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The not-so glamorous origins of American celebrity politics

“In America,” the filmmaker Francois Truffaut once wrote, “politics always overlaps show business, as show business overlaps advertising.” The truth of Truffaut’s statement was on full display last month during the Republican and Democratic nominating conventions.

The Democrats predictably drew a series of A-list celebrities to their cause, including Sarah Silverman, Meryl Streep, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Star power at the Republican convention was noticeably diminished, but this year, of course, the reality show tycoon Donald Trump took center stage.  The fact that his daughter Ivanka invited Twitter followers to “Shop Ivanka’s Look” after her RNC speech tells us how keen an observer Truffaut was.

The merger of politics and entertainment in the 2016 presidential campaign may strike observers as garishly postmodern, something only a novelist such as Don DeLillo could imagine, but its roots stretch back to the vibrant political world of Jacksonian democracy.

America’s founders were keenly interested in the pursuit of fame, what Alexander Hamilton once called the “ruling passion of the noblest minds.” However what we consider celebrity politics originated in the turbulent popular culture of the 1830s and 40s as audiences began to turn their most admired entertainers into heroes of the new democracy.

Born in Philadelphia in 1806, the actor Edwin Forrest was one of the nation’s earliest stars, and in the fluid class structure of early American theater, he entertained everyone from presidents and authors to teamsters and mechanics. Working-class audiences prized Forrest’s highly expressive style of acting, especially when he appeared in action-adventure roles that depicted him as a charismatic, hyper-masculine patriot. Imagine Mel Gibson staging a live performance of Braveheart, and you have some sense of Forrest’s grip on the thousands of Americans who crowded into theaters to see him.

Like many of his Hollywood descendants, Forrest had a larger than life personality that excited sensational gossip and storytelling. His highly publicized divorce trial, with its violent outbreaks and lurid accusations of adultery, engrossed newspaper readers across the country.

The actor’s pugnacious Americanism made him an especially potent figure among young urbanites. In 1849, his bitter rival, the British actor James Macready, appeared in a production of Macbeth at New York’s elite Astor Place opera house, only blocks away from where Forrest was starring in a production of the same play.Ten thousand Forrest supporters rioted in protest. The riot killed twenty-two people and was an early sign of how deeply entrenched entertainment could become in nativism and political allegiance.

Forrest counted Andrew Jackson as both a friend and mentor, and throughout his career, he fiercely defended the tenets of democratic nationalism. The actor’s popularity and zeal for reform led many Democrats to see him as a potential congressional candidate. Though he never ran for office, Forrest frequently spoke at party celebrations and functions. His July 4, 1838 oration to the Democratic Republican Committee of New York remains a classic expression of the period’s egalitarian fervor.

Forrest was the most visibly partisan of a new generation of entertainers who developed a strong interest in reform. Among his contemporaries were the Hutchinson Family singers, a favorite among abolitionists. Traveling with Frederick Douglass, this group of nine brothers and sisters performed at numerous anti-slavery rallies and advocated for women’s rights. While the Hutchinsons targeted specific issues, Forrest focused on the Democratic Party. Anticipating the work of hundreds of Hollywood stars, he pioneered the practice of helping fund party politics. In 1856, he gave $250 to help settle the debts incurred by James Buchanan’s presidential campaign, a sum worth over $7500 today.

Born a generation later than Forrest, the circus clown Dan Rice took celebrity politics in a wildly different direction when he ran for president in 1868. Rice had an insatiable need to inject himself into public consciousness and eagerly aligned himself with the leading politicians of his age. Leaving home at the age of fourteen, he traveled the country as a carnival showman before becoming the star and owner of several highly successful circus companies.

“Edwin Forrest as Spartacus,” NYPL Digital Gallery by “Sarony” photo studio. Published before 1923 and public domain in the US via Wikimedia Commons.

As David Carlyon describes it in Dan Rice: The Most Famous Man You’ve Never Heard Of, the circus clown became interested in politics after meeting General Zachary Taylor during the 1848 presidential race. With typical bravado, Rice liked to boast that Taylor campaigned from his bandwagon during circus parades and that the general had given him the title “Colonel” in gratitude for the endorsement. Billing himself “Colonel Dan Rice,” he performed in a red, white, and blue outfit, complete with striped leggings, star-spangled tunic, and shiny top hat. Carlyon points out that, with his goatee, the circus clown bore a striking resemblance to the figure we would come to know as Uncle Sam.

In much the same way that comedians talk politics on late-night TV, Rice often mixed political songs and commentary into his ring master routine. In 1857, the Democrat celebrated James Buchanan’s inauguration by writing and performing a lengthy comic song about the new president’s cabinet to 20,000 people in Washington. An avowed racist, Rice originally backed the confederate states during the Civil War, and he delighted southern audiences with a comic pro-slavery version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Labeled “the secession showman,” Rice tried to rehabilitate his reputation by promoting himself as the committed benefactor of Union army veterans. With little regard for consistency, he donated money to the families of soldiers and encouraged the rumor that he had single-handedly outfitted an entire regiment. In 1865, he erected a $5000 granite monument to the fallen soldiers of Erie County in front of his Pennsylvania estate. Although easily dismissed as a publicity stunt, the event earned Rice a cover story in Harper’s Weekly.

