Author Archives: Alison Fox

September has provided us with a bumper harvest of five new titles covering everything from solar energy transitions to smuggling via a fascinating account of the fight against gentrification in a London suburb.

The Literature and Translation series gave us the month’s first publication. Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Short Fiction is a unique compilation of 21 short stories by established and emerging Afro-Brazilian voices. This anthology emerges from a UCL-sponsored collaborative translation project, bridging Afro-Brazilian literature with a global audience to respond to the worldwide call for Afro-diasporic narratives. Download Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Short Fiction free.

Geographies of Solar Energy Transitions: Conflicts, controversies and cognate aspects focuses on how solar energy governance (both state-based regulations and more market-driven modes of governance) is evolving to address a diverse range of conflicts and challenges. Take a look at the open access version

Modern Americas gave us another absorbing volume: Contraband Cultures: Reframing smuggling across Latin America and the Caribbean. presents narratives, representations, practices and imaginaries of smuggling and extra-legal or informal circulation practices, across and between the Latin American region (including the Caribbean) and its diasporas. If you’re interested in finding out how smuggling and the informal economy and

With government ever more dependent on speculative property developments that come at the expense of diverse working-class communities, Disrupting the Speculative City: Property, power and community resistance in London tells the fascinating story of successful community resistance in Tottenham, a suburb of London, to inspire urban movements and researchers.

We ended the month with a new volume of the Grammars of World and Minority Languages series: A Grammar of Elfdalian. Elfdalian is a unique language raditionally spoken in Övdaln (Älvdalen), central Sweden; this open access book provides a full account of Late Classical Elfdalian from linguistic, historical and sociolinguistic angles.

We’ll be back again next month with a round up of the very best open access books. As always, stay safe!

Today marks the publication of a new book from UCL Press: Inclusion, Diversity and Innovation in Translation Education, edited by Dr Alejandro Bolaños García-Escribano and Dr Mazal Oaknín. We are delighted to celebrate this new publication by sharing an interview with Alejandro and Mazal, exploring their backgrounds in the field of translation education, their reflections on the process of editing an academic volume, and their thoughts about the future of academic publishing.

Tell us more about your background and experience in this field.

Alejandro: I have been involved in translation education since 2016 when I started training subtitlers at UCL Centre for Translation Studies. Since 2022, I have served as Associate Editor for The Interpreter and Translator Trainer, a leading scholarly journal on translation and interpreting education.

Mazal: Although I have been teaching Spanish language and literature since I graduated, my BA was in Translation. Pedagogical translation plays a key part in my teaching and research interests. I am also on the Editorial Board of Hikma: Translation Studies Journal

What do you enjoy most about your work?

Alejandro & Mazal: We have found many opportunities to collaborate and build a network within and beyond UCL. Our seminars and publications have opened up new research possibilities that have materialised in this book. Our activities have also nurtured a healthy work atmosphere, allowing us to exchange expertise and build a community of like-minded translation educators.

How do you work with authors and contributors to ensure their voices are heard and their work is presented in the best possible light?

Alejandro & Mazal: From the inception of this writing project, we have strived to include a diversity of voices from an array of backgrounds and areas of knowledge. We have worked closely with our contributors to ensure that the book aligns with our ethos on EDI approaches in education. Our work ethics enhances the human factor behind the production of an edited volume of this calibre. This is our trademark and something that we are extremely proud of.

How do you balance the need for academic rigour with the need to make your publications accessible and engaging to a broader audience?

Alejandro & Mazal: Since 2018, we have made efforts to disseminate our research through a series of free, hybrid seminars featuring renowned speakers and cutting-edge education-focused projects and proposals. Albeit scholarly rigorous and therefore appealing to lecturers and researchers alike, these seminars have also attracted much attention from students, language instructors and professionals. This is a testament to the accessible nature of our seminar series, on which this book has been based. In our book, we as editors as well as our contributors have followed this principle, ensuring that content is adequate for a wide readership.

What advice would you give to aspiring editors, and what do you think are the key skills and attributes required?

Alejandro & Mazal: Editors must never lose sight of the overarching themes and rationale of the book. At the same time, a good degree of flexibility is needed to accommodate new circumstances that might arise and thereby affect the workflow, structure or timeline of the writing process. In this respect, communication is always key, and editors need to be in regular touch with contributors and series editors, ensuring that there are no misunderstandings – everyone needs to always be on the same page at all times. For instance, we created ad-hoc documents including components such as rationale, structure, writing style guide, etc. Last but not least, it is easy to get dragged down by the possible challenges but remember to always enjoy the process and the promising opportunities it presents.

Surprise us with something unexpected you encountered in your work on this book.

Alejandro & Mazal: We are extremely pleased to have received the support of many colleagues from the outset. Among our long-term collaborators are UCL’s Centre for Humanities Education (CHE) and the Institute of Advances Studies (IAS), which have duly supported this initiative from its inception. We look forward to our book launch, generously sponsored by both CHE and IAS, on 11 November 2024. Looking back at our initial meeting with the series editors, we could not possibly imagine that so many renowned scholars and specialists would have endorsed the publication of this book. This has been a welcome confirmation of its relevance and timeliness.

What do you think are the biggest challenges facing academic book publishing today, and how do you see the industry evolving in the future?

Alejandro & Mazal: There is a lot to unpack here! Despite its endless opportunities, artificial intelligence is undoubtedly disrupting the ways in which researchers obtain, analyse and discuss data as well as the writing process itself. In the face of ‘Publish or Perish’, scholars are under constant pressure to have their work published, which could potentially lead to malpractice in some cases.

