March 2018 – History of The Human Sciences

Pageantry and the picket line: on the psychology of striking

Watching the current University and College Union (UCU) picket lines from afar – I’m a postdoctoral fellow based in Germany – I was trying to think if I’d ever come across any psychological writings on striking, and, more specifically on picket lines. Of course, as Chris Millard has pointed out already in this series, strikes are not primarily expressions of feeling; they are withdrawals of labour. Indeed, references to strikers’ ‘deep’ or ‘strong’ feelings in letters by university Vice-Chancellors seem to downplay the material demands being made by striking workers. I was nonetheless interested in finding out whether theorisations of the psychological experience of picket lines – as specific spatial, temporal and interpersonal phenomena – already exist.

Perhaps unsurprisingly a search of the multiple psychoanalytic journals included in the Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing database for ‘picket line’ yielded just fourteen results. I looked at the two earliest examples that appeared on this list and in both cases the picket line appeared as a fraught symbol for individual bourgeois analysands. In a discussion of compulsive hand-washing from 1938 a female patient writes a short story whose protagonist is based on her hotel maid’s participation in an elevator operator strike. The patient took up the workers’ cause, organising meetings in support of their actions. In this period of political involvement, the analyst reports, that patient’s hand-washing stopped. As soon as her involvement with the strike ceased (interpreted by the analyst as a form of sublimation), her ‘compulsive’ behaviour resumed.[ref]George S. Goldman, ‘A Case of Compulsive Handwashing’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 7 (1938), 96-121.[/ref] In an article from 1943 a ‘frigid hysteric’ patient dreams of a bus trip being cancelled due to a transport strike. In the subsequent interpretation of the dream, which includes a long cutting from a newspaper article on a strike of charwomen the patient had read, the analyst interprets her reaction to the story as relating to her ‘desperately struggling for male status’; she did not ordinarily support strikes on political groundsm but did so in this case due to the gender of the workers.[ref]Edmund Bergler, ‘A Third Function of the ‘Day Residue’ in Dreams’ Psychoanalytic Quarterly, (1943) 12, 353-370.[/ref] In neither example are the patients themselves involved directly in the strikes and neither have first-hand experience of picket lines; the strikes’ psychic significance is tied to existing individual neuroses. Of course, it might be that non-psychoanalytic theories, with less sinister assumptions about group psychology, might be a better place to start for approaching the question at hand. But instead I found myself thinking about the possibility of approaching the question from different fields altogether.

While researching for a recent article reflecting on commemorations of the 1917 October Revolution I found myself reading about early twentieth-century mass spectacles, left-wing pageants and revolutionary dance troupes in the Soviet Union and America.[ref]https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/revolutionary-commemoration[/ref] In many of these cases the relationship between ‘actual’ historical events and ‘fictional’ theatrical reenactments proved to be blurry. As the title of a 1933 piece Edith Segal choreographed with the Needle Trades Workers Dance Group in New York indicates – Practice for the Picket Line – workers in union or party affiliated dance groups would create scenarios drawing on their own experiences, which would in turn function as rehearsals for future political action.[ref]Ellen Graff, Stepping Left: Dance and Politics in New York City, 1928–1942 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 43.[/ref] But as a historian of the ‘psy’ disciplines with an interest in affective histories of the left, I was particularly intrigued by how the psychological function of such performances was articulated by their creators, participants and audiences. Perhaps these examples, though remote from the ‘psy’ disciplines, could provide material for thinking through the psychic dimension of the collective experience of picketing.

