Community Building for Students

I have been slowly re-establishing links with local universities here in the Midlands over the last few weeks, and catching up with friends and old colleagues. As part of this I have been contacting the chaplaincies at various Universities and have had some very interesting conversations. One of the things that has come through from all these conversations is the real difficulties faced by students, and I guess by young people generally, since the COVID lockdowns.

We were well aware of the growing mental health issues among young people. The head of a local school in Swansea told me some years ago that we should expect a tsunami of mental health problems in subsequent years, and that has been born out. Much of this has been associated with the prevalence of social media and the levels of anxiety and paranoia that this has generated. This was only exacerbated by lockdown, and was added to as young people were unable to socialise and could only maintain contact through various forms of social media. Linked to this was the observation that in many cases the lockdown period also led to a restriction in the growth of social maturity among young people.

There are probably many other factors involved, but the two consequences that we have seen, and are repeated through my conversations in many different types of university here in the Midlands, are first a growth in the numbers of students seeking counselling, and second the high levels of absenteeism in relation to lectures. Universities moved fairly quickly, on the whole, to provide some element of face to face engagement in learning and teaching, despite all the complaints by government ministers and others, and students generally said that what they wanted was face to face teaching. The reality, however, is that with a level of hybrid delivery still in place students are choosing not to turn up to lectures and are engaging, so far as they can, online, or perhaps not at all.

What came out of my conversations around the chaplaincies, however, was the recognition that this is not just to do with lectures, where alternative means of gaining access to the information might be available. Across the chaplaincies, and in other areas of collective activities (clubs, socials etc.) there is also an apparent lack of willingness for students to leave their rooms and to turn up. This is not true of all students, or of all activities, but as one chaplain told me it is a calculation that the students are making, as to whether the anxiety and stress caused by going out is worth the gain in attending an event. Students will sign up, they believe these are things they want to do, but when the moment comes, the stress is too high and, if they do not see the outcome as great enough, they will choose not to leave their room.

Again, the anxiety, as it has been expressed to me, is two-fold. There is a fall-out from lockdown and an unease about simply being in a group. Socialising in person is a stressful activity in and of itself. However, there is also the social media element at play. In this case that expresses itself as a fear of saying, or doing, the wrong thing. The levels of potential ‘offence’ that might be caused by an inadvertent remark or unintended physical contact is perceived to be so high that students are reluctant to put themselves into a position where they might cause offence and suffer the virulent backlash that they see so often coming as a consequence. It is therefore easier to do nothing, to go nowhere and to remain within the confines of their own rooms and their own, known, circle of social media friends.

This is a very sad situation and I have been told that chaplaincies are quieter than ever. These are places where offence is easily given and easily received. They are voluntary. The rewards of attendance and engagement are not overly high in most young people’s reckoning. And so, while levels of one to one engagement, counselling and online activity, is still very high, and perhaps growing, the buildings are practically empty, a shadow of their former selves.

What went through my mind as I listened to this, however, was some of my own experience, many years ago, when I was undertaking church based community work in the isolated and insecure neighbourhoods of East Manchester. I have been trained in community organising in the Chicago school, but always found it difficult to build any sense of community in these neighbourhoods where slums had been cleared, new flats built, and the flats demolished, all in a matter of ten years, leaving small, isolated clusters of housing amidst vast open areas of wasteland. The congregations, within the churches of the area, felt permanently under siege and saw the ‘community’ as the ‘enemy’. My job was simply raising levels of confidence, enabling people to look out beyond their own small worlds to see the bigger picture and to reach out to others.

Part of me thinks, therefore, that much the same has now to happen within our universities, and among our young people. Much of the work that is undertaken so far to meet student mental health issues focuses on the individual, through one to one counselling, or through courses aimed at building personal and individual resilience. I believe that we might have to go back to first principles, however, and begin the process of community building among those who have lost, both the art of socialising, and also the motivation, those who fear meeting and engaging with others. What this might look like I am unsure. I have more listening and engaging to do in order to reflect on that and to see what works. I am very sure, however, that the chaplaincies might be in a really strong position in order to start this work, in a small way at first, but hopefully with increasing confidence over time. I will keep talking and keep listening and see if I have the opportunity to put some of this into action.

Challenging Data and Dominant Discourses in Higher Education

There is a persistent discourse in higher educations, as I am sure there is in many walks of life, that things just ain’t what they used to be. This is in part a nostalgia for a half forgotten ‘golden age’, whenever that might have been. It is also seen in the seemingly ever-present discourse on managerialism, the current state of university leadership which is blamed for all the ills of the sector. What we more rarely reflect on is what exactly it might be that has a changed, and why it is problematic.

The experience of COVID has in very interesting ways provided an opportunity to see some of that change and its consequences in a very stark way. In a very personal sense, it has meant that I have suddenly found myself feeling utterly out of date, particularly in those areas where I would normally claim to be ‘an expert’. That expertise has eluded me, and now I feel that I am out of touch and a new generation is running in an entirely different direction.

When I was at Birmingham University, around ten years ago, I had the privilege of leading in three areas where Birmingham was among the leading institutions in the sector. We established an approach to employability that was referred to at the time as ‘the Birmingham model’ and was copied by several other institutions. I worked hard with colleagues in human resources to transform the culture of Birmingham University, particularly in equality, diversity and inclusion and our approach of working across all characteristics, and across the whole University, are now considered standard practice throughout the sector. Finally, I was among a small group of colleagues who worked, in different ways, to build a new relationship with the community immediately around the University, with the city in general, and with various sectors (education, culture, business) within the city’s economy, what is now referred to as Civic Mission.

Having been at the forefront of the debate, and of action, in each of these three areas of work, I know feel very strongly that the debate has overtaken me, and I am left behind, trying to argue for an older, and often somewhat outdated approach that nobody is really interested in listening to. What is more, in each of these areas, there are many more ‘experts’ who can use contemporary, fashionable language within each discourse and carve a career for themselves as leaders in their field.

So, what has changed? Is it simply that I have been asleep during COVID, too interested and focused on running the university and making sure that we all survived the colossal shift in teaching, student support and work practices, that I have simply missed what has been happening elsewhere? That I am, quite simply, left behind?

