Oxford University Press's Blog, page 492

July 4, 2016

The challenge of adult language learning

Adult migrants often struggle to learn the language of their new country. In receiving societies, this is widely seen as evidence that migrants are lazy, lack the required will power or, worse, actively resist learning the new language as an act of defiance towards their new community.


Unfortunately, most of those who point the finger at migrant language shirkers vastly underestimate the effort involved in language learning. The consensus in applied linguistics is that language learning takes a long time and that the precise duration and final outcome as measured in proficiency level are almost impossible to predict. How long it takes to learn a new language as an adult depends on many factors, most of which are outside of the control of an individual language learner, such as age, level of education, aptitude, teaching program, language proximity, or access to interactional opportunities.


Let’s consider the example of two Syrian refugees who were interviewed by the BBC in Berlin: we meet a hard-working father and daughter pair, who are keen to learn German. Not a trace of refusal or resistance to learning German can be heard in their voices. Even so, their language learning efforts and successes at the time of the interview were far from impressive. 16-year-old Noor was making better progress than her father, a man in his mid-40s. However, the difficult circumstances in the large refugee camp where they live and the “constant worrying” about her family left behind in Damascus make it hard for her to concentrate. Her father Mohammad is similarly committed to learning German and establishing a future for himself and his family in Germany. Even so, he frequently misses his German language classes. However, this is not for lack of trying but due to the fact that classes clash with appointments at the immigration authorities. It is only through these appointments that he can hope to regularize his status and to find a way for his wife and children back in Damascus to join him. So, he obviously has to prioritize bureaucratic appointments over attending language lessons.



Refugee Camp by Tracy Hunter CC by 2.0 via FlickrRefugee Camp by Tracy Hunter. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

Noor’s and Mohammad’s stories are just two examples of the many vagaries of adult language learning; most of these are outside of the control of the language learner. Some of the best-understood learner variables out of a sheer endless list are the following:



Age: Adolescents and young adults are usually better language learners than older adults.
Prior education: High school graduates and those with prior language learning experience have been found to make better language learners than those who have not learnt how to read and write in their first language.
Socioeconomic status: Those who have the time and resources to set aside for dedicated language learning tend to outperform those who struggle to make ends meet.
Gender: Some studies have found that men in employment were learning faster than stay-at-home housewives.
Race: In an Australian study, European-looking students received more interactional opportunities than Asian-looking students; these interactional opportunities increased their confidence and resulted in better progress.
Religion: A Canadian study found that Christian converts were learning faster once they joined a supportive church.
Sheer luck: An Australian study found that a learner with a caring landlady made better progress than those whose accommodation arrangements were less favorable.

The list could go on and on. The general point is that your success at language learning is related to who you are and which hand you have been dealt in life.


The factors listed above – age, prior education, socioeconomic status, gender, race, religion, luck – are by and large outside the control of the individual. What second language learning research shows above all is that learning another language is not an easy feat. It requires a considerable investment of resources and it makes a huge difference whether you are learning in a supportive community or one that rejects you. The ultimate outcome of second language learning efforts is not purely an act of willpower or the result of the learner’s personal choices.


Blaming individuals for having made choices outside their control is patently unjust. Not only is the stigma of lack of willpower, laziness, and pig-headed refusal to play their part unjust in itself but it also has unjust consequences: instead of seeking solutions to actual problems we put resources into addressing imaginary problems. The imaginary problem is that migrants need to be told it is desirable to speak the language of the country in which they live and that life without the national language is hard; they will obviously know that from experience. What many of them cannot figure out is how to improve their proficiency in the new language while also starting a new life through the medium of that language. And what receiving societies cannot figure out is how to facilitate the language learning of real people rather than the stick-figures of political slogans.


A longer version of this post was first published on Language on the Move.


Featured Image: “Advanced Class” by Shane Global. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.


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Published on July 04, 2016 03:30

Slavery and the limits of international criminal justice

By the best available estimates, between one in 162 and one in 400 people currently alive is trapped in a situation of slavery or forced labour. Mauritanians are born into hereditary or ‘chattel’ slavery. Indian families suffer in debt bondage in brick kilns. Migrants from Myanmar are forced to work on Thai fishing boats. Construction workers are trafficked into construction projects in Qatar. Girls are abducted into sexual slavery by Boko Haram and Islamic State and political prisoners are enslaved in North Korea.


How is this possible, in a world in which slavery is prohibited at all times and in all places? And what should international criminal law do about it?


Despite the age, breadth and depth of international obligations to prevent, criminalize and punish slavery crimes, these practices not only persist but even flourish in many countries. The gap between the theoretical protection offered by international law, and the reality of non-enforcement is wide and shocking – and almost wholly unremarked by international criminal lawyers.


The limited potential of international criminal justice to address modern slavery may seem obvious. The tools of contemporary international criminal justice have been shaped to tackle political violence and mass atrocity, not economic injustice, corporate malfeasance or the moral complicity of mass consumption markets. The limited reach of international criminal law beyond national borders, and its vulnerability to being blunted by blatant domestic politicking, becomes clearer with every successful effort by national governments to stymie the International Criminal Court.


All of this seems to suggest that international criminal justice is not the right tool to reach for, if the aim is to effectively fight modern slavery, rather than line the pockets of international criminal lawyers.


Dismissing the inquiry into the potential of international criminal justice for fighting slavery at this point would, however, overlook the fact that international criminal law already recognizes both slavery and enslavement, and various related practices (notably sexual slavery) as crimes, attracting in some cases universal jurisdiction. These are potentially powerful tools for disrupting, punishing and, perhaps, deterring slavery crimes. If international criminal justice already recognizes slavery crimes, is the question really whether it is the ‘right’ tool, or in fact whether we are using these existing tools in the right way?


Perhaps tackling slavery is not in fact alien to international criminal justice, but rather a forgotten part of what created international criminal justice in the first place. The tools are there. The question is how best to use them.



