Category Archives: Humanities and Social Sciences

Bloomsbury Humanitarian Debates

This post was contributed by Anna Marry, Communications Manager, LIDC. It originally appeared on the LIDC blog.

Inter-collegiate, interdisciplinary events are always a pleasure to go to, and not only because of LIDC’s focus on interdisciplinary research in international development working with five Bloomsbury Colleges. That particular approach often unearths issues that would not have been unearthed otherwise, and bringing together academics with the NGO community and policy-makers makes such events even more stimulating.

The Bloomsbury Humanitarian Debate in June was no different. Organised for the fifth time by two LIDC member colleges: Birkbeck and London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and their partner Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF), this series of events explores various issues in the humanitarian sector using a debate format with academic and non-academic experts.

The June event was on resilience in the humanitarian sector. The panel included speakers from MSF, Humanitarian Outcomes, University of Bristol and University of Cambridge. The audience was mostly composed of humanitarian experts themselves, including policy-makers and donors.

Sandrine Tiller from MSF argued that focusing on resilience undermines necessary short-term responses to humanitarian crises. She pointed out that merely surviving is not the same as coping – we often think that people in crisis, for example in Somalia, are resilient, while in fact they are just staying alive.

Paul Harvey from Humanitarian Outcomes disagreed with that view, claiming that resilience was in fact just a new repackaging of an old concept. Resilience is not necessarily anti-relief and can be very helpful. Instead of criticising resilience as a concept and hair-splitting over semantics, one should focus on specific things that work or do not work in short- and long-term responses to humanitarian crises.

Professor Mark Duffield from Bristol University reiterated the view that resilience was not a new concept. According to the expert, the aid industry reinvents itself every few years and now the Holy Grail seems to be resilience. The speaker pointed out a dangerous trend in disaster relief, which he called ‘digital humanitarianism’ – private sector companies boiling down disaster responses to technical fixes. After all, buying an app that tells you how to avoid flooding or pollution, is not going to solve the fundamental issue of the risk of floods or polluted air and water.

The fourth speaker, Professor Virginia Murray from Cambridge University, defended the concept of resilience, drawing on her experience working with inter-governmental disaster risk reduction processes. She argued that resilience is crucial for those high-level international forums, as it resonates well and is easy to translate.

The discussion that followed raised interesting issues such as:

Is local civil society key to resilience?

While resilience seems to be a fairly clear concept when applied to natural disasters, what role does it have in conflict?

Does focus on resilience detract donor funding from humanitarian responses?

Saving lives today versus saving lives tomorrow – does one occur at the expense of the other?

Is it the role of NGOs to engage in state-building, or should they focus on short-term relief efforts?

It was fascinating to listen to the arguments both for and against. The debate made me wonder, however, if the contention is not in fact over definitions rather than the actual concept. After all, few would argue against humanitarian aid in crisis, where saving lives is an absolute priority, and few would completely rule out development efforts that have a chance of preventing crises in the long run. As with many things in life, it may be a question of balancing one with the other. Whether we use the term ‘resilience’ or not, is another matter. It may be safer to think of another term that stirs less controversy.

Either way, I will be watching this space and looking forward to the next Bloomsbury Humanitarian Debate. Earlier this spring LIDC launched its new Working Group on Humanitarian Crisis that brings together academics interested in conflict and natural disaster from across Bloomsbury Colleges. A few weeks ago LIDC awarded one of its annual Fellowship grants to Dr. Tejendra Pherali from the Institute of Education and Dr. Karl Blanchet from London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine to explore the educational and health response to the Syrian refugee crisis in Jordan and Turkey.

Humanitarianism is certainly a very potent area for interdisciplinary, inter-institutional research to explore.

Researching the Text – The Fourth Dimension…

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This post was contributed by Jackie Watson, a PhD student in English.

Coming to early modern thought through a study of the period’s material culture may
be a commonplace of twenty-first century scholarship, but the bringing together of
experts in different literary and art historical disciplines can still be a revelatory
experience!

Thursday 5 June saw the fourth such event at Birkbeck, organised by Professor Sue
Wiseman. In previous years, experts from the Victoria and Albert Museum have
joined faculty and postgraduate researchers from Birkbeck and other universities to
explore the inter-relationship between texts and objects. This year’s range was as
wide as ever, with speakers joining London students from Cambridge, Queen Mary
and the National Portrait Gallery. With panels and lectures accompanied by a
magical tour of the British Museum, the stage was set for a hugely entertaining, as
well as informative, day.

