North East Doctoral Training Centre ESRC Funded Studentships in Politics

Politics at Newcastle University is pleased to announce the availability of ESRC funded PhD studentships as part of the North East Doctoral Training Centre. We are seeking high calibre candidates interested in doctoral study who have clearly defined research projects and wish to be considered for these awards.

The studentships will be allocated on a competitive basis and include 1+3, +3, 3.75 and 2+3 awards. The deadline for approaching prospective supervisors is 27 January 2012. The deadline for submitting completed applications is 24 February 2012.

Preliminary inquiries can be directed to Dr. Kyle Grayson until 30 January, 2012 and to Dr. Martin Coward after that time.

Further details:

The following studentships are available to UK citizens and EU nationals:

• 1+3 awards: targeted at students with or nearing completion of first class undergraduate degrees to undertake an MA in research methods followed by PhD study.
• +3 awards: targeted at students with or nearing completing of MA degrees with ESRC recognised research methods training and who wish to commence PhD study
• +3.75: targeted at students wishing to undertake a PhD with an MA that does not include research methods training. The .75 will allow the applicant to complete research methods training.
• 2+3 awards: targeted at students considering a two year language based MA degree followed by PhD study

Politics at Newcastle University enjoys a strong international reputation. In the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) Newcastle Politics consolidated its position with a very strong research output profile and excellence in terms of research environment and esteem. The RAE Panel noted that: “Research outputs were predominantly of internationally recognised quality” and the “Research environment was predominantly of internationally recognised quality … (including) a large school of PhD students, with good completion rates”. Politics has enjoyed strong growth in staff numbers in recent years indicating excellence in its research and teaching and the overall strength of the programme. Incoming students will be able to fully participate in our program of research related activities and active graduate community.

We offer research supervision expertise in:

International Politics

• Security, human security, critical security studies, biosecurity, European security and defence policy
•  Area specialisation in the Americas, East and Southeast Asia, Russia, European Union
• International political thought and philosophy
• Globalisation and global governance
• Urbicide, cities and war
• Terrorism and Counter-terrorism
• Geopolitics and critical geopolitics
• Ethnic nationalism
• Genocide
• International political economy with specialist focus on work and labour and development
• Popular culture and world politics including music, film, electronic games
• Global justice and ethics
• The arms trade and disarmament
• Post-colonialism

Political Philosophy and Political Theory

• The ethics and politics of climate change
• Environmental citizenship
• Ecological space and global justice
• Legal philosophy with specialist focus on punishment
• Moral philosophy
• Multiculturalism, toleration, recognition
• Rights and freedoms
• Liberalism
• Democracy in divided societies
• Justice and ethics

Governance and Political Organisations:

• Party Politics
• Elections and electoral politics
• Area specialisation in the Americas, Italy, Japan, France, Germany
• Transitional justice and reconciliation in divided societies
• Interest groups
• Social capital
• Participation and non-participation
• Civil Society
• European security
• Political ideologies
• EU integration policies
• European environmental policy and policy making
• European public policy and policy making
• International environmental organisations

Further details on how to apply can be found here.

Further information about postgraduate research in Politics at Newcastle can be found here.

Key Deadlines:

Formation of a supervisory team for the 2012-13 competition: 27 January, 2012

Submission of a completed application for the 2012-13 competition: 24 February, 2012

photo credit: Joseph G. Ajila Pinzón

Recently I finally found time to play my way through the single-player campaign of Modern Warfare 3 (MW3). As those who follow me on twitter know, I had been anticipating MW3 for a while now. Throughout the lead-in to the game’s release we had been treated to epic trailers showing the destruction of cities such as New York and Paris.

Given that I am currently trying to write about visions of urban cataclysm, playing my way through an interactive – if not immersive – rendering of such visions of urban violence had been on my to-do list for a while.

MW3 – at least in its campaign incarnation – is a strangely disappointing experience. It’s true that you watch as the Eiffel tower gets knocked down by an airstrike [ffwd to 17:45 in linked video] , but otherwise, the game is something of a heads-down run through a series of firefights where volume and intensity of fire replace any pretence at stealth or precision. Given that the original Modern Warfare is primary remembered for ‘All Ghillied Up’ which required the player to navigate the abandoned wreck of the city of Prypiat with care and stealth, this substitution of blind-fire is somewhat strange. Moreover, it has the odd effect of stopping the player from appreciating the levels of detail achieved in the rendering of cities such as New York or, later in the campaign, Berlin. Since players must essentially charge through the rubblescapes firing randomly at barely discernible targets, any appreciation of their environment is lost. This has been a feature of recent First Person Shooters (FPS) with a reviewer of last year’s Medal of Honour noting something similar.