I am not sure that that is all that there is to this situation. When I come to look at each of these areas – employability, EDI, and civic mission – I can identify a very similar structure of development, something that must be more than simply the changes of fashion in particular discourses. There are, I would suggest, two – perhaps contradictory – forces at work within each of these areas of work within the university sector.

Data

The first dramatic change has been the use of data. This has been seen across the work of the university from student analytics through to many different areas of human resources. When I was initiating the work in employability and EDI at Birmingham, data was central to our approach. It was the ability to engage with individual schools and departments, programme by programme, about their employability rates that enabled us to bring them on board and to recognise the importance of embedding employability in the curriculum. Likewise, Athena Swann has always had a strong element of data analysis and it was the ability to identify, extract and manipulate the data, not just on gender, but across the protected characteristics, that gave us the lever through which to influence the wider structures and processes of the university. Data is, in both cases, evidence and data was used to support a narrative that was aimed to persuade those who had other priorities to put employability or EDI up there with all the other priorities that needed to be addressed.

The priorities of the University more generally have now changed dramatically. It is not that research and teaching are no longer priorities, they are, but they sit alongside skills development, student mental health, EDI, ethnic minority attainment gaps and civic mission (to mention only a few) as core priorities, and often as key performance indicators of the University. This is in large part due to the fact that the data around these key areas is being collected and the evidence that is generated from this data is being publicised (and compared between institutions in league tables) in a way that is demanding action, if not directly from senior leadership teams, then from those most directly affected, and by the leverage of ‘evidence’ to the senior team.

Discourse

While much of the narrative and discourse around data stresses the idea of evidence led behaviours and decisions, this is, I would suggest, only one half of the change that has occurred. The other element of the change relates much more directly to some of my own research into the role of discourse in religion. It is particularly the concept of ‘discourse’ and Gerd Baumann’s idea of a ‘dominant discourse’ that I would suggest links these two very disparate worlds.

I talked earlier about the rise of experts and one of the changes that has occurred in all the areas that I have mentioned – EDI, civic mission, employability (skills), and others such as student mental health, student analytics and so on – is the growth in the number of people coming forward as ‘experts’, ‘consultants’ and ‘advisors’ to lead the university through the analysis of the data into action, strategic planning and implementation.

What has struck me, however, is how consistent the language of these experts appears to be. It is an accepted position in discourse analysis that ‘expertise’ is identified, in part, by the ability to use a technical language in a defined way that identifies the particular discipline, or area of expertise. There are, therefore, key phrases and jargon language in each of these areas of work that have become not only accepted, but also essential to demonstrate an individual’s understanding of, or expertise in, that field.

What is interesting, however, is that this jargon plays into a wider structure of the discourse such that a specific ‘dominant’ discourse becomes the only way in which to present a subject, a dominant discourse that severely limits what the individual (whether expert or not) can say in that environment. The use of so called ‘woke’ language and values in EDI, especially in debates on race and sexuality or trans issues, is an obvious example, and that particular ‘dominant discourse’ is rooted in a liberal, essentially left wing, sensibility. In relation to the skills agenda however, which is now dominating discourses in employability, or the levelling up debate that has seeped into the discussion on civic mission, then the dominant discourse is more in line with UK government thinking and is essentially right wing in approach (if left and right are still valid distinctions in many of these fields). There is no consistency here, but the presence of a clear dominant discourse that must be spoken, and whose values must be articulated, is a clear feature of all these debates. It is this, I would suggest, that make me most uncomfortable, and makes me, suddenly, feel so terribly out of date.

Contradiction

Finally, therefore, the contradiction. The growth in the use of data suggests openness, especially when linked to the idea of ‘evidence based’ decision making. The growth of dominant discourses, however, with fixed language, values, and expressions, suggests that it is the discourse that is leading the decision, almost irrespective of the evidence. Of course, those who use the discourse will point to data, and to the evidence to support their position. The development of ‘what works’ – building on a pattern that I think originally came from Advance HE’s work on retention – reinforces both the assumption of evidence and the dominant discourse in a particular field. Others have demonstrated that particular actions ‘work’ and they have the data, the evidence, to prove it. So, it is suggested, the dominant position, along with the discourse and the values inherent in that position, are enhanced. But is this necessarily the case.

The problem with a ‘dominant’ discourse is that it is very difficult to speak outside of that discourse and still be heard, however much evidence you might have to support your case. It immediately shuts down debate, not through ‘no platforming’, but simply by the assumption of correctness. The analysis of data very rarely in my experience leads to single answers, or simple solutions. In the hands of an experienced data analysist the data can be allowed to show subtlety, nuance and even surprises, things that go against the dominant discourse. Long term qualitative analysis, listening to life stories, lived experience and the power of individual testimony can often show areas where the data cannot reach. It is not an either/or – data or narrative – it is always a both/and, but it takes more work, more time, and, I would have to say, more openness to really hear what is going on and to challenge the dominant discourses of the field in question, to sustain this position.

So, I suddenly feel out of my depth in areas of work within the university where, at one time, I was among the leaders. I have not kept up with all the new discourses. I do not speak the language of skills, of race, of civic mission, with the fluency of many others who define themselves as ‘experts’. That might not be a bad thing. The new generation will come up with new ideas. Ideas and activities in all these areas moves on and so the world progresses. Yes, but…

It is not just the language, however, but often the values that underpin these new approaches, that I have difficulty with, and which do not match my consistent emphasis on the human. Whether we talk about data, or through data, or whether we use new dominant discourses that are filled with trendy, and often meaning-less, terms and phrases, we almost always manage to lose sight of the real human beings that are the root cause and purpose of these agendas. It is students seeking gainful and fulfilling employment, it is those from a wide range of minority groups (and particularly those who intersect across a range of such groups), it is the people who live around the University and who often feel excluded from it, who need to be put back at the centre of these debates, not data, and certainly not experts.

The Future of Queer

Tasmin Spargo wrote a wonderful little book, back in 1999 tracing the relationship between Michel Foucault’s work and what was then current queer theory. It is an excellent analysis, tracing the positive and negative aspects of Foucault’s work on queer theorists writing at the end of the last century. That, however, was over twenty years ago and queer theory, and what it means to use the word ‘queer’ have moved on considerably. On rereading the book, I was particularly struck by just how dated some of it appeared to be.

