Communicating through mega-events: why Eurovision has always been political
In my last post on the Eurovision Song Contest I explored the idea that our appreciation of songs is supposed to be aesthetic rather than political, which leads western European viewers to perceive ‘neighbourly’ voting patterns as a violation of the norm.
The structure of Eurovision is unusual and potentially compelling because it transfers two principles – competition through amassing scores and competition between countries – from a domain where objectively quantifying performance makes some sense (sport) to a domain where quantification is much more difficult (music).
Many sporting performances are quantifiable: they can be measured. Either Jessica Ennis’s jump was 1.95 m high, or it wasn’t. Not all sports are quite so measurable: performances in diving, gymnastics, ice dance and so on have to be interpreted by judges and translated into numbers using a complicated mark scheme, to be able to evaluate who’s won. This is already harder to reconcile with the idea of one clear, objective result. In fact, research on the most aesthetic sports suggests that judges’ and spectators’ subjective beliefs about criteria that don’t appear on the mark sheet, such as gender or nationality, do affect how successful they evaluate a performance to be.
Song contests, on the other hand, are all aesthetic; there isn’t any mark scheme. The more subjective our judgement has to be, the more room there is for our wider knowledge to flesh out what we perceive in the performance we’ve just seen. Could we ever interpret Eurovision songs without politics being present at some level, especially when every song is deliberately put up to be the representative of a country and a nation? To do so, we’d have to consciously bracket off the common-sense knowledge that helps us make snap judgements about the world. Pulling apart the aesthetic and political, then, may be a false separation.
But what about the deliberate politicisation of music, which occurs when musicians, broadcasters and/or contest organisers consciously use a song to communicate a political message? Eurovision rules (PDF) state that ‘no lyrics, speeches, gestures of a political or similar nature shall be permitted during the ESC’. (They also state that ‘no swearing or other unacceptable language shall be allowed in the lyrics or in the performances of the songs’, which didn’t prevent the most recent Austrian entrants being named ‘Trackshittaz’.)
Often, this is used as evidence that Eurovision’s organisers intend it to be apolitical (though Karen Fricker, interviewed in this CNN report on the politics of Eurovision, would not agree). Yet Eurovision itself came into being as one outcome of a wide-ranging political project to reshape (western) Europe in the 1950s by forging and institutionalising a common European culture to strengthen the emerging free-trade organisations that became the contemporary EU. The European Broadcasting Union, a confederation of public-service broadcasters, was founded in 1950. It launched its best-known activity, the Eurovision Song Contest, in 1956.
The concept of Eurovision was politicised from the outset. Since well before Eurovision’s enlargement, numerous individual entries have reflected the politics of their countries and/or their times, as collated in a 2011 documentary, The Secret History of Eurovision (where I feature briefly as a talking head in sections on former Yugoslavia). Portugal’s entry in 1975 celebrated the 1974 revolution. Greece’s entry in 1976 protested the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. Almost every song in 1990 made some reference to peace, liberty, or falling walls; three years later, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina both lamented the effects of war in their first entries as independent states, while sanctions banned what would become Serbia-Montenegro from participating.
As the scale of Eurovision has expanded, we can also see a growing politicisation of hosting. Contemporary Eurovisions approach the scale of a ‘mega-event’, a term coined by Maurice Roche (PDF) for international spectacles that are broadcast well beyond the host country’s borders and attract visitors from many countries. The classic mega-events are sporting occasions such as the Olympics or the World Cup, and much research has been done on how host countries and cities use them to communicate desirable messages about themselves. Visit us! Invest in us! And buy a mascot!
One of the criticisms being made against Baku’s hosting of Eurovision – similar to the reaction against the Beijing Olympics or the Qatar World Cup – is that Azerbaijan has used it to showcase the Aliyev regime while masking violations of human rights. The principle of political communication through hosting a Eurovision mega-event, however, isn’t new – as Paul Jordan (or ‘Dr Eurovision’, now of BBC3 semi-final interval fame) has shown in his research on ‘nation-branding’ in Estonia and Ukraine.
Kiev’s hosting of Eurovision 2005 and its rehearsal fortnight – like Baku and all Eurovisions in between, an event that dominated the central public space of its host city as well as leading up to a television show – also very explicitly showed off a regime, in this case the renewed Ukraine that Viktor Yushchenko had promised to deliver after the Orange Revolution of 2004. The EBU intervened to prevent Ukraine’s entry directly referencing Yushchenko, but the staging of the event still referenced recent political events in many ways (PDF). At least in the eyes of organisations such as Amnesty or the BBC, this was far less problematic than Baku; and Ukraine was supposed to be moving away from clientelism towards democracy and transparency, after all.
Yet these extravaganzas might be a thing on the past. At a press conference in Baku on Wednesday, the executive supervisor of Eurovision, Jon Ola Sand, stated that it was ‘possible that future contests might be on a smaller scale and there may be possible changes to rehearsal schedules to economise on time and financial costs’. In retrospect, there’s a case for viewing the kind of exuberant nation-branding performances I wrote about in 2008 as evidence of a particular moment in Europe’s economic history, which may now have come to an end.
Eurovision: why bloc voting doesn’t exist, and why ‘we’ think ‘they’ do it
One of the more predictable outcomes of this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, in any event other than a western European victory: recurring complaints from audiences and commentators this side of the former Iron Curtain that bloc voting on the part of eastern countries has become so powerful that it determines the outcome of the contest.
Four years ago, in what proved to be his last Eurovision commentary, the BBC commentator Terry Wogan spent much of the voting in frustration that ‘neighbourly’ voting in Eastern Europe was leading to an inevitable Russian victory:
When Ukraine awarded Russia the maximum 12 points, Wogan commented: “Ukraine want to be absolutely sure that the electricity and the oil flows through.” As Latvia did the same he said it knew which side its bread was buttered on. Over the closing titles he said it could be “goodnight western Europe”. (The Guardian, 26 May 2008)
Statistically, it’s clear that certain geographical concentrations of countries tend to give high points to each other. But thinking in terms of a bloc of states voting, deliberately and politically, for each other stops us seeing something more complex going on.
1. Do we expect that other countries’ musical tastes should be as different from each others’ as ours are from theirs? It’s common sense to assume that every country has its own distinctive musical culture, just like it has its own distinctive language; we often have simplified expectations of what ‘French’ or ‘Italian’ or ‘Spanish’ music ought to be like. Many Western European countries have been fixed and consolidated entities for centuries, even if their borders have moved around, and we tend to use them as our model for making sense of the rest of the world.
We need to unlearn that if we’re going to understand the whole of the continent we live in. (And please excuse, or overthink if you prefer, my decision in this post to use a collective British ‘we’.)
Every nationalist movement in Europe aims to define a national culture and prove that that nation has continuously inhabited whatever territory they identify as their national homeland. But there’s persuasive historical research arguing that national identity in much of Europe was much more wobbly until the late 19th or early 20th century: Czech, German, Italian and Slovene nationalist movements in imperial Austria, for instance, met surprising levels of national indifference among the bilingual populations they tried to mobilise (and even France may have taken longer to integrate nationally than one might think).