After several disappointing state campaigns, Rice briefly sought the Democratic nomination for president in 1868, drawing significant backing from newspapers and veterans’ organizations. Supporters formed Dan Rice clubs across the midwest, and the New York papers touted “the Colonel” as being as viable a candidate as the editor Horace Greeley and the general George McClellan. Many newspapers, of course, were appalled by the excitement over Rice’s candidacy. One editor argued that it was humiliating to think that an office once occupied by Washington, Jefferson, and Madison could fall to a man who had worn the “caps and bells of Master Merryman in a traveling circus.”

Strangely enough, plenty of supporters promoted Rice’s selflessness and patriotism. A letter to Rhode Island’s Newport Daily News argued that like the Roman general Cincinnatus, Rice “would leave the retirement in which he hoped to spend the rest of his life and go forth to the Capitol to straighten the affairs of the nation and relieve the country from the turmoil, anxiety, and strife which are distracting to it.” The message seemed to be that only an entertainer of Rice’s wealth and stature could fix the mess in Washington, DC.

Although Rice’s campaign fizzled out after a few months, he and his supporters developed a rationale for his candidacy that is still used today. Rice’s celebrity, they argued, would help him transcend the self-interest of more traditional candidates.

If Forrest represents one stream of celebrity politics, the star as party activist, Rice represents another: the star who hopes to turn his or her popularity into elected office. These streams would grow in size and strength over the next 150 years. Forrest precedes a whole legion of celebrities, from John Wayne and Barbra Streisand to Chuck Norris and Whoopi Goldberg, who have been steadfast, reliable advocates for the Republican or Democratic parties.

And while it may recall the presidential campaigns of fellow comics Dick Gregory and Stephen Colbert, Rice’s candidacy is perhaps most significant in anticipating the populist appeal of celebrity candidates. In Rice we have a precursor to figures such as Jesse Venturo, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Donald Trump, each of whom has invoked his fame as the answer to a broken system.

Our popular culture is larger and more varied than our forebears could have imagined. But what survives from the mid-nineteenth century is the deeply personal importance that audiences place on famous men and women. Reviewing that history helps us see that celebrity politics has less to do with the stars themselves than it does the people who admire them, the fans who find more power and agency in their show business heroes than they do in their own lives. In a spectacle-driven democracy, what could feel more cathartic than snubbing political insiders for the stars that inspire and embolden us? We care about them, so surely they care about us.

Featured image credit: 1880RNC – 1880 Republican National Convention by C. D. Mosher. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Alcohol and tailgating at football games

Tailgating is a very popular activity associated with American college football games. Tailgating typically involves food and alcoholic beverages served from the backs of parked vehicles or associated equipment at or near athletic events. At large universities with Division I football programs, the football stadiums may hold upwards of 100,000 fans, sometimes with thousands of additional fans who tailgate but don’t have tickets to the game. Tailgating before football games can be a student ritual and often involves multiple generations within families (some of whom may be alumni). In some university cities, the number of people attending football games exceeds the average population of the entire city. The large crowds associated with football games presents a logistic challenge for stadium personnel, school officials, and law-enforcement even independent of alcohol consumption.

Many studies have demonstrated the relationship between alcohol use and college football games. Other studies have shown that universities that report high levels of binge drinking among the undergraduate population are significantly more likely to allow tailgating before and after sporting events. Discussions on tailgating and alcohol consumption must therefore be viewed within the larger framework of the risks of alcohol use within university populations. A study published in 2009 estimated that approximately 1,800 deaths, 600,000 injuries, and 97,000 sexual assaults occurred annually that were related to excessive alcohol consumption. Since tailgating has been shown to have similar student drinking rates compared to other days associated with high levels of drinking such as Halloween and New Year’s Eve, a number of institutions have investigated and implemented various interventions for limiting excessive alcohol consumption.

In this context, tailgating can be viewed as one situation in which there is higher risk for undergraduates to engage in binge drinking. It is important, however, to keep in mind that there may also be substantial alcohol consumption at football games by fans other than undergraduates, with the male 21-29-year-old demographic identified in multiple studies as also being high risk for binge drinking. A good example of interventions aimed at promoting responsible drinking can be seen with the University of Iowa “Think Before You Drink” initiative launched in 2010 just prior to the beginning of the 2010-2011 football season.

There are a variety of interventions that have been tried to reduce excessive alcohol consumption at football games:

Tailgate by Kipp Jones. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.