So where are we up to with queer? Or, perhaps, more importantly, where does queer go next? What is the future of queer? I am not sure that I, or anybody else for that matter, is really able to answer this question. However, the relating of queer to Foucault, and reflecting on what queer means in the contemporary world, did set off a series of interesting lines of thought.

The first reflection takes me to the debate between essentialism and social constructionism. Foucault was, of course, the prophet of social constructionism. It almost seemed, at the end of the last century, that essentialism was dead and that Foucault’s view, or some version of it, had won the day. That, however, is far from reality, especially in the light of contemporary gender wars.

We all now recognise the distinction between sex and gender, although I still remember a time when even that was controversial. Gender is socially constructed. But what about sex? Gender critical feminists still retain an essentialist line on this, whether they base sex on biology or on legal definitions. What matters is that there is an externally defined, biological, ‘sex’ and that all human beings are either male or female (although even here there is a middle category that is seldom discussed). What is interesting, however, at least to me, is that there appears to be an equally essentialist thread in some trans thinking, especially in the rather glib view that an individual sees themselves as ‘essentially’ of the opposite sex to the one they were born into. Again there appears to be a classification into two categories at this point, male but ‘essentially female, or female but ‘essentially’ male, although the middle ground, those who claim the identity of ‘gender fluid’, is so much larger and apparently growing.

The problem with essentialism, or rather, one problem with essentialism, is that it is so closely linked to classification. It is the attempt to provide clear, non-porous, boundaries to our social categories, whether we accept the category we have been put into or we don’t, that leads to the search for essentialist (external, otherly verified) bases for our classifications. We do this with gender/sex, we still, to some extent, do this with race and we do it with other categories, including disability, religion and sexuality.

Spargo argues, at least in part, that it was a rejection of the category of ‘gay’ that led to explorations of ‘queer’. I remember reading a little yellow book, ‘Anti-Gay’, in the early nineteen nineties, edited by Mark Simpson, and being so excited. I never felt fully comfortable with ‘gay’ stereotypes and this presentation of the idea of being ‘gay’ without having to be ‘gay’ was something that spoke to me. It was out of this ambiguity, and the rejection of the categorisation gay/straight, or even lesbian/straight, that the idea and theory of ‘queer’ emerged.

Spargo tells the story, very succinctly, about how queer theorists cleared a space for themselves within the growing debates around sexuality and gender at the end of the last century. Now queer is itself a contested term, too ambiguous for many, not analytical enough for real theory, and used far too loosely and with very little meaning by so many diverse commentators. It seems to have little content apart from the idea of fluidity and the rejection of the gay/straight:lesbian/straight dichotomies.

It is little wonder, given the vagueness and ambiguous nature of the alternatives, that essentialism is making a comeback. People want something more solid to hold on to. They like order. They crave certainty. Of course, there is more to it than this, especially in relation to gender, where the notion of male violence becomes a central player. In all this, however, queer is getting lost even among those for whom it might appear to be a rather attractive option.

From a personal point of view I am vehemently opposed to categorisation and classification, especially of people. We are each unique, and no matter what identities we may claim, the particular mix that forms our own individuality appears in no other person. I am, therefore, far more on the side of Foucault and social constructionism, but social constructionism has never really been about the individual, or really about identity. We are all more or less male, more or less female, more or less homosexual, more or less straight, etc. We are more or less queer. Classification, categorisation, essentialism, social constructionism, even gay, lesbian, straight, and queer, are terms that have a role in the stories we tell ourselves as a society (and they will also vary from person to person). They have no place in establishing identity. The individual person interacts with other individual persons. Separating the myths (stories) we live by, and our own sense of, and personal expression of, our identity, is, however, a difficult thing to achieve. In all this, despite all this, I do think queer has a place, and it remains a term, a category even, that I am proud to inhabit.

Looking Back to when Religion was Golden

I am currently wading my way through J. G. Frazer’s multi-volume Golden Bough. I always tell my students about the importance of reading the original text, rather than relying on other people’s summaries or even the popular edited versions. So, I am now in the middle of many different examples of May Kings and May Queens and the weddings of the gods to bring fertility on the crops. However, that is not the point I want to make.

On page 123 of volume two Frazer quotes Pliny as saying, ‘the woods were formerly the temples of the deities, and even now simple country folk dedicate a tall tree to a god with the ritual of the olden time’. This simple quote sums up in many ways the message of much of the Golden Bough. All the local European folk customs, the may poles and the various mummer plays etc. are, for Frazer, remnants and reminders of earlier, classical or Celtic rites in which gods were married in rituals that re-enacted the events of heaven, which in their turn are developments of even earlier, and somewhat cruder, magical rites (which are often supposed to include some form of human sacrifice) in which homeopathic magic is enjoined to make the crops, or the cows, or the women, fertile and produce plenty. It is all beautifully written with a wonderful turn of phrase – and blatant racism and colonial privilege – but at its heart is the view that real religion existed only in the past and is now lost to humanity, that it is currently present only in quaint survivals.

Frazer was not, of course, the only nineteenth century writer on religion to think in this way. The idea of the ‘survivals’ as it is more generally used in older forms of religious studies, originates from Tylor who uses the term to refer to remnants of older forms of culture that are still present, but often out of place and drained of their original meaning, in contemporary society. For Tylor survivals can be seen in all aspects of life, not just religion. In the wider discourse, however, it is religion, more than any other areas of culture, that is seen to be the province of the survival.

However, as the quote from Pliny suggest, this view is far from being new, even in the nineteenth century. There is a consistent thread in writing about religion that suggests that real religion was only present in the past, at least in its purest form – ‘the ritual of olden time’ – and the product of more innocent times – ‘simple country folk’. There is a thread of this kind inherent in Christianity that leads reformer after reformer to look back on their particular interpretation of the early church as the epitome of all that is true, and all that is pure, in ‘real’ Christian faith. The fact that we also see this in Pliny, and perhaps in many other writers and traditions, suggests that this is one of those understandings of religion that is not uniquely Christian, or uniquely modern.