Even when territory has been divided into nation-states, there can be long-standing reasons for musical cultures to be similar across borders. The musical practices of the Ottoman Empire, in which most of south-east Europe spent at least some time, have left legacies throughout the region even though it’s now politically composed of entities that are imagined as nation-states with distinctive national languages and histories. Pop-folk from Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia and Turkey (and yes, sometimes even from Croatia and Slovenia) has a lot in common. Transnational cover versions are common, and so, these days, are transnational duets; there’s even a satellite TV channel devoted to covering the whole of what the ethnomusicologist Donna Buchanan called the ‘Ottoman ecumene‘ (PDF review).
Audiences in many other countries may well not perceive foreign entries as being as foreign as we do.
2. The disintegrating federation problem. Since the break-ups of Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and the USSR, the map of Europe simply contains more states than it used to thirty years ago. The disintegration of Yugoslavia put six states on the map instead of one (and Kosovo may yet provide a seventh); the former Soviet Union now accounts for fifteen, of which ten are now regular Eurovision participants.
Many of these used not to participate in Eurovision: before the transnational collapse of Communism, Yugoslavia – which hadn’t been part of the Soviet bloc since 1948 – was the only state-socialist country to participate. We can’t tell what Eastern European voting patterns before the 1990s would have been like, even if we might have suspicions.
Like the EU and NATO, Eurovision went through its own gradual enlargement, between 1993 and 2008. Most of the Yugoslav successor states, and some central European ones, began to participate in 1993. By 2000, the rest of central Europe and the Baltic states were on board; Russia first participated in 1994; in 2003-08, post-socialist south-east Europe, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and the post-Soviet Caucasus started to join in as well.
So there are more competing states; and we also see more of them than we used to. Until 2004, Eurovision operated a relegation principle where low-scoring countries had to sit out a year. Introducing semi-finals in 2004 meant that every participating country would be visible in the final every year, as a voter even if not as a contestant.
3. Another disintegrating federation problem. The multi-national federations that broke up in 1989-92 had had flourishing popular music industries since the 1950s-60s (with apologies for simplifying their cultural histories and skipping over the question of whether you can have a music ‘industry’ in a socialist society). These connections, as I’ve found with former Yugoslavia (PDF), didn’t simply disappear when the federal republics became states. Yes, there were nationalistic attempts to separate new countries’ music from their ‘former neighbours’; yes, certain musicians or types of music became unwelcome across certain new borders; yes, there could be problems with performing live in a ‘former neighbour’ or with new national-language quotas on TV and radio. Without expecting it to lead to any political reintegration, we can still talk about a shared popular culture in former Yugoslavia today, or what Tim Judah has called a ‘Yugosphere’ (PDF).
Likewise with the former Soviet Union. There’s a shared entertainment culture here, assisted by widespread knowledge of Russian – and significant Russian-speaking minorities – in the other Soviet successor states. Many contestants from a Yugoslav or Soviet successor country will already be well known in the rest of their former federation. Ukraine’s Verka Serduchka is so well known in Russia that (according to a presentation I heard at the ASEEES convention in 2010) several people in Russia have been arrested for holding concerts pretending to be her. Russia gave 8 points to Verka in 2007, even though her song title was frequently interpreted as a coded way to say ‘Russia, goodbye’.
Imagine that after some constitutional cataclysm there are six states on the territory of the UK. The musicians from each state all used to be in what were ‘our’ national charts, together. We remember who they are. The musical vocabulary they use is something we hear year-round. It would be more surprising if we didn’t vote for them. Whereas a viewer who’d never been part of that shared cultural space would be entitled to go: ‘Is Wessex really voting for Northumbria again?’
In fact, we can already illustrate that right now. Which of this year’s Eurovision contestants only became working musicians because they’d appeared on a talent show in a neighbouring country? Jedward. That one is our fault.
4. Bloc voting on its own won’t win. Some Eurovision entries make perfect sense within their linguistic and cultural area while their appeal doesn’t translate further. For instance, many former Yugoslav entries – Croatia’s Severina, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Laka or Serbia’s Milan Stankovic, and quite likely Montenegro’s Rambo Amadeus – are part of an internal conversation within the ‘Yugosphere’, with complicated local allusions that score highly from other ‘insiders’ but get hardly anything from outside.
These have a knack of ending up 13th, which is where 5 sets of 8-12 points will get you. To actually win, a song needs votes from outside its own bloc – and this is where the Western taste for Eastern exoticism often comes in.
What’s more, the Eurovision record of some states that ‘ought’ to be part of the bloc – Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary – is shocking, to the extent that some have almost given up. The ‘blocs’ we’re perceiving are, effectively, the legacies of the ‘Ottoman ecumene’ and the Yugoslav and Soviet federations.
5. Is it because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? This myth dates back to 2003 when, two months after the invasion of Iraq, the British entrants Jemini received nul points. Perhaps it’s inflected by memories of 1982, when Britain hosted Eurovision during the Falklands War and Spain sent an Argentinian tango.
The difficulty here is showing causality. More European countries are involved in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars than the British public may realise. Besides the NATO members, candidates and participants in the Partnership for Peace programme have also sent (usually small and specialised contingents) to both wars, though this of course isn’t evidence of public support.
Without ethnographic observation of voter behaviour, we can’t know how far a country’s participation in the conflicts affects voter behaviour (has there been a significant drop in votes for Denmark, say, since it began sending combat troops to Helmand Province?), whether or not voters particularly punish the UK, or whether indeed they punish the UK in lieu of being able to punish the US. My own, unproven, feeling is that more personal negative experiences of a country (if a voter has them) would weigh more heavily on most.
6. Is voting inherently political? Sometimes, we know it is. A BBC Panorama report on human rights in Azerbaijan contained an interview with an Azeri who said that in 2009 he had voted for Armenia (involved in a territorial dispute with Azerbaijan) on principle, without even hearing the song.
But it’s not always the case. In 2004, Croatia gave 12 points to Serbia-Montenegro, which was appearing for the first time (or the first time since 1992). The vote made headlines in both countries, at a time when Croatian/Serbian musical contacts had been steadily increasing after the fall of both countries’ nationalist leaders in 1999/2000. Croatian audiences now routinely give 8, 10 or 12 points to Serbia; is every televoting call a conscious political decision? Again, we’d need rigorous studies of voter behaviour to be sure.
Anyone’s decision not to vote for a country will also depend on a complex mix of existing tastes and biases – not to mention unpredictable factors such as a poor sound mix on the night of a performance or whether the contest organisers have inexplicably chosen to broadcast a dance-pop favourite with an alienating greyscale colour filter again. But this isn’t restricted to the members of the ‘bloc’. Perhaps it may be that some viewers who saw or heard about the BBC/Channel 4 news reports from Azerbaijan choose not to vote for the Azeri entry and potentially contribute to Baku hosting a second Eurovision. If voting can be influenced by politics, this holds for all European audiences, not just a subset.
7. What else we think about when we think about a ‘bloc’. To be able to complain about ‘bloc voting’ depends on some assumptions about who’s doing it and who isn’t. At some level, ‘we’ feel offended because ‘they’ are voting in a different way from what we believe the competition ought to judge. There ‘they’ are, ganging up on ‘us’, with their politically motivated behaviour and their unknowability and their sand painters and Olympic figure skaters.
