three—helps him in many non-musical ways. He continued playing cello while at Georgia Tech, performing in the college orchestra for two years. After graduating this year, he landed a job with a top tech firm and hopes to join a community orchestra to play with in his spare time. Through music, he says, “I developed a degree of focus and discipline which fed self-confidence.” He adds that music has social benefits as well. “As someone in a career other than music, it remains a great way to meet people, an interesting topic of conversation, and an enabler of understanding.”

“Playing in jazz bands taught me skills for effective teamwork—how to be a small piece of a larger puzzle,” says Noah Nathan, a new political science assistant professor and sometime saxophonist. “The experience of practicing makes you realize that challenges in new fields aren’t insurmountable. Take statistics or another subject with a lot of jargon. From the outside it seems impenetrable, but experience with music makes you realize that if you take time and apply yourself bit by bit, it will become as easy as playing a complex piece you could barely sightread at the outset, but eventually learned through practice.”

These three young adults chose not to pursue music as a career, as have several others whose childhood music experiences are described in the music parents’ book. Others featured in the book are pursuing music as a career, either by currently studying at a conservatory, teaching, freelancing, or, for a lucky few, performing with a professional orchestra. They would be expected to feel positively about their experiences with music, and their follow-up reports will appear in a later blog post. But the fact that those who aren’t aiming for music careers also feel they gained much from music shows the power music can have in kids’ lives. Neuroscience researchers have uncovered other benefits that go way beyond those that Gina, Kurt, and Noah describe. Research reports show that playing a musical instrument changes the brain for the better and that those changes appear to last a lifetime.

Ever since Harvard neuroscientists reported more than twenty years ago that musicians’ brains differ from those of non-musicians by having a larger corpus callosum, researchers have been exploring the cognitive benefits that may arise from that anatomical difference. The corpus callosum serves as a bridge between the brain’s right and left sections, suggesting that a musician’s brain engages in greater than normal communication among its different regions. Of course, there could be something that predisposes a person to do music that accounts for the brain differences, but some research indicates that making music is in fact the cause. In addition, scientists have found that musicians enjoy impressive cognitive benefits, such as being better than non-musicians at multi-tasking and at doing things that involve planning, flexibility, and problem solving. Playing an instrument also seems to yield crossover benefits for kids in improving reading ability. Special mental abilities that musicians have seem to persist even after they stopped playing an instrument for decades. Moreover, playing a musical instrument may lessen or delay some of the mental decline of aging.

For a quick overview of neuroscience music research, check out educator Anita Collins’ online TEDEd Talk video—How Playing an Instrument Benefits your Brain—or scroll through a slide show on the website of Northwestern University’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory. The benefits described in these online presentations—combined with those noted by Gina, Kurt, and Noah—show that starting kids on music can indeed be a lifetime gift.

As Isabel Trautwein, violinist with the Cleveland Orchestra, observes in The Music Parents’ Survival Guide: “We know that being on a softball team is good for kids. . . .We don’t worry about whether the kids are going to become professional softball players. I wish we would do the same with music. Having a kid make music with other kids is just good. If the love for music captures the kid, fine. If not, then it’s OK that they try something else.” But in the meantime, the kids will have had “songs and music in their minds. That’s a friend for life.”

Featured image: “Cello” by Mathew Bajoras. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr .

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7 questions we should ask about children’s literature

White nationalism is on the rise in the US and nativism is in the ascendant across the globe.  What role can literature for children play in teaching the next generation to be more empathetic, to respect difference, and to reject hatred? How do we find children’s books that promote these values? And what do we do with classics that offend? Here are some suggestions.

1. What does this book present as normal?  You might follow up with these more specific questions borrowed (and slightly modified) from Nathalie Wooldridge:

 What or whose view of the world, or kinds of behavior does the book present as normal?
Why is the book written from this perspective? How else could it have been written?
 What assumptions does the book make about age, gender, race, class, sexuality, and culture (including the age, gender, race, class, sexuality, and culture of the reader)?
Whose perspectives does the book present? Whose perspectives does the book silence or ignore?

2. Does the book have non-white characters? 

The absence of non-white characters can be as hurtful as overt discrimination because when when so many children’s books omit characters of color, non-white children learn that their stories are not worth telling.

3. Are the non-white characters central to the plot or just tokens?

A character’s prominence in the story is a marker of her or his importance. The protagonist is more important than the best friend, and the best friend more important than a secondary or background character. “Token” characters offer a superficial presence, but they do not truly represent that group.

4. How well does the author know the group she or he is representing?

Is he or she a member of that group? If not, how successful has the author’s research been? This, incidentally, is debated. Many contend that, to fully understand the group you’re writing about, you need to be a member of that group. Others suggest that research can help bridge the gap between your experience and your characters’ experiences. And still others note that everyone needs to do research, irrespective of group membership. However you answer this question, remember that the quality of representation is important.

And when a book is accused of promoting discrimination, you might also ask…

5. Who is “they”?

When defending a book with racist or sexist content, people often say “That’s how they thought back then.” This defense should prompt you to ask just who this anonymous “they” might be. Did all girls enjoy seeing themselves mocked in Dr. Seuss’s “The Glunk That Got Thunk” (from I Can Lick Thirty Tigers Today and Other Stories, 1969)? Did all people of African descent enjoy seeing themselves portrayed as simple-minded fools in Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle (1920)? In any given time period at any given place, all people do not think alike. As Robin Bernstein notes, “in the United States, the range of racial beliefs has changed relatively little from the nineteenth century to the present.” The “array of thinkable thoughts” has not changed, but the proportion of people who hold those thoughts has. Think about it: How do people think right now? Do all of us agree on important issues? Claiming “That’s how they thought back then” is not only an oversimplification. It also excuses ignorance by normalizing it, and fails to acknowledge the real harm done to real people in both past and present.