In a more general sense, as Lecturers who work closely with students, we see the impact that social media has on our understanding of knowledge – for instance, the expectation of immediacy, the lack of nuance and the sweeping power of buzzwords appear to have replaced the need for in-depth research, reflection and discussion.

We believe that reflection and critical thinking cannot be rushed in academic publications, and to lead by example we have done our best to find the time and space that this volume has required in the past few years.

About the editors

Alejandro Bolaños García-Escribano (SFHEA, MCIL, CL) is Associate Professor in Audiovisual Translation at University College London.

Mazal Oaknín (FHEA) is Associate Professor (Teaching) and Language Coordinator of Spanish at University College London.

Heritage is everywhere, from politics to popular culture. Heritage is also everywhere in higher education as we see a boom in academic programmes aimed at training heritage students in leading-edge issues that include digital public engagement, sustainability, and social justice. These are signs of a vibrant, growing field playing to its interdisciplinary strengths. We think that the time is right to take stock of where we are as a community of people involved in heritage research and management, and to reflect on how we work and make new knowledge about heritage value. This examination includes assessing intellectual habits that may no longer serve us, as well as reconsidering the ways in which boundaries between disciplines help or hinder our work. Methods and Methodologies in Heritage Studies responds to these concerns.

There are various ways in which one could approach training in methods and methodologies. One way would be to isolate different methods as standalone approaches to perfect and apply to different intellectual and practical challenges, generally in alignment with specific institutional standards. An example of this are the HABS/HAER/HALS documentation guidelines of the US National Parks Service, which dictate the execution of measured drawings, photographs, and historical reports. The other way, as we propose in Methods and Methodologies in Heritage Studies, is to describe methodologies for capturing and assessing heritage value within a problem-oriented framework. This was one of the driving questions behind Methods and Methodologies in Heritage Studies: how do we honor the fact that heritage value transcends and exists independently from established approaches and guidelines? Psychologist Abraham Maslow (1966) famously warned of a cognitive bias that involves an over-reliance on a familiar tool, writing that “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” Likewise, we believe that a concern with capturing heritage value as contained in, say, visible features alone will only ever result in the categorization of a heritage as visual value. Heritage value, however, is a lot more than the academic and disciplinary categories through which it has been captured historically.

Methods and Methodologies in Heritage Studies is a volume firmly aligned with a critical study of cultural heritage and preservation that resists such histories of categorization. In the last 30 years, the study of heritage has dramatically changed to recognize and accommodate an ever-changing and ever-growing mosaic of stewards, voices of authority, and forms of knowledge that contribute to the creation, maintenance, and dissemination of heritage places, practices, and ideas. No longer the domain of powerful global and national institutions alone, the literature on heritage studies now reflects a huge diversity of languages, attitudes, and political agendas representing different publics. However, methodologically, the study of heritage has been slow to accompany these changes. Each of the contributions in this volume, therefore, pays attention to the act of creating particular data about heritage. Ultimately, the goal is to equip users with the tools to critique the intellectual journeys of heritage scholarship and to chart their own.

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About the author

Trinidad Rico is Associate Professor and Director of Cultural Heritage Studies at Rutgers University, USA, and an Honorary Associate Professor at the UCL Institute of Archaeology.

Rachel King is Associate Professor in Cultural Heritage Studies at the UCL Institute of Archaeology and holds an honorary research affiliation at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa.

Daniel Noboa’s victory in the second round of the presidential elections on 15 October 2023 was perplexing for supporters of the former president, Rafael Correa. How did a right-wing candidate with a similar neoliberal agenda to the deeply unpopular outgoing president, Guillermo Lasso (2021-23) defeat Luisa González, the left-leaning candidate of the correísta party, Revolución Ciudadana? Understanding why Ecuadorians opted for Noboa, a member of one of Ecuador’s wealthiest families, over González, a loyal correísta, requires looking back at Correa’s decade-long presidency (2007-2017) and delving into the nature of correísmo, the political movement that he leads from Belgium.

I argue in my article – ‘Dilemmas for the Ecuadorian Left in the Shadow of Correa’ – that while Correa made important advances, including reducing poverty and violence, the progressive potential of his presidency was limited by three interrelated factors – extractivism, centralism, and authoritarianism. A fourth factor – the idolisation of Correa – has trapped correísmo in the past and closed down space for reflection and renewal. Meanwhile, its decision to support Noboa’s right-wing neoliberal agenda in the opening months of his presidency has further undermined its progressive credentials. Nonetheless, correísmo continues to position itself as a left project and remains a powerful electoral force. Thus, the non-correísta left has to engage with it in some way or other. Ignoring it or wishing it away are not realistic strategies.

The challenge is to construct a broad and plural left movement that respects diversity and autonomy and leverages a strengthening environmental consciousness to build a progressive and democratic vision of the future. I argue that this can be achieved working through, alongside, and against correísmo. The best hope of effecting progressive change through correísmo lies at the local and regional levels, where progressive correísta politicians, bureaucrats and advisers have the potential to support struggles around everyday issues like labour, housing, water, transport, and the environment. The potential of working alongside correísmo rests on the capacity of left movements and parties to protect their collective autonomy while seizing opportunities to work strategically with correístas to advance progressive agendas. Resisting and expelling the International Monetary Fund (IMF), one of the chief architects and enforcers of neoliberal austerity in Ecuador, could become a common cause that unites the left and provides a platform for future collaboration. The failure of correísmo to reject extractivism is a major obstacle for left movements to work alongside it, especially indigenous and environmental movements. Yet there are some indications, however tentative, that correísmo is willing to support anti-extractive struggles and consider post-extractive alternatives. Working against correísmo to check its extractive impulses while selectively working through and alongside it might push the movement further in this direction.

