Merit or meritocracy?

Back in April colleagues in Imagining Pasts and Futures organised a one-day conference reflecting on the idea of meritocracy 60 years after Michael Young published the book that put the term into wide circulation. With guest speakers Jo Littler, Nicola Ingram and Daniel Smith we explored meritocracy as ideology and discourse; merit as a social quality and value; the concept of meritocracy in relation to education, policy and work; the history of the idea in sociology and politics; and the kinds of futures that the idea of meritocracy does and does not make imaginable.

Discussions at the event were stimulating, interesting – and sometimes challenging.

We are delighted to announce that one outcome of that event is a special issue of the online journal Discover Society. It was a pleasure working with colleagues from Newcastle (Geoff Payne, Ruth Graham, Anselma Gallinat and Angus McVittie – well done Angus on a first publication! – and Lisa Garforth in Sociology; Samantha Shields in ECLS; and an honorary shout to Kirsty Morrin, UG at Newcastle not that many years ago and now lecturing at Liverpool) and beyond to produce this wide-ranging, critical, reflective and above all readable set of short articles. We encourage you to read and enjoy!

Thanks to the BSA Sociology of Education Study Group for helping us with the April event.

 

Welcome!

Welcome to the blog of the research cluster Imagining Pasts and Futures, which is based in sociology at Newcastle University.

We started using this blog in the autumn of 2018. Blogs on  events and activities prior to this time are reproduced below in partial format – we have copied them from their original home here Pasts & Futures Reads on wordpress.

Meritocracy: kicking a concept around

Originally published here.

Thanks to all our presenters and plenary speakers for a really excellent set of discussions on merit and meritocracy at our conference yesterday. In their plenaries, Jo Littler, Nicola Ingram and Daniel Smith offered three wildly different takes on the concept and the work it does in contemporary societies, thinking about the discursive and political shift the idea has undergone ‘from Michael to Toby’, its work in concealing the continued power of both landed and branded gentries, and the impacts it is having on classed selves and bodies in classrooms.

Panel sessions explored more dimensions – the political history of the concept and how we might get past limited ideas of equality of opportunity and individual merit to really imagine egalitarian, collective and communal alternatives; the shaping of young peoples’ future imaginaries within the limited discourse of individualistic merit and success; and the complex ways in which access to and experiences in HE both exhibit the traces of a problematic meritocratic discourse and push back against it. We were particularly delighted to hear lots of innovative ideas from PhD students and early career scholars in those sessions.

We had great, engaged discussions across these topics throughout the day so we heartily thank ALL our participants as well as presenters for their contributions. Some of us will be continuing the discussion at the BSA conference Education Stream Plenary on Wednesday 11th.

Merit or Meritocracy: 60 Years And Counting… was a one-day conference at Newcastle University on 9th April, organised by Anselma Gallinat, Ruth Graham, Lisa Garforth and Geoff Payne of the Sociology Imagining Pasts and Futures Research Cluster with support from the BSA Education Study Group. We also thank the Newcastle University and the School of GPS for their support for this event.

Imagining alternative futures, marking the past – Pt 3

Originally published here.

Thanks to stalwart cluster members James Cummings and Audrey Verma, as well as first-time visitor Katy Lamb, for a fantastic cluster meeting on Weds 14th February. James, Audrey and Katy talked from their research projects about the vastly different capacities of a range of social actors to imagine alternative liveable futures through reflections on pasts that were narrated in terms of loss, pain – and also joy.

Memorials and futures of Equal Justice: Katy is an UG student in the Combined Honours programme and joined us to talk about recent fieldwork in Montgomery, Alabama. Katy won Ncl university funding to conduct research relating to the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration. Katy’s work helped us to think about the power of commemoration and especially of material objects to rework the past in the present, to make the invisible visible. Here the aim is to inject a new and uncomfortable narrative into the history and historiography of the US and into its contemporary cultural life, adding something distinct to recent debates which have often focused on the removal of Confederate statues and markers.

Katy talked movingly about the museum’s planned National Memorial for Peace and Justice which features displays of soil taken from lynching sites in the museum (seen in the photo here which Katy took during her visit). Katy is working with ideas about the connotations of soil as dirtying and its etymology which is related to wallowing; but also about its links with growth, grit, life-support and renewal. Katy’s reflections on soil, memory and imagined futures also evoked ideas about digging up the past both as a metaphor and as the physical labour involved in locating and recovering these lost sites.