6. Why are people objecting to this book? And what prevents me from hearing their objections?

As Robin DiAngelo notes, many whites are afflicted with “White Fragility”: unaccustomed to racial discomfort, white people often respond to “even a minimum amount of racial stress” with denial, deflection, or anger. They are trying to end an uncomfortable conversation. These responses are not helpful; they merely work to hold racism in place.

So, whites and non-whites should remember: discomfort is not a defense. Nostalgia is not a defense. Affection for the book is not a defense. Assumptions about children’s intelligence (“oh, they won’t see that!”) are not a defense.

The belief in your own goodness or niceness is also not a defense. Being nice and harboring racist assumptions are not mutually exclusive. The kindest, most well-intentioned people often act in ways that uphold racist ideas — without meaning to do so, and without being aware that they are doing so. It is impossible to grow up in a racist culture and not have its ideas infect your thinking. We absorb racist assumptions unconsciously, and are thus often unaware of how these assumptions influence us.

Finally, white people who think that a person of color is overly sensitive about race should remember that non-white people face racism regularly, and should ask themselves: how would I feel if I faced racism every day? And then they should take responsibility by asking themselves: how is my action or inaction creating pain? How am I responsible? What can I do? In other words, failing to act helps sustain a racist status quo. Silence is complicity.

7. Where can I learn more? There are many resources, and so this is not a comprehensive list. But here are five web resources to get you started.

 Lee & Low Books has many diversity initiatives, including the Diversity Baseline Survey for publishers, its Diversity Gap Studies, and many blog posts on diversity, race, and representation.
  Reading While White : “Allies for Racial Diversity & Inclusion in Books for Children and Teens,” this group of White librarians pledges to “hold ourselves responsible for understanding how our whiteness impacts our perspectives and our behavior.” They publish thoughtful essays and book reviews, and offer useful resources. As they say, “As White people, we have the responsibility to change the balance of White privilege.”
Rich in Color — edited by Audrey Gonzalez, Crystal Brunelle, K. Imani Tennyson, and Jessica Yang — is “dedicated to reading, reviewing, talking about, and otherwise promoting young adult fiction starring people of color or written by people of color.”
Teaching for Change , founded in 1990, is dedicated to using education to promote social justice. As its website explains, it “provides teachers and parents with the tools to create schools where students learn to read, write and change the world.” The organization offers an anti-bias curriculum, resources for teaching about the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, recommended books, and ways for parents to get involved.
We Need Diverse Books is Ellen Oh, Malinda Lo, and Aisha Saeed’s “grassroots organization of children’s book lovers that advocates essential changes in the publishing industry to produce and promote literature that reflects and honors the lives of all young people.” It includes resources for writers (including advice, awards, and grants) and readers (on where to find diverse books), and opportunities for you to get involved. So. Get involved!

Featured image credit: “Children, book” by Sasin Tipchai, Public Domain via Pixabay.

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Why do humans commit extraordinary evil?

The hideous deeds committed by members of ISIS raise the question why humans alone, among the species, at times engage in mass killings of their own kind. We can find help in understanding this vexing issue by looking at the men who organized and carried out the Nazis’ attempted destruction of the Jewish people known as the Holocaust. Mass shootings like those in Paris or Orlando, inspired by radical Islamist ideas, take place in violation of legal and societal norms, whereas the massacres of the Holocaust were organized, directed, and legitimated by the state. Nevertheless, both kinds of deeds involve the taking of innocent lives on a large scale, which is something that challenges our most basic notions of human morality. We are inclined to believe that such monstrous deeds can only be carried out by monsters.

The pathological explanation of the Holocaust is the oldest, but also the weakest. Clinical studies of the defendants at the Nuremberg trials in 1945-46, undertaken by several psychiatrists and psychologists, revealed that these men had no recognizable mental impairments that could account for the horrendous actions they had orchestrated. They all knew the difference between right and wrong. The psychiatrist Henry Dicks conducted in-depth interviews with lower-level SS killers and reached the same conclusion. These men were not insane in any generally accepted clinical sense.

Evolutionary psychology has confirmed that human beings have the potential for aggressive violence, but the universal capacity for doing harm does not explain why only some of us perpetrate extraordinary evil. There is no gene for genocide, and indeed we have an innate resistance to killing our own kind. What Steven Pinker has called the “better angels of our nature” generally subdues the demons of violence with which we are wired. The experiments carried out by the social psychologist Stanley Milgram have been held to prove that any person at any time can be made into a murderer. However, there are crucial differences between the Holocaust and the circumstances of the Milgram study on obedience. These discrepancies undermine Milgram’s assertion that one could find enough personnel for a death camp in any medium-sized German city.