The catastrophic decline that Ecuador has suffered during seven years of neoliberal austerity has created opportunities to rebuild the left and construct a plural and progressive alternative. The obstacles are huge but light shines amid the darkness.

About the author

Geoff Goodwin is a Lecturer in Global Political Economy at the University of Leeds, UK. Geoff’s article, Dilemmas for the Ecuadorian left in the shadow of Correa is published in Radical Americas, volume 9. This blog post originally appeared on the Radical Americas blog

To mark International Literacy Day, Sinéad Harmey and Bobbie Kabuto share the importance of thoughtful professional support for literacy educators and the ethos that guides their new open access book, Teaching Literacies in Diverse Contexts.  

With the move towards scripted and commercial curricula and assessment filling classrooms, there has been a growing divide between Teaching Literacies in Diverse Contexts university-based preparation and the realities faced by literacy educators both in classrooms and in alternative learning settings (like adult education settings). As we described in the opening of this chapter, this divide has led researchers to rethink the preparation of literacy professionals in both placement and approach. Zenkov and Pytash (2018) emphasise the importance of critical project-based clinical experiences. Clinical experiences are framed in various ways and include fieldwork embedded into university-based courses, stand-alone practicum or practical experiences, or student teaching. Critical project-based clinical experiences can occur at any point in a programme and are intensive, short-term experiences that focus on justice-oriented approaches (see Zenkov and Pytash, 2018 for a detailed description and examples of these experiences). Similarly, Goia et al. (2019: 13) discuss hybrid spaces for developing teaching practices that are ‘typically outside of the traditional classroom but engaging with new ways of working in schools’. These spaces create a bridge between classroom practice and university-based knowledge. As Goia et al. (2019: 13) described, 

In fact, research has indicated that these hybrid spaces enhanced beginning teachers’ pedagogical knowledge and impacted their roles and beliefs about teaching. They were also spaces where preservice teachers learned to build and value relationships with children and families and reject deficit ideas about children.

Researchers (e.g., O’Neil and Chambers, 2013), in particular, have argued that there is little research on how university-based programmes prepare literacy professionals as literacy coaches who learn to take on the multiple roles and responsibilities (MacPhee and Jewett, 2017). MacPhee and Jewett (2017) write of United States educational policy, that ‘given the urgency with which literacy coaching came to be a common professional development practice in schools across the nation, little time has been devoted to examining the process of becoming a literacy coach’ (p. 409). With the majority of studies on the preparation of literacy professionals as coaches within school-based settings, research has suggested that literacy coaches do not always find themselves prepared to negotiate the power and politics associated with the role (Hargreaves and Skelton, 2012; MacPhee and Jewett, 2017). Kabuto, Wagner and Vasudevan (Chapter 8) and Bates and Malloy (Chapter 13), in this volume, address the need to consider how literacy coaches are supported.

Literacy professionals preparing to be literacy coaches are unique; they completed previous university-based education programmes and are taking advanced coursework in the area of literacy coaching. When entering into a preparation programme to become literacy professionals, these literacy professionals bring with them their structured in-service preparation and the unstructured professional knowledge that they have learned working as classroom teachers (Oliveira et al., 2019). University based preparation programmes, therefore, must find ways to meet candidates where they are in their skills and dispositions towards teaching and assessment reading and writing, rather than assuming that candidates come to the experience with  little knowledge of reading and writing support in classroom settings.

These types of pedagogies for preparing future literacy professionals are in stark contrast to professional development and learning contexts that treat developing literacy professionals as consumers of curricula and assessments (Wixson, 2017). Albers and Seely Flint, in Chapter 6, describe the ‘train the trainer’ model, which is connected to professional development related to teaching scripted curricula. This model, as Albers et al. (2019) and Goia et al. (2019) describe, occurs in many parts of the world and marginalises the need to include justice oriented approaches to preparation of literacy professionals that include dialogues about important issues like racism, inequality, and differences, as well as how literacy professionals are not limited to teaching and learning in classroom settings. In this book, we have collected writings by literacy leaders in multiple settings and multiple roles to shed light on the new ways we might begin thinking about the preparation of literacy educators in and out of school settings. In a sense, it is our hope that these chapters address the question ‘what is possible when you adopt an asset-based and justice-oriented approach to preparing literacy professionals to adopt diverse approaches, frameworks, models, and perspectives to literacy professional preparation?’. 

The ethos that guides this collection

To address the ways that we prepare future specialised literacy professionals to teach in diverse contexts both in and out of schools, we present a collection of chapters that cover a diverse range of contexts – both in terms of the settings in which the practical experiences took place and the professional backgrounds of the literacy providers, volunteers and families involved in the experiences. In bringing such a collection together, one challenge that we faced was trying to connect the diverse set of chapters while allowing each to maintain its own identity. We argue, however, that the uniqueness of the chapters reflects exactly the reality of who and how diverse literacies are being taught in a global context.

We have arranged this edited collection in three parts, each within its own introduction. The first part titled ‘Strategies for supporting literacy educators’ considers broad strategies for supporting literacy educators and tussles with issues of cultural relevance, restrictive policy mandates, and supporting responsive teaching across the spectrum of undergraduate, graduate and CPD contexts. The second part is titled ‘Teaching literacies in diverse settings with diverse populations’ and moves the focus to supporting literacy educators in ‘non-traditional settings’. In this part, the authors describe projects that were framed by a common principle – that quality support for literacy educators with a justice-oriented perspective can occur outside of formal school settings. The third and final part of this book is titled ‘Supporting literacy educators from a distance’. The three chapters in this part consider how literacy education can move into a virtual space and yet maintain a focus on authentic literacy practices.