['All Ghillied Up']
Of course, readers may at this point note one/both of two things: a) this probably echoes the mayhem of war – soldiers do not go to war to go sight seeing; and b) it’s just a game…

Now of course b) is an entirely problematic answer: while I have little time for interminable debates about video games and violence, MW3 is not just a game. It is a cultural event that should be examined for what it tells us about the regimes of representation and affect that characterise the culture it derives from and has so much influence on. Like all cultural artefacts MW3 tells us things about how we see the world and interact with it. Which brings me to objection a): of course this is right in one sense – but MW3 was never supposed to ‘recreate war’. If you wanted to do that you’d need to introduce pain to the experience. Anyone claiming to understand the chaos of war from MW3 needs to seriously think through what they are saying. Of course, it is possible that this kind of visual and somatic chaos does privilege activity over reflection (As Roger Stahl has noted). This may desensitise us to the violence of the war on terror, for example, by foreclosing our more reflective nature. But MW3 does not tell us what it is like to be in Helmand or Basra or Fallujah.

So how to make sense of the disappointment? Well, I would draw a parallel with something else that happened this week. In the AFPAK theatre a NATO airstrike killed up to 28 Pakistani border personnel. This has had serious repercussions with Pakistan seeing the strike as a violation of sovereignty and a breach the understandings that allow US and NATO operations against Taliban fighters in the contested terrain of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region. Pakistan has responded by ejecting the US from an airbase used to launch drones.

The strike on the Pakistan border exposes very clearly the fallacy of the supposed precision targeting of the war on terror. The idea of precision is a product of 2 dynamics: on the one hand the development of sophisticated information technology systems that render battlespace in real time, thus giving the impression that targets can be hit with accuracy; and on the other hand the representation of warfighting through footage of ‘successful’ drone strikes on clearly identifiable targets. The latter representations frame civilian understandings of warfighting giving the impression that improved IT has led to an accurate, precise warfighting. However, the loss of Pakistani border personnel shows us that such precision is a fiction born of cultural expectation (surely machines don’t get things wrong) and representation (we have been shown precise strikes, so all of them must be like this).

Of course, the exposure of the fiction of precision has been underway for a while now – at least since the US dropped bombs on Afghan wedding parties. As such, we have been retreating from the fiction of precision for a while now: understanding, if only tacitly, that war is not precise. I would say that MW3 mirrors this retreat from precision well. There is little that is careful or deliberate about any of the single player campaign in MW3 – even the sniping scenes end in outlandish explosions. And whether we have time to examine the landscape is neither here nor there if all we trying to achieve is ‘good effect on target’.

I am not suggesting some sort of conspiracy by game designers to desensitise us to a lack of precision. That would be a long way from the truth. But I am suggesting that we should look at cultural artefacts such as MW3 and ask whether they play a role in both reflecting and influencing a culture that has been retreating from precision in its overseas campaigns for nearly 10 years. The question, of course, is what can be done about the retreat from precision given the impunity with which drone strikes are proceeding.

photo credit: albertopveiga

Just over a year ago, I was invited to comment on Peter Adey’s book Aerial Life for an ‘author meets critics’ panel at the at the RGS-IBG conference. It was a real pleasure to be afforded the opportunity/excuse to read and comment on Aerial Life. The book itself is a fascinating and challenging examination of the manner in which life becomes ‘aerial’. It examines not so much what it means to be ‘in-the-air’ but the condition of being ‘air-minded’. It is less about pilots and passengers – though these make numerous appearances – than the manner in which air power ‘condition’s’ the life of those on the ground. This ‘air conditioning’ is exmplfied in excellent discussions of air power in the Gaza Strip, Malayan Insurgency and London Blitz. The concentration on the affective dimension of biopolitics is a welcome addition to the literature on the production of forms of life. My commentary, along with several others, have just been published in Political Geography. If you have an interest in vertical geographies or the biopolitics of air power I strongly recommend taking a look here.

photo credit: Tracy O

In a perceptive comment on the LSE-Saif Gaddafi affair, Richard Sennett notes that LSE director Howard Davies “didn’t create the problem of the dodgy donor – he succumbed to a structural danger that is built into the [UK] educational system.” To outsiders the LSE’s decsision to supervise Gaddifi’s PhD and take donations from funds he controls could appear either naive, underhand or worse. However, Sennett raises an important point that bears further consideration as it implies that we should expect more of these problematic funding arrangements in UK Higher Education in future.

