Pod Academy

For half a century Professor Ted Robert Gurr has conducted social science research and theorised about the causes and consequences of organised political rebellion and protest.

His latest book, Political Rebellion Causes Outcomes and Alternatives is a collection of essays looking at how and why, and to what effect, millions of people - from the Castro-inspired revolutionary movements of Latin America in the 1960s to Yugoslavia’s dissolution in ethno-national wars of the 1990s, and the popular revolts of the Arab Spring - have risked their lives by participating in protests and rebellions.

In this interview with Professor Gurr, Pod Academy's Craig Barfoot explores

In which political systems are rebellions likely to be successful and in which are they likely to be unsuccessful

How effective are protest movements as alternatives to rebellions and terrorism?

What public and international responses lead away from violence and toward reforms?

Political Rebellion: Causes Outcomes and Alternatives is published by Routledge

Has the world of commerce encroached irrevocably on our civic spaces, and how much do we care?

Civic Workshop is asking that question and looking at ways to reframe our everyday local experiences with an awareness of our collective social and political future.

A key part of Civic Workshop is the new Civic Radio. We are hoping to cover a lot of their output here on Pod Academy - take a listen to this first podcast in which Jo Barratt talks to writer and urbanist Adam Greenfield @agpublic about a new vision for the civic.  How much is civic exclusion growing because of what participation demands or expects of us?

Civic Radio will be on the road, seeking out the people and organisations that are exploring these topics in different ways.

http://www.civicworkshop.city/blog/2015/2/10/civic-radio-episode-01

For many British families au pairs are the only workable solution to the ‘childcare crisis’. But au pairs are only 'affordable' because their work is not recognised and their poor conditions are justified through discourses of cultural exchange and adventure.

Researchers Dr Rosie Cox, Reader in Geography and Gender Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, and Dr Nicky Busch of the Foundation for International Education have been looking into the ‘perfect storm’ of long working hours, high childcare costs, the cultural devaluing of reproductive labour and the availability of a large, low-waged labour force from other EU countries which make the UK home to about 90,000 au pairs at any one time.

Au pairing is a significant form of low-paid domestic labour that is depended upon by tens of thousands of households in order to balance the demands of work and family life.  The seminar from which this podcast is drawn reported on findings from the two-year  ESRC funded Au Pair research project.

The research project brings together two important issues for contemporary society – women’s changing relationship to the home and paid work and the growth in labour migration. The project worked with au pairs and host families, stakeholders in the sector and collected data from 1000 advertisements for au pair posts in order to understand what au pairing is in contemporary Britain.

Another speaker at the seminar was Bridget Anderson, Professor of Migration and Citizenship and Deputy Director of the Centre for Migration, Policy and Society at the University of Oxford who looked at the way migration is changing how the family performs its role in social reproduction.

 

A full recording of this fascinating seminar, by Backdoor Broadcasting, can be found here.

What exactly is money?

Craig Barfoot spoke to Nigel Dodd, Professor of Sociology at LSE and author of The Social Life of Money, to find out.

Nigel Dodd:  We usually think of money as notes and coins, or even gold.  But, in fact, it mostly takes the form of claims made through the banking system, mediated by plastic cards!  Money has a dynamic quality – it is more like a verb than a noun.

Money is claims that move between people, and it is that movement that sustains its value. It has value not because it has intrinsic qualities, but because of the series of relationships it is part of.  For example, you accept euros or pounds or dollars or yen in return for your work, and you then exchange them for goods and services.

In other words, money is what it does rather than what it is.

 

 

Craig Barfoot: So is it about trust?

ND: Money is partly about trust. We want to trust that the money in our pocket will retain its value. We don’t want to be worrying about money, indeed as soon as we do it means money is in trouble eg in periods of hyperinflation.  As soon as it is under threat, we start thinking about it, which we don’t normally do.  If you ask people in Britain, for example, if they want to join the euro, you find out all sorts of things about the assumptions people make and the way they think about their money – it means something to do with values, history, culture etc.

CB:  One idea is that money is a claim on society

ND: David Frisby, translator of Georg Simmel's The Philosophy of Money, reminded me that my book was about money, not banking!  And he was right, what we had witnessed in 2008-9 was a financial crisis, and that was not the same as a crisis about money.  Money is not the same as finance, it is not reduceable to the banking system.

I saw this banner at the occupy movement rally in Paternoster Square which said, ‘We are the true currency’.  And I remember thinking, ‘that is really interesting, what is being suggested here is that there is a representation of money which is much closer to our core humanity, or communality, our sociality.’  It is not the state or wall street or the banks  – money is us, it isn’t the banks, we need to reclaim it.

Money is a claim upon society – we have a generalised claim that we can levy on anyone else.  We can exchange the money for goods.  With any payment community – the European Union, UK, or in Bristol, the Bristol pound.

