Author Archives: A Youngson

Law on Trial 2015: Lives that slide out of view

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This post was contributed by Kinnari Bhatt

Law on TrialI am excited to attend any seminar examining the critical ethical discourse of our time: poverty. So, I was happy to attend Professor Adam Geary’s inaugural lecture examining three very unlikely bedfellows: poverty, law and welfare.

To me, his seminar foregrounds themes of structural and endemic poverty, alienation and judicial indifference which resonate strongly in our era of recession, with its hallmark of increased poverty.

Falling outside privileged categories

The seminar provided an ethical critique of the jurisprudential turn away from social concerns, poverty and suffering. Traditional jurisprudential thought restricts its vision to the substance of the law (law as a command and legal categorisations) which deny any relationship with questions of justice.

The law itself becomes blind to social concern choosing instead, to privilege the sanctity of contract and private property, thus providing legal structure to the laissez faire hand of the free market in which judges only see ‘clients’ not fellow human beings.

In this analysis the right to earn property becomes absolutely fundamental to human liberty and freedom, making certain lives which fall outside of the law’s privileged categories, slide out of view thus reasserting their alienation. Those that slide out of view are typically the poor, marginalised and downtrodden. The law’s closest articulation of poverty is found in human rights but, as Professor Geary discussed, these rights are a weak substitute for engaging in conversations about humanity and its laissez faire principles.

Alienation, experience and solidarity

Professor Geary presented the three core themes of his paper: alienation, experience and solidarity. He started by discussing Marx’s view that life under conditions of production work to separate us from each other: a state characterised by structural and endemic poverty.

The lecture explored the works of political figures from Jack London, through to George Orwell and the poverty lawyers of the 1960s and 70s. These figures chose to submerge themselves in the experience of being poor: from Orwell joining the poor in his loathing of imperialism to Harvard Law Graduates choosing to engage with people in Harlem instead of financially lucrative clients on Wall Street.

Opening our eyes

Professor Louis Wolcher provided a comment and discussion of Professor Geary’s lecture, discussing how the first task in any ethical approach to law is to make us open our eyes to fellow human beings.

He quoted the Latin phrase ‘What the eye cannot see the heart cannot grieve over’ urging those in positions of privilege to throw off their myopic glasses blinding them to the plight of those that fall outside of positivist law’s substantive categories.

The second task is to be thoughtful about the ways in which the privileged speak on behalf of those they wish to aid. This question has no obvious solution and requires us to be mindful of our own privileged position, motivations and warns against the tyrannical descent into a superior and all too familiar narrative of charity, pity and dependency.

The seminar again demonstrated the Law School’s interest in compassion, social justice and debate.

Watch the lecture video and listen to the podcast

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Law on Trial: Barring Access

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This blog post was contributed by Ruth Saunders, Web and Social Media Administrator at the School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London.

Law on TrialThe School of Law’s Law on Trial 2015 continued into its second day with a panel discussion, organised by Dr Sarah Lamble and chaired by Dr Gail Lewis. The panel explored whether universities were becoming overly concerned with ‘risk management’ and ‘securitisation’ policies – and at what social, political and ethical cost?

Students that apply to study at a university in the UK are asked to disclose a ‘relevant criminal conviction’. The panel of experts, from a wide range of backgrounds, considered the implications of collecting this information on access to, and equality and diversity, in higher education.

Universities and the ‘Carceral’ State

The panel discussion kicked off with a presentation from Birkbeck’s Dr Sarah Lamble, who asked the audience to close their eyes and recall their excitement at applying for university. Imagine then, Lamble said, the university asks: ‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?’.

A criminal conviction, Lamble reiterated, is often associated with complex and personal problems, which students would have to disclose in the university admissions process.

The result – Lamble argued – is that current disclosure practices are an indirect manifestation of class, gender and race discrimination which already pervade the criminal justice system.

Lamble then critiqued the behaviour of universities’ risk management policies as ‘complicit with the carceral state in demanding the disclosure of criminal convictions’.

Concluding the presentation, Lamble challenged the meaning of ‘risk’. Risk is often associated with opening ourselves up to harm, she said, but assuming risk can also mean embracing possibilities.

Exclusionary Strategies

Next up was Patrick Williams of Manchester Metropolitan University who discussed the contribution of universities’ risk management strategies to increasing discrimination against young black men.

Reflecting on this, Williams commented that:

  • The treatment of young black men reflects the ‘disproportionate and differential treatment [that is] a perennial feature of the criminal justice system in England and Wales’.
  • The temptation to engage in a discourse of ‘spurious’ distinction between ‘offender’ and ‘non-offender’ should be resisted.
  • The construct of risk excludes and marginalises those have already been excluded by the criminal justice system.
  • The resources of risk management should instead be allocated to the needs of the ‘offender’.

Stigmatising Semantics

Birkbeck student and freelance writer Wail Qasim was next to speak at the event.

Qasim took the audience back to the 2010 student protests against the rise in tuition fees and the scrap of Education Maintenance Allowance. Over 100 students were arrested and charged with violent disorder.

