Category Archives: Humanities and Social Sciences

The Politics of Population Change: Launch of Book and Research Group

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This post was contributed by Guy Collender, Communications Manager at Birkbeck’s Department of External Relations

The links between politics and population change – often deemed too controversial for debate – were explored during a frank discussion at a book launch held at Birkbeck.

Speakers urged academics and society to recognise the many implications of unprecedented and unfolding developments addressed in the new book Political demography: How population changes are reshaping international security and national politics.

The Population, Environment and Resources Group – a new part of Birkbeck’s Politics Department – was also launched at the event on Thursday 19 April.

Professor Eric Kaufmann, of Birkbeck’s Department of Politics and co-editor of the book, described the range of population dynamics affecting politics. Birth rates, urbanisation, sex ratios and the age structure of a population all have far-reaching consequences for nations, ethnic groups, religions, civilizations, and development.

He explained how we are living through “unprecedented” demographic shifts as the “population explosion” which began in the 20th century is being followed by a “fertility implosion.” These trends are much more exaggerated today in the developing world than they were during the demographic transition – the progression from high birth and death rates to low birth and death rates – in the developed world between 1750 and 1900.

Kaufmann mentioned that such “great unevenness” promises to result in dramatic change. He suggested, for example, how high birth rates, a young population and high unemployment  – a combinations of factors relating to population – might lead to violence.

Fertility as a weapon

Monica Duffy Toft, Associate Professor at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and co-editor of Political Demography, focused on the use of fertility as a political weapon in her presentation on “wombfare.” She said: “In international relations and politics numbers matter. If numbers shift and the political institutions do not this will lead to problems. It becomes a conflict if one group is out-birthing another.” In particular, Toft referred to the political importance of fertility between different groups in Lebanon (Christians and Muslims), and Israel and Palestine (Jews and Arabs, Jews and Muslims).

Population dynamics in Africa

Dr Elliott Green, of the London School of Economics, referred to the interaction between population and conflict in Africa. He emphasised Africa’s low population density, which has led to communal land rights as there is more demand for labour than land, and the existence of large states. Green discussed the phenomenon of rural to rural migration, and conflict between settler and native groups, particularly in Darfur and the Democratic Republic of Congo, which have both experienced population growth rates of four per cent since the mid-20th century.

Sensible debate needed

Professor Tim Dyson, of LSE, reiterated the significance of the demographic transition. He declared that “nothing is more important” in explaining the growth of democratisation as fertility decline leads to a greater proportion of adults in the population, and adults demand a voice in how they are governed. The positive impact on women’s lives because of fertility decline was also mentioned.

However, Dyson warned about the virtual disappearance of demography as a discipline in the English-speaking world, and the widespread aversion to raising population concerns, as well as discussing climate change. He added: “Human beings everywhere do not like to talk about difficult issues. We should be able to talk about these things in a balanced, sensible and civilized way.”

Listen to the podcast of The Politics of Population Change

WAR-net meeting

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This post was contributed by Kate McLoughlin of the Department of English and Humanities.

On 9 March 2012, I organised the fourth biannual WAR-Net meeting at Birkbeck. The meeting was a showcase of members’ interests. Papers ranged from Virtual Iraq to the comedy of war in eighteenth-century novels and prints. Panels covered Holocaust representation, the First World War, the Second World War, visual representation and gender.

The opening keynote, by Professor Debra Kelly of the University of Westminster, was a fascinating exploration of the Free French presence in Second World War London, a presentation that resonated with many of the French delegates to the conference.

Professor Mary Favret closed proceedings with a keynote on wartime Britain’s Fast and Humiliation, a thought-provoking presentation on an eighteenth-century practice now most closely mirrored by the twenty-first-century apology.

You can download speakers’ abstracts and listen to podcasts of the keynote talks on the WAR-Net webpages.

 

I-D: The Boundaries of Identity: The multiple identities of multilingualism

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This post was contributed by Bryony Merritt, from Birkbeck’s Department of External Relations.

Tonight’s lecture was the second in the series of lectures being organised by the School of Social Sciences, History and Philosophy around the theme of identity.

Dr Derek Hook was the first speaker and he started by saying that “Identity is one of the most over-used and under-defined terms in social theory”.  He then introduced the audience to the concept of identification. This he described as the psychological process of assimilating an aspect or attribute of the other, and in the process being transformed wholly or partially.

Identification is not the same as identity. Identification is the outcome of the failure of identity, as defined as “the sameness of a person or thing at all times”. A person is always partially a reflection or copy of something else, having assimilated aspects of others.

Dr Hook said that as social subjects we are always entangled with others and never fully differentiable from those around us. Sometimes we are over inclusive when setting the boundaries of who we identify with, and at other times we tend to be over exclusive.

Freud identified three forms of identification. The first was the primitive form (or father-as-ideal). In this form the object wants to become the father. It is a loving form of identification, yet underscored by ambivalence as there is an implication that the child wants to replace the father, which introduces an element of competitiveness.

The second form of identification discussed by Freud is regressive identification. This form relates to a lost or failed love. The object wants something or someone, but can’t have them, so instead becomes like them, by assimilating their traits.

The third form is hysterical identification. In this case the process is driven by a desire to occupy a place, not to become another person. There is no emotional attachment to the person whose trait is being assimilated, and in fact there could be active antipathy towards that person. It is only the place occupied by them which is being sought.

In the second part of the lecture, Professor Jean-Marc Dewaele gave several clear examples of how people who are multilingual can create different identities for themselves in different languages.