Attempts to find the reasons for the horrors of the Holocaust with specifically German factors fare no better. It is no doubt correct that German education, family life and schooling encouraged an attitude of discipline and obedience to authority. Nazi ideology capitalized on this posture by cultivating the duty of absolute obedience to the commands of the Führer, so many Germans were predisposed to embrace this outlook. Yet, as it has been said, toilet training is not the key to genocide. Again, we must ask why only certain Germans became the perpetrators of the Final Solution. We know that some men found ways not to participate in murder. There were opportunities to choose how to conduct oneself even in the most murderous environment, though relatively few availed themselves of this choice. (The argument of many post-war defendants is that they claim that they had killed, because otherwise they themselves would have been killed has been shown to be self-serving and false. The criminologist Herbert Jäger found that among 103 cases of individuals who asked to be excused from participation in the mass killings, not one suffered a harsh punishment, or danger to life or limb.) The assertion  made by Jonah Goldhagen in his book Hitler’s Willing Executioners is that the Germans’ murder of the Jews is explained by a special  “eliminationist anti-Semitism” is contradicted by the fact that Croats, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and other ethnic groups in Hitler’s formations murdered Jews at least as efficiently and often with more bestiality than did the Germans. The genocides of Cambodia and Rwanda are a reminder that mass killing is not the prerogative of a special kind of German.

Image Credit: ” Close-up of the main gate with the inscription Arbeit macht Frei” by Muu-karhu. CC BY 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons.

The number of those who were the actual killers in the Holocaust—whether in mass shootings or in extermination camps like Auschwitz—was in the tens of thousands, and about 14,000 of these men were tried by Allies or German tribunals. Archival evidence allowed the courts trying Nazi criminals to check and cross-check what the defendants chose to tell or remain silent about. The record of these proceedings revealed not only important details of the killing process, but also produced valuable information about the minds of the defendants and the mainsprings of their actions. These materials help us understand why these men carried out their horrible deeds, and this knowledge has confirmed the insights of social psychologists which illuminate the dynamics of participation in large scale atrocities.

Being in a group diffuses responsibility, and members of a group may become capable of conduct of which they are incapable of individually. Identification with a group also increases a judgmental attitude toward others, which in extreme cases can lead to dehumanizing the “other.” For many men, Christopher Browning found in his study of Police Battalion 101, the Jews stood outside their circle of human obligation. They were the enemy that others felt justified in killing. Following orders strengthens the tendency to conform to the behavior of one’s comrades. When commanded to do a certain act, the individual does not see himself as personally responsible. Habituation also plays a part. Actions that become routine no longer give occasion for moral deliberation.

The conclusion that we are left with is that there is no unique murderous Nazi personality. The killers came from various backgrounds, had different psychological attributes, and acted out of a variety of motives. Some ardent Nazis indeed killed eagerly, enjoyed being masters of life and death, and developed a capacity for brutality. Others killed out of a sense of duty, to advance their careers, or followed orders to kill because it was the easy way out. Still others refused to murder. Individual cases show a gulf between the situation which offers an opportunity and the deed itself. A small, unpredictable factor remains, defying explanation: the freedom to act with violence or to refrain from it. Human beings are not captives of either psychic forces or outside circumstances, and this finding holds true for the Germans under Hitler, as well as for today’s Islamist terrorists. As the ISIS expert Peter Bergen concluded in a recent essay dealing with the questions of why terrorists commit terrorism, it is in the nature of evil that it is ultimately not fully explicable.

Featured image: “ Berlin Holocaust Memorial ” by Jolanda Verhoef. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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Three top tips for writing sociology essays

As the academic semester gets underway, we talked to three senior colleagues in Sociology at the University of Manchester to come up with their ‘pet peeves’ when marking student’s essays. Here are some of their comments, and some of our top tips to help you to improve your work.

First, lecturers said they were frustrated with the way that students write their opening paragraphs:

“A main peeve of mine in student writing is poor introductions. Three common errors regularly stand out: throat clearing sentences (e.g. ‘globalisation is an important topic’, ‘Marx was an important writer’); dictionary definitions for core sociological concepts; and introductions that merely restate the question. What I really want to see from an introduction is a brief account of how the student is approaching the question at hand, what key questions the essay will address, and what answer the student will come to at the end of the essay.” – Senior Lecturer in Sociology

This was a point on which our three colleagues agreed: students often waste the introduction. Here is top tip number one to help you improve your essays:

1. Give the reader a guide to your argument. Much as you would give someone directions in how to get to where they’re going, tell your reader what steps you will take, what the key turning points will be, why it is important to take this route and, ultimately, where you will end up. In other words, tell your reader exactly what you will conclude and why, right at the beginning.

Another point on which our colleagues agreed was that sociological essays can be imprecise, and are sometimes written in a style which is meant to sound intellectual, but which is more confusing than it is enlightening. As one senior lecturer put it:

“A pet peeve of mine is imprecise language, for example peppering an essay with terms like ‘however’, ‘therefore’, and ‘consequently’, but without attending to the logical relationship between sentences that those words are supposed to signal. If the logical connector is wrong then the argument fails. This kind of error is often motivated, I think, by students wanting their essays to ‘sound academic’, when often they would have been more convincing by using simpler language more precisely.” – Senior Lecturer in Sociology

It is worth planning the time needed to rework your essays because a good argument can be let down by poor presentation. Here is top tip number two:

2. Your written work should prioritise clarity and concision over entertainment and erudition when making an argument. Students often write in a style which they think makes their points sound important, but get lost in the meaning of what they are saying by doing so. It might be that you have quite a command of English and want to show off your knowledge of polysyllabic or unusual words, or it might be that you wish to imitate the sociological writers whom you admire. Whatever additional reasons you have for writing, there is none more important in a sociological essay than making your argument clear. Words such as ‘however’ and ‘moreover’ should be used to indicate how your ideas are linked together, not to start a sentence with a good word. Be sure that when you edit your work, you edit for the argument, prioritising the word choices which best help to make your point. Such decisions will reflect maturity and consideration in your written work, and it is these which will truly impress a reader.