Taken together, we suggest that all the chapters are connected by the following threads:

1. A sense of inquiry. Each set of authors was driven by or pursued a question or challenge in supporting literacy learners. The chapters focus on what they understood, what they currently understand, and what is left to be explored. The chapters demonstrate that being prepared to teach reading requires much more than being able to teach to a script. Put simply, a script does not prepare teacher candidates for the reality of the classroom. Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that to teach literacy in today’s global society, all educators (parents and community organisations included) need to be prepared to ‘pivot’ away from the way things have all been done. Perhaps the pivot begins with a sense of inquiry about what matters or about what the core non-negotiables of authentic literacy practice are. We suggest that building in opportunities to intentionally foster experiences that are as authentic as possible is the best preparation for this. This may be in and out of school settings for pre-service and graduate candidates. These opportunities provide contexts for the candidate to reflect on and question what really matters for this child at this point in time. For teacher educators, this requires, as Albers and Seely Flint suggest in Chapter 6, a sense of vulnerability and an ability to be prepared for the unexpected and may lead them to rethink the ways they have always approached their work. Throughout the chapters, we noted how the authors pushed those they work with to constantly question. These questions revolved around issues of pedagogy, policy, as well as social justice. Criticality allows those who teach literacy to reshape and reframe restrictive policies, as Harmey and Moss argued, while keeping the learner at the centre.
2. A sense of respect for those who provide literacy support and an appreciation for the importance of relationships. Regardless of whether the educators were parents, volunteers, undergraduate students or experienced teachers, the authors celebrate and respect their experiences and contextual knowledge. Throughout the chapters, the importance of establishing trusting relationships between tutor and tutee, between teacher educator and teacher candidate, and within and between families and communities was paramount. The ethos of safety described by Millar and colleagues in Chapter 10 seems to be a fundamental aspect of all the relationships described in this collection. Above all we noted the ethos of collaboration and community within the models proposed. In a sense, this bodes well for the diverse contexts within which literacy educators, be they traditional teachers, parents or volunteer tutors, work. Literacy, we argue, is complex, and to provide the best literacy learning opportunities requires a community effort and a concerted effort to build on and respect community resources.

3. A sense of appreciation for the complexities of context and literacy learning. The projects and studies in these chapters are not presented as ‘off the shelf’ strategies that will work with any learner or in any context. They challenge the ‘one-size-fits-all/what works/ programmatic’ approach to literacy teaching and learning. In all the chapters there is a deep appreciation for how context is complicated and needs to impact the design of the systems that support the literacy educator and learner. Throughout this book literacy is defined as a broad and complex phenomenon.

Conclusion 

It is our hope that this book will be a useful resource for preparing literacy educators to teach in today’s classrooms and community settings where policy ebbs and flows in terms of how best to teach reading and writing to diverse student bodies. The book comprises chapters by leading researchers and practitioners in the field to consider how best to support literacy educators in traditional and non-traditional settings with 10 Teaching Literacies in Diverse Contexts diversity in mind. We would like to acknowledge the commitment and passion of the authors in this book to supporting literacy learners and for contributing to this book. This edited collection was written during the COVID-19 pandemic, and we know that, for everyone, life at this time has been messy and complicated. Despite this we were able to bring together a stellar group of people whose commitment to literacy is evident in every chapter of this book.

About the Author

This is an excerpt from Teaching Literacies in Diverse Contexts edited by Sinéad Harmey and Bobbie Kabuto.  

Sinéad Harmey is an Associate Professor in Literacy Education at the IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society. A former primary school teacher, her research focus is built around her interests in early writing and support for literacy learning in the early years, and support of evidence-based practices and the role of knowledge-exchange in this, with a specific focus on review methodologies. She teaches in early years education, literacy teaching and learning, and research methodologies. She has co-authored the most recent meta-analytic review of Reading Recovery.

Bobbie Kabuto is Professor at Queens College, City University of New York, and Chairperson of the Department of Elementary and Early Childhood Education. She is the 2019 Recipient of the United Kingdom Literacy Association (UKLA)/Wiley Research in Literacy Education Award and served as a Provost Faculty Fellow from 2019-2020. She holds leadership roles in national organizations, including National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and the Centre for the Expansion of Language and Teaching (CELT), and sits on the editorial board for Literacy and the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy.

As the Summer continued to hurtle towards Autumn, we published three fantastic (and very different) new open access books in August.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a story about the United States’ role in the long history of world civilization was constructed in public spaces, through public art and popular histories. Early Civilization and the American Modern Images of Middle Eastern origins in the United States, 1893–1939 explores the key institutions and figures who collaborated on the creation of this progressive narrative.

Travel Behaviour Reconsidered in an Era of Decarbonisation by David Metz argues that our transport networks are mature, and the objective should be to improve operational efficiency. Over the past half century, large public expenditures in roads and railways were justified by an analytic approach to the benefits of investment, primarily the value of the time saved through faster travel, to both business and non-business users of the networks. However, average travel time has not changed over this period. People have taken the benefit of faster travel as better access to people, places, activities and services, with the ensuing enhanced opportunities and choices. This book argues that the basis of orthodox transport economic analysis has been misconceived and a fresh perspective on economic analysis is now needed.