Katy has been drawing on these readings to make sense of this material: Forsdick C (2015) Travel, slavery, memory: thanatourism in the French Atlantic. Postcolonial Studies 8790(March): 1–15. Buzinde CN and Santos CA (2008) Representations of slavery. Annals of Tourism Research 35(2): 469–488. Ebron PA (1999) Tourists as Pilgrims: Commercial Fashioning of Transatlantic Politics. American Ethnologist 26(4): 910–932.

Imagining alternative futures, marking the past – Pt 2

Originally published here.

Thanks to stalwart cluster members James Cummings and Audrey Verma, as well as first-time visitor Katy Lamb, for a fantastic cluster meeting on Weds 14th February. James, Audrey and Katy talked from their research projects about the vastly different capacities of a range of social actors to imagine alternative liveable futures through reflections on pasts that were narrated in terms of loss, pain – and also joy.

Birdwatching at twilight in Singapore. Audrey started by focusing on daily time – sunset in the work of Michael Taussig and its liminal, shifting qualities and associations with change, ritual and even magic. She linked this moment to the very different timescales associated with the Anthropocene and the contemporary sense that human societies are at the threshold of a new era. This is likely to be an era of loss and dramatic ecological and social change. Can we also locate in it the possibility of hope and find ways, like twilight, of reenchanting the more than human world? Audrey recounted an evening birding in the Singapore Botanic Gardens, reflecting on moments of engagement with a nature already being lost but also with sometimes surprising signs of continuity. We thank Audrey for sharing her charming drawing of the scene which forms the image for this post in the name of Taussig’s urging that we experiment with philosophies and practices of ‘the mastery of non-mastery’ – learning to live with the imperfection and even ineptitude needed to be authentically curious and open to a world that we can never know entirely and should not seek to dominate.

Imagining alternative futures, marking the past Pt 1

originally published here

Thanks to stalwart cluster members James Cummings and Audrey Verma, as well as first-time visitor Katy Lamb, for a fantastic cluster meeting on Weds 14th February. James, Audrey and Katy talked from their research projects about the vastly different capacities of a range of social actors to imagine alternative liveable futures through reflections on pasts that were narrated in terms of loss, pain – and also joy.

Gay lives and heteronormative futures in Hainan, China. James’s PhD research has identified really interesting contrasts between his participants’ narratives of excitement and joy when they talk about their pasts and current experiences in terms of entering into the gay scene – and narratives of uncertainty and absence when contemplating their personal futures. James talked about the ways in which biographical narratives are dominated by anticipated futures of heterosexual family life and children, and of a strong push to reproduce filial relationships to maintain a line of ancestry and to ensure ongoing care for ageing generations. Discursive alternatives to heteronormative and patrilineal visions were almost entirely absent, and an imaginable future without them was often coined in terms of absence and even death. James gave us a really powerful account of how sexual subjectivities are constituted in relation not just to desires and relationships in the present but by temporally ordered biographies.

Readings that informed James’s analysis include: Edelman, L. (2004). No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press; Hildebrandt, T. (2018). The One-Child Policy, Elder Care, and LGB Chinese: a Social Policy Explanation. Journal of Homosexuality; Wang, Q (2011) The Confucian Conception of Transcendence and Filial Piety. In Ruiping Fan (ed.), The Renaissance of Confucianism in Contemporary China. Springer. pp. 75–90

A YEAR IN PASTS AND FUTURES

A look back at our meetings in 2017. Originally published here.

In the last year we have had lively reading-based discussions and two great talks from invited speakers. The cluster played a key part in the Sociology symposium Fragile Citizenship, and cluster discussions generated the idea for a one-day conference reflecting on meritocracy.

Two recent discussions focused on history and how the past gets drawn into the present in biographical, communal and cultural narratives. On 13th December 2017 James Cummings, Ursula Balderson and Yang Li reflected on historicity, using Hirsch and Stewart’s (2005) article ‘Introduction: Ethnographies of Historicity’ (History and Anthropology 16(3): 261-74) as a starting point. It was fascinating to think about how this concept offered resources for James to think about gay men’s lives and biographical narratives in China’s Hunan province; for Ursula’s engagement with communities campaigning against mining pollution in the Andes; and Yang’s research on film representations of Tibet.