480438282_350c1d9d8b_oImage credit: International Criminal Court by Charles Hutchins. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

Professor Harmen van der Wilt has recently mapped prosecutions of slavery crimes at the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals and the ad hoc international criminal tribunals, and Karen Corrie ponders in another recent piece whether slavery crimes can be effectively prosecuted at the International Criminal Court, identifying several obstacles. But this is not the end of the story. There are various other ways in which investigations, prosecution, and discussion of slavery in international criminal justice contexts may contribute to effective anti-slavery efforts. As Urmila Bhoola, the UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, has explained, international criminal justice intersects with the UN’s human rights mechanisms in important ways. Helen Duffy has shown how international criminal law connects up with growing anti-slavery litigation in regional human rights bodies. Beate Andrees from the International Labour Organization has explored the complementary nature of international labour standards and international criminal law, and Cécile Aptel has explored how existing international criminal jurisprudence overlaps with international child protection norms. Florian Jeßberger, Amol Mehra and Katie Shay note the actual and potential influence of international criminal law on corporate anti-slavery efforts. And Nicole Siller has examined the intersection of slavery and human trafficking norms.


So where does this leave the International Criminal Court? There are significant challenges for the ICC to be successful in prosecuting slavery crimes, relating to jurisdiction, resources and political will, but these obstacles can – and should – be overcome. The most likely prosecutions relate to the open promotion of enslavement by the Islamic State and Boko Haram. ICC prosecution of transnational human trafficking organizations is also theoretically feasible – and might help relieve some of the criticism the ICC perennially attracts for excessive focus on African cases. More importantly, perhaps, ICC efforts to investigate and prosecute slavery crimes would help clarify the obligations of different actors – states, non-state armed groups, corporations, corporate directors – to prevent, punish and remedy slavery crimes. They may also help to draw the attention of regional- and national-level actors to the potential use of international criminal justice tools to tackle slavery. As David Tolbert and Laura Smith of the International Centre for Transitional Justice have shown, the ICC Assembly of States Parties could actively promote such efforts, through discussions around the ‘complementarity’ of national and Hague-level slavery prosecutions, within the ICC framework.


Left to its own devices, international criminal justice has made only marginal, sporadic, normative contributions to the fight against slavery. These are important, but not transformative. On the contrary, the status quo suggests a tragic hypocrisy: even as international criminal justice condemns slavery in no uncertain terms, it tolerates millions of people living in these conditions. That is not a result that is good for those people, for international criminal justice, or for humanity, whom it purports to serve. The silence of international criminal justice on this topic should be addressed. International prosecutions will not eradicate modern slavery. But they will get us closer to that goal.


Featured image credit: feet-tangermünde-foot-ten-shackles by Mondfeuer. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.


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Published on July 04, 2016 00:30

July 3, 2016

Post-truth, post-political, post-democracy: The tragedy of the UK’s referendum on the European Union

I used to cringe at the title of John Keane’s magisterial book The Life and Death of Democracy because of my belief in the innate flexibility and responsiveness of democratic politics – there could be no death of democracy. Now I’m not so sure. There was something about the tone and tenor, the fear and menace of the whole referendum campaign that was somehow tragic. It was a dismal debate but the central defining characteristic was its rejection of basic facts, cold analysis, objective assessments or expert projections. ‘‘People in this country have had enough of experts’’ Michael Gove, one of the leading figures in the campaign to get the UK out of the European Union, responded when asked to name one leading economist or financial institution that thought leaving the EU was a good idea for the UK. It was ‘post-truth’, ‘post-fact’, strangely almost ‘post-political’ in the sense that emotive arguments concerning ‘control’, ‘power’ and ‘sovereignty’ were blended and set against ‘the other’ in the form of ‘immigrants’, ‘foreigners’, ‘European bureaucrats’, etc. The political calculation on which the Brexit campaign was based was alarmingly simple: ‘emotive claim + identified folk devil = ‘leave success.’


But the critical issue is not so much the actual result, but the complete failure of the political system to be able to cultivate a balanced and evidence-based public debate. Democracy was deceived and the public duped because the debate simply never got beyond the level of clichéd sound bites. It created heat but not light, smoke not fire, and noise but certainly no music. This was an argument that was made in several arenas and with increasing concern as the referendum date drew closer. In its report published at the end of May 2016, the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee complained that ‘‘The public debate is being poorly served by inconsistent, unqualified and, in some cases, misleading claims and counter-claims.’’ It added, ‘‘Members of both the ‘leave’ and ‘remain’ camps are making such claims.’’ But the standard of public debate did not improve, and the former Prime Minister, Sir John Major, felt forced to state publicly that he was ‘angry about the way the British people are being misled.’ He argued that Vote Leave were running ‘a deceitful campaign…They are feeding out to the British people a whole galaxy of inaccurate and frankly untrue information.’ Such claims resonate with a public letter signed by over 250 leading academics that suggested that the level of misinformation in the referendum campaign was so great that the democratic legitimacy of the final vote might be questioned.


The final vote has now been taken and it is being questioned exactly due to this widespread concern about the veracity of the (publicly funded) information provided to the public by both sides of the campaign.


Within hours of the referendum result being announced the blame games had begun with Nigel Farage admitting that the claim that £350 million a week could be saved by leaving the EU and invested in the National Health Service was ‘a mistake.’ The fact that 17 million members of the public had voted to leave the European Union in the wake of a campaign that had consistently featured this promise seemed almost trivial. (But possibly not to the millions of people who were at exactly the same time causing the government’s official public petitions website to crash with their demands for a second referendum.)



EU referendum CONTRAST by fernando butcher. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.EU referendum CONTRAST by fernando butcher. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

My argument is not therefore with the outcome of the referendum or how each and every person acted when they picked up the rather grubby little pencil in a generally grubby little voting booth and marked the crisp clean voting slip with a simple cross. My argument is with the architecture of politics and its inability to stop politicians spreading falsehoods and lies, its failure to enforce truthfulness.


Democratic politics tends to be slow, cumbersome, inefficient, hard to understand, and quite simply messy for the simple reason that democratic politics is an institutionalized form of conflict resolution that must somehow satisfy a vast array of competing demands. This was Bernard Crick’s simple argument in his Defence of Politics. Many of the arguments leveled at the European Union by the Brexit campaign therefore contained nuggets of truth – its institutions are inefficient, somewhat remote, and its decisions are frequently what economists would define as ‘sub-optimal’ – but nobody was ever trying to argue that the European Union was perfect, especially not the Remain camp. But the simple fact is that in the context of 28 very different member states these ‘problems’ or ‘weaknesses’ with the European Union can equally be viewed as the strength of the project in the sense that shared decision-making prevents conflict and generally directs shared resources towards shared risks. But the democratic arguments were always secondary to the economic arguments and even in this regard all that was achieved was an unedifying public spectacle in which politicians engaged in slurs and counter-slurs, claims against counter-claims, and deceit-upon-deceit. Turkey was not about to join the European Union, a European Army was not about to be unleashed, and of the £350 million that the UK pays in to the EU each week it receives well over half of this money back.