A final element which our three colleagues all listed in their top pet peeves was poor structure:

“I am often frustrated by the poor structuring of an essay. In other words, with the order in which ideas are presented, either at the level of the whole essay or at paragraph level. Essays that ping-pong from one idea to another, and then back to the original idea, indicate that the student has not really thought their argument through. A trickier thing to get right is the structuring of paragraphs, and some students seem keen to cram in as many (often unconnected) points into one paragraph as possible.” – Senior Lecturer in Sociology

The key point to learn when it comes to structuring your work is to make your writing serve your argument. You should present the main turns of your argument clearly, so as to reach a natural conclusion. Here is top tip number three for improving your essays:

3. Redraft your work for your argument, before you edit and proof-read it. Students often write to tight deadlines and do not plan enough time for a good second draft of their work. Instead, they write a first draft and then edit it as they proof-read it. When writing the first draft of an essay you will still be working out what the argument is. This is because writing helps you to think, so as you write your full first draft you will be meandering around a little, finding the best route as you go. Instead of merely editing this and checking the grammar, you should seriously re-draft the essay in light of the argument you now know you wish to make. This will help you to write a good introduction, since you can now say clearly from the outset what you will go on to argue, and a good conclusion, for you will now be able to say exactly what you have argued and why. Re-drafting for the argument means taking out material, adding in material and ensuring that each paragraph has a main point to contribute. It is an essential step in producing a good essay, which must be undertaken prior to editing for sense and proof-reading for typographical mistakes.

These tips point you towards the most important part of learning to write good sociological essays: bringing everything you do into the service of producing an argument which responds to the question and provides a satisfying answer.

Featured image credit: meeting by Eric Bailey. CC0 Public Domain via Pexels.

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Singing resistance on the border

At an early age, Américo Paredes was preoccupied with the inexorable passing of time, which would leave an imprint in his academic career. At twenty-three, he wrote:

And the seconds tick away into hours, the hours into years. Time glides by like a fox, scarcely seeming to move, yet traveling at a lightning pace…. I cannot withhold the march of time. I cannot live forever. I know that every moment I am living, I am also dying. I know that I shall pass from the world as a boat passes over the waters, scarcely stirring the waves by its passing. And with these thoughts do but hasten my end. And I am standing still.

Devoting his academic career to preserving and displaying Mexican-American traditions through thorough analysis and the recording of folk-songs, it is clear that Paredes kept his focus on beating back the forces of time and amnesia. Ilan Stavans correctly contends that Paredes “recovered memory through folklore.” As a matter of fact, Paredes brought this folklore to the forefront of academia during his tenure at the University of Texas. His work on Mexican-American folk traditions inspired a whole generation of Chicano scholars such as Ramón Saldívar, José Limón, and David Montejano. As we celebrate what would have been his 102nd birthday this year, I would like to take the time to reflect on corridos and how Paredes’ work still manages to counter the inevitable march of time.

The Mexican corrido developed historically from medieval Spanish romances, or ballads. Sung and written in eight-syllable, four-line stanzas with an abcb rhyme scheme, the corrido tradition began to supplant other folk-songs such as décimas, coplas, and versos by the late nineteenth century in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas and Northern Mexico. Corridos quickly became the most popular form of folk-song throughout this region. Within this context, most corridos were known for retelling local histories and events, focusing on individuals who extolled values the community held dear: honor, obedience to elders, and perhaps, most famously, resistance to Anglo injustice.

It is through corridos that, as a teenager in the Rio Grande Valley of Deep South Texas, Américo Paredes learned about the various societal conflicts that occurred between the Texas-Mexican and Anglo populace of the area. These events were precipitated by property loss, economic and social displacement, discrimination, and outright violence inflicted on Mexican-Americans. As Paredes quickly learned, although dispossessed of an official voice in political and social matters, Mexican-American Valley citizens were able to express, share, and record their history through corridos.

Nowadays, the corrido genre has evolved in form and content, and has spread in popularity across the United States and Mexico. In addition to this geographical expansion, corridos have shifted from elegizing border conflicts, to describing international and local events, praising the narco-trafficking lifestyle, or even singing about the whimsical. Indeed, the corrido has changed as borders have been blurred thanks to technological innovations that allow them to be widely disseminated on the Internet rather than the street corner or ranch house where the guitarreros (guitarists) would perform.

In the face of this evolving folk tradition, Paredes’ lessons still resonate today. He was one of the first folklorists who focused not only on the content of the song, but on its context: the public, the performer, and the purpose. Furthermore, Paredes astutely pointed out how humor and sarcasm upturned common stereotypes that ethnographers and folklorists reinforced by taking what their Mexican-American subjects said at face value. One recent popular corrido, performed by the Mexican group Los Tres Tristes Tigres illustrates these lessons. Titled, “La Jaula de Trump” (The Cage of Trump), it is a parody of an earlier well-known corrido by Los Tigres del Norte titled “La Jaula de Oro” (The Cage of Gold.) The parody alludes to the original material, which details in a somber tone the struggle of an undocumented immigrant in constant fear of deportation, trapped in the “golden cage” of the United States.