We’re assuming that ‘they’ will make decisions about a piece of creative work based on political bias, whereas ‘we’ don’t do that and are therefore able to assess the works objectively.
There’s a problem here when we divide Europe into an irrational ‘them’ and a rational ‘us’. The problem is that this form of separation has a long history in western European thought. Our cultural narratives about ‘the Balkans’ and the people who live there as being untrustworthy and irrational go back to 18th-, 19th- and early 20th-century literature and travel writing: Alberto Fortis’s barbarous Morlachs, Anthony Hope’s duplicitous Ruritanians, Agatha Christie’s murderous Herzoslovakians or Hergé’s maddening Syldavians, all needing a firm and rational western European hand to come in and set them to order. (Some critics would argue that contemporary peacebuilding projects depend on a vestige of the same logic.)
‘They’ would do that, wouldn’t they? Not like us. Except of course when we do.
That doesn’t mean that everyone who believes in bloc voting wants to colonise the East. It does mean they/we are tapping into a reservoir of common sense that dates back to a time when western Europeans believed that exercise of power was natural and when they used to act on it.
Not many people like examining how they’re positioned in these kinds of narratives, especially when they’re on the privileged side. It’s still important we try to be aware of them. Our perceptions of Europe aren’t determined by what a novelist or traveller wrote a hundred years ago, but their ideas and constructs have still provided much of the cultural common sense that we may fall back on to interpret what we observe.
8. The take-away message. Many European countries’ musical cultures are much more tightly connected, in various ways, than Britain’s is connected to any of theirs – except to Ireland’s and, perhaps, to Sweden. Audiences are used to hearing hits in foreign languages throughout the year. Very often, that foreign language is ours; but there are also flows of popular music between continental European countries from which the UK market is largely isolated (or from which it’s been cut off since the days of Sandie Shaw and Matt Monro). If not for those flows, the idea of starting a Eurovision Song Contest in 1956 wouldn’t have made sense.
Ironically, the closest thing in this year’s Eurovision to that mid-20th-century European ‘schlager’ scene is none other than the British entry.
If Engelbert Humperdinck does the business at Eurovision 2012, he’ll have achieved it by tapping into precisely that transnational European light-entertainment culture that British audiences profess not to understand.
‘Ethnic banter’: or, when revision and critical pedagogy collide
Like many teachers, I feel I’ve achieved most in the classroom when students’ learning goes outside the classroom – when what we do in class retains some meaning even after the assessments are over and even in contexts of non-learning/non-work. Teaching across institutions and disciplines this year, I’ve been lucky to observe this happen, or help to make it happen, in several ways: seeing students who have travelled to study in London reflect on their own countries’ national identities or security narratives; hearing undergraduates shift independently from a seminar discussion on whether the public in Milosevic’s Serbia had to agree with the messages of turbo-folk lyrics to take pleasure in the music, into a discussion of whether one can appreciate Chris Brown’s songs without condoning his misogynistic and violent behaviour.
This week, I’ve been holding revision classes for the two modules I teach at Southampton (my own module on the post-Yugoslav conflicts, and a second-year module on Music and Resistance, where I’m filling in for the module designer Shirli Gilbert). In both modules, we’ve been going over past exam papers and students have been modelling potential essay plans in groups: partly to reassure them that yes, they do understand the content, and partly to share strategies through which they can show their understanding effectively in the artificial environment of an exam (before the clock stops, or their writing hands drop off). (A hat-tip goes out to my History A-level teachers here: I found their advice so useful in my own studies that, appropriately scaled up, I’ve been passing it on ever since.)
What makes me hesitate is introducing new knowledge at this point. By the last week, students have formed their interpretive frameworks; if they should already have some instinctive feeling of where they stand on the main questions that underpin a module (let’s say ‘does commercialisation destroy the ability of music to function as resistance?’ or ‘where do historians consider responsibility for the Yugoslav wars should lie?’), revision classes are about confirming their knowledge, clearing up confusion and reassuring students that if they’ve prepared properly they’re ready for the task ahead. Challenge and disruption, as important as they are in the intellectual process, might not be the most useful things to introduce.
This means there are things I’d do in a seminar that I wouldn’t do in a revision class. But am I taking the right position in doing so?
I started thinking about this after this week’s Yugoslav wars revision class. A group who were modelling essay plans for the question of (more or less) which political leader should be considered most responsible for the break-up of Yugoslavia were reporting back on arguments about Milosevic and mentioned, as one factor in favour of his responsibility, his use of ‘ethnic banter’ during his rise to power in the late 1980s.
They’re thinking here of research by people like Ivan Colovic or Christina Morus on Milosevic’s political communication. This viewpoint argues that Milosevic used ethno-historical references and deliberately folksy turns of phrase to identify himself as the only imaginable leader of the Serbs:
From his first appearance in Kosovo in 1987, Milosevic’s mythic allusions helped to animate Serbian identity in the present through a collective past, making present cultural values seem timeless and immutable. He inserted the Serb people into this historical narrative as politically charged characters fated to fulfill the predestined story of Serb history. In so doing, Milosevic situated himself within the narrative, like the hero of Kosovo who had come to redeem the Serbian people. (Morus 2007: 3 (£)).
‘Ethnic banter’ is an unusual formation, not a concept taken up from the existing literature. The term might have emerged during a Twitter feud between Wiley and Jay Sean in 2011, when Wiley excused comments about Jay Sean’s Sikh heritage as ‘ethnic banter’ and not racism. This year, ‘banter’ in general has been a controversial topic in student life: the website Unilad defended an article on rape as banter, although the feminist blogosphere was unconvinced. Of course, I can’t tell how much of this the student who spoke the words had followed or what standpoints he would take; the general laughter at the mention of ‘ethnic banter’ still suggested it resonated with some wider context of which the class, composed mainly of 18- or 19-year-old British undergraduates, was aware.
A few weeks previously, we’d had a class on gender and nationalism in the Yugoslav wars, including readings by feminist authors from the region such as Maja Korac (who has written on women’s anti-war activism) and Sasha Milicevic (who has studied draft-dodging in Milosevic’s Serbia – and some of these men, of course, would have been these undergraduates’ age when they hid from the authorities to avoid conscription). In an ordinary seminar, the ‘ethnic banter’ moment would have been my cue to embrace the tangent and invite the group to apply their existing knowledge by asking ‘What would Maja Korac (or Sasha Milicevic) say?’
I let it pass, but now I don’t think I should have. There were two reasons why: not being able to remember which text I’d assigned as key rather than recommended reading, Korac or Milicevic (this time it was the Korac – sorry, Sasha!); and the risk of sacrificing the general aim of the revision class for the sake of exploring this point.
Nonetheless, these students who are aware of the research on Milosevic’s use of language were, at some level, connecting that with the ‘banter’ controversy in British student life. If I’ve recognised that, my teaching philosophy suggests that surely I should encourage them to notice points of comparison between public discourse in the case study they’re learning about and in their own lives. If you ask students to unpick the public discourse of another society, may that give them tools to look more deeply at their own?
In my case, it did. I was studying the break-up of Yugoslavia during the first George W Bush presidency; reading Colovic’s critique of Milosevic’s discourse made me able to think more critically about the similarly folksy language used by Bush or, with less electoral success, by Sarah Palin; reading about war commemoration and national identity in south-east Europe made me able to recognise how much British public discourse relies on the same hinge. But then, I’m a professional overthinker. Maybe it’s just me.
