Author Archives: Alison Fox

UCL Press Play proudly presents the first episode of the brand new podcast series The Greatest Good. This is the first podcast series produced under this title, and joins the documentary film ‘Bentham’s Defence of Sexual Liberty’, which is already available.

In the first podcast episode, Professor Philip Schofield and Professor Gregory Dart from UCL’s Department of English discuss the philosophical differences between Utilitarianism and Romanticism, in the context of the founding of ‘the Cockney College’, as UCL was known at the time. They explore how Bentham’s utilitarian principles, emphasising happiness and the greatest good, contrasted with Romantic notions of moral intentions and conscience.

The full series will be made available in coming weeks, and will include episodes covering Queerness, Islam and the Left; Queer Aesthetics and the Panoptic Gaze; The UK’s First Gaysoc; and Nonbinary Gender in the Middle Ages. The documentary ‘Bentham’s Defence of Sexual Liberty’ is available to stream now via YouTube.

About The Greatest Good

The inaugural series from UCL Press Play, The Greatest Good, explores the lasting influence of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, whose radical progressivism was the intellectual inspiration for UCL. As the first entirely secular university to admit students regardless of religion, UCL was inspired by Bentham’s principles of equality and intellectual freedom.

About UCL Press Play

UCL Press Play is a new initiative presenting documentary videos and podcasts featuring aspects of UCL’s sector-leading research, and casting light on the contribution UCL makes to society.

Just as UCL Press makes its work accessible through Open Access, UCL Press Play brings the ground-breaking research of London’s global university to audiences worldwide.

To mark World Food Day, we’re re-publishing a chat we had in 2017 with Professor Robert Biel, author of Sustainable Food Systems. 

UCL Press: We’re intrigued about your pathway into this topic.

Well it converged from two directions. I’ve been an allotment holder for 15 years, experimenting with a low-input, high-productivity method where you work alongside natural systems, not against them.  That was a hobby, something I loved doing.  Professionally, I was teaching international relations theory, which is a lot about how order can emerge from within a system itself.

In the debate following my first book, The New Imperialism, I discovered general systems theory, which tries to identify what’s common to all systems: they have a capacity to self-regulate, but they can also go haywire.  So I began to understand that the ecological problem and the threats to human society are not two separate challenges which just happen to face us simultaneously; rather, we can study them – and look for answers – in an integrated way.

I addressed this in my 2012 book The Entropy of Capitalism, but at that more general level it was easier to write convincingly about all the bad stuff that was happening, than about solutions! The only way to get to grips with positive solutions was to take a very concrete topic and run with it.  With Sustainable Food Systems, this all came together.

UCL Press: Please tell us a bit about the process, from initial conception, to publication

Together with my colleague Yves Cabannes (editor of Integrating Food into Urban Planning) I started teaching a Masters module on Urban Agriculture, and there were also a few small community food-related action research projects.  This suggested a lot of ideas which I felt somehow needed to be written down.

But the project implies an unusual form of knowledge, drawing on both natural and social sciences.  While general systems theory was a help, I had to be respectful to the integrity of each specific discipline – soil science, anthropology etc. – even where I don’t have specialist training.  To ensure the research was solid, I embraced the peer-review process at several levels.  I started with a conference paper, delivered in Paris in 2012, and then split it into five journal articles and book chapters, all exploring different aspects of food-systems issues.  While I received much important feedback from the reviews on these papers, I was also myself doing quite a lot of peer-reviewing for journals.  And I could trust the peer-review system for the quality of research in the leading scientific journals which I was citing.

At the same time, the ‘new paradigm’, also implies deeper issues of fundamental world view.  In this sense, knowledge (or maybe we should say wisdom) should not be reduced to academic research.  The traditional/indigenous spirituality doesn’t see a distinction between nature and society anyway, it understands that our minds are part of nature, and correctly sees farming as intrinsically rooted in the wider ecosystemic context.  In this sense, visioning sustainable futuresis also a return, to a more authentic way of apprehending the world and our place in it.

Finally, the project implied a different publishing model.  Though there were enquiries from conventional publishing, I quickly rejected this when I realised that the form of publication must reflect the content: the book is about emergent order, self-organisation, commons regimes, peer-to-peer, grassroots research … therefore it had to be open-access.  I was delighted that UCL Press was thinking the same way.

UCL Press: What’s your take on organic food? Are you advocating for it?

There are two issues here.  First, from a consumer angle, of course there are dangers from pesticides or loss of nutrients, which are rightly emphasised, but at the end of the day you might just say mainstream agriculture successfully feeds the world and the risk of changing it is too great.  So I would rather approach the question from the production angle: the main thing wrong with conventional farming is that it destroys the complex soil ecosystem and ultimately the soil itself, and therefore the risk of not changing it is too great.  We have a window of opportunity while there’s still enough food around.  That’s why the issue is urgent.

