Pod Academy

This is the second in our series based on Rod Stoneman's book, Seeing is Believing: the Politics of the Visual. In the podcast, Rod analyses the subculture of graffiti and its social and political significance, using this Banksy graffito in Cleveland Street London W1 as his jumping off point.

The podcast is produced and presented by Esther Gaytan Fuertes.

Rod Stoneman: This image is a photograph taken in a central London street and it shows a graffito made by Banksy. The original starting point for street art and for graffiti —obviously there are precedents in ancient cultures in different times and different places, quite apart from Pompeii and Herculaneum and Greek cities in Western civilisations, it’s not just a phenomenon of the West, one could even look further afield to Mexico, where contemporary political graffiti stencilled in Oaxaca, for example, since in 2006 when there there was a teachers’ strike, connects with the mural painting of the 1920s and 30s when politicised painters worked on art that would be more open and accessible because it was painted on walls, Riviera and Siqueiros being two of the leading ones, and perhaps even there’s resonance before that in Mexico with other civilisations, the Mexica or the Mayan civilisations used highly coloured paint on some of their wall decoration. So its most current versions in the last fifty years, tagging and subway graffiti in New York and painting in the street in Los Angeles, have spread through to most cities in the world.

Politicised use of graffiti is perhaps a narrower tradition but still an interesting development from, say, an Australian group in the seventies called with the marvellous title BUGA UP which was an acronym standing for Billboard Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions, and they devised kind of long poles that could be used to take a spray can 10 or 15 up a billboard to make modifications that changed it. May’68 in Paris was obviously an explosion of art in a very imaginative and engaged way.

'Paris May '68'It is forbidden to forbid'

Perhaps one should also remember the troubles in Northern Ireland with the mural work that’s taken place there.

Belfast mural

So these different and diverse moments of politicised street art come through to contemporary subvertisement, as a neologism to talk about what the French situationists might have called détournement, taking an original image and changing it by word or visual modification. And they all show potential for counteraction, potential for an alternative and indeed more democratic two-way communication. There is a word for communication studies that is, the phatic, which is about opening a channel of communication where you pick up a phone and say, ‘are you there?’ and ‘yes, I can hear you’ and that’s the beginning of a conversation. That’s perhaps the most hopeful and optimistic dimension of graffiti in its various forms at the moment that suggests that the visual landscape that we encounter in cities does not have to be dominated —well, after architecture— by publicity and advertising, that actually artists and young people more generally can make visual material which has the power to make people think, reconsider, change and respond a more open process.

Empty advertsing billboard

If you want to know more about the politics of the visual, here is another in the series -

Seeing is Believing 1: The language of fashion

Seeing is Believing: The politics of the visual is published by Black Dog (UK £19.95, US £29.95) It explores the complex and reciprocal dynamic between world and image in this most visually mediated society. Everyone ‘knows’ images can be false or deceptive, but we all live and work in constant denial of this idea and its implications. In a world saturatedwith media we act as though we are immune to their eff...

What does an image tell us about the reality it represents?

Rod Stonemanʼs latest book, Seeing is Believing: the Politics of the Visual, explores the relationship between world and image in our visually mediated society. In this series, produced and presented by Pod Academy's Esther Gaytan-Fuertes, Rod Stoneman talks about some of the images analysed in his book.

In this first instalment of the series, he examines the language of fashion.

Rod Stoneman: This photograph is quite extraordinary in many ways. It comes from a

magazine called Glamour, Glamour Magazine and it represents a young woman in a vivid

red cardigan, I think, well I imagine itʼd be cashmere and sheʼs over intently reading a book

by V.I. Lenin called The State and Revolution. It opens a whole series of questions about

the relationship of fashion to the image system.

One can say that the world of art thatʼs included in the domain of art within the image system has been widened and the boundaries are soft and inclusive —one probably can thank Marcel Duchamp for that, the ready made and some of his other contributions began to question and open the boundaries of the domain of art. Certainly by the XXI century many museums actually combine art and architecture or craft and art and also specific exhibitions may address fashion or food or even advertising.