One of the most widespread measures has been that alcohol has generally not been sold (at least to most fans) at National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) athletic events. Exceptions to this vary by athletic conference and by specific institutions but have included alcohol drinks served within luxury boxes and other restricted areas of the stadium. More recently, alcohol sales have been piloted at some NCAA events such as the College World Series (baseball). Proponents of alcohol sales at college athletic events argue that access to alcohol during the game may reduce binging on alcohol (“fueling up”) prior to entering the stadium. There is the possibility that alcohol consumption during games may increase excessive drinking, especially given that college football games often extend for more than three hours. Some stadiums may designate certain areas as “alcohol free” or “family friendly” to reduce impact on other fans.
Restrictions on tailgating hours have shown mixed success with reducing binge drinking. One practical limitation to this measure is that it is often unpopular with the fan base and may also have economic ramifications for the community. College football games can bring in substantial revenue for the institutions and surrounding cities, especially hotels and restaurants.
Expanded enforcement of alcohol-related laws has been tried at many stadiums. This may include enforcement of “open container” laws outside of approved tailgating areas and also restrictions on “open bars” (i.e., distribution of alcohol in mass fashion such as from kegs). Additional measures may include increasing driving checkpoints to discourage driving under the influence (DUI) and intervention at “nuisance” parties.
Removal of individuals from stadiums who are excessively intoxicated has been enhanced at many stadiums. Stadiums may offer text messaging services that allow fans to report individuals who are disruptive and unruly.

Measuring the success of interventions can be challenging. Common metrics reported in the literature and media include numbers of arrests, other crimes such as damage to property, emergency department visits, surveys of students on drinking behaviors, and volunteer breathalyzer checks. All of these measures have their strengths and limitations. For example, in the case of University of Iowa, the medical center emergency department is located across the street from the football stadium, meaning that most emergency medical care that cannot be addressed within the stadium itself would be directed to that emergency room. This provides the opportunity to examine how interventions aimed at excessive drinking impact emergency department visits at the University of Iowa. In contrast, for football stadiums in larger cities, emergency care may be dispersed between multiple emergency rooms in the local region, potentially making it more difficult to study impacts on excessive drinking.

As mentioned above, one of the more recent trends is the roll out of alcohol sales at NCAA events. It will be interesting to assess how this move affects drinking behaviors at college football stadiums that adopt this policy.

Featured image credit: Benstailgate by Ben Vardi. CC0 Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Effective hallmarks for teaching the Kodály Concept in the 21st century: part 1

To teach music effectively, we must know our subject—music. We must embody and exemplify musicianship.” (Elliott, Music Matters, 1995, p. 271). But how are we to communicate our musicianship to students in meaningful ways? The Hungarian composer, ethnomusicologist, and educator, Zoltán Kodály (1882–1967) is an internationally recognized composer. The Kodály Concept of music education is based on his philosophical writings and incorporates principles of teaching music developed by his colleagues and students. His writings on music education provided the impetus of developing a new pedagogy for teaching music.

Music teachers should possess and model excellent musicianship.

Consider employing an apprenticeship model of instruction that mirrors a pedagogical model utilized by exceptional studio instructors. Simply stated, students learn the craft of music from individuals who themselves are excellent musicians. In Kodály’s words: “There is a need for better musicians, and only those will become good musicians who work at it every day. The better a musician is the easier it is for him to draw others into the happy, magic circle of music. Thus will he serve the great cause of helping music to belong to everyone.” (Kodály, “Two Part Exercises,” Selected Writings, 1974, p. 225. ).

Identifying quality music repertoire is foundational for teaching music effectively.

It was Kodály’s belief that communication of inferior music inhibits the growth of maximum musical understanding. Consequently, he maintained that the type of repertoire used and the manner of presentation have a lasting effect on the development of a child’s musical taste.

“Conversely, only art of intrinsic value is suitable for children! Everything else is harmful. After all, food is more carefully chosen for an infant than for an adult. Musical nourishment which is ‘rich in vitamins’ is essential for children.”(Kodály, “Children’s Choirs,” Selected Writings, 1974, p. 122.)

All aspects of musicianship should be developed in a music curriculum.

Musicianship training should be comprehensive and develop all dimensions of what it means to be a musical human being. If we are to develop children’s self-knowledge, self-awareness, and emotions, we need to educate them to be:

Stewards of their musical and cultural heritage (knowledge of quality music repertoire)
Performers (singing tunefully, playing instruments musically and moving artfully)
Critical thinkers (reading and writing music)
Creative human beings (improvisation and composition)
Informed audience members


Teaching music literacy has to be taught artfully.

The teaching of music literacy needs to be taught artistically. Kodály advocates that we should “teach music and singing at school in such a way that it is not a torture but a joy for the pupil; instill a thirst for finer music in him, a thirst which will last for a lifetime. Music must not be approached from its intellectual, rational side, nor should it be conveyed to the child as a system of algebraic symbols, or as the secret writing of a language with which he has no connection. The way should be paved for direct intuition.”(Kodály, “Children’s Choirs,” Selected Writings, 1974, p. 124.)