In January 1913 silk weavers and dyers in Paterson, New Jersey went on strike after four workers were fired for complaining about the introduction of a new four-loom technology that required a less skilled workforce. With the strike still on-going but little coverage of it in the mainstream press, activists and intellectuals in New York collaborated with the striking workers to produce an elaborate pageant in Madison Square Gardens on June 7 1913 , sponsored by the International Workers of the World (IWW). The pageant was intended to publicise the strike and raise money for the strike fund, which was urgently needed as the striking workers and their families were at risk of starvation. But the pageant’s purpose was financial, propagandistic and educational, it was also emotional. The Pageant saw 1,029 strikers reenacting the dramatic events of the picket lines punctuated by familiar songs from the labour movement in which the audience was invited to join.[ref]For the programme of the pageant and other associated primary documents, see: ‘Paterson Strike Pageant’, The Drama Review: TDR, 15, 3 (1971), 60-71.[/ref] The dramatic, fast-paced temporality of the staged strike differed markedly from the drawn-out nature of the real one but the worker-performers found the rehearsal process gave them a chance to reflect on and process their experiences. Almost 15,000 people watched the performance which was then described in detail in New York newspapers. The sympathetic leftist publication Solidarity claimed that the performance ‘seized the imagination’, while the hostile New York Times accused it of ‘stimulating mad passion against law and order’[ref]These reviews are cited in Steve Golin, The Fragile Bridge: Paterson Silk Strike, 1913 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), p. 166, p. 169.[/ref]. Although these accounts differed in their political assessment of the production they both emphasised its psychological power. Although the strike was simulated, the passions the reenactment stimulated were real.

The pageant failed to raise significant amounts of money and many subsequently declared it a failure, which distracted workers and took them away from the real pickets outside the mill.[ref]See, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, ‘The Truth About the Paterson Strike’, Rebel Voices: an IWW Anthology, ed. Joyce Kornbluh (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965 pp. 214-226.[/ref] Indeed, the organisers produced the spectacle at a loss. The Paterson silk strike itself was soon defeated. Workers began returning to the factory in July and many of their demands were never met. Yet some discussions both by contemporaries and historians insist that the pageant succeeded not only as an aesthetic innovation which inspired future artistic endeavours – John Reed, one of the New York intellectuals who instigated the production would soon leave for Europe; his book Ten Days That Shook the World would become a defining account of the October Revolution inspiring Sergei Eisenstein’s October in turn – but also as a cognitive and affective interpersonal experience which similarly outlived the performance itself. Though sufficient funds were not raised, consciousnesses were raised (to use the vocabulary of the pageant’s participants and chroniclers).[ref]See, for example, Leslie Fishbein, ‘The Paterson Pageant (1913): The Birth of Docudrama as a Weapon in the Class Struggle’, New York History, 72, 2 (1991), 197-233, Linda Nochlin, ‘The Paterson Strike Pageant of 1913’, Art in America, 62, 1974, 64-68. In her discussion of Segal’s performance Ellen Graff writes that ‘Radicals hoped that mock demonstrations… would prepare workers for actual confrontations as well as engage their sympathies and raise political consciousness.’ Stepping Left, p. 43.[/ref]

The terms ‘class consciousness’ and ‘political consciousness’ in reflections on the performance function as psychological concepts despite rarely having been explicitly understood as such, and as concepts which seem to have gone largely un-thematised within the ‘psy’ disciplines. One starting point for trying to think more about the psychology of the picket line would be to think more carefully about how these terms were used in this context, how they allude to political concepts elaborated by Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, György Lukács and others, but also depart from or complicate them. I’d be interested in thinking about how an emphasis on gaining a broad intellectual understanding of a political situation was combined with an insistence of the importance of immediate emotional experiences, how emotional experience can allow individuals to situate themselves within a collective, and so on.

Perhaps more central, however, would be a consideration of the function of re-enactment as a form of reflection upon political action (and even as a form of political action in its own right) enabling strikers and their supporters to better understand and communicate their struggle. This might open up ways of approaching the (necessarily very different) forms of reflection, representation and dissemination that attend current disputes. Of course, there is often a kind of theatricality to the picket line as has been evident during the current UCU strikes – which can function to communicate demands, alleviate the tedium of standing around in the cold all day, attract more people to the picket etc – but the example of the pageant brings into focus a slight different set of questions about how striking workers represent and communicate their struggles to themselves and others to forge and sustain the solidarity necessary to resist capitulation. This seems particularly urgent in a context in which collective memories of labour organising can be hard to locate.

The current strikes have not succeeded yet, but UCU branches’ rejection of the deal proposed on Monday (March 12th) indicates that something has shifted during this dispute, which may mark the beginning of a broader resistance to the wider marketization of higher education in the UK. University vice-chancellors’ insistence on invoking the ‘deep’ or ‘strong’ feelings of their striking employees can be read as attempts to reduce picket lines to sites of emotional fracas, or coordinated temper tantrums, strangely divorced from the collective withdrawal of labour. But attending to the psychological dimensions of the picket line could potentially do something very different, offering space for acknowledging the anxiety, frustration, boredom and anger associated with striking, while also allowing us to explore how joyful interpersonal collective experiences can participate in building and sustaining political movements.