It somewhat integrates the domain of the commodity economy in art and to take fashion as an example of that. Fashion obviously extends back historically to all known forms of human history and society and was analysed in a more structural and rigorous way, I think, first by Roland Barthes who 1967 published a book in France called The Fashion System. He was just looking at verbal discourse and the way that it worked in the industry of fashion, but actually his approach can also work for visual representation. And there are many Fashion Studies courses in different colleges at the moment, the question is how critical they are, to what extent they perpetuate the fashion industry without deeper analysis and thought, to what extent they might begin to open up the political economy of fashion, the basic economy of fashion.

I remember a strange moment when, quite a while ago, I was walking near Postbridge in Dartmoor, in Devon (South West of England) and encountered a farmer who was shearing all his sheep on that summer afternoon. And he explained that each fleece would be paid at £1 and the sheep takes a year to grow wool. And actually,

coincidentally that thick fleece would produce enough wool for one sweater that Benetton

would be selling for about £80. There was a kind of epiphany with an extraordinary

disparity of relationship of 80 to 1 between the cost of the original raw material and the

eventual consumer price of the finished garment, after manufacture, marketing and

distribution.

So thatʼs a dimension of fashion which is crucial; another one might be or could be

called the libido of economy, the economy of the body. How fashion is part of a visual

system that affects people and unleashed eating disorders such as anorexia... you know,

thatʼs being well debated recently and Kate Moss, a model, was famous for her succinct

phrase, ʻNothing tastes as good as skinny feelsʼ. All of these factors carry fashion in to an

effect on social and economic structure and in fact, that effect is created with increased

speed as people are affected by and respond to the fashion system and buy new

garments on a increasingly speedy basis. The average purchase of garments in America

by young people in 1991 was 33 a year, by 2006 that had risen to 69. And actually we

donʼt have more living space to store or to keep so I guess the immediate obsolescence leads to clothes being discarded mor...

Podcast produced and presented by Jo Barratt.

"No human sense is more neglected in ethnographic museums than sound".  The  Reel to Real project at the Pitt Rivers Museum seeks to redress the balance by making available, both in and beyond the museum space itself, the important sound collections donated to the museum over the past 100 years.

In this podcast, the second in our Pitt Rivers series, Jo Barratt and Sarah Winkler Reid from the University of Bristol talk to ethnomusicologist, Dr Noel Lobley about the hundreds of hours of historically important and rare ethnographic sound held in storage in the museum, much of it known only to a handful of scholars. These sound recordings – which range from children’s songs in Britain to music from South America and the South Pacific, and from improvised water drumming to the sound of rare earth bows in the rainforests of the Central African Republic – have been preserved but until the Real to Real project have remained unavailable to members of the public, teachers, students, or to the communities from which the sound originates.

Listen here to the first podcast, Louis Sarno and the BayAka

Note:  The Reel to Real archive is being made available via SoundCloud

Transcript

Welcome to the Pitt Rivers museum at the University of Oxford. This is Pod Academy and I'm Jo Barrett. We're here for a series looking at the ethnographic sound archive at the museum. This episode is going to look in detail at the Reel to Real project and the work being done to make the most of an unappreciated resource. We also hear how sound can contribute to the overall museum experience. Noel Lobley is going to be an ever-present voice in this series as he guides us through several aspects of his work in ethnomusicology and sound archive.

Noel Lobley: My name is Noel Lobley. I work here at the Pitt Rivers museum as an ethnomusicologist. I deal with a lot of the music and sound collections. For the last 18 months or so a lot of my time has been devoted to developing the sound archive. Pulling it out of storage and getting it digitised, heard and available. Also programming events to engage different audiences with the sound collections that we have here.

JB: You will also hear from Sarah Winkler-Reid an anthropologist from the University of Bristol.  Who joined Noel and I in Oxford. For those of you who do not know about the museum, here is Noel to tell us about his place of work.

 

NL: The Pitt Rivers Museum is the University of Oxford's museum of anthropology and world archaeology it's got wonderful ethnographic galleries that are absolutely crammed with hundreds and thousands of objects from cultures all over the world. Some pre-historic, some modern. It was established by General Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt Rivers who donated his collection here and has been curated here since [sic] 1884.