Or maybe not? In the same class, another student referred to a module on Henry V, where they’d read a historian arguing that: who controls the memory of the battle is more important than who won the battle. That reading had been focused on Agincourt, but it applies equally to the Battle of Kosovo, where historians can’t even precisely say who won.
In one of his articles on critical pedagogy, Henry A Giroux observes:
A radical pedagogy points to the connections between conception and practice, and it honors students’ experiences by connecting what goes on in classrooms to their everyday lives. Within such an approach, theoretical rigor is connected to social relevance, knowledge is subjected to critical scrutiny and engagement, and pedagogy is seen as a moral and political practice crucial to the production of capacities and skills necessary for students to both shape and participate in public life. (Giroux 2003: 11 (£)).
And I would agree. But can I still put it into practice three weeks before the exam?
Song of the week: or, ten reasons why popular music helps in teaching nationalism
One course I took over at UCL SSEES this year was the postgraduate nationalism unit, Nations, Identity and Power in Central and Eastern Europe, where students get to grips with theories of nationalism and apply it to case studies from the region.
At some point while revising the syllabus, I realised practically every topic could match up with a pop song from the region, and then starting every lecture with a clip from YouTube was inevitable.
This also illustrates why one of the things I write about is popular music and nationalism.
1. Theories of origins
The classic debate in nationalism studies is between primordialism (nations go back to time immemorial) and modernism (nations only emerged because of industrialisation, or the bureaucratic state, or mass literacy, or many other flavours of the same argument).
So here is a very knowing performance of primordialism.
2. What makes the nation? / Ethnicity
Nationalism research has traditionally liked to typologise: nations have a shared language, a shared history, a myth of common descent, shared symbols, shared values, a national homeland, and so on. (More recent research often talks about processes of identification, inclusion and exclusion rather than typologising; I find this more interesting, but it’s harder to represent.)
Here are surely all the signifiers that one could want.
(Warning: I am told this is a bit of an earworm.)
3. States, peoples and sovereignty in modernity
The territory and state power week. (If it had been a longer course, I’d have liked a week just on territory; political geography is interesting.) Illustrated with a song from the presidential re-election campaign of Vladimir Putin, where it was useful for him to suggest that he exerts more power over more territory than anyone else.
There’s also a documentary on the song by PBS.
4. Imagining and inventing the nation
The Invention of Tradition (Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s collection) and Imagined Communities (Benedict Anderson) both came out in 1983 and have been taught together ever since as part of a cultural, social constructivist turn in nationalism studies.
By using this video, I wanted to show how the video was imagining a national Croatian homeland (which, importantly, also contains images of Herzegovina, beyond the borders of the actual Croatian state).
5. Social construction, symbolic boundaries and the everyday
The next turn in nationalism studies has been to explore how nationalism manifests in the everyday, through symbols of nationhood that get routinised into everyday life. Flags, currency, national festivals, television news and even the weather forecast (those things have maps) are all part of this, but one of the most productive ways to research this has been to look at sport.
This, by one of Slovenia’s biggest rock bands, was the Slovenian football association’s official song for the 2010 World Cup. Rock has its own part to play in Slovenian national identity, but that would be another post.
6. Nations in communism and post-communism
Communism and nationalism had an uneasy relationship. Two collective ideologies, each based on a different kind of collective; yet communist rule could also be argued to have strengthened nationalist movements or even created proto-national institutions where none had existed before.
One of the best-known pop songs in socialist Yugoslavia was this song in honour of Tito. Containing many symbols of the Yugoslav state, but is there any trace of a Yugoslav nation?
7. National minorities and the politics of belonging
Another week I’d like to have split into two on a longer course: liberal nationalism, cosmopolitanism and the idea of minority rights is a lot. I delivered this lecture as a podcast, so didn’t add a song, but during the seminars one student suggested this song, Djelem, djelem, which has often been used as the Roma anthem, and works better here than anything I’d been thinking of using before.
8. Gender, sexualities and the nation
This was a difficult week to structure: the theoretical material may be completely new to some students yet very familiar to others, plus there’s region-specific literature on gender and post-socialism to integrate.
Territory, soil, motherhood, unique national symbols, rebirth, common descent, national enemies, food cultures, teleology: this song is a revision guide of its own.
I visited an Armenian restaurant in Montreal last month and was disappointed that nothing on the menu contained apricots.
9. Representation, power and hegemony
This week was one of my two main innovations in the syllabus, and brought in several theorists I felt were essential to understanding nationalism in the contemporary world (Edward Said, Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy). Said’s theory of Orientalism has been a jumping-off point for a lot of work on identity construction in south-east European cultural studies, from Maria Todorova and Milica Bakic-Hayden onwards; Hall’s work on hegemonic representations of the national Other complements or informs the work on symbolic boundaries that we’d been using throughout the course; Gilroy is used far less in researching CEE, but I want to explore whether his version of postcolonial thought could add anything that Said doesn’t.
So, yes. Orientalism, and what Dina Iordanova calls ‘self-orientalising’. Here is some.
10. Citizenship, borders and surveillance
This was my other new topic (at least, it wasn’t on the version of the syllabus I worked from), and the one I most enjoyed putting together: identity, power, the nation, sovereignty, the body, territory and the state all come together in the literature on immigration policy, mobility and border control. It’s also a great way to illustrate post-structuralist theories of power, and ‘region-specifically’ there’s much to explore in the expansion of the EU’s Schengen area and the simultaneous exclusion of non-EU states. (Stef Jansen has an excellent article on this, and is also excellent at open access, happily.)
What I did not enjoy was trying to source this video. The original mix of the song has a slapstick comedy video of stock Bulgarian figures (businessman, country woman, etc.) trying to limbo dance under a Schengen barrier staffed by Laurel-and-Hardy EU guards. I downloaded it from eSnips in case the streaming wouldn’t work in class, only for the downloaded file to decide that it didn’t want to work in class either. YouTube has a remix with no original visuals. Google now kindly throws up a streamable version of the original mix with the video, which is what I was looking for all along.
And now some thanks!
Thanks to Richard Mole and Oliwia Berdak for earlier versions of this syllabus. I moved almost everything around, with large doses of ‘I wish I’d known this when I was a postgraduate’, and of course the syllabi for future students will be different too, but if there’s still a presence of Croatian folk/rock or Albanian rap – yes, that was my fault.
Thanks to all the students on NIP this year. The instant-feedback cards I use in lectures are anonymous, so I don’t know who told me after the first lecture that there had also been a Eurovision song called ‘I Love Belarus’, but there was indeed.
Thanks to Laura Seay/@texasinafrica on Twitter for indirectly giving me a prod to do this.
What’s the opposite of irredentism? Or, sounds of a different borderland
With a Conservative-led government in Westminster and a Scottish Nationalist majority in Holyrood, Scottish independence is becoming much more widely thinkable. But where would this leave anti-Conservative political identities in England – and how could we expect popular culture to reflect them?