Hannah Proctor is a Fellow of the Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin.

Image attribution: The accompanying image, ‘Bus load of children of Paterson, N.J., strikers (silk workers) in May Day parade – New York City] [graphic]’ has been sourced form the online catalogue of the Library of Confress. There are no known restrictions on reproduction. The original can be viewed here: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3b00599/

On the emotional and material politics of the strike

by Chris Millard

Strikes stir the emotions. The solidarity of picketing, the anxiety of students missing classes, the anger of those who feel wronged enough to withdraw their labour. There are doubtless strong feelings behind the current University and College Union (UCU) industrial action to defend ‘defined benefit’ pensions. These varied feelings have been mobilized in a number of ways over the past few weeks, and this short post (building on some tweets here and here is an attempt to analyse a bit further the emotional politics of striking.

There are a number of distinct parts (both core and peripheral) of the strike action at play at any one time: the picket line, supportive demonstrations and rallies, teach-outs, the implied dissent, and the withdrawal of labour itself. A key aspect of the emotional politics of this strike can be seen in the confusion (both deliberate and unwitting) between a number of these elements.The Vice-Chancellor of The University of Sheffield, Professor Sir Keith Burnett, sent an email to staff where those on strike were characterized as ‘communicat[ing] the strength of their feelings through strike action’ (you can see an extract from that email in this tweet from Sheffield historian, Simon Stevens). This was not a hostile characterization, but it was a serious misunderstanding. It crystallised out some of the issues I’ve had with the strike and on the picket.

As others have pointed out in response to that communication, the point of a strike is not an expression of feeling, it is to disrupt the operations of the employer to force them back to the negotiating table. As Simon Stevens himself put it on Twitter: ‘A strike is an effort to rebalance the material interests shaping the employer’s behaviour by shutting down production and/or operations.’ But this material intervention seems lost, forgotten or at the very least undersold in the current dispute. The idea (often tacit) that ‘so long as you don’t cross the picket, you are not strike-breaking’ is at issue here. If you do work for the university at home, or in a coffee shop, or anywhere else on strike days, you are not striking. If you sit at home on a strike day, and edit an article to submit to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) on a strike day, you are not striking. So far, so orthodox.

The opposite side to this misapprehension is where emotions come in. It is related to the fact that universities increasingly have been seen in recent years as battlegrounds for free speech. The most recent eruptions are over the Prevent agenda and no-platforming; universities have of course for many years been associated with radical protest and demonstrations. These aspects, the expression of dissent, opinion and protest – often couched in terms of articulation of feelings – have become conflated with strike action. Picket lines superficially have many of the material trappings of protests: banners, placards, megaphones and chanting. But their object is quite distinctive from that of a protest. They exist to demarcate a strike area, to put the strike into a spatial idiom. Even if someone is ‘only’ crossing a picket line for ‘one meeting’ they risk signaling that they do not support the strike, regardless of their actual intentions.

We appear to be in a period of flux in how we think about picket lines, and there is real ambiguity about members of other unions, especially if those unions do not support (or are prevented from supporting) the picketing taking place. However, it is perfectly possible to (at least partially) mitigate the crossing of a picket – with stories across universities of people working who brought hot drinks and snacks out to picketers. I am much less sympathetic to people in UCU, often in senior, permanent positions, who choose not to strike because they don’t agree with the particular issue being foregrounded, or the particular tactics employed. If you choose to freelance when asked for collective action, I think you’ve got some hard thinking to do about solidarity. Saying ‘I don’t agree with this or that’ about the action, mistakes a collective agreement to withdraw labour (overwhelmingly voted for by members) for individuals having a protest. By framing the action in this way, protest is foregrounded, and the spatial and material disruption of the strike disappears. Sir Keith met with Sheffield UCU representatives on Tuesday – and was snapped holding an ‘Official Picket’ sign. However, he still committed this error, inviting UCU delegates into his office, which was across the picket line. They refused to cross, but met him later in a neutral venue.