 

Henry Balfour was the first curator here, he was a polymath, he was ahead of his time. He was interested in decorative art, sound and music which started the collection of sound here which has been happening for over 100 years. There are photographic, manuscript and massive object collections. What you see in the galleries are used as research, teaching resources, and to engage the general public, such as children and schools. It is a very family friendly museum, it has won awards for being accessible to children. We have our own education department here. It's a varied and diverse museum, but it is a part of Oxford University.

JB: Noel is here to talk to us about the Reel to Real project which is the focus of this episode. I asked him to sum up the project in one sentence.

NL: Reel to Real is giving the Pitt Rivers' museum sound collection a voice. Reel to Real is a project designed to digitise,

Nic Dawes [@NicDawes]  (until last month editor of South Africa’s Mail and Guardian newspaper) has a formidable reputation as an investigative journalist and campaigner for press freedom.  His last 2 years at the Mail and Guardian have been marked by tough struggles between leading South African journalists and the South African government,

As he prepared for a new challenge at the Hindustan Times in India, he talked to Rachael Jolley, Editor of Index on Censorship magazine about the importance of social media, which he said ‘outsources part of the editing function to the wider community’,  the moves by the ANC to put in place a Media Appeal Tribunal with political appointees, a secrecy bill that would have made it almost impossible for the public or the media to uncover evidence about corruption or to protect whistleblowers, and the way the Marikana Mine massacre eventually hit the headlines, though the Mail and Guardian had covered the appalling conditions at the mine a year earlier.

Despite his concerns, he says that the threats to press freedom in South Africa must be seen in an international context of growing use and abuse of secrecy legislation including in those established democracies like the US, and UK and Canada – this is emphatically not just a South Africal problem.

A full article by Rachael Jolley drawn from the interview, Mandela's legacy too easily dismissed is to be found in the current edition of Index on Censorship

This is the first of a two part series in which Pod Academy's Paul Brister looks at the fundamentally new approach the UN appears to be taking to the crisis in the Kivu provinces in the East of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In it he speaks to Dr Phil Clark, Reader in Comparative and International Politics, with reference to Africa, from The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), to consider the causes behind the conflict; why the UN is changing tack and deploying an aggressive intervention Brigade; and what this brigade’s chances of success are.

But first Paul explains the context....

The paradoxically named Congo Free State was famously the setting for Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness. The country has changed its name four times since then, but the title of Conrad’s novella seems as apt a description of the DRC today as it was then.

Sat astride the equator and covered in jungle, the country receives high rainfalls – and has the highest frequency of thunderstorms in the world. Beset on all sides by countries that have themselves been ravaged by conflict – including Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, and South Sudan – armed rebel groups have repeatedly strayed across its porous borders, spilling conflict into the DRC and igniting war there.

Following the Rwandan genocide in 1994 – which was perpetrated by the Hutu Interahamwe and republican guard – the Hutu regime in Rwanda was overthrown by the Tutsi rebel group, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Around two million Hutu refugees fled into neighbouring countries, including Zaire, as the DRC was then known. These refugees included many Hutu troops and militia members who had participated in the genocide, and who promptly proceeded to militarise refugee camps, which they used as bases to make incursions into Rwanda to bring down the new RPF-dominated government.

This led to the First Congo War. By 1996, the RPF’s patience had run out. Allied with Uganda, Rwanda launched an invasion of Zaire in support of their favoured proxy force, the AFDL [Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo] led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila. The border refugee camps were rapidly flushed out and the fleeing Hutu militants pursued westwards. The regime of longstanding dictator Mobutu Sese Seko crumbled and Kinshasa was taken. In May 1997 Kabila pronounced himself president of the retitled Democratic Republic of Congo.

Before long however, fearing that they were planning a coup, Kabila turned on his erstwhile military backers, ordering all foreign forces out of the country and forming an alliance with the very Hutu rebels he had previously fought. Withdrawing to the East, Rwanda and Uganda each established a new rebel group – [the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Democratie (RCD) and the Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC)]. The following year these two rebel groups and their backers attacked the DRC army igniting the Second Congo War.

The ensuing conflict sucked in a further six African nations and as many as twenty non-state armed groups were involved, leading some to describe it as the African World War. Over five million people were killed, mostly from preventable diseases, and there was widespread use of rape and torture.