The Public Order Act – where the offence of violent disorder can be found – also lists the offence of riot and the offence of array. Qasim argued that the three crimes are very similar; however, the police chose to charge students with violent disorder because of its stigmatising semantics.

Qasim shared his thoughts, placing the arrests as part of a wider collusion between university management and the police against the emergence of student protests and campaigns e.g. Cops Off Campus. Citing as evidence of the collusion, that ‘universities refused to re-admit convicted student protesters, or when acquitted disciplined students’.

Rounding off his remarks, Qasim critiqued the actions as that of a neoliberal university that seeks to bar possible dissenters, and sees ‘delinquency’ as a threat to education – education being a financial asset.

‘Ex-Con’ Researchers

Discussions continued with Sarcha Darke of the University of Westminster, and coordinator of the mentoring scheme at the British Convict Criminology Group.

Darke moved the conversation towards what he described as a growing research prevention culture within British universities that excludes persons with convictions from conducting research:

  • Individual research ethics committees can now be subject to litigation action – increasing the risk management responsibilities of the university.
  • Research groups are required to obtain insurance for their research, the policy of which affects those with convictions from acting as researchers.
  • Universities are afraid of media attention and litigation, and so turn away researchers with convictions.

Self-Selecting Students

Chris Stacey – Unlock and ‘Ban the Box’ campaign – asked why students have to disclose criminal convictions in the first place.

Arguing that most types of criminal convictions do not require disclosure, Chris describes current policies as ‘pointless’ because they rely 100% on self-disclosure.

Looking to broader policies of exclusion, Stacey encouraged universities to share best practices on handling risk management.

One suggestion was to remove the box in the application form that requests information on previous convictions. Evidence shows, Stacey said, that students begin to self-select out when asked to disclose criminal convictions.

The final hour was dedicated to a Q&A with the audience, comprised of legal academics, professionals and students.

A Birkbeck LLM student asked the panel: how should we balance the contrasting points of view and needs of a victim of sexual assault with a repeat sex offender – both of which seek to access the university community?

Patrick Williams responded that universities should engage in more discussions that reduce risk, and Wail Qasim recommended a policy where victims were involved in discussions of the treatment of perpetrators.

‘Ban the Box’

Dr Sarah Lamble concluded the session with a plea to students, staff and the National Union of Students to push for the ‘box’ to be removed. This year, she said, the NUS voted not to put it on the agenda.

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Law on Trial: The Islamophobic University

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This post was contributed by Kinnari Bhatt

Law on TrialThe School of Law kicked off its Law on Trial 2015 series of public lectures with a thought-provoking session exploring different ways in which free speech is being appropriated for Islamophobic ends.

Sarah Keenan and Nadine El-Enany, lecturers in the School of Law introduced the panellists – who combined perspectives from academia, the student voice and an advocacy organisation – Birkbeck, University de Lyon-2, NUS Black Students’ Officer and the Islamic Human Rights Commission.

The panellists were:

  • Malia Bouattia, NUS Black Students’ Officer
  • Souhail Chichah, lecturer at University de Lyon-2
  • Arzu Merali, researcher and co-founder of the Islamic Human Rights Commission
  • Nadine El-Enany, lecturer in law, Birkbeck law school

Three main issues stood out:

1) The UK counter terrorist measures – Effecting freedom of speech in the classroom

The 2015 UK Counter Terrorism and Security Act form a key part of the government’s counter radicalisation and terror measures. Section 29 imposes a legal duty on universities to monitor student activities, with the specific operationalisation measures to be elaborated in September.

Nadine discussed how these measures run the risk of breaking down the relationship of student-teacher trust, intervening in academic freedom and compromising the autonomy of the university by making it instrumental in the racialisation of Islam.

2) The targeting and creation of an Islamophobic identity – Deploying ‘post-colonial’ narratives

Superbly interesting were insights into how colonial language of ‘them and us’ is deployed in today’s liberal discourse on Islam. The jettisoning of Muslims (echoing Fanon’s colonial ‘compartmentalisation’) into ‘good’ ones who assimilate leaving no traces of Islam vs the ‘bad’ ones who choose to identify as Muslim. More of this in the next paragraph.

3) The hypocritical effects of the #Charlie Hebdo hashtag

Western dominant narrative portrayed the Charlie Hebdo attacks as part of a war on freedom and therefore, western democracy. The panel discussed how the #Je Suis Charlie became both a strategy to identify with the victims and a symbol of solidarity in the fight against ‘those’ that wish to destroy the liberal carte blanche to publish.

The panel explored how its support by predominantly white people, however well meaning, has deeply contradictory effects which need to be queried. For example, within the # we witness the silent co-option of free speech (an immensely valuable tool in its ability to check all forms of unbridled oppressive power) by primarily white individuals as a tool to defend a specific brand of hypocritical and limitless free speech.

This brand permits the publication of cartoons offensive to minorities and goes to great lengths to identify the attackers as Muslim killers (rather than people affiliated with a certain dangerous ideology) thus perpetuating racial divisions, a distinct ‘othering’ of Islamic identity which works to recreate and strengthen hierarchies of power and oppression. As Nadine pointed out, why did the media not categorise white supremacist Anders Breivik a ‘bad Christian’ (even though he portrayed himself as 100% Christian)? Interesting.

