Our education list focuses on education policy and politics and the inequalities that are both built into education systems and perpetuated by them. It speaks to the UN Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality Education.
Our titles, including Arun Verma’s Anti-Racism in Higher Education, address the challenges in education, including those around technology and the digital divide. The list offers students and researchers internationally sourced evidence-based solutions that challenge traditional neoliberal approaches to learning.
Mad People’s History and Identity (MPHI) is a Mad Studies course delivered at Queen Margaret University (QMU), Edinburgh, Scotland. It aims to build a community of learners, activists and engaged academics in an educational space to analyse their lived experiences and critique the dominant ‘psy’ discourses. The course privileges the student’s experiential knowledge of mental distress, psychiatrisation and oppression and the perspectives of Mad Studies activists and scholars. Beresford (2016) asserts that the experiential knowledge of madness has been historically marginalised and devalued by the dominant positivist ‘expert’, whose analysis reduces the credibility and legitimacy of survivor knowledge within research, policy, practice and learning. Mad people continue to challenge the subjugation and dismissal of their experiences, knowledge, perspectives and histories. This course aims to address the power and epistemic imbalance of the overwhelming majority of material about mental distress written by those who study and label them (Crepaz-Keay and Kalathil, 2013). This case study will provide an overview of the MPHI course, reflect on its history and development, explore its philosophical underpinnings, include the student voice and critique the opportunities and challenges of working with this public within a neoliberal university.
Dominant discourses of mental health are frequently depoliticised and mental illness is constructed as an individual problem, an individual medical issue to be dealt with privately. LeBlanc and Kinsella (2016) argue that alternative perspectives to the bio-medical model are excluded from the mainstream, in particular the narratives of those who identify as mad or having mental health issues.
Through pedagogical case studies and dialogues, this book sheds new light on concepts and boundaries in public sociology education. With sections on publics, special knowledges and practices in the field, the book offers bold thinking on important questions including the purposes and targets of sociological knowledge. The book begins with a focus on public sociology that demonstrates affinities with radical education practice and debates in the dialogue between public sociology and radical education at the edges of academia. It refers to a methodology which facilitates the critical dialogue between practitioners of public sociology and education. It then discusses the constitution of 'publics', production of sociological knowledge, and different contexts of pedagogical practice. Dialogue is central to the practices of public sociology education, and it is through this means that the book reflects on concepts and aspects of public sociology education linked by critical dialogue.
This chapter argues from a neo-Marxist perspective that precarity is an existential phenomenon, whereby economic actors experience a state of productive anxiety within a post-industrial labour market. In this sense, all who labour are positioned on a spectrum of vulnerability to precarity; a positionality that is both individuated and collective, constantly producing capital gain. Furthermore, that precarity as a state of existence provides capital with a mechanism to appropriate the commons of the life-world; that personhood is progressively given up to capital through the extensification and intensification of economic labour. In order to develop these critical points, the chapter will utilise particular examples of the precarious interrelationship between individuals and collectives within the labour market in the UK, focusing initially on the nascent labour of students in the marketised university. The examples will be drawn from case studies produced via a longitudinal research project undertaken by one of the authors (Gee, 2017). The chapter will conclude by considering how, through solidarity, individuals and collectives might become less vulnerable to the processes of producing precarity outlined above. As will be discussed, solidarity is understood to be the collective experience of precarity made manifest in the minds of economic actors; a precursor of the formulation and enactment of a practical politics for change (Spivak, 1990).
The focus of the research project was on undergraduate transitions toward the labour market and beyond, three years on from graduation (Gee, 2017).
The rationale for this chapter is different from the others in this collection. Firstly, as editor, I was struck by the paucity of explicit references to class – whether in terms of identity, structure or as a category of analysis – in the various cases in this collection. The authors of the various cases are practising public sociology focused on gender, ethnicity, refugee status, mental health, age, and issues ranging from alcohol to migration, environmental pollution to violence – and even around trade union organising – without explicit reference to class. Many of the people with whom our authors are practising public sociology are working class, yet class was not being explicitly referred to as a category of public. This struck me as surprising, especially since class is a major (and for some sociologists, the major) systemic cause of injustice and exploitation, and increasingly so under the austerity regime of neoliberalism, as well as a significant (or the significant) collective agent for transformation. I therefore decided to include a chapter specifically addressing this issue.
Secondly, Paul Gilfillan’s work (Case I.4), which does focus on class explicitly, raised some interesting and difficult questions. Whilst his chapter analyses the issues faced by the Workers Education Association, his ethnographic research in a working class community in Fife also generated some narratives from white working class men which were highly resentful of what is perceived as the imposition of ‘diversity’ by a cultural elite, onto an established, Scottish working class culture. Paul illustrated this with a particular quotation from an interview with ‘Alec’, which drew on narratives of misogyny, racism and homophobia.