And yet playing ‘fast and lose’ with the truth can’t be placed at the door of just one person or side of the campaign. The whole campaign was, to some extent, a case study in how not to do democracy. But there is a dimension of the debate that has not yet been brought to the fore in relation to why the Remain campaign seemed so lackluster and the Brexit campaign so vigorously populist – the pressure of the status quo. The simple fact was that our membership of the European Union acted as a systemic pressure or brake on the claims that the Remain camp could make. Working relationships with European partners had to be retained. Leading figures in the Remain camp were therefore bound by the rather Procrustean realities of political life which left their concessions and pledges appearing rather limited and dry, especially when compared to the rhetoric of the Brexit leads. It was democratic politics in the sense of ‘the strong and slow boring of hard boards’ – to paraphrase Max Weber – against the populist burning of political bridges.


But the problem with populism is that it draws support on the basis that the world would be such a wonderful place if we could simply remove the cumbersome demands of democratic politics. In recent weeks just about every modern ailment has been placed at the door of either European bureaucrats or immigrants (generally both) and a simple solution offered – Brexit. In making such a political offer to the British public Messrs.’ Johnson, Gove, and Farage have raised the public’s expectations to the extent that far-reaching failure is to some extent arguably inevitable. What’s interesting from the autobiographies and memoirs of former presidents, prime ministers, and leading politicians is that electoral success rarely brings with it emotional confidence. Of course, to the outside world it is smiles and celebratory handshakes all around, but inside the dominant emotion is generally one of dread and a sense of foreboding. ‘What have I done?’ ‘How can I ever deliver what I have promised?’ are the questions that keep new leaders awake at night. In this context John Crace’s commentary on the hours after the referendum result was announced in Vote Leave’s headquarters takes on added meaning. ‘‘Boris and Gove were looking equally stunned. Neither had either expected to win or Cameron to resign, and what had started out as a bit of a game had become horribly real.’’ Crace wrote, ‘‘[Michael Gove] looked like a man who had just come down off a bad trip to find he had murdered one of his closest friends.’’


But the truth is that the biggest risk arising from the EU referendum is neither territorial nor economic, its not even demographic or legalistic — it’s the rise of a form of post-truth politics in which performance and personality matter more than the facts. For the large part the EU referendum was a truth-free zone, a post-political referendum of fairy tales, fantasy, and fig leaves. Dishonest before the truth means that democracy has been deceived, the public duped.


Featured image credit: big ben houses of parliament by Unsplash. Public domain via Pixabay.


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Published on July 03, 2016 03:30

Does my death harm me?

Some people fear flying; some fear buttons; and many, many people fear their own death. We might try to argue a friend out of their fear of flying or their fear of buttons by showing them that the fear is irrational. We might point out to the koumpounophobic that buttons cannot harm them; and we might produce flight safety statistics to demonstrate to the aviophobic that, while flying can certainly harm them, it’s much less likely to do so than plenty of other activities that they don’t fear. Can we argue ourselves out of our fear of death by showing that this fear is also irrational? The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BCE) thought that you could. For Epicurus, the key ingredients in a good life are ataraxia – a peaceful, tranquil state of being in which you have no fears – and aponia – the absence of pain. And he held that our fear of death is the source of all of our other fears. Rid yourself of that, he thought, and you rid yourself of all the others as well, delivering you into the desired state of ataraxia.


How did he hope to argue a person out of their fear of death? Clearly he couldn’t hope to argue as we do when we’re trying to expunge the fear of flying; he couldn’t say that, while your death will harm you, it isn’t very likely to happen! Instead, he argued, as we do when we seek to eradicate the fear of buttons, that your death simply won’t harm you. Combining that with his assumption that it is only rational to fear something that will harm you, he concluded that our fear of our own death is irrational.


But surely my death is the greatest harm that can befall me? What could possibly be worse? Epicurus disagrees. Something can harm you, he claims, only if it leads you to suffer or feel pain or stress or have some other negative experience – put another way, something that causes you no suffering or pain cannot harm you. So, according to Epicurus, you can be harmed by a coconut falling on your head, since that causes you suffering; but you can’t be harmed by a coconut falling on a rock, since that doesn’t. What about your own death? Well, as long as there’s no afterlife (and Epicurus assumes that there isn’t) your own death can’t cause you any suffering. After all, after your death, you won’t exist at all. And you have to exist in order to suffer. Of course, Epicurus doesn’t deny that the process of dying can cause you suffering – in tragically many cases, that process is characterized by severe pain and anguish. But that’s not your death; that’s the period leading up to it. As Hamlet initially sees so clearly, death itself is the end to all experience, both positive and negative: “and by a sleep to say we end / The heartache and a thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to.” (Later, of course, he entertains the possibility of an afterlife and the experience of death becomes less certain for him.) This, then, is Epicurus’ argument; and, by giving it, he hopes to persuade us that our “death is nothing to us.” Our own death is, therefore, an inappropriate object of our fear.



Sarpedon’s body carried by Hypnos and Thanatos (Sleep and Death), while Hermes watches. Side A of the so-called “Euphronios krater”, Attic red-figured calyx-krater signed by Euxitheos (potter) and Euphronios (painter). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.Sarpedon’s body carried by Hypnos and Thanatos (Sleep and Death), while Hermes watches. Side A of the so-called “Euphronios krater”, Attic red-figured calyx-krater signed by Euxitheos (potter) and Euphronios (painter). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

I’ll wager this argument hasn’t moved you – if you feared your death before, I doubt you are rid of that fear now. But that doesn’t mean the argument is a bad one. It could just be that your fear of death is not susceptible to rational argument – when I used to fear flying, that fear was entirely invulnerable to reason or persuasion (as my travel companions at the time will readily attest). Nonetheless, I think Epicurus’ argument is indeed bad. The form of the argument is good – the conclusion follows from the premises. Rather, it is the premises that are the culprits.