A music learning theory should serve as the foundation for teaching music literacy and developing musical skills.

Using a research-based model of learning and instruction provides a organized model for teaching music literacy in an artful manner. It provides teachers with an effective pedagogical compass. It permits children to develop the ability to read and write music as a consequence of music instruction that is perceptually based. Students become active learners not simply learning about the musical concept but additionally learning about the process of their own learning through music performance.

A model of learning and instruction offers teachers a step-by-step roadmap for developing the musical understanding, metacognition, and creativity skills that are relevant for twenty-first-century learning. A feature of this teaching pedagogy is its integration of problem-solving, critical-thinking, and collaborative learning skills into the instruction and learning of music. Building upon the work of Gordon, the Houlahan and Tacka Model of Learning and Instruction promotes simultaneous development of students’ performance, musical understanding, and audiation skills, which promotes deeper learning and creativity.

Featured image: “DSC07843” by Warren B. CC by 2.0 via Flickr.

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Employment law: Post-Brexit

The Leave vote in the EU referendum presents several potential challenges for employers which are of far more immediate and practical importance than speculation about the future direction of employment law in a post-EU environment. An issue over which a considerable amount of ink has been spilled, both before and after the referendum. These challenges include how employers should best seek to manage employee uncertainty and anxiety about the possible impact of the Leave vote on their business; how economic uncertainty will affect recruitment policy, perhaps pushing employers towards more temporary and agency and less permanent recruitment; the impact on employers’ ability to attract and retain skilled staff from overseas of potential changes to immigration laws as part of Brexit; how to reduce the risks of increased disputes in the workplace based on differing views of the merits of Brexit; and ensuring that any relocations or restructurings that the changed climate necessitates are handled so as to minimise exposure to claims. As the UK proceeds with the process of extracting itself from the EU, the impact on free movement and immigration laws will also be crucial for many employers.

Even though the UK already has one of the less heavily regulated labour markets in the EU, Brexit may nonetheless have important longer term implications for domestic employment law. Many commentators have raised their concerns that Brexit will lead to a further diminution of employment rights in the UK and identified various areas as being at risk of repeal or relaxation because they are required by EU law – and so might not need to be continued post-Brexit – and are seen in some quarters as imposing undue burdens on business. These include the incorporation into UK law of the Agency Workers’ Directive which has been unpopular with some employers by virtue, amongst other things, of the right to equal remuneration with comparable permanent employees after 12 weeks; the collective information and consultation regime applying to redundancies affecting 20 or more staff in a 90 day period; and certain provisions of the Working Time Directive such as the 48 hour limit on the working week, the obligation to include the equivalent of commissions in holiday pay, and the ability to treat holiday absence as sickness rather than holiday absence if an individual is ill while on vacation.

the impact on free movement and immigration laws will also be crucial for many employers

Another target for reform could be the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 2006 (“TUPE”). Outright repeal of TUPE might be attractive to those wishing to increase employers’ flexibility but it would potentially cause immense dislocation to existing outsourcing and similar arrangements – which have proceeded on the assumption that TUPE would apply on their termination – and given that TUPE assists business continuity by effecting the automatic transfer of employees. Alternatively, a perhaps more realistic scenario would be reform further to limit the application of TUPE in the insolvency context, and more generally to allow greater scope for post-transfer changes to and harmonisation of the terms of employment of the transferring employees than the restrictive European case law currently permits.

Prognostications about the future of the UK employment law regime can only deal in possibilities rather than specifics. The extent to which UK employment law might further be deregulated following Brexit will depend not just on the nature of the UK’s exit from the EU – and whether an ongoing relationship with the EU necessitates the retention of EU-derived legislation. For example, membership of the EEA would necessitate retention of transfer of undertakings legislation. The political appetite for further reform may also be difficult to forecast.

A bonfire of employment regulation post-Brexit is arguably far from inevitable, even though this view will be seen as naïve in some quarters. For example, in an article published after the referendum but before he became Secretary of State for Brexit, David Davis MP suggested that post-Brexit regulatory reform would not need to extend to employment law on the basis that “[a]ll the empirical studies show that it is not employment regulation that stultifies economic growth, but all the other market-related regulations, many of them wholly unnecessary” and that “Britain has a relatively flexible workforce, and so long as the employment law environment stays reasonably stable it should not be a problem for business.” He was not attracted to cutting the employment rights of “the great British industrial working classes [who] voted overwhelmingly for Brexit.” Theresa May’s more recent indications that legislation should be introduced to require worker representation on boards and binding shareholder votes on pay suggest to at least some extent a more interventionist than deregulatory mindset in relation to the labour market. A more cynical view might suggest that the Coalition Government’s various reforms to employment law – increasing the service required to claim unfair dismissal from one to two years, limiting unfair dismissal compensation to one year’s pay even if less than the statutory cap, and perhaps most significantly, the introduction of fees into the Employment Tribunal system – have already reduced employees’ rights – and their ability to enforce them – so significantly that further reform to reduce burdens on business is unnecessary.