The Scotland secretary, Michael Moore, announced today that Westminster will – temporarily – give the Scottish Parliament the power to hold a legally binding referendum on independence. David Cameron, though not necessarily Nick Clegg, hopes to force the SNP to hold its referendum by 2013 – preventing the SNP leader, Alex Salmond, taking advantage of 2014′s 700-year anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn.
Crucially, this approved referendum would only offer a for/against vote on independence and not allow for ‘devo max’, a hyper-devolved option where the Scottish Parliament would take charge of all Scotland’s domestic affairs. ‘Devo max’ would make Scotland part of what political scientists call an asymmetric federation with the rest of the UK. Excluding it, writes John Curtice, is a political risk:
having been denied the chance to vote for what they want, those who want more devolution might wonder whether unionists could be relied upon to deliver any more devolution at all, especially once the threat of independence was removed. If just one in three such voters were to adopt that view then suddenly the outcome of the referendum would look too close to call.
Independence may still be unlikely, but is suddenly more thinkable, in the sense that the public (or at least the twitterati) are beginning to think about its practical implications. For English leftists, those could be uncomfortable:
In 2010, 41 of Labour’s 258 seats at Westminster came from Scotland, a region where the Conservative vote has been marginal since 1997. Remove Scotland from Westminster and a substantial chunk of likely Labour seats go with it, with no corresponding impact on the Tories.
Is England really likely to witness (or in some eyes suffer) a permanent Conservative majority? We know from studies of ethnopolitical conflict like V. P. Gagnon’s work on Yugoslavia that it’s not the likelihood of threats that matters: it’s the perception of a threat.
An England perpetually predisposed to a Conservative majority, especially if it realised Tory Eurosceptic aspirations of leaving the EU, would leave a substantial minority of the population afraid that their vote would never count.
In 2010, I wrote a book called Sounds of the Borderland about popular music and national identity in Croatia during and after its war of independence. What might the sounds of an Anglo-Scottish borderland be?
I would walk five hundred miles and I would walk five hundred more
I reside in England and have no ethnic or residential ties to Scotland. My UK citizenship currently entitles me to settle anywhere in Scotland – no need for a job offer, family reunion, or exceptional talent of any kind. (Leave jokes about bagpipes at the door.)
In the last four years, 205,000 people have moved to Scotland from elsewhere in the UK – evidence, for the journalist Jennie Kermode, of why a devolving Scotland needs an integration plan. Even as things are, Kermode finds that Scotland’s social democratic politics have created incentives to move:
There is one other sizeable group of people moving, or thinking of moving, to Scotland, and that’s long term sick and disabled people. Scotland’s free personal care has long been attractive to those south of the border, and coupled with the fact that changes in the UK’s support system look likely to be resisted up here, it’s creating a situation in which many people feel they can’t afford not to move.
What would independence mean for non-ethnically-Scottish English residents who would prefer to settle in a social democratic Scotland than a Conservative, non-EU England, even though it meant leaving home? For those with ongoing healthcare needs, or people who fear living without EU anti-discrimination legislation, it’s not just an academic question.
Would independent Scotland offer citizenship to any UK citizen who chose to move there during or after independence, or only to existing non-Scottish residents? And just how many aspirant new residents might there be?
Lucky that Scotland’s research base contains a large University of Edinburgh project on citizenship after the break-up of Yugoslavia. Holyrood could at least learn what not to do.
It’s grim up north
How would separation from Scotland by an international border affect North-East and North-West England? Not much, if it resembles the UK-Irish border or the ossified state borders within Benelux, although a border always contains the potential for tighter controls.
Make the Scottish-English border an external border of the EU and we might be talking about something much more contentious.
The regions by the Scottish border are some of the most left-wing in the UK. Sunderland constituencies are famous among election fans for two things: their near-unbroken Labour history and their competition to return the quickest election results in the UK. (Think the Palio of Siena, but with ballot boxes.)
And we know about the North-South rivalry, of course.
Would residents of a region like the North-East wish to stay under a hypothetical, or feared, perma-Tory England? North-easterners rejected John Prescott’s plan for a North-East Assembly in 2004: there’s little history of popular demands for devolved political control. There’d have to be a massive shift in identities (wouldn’t there?) for the region to perceive more in common with a Scottish state than an English one.
Though a social-democratic federation of Scotland and the Borders, compared to rule from distant Southern Westminster? Almost impossible, but not unthinkable.
Let England shake
Sometimes, a group in one state wants the territory it lives on to be incorporated into a different state. The next question – if it’s an ethnopolitical conflict – is asking how the ‘kin state’ is going to respond. When a nation-state wants to expand to absorb a minority outside its borders, that’s irredentism – a term we owe to the Kingdom of Italy and its aspirations to recover Italia Irredenta in the eastern Adriatic.
Milosevic’s Serbia would have been more than happy, and that’s an understatement, to absorb the Croatian Krajina with its Serb majority. Russia has much better things to do than incorporate Transdnistria.
But a North-East aspiring to join Scotland-and-the-Borders would represent the opposite of irredentism – hoping to detach itself from politically Other ethnic kin and join a group with a different identity and traditions.
Though what then becomes of the southern English radicals – the PJ Harveys, Billy Braggs, Frank Turners and all their less musical cousins?
We’ve got to get out of this place
Fear that sheer force of numbers will condemn you and your people to be outvoted for ever more is a motivating factor for separatism. Once Croatia had elected a nationalist president in 1990, Croatian Serb nationalist leaders and the Serbian media in Belgrade spread fear of being forced to live under that Croatian government (which had re-designed the electoral system to help the majority party always stay the majority).
Through a sustained campaign by politicians and cultural producers, Serb/Croat violence in the WW2 Krajina – where Serbs and others had been persecuted by a Croat state allied to the Axis – took on contemporary political relevance. Badging the new Croatian police with a national symbol that Serbs interpreted as fascist didn’t help, and possibly wasn’t designed to.
There’s no history of recent mass violence in the Borders. But the North/South faultline does bring with it recent memories of structural violence – Margaret Thatcher’s repression of the miners’ strike (evoked in the last decade by Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave and David Peace’s novel GB84), and the loss of livelihoods with the collapse of mining and manufacturing across the North.
And there’s nowt that I can bid ye than that peace and love gan with ye
In our hypothetical scenario – of an independent Scotland and rump Tory England – we could, at least, expect a trans-Borders cultural identity to be re-imagined, putting the emphasis on what Scotland and this part of England have in common. Of course, this doesn’t necessarily lead to political claims (after all, Yorkshire’s got on so far without one).
Expect to hear more about the Prince-Bishops of Durham; the Kingdom of Northumbria; Alt Clut and Strathclyde, one of Norman Davies’s Vanished Kingdoms, which ruled from Dumbarton and Glasgow into Cumbria.
In fact, musicians like the Unthanks have been reinterpreting Northumbrian folk music for a while. Here, they’re performing a traditional song from the lost county of Hexhamshire in Durham cathedral, supported by representatives of another Northern tradition in the shape of a public-subscription brass band:
Expect to hear about the Border Reivers, raider clans who operated along the Anglo-Scottish border for 400 years in defiance of kings, tax collectors and the centralising state. (George R. R. Martin modelled the chaotic North of Westeros on the Anglo-Scottish Borders for a reason.)
In fact, a tradition of outlaw-versus-tax-collector ballads is one more thing the Borders have in common with Krajina and other Dinaric parts of former Yugoslavia. (What does ‘Krajina’ mean in English? Oh, yes.)