What I take from this, however, is a more contemporary reading, and this is perhaps something that I might want to develop further in my book on myth (where, like this blog, I could perhaps relate it to the work of Frazer and his colleagues). We can still find plenty of evidence for a discourse that says religion was better, purer, more prevalent, in the past. However, in a world that does not hold religion in such high esteem there is little incentive to see contemporary religion as particularly corrupt. For much of contemporary society (at least contemporary northern European society) religion has always been corrupt, patriarchal, and extremist. There never was a golden age when it was anything else.

Again, this is not my point, and is perhaps looking at the issue far too narrowly. If the focus is switched to ‘myth’ rather than the wider concept of ‘religion’ then we still instinctively view myth as something that comes from the past. The Greek myths are an obvious, if rather banal, example. But the idea that myth has a hold over society, that people take it seriously, even if they might not have believed it as actual truth, is something that is seen to be true of previous generations, more innocent generations, and something that we have grown out of. Again, Tylor states this explicitly. For Tylor the nineteenth century is the era when poets still allow us to see the potential for believing myth to be true, and science has not yet cut off the older ways of thinking completely, although for Tylor that will happen soon. Tylor, however, is not alone as I am finding in so much of my reading around the idea of myth.

One of the real points of my own book, by deliberately trying to avoid the rarefied concept of ‘myth’ and to talk instead of the ‘story’ or ‘narrative’, is to suggest that this is nonsense, that we still live in a society that is dominated by stories (myths) that we are constantly telling ourselves, primarily in these days through cinema and television, but stories that have a very significant impact on our thought processes and the way in which we structure our lives. These stories are not often recognised by ordinary people as ‘myth’, still less as ‘religion’, but they are, I would suggest, the current form of the ‘religion’ that Frazer sees in the folk customs of nineteenth century Europe, or the woodland rituals of the classical era, or any other form of powerful ritual story telling from any particular place or time in history or from across the world. The idea of a golden age of religion is, of course, itself such a ‘myth’, or it might be if we want it to be, but that is, perhaps, a different story.

Robin and Marion: Reworking Medieval Structures.

While travelling back and forth between Kidderminster and Swansea I listened to a great deal of music and a sizeable proportion of that was medieval music. One CD struck a chord with me and got me thinking. It was a performance of Le Jeu de Robin et de Marion by Adam de la Halle. This is a thirteenth century dramatic work by a French musician, who probably wrote it in Naples and who might have visited London, but only at the very end of his life. Robin and Marion is a romance between a shepherdess and her lovers, that has nothing whatsoever to do with the archer of Sherwood forest except for an uncanny similarity of names.

The first thing this performance gave me, quite unrelated to the music or the text, but building solely on the associations of names, was the possibility of a plot for an opera based (I have to say somewhat loosely) on the life of Robin of Nottingham. This is only the fourth plot for an opera that I have thought through in any detail and that I believe would work on stage. It also provided an opportunity to find a home for an idea I have carried around with me for many years about how to rework the Batman narrative based on the possibility of gay leather culture (and once again the link is solely in the name ‘Robin’, but somehow it seemed to work). I am not going to outline that plot here because, you never know, I might someday actually get around to writing the thing.

My sconed thought was one that I often have when I am listening to music that catches my attention. I wanted to try and work out how it worked, what was going on, how the structures and the sub-structures worked. In practical I wanted to see it written down, to see the music in a visual form so that I could see the patterns that it made on the page and so that I could understand it more fully.

I learnt to read a score at an early age. Both my parents were conductors, of their different choirs or orchestras, and I sought out the scores of works by Shostakovich and Stravinsky that particularly inspired me as a teenager. I loved just working through the score and imagining the sound, or even just looking at the visual impact of the score on the page. It was at this structural level, among the shapes and the lines that I felt that I could really get inside the music. Scores still fascinate me (as do maps for the very same reason) and with medieval music, as with other complex, or unfamiliar, music, such as African drumming for example, I really want to see the shapes it makes on the page, to freeze it into a static image, to fully understand what is happening.

David Fanshawe talks somewhere, in his account of African Sanctus, of going down to the local music library and ordering the score. I am sure these things are now more widely available online if you only know where to look.

The problem, of course, is that the ‘score’ the actual written form of medieval music such as Robin and Marion, while no doubt being both fascinating and beautiful in itself, undoubtedly bears very little resemblance to the performance. As with African drumming the performers bring so much to the final form of the music that any ‘score’ or written version must be a distant shadow of the actual music I am listening to.

What is required, of course, is the expert tuition of somebody who understands how this music works, both the performer and the scholar, somebody who has spent a lifetime getting inside it and understanding the nuances of performance, what is possible and what is not. To fully understand it, of course, I must become that scholar, perhaps even that performer, but that is an almost impossible dream, even more impossible than the possibility of writing an opera based on Robin Hood.

What really fascinates me, however, and what brings these two ideas together, is the possibility of recreating something in the form – I don’t want to use the word ‘style’ – of the original medieval song cycle as the basis for the music in the opera. I love the idea of reworking these ancient forms, and even those of different traditions from around the globe and making them available to modern audiences. Stravinsky and many others have done this, but the results still appear surprisingly classical, albeit that we know instantly that it is ‘modern’, that it is Stravinsky. I dream of going one step further, but I still do not really know enough to be able to make it work.

What this involves, as I conceive it, is to get fully inside the music, to understand its inner workings, the repetitions, the transformations, the constructions, for want of a better word its ‘deep structure’ (as understood by Levi-Strauss and others). Only at that point, when this is fully grasped, would I want to build a new piece drawing on the same structural elements, that worked in the way the original medieval (or other) music worked, but drew on contemporary, or at least entirely original melody and musical forms. This is not, in my own head, about harmony. The reworked piece would have an entirely ‘other’ harmony, a long way perhaps from its medieval original. It might, however, be about ‘mode’ if that is the basis upon which the original is structured. It is fundamentally, however, about structure, and about reworking that structure with new material to make something original. Just as the plot of the opera is about taking the structure, and particular allusions or images, of original and diverse narratives, and reworking them in an entirely different context, without ever loosing the original, to shock and surprise, and I would hope to delight, the contemporary audience. We can but dream….