However, in contrast, concern has been expressed in some quarters that views previously expressed about employment law by some of those now involved in high level policy formation could herald material diminutions to employment law and minimum wage protections. More dramatic changes that might be floated could be the introduction of a cap on the currently unlimited compensation which can be claimed for unlawful discrimination or indeed the revival of the proposal made in 2012 in the controversial Beecroft report that the domestic unfair dismissal regime should be abolished and replaced by a system of “no fault” termination entitling individuals to only to specific and relatively modest severance payments.

What is for sure is that the position is far from clear and that specific reform is not imminent, if only because, until the UK’s post-EU position is determined, the extent to which current regulations derived from EU law can be amended or repealed will remain unclear. Depending on their specific sector and the economic climate more generally, employers and employees may well have more immediate concerns in the short term than wondering about how the employment law landscape might change down the line.

Featured image credit: ‘Brexit’. CC0 Public Domain via freestocks.

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A new (musical) direction for healthcare?

Most would agree with the idea that music can have a powerful hold over us—our thoughts, feelings, and movements. Given this, how might music help measure thoughts, feelings, and movements in a way that allows professionals in healthcare improve client treatment?

The music therapy profession seems to be experiencing a surge in developing data-measuring tools that incorporate music in the client assessment. We’ve seen an increase of articles on the topic published in scholarly journals, the forming of a consortium, and a recent roundtable discussion.

Given this increase, we invited four music therapy experts to participate in a Q&A about music therapy assessments: Dr. Felicity Baker, who co-developed the Meaningfulness of Songwriting Scale (MSS); Dr. Eric Waldon, who co-developed the Music Attentiveness Screening Assessment, Revised (MASA-R); Dr. Julian O’Kelly, who co-developed the Music Therapy Assessment Tool for advanced Huntington’s Disease (MATA-HD); and Dr. Wendy Magee, who co-developed the Music Therapy Assessment Tool for Awareness in Disorders of Consciousness (MATADOC).

Why did you create your particular assessment?

Felicity Baker: The MSS was designed primarily as a research tool, so I could map the degree of meaning the songwriting process held for participants with their outcome measures. This would enable me to theorise about why some participants are more responsive and have better outcomes than others. I also wanted to explore meaning-making as a mechanism of change activated by songwriting.

Eric Waldon: The MASA-R was designed to assess childrens’ ability to attend to musical stimuli and evolved from clinical work in pediatrics at University of the Pacific. It’s intended for use by clinicians to assist music therapists in designing music-based procedural support interventions for hospitalized children.

Julian O’Kelly: The MATA-HD was designed for both clinical and research purposes to measure Huntington’s disease (HD) patient responses to music therapy interventions across psychological, physical, social, and communication domains. HD is a complex condition, where subtle responses require the focussed attention of clinicians to accurately monitor. It was felt a robust and valid tool would assist this process and assist our ability to communicate clinical progress. From a research perspective, it was felt the tool would meet a need for a sensitive means of measuring the efficacy of music therapy.

Wendy Magee: The MATADOC, a standardized measure for assessment of patients with Prolonged Disorders of Consciousness (PDOC), was developed because my colleague Rosie Monaghan and I were both newly qualified music therapists. We were new to the population and we had many questions about what we should be doing in a music therapy session with people with such minimal responsiveness, how we could measure responses, and how we could communicate clinical events to colleagues in a way that could contribute to the patient’s overall assessment.

What were the greatest challenges you encountered when developing your assessment measure?

FB: I found the experience of gaining face validity the most fascinating part. Having developed the tool based on a combination of pilot work, our own experiences, and a synthesis of the literature, I approached a number of key researchers in our field to ask for their perspectives on the items. I found their input so valuable and did result in omitting some items and tweaking others. In terms of challenge, gaining test-retest data is tricky as dropout is quite critical. Missing data is also a real challenge!

JO: The development of the MATA-HD took a total of five years to reach publication, only two of which were funded and directly involved in data collection. This is by no means unusual, and is itself a challenge – managing the demands of ethics applications, data analysis, and the rigorous review process can be arduous!



Education Minister John O’Dowd with music therapist, Jenny Kirkwood and pupil Tessa Martin at the official opening of new facilities for Tor Bank School in Dundonald. Image by Northern Ireland Executive. CC BY-ND 2.0 via Flickr.

What recommendations do you have for assessment development, particularly from a scientific versus clinical perspective? 

WM: One of the most important things when developing a measure is to understand that the criteria a music therapist thinks are important may not be what the patient, family, or other team members think are important. This will influence the development of the measure’s items. Using terminology and incorporating concepts pertinent to the population are important too. This might be different from terminology more typical for a music therapist. For example, the MATADOC has a “verbal command” item. Though this may be uncomfortable for music therapists from particular perspectives, demonstrating that a person can respond to a verbal command is critical diagnostically.