The border ballad Hughie Graeme, attributed to Scotland’s national poet Robert Burns and performed here by the Midlands-born June Tabor, tells of a relentless horse-thief executed in Carlisle:
Would building a neo-kinship along the Borders be a precondition for any meaningful political identity?
Anything that’s worth having is sure enough worth fighting for
Even the development of a serious Borders Question is unlikely; its resolution by force would be even more so. It would also be asymmetric and, of course, unpleasant.
The conflict Bill Drummond imagined at the end of the Thatcher era in It’s Grim Up North is probably not going to be prophetic. We’re a long way from the Newcastle-born Cheryl Cole being asked to wheel out this performance every year on some pro-union anniversary or other:
Yet recent history in other parts of Europe shows us that, during political and financial crises, identities can re-form faster than we think.
There’s always a place in me that you can call home?
YouTube ate my research field
Cross-posted from Networked Researcher.
As a researcher who did fieldwork on popular music in 2006 and 2007, I’m coming to this YouTube series as an accidental dinosaur: someone whose published research contains almost no study of YouTube, even though her fieldwork took place at the very time its users were just beginning to codify the new kinds of identity performances YouTube made possible.
YouTube launched in February 2005. By 2006, it was already crammed with music video as well as (its first intended use) original short films. I first became conscious of YouTube in the summer of 2006, when friends began sharing links to music videos with each other through email. After deciding to research popular music as an example of how political rupture, conflict and nationalist ideology affect everyday life, I was starting my first period of fieldwork in Zagreb and could use the apartment’s fast broadband internet connection (an improvement on the connection I had access to at home in the UK) to explore the site as a musical resource.
Did YouTube change my research practices and my field? Not as much as it should have. At the time, I only used it as a searchable repository for exploring commonalities among the popular music of south-east Europe and planning an abortive side project about cover versions.
My next apartment had dial-up internet but satellite TV; I used music television as my main resource for gathering examples of music videos and failed to appreciate that YouTube might be changing not only my methods of data collection but also the field itself.
Unlike Martin Pogačar, the author of a recent post for Networked Researcher on user-generated digital memorials of Yugoslavia, I didn’t manage to theorise the changes that YouTube and digital video sharing might be making in musical memorialisation in Croatia. Maybe this was poor timing on my part. My fieldwork ended in September 2007 (almost concurrently with the end of a heatwave that had affected my health and slowed the last three weeks of research to a crawl). Martin writes that in late 2007, when he first began investigating digital memory, there were still hardly any examples of ‘grassroots’ or ‘vernacular’ memory production on the site compared to the wealth of user-generated montages YouTube contains today.
During my own fieldwork, in other words, users had only just begun to go beyond re-recording the original videos from television and re-broadcasting them across national borders; the memory montage was only just being consolidated as a genre with conventions of form (the types of image and sound that might be joined together) and reception (the supportive or antagonistic comments left by other users who identify themselves in terms of ethnicity, language, sporting affinity and/or politics). Without appreciating this emergent genre myself, I was unable to alter my research design to take account of it: I never asked about video sharing during interviews on music, nor did I even begin to conceive of ways to observe video sharing practices in the field.
Martin studies vernacular digital memorials that engage with memories of Yugoslavia, Tito, anti-fascism and Yugoslav popular music (the soundtrack to almost every montage). Equally, YouTube is a repository for montages that memorialise nationalist narratives using exactly the same techniques. The diasporic ethnic communities whose members show each other stories on YouTube are transformations of the diasporas in Dona Kolar-Panov’s research from the 1990s (£) who mediated their connection to ex-Yugoslav homelands by watching VHS cassettes of music and war news.
In the link below, a creator who identifies themselves as a Croat resident outside Croatia accompanies their own photographs from a touristic return visit with the famous patriotic pop song ‘Moja domovina’ (‘My homeland’), one of the most famous songs to have emerged from the beginning of Croatia’s war of independence in 1991.
While this involves Croatia, YouTube contains similar texts for every nation in the Western Balkans. Other montages (many other montages) incorporate music and/or images referencing nationalist collaborationists from the Second World War or symbols of contemporary far-right significance. I have not yet attempted to gauge what proportion of patriotic videos on YouTube are far-right or extreme nationalist – far less have I attempted, so far, to determine where to draw the boundary.
Could and should YouTube have changed my practices of disseminating research? The ease of sharing music texts with colleagues and students rests largely on continued access to YouTube and the clips themselves. Each lecture of the ten-week nationalism course I teach this semester begins with a ‘song of the week’ straight from YouTube; to achieve the same thing before YouTube would have required access to recording equipment, signals from broadcasters in eight or nine countries, and the luck to be tuned in at the right time.
Since my book on popular music in Croatia, Sounds of the Borderland, was published last year, I’ve often mused about how it would look as a hypertext publication filled with embedded clips. (I’m told at least one reader has read the book at their PC, searching YouTube for song titles as they went.) The future of pop research? But there’s a problem of legacy here. Since 2009 or so, most multinational record companies have settled copyright disputes and launched their own YouTube accounts: a link to their official copy of the video is likely to be permanent.
The managers of some performers in south-east Europe run official accounts for their acts and a few record companies from the region have followed the multinationals’ lead this year. The uploaders of most clips, however, aren’t the copyright owners. When a rights-holder complains, videos or whole accounts risk deactivation: most of the music video channels I subscribed to in 2006 have disappeared. YouTube links in a print text would very quickly be outdated, while checking and replacing broken links in book-length hypertext would be a mammoth editing task.
With Sounds of the Borderland, I compromised and appended a ‘playlist’ with a list of songs readers should search for. Would there be a more elegant solution if I returned to the topic in another book?
More about those feedback cards
Two weeks into the term and my experiment with instant feedback cards, they are beginning to have some effect on the shape of the course, and maybe even to give insights into how students are synthesising material in the different courses they take.
The two main courses I’m delivering this semester are a course on the theory and practice of social research and a longer course on nations, identity and power where students apply theory to cases from the region that this School studies. Many students on social sciences tracks choose to or need to take the social research course, while the course on nations, identity and power appeals to students with interests in politics and nationalism.
The overlap in students taking both these courses is a big help for remembering names, and also gives me twice as many opportunities a week to think about how their learning is progressing.
After the first social research lecture, I realised the point that most students had found ‘least clear’ was the idea of anti-foundationalist thought. (Well they might, since anti-foundationalism doesn’t leave anything to grasp.) At the next lecture, I tried to provide more – one provocative (Nietzsche’s anti-foundationalist take on good and evil) and one probably less so (the interpretive way that Mark Bevir and R. A. W. Rhodes approach policy networks in political science).
The next day, I was lecturing to the Nations/Identity/Power class on ‘what makes the nation?’. This week’s focus was on approaches to the study of ethnicity: attempts to typologise features of ethnicity, versus constructivist accounts that problematise identity and group formation.
The most extreme example of constructivism I wanted to introduce was work on ethnicity by Rogers Brubaker, a sociologist at UCLA. Brubaker, put simply, rejects the common-sense idea that researchers in ethnicity should be studying groups (his last theoretical book was even called Ethnicity Without Groups). Instead, we should be studying the practices and processes that make people consider they belong to groups. It’s all right for group members to believe that they belong to groups; researchers with their professional hats on should not.