Backs to the Wall: Learning from Clause 28

There has been a certain amount of discussion in the higher education press recently about legislation passing through several States across the Atlantic that aims to curtail the teaching of critical race theory or particular approaches to trans-gender issues. The response, at least from those on the left, the so-called ‘woke’ community, is, understandably one of horror at what is undoubtedly a curtailment of free speech. From the other side such ideas are seen to undermine society and social order and the cancelling of speakers who speak out against such theories is also seen as a curtailment of free speech.

In this country the UK government is progressing with its legislation on free speech in universities, and the Scottish government is getting into all kinds of trouble in trying to pass legislation around gender identity. Much of this debate is presented in terms of ‘academic freedom’ or ‘free speech’ and both sides are clearly poles apart. It is also seen as part of a wider ‘culture war’ that has been spreading across the US, and beyond that through Canada, Australia, the UK and elsewhere for many years now.

I have heard others say that in the light of the invasion of Ukraine, or the global climate crisis (to take just two examples) such ‘petty’ disputes fade into insignificance. Who can worry about what we can or cannot say about race, or gender, when others are being killed in Russian bombing raids at the heart of Europe and the world is failing to tackle the crisis in our climate that could kill many millions of people?

What comes to my mind when I read of this activity are the campaigns in the 1990s around Clause 28 (introduced into UK legislation in 1988). In this clause the UK government set out to ban the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality in schools. As with many of the debates in the States today around race, and the current debate about gender identity, this also led to the banning of books and a concern about the potential corruption of younger generations, especially children. In the 1990s case a children’s book about a young child who lived with two dads became the subject of concern and negative campaigns. Public libraries and schools were petitioned not to stock the book and shops were picketed in an attempt to make sure it was not distributed.

Clause 28 was a major cause for the gay community, alongside fighting for recognition for AIDS patients, and the two were closely related. It was the presence of AIDS, and its popular image as a ‘gay plague’ that gave the Conservative government the moral cover to impose Clause 28. It was not referred to, in those days, in terms of ‘culture wars’ but, of course, it was exactly the same principle that was at play, and much the same groups that were lined up on either side of the debate. It was a discussion, in theory, about ‘morality’ and ‘protecting children from harm’ but it was, at heart, discrimination pure and simple, enacted in legislation.

Clause 28 was finally repealed in 2003 and the gay community celebrated widely. It was only a few years later that gay marriage was also legalised in the UK, and the gay community gained a range of other rights, bringing inequality for those who identified as lesbian and gay in particular to levels that would have been unimaginable in the 1980s or before. We are now at the stage where Tom Daly and Elton John (to name but two), and their respective husbands and children, are feted by the press and treated as national treasures, beloved of the nation, including many children. This is a very long way from the banning of books about children and their two dads. We can, perhaps, hardly believe that the Clause 28 legislation was ever enacted, or at least, that so many people at the time supported it.

The situation in the United States is clearly very different and far more complex even today. The latest reports are of certain conservative States banning drag shows in public spaces as they are thought to have the potential to corrupt the young. Other countries, of course, still have a very long way to go and racism and homophobia are far from settled even here in the UK.

The learning point in all this, however, is obvious, at least to me (but there will no doubt be many out there who disagree with me). Clause 28 is often seen as the last gasp, the final throw of the dice, from those who held prejudicial views on homosexuality (often derived from their own upbringing). It was an act of desperation by those who saw that society at large, and the younger generation in particular, were rejecting their own understanding of morality and establishing a new order, in which sexual orientation was becoming less of an issue and being gay, lesbian, bi-sexual or whatever was being seen as unremarkable, if not exactly normal.

Is it possible, therefore, that the current banning of teaching around critical race theory and transgender rights in the States, and the opposition to trans rights in the UK, is itself a sign of a desperate, aging, conservative minority (who happen to hold on to power for now) in the face of an inevitable and unstoppable change in society more generally? Will we all be ‘woke’ in ten years’ time? Will we wonder, in twenty years’ time, what all the fuss was about? Probably. Hopefully. It does not, of course, make life any easier for black Americans, or transgender people in the meantime, as life was not at all easy for the gay community in the face of Clause 28. Nor does it mean that we should stop fighting these bigoted views. We are all in the debt of those brave few who challenged Clause 28 in the 1990s.

However, there may be hope on the horizon. If we see these actions, including the debate about free speech, as nothing more than the desperate acts of the prejudiced few who now have their backs against the wall and are thrashing out in one last gasp of outdated values, then we should perhaps be less concerned about the impact of legislation, at least in the long term, while constantly fighting to have it repealed. We should, perhaps, also respond with more understanding to those who find it difficult to change the views that are so entrenched. That will only come through listening, sharing, and speaking out, not by refusing people the right to speak.

Exploring the Idea of Regionalism in Religion

One of the books I read over Christmas was Susan Vogel’s book on the Baule, based on an exhibition at Yale in 1997. It was not so much the art that struck me, or really the ethnographic details of the Baule, although that did illuminate certain elements of our visit to Ivory Coast back in 2019/20. What kept coming back to my mind was the question of regionalism in religion. For some reason this is something that has fixated me for many years and I am still not really sure what my answer is.

Moli masked dancers among the Baule, Cote d’Ivoire (MDS 2019)

What I mean by ‘regionalism in religion’ is the suggestion that religious principles, ideas, rituals etc. have a commonality across a wider area. The question, however, is how wide is that area, and how coherent do the ideas/acts etc. have to be to support the theory.

The principle goes back to my days in studying anthropology at Manchester in the 1980s and early 90s. The emphasis there was on specific cultures. The idea that cultures were fluid and merged into each other at the edges, or that they did not exist as coherent wholes, was part of the mainstream at the time, a reaction against the mosaic of distinct, and collectable, cultures of the previous generation. Fredrik Barth wrote a text about the fluidity and flexibility of culture in the middle east way back in 1969, and other writers were exploring regional ideas in New Guinea, the Pacific more generally and elsewhere. However, comparative analysis was certainly out and the idea that we could talk about wider linguistic or cultural regions was being frowned upon. I am still not sure whether this is an appropriate level in which to do such analysis or not, nor, if I am honest, whether it really matters.