Recall the first premise: It is rational to fear something only if it might harm you. While initially plausible, I think this is wrong. I fear the effects of climate change on human life, animal life, and the environment in 100 years’ time, when I will be dead; I fear my nieces and nephew getting caught up in a global war that starts long after my death. But these events will not harm me (though, of course, thinking about them might cause me great distress). Rather, they will harm those I love; they will harm things to which I assign a great deal of value, such as people and the environment. And it is rational to fear such things. Will my death do this too? For many people, it isn’t arrogant to think that it will. I’ve seen the torment and anguish that bereavement has brought to my loved ones when others who are close to them die. It seems perfectly appropriate to fear my own death when I know that it will have that same effect. As the philosopher Anne Jaap Jacobsen explains, many people with terminal illnesses explain their fear of death in this way; they fear the calamity that their death will visit on their families and loved ones. And surely this is part of what we all fear about our own death. But is this the whole of it? Those with few social connections fear their death; and those whose death would be mourned but would not create a calamity in the lives of others, they too fear their death. So it seems there must be something more.


Let’s now recall the second premise of Epicurus’ argument: something can harm you only if it causes you suffering or pain or anguish or other negative experiences. This too is wrong, I think. Suppose you live in a beautiful natural landscape – the rugged hillsides of the Scottish Hebrides, perhaps. You value that beauty greatly. I arrive with a digger and build a fairly ugly house half a mile down the hill; it removes the isolation of your home, and lessens the beauty of the place where you live. Surely, in this case, I harm you. Yet I cause you no suffering. After my arrival, you will enjoy living where you do rather less than you did before; but you could not claim to suffer from this intrusion. As it goes with this, so it goes with death, perhaps? Just as I might harm you by depriving you of the beauty in which you once lived, so might your own death harm you by depriving you of the good things that you would have enjoyed if you had not died. Perhaps this is what we fear when we fear death – we fear the deprivation of life. Perhaps, but is fear really the appropriate response to something that merely deprives me of something good without inflicting upon me something bad? Were you to fear the arrival of my digger, we might say that you reacted too strongly. It is appropriate to be disappointed or saddened, perhaps, but the halting terror that some people report when they contemplate their own death doesn’t seem to fit well if the only harm that death can do is take away life’s good things without inflicting anything bad.


So Epicurus’ argument is not entirely successful: I might rationally fear my own death because of its likely effects on my loved ones; and I might be disappointed or saddened that I will die because my death will deprive me of the good things that I would enjoy were I to continue to live. But while this might justify certain responses to the fact of our own mortality, it does not seem to support the sort of response that people often report – the halting existential terror felt in the pit of the stomach; the feeling that moves Ivan Illyich to scream incessantly for much of the last three days of his life. This sort of response, it seems, comes from somewhere else – in the sequel to this post, we explore one promising suggestion as to where.


Featured image: Project 365 Day 117: Cemetery by Peter O’Connor. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Flickr.


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Published on July 03, 2016 00:30

July 2, 2016

Getting to know Aviva LeShaw, Marketing Intern

From time to time, we try to give you a glimpse into our offices around the globe. This week, we are excited to bring you an interview with Aviva LeShaw, a Marketing Intern in the Humanities Department of our New York office.


What’s the first thing you do when you get to work in the morning?


Before I speak to anyone or do anything, I have a big cup of coffee. Strong. With half & half. And on Mondays, lots of sugar, too.


What is your favorite word?


Manifest.” I read it when I was really young and started using it before I actually knew how. It just has a great sound, and comes in handy in so many sentences.


Longest book ever read?


I’ve attempted to read the thousand-page Infinite Jest several times. Does that effort count?


What’s the most enjoyable part of your day?


I’m a morning person, so I like the beginning part of the day where I can map out what I’d like to accomplish. I’m most productive before lunchtime.


What’s the strangest thing currently on your desk?


Nothing too strange…although I do keep lots of blank pieces of paper around, to write disjointed notes to myself. If anyone else reads them, they’re just senseless lists and groupings of words and phrases, but I actually have a rigid system for decoding these. Often at the end of the week I’ll find a pile of little pieces of paper in my bag that I can hardly remember writing.


If you didn’t aspire for a career in publishing, what would you be doing?


In some dream world I’d probably be a professional yogi, although I haven’t gone to a real-life class in several weeks…


Most obscure talent or hobby?


I’ve known the first 64 digits of Pi by heart since 8th grade. It’s pretty useless knowledge except for once a year on Pi Day, when I slip the fun fact into most of my conversations, just to show off.


If you were stranded on a desert island, what three items would you take with you?


Coffee, some sort of writing instrument, and a big book of modern poetry. With those three things I could have a wonderful, productive time until someone is nice enough to come pick me up.


If you could trade places with one person for a week, who would it be and why?


I’d have to go with J.K. Rowling. She was my childhood hero! And I’m curious to know what it feels like to have written something that created a completely new world for so many children (myself included). Plus, her books helped me form so much of my vocabulary—including the word “manifest”!


What is the most exciting project you have been a part of while working at OUP?


I’ve been working on the OUP Music Twitter account…it’s a great experience to contribute to such an enormous company through even a single tweet. Just a few words and I feel like I’m part of the OUP family!


Featured image credit: “lights,” by halderzs. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.


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Published on July 02, 2016 04:30

Cycling: a sport, a mode of transport, and a marketing phenomenon

Cycling has always been a global activity, and in the 21st century a marketing phenomenon. At its simplest, the bicycle is a functional form of transport that was invented sometime in the early 19th century, although attribution to a single inventor is not possible as there appear to have been a number of prototypes developed throughout Europe. However, for many, cycling is a sport first and a mode of transport second. The Tour de France, the most famous and prestigious bike race, began in 1903 as a marketing promotion for the French magazine L’Auto, and in its present form consists of some 200 of the best cyclists racing across 21 stages and covering well over 2,000 miles.


Perhaps the most famous country for bicycles as everyday transport is China, once reported to have as many as 9 million cycles on the road. But as affluence and car ownership doubled, bicycle ownership declined dramatically, by as much as 35% between 1995 and 2005. Bicycles were also blamed for congestion and road accidents with Shanghai actually banning them from some roads in 2004. But just like a cycle wheel, what goes round comes round and since 2011, as air quality has deteriorated and traffic jams are a daily nightmare for Chinese commuters, the bicycle has been brought back into favour with bike share programmes.