So picket lines are not protests, and they are not about expressions of feelings: they are a spatial manifestation of the collective withdrawal of labour. Strikes are also material interventions that are undermined by all work, even when it doesn’t cross the picket line.” Well, so what? As I see it, this brings into focus the demand to reschedule teaching, which had previously been backed by, by many institutions, by a threat to deduct up to 100% of pay for each day teaching was not rescheduled. (Most institutions have backed down under public pressure on this particular point. A list of institutions not understood to have backed down on this point at the time of writing can be seen here). However, the fact that the demand was made at all is important, in both material and emotional terms. According to the view that mistakes strike action for an expression of feeling, once the feeling is expressed, there is no reason why the teaching can’t be done. It can be rescheduled (the logistical impossibility notwithstanding), because making the point was the point, rather than the withdrawal of labour. In other words: the supportive demonstrations, the protest, the signs, the placards have obscured the core of the strike, i.e. the withdrawal of labour.

But materially this matters too. Pay has already been, or will be, docked for the work not done, so clearly the employers are engaging on this material, financial level. This relation is in turn connected to the financial interests of students: they are paying their fees, so why shouldn’t they get the promised teaching? However, the employers do not follow through on this view of the financial politics of the strike; they do not, for example, propose to repay people for making up the work. They also (as noted) threatened to dock pay again for the refusal to reschedule. This only makes sense if the strike is transformed into a free-floating expression of dissent, of emotion, of feeling. But that logic doesn’t tally with pay-docking.

If the strike is an expression of feeling, then employers should not dock pay on strike days, and the demand to reschedule will become understandable. (The corresponding logic of holding a 14-day demonstration outside places of work is another matter.) On the other hand, if the docking of pay is legitimate as a response to the withdrawal of labour (and the withdrawal is put in spatial terms by a picket line), then the demand to make it that labour is arguably a challenge to the right to strike after the fact. Emotions and feelings matter hugely in this action. But they are not the point of the strike.

Chris Millard is Lecturer in the History of Medicine and Medical Humanities at the University of Sheffield, and book reviews editor of History of the Human Sciences.

This article represents the views of the author only, and is not written on behalf of History of The Human Sciences, its editors, or editorial board.

The featured image, ‘Penn[sylvania] on The Picket Line — 1917’ comes from ‘Women of Protest: Photographs from the Records of the National Woman’s Party,’ Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. There are no known copyright restrictions with this image. The original can be viewed at this link: https://www.loc.gov/resource/mnwp.160022

#notallgeographers

by Felicity Callard

Human geography – a discipline in the hinterland of the human sciences – is a discipline preoccupied with praxis. Analyses of the relationship between what the geographer writes, what the geographer says, and what the geographer does have animated many of the discipline’s vigorous epistemological and political battles. It is unsurprising, then, that the University & College Union (UCU) strike over Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) pensions has brought questions of praxis into fraught focus. Indeed, in Marxist and other radical geographies – whose histories are generally traced back to the 1960s – the strike has been a privileged site of analytical and activist attention. But tensions today have not been solely about which geographers are – and are not – on the picket lines. Broader issues over where the discipline of geography is made, and who comes to represent that discipline are at stake. On the picket lines and on social media, geography’s present and past – both in material and fantasmatic form – are being worked up and worked through

On the first day of the strike, the Vice Chancellor (VC) of the University of Sussex, Adam Tickell, issued a statement that made it clear that he did not believe that there was an ‘affordable proposal’ for pensions that would satisfy both USS and the Pensions Regulator. As the hours passed, Tickell appeared uncompromising in the face of calls for him to join other VCs who had called for a return to negotiations. An interview with him conducted shortly before the strikes was re-circulated – where he was quoted as saying ‘The younger me may have taken part in the strikes, I don’t know about the current me.’