Secondly, ‘organic’ can often seem a negative definition, i.e. we limit ourselves by renouncing chemicals, which makes it seem like we’re farming with one hand tied behind our back.  I’d rather emphasise what we are opting into: a whole new world of biomimicry and self-organisation … that’s why I sometimes prefer a term like Natural Systems Agriculture.  Besides, the problem isn’t just chemicals, but a lot of other stuff: excessive ploughing, monocropping … Much of this is about how we face risk, because natural systems spontaneously evolve in response to shocks, and become stronger in doing so.

UCL Press: Surprise me with something unexpected you encountered in researching this book.

A couple of paradoxes, which are in fact closely linked:

[1] When looking for cutting-edge examples of the new paradigm in action – learning from nature, self-assembly and self-healing, not trying to control systems too much – I found them in areas like industrial design and materials science; farming in contrast, which you might expect to be our interface with nature, is still horribly conservative and stuck in the old ways. Wonderful research is being done, about soil systems for example, but translating this into an innovative, high-productivity, totally biomimicked farming practice: that’s not yet the mainstream, it’s still very peripheral.

[2] The countryside is so heavily depleted by herbicides, pesticides and monocropping, that cities are potentially havens for nature to regenerate itself: this has been beautifully demonstrated by green roofs, for example, and is potentially very encouraging for a programme of greening the city.  We might even pioneer the new paradigm here!

UCL Press: The book has an optimistic vibe, because it’s about solutions, and as you’ve said, some elements of ‘paradigm shift’ already underway.  So what’s blocking it?  And in particular, how do you interpret the recent Right-wing nationalist backlash.

In the book, I paraphrase a quote from Lenin, about the ruling system being dragged against its will into a new social order.  The shift in world politics towards the nationalist Right shows the system digging its heels in, frantically resisting the implications which its very own development has unleashed.  That’s the aspect internal to society.  But then there’s the environmental context: climate – plus soil-degradation and species-loss – forms the backdrop to everything.

So why is the nationalist Right addicted to climate denial? Because if we take climate seriously, we’d have to face up to the social conditions demanded by resilience: decentralised capacity, peer-to-peer networks, modularity, non-monetary exchange, commons regimes.  These are all evident in today’s food-related social movements – seed-sharing for example.  The issue is inevitably political: a new ‘order’ is a self-organised, emergent order.  That’s what scares the ruling interests.

UCL Press: So what about this term ‘food sovereignty’? That sounds nationalistic in a way…

I think it was always more about community autonomy.  But in a deeper sense, I take your point: we must dare to be normative, not just describe a movement like food sovereignty, but discover what it should be.  A lot about the ‘old’ food sovereignty was resisting the extreme neo-liberal agenda of ‘free’ trade and its disastrous implications for food, and that was all very necessary, but it was only a phase.  In the book I try to place this in a much broader historical context. You have millennia of resistance against exploitative agrarian systems, then against colonialism and imperialism, then against the ‘Green Revolution’ of the Cold War; at an English level, there is an unbroken legacy: the peasants’ revolt, the Diggers of 1649, early 19^th century Chartists, the Land and Freedom movement of the 1970s, and some inspiring contemporary stuff. If the ruling agenda is today shifting away from ‘free’ trade, the enduring issues of commons and land rights haven’t changed.

At the same time, today’s food sovereignty must also face up to new challenges.  What has gone haywire (in society and its relations with nature) has been a narrowing, homogenisation, simplification.  Physically, this is seen in the shrinking variety of crops being cultivated, in the strains of each crop etc.; socio-politically this is seen in intolerance, xenophopia, the narrowing of discourses.  If that is permitted, we will have a system (in food, in society) which fractures and disintegrates in the face of shocks.

So if we are to respond to this threat, I would say – prolonging the book’s argument – that if political liberalism has in a sense destroyed itself by hitching itself to economic neo-liberalism, then the good things which used to be (very imperfectly) identified with liberalism must be regenerated on a new basis: tolerance, pluralism, what I’d call a ‘new cosmopolitanism’ … in essence a diverse system which can produce innovation from anywhere and which – when it faces shocks – will get stronger.

The movement over land and food can be a flagship for this.  Today, the academic and science community is trying to resist the attacks of obscurantism, but can’t do this alone: it needs mass allies.  This is precisely what the land/food-related struggles – of peasants, indigenous peoples, the urban masses – can supply; the academic world has important knowledge to offer, but it will also be itself transformed by discovering a new social relevance.

In these ways, researching the book, I got some kind of glimpse of a new world coming into being.  It’s exciting to feel part of this.