The first panel brought together three surprisingly cohesive papers from speakers at
different stages of their careers in Cambridge. Opening the day was Irene Galandra
Cooper from Jesus College, whose paper on the role of rosaries in Italy began the
spiritual thread which was to weave through so many papers on supposedly physical
objects. Irene discussed the presence of rosaries on inventories and examined specific
examples made of a variety of materials from the everyday wooden versions to those
made of amber, coral and precious metals – some even filled with perfumes such as
ambergris. As she displayed images of their use in portraiture, she hinted at the
liminal quality of an object which was at the same time a means of guiding prayer and
a bodily adornment.

Building on the issues of cultural, geographical and social contingency Irene raised,
the second speaker, Ellie Chan from St Catherine’s, went on to discuss the
multiplicity of meanings in her thinking about points, which is to be the subject of her
PhD thesis. From developments in geometry to clothing design, Ellie challenged the
presumption of a mathematical point’s static nature, looking instead at the mobility
involved in a point’s development of patterns, and in the effect of points on the body
and on the senses.

Post-doc researcher, Lucy Razzell, from Emmanuel College, completed the first
panel, with another paper of dazzling semantics. Focusing this time on chests, Lucy
explained how her work formed part of a larger project on containment and enclosure,
and went on, via a discussion of the parallels between wooden chests and the human
thorax, to a perceptive interpretation of Act 2, scene 2 of Cymbeline. Forced by all of
the papers to think hard about the tension between materiality and language, between
the physical and the spiritual and sensual reality of objects, we were prepared for a
development of some of these ideas in the second panel of the morning.

In this, Birkbeck PhD students, Becky Tomlin and Sue Jones, were joined by Nicolle
Mennell, just leaving Queen Mary and about to embark on her thesis at Sussex.
Nicole’s focus was on Zibellini, the often-ornate objects made from the bodies of
martens or weasels. Erroneously called flea-furs in the nineteenth century, these
Zibellini were sometimes unembellished, but more often covered in precious metals,
enamelled and/or embedded with jewels. Her discussion of the function of the objects
(which some scholars have suggested were amulets connected with childbirth) led
Nicole to an interesting reappraisal of the reference to ‘a sable silvered’ in Hamlet.

Silver also featured prominently in Sue Jones’ paper on the Admiralty Oar. A unique
object of great material worth, the oar had even greater symbolic value in its use at
Admiralty courts, and indeed still does today. In a fascinating paper detailing
references to the oar from the late middle ages, we saw the presence of the oar at
judgements of early modern piracy as well as the creation of ‘mini’ oars to enable
justice overseas in times of Empire. Prompting consideration of how an object can
embody the authority of an institution, the paper fitted well alongside that of Becky
Tomlin, whose discussion of a 1576 manuscript prayerbook encouraged consideration
of its functionality within the wider context of the Reformed Church.

The prayerbook, created by Robert Heasse, minister at St Botolph’s, Aldgate, existed
alongside the officially sanctioned Book of Common Prayer – and clearly one had to
question why, in this especially controlled area of life, a handwritten copy of the
minister’s contributions to services throughout the year should exist at all. In a
perceptive survey of the issues involved in consideration of a book as an object,
Becky’s paper explored its aesthetic qualities as well as its likely place in religious
observance and, perhaps, its creation as an aid to an aging priest with possibly
diminishing eyesight. From issues of authority and religion, to the pragmatics of
everyday life, the second panel added to the larger questions the day was raising about
the study of objects and their interrelationship with text and ideas.

The afternoon offered two sessions led by established experts in their fields. Firstly,
Jane Eade, a curator at the National Portrait Gallery, delivered a hugely enjoyable
lecture on family portraiture in the early modern period. Her account of how
portraiture burgeoned at the Reformation, in response to the decline of ecclesiastical
painting, focused on the growth of a new form of family portrait in England during
the latter part of the sixteenth century. From issues of genealogy and the presence of
coats of arms on highly ornate representations in church settings, to the more intimate
depiction of family groups such as Holbein’s painting of Thomas More’s, the lecture
enabled listeners to develop skills in reading these particular objects – like many
already discussed during the day, contingent on cultural and social circumstances, but
particularly dependent on visual interpretation.