Day one of Birkbeck Law on Trial succinctly brought home a fantastic example of how the colonial logic of historical dominance under the ruse of a ‘civilising mission’ endures, now, under a rhetoric of security, protection and possibly, free speech.

The slow creation of an Islamophobic identity marks a new ‘dynamics of difference’, demarcating and racialising difference in an attempt to either assimilate or racialize the other. Colonialism has found a new laboratory.

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Spatial Distortion in Perception and Cognition

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This post was contributed by Elena Azañón and Luigi Tamè, postdoctoral fellows in Birkbeck’s BodyLab

matthew-longoProf Matthew Longo gave his inaugural lecture about “Spatial Distortions in Perception and Cognition” on June 4th. He has been a lecturer in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Birkbeck, University of London, since 2010, and has recently been appointed Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the same Department.

He completed his PhD at the University of Chicago in 2006 and spent several years at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London as a postdoctoral researcher before joining Birkbeck. The main focus of his research concerns the psychological and neural mechanisms underlying body representations, and how these affect all aspects of our mental lives.

Longo’s inaugural lecture was introduced by the Master of Birkbeck, Prof David S Latchman, who commented on Longo’s exceptional achievements during his remarkable career. Professor Latchman highlighted the high quality of his research and impressive publication record in high impact journals. Indeed, Longo has been recently awarded by two of the major internationally recognised early career awards, in Europe (i.e., the 2014 Experimental Psychology Society Prize) and overseas (i.e., the American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career).

Pathological conditions

Longo started his lecture by highlighting that in many situations healthy people appear to have distorted representations of their bodies. However, despite these distortions, people are able to appropriately interact with the environment. Longo continued by describing several bizarre pathological conditions characterised by distortions in the representations of the body.

The underlying idea is that pathology is a continuum and, in one way or another, healthy people might share some features of these deficits. One of the paradigmatic examples he mentioned was the phantom limb experience, a condition in which a patient who has suffered the amputation of a limb, continues to experience the limb. In this respect, he recounted an elegant historical anecdote about Horatio Nelson’s phantom limb experience after loss of his arm, which was described by the admiral as proof of the immaterial soul.

He finally mentioned a patient, described by Oliver Sacks, who repeatedly fell out of her bed. When asked the reason of this behaviour, the patient complained that the nurses were secretly introducing a severed arm in the bed with her. The nurses finally realized that the patient was affected by somatoparaphrenia (i.e., the lack of awareness of a part of the body). It was the patient’s own left arm, which she believed was somebody else’s arm that she was throwing out of the bed!

Spatial distortions in perception

Before starting to describe his own work, he explained more about the idea of spatial distortions in perception. This is somehow a counterintuitive concept considering that the goal of perception is to create a veridical model of the world.

If people perceive a distorted world, how can they possibly act on it in an appropriate way? As an example of normal distortions, he described the representations at the level of the primary sensory and motor cortices in which the body parts are represented with different levels of magnification. Longo explained that these distortions are necessary steps to achieve complex behaviours.

Indeed, if we had homogenous tactile sensitivity across the body, then apparently simple tasks such as lacing up our shoes would be impossible. What allows us to perform everyday actions, which seem simple to us but are incredibly complex from a motor control perspective, is that different bits of the skin are represented differently in the brain. That is, bits of the skin able to produce fine-grained movements, such as the fingers, have extremely high tactile sensitivity, while others, such as the back of the leg have much less sensitivity.

Examining distortions

In the second half of the lecture he demonstrated that body representations are not only distorted at the level of the primary cortices, but also, though to a lesser degree, at higher levels of perceptual processing. Across several experiments, Longo made use of Weber’s illusion. In this illusion, the perceived distance between two touches is larger on skin regions of high tactile sensitivity than on those with lower acuity. His research suggests that the dorsum of the hand, but not the palm, is implicitly represented wider and squatter than it actually is. He argued that these distortions are partly explained by the shape of the tactile receptive fields of cortical neurons on the different parts of the hand.

Longo continued describing similar distortions of the representation of our bodies that are independent from touch. In order to isolate and measure this implicit body representation, Longo developed, jointly with his former supervisor, Professor Patrick Haggard from UCL, an elegant, simple and effective paradigm.

Participants used a long baton to judge the location of the knuckle and tip of each finger of their own occluded hand. By comparing the relative location of each landmark, he was able to construct implicit maps of the represented shape and size of the hand, which could then be compared to the actual hand shape. He found that these maps were drastically distorted, and in a highly consistent manner across individuals. In particular, across a number of studies, Longo revealed a general underestimation of finger length and an overestimation of hand width. These distortions are similar to those he found in the tactile modality. He further noted that this pattern of results was highly stable across body parts.

The event concluded with a final speech by Professor Martin Eimer. He thanked Longo for his exciting and entertaining lecture. He further highlighted the high productivity and creativity of Longo’s research during his early career, exalting the elegance of his experimental approach and design. He also highlighted that despite being a great scientist, he is likewise an excellent colleague, who is always available and willing to perform mundane duties that despite being unexciting, are fundamental for the department’s life.

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