Category: Guest post

This rather brilliant post, by the newly-minted Dr Dena Arya, appeared on the website of the Political Studies Association. I have Dr Arya’s permission to repost it. Please read it. It eloquently raises many of the questions that face precarious ECRs.

12 June 2024

After six years of perseverance and determination, nourished by the love and support of my communities, I have completed my PhD. I must confess I have daydreamed about writing that post – the one where I tag my examiners, my supervisors, my mentors and bask for just a moment in the glory of ‘likes’, ‘shares’, and praises. A virtual homecoming where I can finally be recognised for my proverbial blood sweat and tears – having shared my ideas with the world ready to stand proud amongst my peers who made it over the finish line – to the land of early career researchers.

But I am yet to write that ‘glory tweet’. The next few paragraphs are not going to tell my personal story of academic success – rather I hope that this blog might be read by others who have lessons to share with me so that I can learn how to ‘do something’ about the predicament I find myself in.

Since September 2022, with the murder of Jina Amini which sparked the Zan Zendegi Azadi (Women Life Freedom) movement in Iran – the online space shifted for me. In the winter of ’22, as a member of the Iranian diaspora, and at the time teaching a module on the politics of youth resistance, suddenly online protest space was no longer something abstract, theoretical or removed. In real time I began to watch the bravery of young people back home risking their lives and standing up for each other – many lost their lives dreaming of a better tomorrow. For months my research, my thesis, my PhD seemed futile, I felt purposeless and all I could do was scroll as day turned to night and watch young people, often women, risk everything for a slither of possibility that their singing, dancing, hair, art, bodies could carry others beyond the brutality they faced.

After some months, I could no longer watch. I did what I could where I could, but nothing felt good enough. My contributions felt empty and the pain of watching too severe – so I stopped watching and went back to my theories, concepts and eventually the movement fell into a period of lull. A year went by and I submitted my thesis – and then came October 7th and the now eight months of catastrophe that people surviving in struggle in Palestine are living through.

This time, I could not watch. This horror is beyond my body’s capabilities to simply bear witness to. So, I do what I can where I can and I carry on living my life. A freedom that many surviving in struggle through the multiple monstruous genocides across the planet can only dream.

My life goes on and I pass my viva. I submit my corrections – I have spent six years reading, thinking, writing and exploring with young people the role of intersectional inequalities in their climate action. I publish papers, I attend talks, I experience, in my little world successes – I am the first person in my family to get a doctorate. My father who dedicated his life to nourishing my critical mind is proud of me. This is a reason to celebrate.

But how do we celebrate success in the face of horror as early career researchers?

And so what of our role is as academics, researchers, scholars, intellectuals (whatever term floats your boat) In the commodified academy where you can be as justice orientated and radically left as you like as long as you bring in the REF scores? How do we ensure that we don’t become the ‘left wing intelligencia’ that simply critiques horror from the side lines? How do we ‘do the doing’ of scholar activism in an academy that was never meant to be a place where political community, social movements, resistance or change happened? How do we subvert power in a thought factory that benefits from our labour?

Then I remember that, in spite of the very nature of the academy, when people come together and break out of their atomisation there is possibility. I suppose Foucault might have called that ‘power to/power with’.

I think about what I have learnt from great thinkers and political creators like hooks, Freire, Fanon, Davis and Truth. I think about the encampments in support of Palestine where students and academics across the world area standing together and risking their bodies, their livelihoods and their careers to stand up for those who are not able to stand up for themselves in the face of megaton bombs, warheads and fighter jets. And I ask myself – what is my role? How can I contribute from within the academy?

We all know that early career researchers occupy second class citizen status in academia – then there are those who are racially minoritised, working class, differently abled, or gender oppressed. We take short term precarious contracts anywhere we can, jump for joy at opportunities which promise to elevate our status but which in reality are free labour – all the while we sit alone at our desks wondering how to jump through the next hoop.

In no way of course am I insinuating that the experiences of ECRs, many of whom live in the relative safety of Global Minority locales, can be compared to the immeasurable pain and suffering that exists globally as a result of the mechanisms of a global hegemony that prides itself of racialised patriarchal capitalism that exploits people and planet for profit.

But, whilst I count up my successes and wonder how to share them, I also reflect on how we within academies across the world are supposed to make sense of our purpose. I left grassroots organising and community engagement to try and be a more useful member of the collective struggle – hoping that I could find it in academia.

I have indeed found communities of care, people who are willing to stand up and speak out: dedicators, strugglers, fighters and dreamers. In and amongst the conveyer belt of commodification of intellectualism there is a beautiful thread that ties so many of us together that I like to see as a shared experience of injustice and a striving for transformation – from the minute to the mountainous.