Having travelled extensively in West Africa then the question of regionalism comes back, again raising questions about what kind of ‘region’ matters, and for what purpose. A distinction can be made between Francophone and Anglophone countries of the region, but that, as our latest visit to Ghana showed only too clearly, is very superficial (as is Christian vs Islamic). The traditional subdivision of anthropology is between the coastal peoples, the forest peoples, and the peoples of the savannah, but again that does not really work. My own reflections on religion in this area tend to focus on what is common across the whole region – West Africa – especially in terms of traditional religion, or the base level of thinking about spirits, souls and the like.

Vogel makes some interesting comments on the Baule. These people have traditionally been associated with the wider Akan, with stories that focus on the migration of ancestors from the Akan heartlands in Ghana. However, as Vogel makes clear, there are also stories of indigenous, autochthonous origin based around people who emerged from the earth in the area where the Baule are now based. Add to this traditions/dances that have been bought, or borrowed, from neighbouring, and clearly non-Akan, peoples and the particular mix of rituals, dances and art styles that form the current Baule corpus is a mixture of many different traditions and influences.

So do the Akan, in their wider form, which includes a certain linguistic commonality, form a region that shares a common approach to the spiritual? I don’t really think so. The ‘region’ that I would want to focus on is somewhat larger than this.

Vogel also draws attention to some of the cultural, or religious, principles underlying Baule thought processes. One is the distinction between village and the bush that can be seen across much of the West African region. I have come across this within the Dogon and many other peoples from very different parts of the ‘region’. Associated with this is the populating of the wild spaces, the bush, with amoral spirits and the need either to placate or tame these spirits in ritual, dance and masking. The particular form of these spirits may be very local or have wider application (and can be shared across peoples as Vogel illustrates) but they have a similar and consistent relationship with the humans of the village and are distinct from any kind of ancestor.

Likewise, there is a widespread assumption that the individual not only enters a different world at death, but comes out of that world at birth, and maintains links with that other world throughout their lives. This links to the idea of ancestors, a subgroup of those who pass into the other world, whose particular role can vary considerably, as can the depth of genealogy that is recognised. However, the place and recognition of ancestors in some shape or form is also widespread.

A final commonality is seen in a shared understanding of humans as being essentially both male and female. As Vogel notes, most societies in this area, especially those from further north, see the female part of the male in the foreskin, which is removed at circumcision, and the male part of the female in the clitoris, which is also often removed in traditional societies. For the Baule, however, this is reflected in a different way. Each person is said to have a spirit husband or wife in the other world, who can seek to influence an individual’s life. This spirit spouse then needs to be placated, or otherwise engaged with, most commonly through the commissioning of a statue to which offerings are made. Vogel notes that to her knowledge this view is unique to the Baule although she does say it only became apparent in the 1960s so there may be other societies who share it, but for whom it remains secret.

This leads on to a different kind of commonality, the hidden nature of much of the art, whether masks or statues, and the limited information those outside any one of these societies actually possess. There are so many overlaps here that I can see between the Baule and Dogon, and also know of in Nigerian and other West African societies.

The question remains, however, of whether all these commonalities actually reflect a specific, regional or West African approach to the sacred. There are undoubtedly societies in this region that share few, if any, of these traits, and were that the case then does that automatically negate the theory? The different traits may well have different distributions across the area. The traits form a kind of cluster that often, but not necessarily, come together, and are shared widely across a region, South of the Sahara and from the Atlantic coast in the West to … well where? Or is the distribution somewhat smaller than this. Is the western Atlantic coast different (I know far less about these societies)? Is Nigeria actually a very different region in religious terms? I don’t know, and that is what puzzles me. The West African way of thinking about religion and the spiritual (which consists of far more than the traits specified here) is very different from that of Northern Europe (whether considered traditional or Christian), but does that really tell us anything very significant?

Histories and Futures: A Reflection on the Generations

A new year, a new future. One of the things that struck me most forcefully in 2022 was the thought of my father’s age. On March 7th, 2022, he would have been 95. That is terrifying in so many ways.

My father was the youngest of six children, the only boy after five daughters. His eldest sister was over twenty years older than him and so his father, my grandfather, must have been born in the 1880s. I did know my grandmother, Grannie, as a child, but she must have been in her eighties even then, and she died when I was still young.

Sutton Scarsdale Hall, Derbyshire.

The world my grandparents had been bought up in was so very different from anything we can imagine today. The stories I have been told are almost Downtonesque. My grandfather, and my grandmother, entered service at Sutton Scarsdale in Derbyshire (which was closed, and asset stripped, in 1919). My grandfather was a chauffeur, and so, in the early years of the twentieth century somewhat ahead of the growing technology. I assume my grandmother worked in the kitchens or as a housemaid of some description. This is not a history that I have ever investigated. I am only aware of the stories as told by my aunts, and within those stories there are elements that were not spoken about. Some were dropped into conversation in hushed tones. Others are still gaps.

The earliest story is straight out of Downton Abbey as my grandfather and grandmother had to leave service because she became pregnant with my eldest aunt before they were married. It was clearly a love match, or grew into one, because the marriage lasted forty to fifty years and all the indications I have been given is that this was a happy family. My grandfather went on, eventually, to be chauffeur to Lord Kenning in the 1930s and 40s, a name that was still widely known in the car industry when I was child, but probably forgotten now. He also served in the First World War (we still have the postcards from the front, heavily censored of course) where, it is said, he was among the first to drive tanks. He died when my father was still a teenager, or young adult, but again this is a story that was never told, and I have never found out the circumstances of his death. For many years I had assumed that he had died in the Second World War, but I gather that that was not the case.

You can tell that I am not really into searching out my ancestors despite my love of Who do you Think You Are and similar programmes on TV. My fascination for such programmes, however, is more about the social history, seeing the events of the past through the eyes of individuals who played a part, and the uniqueness of those individual stories, rather than any larger interest in personal origins or my own inheritance.

My partner commented the other day that he felt that living in the contemporary world often felt like somebody born in the late Victorian era living through the 1960s and being confronted with miniskirts and sexual liberation. All the new technologies, global warming, the power of social media, conflicts over trans rights and what it is to be a woman etc. etc. mean that we now live in a very different world from the one in which we were bought up, and he, in particular, feels very much at sea within this new environment. Neither of us is entirely sure how to react and how to engage.