But we all know groups exist. We know that we belong to groups. Don’t we?
I wanted to introduce this now so that students would begin to ask the question, even if they find Brubaker too counter-intuitive to agree with. It’s helpful as an intellectual exercise in taking nothing for granted (I gave an illustration of some of the bureaucratic, financial, legal, social, hospitality-related and linguistic practices that might operate to produce the ‘groupness’ of belonging to the collectivity ‘UCL students’). Because I know grasping anti-foundationalism has been an issue for some students in the other course, I added that, for those who are taking Theory and Practice of Social Research at the same time, Brubaker is an example of anti-foundationalist thought.
Which made me very pleased, after I’d collected the feedback cards from the ethnicity lecture, to find out someone had found ‘Brubaker’s anti-foundationalist ideas’ the clearest thing of all.
This may not be the same person who said they’d had trouble understanding anti-foundationalism in week 1. The cards are anonymous, I don’t take much account of handwriting, and I don’t use them as a way to track individual progress from week to week.
It’s still evidence that students are learning actively by applying their knowledge from one course to another, my teaching has had some intellectual coherence across courses, and that a difficult concept may be starting to sink in as students use it in different ways.
I could have found this out in a seminar if the discussion had gone in that direction (although, conscious that students don’t necessarily take both courses, I’d have been unlikely to lead it there myself). As it is, I’m able to observe this from the feedback cards.
The cards also work as a way for students to make brief ‘off-topic’ comments about classroom management or seminar structure (such as one thing that always trips me up: when and where is the best point to put out the sign-in sheet?). Someone took the opportunity to suggest a further primary source I might like to use as a case study in the nationalism course. I enjoy these, and I enjoy having had at least one moment of interaction with every person in a group 40-60 strong.
I just wish the institution where I’m using them had an easy way to recycle them (unlike my other institution, which recycles everything – apart from glass). The paper recycling points in our print rooms only accept white printer paper, so I have been throwing a shocking number of plain white cards away.
Time to plan a simulation that will take up a lot of place cards, maybe?
Instant student feedback and the power of social media
A post at The Teaching Tom Tom about using Twitter and blogging as professional development tools has reminded me to follow up on my own recent post about how social media has helped me to change my own teaching practice.
One of my priorities this year is to help students get more from my lectures. This means finding strategies to slow the pace and provide space for reflection within the lecture, and finding ways to gauge how students are understanding the material well before the coursework and marking stage.
This post is about the second issue: rapid feedback techniques I have begun using thanks to social media.
The department where I was teaching last year introduced informal mid-semester student feedback as well as the formal end-of-semester student evaluations. As a new teacher, I also had a more experienced colleague visit one of my classes for a teaching observation.
But how can I get student feedback in time for it to have an instant impact, before students have spent weeks feeling lost and not telling anybody? Even halfway through the unit feels like too late, when I know that I could have tried to correct the problems if only I’d known about them.
A blog post by Liz Gloyn, a classicist at Birmingham, caught my attention when she re-promoted it a month or two ago. Liz had been reading Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher by Stephen D Broomfield and trying to implement some of his tools, including a reflective teaching log. Broomfield also introduces an instant feedback exercise called the Critical Incident Questionnaire, which Liz has been thinking of adopting:
students anonymously fill this out at the end of the last class of each week, noting what they felt most engaged with in class over the past week, what they felt most distanced from, what action they found most affirming, what action they found most puzzling, and what about class surprised them the most. At the start of the next week, the teacher reports back on the responses and the trends they illustrated, and opens discussion about any serious issues that have turned up as group issues.
I’ve done something similiar with this in the past with an activity called the One Minute Paper, where at the end of each class students write on a notecard the clearest and muddiest point covered in class that day. That’s given me some great insight into content issues my students face, but it’s less helpful for identifying other problems with my teaching in the way Brookfield suggests the CIQ could. I’m very tempted to experiment with something along these lines next time I teach, in place of the One Minute Paper, and see what difference it makes.
Both these ideas could solve my speed-of-feedback problem. For my first venture into instant feedback, I’ve decided to borrow the one-minute-paper technique and apply it to the lectures in the two main units I’m teaching these semester. Both are theoretically focused, making the early weeks essential scaffolding for material later on: a student who is confused at this stage and gets disengaged will find it hard to recover.
At the end of both introductory lectures this week, I’ve handed out note cards and asked students to write bullet points saying what they found the clearest and least clear points in the lecture. At the moment I still have the energy to type them up (which is helpful for my teaching log and may even help when I revise my teaching dossier), open the document where I keep early notes for the next lecture and add thoughts about what I need to go over in a different way.
I can tell, for instance, that students feel my explanation of ontology was particularly successful (and that the most memorable illustration I used was a discussion of wizard and Muggle ontologies in Harry Potter) but that more examples of anti-foundationalist thought would have helped them grasp the difference between anti-foundationalism and foundationalism.
Just by doing this, I hope I also make myself seem responsive approachable, interested in student progress, and prepared to help when students feel confused.
(The Critical Incident Questionnaire strikes me as more useful for seminars: I may give it a try in a different unit next semester where a previous colleague has introduced many different student discussion activities into the module and I’d like some feedback on what works. One step at a time.)
I could have come across all these ideas without social media by studying teaching and learning practice or through mentoring. The power of social media, at least for an informationvore, is that I encounter these ideas in semi-downtime. Opening a Twitter or Google Reader session is a signal that I’m going to spend the next half an hour thinking in a creative and relaxed way, but I don’t know what I will be made to think about.
It could be how a pet cat has made the UK government look silly, what was wrong with the plotting of female characters in the finale of Doctor Who or carrying out political science fieldwork in conflict zones (all blog posts that have stuck in my mind that I’ve read in the last 24 hours). I’m more likely to retain and digest an idea if I feel that I’ve come across it voluntarily, in time I construct as not-work.
I’ve already passed this technique on to a colleague in my department, although I hope she’s prepared for how many packs of notecards she’ll get through. People I don’t know may take up the idea from my post or Liz’s if they find it through Twitter, Facebook, bookmarking or old-fashioned web search. At this early stage, I’d recommend it to anyone. Unless you are a tree.
Turning research into lectures without tears
Since I’m still knocking two and a half first-semester modules into shape at my first institution, a quick blog post/response to my historian colleague Melodee Beals, who is also starting a new job as a Teaching Fellow (a charming British name for contingent faculty).
Last week, Melodee blogged about her approach to revising one of her department’s modules on the Atlantic world, which she’s chosen to revise intensively to suit her own research interests. I was in Melodee’s position last year, when the Faculty I worked for as a researcher offered me the chance to design a new module on a topic that would appeal to first-year historians and could be structured around a historical controversy (translation: build your own primary-source-packed syllabus on the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s).
I wish I had read Melodee’s lecture writing rules before trying to turn my subject knowledge and vision for the module into lectures. Probably like most early-career academics, I’ve been in the situation she found herself in when she began approaching the material:
It was not that I did not know the material I needed to present. I have been immersed in Atlantic World historiography since I was an undergraduate. I simply had too many ideas and no way of determining the correct course of action. I was, in all honesty, paralysed with indecision. But, at least, I thought, I have four months until my first lecture. I am sure it will all turn out for the best.