Consider the following:

1. Universities are expected to both teach more students and produce world class research while having their government funding cut.

2. University degrees are treated as a private good that prepare students for the employment market. Hence, universities are told told be more engaged with the needs of private business.

3. University research is to to be increasingly judged on the basis of ‘impact’ – how it translates into public activity, particularly how it it is taken up and used by private and public bodies.

Successive governments have encouraged universities to cope with these constraints by doing the following:

1. Accepting increasing numbers of premium-fee paying foreign (non-UK/non-EU) students.

2. Seeking funds from private donors and alumni (along the lines of the endowments that sustain universities in the US)

3. Selling their expertise to private and  public bodies to ensure that it is not locked away in the academy (and that researchers can demonstrate ‘impact’).

Under those circumstances is it any surprise that a UK Higher Education institution accepted a foreign, premium fee student for a 3 year course and then accepted his alumni contribution to the continued running of the institution? Moreover, when experts in democratic transition were invited to advise a country that is surely in need of such a political transformation, is it any surprise they took the opportunity? Of course you could argue that they should have resisted such temptation and made a principled stand. And yet if institutions are being encouraged to balance their tricky funding equations by behaving more like private sector businesses it is competition, not principles, that they are being urged to accept as their guiding motive.

Why is it important to bear these factors in mind? Overall it is successive governments that have established this structural framework. And let us not forget that, in the UK at least, governments are elected and thus have the support of the electorate. Even in a situation where parties cannot secure the support of a majority of the population - as is the case with the current ruling coalition – a sizeable part of the electorate is responsible for the subsequent policies they implement.

So far from being a story of individual failings, the LSE-Saif Gaddafi story is one in which successive governments and electorates are embroiled. It is worth bearing this context in mind before leaping to rash conclusions. Moreover, if we don’t want to repeat stories such as the LSE-Saif Gaddafi affair then perhaps we – as a society - need to reverse the current direction of travel of UK Higher Education policy. If you want a principled higher education system then you need to recognise the public good it provides and match it with adequate funding, thus removing the market incentives that encourage exploitation of resources despite the ethical implications.

photo credit: baboon™

I’ve been busy for the last month or so, so have fallen behind with a few things. One of the things I wanted to publicise before Christmas was James Ash‘s New Voices seminar at Newcastle Politics on November 17th 2010. James gave a paper entitled ‘Commodifying Affect: Videogames and the Technics of Affective Amplification‘. James discussed the manner in which videogames modulate affective states in order to draw the player further into their diegetic world. He effectively used Modern Warfare 2′s Second Sun sequence as an example of how affect is modulated through the interplay of scripted an unscripted events. Overall the thing I found most interesting was the way in which he suggests affect is modulated in order to make gameplay absorbing – that is to make it an experience that occupies attention to the detriment of reflection. This helps to explain the lack of attunement to moral judgement that occurs in games where players are asked to kill and maim in ways that outside the games diegetic space they may find unpalatable.

The event was podcast – you can download it here.

photo credit: Pedro Moura Pinheiro

Reflections on the future of social science in UK universities

I don’t usually comment on UK politics at martincoward.net. This is largely because I want the content on this site to reflect my particular research interests and activity. My expertise lies in the intersection of political philosophy and international politics. More specifically, my interests are in thinking about the inter-related topics of cities, security and political violence. I have therefore, largely confined myself to comments on these issues. However, as a politics scholar at a UK Higher Education (UKHE) institution, the nature and future of social sciences in UK universities is something I am both interested and invested in.