We finished the month with the latest book in the Ageing with Smartphones series: Ageing with Smartphones in Japan: Care in a visual digital age by Laura Haapio-Kirk, who we have worked with since the early days of the Press when she was closely involved in the Why We Post series of books as the team’s Research Assistant. Based on 16 months of ethnographic research in urban Kyoto and in rural Kōchi Prefecture, Ageing with Smartphones in Japan follows members of one of the most aged populations in the world as they navigate social and personal shifts post-retirement.

We’ll be back again next month with a round up of the very best open access books. As always, stay safe!

On World Beard Day, it seemed appropriate to repeat a post from the archives. In this intriguing post, which originally appeared on the UCL European Institute blog, Seb Coxon explains what got him interested in researching how beards are portrayed in medieval German literary texts, and how we make make sense of this. His book, Beards and Texts: Images of masculinity in medieval German literature is out now.

Really, I ought to claim that my interest in this niche topic was sparked by landmark works of medieval European literature. By the Old French Chanson de Roland, for example, with its battles between white-bearded Franks (led by a white-bearded Charlemagne) and their white-bearded heathen adversaries. Or by the medieval Spanish epic, the Poema de Mio Cid, whose long-suffering protagonist takes remarkable pride in his own beard. Or even by the medieval English romance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, where the bushy-bearded Green Knight causes an uproar by deriding the knights at Arthur’s court as ‘beardless boys’.

But the truth is I have a class of students to thank. They were the ones who first drew my attention to a particular episode towards the end of the Nibelungenlied, the foremost medieval German heroic epic. Here, in a twist of Germanic fate, one fearless warrior meets his bloody end at the hands of his friends, whereupon he is mourned by a whole host of suitably devastated heroes, as visualized by the poet: ‘You could see the tears flowing down their beards and chins, for they had suffered a cruel loss.’

So what, if anything, does the almost incidental beard-reference in this scene achieve? My best guess is that it forms part of a strategy of compensation, reasserting the notion of heroic masculinity at a precarious moment. In other words: if warriors are going to cry, then at the very least they should shed tears collectively as a band of bearded brothers and in demonstratively manly fashion.

As a ‘natural’ and naturally conspicuous symbol for masculinity, beards were imbued throughout the Middle Ages with theological, legal and medical significance. In the hands and mouths of poets references to beards, and to beardlessness for that matter, could always serve as a shorthand way of evoking a masculine ideal in any number of complementary or incongruous contexts.

Of course, some figure-types were more likely to be portrayed as bearded than others, although it is always worth looking out for bearded women (not least those virgin saints who miraculously grow a beard to escape unwanted male attention). The bearded king, for example, often wears his majesty in his face, as it were, his beard betokening such credentials for rulership as (sexual) maturity and wisdom. This was in fact a widespread iconographic motif from the twelfth century onwards. And the same motif was exploited by narrative poets too. Thus, a certain Pfaffe Konrad, the author of the German Rolandslied (a reworking of the Chanson de Roland), repeatedly draws attention to Charlemagne’s beard at moments of crisis, when the emperor’s composure is threatened and he expresses his disquiet by grabbing, stroking or shaking his beard at those around him.

Different texts do different things with the same bearded figure-types. In stories where kings are presented as unworthy or fit only for ridicule, their beards are liable to be manhandled, plucked, or even vomited over (as in the widespread fable of the nauseous and somewhat disrespectful philosopher).

Much of this material conforms to one of the cardinal rules of pre-modern storytelling: selective visualization, or rather: choice details pertaining to the appearance of characters tend to be given for a special, thematic reason. Where no such reason existed, the beardedness, or otherwise, of male figures was left to the audience’s (or reader’s) imagination. By contrast, the artists of the miniatures contained in illustrated manuscripts of these same poetic works had no choice but to decide which male figures to beard and which not. The relationship between medieval text and image was very rarely one of straightforward correspondence.

Not infrequently artists had ingenious ideas of their own in matters of the beard. The artist(s) behind some of the pictures designed for Hugo von Trimberg’s very popular moral compendium, Der Renner, for instance, compounds the comic effect of one tale of marital infidelity by emphasizing the affinity between unattractive husband and goat: bearded, outside, and of little interest to the wife indoors, who is embracing her (beardless) young lover. Elsewhere in the same codex, an exquisitely executed beard forms the very focal point of another miniature, framed as it is by the bow and arrow held by the eldest of a dead king’s four sons. Ironically enough, in the macabre trial to discover who among them is worthy of the crown it is the youngest son – the beardless figure to the left of centre – who distinguishes himself by refusing to shoot at his father’s corpse. Sometimes, it would seem, a decorous beard is no more than just that.

About the author

This post originally appeared on the UCL European Institute blog.

Seb Coxon is Reader in German at the School of European Languages, Culture and Society, UCL. 

In today’s guest post, Maria Rubins talks about Redefining Russian Literary Diaspora, 1920-2020, which resulted from an international research project uniting leading experts on Russian culture from British and American universities. 

The last hundred years have been marked by unprecedented migrations caused by world wars, revolutions, and economic globalization. Millions of people reside today outside their homelands, speak in adopted tongues and experience challenges and advantages provided by their status as “outsiders.” This specific anthropological experience generates hybrid identities that in turn inform art and fiction created by individuals who live at the crossroads between different cultures, languages and social codes.

