Inaugural Conference 2005: "Culture and Social Change: Disciplinary Exchanges"
11-13 July 2005
Hulme Hall
The University of Manchester, UK
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Craig Calhoun (Sociology, New York University)
Veena Das (Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University)
Ash Amin (Geography, Durham)
Nigel Thrift (Geography, Oxford)
Conference Report
From Craig Calhoun's opening sweeping account of different disciplinary (sociology, anthropology, geography, economics, history, science and technology studies, to name the most salient) approaches to culture, to Veena Das's meticulous use of an ethnography of health care in India to open up huge questions about suffering and hope, which closed the conference, and to the breath of papers sandwiched between, this inaugural conference epitomised some of CRESC's key commitments: to disciplinary exchanges; to an intentional intellectual openness, at times eclectic, but a committed refusal to be constrained by the possible limits of disciplines; to the use of empirical research to tease out questions of socio-cultural change; and to a conceptual and methodological creativity in thinking through how we can understand such processes.
Craig Calhoun's account of disciplinary exchanges even stretched beyond the social sciences and humanities to argue the need for researchers to have knowledge of basic science, a point reiterated by others such as Elspeth Probyn, who was adamant on the need to move out of our intellectual comfort zones. Probyn pointed out how the culture/science dualism continues to haunt fields such as gender studies and sociology. Nigel Thrift also posed challenging questions asking how biology might speak to the social, and relatedly, how we might develop kinship with the world. However despite Calhoun's suggestion that without knowledge of basic science, we will be unable to enter important arguments about the meaning of science and technological change, Joan Haran and Kate O'Riordan nonetheless managed a provocative intervention into debates about genomics. Their paper, 'Genomics: A Political Investment in the New', offered a compelling reflection on a further CRESC concern, not just an interest in examining socio-cultural change, but also in subjecting claims of change to scrutiny. Haran and O'Riordan provided a clear illustration of the political work that claims to change and the 'new' are invested with in the field of genomics. Their paper argued that the 'new' genetics enacts a radical rupture with the history of eugenics in order to offer the promise of human perfectibility in an orderly liberal nation-state. This chimed with the assertion from a number of speakers that a critique of presentism is necessary in accounts of socio-cultural change. Frank Mort noted the dangers of casting history merely as background, and argued the importance of history in a genealogy of the present, calling for relational histories and microhistories of specific events. Liz Stanley pointed to the need for longitudinal research in examining processes of social change.
Other keynotes and roundtables raised a host of further issues. Both Elspeth Probyn and Angela McRobbie insisted that gender remains a pressing issue when trying to understand processes of socio-cultural change. For McRobbie, New Labour, championing young women's success in education and employment, utilises feminist gains while also undoing them. Her paper, 'Top Girls?: Female Success and New Labour's New Meritocracy', argued that young women have been positioned as privileged subjects of political discourses, which suggest women recognise themselves as subjects of social change, yet at the same time the possibility of a renewed anti-racist and feminist politics is repudiated.
Probyn's paper took her research with school girls, on what they think about how the media represents them, as an opportunity to reflect on the messiness of research. The paper was itself a manifestation of the contingent nature of much academic research, being a collision of two projects, one a conceptual project on emotions, focusing on shame, and the other on girls and the media. While shame was not a focus of the research on girls and the media, the management of emotions, including shame was one of the key points which emerged from interviews and focus groups. Yet this prompted further reflection from Probyn on her own experiences of shame, and about the gaps between researcher and researched, and on the role of social science research methods in distancing and protecting the researcher from the feelings, anxieties and emotions raised in research relationships.
Both McRobbie and Probyn echoed each other in their questioning of how cultural studies can continue to make claims for political relevance, their research in and of itself offering exemplars of how this can be achieved. For Probyn in particular this raised the question of how to bring the personal into the policy field, and as MacRobbie demonstrated in her account of the use of stories of high achieving school girls in the Daily Mail, the introduction of the personal in the context of policy debates is fraught with danger.
Craig Calhoun concluded his keynote with a call to make our inquiries reflexive. As he noted, not only are universities sites for reflecting on socio-cultural change, they are also sites for the institution of socio-cultural change - in the UK, Blair's desire for 50% of school leavers to enter Higher Education by 2010 serves as a potent demonstration of this. Universities as a key arena of contemporary change was a topic further elaborated by Sue Wright in her paper, 'Processes of Cultural Transformation: Higher Education and Neo-Liberal Governance in England'. Wright elaborated how anthropologists use detailed studies of everyday life to understand bigger processes of social change. Through an anthropology of policy, specifically of transformations in higher education, she offered an exploration of how these new governance models, management systems and associated technologies work in specific university contexts, and significantly, she provided an account of how these neo-liberal transformations have often been misrecognised by academics.
While on the one hand the conference elicited an at times mind boggling array of papers under the catch-all topic of socio-cultural change, on the other hand there were perhaps some notable absences or gaps or weaknesses. It is an interesting task for CRESC to contemplate what was missing, despite the wide remit of the conference. Some conversations with participants suggested perhaps less on social movements and social protest, on race, on the rural, than might be anticipated, and no doubt there were many other elisions.
Throughout the conference there was the implicit and at times more explicit suggestion that the social sciences have been failing to analyse contemporary social change, with occasional exceptions noted such as Cultural Studies at Birmingham and Mass Observation, now located at Sussex University (in Nick Hubble's paper), all suggesting a rather substantial agenda for CRESC in the future ..
. and these are just some tantalising glimpses of some of the work on socio-cultural change which this conference brought together. Inevitably a review such as this can only touch on a very partial account of a number of papers, given altogether there were more than 100 papers presented. While this inaugural conference offered a preview of some of CRESC's overall interests, next year's conference to be held at St Hugh's College, University of Oxford, will focus more specifically on the concerns of CRESC's Theme 2 - Media and Social Theory.
Niamh Moore
CRESC
University of Manchester