Over the last couple
of months, a few postgraduate friends and I started organising a postgraduate
conference. We managed to secure two external key note speakers; Gurminder K.
Bhambra from the University of Warwick spoke on
Citizens and Others, offering insights into the difficulty of
marrying imperial history with contemporary citizenship. She discussed the US
and the UK as contemporary examples of this, suggesting that the ongoing move
toward “a more perfect union” brings us to a paradoxical juncture wherein the
US constitution itself was never incongruent with the systematic subjugation of
the other (namely, those who lived on the land now recognised as the united
states). She also made mention of the UK history curriculum, that is undergoing
a rewriting wherein teaching is to focus specifically on the history of the
British isles. This thereby distantiates from education discourse the
mulitiplicity of histories that have come to inform Britain as it stands today.
This is an ongoing discussion about this matter in the UK media (see
here and
here).
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| Professor Gurminder K. Bhambra |
Simon Winlow, who was
visiting from Teeside University, gave an account of the English Defence League
in his talk Don’t know who you are? ...
Find somebody to hate. Winlow discussed his conviction that is wrong to
assume that there is a growing political consciousness in many working class
communities. Rather, he argued, the escalating anxiety borne of the
contemporary capitalist system in Britain has been galvanized in the projection of hate onto the Muslim other.
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| Professor Simon Winlow |
A number of external and home speakers presented on politics, structure, disability and representation. This bred a number of really interesting question-lead conversations. A highlight for me was Alex Simpson’s talk on Market Society and the Other. Anchored in the Hegelian conceptions of the Other and the One, he advocated a move toward looking not only at othered peoples, but the agents who bring that otherness into being. For Alex, this is doubtless routed in his concern with the Elite and the super rich.
On reflection, Winlow and Simpson seemed to share much in common here: the system, and those who perpetuate it, are often sidelined in sociological consideration of the people affected by systems. By looking at this less accessible group, research into the Elite – also being undertaken by our closing speaker, Rowland Atkinson – can help us to theoretically unpick (or, for the more revolutionary, physically dismantle) the process of othering and the various articulations of identity it produces.
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