Narratives of immigrant authors who, like Salman Rushdie or Assia Djebar, express themselves in the languages of their host countries, have long been discussed as a special category within diasporic and postcolonial contexts. But when we turn to the rich extraterritorial Russian literature produced over the last century in various parts around the globe, from Harbin to Paris, New York, Tel Aviv and São Paulo, we discover that the dominant critical reception has mainly focused on its connection to the homeland tradition. Russian émigré writing has been routinely discussed as a minor branch of Russian literature and its artistic lineage has been traced to the same set of canonical figures (Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy etc.). Have Russian writers who lived abroad for decades remained somehow immune to diverse transnational flows, as opposed to their peers who originated in other countries? Is the Russian case different because most of émigré writers continued to use their mother tongue, such notable exceptions as Nabokov and Brodsky notwithstanding? And can the language be still considered a crucial factor in defining a writer’s national affiliation?

Together with a group of international experts, I set out to explore whether the hundred-year-old intellectual Russian diaspora has produced a mere clone of metropolitan literature, or an alternative cultural formation. We sought to identify distinct markers of diasporic Russian writing that go far beyond just thematic content, linguistic hybridity, a sense of alienation, nostalgia, or emphasis on the workings of memory. We examined how diasporic literature inscribes experiences that are not easily available within the metropolitan locus, giving us insight into the human condition from a perspective informed by a simultaneous awareness of at least two cultural dimensions. Contributions to the book Redefining Russian Literary Diaspora discuss characteristic ways in which diasporic texts and literary practices reframe Russian master narratives; question the dominant cultural canon; contest standard historical interpretations; reshape cultural memory; and reflect experiences of exile, deracination, migration, translingualism and multiple belonging. In particular, they engage with diaspora writers’ responses to foundational rhetorical or ideological parameters that have come to define Russian cultural politics. 

For instance, in Russia, writers were traditionally perceived as “prophets” and exerted tremendous authority. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were approached for guidance on various moral, religious and practical matters. In the 20^thcentury their works were reinterpreted as a prophecy of the Bolshevik rule: Lenin famously praised Leo Tolstoy “as a mirror of the Russian revolution” whereas Dostoevsky’s Demons was seen as a visionary novel about the chaos and violence of the social upheaval. Indeed, the status of a writer in Russia has always implied ethical responsibility.

How does the sense of mission change in the diaspora? What kind of prophecy can an exiled author deliver and to whom is it addressed? As Pamela Davidson’s chapter demonstrates, the tropes of prophecy and mission were radically reinterpreted in emigration. Many post-revolutionary intellectuals saw their mission as the rejection of Soviet Russia (for some this went as far as supporting Hitler as Stalin’s chief opponent). Others regarded emigres’ geographical dispersion across Europe as a prerequisite for a fulfilment of Russia’s providential calling to mediate between Eastern and Western Christianity. Yet, others, like Nabokov, resisted any mission at all.

If we turn to another cornerstone of collective Russian identity—the victory in the Great Patriotic War (as World War II is officially designated in Russia) and the tremendous suffering during the Siege of Leningrad,– we will see that diasporic and domestic writers interpret these events differently. Mark Lipovetsky’s analysis reveals that today’s liberal-minded authors living in Russia often show a cynical, a-historical attitude to the Siege as a reaction against the manipulation of this lingering trauma by the state propaganda. By contrast, diasporic writers tend to distance themselves from the present debates, to approach the Siege through historical documents, and to minimize the internal conflicts in their representations of life in Leningrad. 

Another sensitive topic, the Holocaust, was a de facto taboo in official Soviet discourse that deflated the specifically Jewish tragedy and focused on the common sacrifice of the Soviet people in the war against Nazi Germany. Diaspora naturally offered a space for reflection on this subject. It became one of the central topics in the writing of Russian Israelis and their interpretation has been coloured by the memory of Soviet antisemitism and silencing of the Holocaust and by local Israeli narratives of the shoah.

Many other key elements of the metropolitan canon have been likewise dramatically renegotiated in the diaspora. These complex processes of critical rethinking of the national tradition complemented by Russian writers’ engagement with political, ideological and cultural trends in their host countries eventually produced new forms of Russian cultural identities and alternative definitions of Russianness.  By articulating a new interpretive optic of this rich legacy our book aims to highlight the generative potential of diasporic difference. In this way, we believe, the metropolitan and diasporic literatures can engage in a productive dialogue and offer a more balanced view of Russia’s past and future cultural trajectories.

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About the author

Maria Rubins is Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies. A Russian translation is available with НЛО, under the title Век диаспоры: Траектории русской зарубежной литературы.

This post originally appeared on the UCL European Institute blog,

View of Downtown Brooklyn’s Fabric with Infill Housing Spatially Integrating the Farragut Housing Towers (indicated by use of brown roof)

For much of the 20th century, the image of cities was defined by the skyline of corporate office towers. The disruption of the pandemic, however, has reduced the demand for new office towers and dampened their allure as the image of the city. At the same time, the importance of housing in cities has only grown and is now the critical focus of city governments across the world. Despite the ability to work and live remotely, urban housing, especially in global cities like New York, is still in high demand as cities are the economic engines of their region, providing opportunity to a diverse range of people. These city governments are working to meet the vast needs for new housing stock, in particular affordable housing, while at the same time preserving as much existing housing as possible, especially housing for low-income families. This task of meeting the housing demand is daunting, with hundreds of thousands of new units required and many older buildings faltering due to a lack of adequate investment and maintenance. Making this task more difficult is the resistance many communities have to change, rendering proposals for new housing contentious. This volume of housing research offers multiple perspectives considering the nature of housing and specific instances where the provision of housing is a complex process with social, economic, and political implications.