Thinking, understanding, participating in collective and self-education – developing our critical consciousness is dangerous to the system. If it wasn’t so dangerous I suppose Gramsci would have been allowed access to a pen in the first years of his solitary confinement in prison.

So perhaps with that in mind, and in honouring the innumerable students across the world from Palestine, the Congo, Sudan, Ukraine who no longer have universities within which to complete their PhD’s, I owe it to them to celebrate my success – as all of our wins belong to each other and are for each other’s tomorrow.

Author Biography:

Dr Dena Arya, Nottingham Trent University and the PSA’s Young People’s Politics Specialist Group Convenor, is an expert in conducting focus groups on climate change issues and who has worked with Professor Henn on recent projects for the Nottingham City Council.

A week ago a very good article called “If we’re all going to die in the collapse, why bother prepping?” appeared.

I sent it to a friend whom I have a great deal of respect for. He replied with this below, and kindly gave his permission for it to be used as a guest post.

At this point, being as prepared as possible for emergency states, for other ways of meeting basic needs, to look out for your neighbours, and so on, should be de rigeur. Of course, so many folks are struggling to just make ends meet as things stand, so there’s already millions (billions?) who can’t “prep” in any meaningful way. Seems likely that the countries that will bear the initial brunt of deadly heatwaves are the ones where the weather is already hot, which are also in many cases where there is a lot of population growth, as well as large absolute population numbers.  So the idea of hitting 10Bn or whatever numbers the UN is chucking about based on “normal” seems increasingly unlikely to me.  We have, I think, somewhat forgotten just how dreadful the “Four Horsemen” can be when they really get going.

I suppose what I find odd about posts like these is the idea that we are certain to see an “end” to “civilisation” and that necessarily means the death of every human being.  I’m not trying to play down the horror of what’s already here, and accelerating. Just that if we were to fast-forward 50 years, what would we expect to see? Humans *are* really intelligent, adaptable, and there is an awful lot of us. So if I had to guess, there will be a few million (tens of millions, perhaps) humans who have witnessed “The Fall”, have had human folly indelibly branded into their racial consciousness, and who are living in a world that is more hostile and less fertile than the one that even we grew up in. But not, I don’t think, one that is wholly uninhabitable. Fast forward 50,000-100,000 years, humanity might even learn to live in something like harmony with the “new earth”, if they can last that long.

Or there might be something lurking “out there” that really will do away with every last human (and a great deal of other life as well, more’s the tragedy). In which case, I can’t stop it, and neither can you. In either case, doing our best to carpe as many damn diems as we can in the meantime, trying to help our fellow living things as we go, seems like the best we can do at this point.

Just that claiming anything in the absolute seems more like a human desire for certainty, than anything else. 

Of course, all of this thinking is happening in a different partition of my brain than the parent part, because otherwise I’d go mad, and that won’t help me help anyone….

This is not a future I’m cheering for, in some sort of misanthropic fug. It’s just the one that, if I stand outside myself and try to extrapolate forward, seems the most likely. It’s worth reminding ourselves that there are many shades of grey in commonly-used terms like “doomed”, “fucked” and whatever other adjectives you might choose to apply to humanity’s future, and the lighter ones, even if locally, even if not forever, will always be worth fighting for

Here is a great guest post from Jennie Kermode, on what we knew, and how long ago….

The child who knew too much

When I was a kid I really, really wanted a silvery blue Porsche Turbo. not the most eco-friendly choice, I know, but I was far too young to have driven it – I just wanted to look at it, stroke it, sit inside it and watch other kids turn green with envy. Of course I never got it (though the local owner of a Ferrari did very nicely out of my brother by offering to sell that to him, piece by piece, at inflated rates), but it sat at the top of my birthday and Christmas lists for years. Next to that list, however, was another list, and what really used to upset me was how often that one was ignored. It was the list of things that I definitely did not want people to buy me.

There was some stuff on there about gendered toys. No Barbies, please, and nothing frilly. But most of it was devoted to products which I knew were doing harm to the world. Body sprays – a precursor to deodorants – were unpleasant enough in themselves, but I knew that they were destroying the ozone layer. I didn’t want things with lots of plastic packaging because I knew it was polluting the seas. I was uncomfortable about mass consumption in general because I knew about climate change.

This was the late ‘seventies and early ‘eighties – an era when mass consumption was all the rage. Michael Douglas delivered a satirical line about greed being good and billions of people took it seriously. There was an actor in the White House and the promises of Thatcherism made themselves felt even where I was living, in Yorkshire, where all the lights went out at planned intervals because of the miners’ strike. My friends, and many of my relatives, thought that my concerns were hilarious. When related topics came up at school, teachers would join them in laughing at me. My chemistry teacher told me that plastic bag pollution was trivial because, basically, the world was big. I pointed out that there were a lot of us on it, but nobody took me seriously.