How far is that dislocation over the last sixty years equivalent to the one over the previous sixty years? We have lived through the last sixty years and, on the whole, the changes that we have experienced have been gradual. We did not experience two world wars, which are always said to have radically changed the social structure and values of our nation in the first half of the twentieth century. Nothing of that kind has happened in my lifetime, although the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union was very significant, as was the growth of neo-liberalism, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the economic crash in 2008. All of these have changed the world we live in. More recently that change is speeding up, with the impact of the pandemic and now the war in Ukraine dominating, and changing, our world. Many of the certainties of my childhood and teenage years no longer hold true.

But it is more than this. My grandfather obviously watched, and participated in, a radical change in technology. As a chauffeur he was involved in the changes to cars, and less directly to planes and the impact of the combustion engine. He did not personally live to see the landing of men on the moon in the 1960s, but over his lifetime the technology of transportation, its democratisation, and its impact on trade, on leisure and on society must have been very apparent.

In our lifetimes that change has been within information technology. My mother worked with computers, preparing punch cards, in the 1950s. I took one of the very first ‘O’ levels in computer studies in the late 1970s, working at that time on a single BBC machine within the school. I wrote my PhD on a word processor, the latest technology of the time, and since then I have lost touch with the developments in gaming, personal technology and particularly in social media. Like the combustion engine for my grandfather the impact of information technology on society has been complete and in such a way that nobody could easily have predicted where it would lead. I live in a very different world from the one I was born into.

However, it is the values that have perhaps changed most dramatically, and which my partner was really drawing attention to when he said that he felt out of place within the contemporary world. My grandfather had to leave his job because he and my grandmother were to have a baby. The impact on my grandmother would have been even greater, and while they were married before the baby arrived, and therefore never really had the stigma of a child out of wedlock, the pressures on them both at the time must have been enormous.

I am gay, something that would have been unthinkable to my grandfather’s generation, although only one of my father’s sisters married (something, in part, to do with the post-First World War generation) and two of them lived with close female partners for all their adult lives. The revolutions in sexual politics and the acceptance of homosexuality through the second half of the twentieth century have been something that has been very positive for my partner and myself. But do we understand the younger generation? Can I really make sense of a recent survey that said that over 50% of young people at Oxford University saw themselves as fluid sexually and only a very small percentage as gay/lesbian? Does the level of offence that some of the attitudes that were so normal in my own growing up now cause – about gender, sexuality, race etc. – really sit comfortably? This is a different world, and we can very easily feel alienated and somewhat out of our depth. But somehow, we still make sense of it, and perhaps even celebrate it.

And what of the next fifty years, the lives that our current students are going to experience? Who knows? One thing I am very sure about, however, is that I will not be around to see it. Roll on 2023…

A Sociology of the Story in the Study of Religion

My next writing project is to be a book on ‘myth’. This is part of the wider project to produce a ‘general theory of religion’ that I have been working on since the mid-nineteen-nineties. The overall structure of the project has hardly changed at all, the details of the individual elements continue to develop. At the heart of this project is the place of the story in relation to religion. In my first book, On the Perception of Worship, I outlined how the story plays such significant and central role within the worship of the Baptist Church that I studied, and by implication, in all worship. The essence of the story, I suggested, was that it could convey human experience without having to describe that experience explicitly. The story implicitly says, ‘it was like this …’ and expects the listener/reader to draw on their own experience, empathy, or emotions to communicate the core of the human experience/emotion being conveyed.

Hittite ruins in Eastern Turkey (MDS 2005).

Any standard of theory of religion would be expected, at some point, to engage with the idea of myth (or story), which, alongside ritual, religious experience, symbol, belief, and other elements, is understood to be part of the (Western, Christian) construction of religion. It is almost inevitable, therefore, that in a multi-volume work on the theory of religion, the concept of myth would be touched on, and discussed at length, at some point. That, therefore, is my next project.

After engaging with a series of theories of myth within the literature I am clear that I do not want to distinguish any particular set of stories as ‘myth’. Myth, like ‘religion’, has a Western, although far less obviously Christian, foundation and is not, in my view, particularly helpful in understanding the nature of religion in the world. My emphasis, therefore, will, throughout the new book, be on the ‘story’, and I am happy to include almost any story, or hint of a story, within the compass of my work. This will probably make it far too big and unwieldly to be manageable. However, that is my goal.

The starting point, however, will undoubtedly be the classic theories of myth, and it is in that context that I have been reading various works, classic and other, on myth, just to see what there is out there. The latest of these is Wendy Doniger’s The Implied Spider. I was somewhat frustrated by Doniger’s work at the start, not least because of her deliberately playful use of metaphor (including the implied spider of the title) which I felt distracted from the development of the ideas and appeared to be there just to look clever and well read. However, I soon got used to the rather overblown style and even began to enjoy it.

The other frustration was that for Doniger myth is primarily something that is written down, or perhaps more accurately, all the examples of myth that she draws on (and she does have a very wide definition, that seems to encompass fairy tales as the primary example) are literary. She is a specialist on India and Sanskrit literature, so this is perhaps not surprising. However, it does seem to limit the range and breadth of analysis that is possible.

Where Doniger is interesting, and what is the real focus of this book, is in her defence of the comparative in the study of myth. This is not a fashionable approach and Doniger is clear that she must defend her comparativist approach, both in method and in its underlying assumptions about the universality of the human condition (or of diffusion, that she attempts, but in a much more half-hearted fashion). Given that many of the classic theories of myth are fundamentally comparativist, and it is that comparative approach that has come in for the most sustained criticism, this is both a refreshing read and a powerful defence of what some might see as the indefensible.

The one thing that came out of reading this book for me, however, was a reinforcement of what my own book will be, and what it will not be. Much of Doniger’s approach, and her assumption about why we might be interested in myth in the first place, focuses on meaning, and hence on content, as the key element that needs to be investigated and compared across cultures. She is not naïve about this. Far from it, meaning is multivalent and constantly shifting, always context specific and probably undefinable for any particular telling of a myth/story. It is, however, content/meaning that she is constantly referencing and seeking in her defence of the comparative method.