My paper explores this complexity in the context of the vital questions surrounding the survival of public housing in New York City. The research and speculative design demonstrate the potential for new housing and site-specific urban design to be part of the solution to saving and upgrading the deteriorating subsidised apartments for low-income New Yorkers. This new housing, the fabric of a new neighbourhood integrating the public housing towers, is shown to simultaneously address the economic needs for the existing housing and the spatial and social isolation of public housing residents by providing the definition of new streets, parks, and public squares as an active and connected public realm. This paper’s goal is to help move the conversation forward by demonstrating what change could look like and how new urban housing development could benefit a wide range of new and current city residents.

Addressing urban social and spatial stratification: testing the potential for integration of public housing by Jason Montgomery (School of Architecture and Planning, Catholic University of America, USA) is published in Architecture_MPS, volume 28.

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About the author

This post originally appeared on the Architecture_MPS blog, and can be read here.

Jason Montgomery is an architect, urban designer, scholar, and educator. An Associate Professor at Catholic University School of Architecture and a principal at Truong Montgomery Architect, his research reflects his interests in urban architecture and morphology. He co-organized a number of conferences and symposia addressing the complexity of cities, the evolution of downtown Brooklyn, and housing along the Brooklyn waterfront. He was the editor of a recently published volume Place-based Sustainability: Research and Design Extending Pathways for Ecological Stewardship, and a guest editor of a special issue of AMPS Journal: Re-imagining the City: Urban Space in the Post-Covid City.

Just what is it like to be an ethnographer in your own community? Jayaseelan Raj shares his experiences in this excerpt from Plantation Crisis: Ruptures of Dalit life in the Indian tea belt.

Ethnographic accounts are generally written by anthropologists outside their own community. I had the rare opportunity to carry out ethnographic fieldwork in the very micro community into which I was born. While I carried out systematic ethnographic fieldwork, this book also draws on my experience growing up in a workers’ household as a plantation boy. An extended embodiment of the plantation community has shaped my world views and my anthropological approach to the study of human beings. I had the profound advantage of speaking the same language as my interlocutors, their dialect, but also their style of speech, its oratory with all its proverbs, aphorisms and short stories through which the socio-cultural world of the Tamil plantation workers are articulated and transmitted. I was able to grasp subtle and implicit aspects of socio-cultural life which might have gone unnoticed by anthropologists from outside the community. For instance, I was attuned to the differences between people belonging to different castes, which are sometimes transmitted in non-verbal embodied ways through etiquette, politeness, avoidance and abstinence. These can often be difficult for a foreign anthropologist to recognise, although long-term field immersion is intended to overcome this. This does not in any way suggest that my information is necessarily superior to that gained by a non-native anthropologist. However, the quality and sense of significance may be distinct. The importance that I give to identity, to its complexity and to certain principle values, I suggest, derive from my day-to-day experience as a member of the very community that I was studying.

Although there are clear advantages to being a native anthropologist – especially in giving me a deep sensitivity to the economic crisis that the workers confronted – in certain ways I was also restricted in the kinds of information I was able to gather. For the plantation workers, a foreigner is simply a foreigner; they do not care whether the particular researcher is from (another part of) India, North America, Europe or Australia. But the cultural capital of upper-caste urban India, or of whiteness and the colonial heritage, has its own hierarchy within which foreign researchers become positioned. Plantation workers are not concerned about foreign researchers publicising their personal life because they stay in the field for only a short period of time and disseminate the information gathered to a distant and unknown audience.

The fear was that I would share local knowledge (to which I was privy through my web of personal relations), with significant implications for a local audience. The expectation was that information presented in newspapers or academic articles that I wrote would feed back into the local situation, with negative consequences. As such my position was neither neutral nor outside. I was regarded by many as too close, too intimate with the events, and people were concerned that I might divulge too much. My positioning created in certain circumstances an ambivalent caution. People would test me by teasing, responding ironically or being extremely hesitant and even avoiding interaction with me. This became even more true as the workers were increasingly affected by the uncertainty that the crisis in the tea industry had generated.

I realised that, even when I was part of the plantation community, participant observation transformed me, in a way making me more intimate with the life in the tea belt. Over time I realised that I had come to know more about some people than most of their own neighbours did. Many told me stories of poverty that they would not share even with their close relatives or neighbours. Sometimes they described their poverty objectively to others, yet not with the kind of emotion they employed with me. These were organic moments of sharing the inner experience of poverty, not merely the daily routine of collecting information. When I met people in the street after long conversations, the way they greeted me expressed that intimacy, precisely because they had told me many things that they might not have told anyone else. And, as it happened with more and more people in the village, I became something like a sorcerer, one who knows a great deal about everyone – a person who holds the secrets of plantation life. The workers and their families had experiences that were overflowing through my fieldnotes. At the same time, it was paradoxical that those overflowing experiences were indicative of what many of them thought of as the futility of human life. As many workers told me, they had to sustain their lives ‘for their children even if not for themselves’.

I do not presume to speak on behalf of the workers, although I was born and raised in a Tamil Dalit plantation household. My intention is simply to lay out the stories as told to me over years of living and doing fieldwork. As a ‘native’ researcher, my approach to ethnography is mindful of the postmodern critique of participant observation (Geertz 1972; Clifford and Marcus 1986) and also of the importance of Bourdieu’s phenomenologically reflexive approach (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). The significance of this is crucial whether the observer is an outsider (which is Bourdieu’s reference) or an insider. Perhaps there is a greater onus on the native researcher to be cognisant of her or his own common-sense assumptions that may mask the effects of other processes. As the foreign researcher must critically interrogate the nature of her or his positioning, so must the native researcher. I have tried to take both the position of an outsider – where nothing can be taken for granted or assumed – and that of an insider, one who has lived the structures of which she or he may not have hitherto (prior to engaging in anthropological research) been fully aware. My critical approach combines the intimate experience of the insider with the more distanced reflexive orientation of the outsider. Part of such a critical approach is attending to structural processes that are not necessarily reducible to individual subjectivist terms – an emphasis of postcolonial and postmodern perspectives.

