shards

Things I’ve been reading:

• Chantal Jacquet, Transclasses, Robert Blatchford, Merrie England; Nick Bano, Against Landlords; Liam Halligan, Home Truths; Lise Butler, Michael Young, Social Science and the British Left; Daniel Weinbren, The Open University: A History.
• Fiction and poetry: Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker; Mariel Franklin, Bonding; Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child; George Eliot, Middlemarch; and the poetry of John Clare and Sofia Parnok (reminiscent of Carol Rumens, one translation here).
• Mike Makin White, On Burnley Road, a brilliant book about the riots across Northern England in 2001 which very much speaks to the riots in Southport last month.
• Some propositions there: seek the political content; uncover the “truthyness” behind the riots, the ideas and emotions that led some to get caught up in what was in most cases awful, racist violence (and in others, often just young teenagers throwing stuff at the police); bring communities together to engage in multiple sessions of sympathetic listening that’s not forced into easy consensus; look at the wider collapse of shared social meanings, solidarity and the impact of austerity and deindustrialisation.

Bits of good news:

I’ve been promoted to Senior Lecturer in Social and Political Thought at the OU, which officially kicks in next month. I was also a joint winner of the Outstanding Early Career Research Excellence Award, with two other brilliant people. A little film has been made about my work:

(In case you’re wondering what I’m doing with my hands, I’m demonstrating how to fit 50 marshmallows into a bottle of Tizer).

I picked up the award last night. I thanked communities for putting trust in me, brilliant colleagues at the OU, and my partner and family for their enduring support and understanding.

We’re co-organising a new research group on British Political History with a few online seminars this month, all welcome.

No new writing since June but as ever things caught up in the pipeline.

Last on the good news – we’ve just got funding to launch a community research network in Barking and Dagenham focused on the right to community infrastructure. It’s me with my colleague Merim Baitembetova in partnership with Thames Life. This will begin soon and run until summer 2026. We will train and pay residents in the borough to become researchers in their own right, building capacity and expertise. It’ll be funded by the Open University’s Open Societal Challenges – “Challenge us!” competition.

Other fragments and pieces.

Gateshead Carers Association recently lost its tender to run the all-age carers service in Gateshead over 5 years, to a relatively unknown organisation based in the Midlands. GCA has done brilliant work with unpaid carers going back decades and it comes as a significant blow for the area. While the new provider will pick up the carers service, with most of GCA’s staff moving over, it’s placed the organisation in existential peril – the local authority is the main funder. But, it/we’re going to shift it in an exciting new direction, becoming a rights-based organisation, focused much more on the politics and social justice aspects of unpaid care, and holding local authorities to account.

I’m not aware of anything else like this before, and it’s an important and much-needed proposition. Local authorities have had their funding hollowed out, as everyone knows; local services are often staffed by brilliant, hard-working and underpaid people who do their best but there isn’t the wider support and social safety net in place to then refer people to. Rather than seeing this as a crisis of care, a bit of a cliché, I’ve been thinking about this in terms of an intentional and functional dysfunction in the system. So it’s matter of politics, and drawing attention back to political choices.

Don’t get me started on the new-old austerity politics of our latest government.

Last for now, wishing my friend Dave all the best as he becomes a Dad. And a note of thanks to all the wonderful people I’ve been meeting and interviewing recently across Peterborough, Wisbech and the Fens, where the work continues (it never stops).