Three months later I was not much closer. I had created a programme and developed reading lists to accompany it. Indeed, I had spent much of the summer re-reading these books and articles in search of inspiration. But I was no closer to a set of completed lectures.
Click through to her blog for a list of all the five rules she set herself, but what resonated with me most was this:
If I want my students to think, rather than merely transcribe, my lectures should offer spaces for individual reflection.
This is what I believe I should be doing, and after my mid-semester feedback sheets and teaching observation, I knew I had to change something in my lecturing practice in order to make this happen.
But how?
Melodee helped me out some more on Twitter:
Last year I had slides after each section that summed up the past 15 minutes, during which I poured myself a glass of water.
I like this. I’m going to try it. And it solves another classroom problem, because I always fret that my mid-lecture water breaks turn into unintentional displays of slapstick (drop bottle cap on floor; drip water on to light grey shirt; etc.). I do not want to find bingo cards with all the different ways my taking a drink of water can go wrong.
Over the summer, I was asked whether I could repeat the Yugoslav wars module this year. Again, I hope to talk about that in more detail. But I already feel much better equipped to make the lectures do what I believe they should.
Can civilians learn from the military about learning?
On the same day that the British education secretary, Michael Gove, announced an initiative to encourage ex-military personnel to become primary and secondary teachers,the Centre for Policy Studies proposed a free school in Manchester that would be staffed entirely by former servicemen and women.
Gove’s announcement isn’t new: his department’s White Paper on schools in November 2010, which introduced the controversial ‘English Baccalaureate’ concept of a core set of GCSEs, had already mentioned sponsoring the tuition fees of ex-Forces graduates entering teacher training and investigating whether Forces non-graduates could take accelerated degrees.
The CPS’s brochure on the Phoenix School may fall on open ears at the Department for Education: the authors criticise Labour’s early-years intervention programmes (Every Child Matters and Sure Start). Tempting fate, they argue that their solution, which ‘will categorically reject the concept of moral relativism’ and ‘the charade of “personalised learning”‘, will support the government’s policy of moral restoration:
And, as a beneficial side-effect, the next time that riots break out in Britain, we should expect that few, if any, participants come from such schools.
The proposal has come in for sustained ridicule: as with any free school, which is allowed to employ unqualified teachers, why should non-specialist teachers be in schools? What place does the demeanour of the archetypal regimental sergeant-major have in a contemporary classroom? Is this really where the 2,000 Army and RAF personnel made redundant yesterday are expected to go?
But is there anything civilians could learn from the military about learning?
The military is a complex organisation that supplies its own version of much of the infrastructure in civilian society: transport, mail, telecommunications, media, food supply. The British Army’s recruitment website advertises ‘over 140 different jobs’; its US equivalent talks about more than 150. Fewer soldiers serve in the ‘combat arms’ (infantry and cavalry) than in ‘combat support’ (Artillery, Engineers, Signals and Intelligence) or ‘combat service support’ arms.
‘Combat service support’ designates the functions furthest away from the primary infantry/cavalry business of closing with and killing the enemy – mechanics, medics, logistics and many back office functions, including education and training.
Soldiers in these corps deploy to front lines, of course, either in their own units or on individual postings: Army educators with language skills, for instance, tend to be the first to volunteer for operational language training and deployment as ‘military colloquial speakers’ on six-month tours.
If an army contains so many professional dispositions, what makes a soldier? Rachel Woodward and K Neil Jenkings have argued in a recent issue of Sociology that soldiers express their military identities ‘with reference to the specificities of their professional skills’. Sometimes, but not always, those skills are in the disciplined use of force:
The military, according to the classic (Weberian) definition, is the state-sanctioned body with the authority to use lethal force. The exercise of lethal force defines military personnel as such. Our interviewees fleshed out that idea by talking about the constitution and expression of their military identities with reference to the specificities of their professional skills. For some, these skills were clearly identifiable as military tasks: accuracy in marksmanship, for example, or surveillance and observation skills, or the deployment of technical knowledge in the act of patrolling hostile urban areas.
Yet, they find, other soldiers base their soldier-ness in mastery of skills that aren’t to do with force (being first to put down heavy-duty electronic cables; survival and endurance outdoors; performing complex marching band manoeuvres). Military identity lies in the specifics, such as technical knowledge of military equipment and being able to operate in difficult or dangerous conditions where civilians would not work:
The skills of vehicle repair and rescue could be seen as similar to those required in civilian mechanic occupations. What was significant to this interviewee was the possession of not just technical skills but also an aptitude and willingness, specific to the military, to use such skills in extreme and hostile environments, for the sake of a wider military objective. So even when individual skills may be generic, and held by civilians, their application is not.
During my research on international intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina, I’ve met a number of soldiers from one of the less well known military populations, Army educators. The Educational and Training Services, which had existed as a separate corps between 1845 and 1992, deal with adult learning, basic skills training, staff development and needs analysis for the Army’s 110,000 soldiers. Among the enlisted personnel will be soldiers who have enlisted with few or no formal qualifications. ETS officers aim to equip them to take GCSEs and vocational qualifications, and ‘lifelong learning’ is even a selling point in Army recruitment material today.
Following Woodward and Jenkings, we could expect the ‘military’ in military education to rest in what you teach, how you teach, and where you teach it. Military language training for operations (the short courses that produce ‘colloquial speakers’ with basic competence in selected areas) differs from the civilian classroom in many ways. Courses emphasise military vocabulary and use authentic military texts for reading and listening practice; scenario-based learning, where students apply their language knowledge to situations based on recent operational experience, is the norm. Practical classes are often held outdoors and are reinforced when the language students take part in field exercises. No matter how difficult British society believes language learning to be, soldiers with very few formal qualifications have been able to learn entirely new languages (Bosnian/Serbian, Arabic, Pashto) to a usable colloquial standard through military educators’ training methods.
The civilian education system rarely taps into military ideas about education. In 1995, the Higher Education Funding Council for England published a report on what east European language needs the United Kingdom would have after the fall of communism and the crisis in former Yugoslavia. The report contained contributions from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office but not the Ministry of Defence, which had decades’ experience in teaching Russian and had been teaching and using ‘Serbo-Croatian’ on operations ever since 1992.
Being a military educator does not map into success or comfort in school teaching. Far from it. One of the educators I met had entered school teaching after leaving the Army in the mid-1990s only to find the environment conflicted so badly with their previous experiences that they moved out of the profession.
Yet might there be a reserve of knowledge in the military about alternative teaching methods for students who learn best through doing, outdoor learning, or teaching a functional level of basic skills to people who have disengaged from formal education?
There might; but this is not what the debate is about.
Instead, the government initiative to encourage former soldiers into teaching is being launched within a frame of discipline: increasing ‘male role models’ in schools and reducing bureaucracy that deters teachers restraining students with physical force. Gove’s undertone is a retraditionalisation of society to restore adult and legitimate authority, using the August riots as proof of a moral collapse. Only a body with masculine power and military training, he implies, can provide the necessary discipline and physicality.
There is a conversation about learning that the military, and military educators in particular, might be able to take part in. We are not having it yet.