So far, perhaps so predictable. But Tickell’s words about strike participation could not but carry particular weight given that they had been uttered not only by an economic geographer, but one of the most prominent theorists of neo-liberalism. Indeed, Tickell, in the 1990s and 2000s, had published – often in articles co-authored with Jamie Peck – what became some of the most widely read, and remain some of the most widely taught, economic-geographical anatomizations of post-Fordism, neoliberalism, and global finance. (You can see a list of Tickell’s publications here.) On day 2 of the strike, I addressed Adam Tickell on Twitter lamenting how ‘my younger (geography undergrad & grad) self would not have wanted to imagine that I would be reading your work, years on, to help in the fight against what you are now upholding.’ (These perturbances are as much about disciplinary memory as well as about a discipline’s moral rectitude.) As the days of the strike passed, anger against the position adopted by Tickell amongst geographers grew, to the point where the lustre of the esteemed author was at risk of being tarnished by the apparent intransigence of the university head. By day 4 of the strike, an anonymous parody Twitter account for Adam Tickle. VC. was up and running; it was tweeting about the strike and about the disparity between the alleged ‘early’ and ‘late’ Tickell.

Laura Gill at the University of Sussex picket line holds a placard reading ‘SLAY THE NEOLIBERAL BEAST,’ a quotation from Adam Tickell. From a tweet by Benjamin Fowler, and used with both his and Laura Gill’s approval. Original tweet available at: https://twitter.com/B_B_Fowler/status/968481178444541952

Many human sciences have wrestled with how best to bring into focus the object that demands analysis (in this case, the current crisis within universities manifest through the USS strike) – debating which frameworks best allow us to understand that object, as well as the role of those variously positioned in relation to that object. In this sense, Tickell has become a useful figure. Through him, many more general issues – that are not actually about one, or even several individuals, and that relate to the production of academic knowledge and the organization of today’s universities – can be debated and contested. Here those debates centre on the extent to which one university manager’s earlier publications on neoliberalism could and should be used to understand the current crisis in toto, as well as on the extent to which the existence of those same writings should give added weight to the moral opprobrium directed to that same manager’s current stance. There are two separate issues, here. One might, with Barnett, think that neoliberalism ‘was and is a crap concept.’ In this case, one might argue that Tickell’s earlier writings – and his formulation of concepts therein – don’t much help us in understanding, let alone combating, what is unfolding in universities today. Our energies would be better used if they sourced better writings from the archives and activism of geography – as well as from other social sciences and social movements. But that does not imply that the disruption provoked by the inferred disparity between ‘early’ and ‘late’ Tickell is misplaced. If the former concern is largely epistemological, the latter is as much ethico-political as epistemological.

Geographers Derek McCormack and James Palmer hold placards in the strikes quoting from Adam Tickell’s research papers. From a tweet by Tina Fawcett, and used with approval from her as well as from Derek McCormack and James Palmer. Original tweet available at: https://twitter.com/fawcett_tina/status/968777039384928262

Here we have a scene in which the history of geography, and the politics of that history, is undergoing disturbance. (The Adam Tickle Twitter parody account explicitly reworks the discipline’s historiography through its satiric phrase ‘formerly an economic geographer of note’.) And below the contretemps over Tickell, something else pulses in the discipline’s corpus – something I do not think has been worked through. That is geography’s collective relationship to the long, and continuing, career of Nigel Thrift. Thrift is another prominent geographer and social theorist who was a highly visible and, in the words of student-facing website The Tab, ‘divisive’ VC at the University of Warwick. In the course of his tenure there, the institution – as Times Higher Education put it– ‘experienced a number of controversies.’ In relation to Thrift, there is obvious scope to reflect on the relationship between his earlier work on left politics and his later career as a university manager. And there have been, online, some serious, critical reflections on this. But in the standard outlets for academic production, such as journals, there has been – as far as I know – very little substantive discussion. This is a noticeable – and meaning-ful – lacuna.

But I want to return to the affective and political disturbance generated by the stance taken by Adam Tickell. And to one reason why the apparent disparity between the so-called ‘early’ and ‘late’ Tickell seems to have been experienced by many – including me – as peculiarly wounding. To my mind, we should not uniformly expect or demand thinkers and writers to be free of contradiction. I recall, here, the opening of the obituary of one of geography’s most prominent radical theorists and activists, Neil Smith, which drew on words spoken by the radical geographer David Harvey (also Smith’s doctoral supervisor as well as colleague at CUNY) at Smith’s memorial service: ‘Neil Smith was the perfect practicing Marxist – completely defined by his contradictions’. (Such inconsistencies did not sway Smith’s steadfast commitment to radical politics.)