Last week’s Browne Review of Higher Education and tomorrow’s Spending Review (SR), will have significant consequences for social science in UKHE. While Browne proposes allowing universities to charge as much as they like for degree courses, the SR is rumoured to eliminate a substantial amount (if not all) of public funding for research and teaching in arts, humanities and social science in UK universities. For social scientists as well as their potential students (and their parents), these proposals have the potential to distort the balance of teaching and research in universities, restrict access to degree courses, hinder the international competitiveness of research  and, ultimately, recast the relationship between universities and wider UK society. As someone with both an individual stake and a professional interest in how these changes will unfold, it would seem appropriate to offer a few reflections.

Support for the principles of the Browne review reveals a belief that education beyond the age of 18 is a private, not a public good.¹ Those who argue for increased contributions by individual students regard enquiry into, and propagation of, knowledge beyond basic competence as a private matter that individuals would only undertake if it gave them some sort of benefit.² Supporters of the idea of increased individual contributions see enquiry into arts, humanities and social science subjects such as English Literature, Anthropology and Politics as unnecessary unless it can confer competitive advantage onto an individual in the job market. And if it can do so the individual, not society, should pay. In espousing this notion of training (this is not a vision of education) Browne and his supporters demonstrate a very poor understanding of the nature of higher education.

The question is, therefore, what is the nature of social science degrees in UKHE? For the most part pre-university schooling emphasises instrumental, goal oriented tasks. As such many students lack a strong grasp of what it means to conduct independent enquiry. Put another way – in the language that employers might understand – they lack a firm grasp of what it means to exercise initiative as opposed to following guidance. University exposes these students to a structured learning environment in which they are challenged to acquire the critical thinking skills that will enable them to exercise independent judgement. My role is to support them in acquiring those skills – which by definition must be independently achieved – through structured courses, environments and exchanges. Their final degree classification (a system which could be reformed, by the way) reflects the extent to which they have utilised our support and gained an independent grasp of how to find, order, understand and critically evaluate knowledge (n my case, knowledge of politics in a variety of forms). In addition it reflects the extent to which they can communicate that knowledge verbally and in writing.

That’s what we do: build the ability to locate, understand, evaluate, organise, structure, present and communicate knowledge in an independent fashion. That’s why our graduates are employable – they are flexible, adaptable, able to take initiative, reflect and communicate.  If society can only see this as a private good, it is short-sighted. Their presence in society means that the UK is a better place and that the public and private sector organisations that employ our graduates are better able to adapt to the challenges they encounter.

As an aside, I would venture that this failure to conceive of the education of social science graduates as a public good could be linked to a perceived lack of interest in independent judgement across wider UK society. This might help to explain why organisations such as Migration Watch are able to publish flawed statistics in order to support their exclusionary stance towards immigration. Or indeed, why the present government managed to misrepresent crime statistics when in opposition (or indeed how it has managed to perpetuate the myth that welfare spending ballooned under labour). Were the general population more concerned with understanding the manner in which knowledge is represented and communicated, it might reject such flimsy misrepresentations. It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that Browne’s idea of education as a private good has not been met with the widespread incredulity it deserves.

What will happen, then to social sciences in UKHE? And how might universities respond?

In the first place, I think it is worth pointing out that cabinet millionaires probably don’t care either way what what happens. Increases in fees for their children are small change however steep they are. It is also worth noting that there is a real danger that UKHE will return to being the elite institution it was for much of the twentieth century. Stripped of state support for social science teaching, many universities will set fees at a level that will deter those who might not traditionally go to university. Ultimately, only the wealthy will be able to dig their children out of the debt-trap of university fees. The middle classes will, of course, continue to see the benefit of going to university but the debt their children will accumulate is likely to seriously dent any increase in earning they might have expected to see.³ As such they are likely to consume less and afford smaller houses. The ripples could be significant. But the headline is that fees are more than likely to entrench the boundaries to social mobility that keep children who would not traditionally go to university – children from economically deprived areas – out of the UKHE system.