On 19th November 2017 we had a Sociology seminar from the cluster’s invited speaker, Felix Ringel (Anthropology, Durham). Felix’s discussion of ‘presentism as method’ used ethnographic material from two German cities to critically engage with the way the social sciences have conceptualised the past and the future, and drew an interesting response from Dariusz Gafizcjuk. The book on which Felix’s talk was based is out now.

Cluster members played prominent parts in Sociology’s March 2017 conference Fragile Citizenship. We organised a round-table discussion beginning with an intensely engaging talk about urban social history, music, and multicultural futures from Les Back (Goldsmiths). Post-grad cluster member James Cummings gave a fantastic talk based on his PhD work investigating belonging in the everyday lives of gay men in Hainan, and Diana Kopbayeva reflected on the notion of the ‘eternal nation’, which recently rose to prominence in Kazakhstan’s projects of nation-building.

Earlier in the year we had a couple of meetings focused on visions of the future and questions of social change. On 24th May 2017 Geoff Payne and Ruth Graham offered contrasting views on a still-resonant post-war vision of a more meritocratic (and less just?) future: Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy. On 8th March 2017 Lisa Garforth and Robert Hollands discussed the everyday transformative practices analysed in Davina Cooper’s 2014 book Everyday Utopias, and how artists and activists work for urban change, looking at Mould’s Urban Subversion. This meeting provided an interesting context for the talk on 3rd May 2017 from the cluster’s invited Sociology Seminar speaker Prof David Pinder (Roskilde) which explored utopia, time and vitality in urban spaces and practices.

2015-16: at look back at the start of our cluster

Originally published here.

During the early days of the cluster’s formation we focused on finding common ground in our work and developing our thinking about imaginations and representations of the past and of the future, as well as notions and structures of temporality. To support this, cluster members contributed to an annotated bibliography with a personal touch, which supported the series of discussions in 2016-17 about specific texts, usually read and presented by two colleagues.

In addition to this we were inspired and intrigued by a seminar with Molly Andrews (UEL) on ‘Narrating the political: temporality, imagination and possibility’ (16th May 2016).

Westworld: imagined futures and re/imagined pasts

Amy C. Chambers (@AmyCChambers), now at Manchester Metropolitan University, wrote this brilliant post on Westworld after talking about the series in one of our cluster meetings.

Originally published here, with images.

Amy says: I finally made it to the end of the series after being out of the country for several episodes and trying (and ultimately failing) not to binge watch them. I tried to spread them out but ended up mainlining most of the episodes in a day so I could watch the finale. I have Westworld overload and following that finale I will have to rewatch all ten episodes in a vague attempt to distinguish between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’, and past, present and/or future.

This post includes **spoilers** for season one of Westworld.

In the finale it was eventually confirmed that the story arc of the first season of Westworld was being told across multiple timelines. Age and aging are central to this method of storytelling. Whereas William’s aging masks his identity (Ed Harris), Dolores’ (Evan Rachel Wood) transhistorical nature (eternal youth) allows her character to move between pasts, presents, and futures. She is part of the history of the park, she has a history, but lacks historical agency until she solves the puzzle that allows her to access her memories and lived experiences. Within a single episode Dolores can seamlessly move between her various storylines over a 35-year period (since the opening of the park). Although the multiple timeline was a theory that was discussed at great length across the large online fan community (mostly in discussions on Reddit – go on, fall into the rabbit hole) it was a surprising revelation for many viewers and conformation for those who had suspected it. It is something that makes the show eminently rewatchable as viewers (players?) attempt to fit together all of the parts of the puzzle.

Westworld is set in an imagined near-future where the rich are even richer with those ‘vacationing’ at the theme park spending at least $40,000 a day in a storyworld cycle that probably lasts at least a week (and up to a month). The absurd expense (even if we take future inflation into consideration) suggests a reasonably large elite wealthy class that can afford to play in this interactive narrative world. Conversations and incidents throughout the series indicate that the world outside the park (we never see it) has solved extreme poverty and cured diseases (post-scarcity/post-disease), but it is clear that institutional inequality (gender/race/class/age) is still a major problem. Westworld presents a post-scarcity future but one where capitalism is still thriving – despite their utopian roots SF post-scarcity societies are often defined by their inequalities and the inability to allow everyone to benefit from major technological changes and advances (consider the restrictive access to medical technologies in Elysium).