Another country renowned for bicycles is Amsterdam, a town designated by its cycle routes and when crossing the road you need to be very aware of both the bike and vehicle traffic. Amsterdam is completely flat and with 4,000 kilometres of bike paths it should be a cyclists dream, but you have to know how to cycle like a Dutch person and never leave your bike unlocked (55,000 cycles go missing every year). Dutch cyclists own the road and they decide whether they will cycle fast or slow – many engage in other activities while cycling, on their mobile phones, talking to pedestrians, but they are always in the right. Few cyclists in Amsterdam wear helmets – it would probably be wiser for the pedestrians to wear them!


Another bike friendly city is Copenhagen, where most inhabitants bike to work; half of Danish households don’t own a car. Back in the 19th century bikes were considered so good for Danish society that cycling unions developed with political goals. Although, like other western cities, the introduction of the car led to a reduction in cycling, in the early 1960s Copenhagen began reducing city centre traffic converting the main Street Stroget in 1962 to a pedestrian promenade. The energy crisis of the 1970s hit Denmark hard and car free Sundays were introduced to save fuel. People also protested by painting white crosses on roads where cyclists had been killed, and with such pressure the cycle track network was rebuilt in the 1980s and expanded as fatalities and injuries fell.



Cyclists bicycles riders by skeeze. Public domain via Pixabay.Cyclists bicycles riders by skeeze. Public domain via Pixabay.

However, whilst the bicycle as a mode of transport is very popular in China, Holland, and Denmark, none of those countries have been particularly successful in cycle racing in recent history. The last Danish winner of the Tour de France was Bjarne Riis in 1996 (who later admitted to doping during the 1996 Tour), for Holland it was Joop Zoetemelk in 1980, and for China, well there has never been a Chinese winner of the Tour de France.


In Britain, few people would disagree that cycling is seen as a sport first and a mode of transport second. This is in no small part down to Britain’s recent success both on the track and on the road, including three Tour de France wins in the last five years (Bradley Wiggins in 2012 and Chris Froome in 2013 and 2015) and sixteen gold medals at the last two Olympic Games. Cycling is no longer a niche sport and has moved into the mainstream. However, as well as using the bicycle as a mode of transport, we use it as a recreational and fitness tool, taking to the roads on a Saturday morning to ride out of London and into Richmond Park or the Surrey Hills, and during the week the bicycle stays at home and we take the train, bus, or car to work.


As a sporting activity, we look for the newest technology and the best kit, and you do not have to walk far in London to find a bike shop selling it. We want the latest wireless electronic gears and to wear the best and most fashionable clothes, which in the case of upmarket brands such as Rapha, can be very expensive. Simon Mottram actually started Rapha back in 2004 with the objective of designing clothing that would offer excellent performance. While some criticise the price – in January its latest Shadow collection included shorts priced at £260, – its offering of clothing which is both high performance and fashionable is unmatched in the market. And this is where Rapha as a marketing phenomenon becomes even more interesting. Having sponsored Team Sky over two Tour de France wins, Mottram announced a parting of the ways following the 2016 season. Already Rapha has announced sponsorship of CANYON//SRAM Racing, a newly formed UCI Women’s World Tour professional cycling team. Clearly Rapha is looking for growth markets now it has established itself as the outstanding brand for men. As Mottram says: “Our average customer is a man in his mid-30s,” he says. “Yet at the same time, our fastest-growing customer section is female road bikers.”


In London, cycling as a mode of transport is still not easy, and unlike Copenhagen and Amsterdam, most cyclists other than the occasional ‘Boris Bike’ tourist will be wearing a helmet. Nevertheless Transport for London has taken the initiative to build The East-West Cycle Superhighway which will run from Tower Hill to Lancaster Gate due to be completed by the end of 2016.


Cycling is definitely here to stay and with it, there are not only business opportunities but chances for cities to become safer and better places to live in. What we are seeing, especially in London, is significant investment in cycling infrastructure as a result of the increased popularity of cycling as a sport in Britain, but which will benefit those people who want to use the bicycle as a mode of transport first and as a recreational tool second.


Featured image credit: bicycle derailleur wheel by kaboompics. Public domain via Pixabay.


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Published on July 02, 2016 02:30

Cycling: a sport, a mode of transport, and a marketing phenomena

Cycling has always been a global activity, and in the 21st century a marketing phenomenon. At its simplest, the bicycle is a functional form of transport that was invented sometime in the early 19th century, although attribution to a single inventor is not possible as there appear to have been a number of prototypes developed throughout Europe. However, for many, cycling is a sport first and a mode of transport second. The Tour de France, the most famous and prestigious bike race, began in 1903 as a marketing promotion for the French magazine L’Auto, and in its present form consists of some 200 of the best cyclists racing across 21 stages and covering well over 2,000 miles.


Perhaps the most famous country for bicycles as everyday transport is China, once reported to have as many as 9 million cycles on the road. But as affluence and car ownership doubled, bicycle ownership declined dramatically, by as much as 35% between 1995 and 2005. Bicycles were also blamed for congestion and road accidents with Shanghai actually banning them from some roads in 2004. But just like a cycle wheel, what goes round comes round and since 2011, as air quality has deteriorated and traffic jams are a daily nightmare for Chinese commuters, the bicycle has been brought back into favour with bike share programmes.


Another country renowned for bicycles is Amsterdam, a town designated by its cycle routes and when crossing the road you need to be very aware of both the bike and vehicle traffic. Amsterdam is completely flat and with 4,000 kilometres of bike paths it should be a cyclists dream, but you have to know how to cycle like a Dutch person and never leave your bike unlocked (55,000 cycles go missing every year). Dutch cyclists own the road and they decide whether they will cycle fast or slow – many engage in other activities while cycling, on their mobile phones, talking to pedestrians, but they are always in the right. Few cyclists in Amsterdam wear helmets – it would probably be wiser for the pedestrians to wear them!


Another bike friendly city is Copenhagen, where most inhabitants bike to work; half of Danish households don’t own a car. Back in the 19th century bikes were considered so good for Danish society that cycling unions developed with political goals. Although, like other western cities, the introduction of the car led to a reduction in cycling, in the early 1960s Copenhagen began reducing city centre traffic converting the main Street Stroget in 1962 to a pedestrian promenade. The energy crisis of the 1970s hit Denmark hard and car free Sundays were introduced to save fuel. People also protested by painting white crosses on roads where cyclists had been killed, and with such pressure the cycle track network was rebuilt in the 1980s and expanded as fatalities and injuries fell.



Cyclists bicycles riders by skeeze. Public domain via Pixabay.Cyclists bicycles riders by skeeze. Public domain via Pixabay.