El Corrido Del Segundo Barrio” by Jesus ‘Cimi’ Alvarado in El Paso, Texas VisitElPaso. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

If we take into account the context of “La Jaula de Trump,” this corrido transforms itself from a simple parody to a subversive commentary of its contemporary political climate. As Paredes stressed, its subversive nature lies in its use of humor and sarcasm to undermine stereotypes and to comment on current events. When the song was released, Donald Trump’s campaign had capitalized on stereotypical representations of minorities to justify public policies. Los Tres Tristes Tigres appropriate these stereotypes, playing into a depiction of a determined border-wall jumper, exaggerating his traits in a Trump-like manner. Through the use of stereotypes, humor becomes a method of subversion and political criticism. The song therefore participates in the genealogical history of resistance that Paredes uncovered in his work.

As Paredes has shown us, resistance comes in many forms. If their content often explicitly expresses a political resistance, corridos also preserve alternative and performative moments of history, resisting the amnesia of time. Although folklore is, by its nature, constantly changing, contextual analysis helps to ground and decipher meaning across time and medium. After over a century of evolution, the corrido still serves as a vessel of expression, memory, and empowerment for the Mexican/Mexican-American community. Indeed, Paredes’ lessons are still very much relevant today.

Featured image credit: New border line wall by Steve Hillebrand, US Fish and Wildlife Service. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons .

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The trouble with elite cities

The transformation of the city into a pricey commodity for sale is one of the most profitable ventures in the current phase of capitalism. This is why private players and local governments are eager to invest monumental resources in the production and promotion of this ever more sophisticated, ever more seductive money-making machine: the city. And the urban space created by capital is a very seductive space indeed—provided you have the money.

Yes, because the driving motor of the process of urbanization is the quest for profit.  And despite what we may have heard in the campaign speeches of this or that elected official, one of their fundamental duties once in office will be to create the conditions where urban land can be turned into profit. This is the key to a deeper understand­ing of the functioning of our cities. This explains why, despite their polit­ical color or campaign promises, elected officials in successful global cities from London to New York, from San Francisco to Beijing, routinely adopt strikingly similar, ubiquitous policies, whose bottom line, apart from a few tweaks here and there, is always one and the same: the redevelopment of underperforming property markets (i.e., working- class or ex-manufacturing districts) into high- revenue urban land that can accommodate the most profitable uses (swanky residential enclaves, high-end retail rows) and attract the most profitable consumers (international companies and their employ­ees, wealthy newcomers, tourists, and the global super-rich).

From Beijing’s hutong settlements to London’s industrial waterfronts, from Berlin’s Soviet-era Plattenbauten to Chicago’s public housing projects, demolition and reconstruction are the order of the day. In New York City, we know all too well how this works on the ground: low- income neighborhoods and former industrial districts are relentlessly being revamped into upscale residential enclaves with amenable parks and high-end retail, driving up the overall cost of land and pushing low- and middle- income longtime residents and small local businesses out of their communities. New York has seen this trend during the last decade under the administrations of Michael Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio, courtesy of an unprecedented wave of rezonings across the five boroughs. From 125th Street in Harlem to the Williamsburg waterfront, from Long Island City to Bedford-Stuyvesant, New York’s city producers have hammered away to enhance housing, amenities, and retail options to make them into fashionable, revamped destinations for wealthier residents.

New York’s city producers have hammered away to enhance housing, amenities, and retail options to make them into fashionable, revamped destinations for wealthier residents.

Space is getting tight, courtesy of a new global population of urban consumers whose spending power has changed the rules of the game entirely, and of local governments that are all too eager to oblige. In New York, this trend has been magnified by the city’s position as one of the major global financial capitals, where immense wealth in the upper crust of the corporate and financial industries collides with growing poverty in the lower sectors of the economy. There’s a brand-new elite of super-wealthy individuals who demand the highest standards of living in the city’s most exclusive properties, and hordes of foreign buyers looking for safe deposit boxes in an ever-booming NYC luxury condo market. Their ability to outbid any other buyer when it comes to real estate, as well as their demands for outrageously priced housing, services, and amenities, which are met by developers eager to extract all the profit they can from this luxury craze, is one of the crucial engines of the mas­sive gentrification waves that today have made Manhattan, and even large swaths of Brooklyn and Queens, an off-limits territory even to upper- middle-class New Yorkers.


But this process is global. Take London, for instance. In the city where a 188-square-foot apartment (not much larger than a prison cell) can sell for £275,000, a car box in Highgate for £250,000, and a Knightsbridge apartment for £65 million, real estate insanity has become the norm. Not to mention Paris. In the City of Love, where rich Middle Eastern and Chinese buyers are now ousting the French from the housing market, even the upper middle classes are being priced out. And don’t get me started on San Francisco. The City by the Bay is the new US capital of insane housing prices, and home to the highest concentration of the global super-rich (those making over $30 million) of any city in the US. Here, venture capitalists, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and tech-sector employees have been buying up the most desirable areas in a bidding frenzy for years, creating a housing market where most new construction consists of super-upscale condos, and where the median home price today is above $1.2 million. And if San Francisco prices are crazy, then prices in cities like Tokyo or Melbourne have long been in the asylum. And the list could go on.