For me the content, as such, is not that relevant, and hence I have less interest in the comparative, and none at all in its diffusionist version. What interests me is the social context of the story, its place in society and the way in which it acts (not ‘functions’) to mould, or reinforce, or transform social actions. From my perspective, the story is an active player in society, something that I must think through and aim to articulate in a better way than I am managing at this point. It is not as a literary element, or even as a plot or a narrative, that I have a particular interest in stories, it is the sociology of the story that I want to write, a rethinking of myth in a very down to earth, and yet at the same time, utterly transformative fashion. It goes back, in my own mind, to the idea that the story (any story, but equally a well-chosen story, or a story that is plucked from a bank of possible stories) is the means of communicating experience/emotion, that which cannot be spoken, that begins to make the story so important to a wider theory, or understanding, of religion.

Being in the Top One Hundred: and why I will never get there.

Last week I attended what I think was my first live dance event since the end of COVID. It was a performance by the 2 Faced Dance Company at the Taliesin Arts Centre in Swansea. The three pieces were very different, and the final item, Reduxed, which is noted as the companies most successful work to date, was incredible, having real energy and danger as the young dancers threw themselves and each other around the stage. However, it was the first work, The Qualies, that has stuck in my mind. This was based on moves within a tennis tournament was danced to a spoken text, an article by a sports reporter visiting the qualifications round of a major tennis event.

Playing Quidditch on the Meadow at Swansea University 2015 (MDS).

The text was almost as interesting, perhaps even more interesting, than what the dancers were doing on stage. One phrase in particular stuck with me. Towards the beginning of the text, the author asks whether any of us has the possibility of ever being in the top one hundred of anything in the world. The tennis players he is watching are all in the top one hundred, and part of the text focused on just how utterly different this is from the national championship games that he was involved in as a youth. It is a qualitatively different game and while he considered himself a good tennis player, he was never, ever at this standard. On the other hand, these qualifiers, however good they might appear to be, had very little hope of breaking into the real championships, there was another qualitative leap from this, albeit the top one hundred, and the really famous, celebrity, tennis circuit.

This set me thinking. Is there anything that I could be said to be in top one hundred in the world for? I might be considered among the top one hundred sociologists of religion in the world. That is certainly a possibility, but I am conscious that the sociology of religion has moved on since I last wrote anything or attended an international conference, and many people may have forgotten that I exist. Swansea University is not among the top one hundred universities in the world, and probably never will be, although we recognise that we really should be higher than the top 300-400 which is where we are currently positioned. This probably means that I could not be considered among the top one hundred PVC Education in the world. And, quite frankly, I cannot think of any other context in which I could sensibly be considered among the top one hundred in the world.

What this led me to contemplate, however, is what it takes to be among those top one hundred, and why my own chances are probably very limited. It also relates, in a less direct way, to what it might take to get one of the top one hundred leadership roles in the UK Higher Education sector.

At one level I would, of course, need to demonstrate innate talent, experience, ability, personality and so on. I am going to take it for granted that I have all those, especially when it comes to the ability to run a University (I clearly do not have what it takes to be among the top one hundred public intellectuals, novelists, composers or whatever else I might dream of being among the top one hundred in, but I do at least have a chance of being top one hundred in University leadership).

Given the innate talent etc., there are still four other elements where I think I lack what it really takes to be in the top one hundred: Focus, Networking, Self-Promotion, Selfishness or Self-Centredness.

I have never been good at focus. I have always tried to do too much. The fact that this blog series is framed as a quartet says that I cannot easily focus on one thing. I do not have obsessions and I have never gone out of my way to make myself the best in one field at the expense of all other interests and concerns. I have often thought about whether I should concentrate on one activity, or one agenda, and become a recognised ‘expert’ in that. That might be urban religion in my academic work, civic mission, EDI or student voice in my role as PVC education, or perhaps as a writer or artist of some other kind, leaving the academic and the university roles behind. I can dream, but when it comes down to it, I have too many interests, far too many interests for my own good, and I find it very difficult to focus, to concentrate on one and say ‘no’ to the others. I end up being a jack of all trades and a master of none (to use what now seems a very sexist phrase) and I end up not being known more widely for anything in particular. That will never help me become the top one hundred at anything.

Networking is something that I know I am not very good at. The idea of meeting up with, and initiating conversations with, other people, especially if it is simply for the purpose of ‘getting on’, is something that I find very difficult. This is the one area where I have worked most systematically through coaching and otherwise, and I have improved. I can do it, but it is so much hard work. It goes against my natural shyness, or latent asperges, I really do not enjoy it. Being online does not help. Cold calling by email, even to seek help from others, is something I continually put off and need to psych myself up to do. This is a real handicap, but in the contemporary world, you need to be known in the right networks if you are ever going to advance within any of those networks, that is to become one of the top one hundred in the world within those networks.

This factor is closely related to ‘self-promotion’, but the two are not the same. You can promote yourself, get your name out there, let others know about your existence and achievements, ideas, hopes and dreams, without ever networking. The same factors, however, limit my motivation to do either. I am not sure which comes first, a real distaste for self-promotion, or a significant fear of engaging with others. Ironically this blog, and other similar techniques, are part of my own attempt to overcome that drive against self-promotion. I am doing this on my own terms, and I am, perhaps, convincing myself that there is nobody out there who is reading this stuff. However, you are never going to be in the top one hundred in the world if nobody else knows who you are and what you can achieve. And, quite frankly, in today’s world nobody is ever going to know that unless you tell them yourself. Reputation in the social media world is self-built, you simply cannot rely on others, or the wider grapevine, to do this for you. That is one thing I have learnt very clearly.

So that brings me to ‘selfishness’. I guess the real term I should use here is the more morally acceptable ‘self-centeredness’. If you want to be in the top one hundred you must put yourself first, sell yourself certainly, but also focus, single-mindedly, on that attribute that you want to be recognised for, and, by implication, ignore all calls to help others. As noted in the previous blog, that is not my style. I will always credit others with their achievements. I will always help other to grow, to develop and to flourish. I will always put others before myself unless I am part of an application or interview process, where such activity really does not work, and that, in the aim to be top one hundred, is clearly a failing.

Perhaps, in the end, other things are more important than being in the top one hundred. Perhaps I have also been in higher education too long if I am consistently asking myself if I need to be better in this or that league table. Perhaps I should be asking a different question.