However, whilst the bicycle as a mode of transport is very popular in China, Holland, and Denmark, none of those countries have been particularly successful in cycle racing in recent history. The last Danish winner of the Tour de France was Bjarne Riis in 1996 (who later admitted to doping during the 1996 Tour), for Holland it was Joop Zoetemelk in 1980, and for China, well there has never been a Chinese winner of the Tour de France.


In Britain, few people would disagree that cycling is seen as a sport first and a mode of transport second. This is in no small part down to Britain’s recent success both on the track and on the road, including three Tour de France wins in the last five years (Bradley Wiggins in 2012 and Chris Froome in 2013 and 2015) and sixteen gold medals at the last two Olympic Games. Cycling is no longer a niche sport and has moved into the mainstream. However, as well as using the bicycle as a mode of transport, we use it as a recreational and fitness tool, taking to the roads on a Saturday morning to ride out of London and into Richmond Park or the Surrey Hills, and during the week the bicycle stays at home and we take the train, bus, or car to work.


As a sporting activity, we look for the newest technology and the best kit, and you do not have to walk far in London to find a bike shop selling it. We want the latest wireless electronic gears and to wear the best and most fashionable clothes, which in the case of upmarket brands such as Rapha, can be very expensive. Simon Mottram actually started Rapha back in 2004 with the objective of designing clothing that would offer excellent performance. While some criticise the price – in January its latest Shadow collection included shorts priced at £260, – its offering of clothing which is both high performance and fashionable is unmatched in the market. And this is where Rapha as a marketing phenomenon becomes even more interesting. Having sponsored Team Sky over two Tour de France wins, Mottram announced a parting of the ways following the 2016 season. Already Rapha has announced sponsorship of CANYON//SRAM Racing, a newly formed UCI Women’s World Tour professional cycling team. Clearly Rapha is looking for growth markets now it has established itself as the outstanding brand for men. As Mottram says: “Our average customer is a man in his mid-30s,” he says. “Yet at the same time, our fastest-growing customer section is female road bikers.”


In London, cycling as a mode of transport is still not easy, and unlike Copenhagen and Amsterdam, most cyclists other than the occasional ‘Boris Bike’ tourist will be wearing a helmet. Nevertheless Transport for London has taken the initiative to build The East-West Cycle Superhighway which will run from Tower Hill to Lancaster Gate due to be completed by the end of 2016.


Cycling is definitely here to stay and with it, there are not only business opportunities but chances for cities to become safer and better places to live in. What we are seeing, especially in London, is significant investment in cycling infrastructure as a result of the increased popularity of cycling as a sport in Britain, but which will benefit those people who want to use the bicycle as a mode of transport first and as a recreational tool second.


Featured image credit: bicycle derailleur wheel by kaboompics. Public domain via Pixabay.


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Supernatural Shakespeare

How do you make fairytales into realism? Everyone agrees that doing this work means supplying them with material forms. This is not, however, a novelist’s novelty. Shakespeare’s fairies are small plant flowers and seeds, and his monster knows how to dig pignuts. His witch likes chestnuts, and his ghosts rise out of real graves. The writer’s problem is how to make the fantastic seem real. But there is more to it than that. If Titania’s ‘small elves’ need coats, then they – and we – walk a shivery line between real and imaginary. If they need coats, are they as real as we are? Are we as fantastical as they? Not merely a collage of real thrown at a concept, but writing, itself.


Most of Shakespeare’s supernatural are the dead. This is delicately signed; when someone delivers a big explanation, it’s usually wrong. Fairies, for example; they follow darkness like a dream. Midnight is their time, just as it is the ghost’s time – and let’s recall that the ghost, too, is ‘goblin’, as Puck is ‘hobgoblin’. Yet, we are not meant to think any the worse of them for that. By and large, ghosts are more morally authoritative than the living, or think they are. Despite threats, they do not do the kind of harm that the living have done to them. And yet even the innocent regard them with ‘fear and wonder’; they ‘harrow’, break open, tear apart. This is a violently framed version of what the fairies do too. Not only does their magic expose the arbitrary emptiness of mortal hearts; their tricks – literally – drag support away from the old, while their quarrels leave a land as devastated as the heath on which the Weird Sisters stand.



William_Hamilton_Prospero_and_Ariel“Prospero and Ariel” by William Hamilton. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

That devastated land was all too real. By the time Shakespeare was writing, the second phase of the Little Ice Age had struck farming a savage blow. The fold did stand empty and the crops did rot in the fields, and human beings, bellies shrunken with hunger, could feel the icy and sodden air rage against them, could feel the fog heavy in their lungs. Shakespeare’s last and most ambivalent supernatural creation, the air sprite Ariel, can bring this gravid air to birth with a storm that makes ships split and men drown. The Weird Sisters are also conjurers of storms. The first witch, possessing herself of words lent her by others, can make a ship stand still in storm for long enough to make its master ‘peak and pine’, and Macbeth knows that they can “untie the winds and let them fight/ Against the churches….” Trees and castles, and above all the ‘bladed corn’, can be laid low by powers like these, powers that can be summoned by a magician, but which belong to others.


While there are plenty of dramatists and poets writing about the supernatural in Shakespeare’s time, his own half-amused and half-fascinated response is unique. For Ben Jonson, alchemy and fairies are sheer nonsense; for Dekker, Ford, and Rowley, witches are a sad response to popular stupidity and greed. For such writers, ‘the supernatural’ is part of a Popish past they hope to discard. For Shakespeare, ‘the supernatural’ is part of a vanishing past he wants to retain. His attitude is much closer to that of the great antiquarians John Aubrey and Anthony Wood. He arrived at this acute sense of what was being lost by reading Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft, printed in 1582. While most people knew Scot’s work as a searingly sceptical denunciation of popular ignorance, it is also well understood that cunning folk later used Scot’s trove of incantations and practices to ply their trade. Himself cunning in his power to comprehend human rage and longing, Shakespeare may have gone before them in seeing Scot as a compendium of the wildness of folklore, replete with the words he loved. The rich texture of passages like this one, from Book XV: ‘Kit-with-the-canstick, tritons, centaurs, dwarfs, giants, imps, Colcars, conjurers, nymphs, changelings, incubus, Robin Goodfellow, the spoorn, the mare, the man in the oak, the hell-wain, the Fire-drake, the puckle, Tom Thumb, hobgoblin, Tom-tumbler, Boneless, and such other bugs’, is a mixture of the names Shakespeare himself knew, names from classical mythology tumbled about with Irish and English, in a mishmash that is in no way syncretist; each keeps his or her own true form.