For ordinary people, keeping afloat in big cities around the world has become a serious challenge, and for those at the lower end of the economic ladder, survival in these cities is a daily struggle. These are the small business-owners, the minimum-wage clerks, the runners and the janitors— those working in the so-called service economy that makes the other half of the city function. But even those able to make a middle-class income— salespeople, nurses, managers, executive assistants, graphic designers, copywriters, and other professionals— are being priced out. From London to San Francisco, from Paris to Milan, from Singapore to Dublin, finding a decent rental has become a pipe dream for most—not to mention buying a home. This is what urban life is becoming for many of us, in a world where big cities are slowly becoming citadels of overpriced offshore properties where the absurdly rich love to park their cash, leaving very little space at hand for anyone else. And in this book I will show how this is not some unexplainable god-given plague, but a man-made disaster—the result of very concrete urban policies that for years have been favoring the influx of a new, extra-national, super-wealthy class of citizens, for which governments and developers have devised brand-new glittering enclaves that are pushing the lower-, middle-, and even upper-middle-income classes out.

The end game of this era of rampant hypergentrification is a segregated, dysfunctional city that bears very little resemblance to the cities of opportunities to which our fathers and grandfathers migrated. Is the elite city to become the final destination of booming cities around the world? And are our neighborhoods destined to be trampled by multimillion-dollar safe-deposit boxes in the sky for the wealthiest global players?

Featured Image: New York City by Jeff Turner. CC by 2.0 via Flickr.

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Challenging ageism through burlesque performance [video]

Five years ago, Kaitlyn Regehr and Matilda Temperley, documentarian and photographer respectively, set off for Las Vegas to interview members of the League of Exotic Dancers. At the Burlesque Hall of Fame, these legends—thriving sixty years past the supposed prime of burlesque—have created a community in “Old Vegas” where they continue to perform half-century-old routines.

Our perception of women’s bodies changes with age—because the social construction of femininity is so dependent on sexual attractiveness, women are often viewed as becoming less valuable as they age. But through their performances, burlesque legends have challenged preconceived ideas of women should present themselves.

We sat down with Regehr and Temperley to discuss the history of American burlesque. In the video below, Temperley reflects on her experience photographing women of the League of Exotic Dancers.

Featured image credit: Photo provided by Matilda Temperley. Please do not re-use without permission.

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Silas Marner, Threads, and Weaving [an excerpt]

Repetition and storytelling are bound in the novel’s representation of weaving, a theme that exemplifies the manner in which Silas Marner deftly moves between fable and realism. Classical mythology and fairy tales are crowded with weavers. Silas’s insect-like activity (he is reduced ‘to the unquestioning activity of a spinning insect’ and ‘seemed to weave, like the spider, from pure impulse, without reflection’ (p. 14)) calls to mind the myth of Arachne, who boldly challenged a goddess to a weaving contest. In the version given by Ovid in Metamorphoses, the goddess Athena recognizes Arachne’s superior skill but, enraged, transforms her into a spider. The myth presents Arachne’s weaving as a source of tremendous artistic power, but other tales underscore the confinement of weaving: in the fairy tale of Rumpelstiltskin, for example,a miller’s daughter is imprisoned and forced to spin straw into gold after her father’s careless boast. In Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’, published in 1832, both creativity and imprisonment are suggested by the mysterious figure who ‘weaves by night and day’. Eliot was sufficiently intrigued by such tales to compose, sometime between 1873 and 1876, the elegiac poem ‘Erinna’ about the Greek poetess who, at the age of 19, supposedly died after having been chained by her mother to a spinning wheel. Here, too, the weaver is condemned ‘to spin the byssus drearily | In insect labour’; unlike Silas, however, ‘the passion in her eyes | Changes to melodic cries’. Erinna develops a creative vision in spite of, not thanks to, the weaving.

Although Silas’s weaving provides him with a numbing occupation rather than a creative vision, the novel nonetheless plays with the many affinities between weaving and writing, anticipating the narrator who, in Middlemarch, has ‘so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven’. The Latin etymology of the word ‘text’, textus, evokes ‘that which is woven, web, texture’ (OED). The language of storytelling is replete with similar associations, as indicated by Silas who recognizes that the Lantern Yard brethren have ‘woven a plot to lay the sin’ at his door (p. 11), or the farrier who, in the Rainbow, is shown ‘taking up the thread of discourse’ (p. 40). The narrator’s comment on ‘the only clew’ that Silas’s ‘bewildered mind could hold by’ (p. 126) evokes the dual significance of ‘clew’: a solution, but also a ‘ball of thread or yarn’, like that with which Ariadne leads Theseus out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth (OED). There are similarly suggestive links between storytelling and counting. To ‘tell’ is to narrate, but it is also to enumerate or count—Silas, for example, works ‘far on into the night to finish the tale of Mrs Osgood’s table-linen’ (p. 14). The unproductive, materialistic ‘telling’ of Silas’s coins contrasts with Eliot’s view of storytelling as an outward-looking mode that sheds light on the web-like nature of society and produces sympathetic ties. Silas Marner is interested in the slippage between the figurative and the literal; Silas loses his heap of coins, but Eppie becomes a far more valued ‘new treasure’ (p. 121). As Mary Poovey explores, in this work ‘metaphor trumps such literalness’, just as the bonds Eppie forges with Silas make him more of a father to her than her ‘literal’ parent Godfrey.