The first example was of an American student called Alice. In the USA she distanced herself from classmates, and felt that she could not change her identity as defined by her class and social status. When she went to France, she used the opportunity to recreate herself, regularly organising parties in her dorm room, and creating an identity as an intellectual who was able to hold her own in philosophical discussions with her French friends, using “big long French words”.

A Finnish multilingual was able to pinpoint very specific personality traits which manifested themselves when he spoke different languages. Although in this case the multilingual was able to identify different traits coming to the fore when he spoke different languages, sometimes this is a more subtle difference. An interesting experiment with Spanish-English bilinguals showed that when asked to rank themselves on the ‘Big Five’ personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) the same participants gave different results, depending on which language they were asked in.

Another fascinating study with Greek-English bilinguals, told participants a story about Andy, or Andreas, depending on the language that the story was told in. Andy/Andreas had been neglecting his girlfriend and elderly mother because of pressures at work. The participants in the study were much more likely to be tolerant of Andy’s behaviour than of Andreas’s, showing that not only were they language switching, they were also switching between cultural frameworks.

Professor Dewaele ended by saying that multilingualism has been shown to have a positive effect on open-mindedness, cultural empathy and social initiative, and that he wishes that more governments would recognise the benefits that multilingualism can bring.

I-D: The Boundaries of Identity: the political and geographical boundaries of identity and ethnicity

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This post was contributed by Bryony Merritt from Birkbeck’s Department of External Relations.

This event was the first in a series of events being held by the School of Social Sciences, History and Philosophy, each of which will explore the boundaries of identity from a different angle.

Tonight’s event focuses on the way that politics and geography can play a role in defining ideas of identity, and specifically ethnic identity.

The first speaker, Dr Eric Kaufmann started by explaining what identity is, from a social science perspective. He described it as the characteristics which a group of people identify with and which link them socially. These might be characteristics of class, gender, ethnicity or religion. The fact that identity uses markers to show who is within and who is outside of the group leads to the concept of boundaries. These boundaries are essential for the constitution of groups, whose members share a common identity.

Dr Kaufmann then went on to introduce the two key schools of thought around what creates and maintains identity and its boundaries. The first is that identities are created by power and material interests, for example the promotion of a Serbian national identity by Milosevic during the ’90s. In this case, as configurations of power shift, the boundaries of those identities created to secure it can also move.

The second school of thought is that identity is inherited and passed down through institutions such as the church or state education. In this model the boundaries of identity are not flexible, but embedded through generations.

In the case of ethnic identity, Dr Kaufmann explained, the defining characteristic can vary, depending on which ethnic identities a boundary is being created between. For example, between the Basques and the Spanish, the boundary line is one of language. For the Irish and the Northern Irish, it is one of religion. Sometimes the marker of the boundary between two ethnic identities can change, although the groups remain the same. In Canada in the pre-1960s, the marker of the boundary line between the French Canadians and English Canadians was one of religion (Catholic/Protestant), today there is still a boundary line between the two groups, but language is now a much more important differentiator, as both groups have become increasingly secularised.

Dr Kaufmann also illustrated how different group identities show differing levels of boundary fluidity. For example, in the USA in 1928, the idea of a Catholic president was still not acceptable to the majority of the white voting population, but in 1960 JFK was elected as the country’s first Catholic president and white Catholics had been accepted into the majority white north-American category. By 2012 it is even less of an issue that Mitt Romney, a Mormon, is running for President. This widening of the boundary markers for this ethnic identity is in stark contrast to the situation in Northern Ireland, where ethnic boundaries have been reproduced for centuries and cannot be easily displaced.

Dr Kaufmann’s talk provided some interesting and illuminating examples of the geographical and political boundaries of ethnic identity.

The second speaker, Dr Karen Wells, talked about how human geography can help us to understand identity and ethnicity, and also considered the issue of the borderland in ethnic identity construction. She explained that concepts that are abstract in other disciplines such as political science are given material concreteness by geographers’ fixation with spaces.

Dr Wells showed that as people move across physical boundaries they often redefine themselves, as well as changing both the place they leave behind and the place that they arrive to. For example, the celebration of traditional Mexican festivals in North America.

The Oromo community in London provide an example of how crossing a physical border can affect identity. In their native Ethiopia this community holds very closely to its Oromo identity. In London, however, the group members found that they were referred to as African, Ethiopian, Black British or even Black Caribbean. The one place where they are recognised as Oromo in London is at a local community centre. This experience demonstrates that identities can be pressed onto groups by circumstances.

Dr Wells also explored the way that spaces can be coded in a certain way to create certain reactions. For example, a blue plaque or a monument will invite the passerby to recall specific events that have taken place in that space, but what of the hidden or forgotten history? The photographer Ingrid Pollard used images of black people in rural landscapes to challenge this enforced identification of black British culture belonging in urban environments and of the British countryside as white.

Two examples given by Dr Wells demonstrate how maps, landscapes and borders can be used as tools to manipulate identities, including ethnicity. Her own experience in Addis Adaba, when conducting her PhD research, showed Dr Wells this practice in action. The only maps of the city that she could find showed government offices, the university and hotels, but not the vast areas of the city where the majority of (poor) people lived. This was an attempt to present the city as a modern capital of a modern state but attempted to exclude the poor people from the city’s identity.

Similarly, the map of Africa in 1914, as divided up by the European colonial powers, bore no resemblance to the historical or physical geography of Africa, yet these arbitrary boundaries went on to become the post-colonial countries.

These examples demonstrate how physical borders – both their manipulation, and crossing them, can impact on the redefining of ethnic identities.