By the time the war had officially ended in 2003, the country was on its knees. Despite its huge wealth in untapped mineral resources – which at some estimates are in excess of US$24 trillion – the DRC has the second lowest nominal GDP per capita in the world. The DRC also takes joint last place with Niger on the Human Development Index scale, scoring just 0.304. Measured in terms of life expectancy, literacy, education, standards of living, and quality of life, the lot of the Congolese is the most miserable in the world.

So in this most troubled region, the DRC stands out among its peers as the most troubled. And in this shattered country, the provinces of North and South Kivu in the far...

Are you sick of the overheated, braying politics of Westminster, where there is a lot of heat, but not much light?

What’s the alternative?  Try this:

A rational parliament would be ruled by free thinking and would respect the balance between personal values and scientific research.  It would value independent reasoning above organised thinking, such as uncritical political party allegiance.  It would debate current live topics. It would be open to reform.  It should be configured in a horseshoe and at least two individuals who have conducted publicly funded academic research on the topic would have to be in attendance.  Every member would have the same right to speak, and no one should make a personal attack on a fellow member of the speaker.

In its debates, claims of research findings should be supported with references to academic literature and provided on request. Members proposing a motion should take no more than five minutes to do so and any member who receive payment related to the views they take on a topic must declare such payments.

Well, Pod Academy’s very own Adam Smith (producer of many of our science podcasts) has launched such a Rational Parliament, and it held its first debate earlier this month – on genetically modified foods (the attached podcast gives you a flavour of the opening presentations). The first sitting was characterised by live tweeting about the debate (with all  #GMatRP tweets projected onto a huge screen at the front of the hall), and by the services of a ‘rhetoric officer’, Johnny Unger, a linguist from Lancaster University, who pointed out the rhetorical devices people were using to persuade others.  In the end the following motion was passed:

This House agrees that GM food has a contribution to make in meeting global food demand.

Future topics are likely to include badgers and bovine TB, alcohol minimum pricing, wind farms, climate change and education – all highly controversial topics which would benefit from the Rational Parliament’s  ‘let’s look at the evidence and the ethics’ approach.

If you are interested in attending the next RatParl, either as an MRP (member of the rational parliament) or an observer in the gallery, just sign up at the ratparl website, and follow them on twitter at @ratparl .

It is now 5 years since the collapse of Lehman Bros and the start of the financial crisis that collapse precipitated.  Though most of us grow more and more cynical and angry about the financial system, how many of us really understand it?

Brett Scott is well placed to lead us on an exploration of radical approaches to global finance, shareholder activism..  An anthropologist and former whizz kid broker, his  Heretic's Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money offers the reader a framework for approaching the financial system based on hacking, activist entrepreneurialism, DIY and open source culture.

In the podcast, Brett talks to Craig Barfoot about the creative disruption of hacking and describes  ‘the sheer joy and curiosity of exploring an economic system……..once you’ve explored the financial system enough you can see the weak points and how you can exploit them.”

Brett’s hacker approach is to take the existing technology and play with it creatively - changing the DNA of a financial instrument.  So he looks at how campaigners have used financial instruments and subverted them  - shareholder activists buy shares, others press for Socially Responsible Investment Funds (which, as he points out are tiny compared with the massive investment funds they run alongside), the divestment movement aims to get large organisations to divest from companies involved in mining or the arms industry, and those using the ‘social return’ model push for something different on the bottom line.  As he points out, the aim of much of this is education as well as advocacy – by getting involved we learn more about the financial system.

But he counsels that you  have to maintain radical input, you must not allow the social impact  bond, for example, to be co-opted by Goldman Sachs and used in their PR campaigns!

Nevertheless he says it is a mistake to see bankers as just the stereotypical 'greedy bankers', arguing that people go into finance for a variety of reasons -  financial reward is just one of those reasons. with family pressures and intellectual challenge being equally important.

This is an excellent starting point for anyone who wants to begin to understand the financial system in order to change it.

Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money is published by Pluto Press, price £11.50.

Pod Academy's Daniel Marc Janes speaks to playwright and academic Dan Rebellato, Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Royal Holloway and one of Britain’s leading theatrical commentators.