The fairy-tale and mythical affinities of Silas’s weaving are counterbalanced by a far more realist preoccupation with weaving. The Raveloe community attaches mysterious powers to string, and compares Silas to the Wise Woman of Tarley who ‘tied a bit of red thread round the child’s toe’ to ‘keep off water in the head’ (p. 16). But Silas, whose livelihood depends on thread, has much more practical uses for it: his door closes with a latch-string, and in order to cook a piece of pork he ties it with string passed through a door-key. He relies on cloth as a child-rearing method, attaching Eppie to his loom with an umbilical-like ‘broad strip of linen’ (p. 115) that Eppie cuts. This attention to detail reflects Eliot’s careful rendering of the lives and economic status of weavers at the turn of the nineteenth century. The novel’s depiction of Silas’s labour echoes a number of nineteenth-century studies, such as Philip Gaskell’s The Manufacturing Population of England (1833), which describes the period between 1760 and 1800 as the heyday of domestic manufacture, when ‘the cottage every where resounded with the clack of the hand-loom’, a carefully tended garden was ‘an invariable adjunct to the cottage of the hand-loom weaver’, and the labour was deemed respectable and both financially and physically comfortable. In 1841, the report of the Royal Commission on the Condition of the Handloom Weavers lamented the degraded condition of handloom weavers who by then were in decline, and contrasted it with that of an older, happier, generation.

Eliot puts the language of weaving and threads to still further use by drawing upon it to explore the emotional lives of her characters. Silas’s personality is one that seeks attachments: his life as a miser ‘had been a clinging life; and though the object round which its fibres had clung was a dead disrupted thing, it satisfied the need for clinging’ (p. 67). This need finds a more rewarding outlet in Eppie, and Eliot returns to the language of fibres to trace this new connection, as her presence ‘stirred fibres that had never been moved’ (p. 100); he is later compared to an ‘affectionate Goliath’ who has got ‘himself tied to a small tender thing, dreading to hurt it by pulling, and dreading still more to snap the cord’ (pp. 114–15). In contrast, Godfrey is presented as a character who strains against personal ties, and finds the ‘chain’ of his wife Molly ‘all the more galling’. Nancy offers the promise of healthier bonds, but ‘Instead of keeping fast hold of the strong silken rope by which Nancy would have drawn him safe to the green banks where it was easy to step firmly, he had let himself be dragged back into mud and slime’ (p. 28). It is singularly appropriate that, when Godfrey and Nancy are dancing at the ball, the Squire steps on her dress, ‘so as to rend certain stitches at the waist’ (p. 94)—precisely at the moment when Silas forges a new bond with Eppie, Godfrey’s ties with Nancy threaten to become unravelled. When Silas interrupts the dance with Eppie, Godfrey hears his child and ‘felt the cry as if some fibre were drawn tight within him’ (p. 104). Unlike Silas, however, Godfrey represses the impulse so that, many years later, childlessness remains the ‘one main thread of painful experience in Nancy’s married life’ (p. 137). Such imagery is not applied rigidly or obtrusively, but on the contrary quietly brings together the different facets—mythical, social, and psychological—of this deceptively simple novel, revealing the profound artistry of a work as touching to discover as it is endlessly rewarding to revisit.

Featured image credit: “Thread, Weaving” by HeungSoon. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

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The morality of genocide

Among the thousands of pictures displayed in that monument to human depravity which is the Tuol Sleng Centre outside Phnom Penh —now part of Cambodia’s “dark tourism” circuit—, one stands out. It is the picture of a middle-aged man, eyes wide open, his identity reduced to a plastic sign bearing the inmate number “404” pinned to his collar. The image is conspicuous not because of any sign of violence—unlike other images at the former school turned-into-torture-centre, and then museum—but because of the man’s facial expression. It conveys a sense of utter bewilderment, rather than pain or fear. And it screams, in silence, one question: why?

That man’s incredulity is partly our own, for more than forty years after the Cambodian “genocide”—if that is what it was—we, too, are still asking “why.” We of course know “why” the Khmer Rouge imprisoned, tortured, and exterminated two million of the country’s eight million people: because they saw them as “class enemies” standing in the way of Pol Pot’s revolutionary project, one that was meant to turn Cambodia into an agrarian utopia. We also know that such a project failed miserably and that the country is still paying a hefty price for it.

Yet there remains something unfathomable about the term “genocide.” Those who enter the field of genocide studies are darkly fascinated by the subject because they cannot comprehend how such inhuman acts can occur—especially in our recent decades. Outside the world of academia, too, people are drawn to these events, as evidenced by the growth of the “dark tourism” industry. People are particularly dismayed to learn that the legal definition of genocide leaves out events that are close to their hearts (the War of Independence for Bangladeshis, say, or Israel’s policies for Palestinians); and are shocked to discover that—far from being committed by monsters devoid of any kind of value or ethics—genocides are seen as entirely reasonable (indeed, as “moral”) by their perpetrators, and that this is precisely what motivates them to act.

Tuol Sleng genocide museum sign by Herman T. Salton. Used with permission.

The Genocide Convention references acts which are “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group”, but excludes from its protection attacks on groups that are seen as “political” enemies. So while the Rwandan events were clearly covered by the Genocide Convention, the Cambodian ones were not because the Khmer Rouge were supposedly motivated by “political” hatred rather than by their loathing of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. Likewise, Stalin’s pogroms are not, legally speaking, genocide despite the fact that the Soviet dictator executed millions of opponents; and neither are—arguably—the atrocities committed by the Pakistani army in 1971, for it’s not Bengalis as a national or ethnic group that were targeted, but those Bengalis who wanted an independent Bangladesh (unhappy with this, in 2016 the Bangladeshi authorities drafted a Liberation War Denial Crimes Act).