Contradiction in and of itself is not the problem. Then what is? Let’s look at how the passing of time is staged. Tickell said that while his ‘younger me’ may have taken part in the strikes, he was not sure about his older, contemporary self. Such a sentence resonates with a powerful discourse in which left politics is positioned as a childish practice, one that might well need to be given up as adulthood ensues. (Recall Saint Paul’s exhortation to ‘put away childish things.’) And this is not unconnected with the rhetorical campaign that Universities UK has been waging in an attempt to persuade others of the pragmatism, reasonableness and maturity of their assessment that there is no clear option around pensions other than the one they have proposed.

That the discipline of geography has produced a number of today’s UK Vice Chancellors (including Paul Boyle at the University of Leicester, Paul Curran at City University of London and Judith Petts at Plymouth University) – as well as the current UK Conservative Prime Minister – makes it urgent for many of us on the picket lines to demonstrate that geography as a discipline and as a political project is not exclusively held by or in those figures. The figure who might regard strikes as childish things needs to be substituted; another articulation of the social world, and of the geographer’s role in making it, needs to take their place. Hence geographers from UCL carrying a placard during the strikes announcing that ‘Not all geographers are neo-liberal vice-chancellors.’ Or the social and economic geographer, Alison Stenning, using the hashtag #notallgeographers, tweeting that, in spite of some ‘ignominious attention [that] certain geographers are getting’ geographers had nonetheless ‘been pretty impressive on the picket lines & the Twitter frontline.’

But I want to conclude with the outlines of a psychosocial argument, one that dismantles the apparent disjunction between the early and the late – or the gap that appears, as one Twitter user put it, within ‘the radical academic turned hard-line conservative’. Beneath the concern that many of us geographers have for the stances taken by prominent individuals within the discipline, perhaps lies a deeper wound that has not substantially been acknowledged or worked through. And that is the possibility that the very criticality of much of what passed for ‘critical geography,’ in the 1990s and beyond, precisely constituted the register of the successful and upward-moving academic. That criticality was part and parcel of adhering to and advancing a certain kind of theoretically-smart ‘knowledge’ that was required as evidence that would help one advance – even to the level of VC – within a professionalized space. Being critical in a particular way in the 1990s was, indeed, one of the pathways to advancement. And many of those ‘critical’ publications were at the heart of, rather than in conflict with, the current remaking of the university.

Rather than the adult putting away childish things, or the late eclipsing the early, what if the child made the adult? What if the early led to – was continuous with – the late, rather than being disavowed by it? If this were the case, then it would put many of us – and I include myself explicitly, here – in an uncomfortable position. For let us acknowledge the affective payoff that can accompany lamenting the eclipse of the early by the late: in addition to anger, it is possible to feel secure in one’s conviction that one has now cast out the late as the politically compromised. The radical credentials of a good geography are safe. By contrast, a situation in which there is no easy division between the early and late, the putatively radical and the compromised, is much more affectively and politically tricky to navigate. And this leads to some difficult questions that I have pondering over – on and off the pickets – these last few days

First, how do those of us inside as well as outside geography tell the history of critical geography in and beyond the 1990s? This is certainly important epistemologically – it’s part of the history of the human sciences that deserves greater attention than it has currently received. But it’s also central to how we understand what has been happening to the university. And this should help us think through how we might best use the strike in which we are currently involved to challenge what we see as most pernicious about these recent transformations.

Second, where and how is geography made? Where does it do its work? While there has been some interest in the apparent abundance of geographers who have become VCs, I don’t think we (those of us in and near geography and the history of the human sciences) have remotely got to grips with how to account for this. If there is that abundance in comparison with other disciplines, how does that reroute our accounts of where and how geography as an epistemological formation wields power? The tight relationship between PPE (the University of Oxford’s degree in philosophy, politics and economics) and the UK’s twentieth-century elite is a topic of frequent discussion. Beyond Neil Smith’s account of Isaiah Bowman, where are the historically and sociologically astute analyses of hard and soft geographical power?