Daniel Marc Janes: I’m in the Calder Theatre Bookshop in London. It couldn’t be better located to evoke Britain’s theatrical heritage, situated as it is on The Cut alongside the Old Vic and the Young Vic. Looking at the bookshop’s selection, I can see plays from some of the most distinguished British playwrights of recent years. Here’s David Greig... Sarah Kane... Dennis Kelly... Mark Ravenhill. What all these writers have in common is that they all studied drama at the university level. But drama at the university is a recent innovation. Many of Britain’s most brilliant playwrights have been autodidacts: Tom Stoppard, George Bernard Shaw, William Shakespeare. So why study drama?

I’m in the downstairs rehearsal space of the Calder Theatre Bookshop. This is a place where writers and performers go to make plays come alive. But how far can the inscrutable, mysterious act of playwriting be taught in an academic environment? What is the role of drama in the university? To talk about these topics, I’m joined by Dan Rebellato, Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Royal Holloway, author of numerous stage and radio plays and of several books, most notably 1956 And All That: The Making of Modern British Theatre. Professor Rebellato, thank you for joining us.

Dan Rebellato: Thanks very much.

DMJ: So before we start to unpack the broader questions, I’m wondering whether you could outline for us a kind of potted history of drama as an academic discipline in the British university.

DR: There are lots of examples, of course, of theatre being made in universities and that goes back centuries, but drama as an academic discipline really starts in the late 1940s at the University of Bristol. Oxford University, during the war, set up a commission to see if drama was a suitable subject for the universities and it was a very ramshackle affair. They booked the wrong flights and they lost their luggage and they ended up with half the amount of time they were supposed to have. And they recommended that you shouldn’t do drama at the university. But the University of Bristol decided that it was a good subject and that was the first degree – I think that started in about 1947, 1948, something like that – and the big waves of expansion followed from there. Manchester, Hull was quite early, but the 1970s had a lot of expansion and the 1990s saw another big wave of expansion as well.

DMJ: But what’s interesting is that drama, as an academic course outside of English, took some time to be accepted. Even at Bristol it took them 21 years for drama to be a full honours degree. You mentioned the committee at Oxford; Oxford and Cambridge stopped short of having full honours drama courses. Where do you think that this lack of acceptance comes from?

DR: A lot of things that I think are interesting about the theatre are the reasons why it can sometimes be a difficult subject in the academy. Because it’s neither purely literary, nor is it purely a live experience. It’s a kind of mixture of the two. I think that in academic terms – of course there are certain kinds of theatre that are, in a sense, purely live and also purely literary – but also I think there’s a sense in which theatre is clearly a collection of different crafts and skills, because you have scenic designers and you have actors and you have directors and you have writers and composers and so on and so on. That maps on in the academy into the fact that it’s a very interdisciplinary subject. So in order to fully – if you could ever fully understand theatre – you’d have to be a bit of a linguist, a bit of a philosopher, a bit of a psychologist, a bit of an archaeologist and so on and so on and so on.

Federica di Lascio writes: NATCEN [the National Centre for Social Research, UK] recently held a panel focusing on the relationship between flexible working and work-life balance. It was chaired by Dalia Ben-Galim, Associate Director of IPPR.

Starting from some recent research (Workplace Employment Relation Study, 2011), and comparing them with older ones (The Time of our Lives; 2003, 2008), the panelists agreed that there is actually a strong business case for flexible working, even though it is still considered simply a staff benefit.

The speakers underlined the reality of the new workplace  - looking at global competition (with businesses facing increasing demands for flexibility and efficiency), the changing labour market, the changing size and structure of businesses, and also the changing needs of staff, such as looking after older relatives as we become an aging society.

According to research, the majority of UK managers would consider the possibility of introducing flexible working arrangements (part-time, compressed hours, working at home, etc.), but the risk they fear – a decrease in productivity - looms lager than the advantages.  Indeed there are now more employers who believe it is solely up to the employee to balance home and work than there were in 2004

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nevertheless, especially for women - who still bear the greatest responsibility for caring for children and elderly relatives - flexible working would enable them to combine a professional career, productivity and social care.