Why did I know what others did not? It wasn’t that I was some kind of savant – just that my father was a physicist. I was a curious child and kept asking questions. I talked to his colleagues. I talked to his brothers, a haematologist and an engineer, who had insights of their own. My mother, a teacher, taught me to read when I was two and I consumed every book I could get. With this background, I noticed what was happening in the wider world around me in a way that most other people did not. Consequently, few of the symptoms of climate change that we saw then or that we have seen since have surprised me. Sometimes I feel as if I have been screaming for half a century and a very small proportion of people have noticed or cared.

In the face of that, it can be hard to hold onto hope. I was thirteen or so when, in a biology lesson, one of my teachers talked about bacterial cultures and the common pattern of their growth in a contained space: lag phase, log phase, death phase. Immediately, I associated it with the human population and recognised where we were on that journey.

I also read a lot of history. I knew fine well that people in almost every age have believed that they were living in the last days. Could we be just as wrong? I hope so. Humanity keeps surprising me; keeps pushing past its limits in unexpected ways. But I know better than to rely on it. So I put my talents to use where I can: in media, seeking to broaden conversations and bring in different kinds of expertise, seeking to encourage my readers to use their brains, and deliver bitter pills of understanding wrapped up in entertainment which helps them to go down more easily. Always I am aware of the ticking of the clock.

I am aware, too, of the absences. I used to do a lot of tape recording as a child. I know that, even in similar environments, the birds don’t sing as loudly as they did. I used to go berry picking. Now the berries come earlier every year. I used to sit outside in my grandmother’s garden and listen to the bees buzzing around the flowerbeds. They, too, have grown much quieter. But there are winners. More jellyfish in the sea. Vineyards spreading across the South of England. Scottish home-grown tea. Earth abides. When parts of it become too hot for human habitation year-round, what strange new forms will grow up there, free from our interference? Perhaps that is too optimistic; perhaps we will assault them with robotic vehicles, as we have the deep sea.

One thing I am sure of: the next fifty years will look very different from the last. Kids will no doubt continue to dream of shiny, unaffordable machines, but more and more of them will prioritise simply getting enough to eat.

Jennie Kermode is an author, journalist and human rights campaigner, inclusivity coordinator at the Bylines Network and content director at Eye For Film.

Calum McFarlane reflects on half a decade of climate promises…

Five years ago I wrote this, nominally as an interview for Marc about how I viewed activism (climate and otherwise) but also as a release valve for all the Big Feelings I was having at that time¹.

To quote myself:

“…an abiding sense of unease that things were Not Right (more so than usual) was affirmed by the IPCC 1.5 report – I knew that the uncertain future I was concerned about was much closer than I had feared.”

I have not to this day read the full report – I think I did struggle through the summary at one point. But the gruesome details are not really the point, being as we are five years down the track, and however many increments worse on however many metrics you care to mention. 

(There is of course a counterfactual here – how much worse things might have been if that report had not been published. But given how bad things are now, and how much faster they are getting worse than was expected even five years ago (at least in mainstream IPCC communications, which we know to be ‘conservative’), this is small comfort).

Did this report, and the wave of ‘climate awareness’ that came with it drag more people into the category of being outright worried / scared by climate change, than merely “concerned”, as the pollsters have it? Maybe. But it clearly didn’t have any impact where it matters, where the power to change things is. Again, as I wrote five years ago:

“From here:

‘Matthew Bolton writes that the first principle of making change is that ‘you only get the justice that you have the power to make happen’, the justice that you have ‘the power to compel’. The point of campaigning is to make a difference. It’s not to live in an activist bubble where we can comfort ourselves that we have the right ideas and everyone else has the wrong ideas.’”

We (where “we” = people who would prefer not to have seen our planet get the shit kicked out of it, to use the vernacular) still have no power. Without it, we have compelled no justice. Much ink has been spilled about the reasons for this – after all, it is probably the ultimate “Wicked Problem”. But none of it changes where we are now.

We² have already unleashed horrors that the writers of the goriest bits of the Old Testament would shrink from. And that is to say nothing of what is now known to be inevitable, or what is waiting for us in the lucky dip I mentally refer to as “sooner and / or worse than expected” in the years and decades to come.

Is there anything else to say? The closing paragraph of part of my interview five years ago “Activist Vuvuzela” covers it all, I think:

“Anything else you’d like to say?

All of the previous answers notwithstanding, I find myself increasingly afraid that humanity will bequeath the current and next generations not only a degraded world, but a lack of hope that anything can ever be better, that there is any point to trying. I hope to find the courage in myself to do the best I can, for as long as I can, for my family, my community, and our planet.

(Sounds trite as I read it back, but there it is).”

Footnotes

1. The Big Feelings are different now, but they haven’t gone anywhere. 
2. White, rich men, mainly