Third, how do we widen the circles for forms of critical praxis that are not beholden to discourse and practices of promotion and managerial success in academia? What does that mean for those of us making geographies on and off the picket lines today? The interventions of black studies and anti-colonial studies, in particular, provide numerous routes through which to envisage – and put into practice – the reshaping of geography and of the university.

And there is one final note in relation to my previous point. It would be too easy to construe the historical tale of geography’s travails as a white boys’ story. Many of the protagonists in this post – those who have wielded power, and those configured as radicals who have contested it – do indeed fall within this category. But there are also many, ongoing attempts on the picket lines and on social media to disrupt that historical account, and to disrupt the future paths that geography and the university might take. As I finish this post, the geographer Gail Davies, for example, is unearthing the complex role that management consultants have played in the USS valuation and in the discursive shift that university senior managements have made towards ‘flexible pensions’. There is perhaps more work to be done along these lines before we can, indeed, comfort ourselves with the thought: #notallgeographers

I am profoundly indebted to Stan (Constantina) Papoulias in the writing of this blog post. They clarified for me much of what was most interesting in the figuring of the early and the late – in particular in relation to how a certain kind of criticality went hand in glove with the late twentieth-century transformations of the academy. Our discussions have taken place as we both take strike action in our respective universities.

Felicity Callard is Professor of Social Research in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, Director of the Birkbeck Institute of Social Research and Editor-in Chief of History of the Human Sciences.

This article represents the views of the author only, and is not written on behalf of History of The Human Sciences, its editors, or editorial board.

Striking is the best medicine

by Rhodri Hayward

Six days into the current Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) strike against pension cuts, Universities UK (UUK), the representative body for British higher education management, launched a series of tweets and videos in support of University Mental Health Day. In a move that is now pretty familiar, the presentations shifted attention from a toxic environment in which staff and students now experience unprecedented levels of mental distress, to a series of tips for self care – joining a club, eating well, pursuing a hobby – in which much of the responsibility for well-being is placed back upon the shoulders of the individual sufferer. As the UUK Mental Health Policy Officer advised in a Twitter video, ‘Don’t be afraid to take time for yourself.’

I guess to many of the viewers, this advice must have seemed spectacularly mistimed. At the precise moment that the UUK was outlining its commitment to ending anxiety and depression in higher education, the wider organisation was working to significantly change pension conditions, undermining the secure livelihood once promised to university staff. It would be foolish, however, to dismiss the advice out of hand. The idea of ‘making time for oneself’ has been a central part of the labour struggle for the last three centuries. As E. P. Thompson argued many years ago, once employers had hammered into modern workers the idea that ‘time is money’, employees’ struggle shifted from the preservation of traditional rights to the recovery of lost time.[ref]E.P. Thompson. ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, Past & Present 38 (1967):56-97; (4), p. 34. [/ref]

The attack on future pensions, and the different analyses offered by UUK and by EP Thompson, all point to ways that different notions of temporality are caught up in academic work: not simply in the way it is organised but also in the way that it is experienced. The unremitting busyness of academic life, mostly complained of but occasionally worn as a ridiculous badge of honour, throws colleagues into a relentless present in which prospect and perspective are all too often lost to the insistent clamour of everyday demands. This sense of the overwhelming present is only heightened, as the critic Mark Fisher noted, by the precariousness of modern casualised labour, which offers no secure place from which to understand our past or project our future hopes.[ref]Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?(Chichester: Zero Books, 2009), p.34 [/ref] Strikes offer us an opportunity to disengage, to escape a constricting present and get a sense of where we stand in time. Many strikes, certainly most of the strikes I have participated in, are kind of nostalgic: they mark a world we are on the brink of losing, or perhaps have lost. Others, like this current strike, quickly go beyond that, taking us out of the present to remind us there is a future to make. They give us, as UUK recommended, the opportunity to take time for ourselves. In our present crisis, strikes are the best medicine we have.

Rhodri Hayward is Reader in History in the School of History at Queen Mary University of London, and one of the editors of History of The Human Sciences.

The accompanying image, ‘Image taken from page 5 of “The Universal Strike of 1899. [A tale.]”‘ has been been taken from the British Library’s flickr site. The original can be viewed here.

This article represents the views of the author only, and is not written on behalf of History of The Human Sciences, its editors, or editorial board.