Dan Taylor

the winning caption gets a magic money tree from the Duke of Westminster’s estate.

but while I’m here, some quick updates on the previous many months:

My audio essay on the A13, “Arteries of tomorrow”, was broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s The Essay in March. It’s based on over a year (to date)’s research with communities and individuals in Barking and Dagenham about the keyword “growth”.

i was invited to give some guest lectures and talks:

• “Why do unfree republics prosper” at the Protestant Theological University of Amsterdam
• “What does it mean for a multitude to be free?” at the University of Bologna
• “Borders, migration and the hostile environment” at the Open University GCSJ research festival

Publications:

• On Method (The Philosopher), now open access
• Spinoza and relationality, also for The Philosopher as part of a forum I coedited with Gil Morejon called “Spinoza after politics”

I submitted an edited collection to Edinburgh University Press on Spinoza’s TTP which I coedited with Marie Wuth, which has a chapter by me and is out early next year. There’s a fair bit of other work, several academic journal articles and a special issue, in varying states of completion.

Work news: I’ve been elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. I gained Senior Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy. I’m now Co-Director of the Language Literature and Politics Research Group. I set up and now co-convene a working group on generative AI in my School. I’m Deputy Lead of the OU Carers Research Group, where I’m now leading a small group as research partners to a new carers community research network. I’m also now on the Editorial Advisory Board of Spinoza Studies.

But really the main thing is extensive travel, fieldwork, interviews, discussion groups, reflections, walks and talks in communities across the Fens and east London. The work is broad and increasingly deep. A large part has involved slowly and carefully building trust and understanding, and setting out to understand why distrust, fatalism and anger are embedded and perpetuated in the economic and social fabric. Multiple interviews with a cast approaching one hundred plus discussions, reflective tasks, plus a continual effort of my own to understand ideologically contested keywords in place and community (and “community” itself one must question too). It’s layering in complexity. At some point it must stop. But I have not stopped writing, far from it. And this long-term approach has built a store of trust and insight, such that I’ve seen other researchers come and go while I’ve been in the field, as well as the impacts of unethical or shoddy journalism about Boston, Wisbech and Dagenham. It’s become a cliché that our politics needs new narratives. It’s also in desperate need of new ideas. And, I think, new forms of diction and expression that are human and are ours, as generative ai use becomes more depressingly widespread.

But work comes in between life. The work on care was punctuated by miscarriages, failed IVF cycles and wider family sadnesses. The research on growth was punctuated by the work of being a dad to a very sensitive, beautiful boy. Work supplies the fantasy of control. Writing supplies the refuge of an uninterrupted, confident voice.

and everything else must be questioned. Even that image at the start is one fragment of a story (the empty new builds on the other side of the old industrial supply road, the queue of transits at Amazon’s DRM4 nearby, the wild rosemary and elderberries growing in the bushes and along the river nearby, my friends said, I haven’t a clue about these things, the contaminated sub-station, the poisoned earth, the beating sun above…)