This, however, is unlikely to be the end of the effects of fees. The following are also very possible as a consequence of removing a cap on fees income:

• Privatisation: Browne (and Cable’s) vision is of a market in which the provider sets the price, but the government actually hands out the money. Moreover, in return for this distorted vision of a market, providers are supposed to submit to a super-quango that will regulate all areas of their activity. It is difficult to imagine any private sector company operating under these conditions. It will not take long before universities in a strong financial position realise this and make moves to become private entities. Once they do they will control their income stream and they will be exempt from overbearing regulation. We can only hope they chose to be not-for-profit organisations. Needless to say, privatisation will break up the idea of a university system in which institutions enjoy a certain parity of conditions.
• Wage inflation: On the one hand, graduates saddled with mountainous debt will demand higher salaries. If they have to take on the costs of their education, they will make employers pay in return. Similarly, if universities seek to capitalise on the public profiles of their researchers to attract paying customers they will have to pay for that talent. At a time when universities are seeking to end the implicit bargain that saw researchers who could earn more in the private sector accept lower salaries in return for decent final pensions, this could lead to wage inflation. Universities will not want to see good researchers and teachers leaving because pay (immediate or deferred) cannot compete with private sector employment (or indeed with competitor institutions). Universities will be in no position to drive their most talented staff – the very staff that will help them recruit customers – away.
• The end of social bargains: There is an implicit bargain that gives both government and the private sector access to university graduates and research for very little in return. Academics frequently offer their services for free: charging no consultancy fees and receiving only travel expenses in return. This bargain will end. Government can expect to see universities charge commercial consultancy rates for the services they provide. Similarly, ideas such as open access publishing may die. Similarly, employers recruit graduates without paying any sort of premium beyond corporation tax. While universities will want their graduates to be employed, they will also want a greater income from the very people that benefit from those graduates.
• The emergence of entrepreneurial leaders: At present Vice Chancellors (VCs) are, for the most part, academics who have chosen administrative roles over research roles. On the whole they do a good job because they understand the nature of academia. But markets and privatisation will require VCs to become entrepreneurs. They will need to have commercial sensibilities. This will not be about managing budgets made of of bloc grants, but rather nurturing talent, growing income streams and diversifying portfolios. Once entrepreneurial managers move in (with the inflated wages common to the private sector), who knows where institutions will go. While I have no particular love for VCs (most of them have lacked the courage to control the growing administrative strata in HE institutions and have thus failed to keep research and teaching staff focused solely on these tasks), the loss of academic managers in HE would be as significant as the loss of clinician managers in the NHS.
• Loss of international competitiveness in research: At present the UK social science research base is broad and diverse because all institutions stand to benefit by engaging in research. However, many institutions will see teaching as a more reliable – and bigger – source of income post-Browne. As such they will not consider research vital. A two-tier workforce of teachers and researchers will emerge. As such social science research will be consolidated in a smaller number of universities. UK social science will be narrower and poorer for this consolidation.

I have mixed feelings about how this will unfold. I suspect that in 10 years time UK social science will be a much narrower field, research output will have declined, institutions will have closed and social mobility will have been reduced. I hope that universities find a way to become not-for-profit entities that can escape the shackles of overbearing government regulation, protect the balance between teaching and research, and yet at the same ensure sufficient income is invested in bursaries for those who might be deterred from attending university by cost considerations. I am not optimistic, however. What is certain, however, is that if those who seek to destroy the idea of education as a private good – the ConDem small-state ideologues – get their way, they will pay for it.

You can find my introduction, the reviews and my response, here: http://global-discourse.com/contents/urbicide-by-martin-coward/

As with all research, the monograph represents a snapshot of thought about this variety of urban violence, rather than the last word on it. Reflecting on that snapshot, I think there is much I still agree with, but there are also things I would change. This has thus been a valuable opportunity to reflect on my argument about the widespread and deliberate destruction of urban fabric and to highlight what I think its key contributions are as well as to ponder some of its limitations.

My thanks to the reviewers for their thoughts as well as to the editors of Global Discourse for both the original invitation and their work compiling and publishing the review section.

photo credit: hide99

Along with my colleagues Angharad Closs-Stephens, Debbie Lisle and Emily Jackson, I am organising a one day workshop at the Imperial War Museum London on 3rd December 2010. The workshop will be a joint BISA Poststructural Politics Working Group and BISA/PSA Art and Politics Group event.

Since my work turned to consider critical infrastructure and I encountered Jane Bennett’s thought provoking account of role of thing-power in the North American Blackout of 2003, I have been intrigued by the question of the materiality of political life – a question that is often only obliquely answered in the disciplines of Politics and International Relations. I hope that the discussions that are started in the December workshop will allow further explanation of the complex ecologies of political subjectivity.