There is no doubt that the Genocide Convention is defective. For one thing, state-sponsored violence against a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group is nothing if not politically motivated. For another, leaving “political” groups unprotected is problematic given that it is precisely such groups that have been at the receiving end of much of post-1945 state-sponsored violence. Yet, like so many UN documents, the 1948 Convention is a compromise: far from being accidental, excluding “political” groups from its protection was deliberate and was meant to secure the Convention’s ratification by those member states fearful that the actions of their own leaders against domestic dissidents might one day lead to prosecution under the Genocide Convention.

What remains to be seen, particularly in a context of rising nationalism and highly politicized education systems, is whether the new generation understands that, given the right mix of indoctrination and nationalism, we can all become génocidaires—not because humans are inherently evil, but because we can be programmed to believe that our survival depends on the annihilation of another group of people. When that happens—and when “doing something” about the existential threat posed by another group is seen as a moral imperative—genocide becomes not only possible, but also the “right” thing to do in their eyes. Which is why genocidal regimes see education both as an existential threat and as an essential tool, and why the picture of that incredulous man at Tuol Sleng—taken in what used to be a place of learning—is so harrowing.

Featured image credit: Tuol Sleng genocide museum by Herman T. Salton. Used with permission.

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The traps of social media: to ‘like’ or not to ‘like’

A recent Swiss case reported in the media has raised the spectre of criminal liability and/or defamation for merely ‘liking’ a 3rd party post on Facebook. Whilst this may have been the first time that this specific issue has come up in court it may not be the last! We are all already very aware of the trouble that can result from indulging in posts and tweets on line which may cause offence but until now merely ‘liking’ a post has not, to the author’s knowledge, given rise to any liability.

In this case, the ‘like’ on Facebook related to a post which accused Erwin Kessler, the president of an animal rights group, of anti-Semitism and racism.

The context of the post was discussions online about which animal welfare groups should be able to join in a vegan street festival. The posts referred to Mr Kessler as racist and anti-Semitic and were ‘liked’ by a number of people, including the defendant. Mr Kessler then took action against one of them on the basis that the likes had spread the message out more widely.

The judge indicated that ‘liking it’ was akin to ‘spreading a value judgment and that a ‘like’ had a positive connotation and suggested support of the content.

Here, according to the media reports, as the defendant could not prove that the statements about Mr Kessler were true or that he had a real basis to believe that they were, he was convicted and fined £3,190.

Would/could the same result happen under UK, or indeed Scottish law? Under the law of defamation in the United Kingdom it is no defence to say that you were not the originator of the material but only republished it. However ‘liking’ is not the equivalent of republishing as such, although it may have the effect of spreading the ‘liked’ content further than otherwise might have been the case.

Like by Mizter_x94. CC0 public domain via Pixabay.

However under the Communications Act 2003 (‘the Act’) in the United Kingdom, improper use of a public electronic communications network can be an offence. Such ‘improper use’ includes, for example, if someone sends or causes to be sent by means of a public electronic communications network, a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene, or menacing character.

In addition it is an offence if a message that is known to be false is sent or caused to be sent by means of such a network for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience, or needless anxiety to another.

Whilst it might be debatable if a ‘like’ falls within the scope of the Act as actually causing the message to be sent or is defamation, a retweet or even a ‘share’ of material which is potentially defamatory may well amount to sending it or causing it to be sent and may thus be caught by the Act and/or be defamatory.

Therefore the best approach may be to regard any such likes/shares/retweets as equivalent to actually authoring and publishing the material in the first place as it may be no excuse to say that you were not the primary source.

This is not in reality anything new and does not mean that the floodgates are open to defamation actions and/or criminal prosecutions for such online activities. Firstly the key targets are most likely to be the primary authors as without them the viral spread would not have been possible at all. Secondly there are the practicalities as ever of dealing with identifying the offenders and the sheer numbers that may be involved. But a ‘like’ or ‘share’ can also mean different things in different contexts and may not always be an endorsement of the original message in question. A ‘share’ can also be qualified by its author’s accompanying narrative which could make it clear that the author’s views were very different.

How confident are you that the content you ‘like’ or ‘share’ today might not come back to haunt you now or even in years to come?

Could this principle also result in incurring liability for the purposes of infringement of 3rd party copyright? If material is posted to Facebook for example and infringes 3rd party copyright and it is ‘shared’ or retweeted, there seems no reason why this should not be the case, particularly if the party concerned knew or ought to have known that the material was so infringing.

The message with use of social media has to be, as always, think before you act and click or take the consequences. Whilst ‘liking’ or ‘sharing’ content may not necessarily be considered defamatory in the United Kingdom/Scotland, such endorsement continues to have the potential to be disastrous from a reputational perspective. How confident are you that the content you ‘like’ or ‘share’ today might not come back to haunt you now or even in years to come? One press of a button could get you into very hot water and easy as it is to ‘like’ or ‘share’ or retweet or publicise reactions to 3rd party posted content it will pay to pause and be sure that liability or reputational damage will not follow. Whilst it will be a defence if the material is accurate and not false the problem is heightened as it is increasingly impossible in many cases to trust the sources or factual accuracy of on line content. After all, the fake news phenomenon is on the rise and rise. This recent case, whilst not so surprising in its outcome, highlights the risks participation in social media can pose. Thus it is worth taking care to avoid unwitting endorsement or spreading of potentially libellous/offensive or infringing material and consequent exposure to legal liability.

Featured image credit: Mobile Phone by Geralt. CC0 public domain via Pixabay.

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