At the same time, my description of my positionality in the field should not be interpreted as a mere addition to the postmodernist ‘anthropological critique’ that has been dominating anthropological writing for the last quarter-century. This critique, rooted in textual analysis of every component of anthropological research, occasionally becomes a self-centred analysis that downplays broader structural hierarchies and inequalities. Some of the recent ‘turns’ in anthropology, such as the ‘ontological turn’, seem to reinforce this self-centric analysis of ethnographic situations. While I agree with the significance of thick descriptions of ethnographic situations, I believe that a holistic approach is required to fully understand the ontological transition, or the repositioning of self of the plantation workers and the changes in the perception of self and others due to structural transformations in the dominant social identities (of class, gender and caste) in the crisis context.

Alienation of the workers is at the centre of this ontological transition. At the same time, in my exposition of this ontological transition and the phenomenology of crisis, I was careful not to deny the social dimensions in which the crisis unravels. It may appear therefore that my focus on the alienation and powerlessness of the workers overshadows their creative engagement, or their ‘agency’. Such celebrations of agency have become a dominant orientation in anthropological literature afterthe ‘crisis of representation’ discourse (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986). In my view, the celebration of the workers’ agency, without examining the true liberatory potential of workers’ actions, is myopic and does not allow the fieldwork-based knowledge to examine the structures of exploitation. It is important to understand that the social process goes beyond the rhetoric of agency and individual, which may themselves be produced out of structural forces rather than the other way around – often the perspective of individualist and ego-centred perspectives (Kapferer 2005a). Further, the fieldwork on the lived experience of the tea workers demonstrates that they ‘speak’ of their alienation as the core phenomenon of their lives. They were impassive whenever I tried to ‘appreciate’ them for their ‘creative engagement’ with the crisis. Therefore, not recognising their recognition of alienation would be to deny their agency.

Walking through the crisis was emotionally taxing for me as I have experienced sleepless nights pondering the crisis and the hollowness it produced for the workers’ families. Despite being from a family of plantation workers, the ethnographic fieldwork has radically transformed my own cosmological and ontological understanding of human life in the plantations. Now the difficult part was to come to terms with how I wanted to lay out their lives in the text with the highest regard for their dignity and the ways they experience the dimensions of the economic crisis. Perhaps one thing I paid the utmost attention to was to unpack the crisis in a way that de-naturalises the marginal life of the Tamil Dalits in the plantation frontiers of India.

Doing fieldwork in one’s own community is a challenge not only in terms of how you choose to position yourself in it, but also how you are already positioned within the plantation cosmology and its categorical relationships. As a native anthropologist, I was subjected to structures of social and political significance that were different from those to which a foreign anthropologist might be subjected. Foreign anthropologists would not be personally confronted on a daily basis with the subtleties underpinning the dynamics of identity and relations in the contexts they enter. I was constantly enmeshed in the complexities of identity as I negotiated my path through plantation life. In distant tea estates where I did not know the people, I would be asked leading questions indicative of my caste and social origin (whether my ancestors were from northern or southern Tamil Nadu, for instance). I was often asked by the workers if I had any relatives in the tea estates that I visited. Giving the names of my relatives living in their estate would position me in terms of caste and family reputation.

This was mainly done by the upper-caste managerial staff, trade union leaders, government officials and merchants in the nodal towns, who often wanted to put me in my place. The coerced embodiment of a particular identity ascribed to me by the upper caste occurred through their narratives of incidents in which plantation people from my kinship networks sought their help in sorting out issues with the labour conflicts in the plantations. Their narratives were often filled with sarcasm and stereotypes about Tamil plantation workers. Some would invoke incidents in which they had helped the workers and would link that to my kinship networks, as if I should be obliged for their assistance to the plantation workers. Whenever I left the offices of these non-plantation people who were somehow connected to the plantation business, I would ask myself what the relationship would have been between Sidney Mintz and Don Taso if Mintz had been a Black anthropologist. Or, for that matter, if M.N. Srinivas and André Béteille had been Dalits trying to walk though Brahmin streets to conduct research on caste.

Anthropologists critically discuss their privileged position and the power they hold in ‘re-presenting’ the lives of people they engage with. Such discussions do not pay due attention to the vulnerability of those ethnographers who are not treated on a par with some of the population within the socio-political hierarchies of the society they write about. The precariousness of being a Dalit while doing fieldwork in the Indian countryside is indeed revealing. Such dehumanising experiences push us to be much more intimate to the stories of those who suffer at the bottom. This poses a challenge to the detachment from the field that is supposed to be required to finish writing, for example, this book. This challenge is augmented by the call for reflexivity and positioning of oneself in describing plantation life in a crisis. Perhaps, in the course of becoming an anthropologist, I recognised more the mutuality of being with the plantation community, thus continually becoming a plantation boy.

About the Author

This post is an excerpt from the open access book Plantation Crisis: Ruptures of Dalit life in the Indian tea belt by Jayaseelan Raj.

Jayaseelan Raj is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram, India, and Fellow in the GRNPP project at SOAS, London.