EW: My recommendation is to focus on measuring a few clinically relevant skills, abilities, or responses that will lend themselves meaningfully to the assessment process. When psychologists employ testing as part of assessment, they use multiple tests as a part of a battery as opposed to one “big test” that measures everything. As tests become a larger part of music therapy assessments, I see clinicians employing such a “battery of tests.”

What do you envision is the role of music-based measures in healthcare? What differentiates them from non-music based ones?

JO: To a commissioner of services in healthcare today, there exists a bewildering array of choices to invest in when it comes to arts-based interventions which claim to support health or educational development. In this context, music-based assessments, tailored to some of the unique qualities of music therapy, can play an important role. Here, clinicians addressing shared goals of their multidisciplinary colleagues may with objectivity produce reliable and valid measures of what their input contributes to client care.

EW: Music-based tests are able to measure clinically relevant thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in a way non-music-based tests cannot. Furthermore, they are a way to view client functioning under a music condition that can be compared to evidence obtained under a non-music condition. But there is a place for BOTH music-based and non-music-based measures in clinical practice.

FB: I think the role of assessment is very important because to write accurate reports is tricky without rigorously tested assessment tools. Whether these need to be always music-specific is debatable and I think we have a tendency to create tools that are so discipline-specific they might only be meaningful for music therapists. I think it essential that if we use music therapy-specific assessments, we need to be mindful to report the findings in terms that relate to a person’s wellbeing and can be understood from a broader health agenda.

Featured image credit: music, piano by Jamille Queiroz. CC0 Public Domain via Unsplash.

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The OWC Podcast: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Pride encounters prejudice, upward-mobility confronts social disdain, and quick-wittedness challenges sagacity, as misconceptions and hasty judgments lead to heartache and scandal, but eventually to true understanding, self-knowledge, and love. In this supremely satisfying story, Jane Austen balances comedy with seriousness, and witty observation with profound insight. If Elizabeth Bennet returns again and again to her letter from Mr Darcy, readers of the novel are drawn even more irresistibly by its captivating wisdom.

Pride and Prejudice has delighted generations of readers with its unforgettable cast of characters, carefully choreographed plot, and a hugely entertaining view of the world and its absurdities. With the arrival of eligible young men in their neighbourhood, the lives of Mr and Mrs Bennet and their five daughters are turned inside out and upside down.

Listen now or download this Oxford World’s Classics podcast, in which Fiona Stafford of Somerville College, Oxford, introduce and discuss Jane Austen’s most famous novel.

Featured Image: Victorian Guest Book, CC BY 2.0 via Pixabay. 

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UK food retailing and the challenge of the ‘new retail’

In mid-August, ASDA, the UK’s third largest food retailer by sales, announced its worst ever sales results. Like-for-like sales in stores open for more than one year (a standard industry measure) fell by 7.5% for the three months to the end of June. That was even worse than the 5.7% decline reported for the previous quarter and the 5.8% decline for the quarter before that. In fact, ASDA is now in a period of 8 consecutive quarters of declining like-for-like store sales. For a food retailer, sales declines of these levels are calamitous. Profit margins are very slender at the best of times (and these are most definitely not the best of times for the major grocery retailers in the UK) and big losses of sales volumes get strongly magnified in terms of their impact on profitability. And yet on exactly the same day that ASDA was confirming just how bad its sales position is, Amazon announced that it would open in early 2017 another fulfilment centre – its thirteenth – in the UK. Part—but only part—of the reason why Amazon needs more capacity is due to the initial success of its Amazon Fresh food delivery business which launched in the UK in July 2016.

So what’s going on? Is ASDA’s trading difficulties and Amazon’s continued expansion an illustration in a nutshell of a transformation from the store-based world of ‘old’ retailing to the online world of ‘new’ retailing? Well, yes and no.

“ASDA KX57OLO 110110”, by EDDIE. CC BY-ND 2.0 via Flickr.

For ASDA the conundrum is that, as arguably the most consistently price focused of the major UK grocers, the business ought to be trading better than it is in the face of strong competition from the aggressive price-led grocery discounters, Aldi and Lidl. The fact that it isn’t points to big structural challenges. Price deflation is a structural feature of the UK grocery retailing marketplace. It is almost impossible to increase prices to shoppers who have a growing range of shopping options, including online. And when you can’t – structurally – increase prices you have to have an offer and a brand that truly engages with shoppers in order to add sales volume, and you have to have a very, very efficient cost base. ASDA doesn’t appear to have the first and perhaps not the second either. At the same time as it’s trying to ‘fix the basics’ of its existing business, ASDA is also challenged to radically reconfigure its business to better fit with the very changed expectations of a lot of shoppers. What this means in practice is a very strong online ordering and fulfilment business as well as smaller stores in more convenient locations that work for busy shoppers wanting to buy smaller amounts of food more frequently and closer to the point of need. ASDA doesn’t have either.

