Fire

Round-up

1. Funding: Come and do a PhD with me. There’s two ways. You can take up this specific project, “Bridging the Protection Gap: Lived experiences of insecurity and regulatory deficits”, working with me, Professor Ian Loader (Oxford University) and Unchecked UK, working in communities in Macclesfield and – of course – Barking and Dagenham.

Or you can propose something from your own research that fits the broader theme of Social Justice and Inequalities. Both are fully-funded social sciences PhDs.

Maybe you’ve finished your PhD and are looking for a funded postdoc – good news, get in touch if you’re interested in a 1-year Social Justice and Inequalities postdoc with me as your mentor.

If it’s of interest, be quick – deadlines are in January but I’d expect to have a chat with you in the next couple of weeks if you’ve got a good idea.

2. Publications: I’ve got a new journal article on the meaning of sympathy coming out in a few weeks. In it, I use George Eliot’s novels and Spinoza to set out what I call a process of sympathetic knowledge. It’s taken a fair bit of conceptual work, and pleasure reading George Eliot too.

Even if you’ve read neither, it will introduce you to both and add to the discussions around sympathy by bringing in a critical and relational dimension. “Interwoven Threads: Sympathetic knowledge in George Eliot and Spinoza” is coming out with Spinoza Studies, a good home for my rather idiosyncratic style, and is dedicated to my wonderful Grandma Ruth, who is approaching 100. “The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts”, George Eliot once wrote. More than partly.

(This essay came out of a heightened period when I also wrote about Malcolm X, anger, and on chess – perhaps the best thing I’ve written)

I’ve also got a thinkpiece out on whether we should read John Locke today. Is he a racist apologist for transatlantic slavery, or the key figure that underpins modern liberal ideas of freedom and consent, or a bit of both? Make up your own mind – it’s here.

Other stuff

I organised a lovely event for the national Being Human festival in Peterborough. My night was called “Beyond borders: sharing stories of Peterborough”. We had about a packed out room of people producing drawings, paintings and poetry about their stories of a place. I’m finishing up a zine out of it. Want one? Just ask. Thank you Keely and Fasiha for facilitating with me.

Real life

Every day, tens of millions of small and insignificant rocks enter the earth’s atmosphere and burn up soon after. Most of these are no larger than a grain of sand. They are the derivative or orphaned products of comets or Soviet-era debris. Sometimes they appear as shooting stars, but most of the time they are seen by no-one. Or, perhaps, by one keen onlooker in the Ouseburn area.

In the moment before such a space rock burns up, does it think? Does it wonder: I have chosen to enter the exosphere of this distant, swirling rock, ambiguously blue? Does it ask itself: I have aspired and determined that I will enter this atmosphere, and I am the master of my destiny? Does it say: I am actually a Senior Lecturer at the Open University (and not a micrometeoroid)?

I wish it well.

These days, I hardly sleep, hardly eat, and keep losing my valuables. I write and interview a lot, even though I lost my phone. Though, most of the time, it is about listening (not the phone bit). And listening is no good unless you ask the right questions.

It’s a vulnerable immersion into the otherness of a stranger’s distinctive experience. Each utterance and each silence is like a philosophical syllogism; one to be scrutinised, often in silence, with ethical regard for that person’s own vulnerability and wonderfully idiosyncratic character. It’s not a game of chess. The best of these conversations is like a piece of music involving multiple instruments. There must be some underlying discovery and sense-based understanding of the rhythm, the key. These instruments should play in time but rarely together. They must gesture to a deeper, subterranean sea of human feeling, that all music speaks to when you feel it take you out of yourself ( — and to where?)

But they’ve got to be straight up, self-deprecating, sometimes funny, often fun. Each conversation draws out every resource I have – emotional, ethical, philosophical, personal, and political. Between it, I write modules, essays, memos, letters, run courses, run research groups, and care for a family who I love in each cell of my body, and who suffer when my attention is turned away. And so I do not often write back to my friends and family. (Unless they give me a deadline or are a current or former student).

It’s burning, but it’s exciting. I’m nearly at the end of my work in the Fens – around 100 interviews now, many groups. I travel a lot, more than I should, and my beautiful partner and my beautiful son suffer from that. So it will come to an end after this year. I’ve cherished a lot – many interviews with farmers, many deep and intimate conversations, in person and on paper, with people of all backgrounds. I’m really pleased I brought in funding for a community research network in Barking, and to be on another new initiative around community memory mapping in North London. The work on unpaid care also continues.

At the same time – madness – I decided to keep up everything else. I’m close to people all across England now, in a way I never could’ve imagined years ago. Island Story in reverse. But I think I always liked it that way. Whether it’s around social care or unpaid care, or housing struggles and justice in London, or the mythical Fens tigers, I’m now close to and regularly meeting (literally) hundreds of people around the country. It’s in me. I’m writing three books at the same time. Yes, I did say that. Each one has too much of me wrapped in. Who said a burning, miniscule piece of rock couldn’t think?

Recent books I’ve liked:

Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel (thanks Nai)

Border Country by Raymond Williams (thanks Daryl)

Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore (thanks Zack)

Detroit Techno – Cybotron, K-hand, Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson — don’t worry, this year I’ve had Depeche Mode’s Black Celebration on incessant re-repeat.

Who gives a monkey’s?

Yeah, that’s true.

Ok, if we proceed with that conclusion, then let me set out one more thing. Ok, burn up, and then, what was a life, ventriloquised in writing? Alienated mostly, thought out in some rusting satellite, gazing at the distant blue. Three pieces of writing matter, maybe: Island Story, and two poems, Cordyceps and French Ordinary Court. Maybe. None of that matters, really, compared to the people I love and loved. And then, perhaps, what comes next.

All my love to auntie Carol, who passed away recently, who I remember and cherish. You taught us love’s architecture, that maybe love lives on, in a trans-generational world of kind gestures, dispositions, and loving sense. In other words, love written into the body x