Money is a claim on social life.  Each chapter in my book is an iteration of Georg Simmel's idea of money as 'a claim on society'.

CB:  You talk about monies – not money, but surely I have just one currency, euros.

ND: Air miles, euros, pounds, store cards, the Brixton pound, Bitcoin, local currencies emerging in Greece – they are all forms of money.

And what is more, the way we pay is changing.  Soon we will all be paying with our mobile phones.  And that means participating in payments networks that aren’t connected to the banking system, such as ApplePay.

CB: So can anyone start their own currency?

ND: Yes, but that was not always the case.  In Austria in 1920s, a town launched a successful currency, and several others started up, but that was stopped by an Austrian law.  However, in most countries you can, though you obviously have to go through certain regulatory rules, eg the Bristol pound is backed by pound sterling.  What is happening is that smaller and smaller groups are establishing their own money for certain things – that is exciting

CB: Control of money supply is control of power.  Why are governments prepared to allow others to start their own currency?

ND: This is about the end of the national monopoly over the production of money,

On Friday 7th November 2014, Manchester Metropolitan University and the Centre for the Study of Football and its Communities hosted a conference entitled ‘Football and Culture 2014.’ The event aimed to explore the relationship and interaction between football and wider forms of cultural representation, with papers exploring topics as diverse as fanzines, commemorative statues, fictional representations of the game, and emerging online phenomena. Pod Academy’s Christopher Daley was the co-organiser of the event and he managed to find time to conduct a series of interviews with some of the speakers. Below you can find further information about each of the speakers featured in the above podcast.

David Goldblatt

Conference paper: England is Paradise? The Meaning of Football since Thatcherism

David Goldblatt is a writer, academic and broadcaster. He has published widely on world football and his new book, The Game of Our Lives: The Meaning and Making of English Football, explores the recent history of the English game. In the podcast he discusses some of the themes in his new work, whilst also touching upon the specific transformations within the sport since the reign of Margaret Thatcher and the establishment of the English Premier League in 1992.

David Webber

Conference paper: Karl Polanyi and the Cultural ‘Everyday’ Political Economy of English Football

David Webber is a Lecturer in Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick and spoke at both the conference and to Pod Academy about the work of the political economist Karl Polanyi and how his ideas might be applied to a critical analysis of the everyday experience of watching and following football.

Joel Rookwood

Joel is a Senior Lecturer in Sport Management at Liverpool Hope University. At the conference he screened his short film Rio: Football and Favelas, which was followed by an informative talk. He spoke to Pod Academy about his time in Brazil and his experience of visiting a favela in Rio during the 2014 World Cup.

You can watch Joel’s film here.

Ronnie Close

Conference paper: Filming Sublime Conflict in Contemporary Football

Ronnie Close is an artist and filmmaker and he treated the conference to a screening of his most recent film, Serious Games, which also focused on the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Ronnie spoke to us about this recent project but also touched upon his broader reasons for selecting football as the focal point for many of his films.

You can see clips from Ronnie’s films through his website, which can be found here.

For further information about this event, visit the Football and Culture webpage.

Pod Academy has a podcast on Racism in the Beautiful Game in which Mark Doidge of the University of Brighton talks to Alex Burd.

Here at Pod Academy we are convinced that podcasting is a great way to get research out to a wide audience, to make an impact.

If you'd like to try your hand at making a podcast, here are some tips to help you, they came out of a course we ran for our volunteer producers.  And take a listen to the podcast above  - it demonstrates a number of different approaches you might take.

Preparation

Preparation 1: Preparing around the CONTENT

What are you trying to achieve?

First of all decide, what are your objectives for the podcast.  Of course two of your principal objectives will be:

To make people care about the subject

To entertain

But you may have other objectives, such as: –

To get the audience to see the relevance for themselves of this research

To help your audience understand something complex

To inform them about something new in the field

To introduce them to something quirky they may not know about

It may be that your objectives span all or none of these, but whatever you are aiming to achieve, be clear about it from the outset as this will help in your preparation and will inevitably influence the questions you ask, the tone, the writing and the editing.

What is the story? Why should we care?

This American Life’s Alex Blumberg says you should be able to pitch a story in this way:

I want to make a podcast about…..

It’s important because…..

According to Alex this simple formula will give you the story.  Other people talk about this as ‘the angle’ of your podcast.   It is certainly an essential stage to go through in the preparation for your podcast.

To decide what is the angle, have a preparatory conversation with the academic whose research you are covering and really pin him/her down on the following questions:

Why is your research/your work/your book important?

What is the significance of your research/this area of study/your work?

We hear a lot about……….these days – how does your research relate to that?

What is your big idea? What is the take-home message of your research/your work/your book? What is the story?

What is ground breaking about it?

Why should the audience care about your research?