But as panelists noted, a major problem is the lack of welfare security for flexible workers. This tends to mean that flexible options that result in reduced hours are less popular than those that enable employees to craft a way of working that fits their lives (such as being able to work from home)

Ideally, priorities should reflect the aspirations and needs of everyone -  from the bottom to the top, and should be built on the recognition of the changing business environment.  There should be help made available to businesses, and information campaigns. Flexible working can be good for the economy, and for the wellbeing of workers. It is especially possible within small businesses, where the scale enables a more personal approach, providing potentially greater flexibility in considering workers as people and not mere numbers.

The challenge is to help employers understand the real advantages of flexible work, enabling their employees to craft a way of working that combines career and private needs – and overcoming employers’ fears of ‘certain loss’.  And there is another challenge, too, the challenge at the State level to make law favourable, especially in guaranteeing welfare security to flexible workers.  You can find more information from the seminar and about NatCen here.  And here a short podcast with extracts from the seminar by clicking this link: Is there a business case for flexible working_edit3

The panel

Speakers at the seminar were Jenny Chanfreau (Senior Researcher at NatCen), Fiona Cannon (Director of Inclusion and Diversity at Lloyds Banking Group), Michael Mealing (Chair at Employment Policy Unit, Federation of Small Businesses) and Sarah Veale (Head at Equality and Employment Rights Department, TUC).

 

 

 

This podcast looks at how even disadvantaged kids in Vietnam are educationally years ahead of their counterparts in India, despite per capita GDP being broadly the same in both countries.

Amanda Barnes talked to Professor Jo Boyden, director of the Young Lives research programme at the Department of International Development at Oxford University, about their research findings.

Amanda Barnes: The Young Lives study has been following the progress of thousands of children in the developing world.  And you’ve got some new findings from a survey of ten year-old pupils in Vietnam.  What did the Young Lives study find out about education in Vietnam?

Jo Boyden: Young Lives has established that pupil performance is really exceptional in some very important ways.  Around 19 out of every 20 ten year-olds, for example, can add four -digit numbers.  At the same time 85% can subtract fractions and 81% are able to find X in a simple equation.

This is partly to do with the school systems but it’s also to do with the fact that there’s a strong focus in children’s home lives on their education.  So out of school hours around about 85% spend more than an hour a day on homework and 87% report reading books outside of school.

At the same time the education system in Vietnam is relatively equitable and this means that poorer children really get the same deal as those who are better-off than they are.  And they are therefore not less advantaged in the school system.

AB: That’s really interesting.  How does Vietnam compare with India?

I think perhaps the most dramatic thing we can say is that the best-performing children in India, and in this case Young Lives is looking at the state of Andhra Pradesh in particular, don’t do as well as those children who perform worst in Vietnam.

So you see an enormous disparity between the two countries.  And what I think this can be translated into in terms of families’ and children’s responses is that disappointment in the standards in state schools has resulted in a dramatic increase in the proportion of eight year-olds being educated in low-fee private schools: the figure almost having doubled between 2002 and 2009.

These kinds of findings are actually reported by other studies. For example, India’s ASER research centre found that 47% of ten year-olds were unable to add even two-digit numbers in India.  And 68% of grade three children in government schools couldn’t read a task designed for first-year pupils.  Research from the University of California also found that only the top 10% of school students are at the age-appropriate level and the bottom 10% appear to learn nothing in school at all.

So I think the point is that India really short-changing it’s children in terms of education.

AB: Why did you decide to compare Vietnam with India?

JB: Young Lives is studying in four different countries.  But the reason we compare Vietnam with India is because both are Asian countries and both have experienced dramatic rates of growth over recent years.  This of course means that there’s enormous potential to do something about education to make sure that education systems are strong.  At the same time, they have similar GDP levels and the population of young people roughly about 50% of the total.

AB: The International Community’s united behind the Millennium Development Goal of achieving primary education for all by 2015.  How good is the primary school learning in other developing countries that you’ve looked at?

JB: Unfortunately Young Lives has found that children generally are receiving much poorer quality education than is the hope of the International Community.  So in other words the trends in India are much more typical than are the trends in Vietnam. And the early focus,