For the playwright, though, Robin Goodfellow had to be more than a name, more even than two names (the Puck[le], Robin), or three names (‘hob-goblin’), or more names, names like Oberon, or Auberon, a name from a medieval romance of the Crusades that had more recently featured in magicians’ lists of ‘spirits’ who could be summoned to do the bidding of the one who called him. Such ‘spirits’ were most often either (fallen) angels, or the dead. Or there are the names like Titania, familiar enough now, but once an obscure cognomen of the goddess Diana, the goddess whom medieval women believed led them on wild flights through the night. When Shakespeare’s Titania speaks of the changeling boy as the child of ‘a votaress of my order’, she may have such night flights in mind. And there may be still darker forces at work. In Shakespeare’s time, a changeling was usually understood as the fairy baby left behind with the mother after the human child had been carried off. Titania says nothing of this in her story, where the child’s mother dies ‘of that boy’, i.e. in childbirth, but such deaths in childbirth accompanied by the death of the child were frequently read as signs that the queen of the fairies had ‘taken’ both to be her votaries. By giving the queen a more obviously ‘low’ minion in the form of the ass-headed actor and mechanical Bottom, Oberon and Puck expose the dark bodily and sexual longings that underlie the fairy queen’s dealings with the dead.


While there are plenty of dramatists and poets writing about the supernatural in Shakespeare’s time, his own half-amused and half-fascinated response is unique.

And yet it is not in this play, but in two of the tragedies, that Shakespeare’s fascination with these active and restless kinds of dead finds full expression. In Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio tries to ward off Romeo’s faith in omens with a speech about their comically incredible cause – that is, Queen Mab, the fairies’ midwife, when everyone knows fairies don’t have midwives and must invite visitors from the human realms to help them… unless fairy babies are the nightmares born in the heads of the mortals across whose faces she gallops? But how can we not believe in her when we know all about how her equipage is made of spiders’ legs and the moonshine’s watery beams? Troublingly insect-like, Mab is creepily believable and quite incredible, awakening the sexuality of sleeping girls to her own improbable bodiliness. She hovers gauzily between incredible and plausible.


The other fairy reference comes in Hamlet. Stopping the action dead for rumination, on the ghost they have just seen, Shakespeare gives ones beautiful speech to Marcellus:


Then [at Christmas], they say, no spirit dare stir abroad,


The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike,


No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,


So hallowed and so gracious is the time.


Shakespeare’s plays, however, happen outside such graciousness, both figuratively and literally, since all theatres were closed for Christmas. Experience of a temporarily racked by wind and hail, and haunted by the unseen ‘following darkness like a dream’, leads Horatio to conclude ‘so I have heard, and do in part believe it.’ He speaks for Shakespeare too.


Featured image credit: Hamlet Meets the Ghost. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.


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Published on July 02, 2016 01:30

Making the big decisions

This post is about how we make decisions – in particular, it’s about how we make major life decisions, such as whether or not to start a family, whether to leave your home country and start a life elsewhere, or whether to join a revolution and fight for a cause. These are what philosophers Edna Ullman-Margalit and L. A. Paul call “big decisions” or “transformative decisions.”


But let’s start small. How do I make the little decisions in life? I am about to walk to a friend’s house, and I am deciding whether or not to take an umbrella. How do I go about making this decision? Well, I think first about what I can expect things to be like if I take the umbrella. Either it will rain or it won’t. I think about what value I assign to the situation in which it rains and I have the umbrella (a low value because rain’s a drag, as is carrying an umbrella, but not very low because at least I’m mostly dry) and the situation in which it doesn’t rain and I have the umbrella (still a low value, but a bit higher, because now I’m only carrying the umbrella and I’m still dry); then I weigh the first value by how likely I think it is to rain and I weigh the second value by how likely I think it is to stay dry; and I add those two weighted values together. That gives me what economists call my “expected utility” for taking the umbrella. Then I do the same to figure out my expected utility for not taking the umbrella. And I compare the two. I should pick whichever of the options has the higher expected utility (or, if they’re equal, pick either). This is the main claim of “expected utility theory.”


Expected utility theory looks very general, and indeed economists take it to be so, using it to predict how people will act in a wide variety of different situations, from buying fruit to choosing how to vote in an election. Surely, then, it will work also for those major life decisions that I mentioned at the beginning? When I decide whether or not to become a parent, I think about how likely various possible outcomes are and how much value I’d attach to those outcomes: for instance, I become a parent and my child is happy and I retain a close-knit group of friends; I become a parent and I don’t bond with my child and resent them for restricting what I can do; and so on. Surely, as in the case of the umbrella, I weigh the values I assign to these outcomes by how likely the outcomes would be should I choose to become a parent; and I calculate my expected utility as before? And then I do the same should I not become a parent; and I compare the expected utilities. But there’s a problem. In the case of the umbrella, I could reasonably expect not to change the values I assign to the possible outcomes between the time I make the decision and the time it would have its effect, namely, when I am outside, walking to my friend’s house. But the distinctive feature of major life decisions is that choosing one of the options might very well change something about you as a person – it might change the values that you assign to things. Before becoming a parent, I might assign a rather low value to the outcome in which I become a parent who doesn’t bond with their child and resents them, and I might prefer not becoming a parent at all to this outcome; but, once a parent, I might still wish I bonded more with my child and wish I had more choice in what I could do with my time; but now I might nonetheless prefer this situation to one in which I am not a parent at all. That is, by becoming a parent, I might have raised the value I assign to that state so much that it outweighs other negative components of my experience, whereas it did not before. So we face a problem: when making major life decisions, whose values matter? The values I assign at the time when I’m making the decision to begin the adoption process? Or the values assigned by my possible future selves once the decision is made one way or the other? Or perhaps I should effect a compromise between these two conflicting assignments of values? But how? This is the problem that Ullmann-Margalit and Paul raise for the standard account of decision-making that we introduced above under the title of expected utility theory.