Leading academics take a distinctive new approach to the understanding of public sociology education in this perceptive new resource. Through pedagogical case studies and inter-contributor dialogues, they develop and challenge thinking in the field.
Divided into three sections on the publics, knowledges and practices of public sociology education, it looks beyond the boundaries of academia to deliver fresh responses to key disciplinary questions including the purposes and targets of sociological knowledge.
For students, academics and practitioners, it is a timely and thought-provoking contribution to debate about public sociology education.
Having been an associate member of the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) from attending WEA courses when conducting research into the politicisation of Scottish national identity (Gilfillan, 2014), the WEA seemed an ideal public to partner with in light of Burawoy’s (2005) call for sociologists to engage with the likes of church groups, the labour movement and the working class. When going to meet with the WEA education development manager for Fife (‘Maesie’) at her Lumphinnans office in March 2017, it seemed appropriate to park in Gagarin Way opposite the WEA office as this street name indicated the previous industrial era when this former ‘pit village’ had earned the local nickname ‘Little Moscow’ thanks to a Communist tradition strong enough to have streets named after heroes of the Soviet Union. However, in light of 1980s deindustrialisation and the flight of private capital from the central Fife corridor from Buckhaven and Methil in the east to Ballingry and Lochore in the west, Burawoy’s question ‘are there any publics out there?’ (in Tamdgidi, 2008: 140) was a topic I wanted to explore with Maesie.
Paul: Does the WEA struggle for local publics?
Maesie: One of the biggest challenges for the WEA is the fact that we are still a very, very traditional organisation; still trying to work to fairly traditional values and aspirations. An yet society is movin on all the time. And so the models and the approaches that we used even 20 years ago are no really relevant any more. So one of the things that we’re having to do, and we absolutely sit doon an talk about this regularly, is how do we make ourselves more relevant to people in the way that people live and work and move around now, because we believe that the content of the education that we offer is still relevant.
This chapter analyses how public sociology education is practised in diverse contexts and where public sociology educators locate their practice with respect to communities and movements of publics. It describes institutions and forms of educational organisation that are allowed for public sociology education. It also discusses how public sociologists work with institutions of higher education, in which it is possible to do public sociology education in increasingly neoliberal universities. The chapter explores what public sociologists do and illuminate the ambivalent institutional locations of public sociology. It explains how locatedness and institutional status is marked by the power relations considered in the constitution of publics and the production and validation of knowledge in public sociology.
As a dialogue, this section engaged a wider range of participants than previous attempts. The email invitation to respond to the provocation and cases generated responses from contributors to four of the six cases, interestingly reflecting the contexts of England and Scotland; early career and recently retired academics, on more or less precarious contracts; and in ancient and modern universities. To what extent is public sociology as educational practice sustainable, even possible, within the neoliberal university? The challenges of engaging with integrity in educational practice within the neoliberal university, however that is mediated and experienced, has prompted an engaging and impassioned debate which will undoubtedly continue. Moreover, the personal cost of public sociology as educational practice has also been articulated. The context of the neoliberal university makes public sociology, and indeed educational practice with any integrity, a constant battle: exhausting, upsetting and demoralising. The medium of email exchange has mediated the emotional content, but the experience of rage, and tears, and indignation, is clearly shared by the dialogical participants.
The focus of this section is on the university, the institution in which many public sociologists are located, at least partially. To what extent does the neoliberal university provide spaces for public sociology education, for the generation of really useful knowledge with subaltern counterpublics? Elsewhere Scandrett argued that ‘The current crisis potentially makes universities privileged places for the realisation of mass intellectuality, because they are educational spaces in which the structural contradictions of neoliberal capital are so explicitly being played out’ (Scandrett, 2017: 83).
Through pedagogical case studies and dialogues, this book sheds new light on concepts and boundaries in public sociology education. With sections on publics, special knowledges and practices in the field, the book offers bold thinking on important questions including the purposes and targets of sociological knowledge. The book begins with a focus on public sociology that demonstrates affinities with radical education practice and debates in the dialogue between public sociology and radical education at the edges of academia. It refers to a methodology which facilitates the critical dialogue between practitioners of public sociology and education. It then discusses the constitution of 'publics', production of sociological knowledge, and different contexts of pedagogical practice. Dialogue is central to the practices of public sociology education, and it is through this means that the book reflects on concepts and aspects of public sociology education linked by critical dialogue.
This chapter describes special knowledges that public sociology pedagogies can generate and the theoretical point of departure in the nineteenth-century working class that demand for control of educational curricula. It points out how public sociology knowledge is be validated as 'really useful' by the participants in public sociology education. It also addresses the 'what' of public sociology education and the political, and epistemological status of public sociology knowledge. The chapter refers to the concept of 'really useful knowledge' that has been used in radical adult education theory. It explains knowledge that is selected, critiqued, and generated by communities and groups engaged in struggles against oppression.