For Amazon there is a sense of a business which continues to invest ahead of the curve in that the infrastructure is being built while the business works simultaneously to add more shoppers and more sales volume. Jeff Bezos has spent the entire history of Amazon preaching the same message to his sometimes impatient investors: stick with us and sustained profits will come as volumes grow. That’s looking much closer today than it did even a few years ago. In this sense Amazon’s challenge is the exact opposite of ASDAs. While ASDA is challenged by declining sales and loss of customer engagement, Amazon is dealing with the challenge of absorbing strong sales growth and more customer acquisition across multiple categories, including now grocery.

Where will this end? It’s clear that there’s too much capacity in UK food retailing and the challenges are getting worse as the discounters grow and the online operators advance further. More large stores will close and more price competition seems inevitable which will further strain already marginal profitability and the patience of investors. Indeed, investor patience may be so tested that ownership changes will happen. Shoppers have more choice and retailers have more opportunities to realise them, but the transitional challenges are tremendous.

Featured image credit: Shopping Cart by MichaelGaida. Public domain via Pixabay.

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11 facts about the modern peace movement

On this day on 28 August 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I have a dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech left an indelible mark on American history and the world. His universal cry for a more humane and united world became a source of inspiration for all. His speech and the Civil Rights Movement were an important part of the broader peace movement. The peace movement helped form the basis of the Civil Rights Movement’s successful strategies and tactics. The peace movement was a social movement that sought to end wars, minimize violence, and ultimately achieve world peace. Non-violent resistance, pacifism, demonstrations, boycotts, ethical consumerism, and supporting anti-war candidates were some of the tactics the peace movement employed to achieve their goals.

Other social movements in the twentieth century were also heavily influenced and impacted by the peace movement. In honor of the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech, here are 11 facts about the contemporary peace movement you probably didn’t know:

1. Gandhi saw himself as being a disciple of Leo Tolstoy and strongly credits his pacifist ideas to the Russian novelist (Green, The Origins of Nonviolence).

2. Peace activists “pioneered the use of Gandhian nonviolence in the United States and provided critical assistance to the African American civil rights movement.”

3. It has been argued that peace activists have helped “shape the political culture of American radicalism.”

4. Not only did the peace movement address antiwar and antinuclear issues, it also addressed racism, sexism, poverty, imperialism, and environmental degradation.

“Dr. Martin Luther King speaking against war in Vietnam, St. Paul Campus, University of Minnesota” by Minnesota Historical Society. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

5. The Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 helped to solidify Martin Luther King Jr.’s decision to use acts of nonviolence to champion the civil rights movement.

6. The peace movement was responsible for organizing the “Freedom Ride” which drew attention to Southern segregation.

7. Martin Luther King Jr. was also active in opposing the Vietnam War. In perhaps his second most famous speech, King accused the US government as being the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” He went on to share some incredibly wise words that are still relevant today:

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

8. Feminist peace activists played an important role in creating unprecedented levels of interaction among women of different races and nationalities.

9. In protest of the Vietnam War, feminist peace activists used to use the antiwar slogan “Girls say yes to boys who say no.”

10. By increasing awareness of global women’s issues, feminist peace activists helped to make 1975 the United Nations’ International Women’s Year and 1975–1985 the Decade of Women.

11. The largest recorded anti-war rally ever took place in Rome in 2004 with around three million people, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.

Featured image credit: Martin Luther King Jr. addresses a crowd from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial where he delivered his famous, “I Have a Dream,” speech during the Aug. 28, 1963, march on Washington, D.C. via the US Marines. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Scenario analysis and political science

At a 2006 workshop in Geneva, founding members of the Bridging the Gap project presented a scenario that posited a financial crisis originating in the United States that would bring on a global recession with painful economic consequences for Europe. Many workshop participants—scholars and policy makers—were incredulous: “That’s just impossible”… “It could never happen”…  “It’s a waste of time to talk about it”…

This story suggests both the challenge and the value of scenario analysis. Scenarios are often mistaken for forecasts, expert predictions, or simulations. They are none of these. Instead, scenarios depict possible future states of the world by combining theory and story-telling in rigorous and resonant ways to facilitate creative thinking. The Geneva experience is not important because the financial crisis scenario happened to be prescient. Rather, it serves to illustrate how hemmed in our thinking about the future can be—and how scenarios can help us break free of these constraints.

Royal Dutch Shell, the technique’s pioneer, says it uses scenarios to encourage leaders to stretch their thinking by asking “what if” questions about the world. In addition to their antecedents in corporate futures studies of the 1960s and 1970s, scenarios have long been used in the foreign policy making world—the National Intelligence Council’s series of Global Trends reports are one prominent application, intended to stimulate thinking about geopolitical change and its effects.