---

About the Author

Robert Biel is Professor of the Political Ecology of Sustainable Food at the Bartlett Development Planning Unit, UCL.

To mark the publication today of the late Denis J. B. Shaw’s Reconnoitring Russia: Mapping, exploring and describing early modern Russia, 1613-1825, we bring you an excerpt from the Introduction. This passage provides the historical context for the book’s overall goal of explaining how Russia’s rulers and its educated public came to know and understand the territory of their expanding state and empire.

‘I love my country in the way that Peter the Great taught me to love it.’

Petr Chaadaev, 1837

This book is about how the Russians came to know Russia. It focuses on ‘those practices – observing, mapping, collecting, comparing, writing, sketching, classifying, reading, and so on – through which people came to know the world’ (Withers 2007, 12). More precisely, it concerns those geographical practices through which the territory of the Russian state and empire, and to a lesser degree the rest of the globe, became known to the country’s rulers and its educated public.

As intimated by the epigraph to this chapter, a key moment for this book is the reign of Peter the Great (1682–1725). The noted Russian writer and philosopher Petr Chaadaev regarded Peter’s reign as a turning point in the history of his country, a time when Russia threw off the shackles of its medieval past and adopted a new, more progressive role, one open to the influences of the outside world, and of Europe and the West in particular (Kohn 1962, 50–1). Writing in 1837, Chaadaev declaimed:

‘One hundred and fifty years ago the greatest of our kings – the one who supposedly began a new era, and to whom, it is said, we owe our greatness, our glory, and all the goods which we own today – disavowed the old Russia in the face of the whole world. He swept away all our institutions with his powerful breath; he dug an abyss between our past and our present, and into it he threw pell-mell all our traditions. He himself went to the Occidental countries and made himself the smallest of men, and he came back to us so much the greater; he prostrated himself before the Occident, and he arose as our master and our ruler. He introduced Occidental idioms into our language; he called his new capital by an Occidental name; he rejected his hereditary title and took an Occidental title; finally, he almost gave up his own name, and more than once he signed his sovereign decrees with an Occidental name.’

Chaadaev’s contemporaries and subsequent writers engaged in heated debates about whether Peter’s policies had had positive or negative consequences for Russia’s long-term development. In the present book I shall adopt a more nuanced stance on Peter’s reign than that taken by Chaadaev, but I do agree with him that the reign represented a significant break with the past. The book will focus on geographical practices, or what I shall call geographical endeavour, over the period between 1613, when the Romanov dynasty assumed power (but with some attention paid to the preceding era) and 1825, the conclusion of Alexander I’s reign, or what is often termed the end of Russia’s ‘long eighteenth century’. Hence it will focus on the period between the inauguration of the dynasty to which Peter belonged and end at the point immediately before the onset of the precipitate changes that characterized the nineteenth century – the building of the railways, the Emancipation of the Serfs (1861) and the initial industrialization and urbanization of Russia. Chronologically, Peter’s reign is thus the period around which the book pivots.

Chaadaev’s emphasis on the significance of Peter the Great’s reign points to a central feature of the book – the comparative dimension. Peter’s reforms derived from his admiration of a series of Western developments, and these he strove to emulate in Russia, adapting them to the very different circumstances prevailing in his homeland. We cannot understand Russian geographical endeavour from Peter’s time (and even to a limited extent before Peter) without placing it in a broader European context. Throughout the book, therefore, explicit reference is made to this broader context.

The principal question to be addressed in this book is: by what means did Russian geographical endeavour reveal and explain to Russians the variable character of the territories which formed their expanding realm? Related questions include: how far did Russian geographical endeavour inform Russians of the character of the globe as a whole, and to what extent was Russian geographical endeavour distinctive? Finally: how far did Russian geographical endeavour inform Europeans of the nature of Russian territory and of Russia’s place in the world? Of course, I am aware that these questions are far too broad to tackle in a single volume, but I do at least hope to build on earlier work relating to such themes and to open up new questions for future research.

Whilst the book will consider many different types of geographical endeavour over the period, I make no pretence to be systematic or comprehensive. That would be impossible in a volume of such length. Rather, in aiming to provide a general framework for understanding the nature of geographical endeavour, and describing how it changed through time, I particularly emphasize scholarship and episodes that appear to me to be especially significant. No doubt my choice will disappoint or displease some readers. But by seeking to place selected aspects of the Russian story into an international context I hope to show how far that story was distinctive and how far Russia’s experience was just part and parcel of a common endeavour in the early modern period.

About the Author

This is an excerpt from Reconnoitring Russia: Mapping, exploring and describing early modern Russia, 1613-1825 by Denis J. B. Shaw.

Until his death in March 2024 Denis J. B. Shaw was an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, where he had formerly been Reader in Russian Geography.

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.

---

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.