I’m very excited by the group of speakers confirmed at the event so far. I also hope that we will be able to add more in the near future.We are very lucky to have Jane Bennett as well as Jeremy Deller – whose work is currently on display at the Imperial War Museum – as keynote speakers.

For those interested, here are the full details:

The Political Life of Things

A One Day Workshop

The Imperial War Museum, London, UK

3rd December 2010

Keynote 1: Jeremy Deller (Turner Prize Winner, 2004)

Keynote 2: Jane Bennett (Johns Hopkins, author of Vibrant Matter)

Confirmed speakers include:

Cindy Weber (Sussex University): TBC

Louise Amoore (Durham University): Making things secure: on objects of violence and things of beauty

Lisa Smirl (Sussex University): Drive-by Development: Thinking through the Sports Utility Vehicle in humanitarian assistance

Claudia Aradau (Open University): Security That Matters: Critical Infrastructure and Objects of Protection

Jairus Grove (Johns Hopkins): Improvised Explosive Devices and the New Ecology of War

About the workshop

This workshop starts from the assumption that the subject of politics is always already embodied and exists in the context of a multitude of material objects. Politics thus comprises complex assemblages in which things play a constitutive role. Despite often speaking of the role of things – from ballot papers to missiles – scholars of politics and international relations have largely overlooked their constitutive power. Indeed, the classical agenda of politics scholarship is dominated by an anthropocentrism that locates politics in the figure of the human individual. It is an agenda defined by ideas of agency and rationality that regards things as mere equipment. Despite this seeming neglect, the intersection of materiality and politics has recently become the focus of a number of innovative strands of thought. From Appadurai’s Social Life of Things to Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, via Deleuzian notions of affect and notions of non-representational geographies, new perspectives on what things are and do are re-problematising the constitutive materiality of politics.

Artists and art practitioners, of course, have long been engaged with questions of materiality. Whether it is the embodiment of performance, the tactility of sculpture or the physical nature of imaging media, artists have probed the materiality of the assemblages they create. As such, the intersection between such artistic practice and scholarship on materiality provides a fertile ground for exploring the question of what things are and do in politics.

This one-day workshop brings together scholars engaged in thinking about materiality to explore the nature, role and power of things in the assemblages of politics. In the context of the material culture collected and displayed by the Imperial War Museum, the workshop will explore how we can understand the role of things in war, conflict, violence and everyday practices of resistance.

This workshop will be an interdisciplinary event bringing artists, art practitioners, museum curators, art historians, geographers, anthropologists and international relations scholars together to discuss questions of the political life of things.

Attending the workshop

Attendance at the workshop is free. Light lunch and refreshments will be provided. Due to the costs associated with organising a workshop in London there will unfortunately be no support for travel or accommodation costs.

Places at this workshop are limited. Please contact Emily Jackson (emily.jackson@durham.ac.uk) if you wish to attend.

This workshop is sponsored by BISA, PSA, Durham University, Queens Belfast University and Newcastle University

At the heart of this failure of infrastructure lies two important contributory factors. On the one hand car traffic in China is rapidly expanding. As urbanisation gives rise to grater wealth as well as greater distances to travel, car culture is taking hold as it has done across the urbanised global north. In 2009 13.6 million vehicles were sold in China, leading China to surpass the US in car sales. As volume of traffic rises, infrastructure cannot cope and jams become more commonplace. This is a familiar story in  urbanising zones of the global south such as Lagos and Sao Paulo.

The Guardian points, however, to another contributory factor – namely the transport along China’s road’s of coal mined from newly found deposits. Heavy traffic and inadequate infrastructure lead to repairs which themselves gave rise to jams.  The bigger picture here is the co-dependent relationship between urbanisation and fossil fuels. This is a question that the global north has failed to properly address, perpetuating car cultures that demand oil². Conceptually, this raises the question of the type of fossil-infrastructure hybrid that forms the material substrate of contemporary urban subjectivity.

Overall then, this traffic jam both offers insight into the ‘complex ecology of political subjectivity’³ characteristic of cities as well as posing urgent questions about how we might achieve sustainable global urbanisation.