If it were a newspaper article, what would the headline be?

Remember, one way of finding the angle is to see if there is an ‘est’ word associated with the research – the first, the best, the worst, the biggest, the smallest, the most, the last etc. Ask the academic.

After that conversation, think about it yourself.  Decide:  What is this podcast about?

The audience

Part of your preparation should be to think about your audience and what would interest them.  Pod Academy has a broad audience, but it is helpful to imagine just one listener, because then you are more likely to make an appealing podcast, that works as a communication from one person to another.  Try this listener:

A bright, engaged 28year old who is prepared to listen to and maybe even sign up with Charity street fundraisers, who probably plays or watches a bit of sport, has good friends who he/she values, has a favourite soap opera, and listens to an eclectic range of music. Importantly, has a 40 minute commute to work, during which time they listen to podcasts.

How can you engage/entertain/inform this listener?

 

Chunking the content

Think of your content in 4 chunks (note: they might not divide up as neatly as this suggests – for example, in the interview you might ask some of the more detailed questions in Chunk 4 when you are on chunk 3 about the significance of the research.)

In the next couple of weeks, Greece will elect a new government and according to the polls, the emerging Syriza party could form that government.  They are calling for an end to austerity measures and their Marxist Communist roots are causing quite a bit of concern in the wider Europe.  Greece, austerity and the European Monetary Union are a heady mix!

But regardless of who wins this election, Greece faces substantial problems. Among them, a huge, and growing, public debt.

Craig Barfoot spoke to Greek economist Dr Yiannis Kitromilides, an Associate Member of the Cambridge Centre for Economic and Public Policy, Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge, about the current situation and the position of Greece within the European Monetary Union (EMU).

He started by asking Dr Kitromilides  to comment on the repeated narrative that high public spending and widespread tax evasion, combined with the credit crunch, were the causes of Greece’s problems.

Yiannis Kitromilides:  This narrative is correct.  There was widespread tax evasion, and avoidance. There is tax avoidance in most countries, but there was tax evasion on a large scale in Greece; there was corruption; an overblown public sector (politicians were creating jobs in the public sector and employing their supporters, even in key positions).

Craig Barfoot:  so where are we now?

YK: The current economic situation in Greece is best compared to the economic situation in the US in the 1930s.  Since 2009 the economy has lost 25% of its output, they are 25% poorer, unemployment is 25%, youth unemployment is about 60% and the prospects of growth are – as in the wider Eurozone – quite bleak.  And yet the debt, the original form of the problem, is increasing.

So, after five years of sacrificing all this output the prospects are bleak.

CB: When we talk about austerity measures specifically for Greece, what was implemented?

YK: Austerity measures are those measure imposed in order to produce a balance in the annual budget.  The reason you owe money is that you are spending more than you’re earning, so if you are an individual who wants to avoid insolvency the only way to get out of it is to cut down on your spending and increase your income.

If you apply this to governments, it means cutting government spending and increasing taxes, as in Greece.

CB:  That sounds reasonable….

YK: But this is a process that many economists believe to be counterproductive. If you are trying to pay your debts as a country, you must not look at the solution for an individual family.  It is what the economists call the ‘fallacy of composition’ - what is true for the part is not always true for the whole.

This is something that has a long history in economic thought going back to the 1930s, when Keynes argued along similar lines about what needed to be done to deal with the 1930s depression in the UK and USA.  That if you are in a bad situation economicallhy, the solution is not to act in the same way as a family in economic difficulties (ie to impose austerity), but rather to do the opposite.

It sounds paradoxical and counter intuitive, but some people say this is what needed to be done, not only in Greece but also in other indebted economies.  By trying to solve the problem of indebtedness by austerity, you are making the problem worse.

CB:  Who does Greece owe its debt to?

YK: Not to the European banks, though they were the original lenders, but rather to international institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Central Bank (ECB) - which means Greece owes money to the other members of the Monetary Union.

Syriza is asking them to cut the debt by 50% - to forgive 50%.  The other 50% they say they will repay as soon as...

'Water wars' used to seem like the stuff of science fiction.  But water poverty is creating major geopolitical upheaval right now in the real world.  It contributed to the Arab Spring in Egypt, and to the growth of ISIS in Syria argues Dr Karen Piper, who teaches post colonial studies and English and is adjunct professor of geography at the University of Missouri.

In this conversation with Pod Academy's Craig Barfoot, about her extensively researched book, The Price of Thirst: Global Water Inequality and the Coming Chaos   Dr Piper paints a disturbing picture of the world's journey towards the 'coming chaos' -  including dams that dessicate neighbouring countries and an International Monetary Fund that insists on developing countries handing over their water to multinational corporations who make a profit from drought.