The problem is that every answer has troubling consequences. I’m offered a year’s pass to Disney World that will become valid only when I reach 80 years of age. If I pay attention only to the values of my current self, I’ll pay a pretty high price for this, because currently I love Disney World. But, given that I can reasonably expect my 80-year-old self to place a pretty low value on what I now view as the glories of Splash Mountain, this seems money poorly spent. Or suppose I must decide now whether to make an unchangeable will that bequeaths my entire estate to an effective health charity working in very poor areas of the world. Having watched so many people tread what the playwright Alan Bennett describes as that “dreary safari” from the left of the political spectrum to the right as they grow older, I might reasonably expect myself to do the same. But I should certainly not now give full weight in the decision about my will to that future right-wing self – I currently abhor his views! Perhaps, then, we should give full weight to neither self, but rather attempt to affect a compromise between them, taking account of both of their values, just as a committee might attempt to make a decision by weighing up the attitudes and judgments of all of its members. Perhaps – but, if that is right, how are we to weigh the two selves, current and future? The example above of choosing how to make my unchangeable will suggests that the values of my future self should be given less weight the further those values lie from my current self. But this strategy results in parochialism – if I follow it, I will never make a choice that I can expect to lead me to assign value in a way that is very different from the way I currently do; I will be stuck in a small circle of my current values. And this seems most unwelcome. There are plenty of other ways of assigning value that I think are perfectly legitimate and rational and reasonable, but that differ greatly from mine. Our theory of decision-making is impoverished if it prevents me from ever making decisions that will lead me to change my values in that direction. This, then, is the problem of making major life decisions.


Featured image: decision by Thomas Haase. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.


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Published on July 02, 2016 00:30

July 1, 2016

The complexity of biography

Throughout the month of July the students and alumni of the Oral History Masters program at Columbia University are occupying the OHR blog, bringing some of their insights and experiences to our corner of the Internet. This first post in the #OHMATakeover begins with Liz Strong responding to post originally published here last November, discussing how to strike a balance in the inclusion of biography in oral history interviews. Stay tuned to the OHR blog throughout the month of July for additional pieces from OHMA students and alumni, and come back in August for a return to our regularly scheduled program. For more from Columbia’s oral history program, visit them online at oralhistory.columbia.edu or follow their blog.


I came across Oral History and Childhood Memories by Evan Faulkenbury on the Oral History Review’s blog. His emphasis on narrators’ earliest memories caught my eye. Faulkenbury describes his own experiences as an interviewer, highlighting the importance of talking about narrators’ memories of growing up. Faulkenbury’s insights sent me scrounging through my old notes and photocopies from when I was a student at the Columbia Oral History MA program. Heaped under a pile of thesis drafts, IRB training manuals, and course syllabi was this helpful handout given to me during my first fall semester.


“Tips on Oral History Interviewing,” by Amy Starecheski


In this formative example of grad-school handouts, Starecheski explains the value of a “biographical approach” to oral history interviews:


Oral historians tend to be interested in subjectivity, in how people make meaning and make stories out of their experiences. Asking, as much as possible, for a full, well-rounded, multi-layered life story helps us to bring the interviewee’s subjectivity in to the interview. We need to know what experiences, ideas, and people created the interviewee’s unique point of view.


Oral history sources are distinguished from other historical evidence precisely because they are not objects, or texts. They are people. Where historians can investigate and examine archival documents, analyze and present them within the relevant contexts to understand them, oral historians can interrogate their sources directly. If you ask your source a question about how they came to a certain conclusion, why they were motivated to take a certain action, they’ll answer it. This is what makes oral history unique. Moreover, it is a valuable opportunity to provide key information for future researchers to interpret the records you and your narrator are creating. Don’t miss it!


Faulkenbury’s approach to building biographical context in his interviews, as described in his article, is specifically centered on childhood. He writes, “These memories enhanced the total value of the interview, and they opened the door to more questions, more stories, and a richer interview…” While I agree with Faulkenbury, I would push farther to say that childhood is not the sole font of all motivations, identity, and character-forming experiences. A biographical approach to contextualizing narrators’ memories can be integrated throughout an oral history interview. Interest in a narrator’s personal background need not be relegated to the first portion of a life story. Their adult memories are just as valuable.


There are a few fundamental components of a narrator’s biography that, as interviewers, we look for like trail markers: Who are they? Where do they come from? Who are their people, their family, their community? What events or actions have shaped them? The answers to these questions will change throughout different stages of a narrator’s life, and also through different ways of remembering that life. These answers are vital to the quality of the oral history. However, they are innumerable. As interviewers, we must also avoid the rabbit hole of purely biographical interviewing. Our interviews have a specific research focus, and we won’t be able to capture everything.


Over the past year, I’ve been Oral History Coordinator for the New York Preservation Archive Project (NYPAP). The guiding purpose of our oral history interviews with leaders of historic preservation efforts in New York City is to fill a gap in existing resources about the movement. We have clear goals for our interviews, and limited time and funds with which to conduct them. However, taking the time to understand someone’s perspective on the field, or their expertise on a historic site, requires some meaningful engagement with their biography. As one narrator I interviewed for NYPAP, Sam Goodman, put it, “these stories have a lot to do with who I am, both as an individual and as a professional.” His stories weren’t just about his memories of growing up in the neighborhood, but of coming back as an adult and seeing it change, going to community meetings, being inspired by new people, and getting a job where he felt he could make a positive difference in the area.


Taking the time to understand someone’s perspective on the field, or their expertise on a historic site, requires some meaningful engagement with their biography.

Faulkenbury described his oral history students’ skepticism when he encouraged them to capture childhood memories during the early stages of their interviews. “They may think,” he says, “stories about growing up have nothing to do with their project at hand, and they don’t want to waste time talking about childhood memories.” While biographical stories are indeed necessary, the concern about wasting time is astute. Resources are always limited, priorities must be set to attain the research objectives of an oral history, and not all biographical information is equally useful. There is an important balance to be struck when seeking out the relevant context in a person’s life. This is made even more challenging because those moments of biographical context are woven throughout a person’s entire life, not only their early life. In response to Faulkenbury’s article, I would only caution that chasing childhood stories not become an end in itself. Guided by your research goals, you’ll be able to find excellent personal background from a person’s whole life, and still wrap up the interview on time.


This post was originally published on the OHMA blog. Add your voice the conversation by chiming into the discussion in the comments below, or on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Google+.


Featured image: “Photograph of Butler Library, Columbia University’s largest single library.” by JSquish, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.


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Published on July 01, 2016 05:30

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