Scenario analysis constitutes the art of juxtaposing current trends in unexpected combinations in order to articulate surprising and yet plausible futures, often referred to as “alternative worlds.” Scenarios can also be constructed and used for the purpose of generating policy-relevant research in political science. This technique is used at the annual New Era Foreign Policy Conference, a scenario-oriented workshop for doctoral students in international affairs with a demonstrated commitment to policy-relevant scholarship. (At the 10th annual conference in March 2016, one of our participants described the interactive workshop as “political science nerd heaven.”).

New Era Foreign Policy Project by Bridging the Gap. Image used with permission.

To illustrate the potential of scenario thinking for political science scholarship, let’s return to the global financial crisis we posited a year before it struck. We didn’t foresee that it was going to happen nor, exactly, how it might unfold. But we did recognize at the time, in constructing the scenario, a number of secular trends in the international economy. These included a housing asset bubble in the United States; an inability to resolve long-term economic stagnation in Japan; increasing fractiousness over financial governance systems within Europe; and an International Monetary Fund still struggling to find its footing and identity after its failures in the Asian financial crisis a decade earlier. Our scenario, as is typical with the technique, put together such trends along with others in parallel—although not obviously related—spaces: global recriminations over the Iraq War, working class families in economic stress, aging populations in the industrialized world, and the potential of major global refugee flows due to climate disaster or pandemic.

A political scientist imagining the world of this scenario in 2006, in turn, might have framed research questions such as:

When global organizations like the International Monetary Fund or the United Nations are faced with crisis in one sphere of their competence, where do their vulnerabilities manifest and how do they spread? How, in the past, have such organizations survived such crises and re-established their purpose?
Do other disciplines offer lessons about resilience—for example, might evolutionary biology teach us something about how global and national political institutions can adapt over time?
Are societies under economic stress typically more likely to reject refugees? What types of societies and economies have been more likely to integrate migrants successfully?

The need for answers to such questions is evident today, in the face of Britain’s referendum vote to leave the European Union, the rise of populist and nativist political sentiment across the industrialized world, and the stresses crippling the multilateral organizations that the international community relies upon to address such global challenges. The point of using scenarios in political science is not to predict what will happen. Instead, scenario thinking can serve as a creative scaffolding to aid political scientists in recognizing emergent trends that might reshape the world around us—and thereby frame otherwise unseen research agendas to which the more traditional tools of social science theory and analysis can then be applied.

Featured image credit: New Era Foreign Policy Project by Bridging the Gap. Image used with permission.

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The origins of political order

What importance do the civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean have for us? This question has been answered in different ways over the centuries, but for a long time the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome have been attractive as a baseline and a model, be it in economic, aesthetic, cultural, military, or political terms. Nowhere has the impact of the classics been more pronounced than in political theory: ideas about government and political order were first developed by Greek thinkers, and the institutions and laws of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire have left far-reaching traces in European history.

While there had always existed a strand of thinking which admired the early Roman Republic for its military valor and its austere virtue, there had also developed a tradition with a very different focus on the late Roman Republic. Paradoxically, this tradition was interested first and foremost in the Republic’s crisis, civil wars and eventual collapse into military despotism. As an answer and remedy to crisis and civil war, thinkers belonging to this tradition developed a normative constitutional theory. This was the first time the concept of a normative constitution had ever been put forward in the history of political thought. Roman constitutional theory was thus sharply different from anything Greek thinkers had ever produced.

When in the late eighteenth century the American colonies and France experienced political upheaval, violence and revolution—in the name of a more consensual, egalitarian politics and self-government—the history of the republics of classical antiquity, especially the Roman Republic, provided a historical laboratory. Large territorial states in the eighteenth century were, as a rule, monarchies, which meant that apart from the Roman Republic, the Framers of the American Constitution had few precedents to go by. Seeking to establish political order based on self-government, the American Founders considered it to be a key task to inquire into the reasons why the Roman Republic had declined and fallen, after centuries of stability and success.

Declaration of Independence, a painting by John Trumbull depicting the Committee of Five presenting their draft of the Declaration of Independence to the Congress on June 28, 1776. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Assisted by a long tradition of Roman constitutional thought, the Founders concluded that it was a lack of entrenched constitutional institutions that was to blame for the Roman Republic’s collapse. With Cicero, this tradition insisted that constitutionalism, not virtue, was a necessary condition for political order. And like Cicero, the Founders wrestled with the hard cases on the fringes of constitutionalism, with emergencies and exceptions, seeking institutional solutions while discounting virtue. As a result of their engagement with the crises of the late Roman Republic, political theorists and writers from Bodin to Hobbes to Montesquieu and the Federalist, shared Cicero’s view of the importance of entrenched constitutional norms understood as legal norms. This account suggests, furthermore, that liberal constitutionalism, far from being oblivious to the problem of emergency rule and unprepared to deal with exceptions, really first emerged as a response to crisis and emergencies. This is how liberal constitutionalism was conceived and conceptualized in the first place: as an essentially legal answer to the extra-legal emergency powers of the collapsing Roman Republic.

Featured image credit: Cicero Denounces Catiline. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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