The final session of the day built on the liminal – the spiritual and symbolic qualities
of many objects so far considered – and moved to an appraisal of objects believed to
be able to establish contact with the spirit world. Beside the British Museum’s
collection of objects supposedly owned by John Dee, Dr Stephen Clucas discussed the
probability of this ownership as well as exploring the ways in which such objects
would have been used by the man whom many consider a champion of the occult, but
who was actually demonstrating his devotion to God in his attempts to contact the
angels. A reading of excerpts from Dee’s Libri Mysteriorum allowed understanding
both of the precision with which objects such as the ‘Shew Stone’ were used and of
the kind of messages Dee felt he was receiving through scryers such as Edward
Kelley.

Stephen Clucas communicates through the glass

Birkbeck’s fourth study day on the relationship between objects, culture and texts was
both enjoyable and rewarding. The range of material touched upon, the breadth of
ideas and approaches to objects, and the consequent development of contextual
understanding, all made the event very useful to the researchers who were part of it.
The day concluded with a superb London Renaissance Seminar lecture delivered by
Professor Alan Stewart from Columbia. His discussion of Richard Stonley’s diaries,
their function and their composition, led to a lively discussion of the various factors
involved in life-writing in the early modern period. Many know the diaries by
Stonley, a man clearly both devout and widely read, because they contain one of the
first accounts of buying a copy of a Shakespearean text (here Venus and Adonis) in
print. Those who had participated in the day had a fuller understanding of what
consideration of such a diary demanded, and how to question its materiality; it had
become more than simply a three-dimensional object.

Whose legacy is it, anyway? (East London in Flux III)

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This post was contributed by Elisa Engel, Architect and Director at ehk! (engelhadleykirk)

In May, Birkbeck hosted ‘From the East End to the West End: Locals’ Perspectives on Changing Stratford and the 2012 Olympics’, an event that was part of the ‘East London in Flux’ event series, organised by Fundamental Architectural Inclusion and Birkbeck. The series sets out to investigate the changes that East London has been going through since the Olympic Games.

Dr Paul Watt – a Senior Lecturer at Birkbeck – presented research that he carried out in collaboration with Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Their study looks at how a group of young people living in temporary accommodation in Stratford perceive the Olympic Legacy. Dr Watt argued that rather than creating opportunities for vulnerable young people in East London, those who took part in the study felt excluded from the Olympic Games – they were unable to obtain tickets to any of the events and were targeted by profiling techniques used by the security agencies around the event, leading to an increasing sense of alienation. Similarly, those interviewed did not feel that the infrastructure improvements facilitated by the Olympic Games benefited them, as they had led to increasing house prices that will see them and many others in their community priced out of the area all together.

The presentation prompted discussions that dealt with a much wider range of issues around gentrification and vulnerable communities. The real strength of the evening lay in the diverse viewpoints of the participants – local residents, housing professionals, architects, etc.

It was felt on the whole that the experiences of those who took part in the study were by no means unique to Stratford or even to those of a similar age and income bracket.

London has always been a city in flux. Neighbourhoods’ fortunes rise and fall. Industries see their heyday followed by a sometimes sharp decline. New communities move in, displacing existing ones for a whole variety of reasons, often, as in East London, through sheer financial muscle. Despite efforts to decentralise, the capital remains the UK’s main economic driver, and as long as that is the case, people will want to move to London from all over the world. What was felt to be a relatively recent development was that with the London housing stock overall increasing far too slowly to accommodate the influx of people to the capital, the pressure on the housing market had reached unprecedented levels. It is no longer just the young and the poor who cannot afford to rent or buy – the problem is increasingly affecting the middle-aged and the middle classes.

The improvements made in terms of transport links and public spaces that were carried out in the host boroughs as part of the Olympic Games have made these areas more accessible and more attractive. It naturally follows that more people will want to move to the area, and that some of them will have the financial means to outbid existing residents and cause them to be displaced. This is a fundamental conundrum facing those involved with improving neighbourhoods – improving the physical fabric will often destroy the communities the measure aims to assist.

I would love to be able to report that we participants found a quick and easy solution to the problem, but unfortunately this was not the case. What the event did provide was an unusually diverse, honest and lucid discussion about issues of inequality and possible measures, such as increased regulation of the private rental market and public investment and housing. And that is the kind of discussion we need to have as a matter of urgency.

Further events in the East London in Flux series will be taking place throughout the summer. Tickets are free.