The UN has declared access to clean drinking water to be a human right, but can do little to enforce that right. Karen Piper says that is was scary in conducting her research, to talk to climate scientists, and to see the droughts and coastal erosion and species moving.  But, she says, she met dedicated activists, and her hope is that people can make the change.

Picture of water droplets by Matt Newman

If you have seen the film, Pride, about the involvement of lesbian and gay activists in the UK miners' strike of the 1980s - or even if you haven't - you will find this discussion that took place at Birkbeck, University  of London, hosted by  BiGS (Birkbeck Gender & Sexuality) and The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities  fascinating.

The event was called Pits and Perverts Revisited, a reference to the benefit ball organised by LGSM (Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners), at which the line up included Bronski Beat.

The discussion starts with the making of the film and goes on to look at the politics of the Thatcher era when, as Mike Jackson says, you had to be a "very brave person indeed" to declare your homosexuality.  It explores the legacy of the Miners strike and the relevance of LGSM to today.

The first section brings together Mike Jackson and Sian James MP, both active in the strike and featured in Pride.  It is chaired by Daniel Monk.

In the second part of the event,Diarmaid Kelliher of Glasgow University focuses on the politics of the 1970s and 1980s and explores the culture of solidarity that was so important in the strike and beyond.

In the final section, Bev Skeggs, Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London 'commits a sociology' as she considers the 'enemies within'.

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A couple of years ago, we carried a blog by Chris Creegan which also considered the legacy of that period (Margaret Thatcher had just died). It carried a picture of Chris's copy of the Pits and Perverts poster, one of the few still in existence, and reflected on Chris's own experience as a gay trade unionist and how Thatcher's triumph on the economic front contributed to her defeat in the social arena.

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One of the most moving parts of the film Pride was Bronwen Lewis singing Bread and Roses - and here it is......

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiiKgST_G2Q

It is a hundred years since the start of the first world war, and this Christmas marks the 100th anniversary of the Christmas Truce - the soldiers' truce - in that war.

Our special Christmas podcast is introduced by Stephen Sedley, former Appeal Court Judge and Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Law at Oxford University, who, nearly 50 years ago, recorded the interview with Frank Austin, which is at the heart of this podcast.  Frank was a 21 year old soldier when he took part in the 1914 Christmas Truce.

Stephen Sedley:  Frank Austin was a Fleet Street compositor in the days when newspapers were set in hot metal.  He was born in 1893 and was still an apprentice when he signed up in 1914 without a second thought, after all, everyone knew the war would be over by Christmas....

In 1966, in his sitting room in Edgeware, Middlesex, I recorded some of Frank's memories of a conflict that, by pure good fortune, he survived - one of fewer than 30 known     survivors of an entire regiment. But on the first Christmas day of the war, Frank had both witnessed and taken part in one of the most  significant and dramatic events in the history of warfare.  As he reflects in this recording, in that brief moment of time, the troops could have stopped the war.

This is the account he gave me half a century later.

Frank Austin:  A day or two before Christmas, we were given Princess Mary's Golden Gift Box.  It was flat, gilt, and there were cigarettes on one side and pipe tobacco on the other and also a photo of Princess Mary, as she then was.

Princess Mary Golden Gift Box

On Christmas day, dawn broke.  And not a shot was fired.

A little further down to the right we saw a white flag flying.  And several Germans came out, very slowly, and one officer was waving a white handkerchief.  We could see that there was a sort of ........armistice?

They were very friendly. We gave them some of our rum, or rather our sergeant did, and we had some of their schnapps.  I can't remember what they gave us to eat.  I handed out one or two tins of Maconochie's M&V  [Meat and Veg] ration. I don't know what they thought of the bully beef others gave them!

I remember sitting on a log - there were two Germans and my own sergeant as well - and they showed me their photographs of their wives and children.  One of them could speak English very well - he'd been a student and had had a job in the West End for some time.  He seemed to be politically conscious, because he asked the sergeant, I remember this very well, if he knew why we were fighting.   And of course we had no more idea than that we thought it was the right thing to be doing.

This business went on all day, and a good many of us got rather drunk and they were actually in our trenches, and some of our lads (I didn't go myself) went up to their dug outs - I don't know what they got up to!

There was football, I don't know whether it was a real football, or simply a lot of newspapers tied up with string (some said one thing and some the other), I didn't actually see it.  There was a game, on a flat piece of ground  between the trenches, with two piles of grey uniforms and two piles of khaki uniforms - and some sort of a ragtime game was arrived at.

It seems incredible looking back on it.

It must have worried the General Staff a whole lot.  Because when the dawn broke the following day, the Germans didn't come out of their line at first on Boxing Day morning, but to our surprise we heard the rattle of machine guns further off to our right.  I have heard that the Staff sent up a battalion of the Guards to open fire, and of course once the machine guns started up the battle was on once more.  As far as I was concerned that was the end of the Christmas celebrations.