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I.4 - A Public Sociology for Post-Industrial Fife
- Edited by Eurig Scandrett, Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh
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- Book:
- Public Sociology as Educational Practice
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 02 March 2021
- Print publication:
- 14 September 2020, pp 65-78
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Summary
Introduction
Having been an associate member of the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) from attending WEA courses when conducting research into the politicisation of Scottish national identity (Gilfillan, 2014), the WEA seemed an ideal public to partner with in light of Burawoy's (2005) call for sociologists to engage with the likes of church groups, the labour movement and the working class. When going to meet with the WEA education development manager for Fife (‘Maesie’) at her Lumphinnans office in March 2017, it seemed appropriate to park in Gagarin Way opposite the WEA office as this street name indicated the previous industrial era when this former ‘pit village’ had earned the local nickname ‘Little Moscow’ thanks to a Communist tradition strong enough to have streets named after heroes of the Soviet Union. However, in light of 1980s deindustrialisation and the flight of private capital from the central Fife corridor from Buckhaven and Methil in the east to Ballingry and Lochore in the west, Burawoy's question ‘are there any publics out there?’ (in Tamdgidi, 2008: 140) was a topic I wanted to explore with Maesie.
Paul: Does the WEA struggle for local publics?
Maesie: One of the biggest challenges for the WEA is the fact that we are still a very, very traditional organisation; still trying to work to fairly traditional values and aspirations. An yet society is movin on all the time. And so the models and the approaches that we used even 20 years ago are no really relevant any more. So one of the things that we’re having to do, and we absolutely sit doon an talk about this regularly, is how do we make ourselves more relevant to people in the way that people live and work and move around now, because we believe that the content of the education that we offer is still relevant.
Paul: What are the values of the WEA? Is it empowerment via education?
Maesie: Absolutely! We talk about ‘social purpose’ education; which means that anything we are delivering is about enabling people to think very, very critically about their situations. About the things that impact on their lives. So it's no just a case of comin an doing a creative writin class because that's something yer interested in.
I.6 - Dialogue I: Subaltern Counterpublics
- Edited by Eurig Scandrett, Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh
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- Book:
- Public Sociology as Educational Practice
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 02 March 2021
- Print publication:
- 14 September 2020, pp 93-108
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- Chapter
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Summary
The dialogue around publics took the form of an invitation to the contributors to respond to a narrative around generative themes emerging from the cases in this section, and the extent to which the problematics posed in the provocation were responded to. Whilst all contributors were invited to participate, this dialogue took the form of an extended email correspondence between Paul Gilfillan, author of Case I.4, and Eurig Scandrett, editor and author of Case I.5, which is itself a response to an earlier version of Paul's case study. Whilst this inevitably puts a restriction on the diversity of voices in the section (not least because the only voices are those of the two male contributors), the correspondence between Paul and Eurig has provided the opportunity to examine, test and interrogate in some depth, the proposition of public sociology engagement with subaltern counterpublics.
In the provocation for this section, it is proposed that the publics with whom public sociologists should be engaging are best understood through Nancy Fraser's (1990) formulation of the subaltern counterpublic. The public sociologist therefore has a role in contributing to the analysis of subalternity in terms of understanding social axes of oppression, exploitation and injustice, and contributing to the strategies of countering these. The means of analysis and strategy development is through dialogue between the resources of sociology (and other academic disciplines) and the praxis of publics engaged in struggle, and this dialogue is a pedagogical task. This argument builds on Burawoy's ‘Between the organic public sociologist and a public is a dialogue, a process of mutual education’ (Burawoy, 2005: 7) and, more politically, Gramsci's ‘every relationship of “hegemony” is necessarily an educational relationship’ (Hoare and Smith, 1971: 350). How useful is this proposition?
The choice of cases from which to develop our dialogue have been drawn from selected forms of public sociology practice. In the newly emergent field of Mad Studies, the knowledge of madidentifying people who have experience of psychiatric diagnosis or mental distress is validated and valued through a dialogical education programme Mad People's History and Identity. The feminist movement has constructed an analysis of violence from the collective experience of women, and demonstrates the ongoing engagement with this analysis through dialogue between practice and theory in pedagogy and in participatory research.