Escaping the park is Maeve’s (Thandie Newton) mission and young William’s (Jimmi Simpson) hope for a future with Dolores. But this imagined future outside of the park is difficult to envision as neither the audience nor the hosts know what exists outside of Westworld. We know Westworld is a space of escape for the wealthy – but what is it that they are vacationing from, and what has happened on future Earth? Is the near (ish) future presented in Westworld off-world – as imagined in texts like Blade Runner and Elysium. There is a suggestion that this future world (outside the park) is devoid of any living creatures that are not human – in Westworld even the animals are artificial – is this because they are all extinct? Westworld offers an escape at a price, and perhaps rather than using biodome technology to protect ecology (eco-future) as seen in the massive geodesic domes in Silent Running the protective bubble covering Westworld is used is a means of preserving an imagined past where fantasies of imperial and institutionalised inequality can be enacted. The staff (from upper-level management down to technicians/‘butchers’) live at the park and have to rotate off-(West)world for days off/vacations, further suggesting that Westworld is not of this world. When guests get to the end of their stay they must go to the ‘Mesa Gold decompression chamber’, which allows them time to disengage from the park and readjust to the ‘real’ world after they have lived out their violent delights – but this could also mean that it allows for literal decompression because Westworld might not be in a place that humans can normally survive in (Mars, outer space, or even under the sea).

Westworld re/imagines a past – a version of the c.19th century American Old West filtered through Westerns and revisionings of the myths and histories of the era. It is a remembered future – the park is a future world that is based upon memories, histories, and imaginaries of the Old West. The Western movie genre – one the key reference point for the both the park’s and the series’ creators – is often defined in relation to a binary of some kind, e.g. garden/desert, tamed/wild, white hat/black hat, lawmen/outlaws, Americans/Indian. Many classic westerns were also structured around a stock narratives (like many of those played out in the park) that resolved with shoot outs that sorted to the heroes from the villains. Characters like Logan (Ben Barnes) endeavour to avoid these derivative binary narratives in search of more complex stories with trophies and Easter eggs such as El Lazo’s tequila (the best alcohol in the park). At Westworld the binaries are between human and non-human, cognisant and non-cognisant, old and young, past and present, and real and imagined – alongside the binaristic tropes of the Western genre.

One of the most interesting ways that Westworld merges together imagined pasts, presents, and future is in the show’s soundtrack. The diegetic music often played by the brothel/saloon’s player piano is nostalgic for the viewer, for me the use of Radiohead songs (e.g. ‘No Surprises‘, 1997) linked the show with my teenage years. But at the same time these contemporary tracks are framed as old/nostalgic as they are played in the slightly out-of-tune and mechanical style of player pianos and Old West saloon piano music that is synonymous with the Western. The soundtrack features reimagined modern music alongside classical tracks and ragtime tunes (e.g. Claude Debussey’s ‘Clair de Lune‘ and Scott Joplin’s ‘Peacherine Rag‘). The music rolls in the background of scenes simultaneously invoking the past of America (an onscreen imagined one) and the memories of the audience watching (who recognise the tunes despite their new/old world context), whilst also suggesting that in this future these near-past songs (e.g. Amy Winehouse’s ‘Back to Black’) may be so old for the guests experiencing Westworld that they are indistinguishable from the music of a real/reel Old West saloon.

1_According to showrunner Jonathan Nolan the player piano is a touchstone image for the show – it appears in the title sequence (take a look at my discussion of the opening credits here) and throughout the scenes set in the saloon. The mechanical music is also woven into the incidental music that plays across the show. It is a reference to and inspired by Kurt Vonnegut’s speculative fiction Player Piano (1952) that describes a near-future society that is mechanised to such an extent that human labourers are no longer required. Show composer Ramin Djawadi (composer, Game of Thrones – Westworld and Westeros!) insisted on using and recording from a pianola – the music had to be transcribed and mechanised. The digital files were converted into perforated paper rolls that were then read by the player piano and recorded. As Djawadi remarks: “It’s got a robotic harshness to it which is very distinctive. When a human plays it, the dynamics are modified. But when the player piano hits a note, it’s always the same.” These remembered and recognisable melodies all add the sense that this has all happened before, and that the hosts and indeed Westworld as a whole are playing out already repeated and repeatable scripted narratives that they do not control.

The finale answered many questions and/or confirmed fan theories but there is still lots of scope for Westworld to explore more about the nature of the past, present, and imagined futures. Will the next season venture into the outside world, or will the hosts chose to stay in the reality that was created for them. We don’t get the next season until at least 2018 so there is plenty of time to meticulously rewatch season one and work through all of those fan theories!