Rethinking the Market » Activities and Outputs (tag [Warwick])

Paper presented to the PAIS Annual Research Conference, University of Warwick

Thu, 30 Jun 2022 08:40:21 GMT

On June 22nd 2022 I presented a paper alongside my co-author, Shahnaz Akhter, to my own Department's annual research conference at Warwick. The paper was entitled 'Decolonising the School Curriculum in an Age of Political Polarisation'.

Abstract: 'The objective of decolonising the school curriculum itself embodies an obviously political act, but it has arisen within a broader political context that could hardly be said to support such an aim. There is a clear tension here. As students move through the school year groups they are increasingly exposing themselves to important questions of why the world looks as it does, why some people’s experiences of that world diverge from others’, and why what they are taught in schools appears to reinforce the structural inequalities to which they are becoming sensitised. Today’s students have embraced their access to a knowledge-rich society to become much more aware through self-education of the limitations of their curriculum than arguably any previous generation. Yet at the same time teachers are confronted with ever stricter guidance from government ministers about how they are expected to stick rigidly to the centrally-approved curriculum in a way that is inconsistent with any attempts to decolonise the content of lessons, let alone the experience of school more generally. This might be through full-throated endorsement of a culture wars narrative, which labels any attempt to enlarge the content of the curriculum as a ‘woke’ attack on the very idea of Britishness, with associated emotional pleas to save the country’s children from indoctrination by critical race theory and/or cultural Marxism. It might alternatively be through the use of the House of Commons despatch box to threaten legal action against any teacher who is deemed to be in breach of the 1996 Education Act’s duty of political neutrality, as if the furious spats over the 2013 rewriting of the national curriculum can somehow be construed as evidence that the neutrality condition is alive and well. Our paper asks what the prospects are for a meaningful decolonisation of the school curriculum in an age of political polarisation, culture wars and threats to teacher autonomy.'

Launch Event for Oxford Handbook of Politics and Performance, University of Warwick

Thu, 22 Apr 2021 12:55:00 GMT

On April 21st 2021 I delivered a paper at the launch event for the Oxford Handbook of Politics and Performance. The title of my paper followed that of the chapter I contributed to the book, 'The Market: Eighteenth-Century Insights into the Performance of Market Practices'. The event was organised by the University of Warwick, but in line with all other events at the time it was held online.

Abstract: ‘The market’ has no independent objective existence beyond the practices that are embedded within particular market institutions. Those practices, in turn, involve learning particular techniques of performance, on the assumption that each market environment rewards a corresponding type of market agency. However, the ability to reflect what might be supposed the right agential characteristics is not an instinct that is hard-wired into us from birth. Instead it comes from perfecting the specific performance elements which allow people to recognise themselves as potentially competent actors in any given market context. This chapter takes the reader back to some of the earliest accounts of these performance elements, showing that important eighteenth-century debates about how to flourish as a market actor revolved around little else. In the early eighteenth century, Daniel Defoe emphasised the need for market actors to create convincing falsehoods, hiding their true feelings behind a presentation of self where customers’ whims were always catered to. In the late eighteenth century, Adam Smith was still wrestling with the dilemma of how genuinely the self could be put on display within market environments, believing that customers had a responsibility to curb excessive demands so that merchants’ interests could be respected. This meant not forcing them into knowingly false declarations, so that moral propriety and economic expedience were not necessarily antagonistic forces in the development of merchants’ character.

Sutton Trust Summer School 2019

Fri, 02 Aug 2019 16:27:56 GMT

For a week during the school summer holidays of 2019, my Department co-hosted sixteen young people along with the Departments of Liberal Arts and Sociology for Warwick's Sutton Trust Summer School. Our stream was organised around the themes and the insights of the Colonial Hangover project. I delivered three sessions to the students during the course of the week. One was with my colleagues Shahnaz Akhter, John Morris and Ben Richardson, where we relied on the help we had been given this year by our undergraduate student research assistants Victoria Carasava and Darius Stasiulevicius to deliver an Imperial Walking Tour of Royal Leamington Spa, the town in which most Warwick undergraduates live for at least part of their degree. The other sessions were interactive lectures using the Vevox app to allow the students to express themselves through in-time online voting. These latter sessions were called, 'Restorative Approaches to the Legacy of Empire' and 'Empire and the Politics of Heroes'.

Political Studies Association Schools Day

Fri, 07 Jun 2019 16:37:16 GMT

On June 6th 2019 I delivered the keynote lecture at the Political Studies Association Schools Day at the University of Warwick. The theme of the event was the politics of the future. My talk was entitled 'Democracy and Intergenerational Justice', and it focused specifically on how young people understand the mandate that was delivered for the UK to withdraw from membership of the European Union in a decision over which they had no say. In particular, we debated the possibility of moving towards a voting system in one-off events such as referendums whereby votes would be weighted proportionately according to how long you could be expected to live with the consequences of the result.

Sutton Trust Summer School 2018

Sun, 05 Aug 2018 18:36:20 GMT

For a week during the school summer holidays of 2018, my Department hosted sixteen young people who had successfully applied to the Politics stream of the Sutton Trust Summer School at Warwick (https://summerschools.suttontrust.com/). Our week of events was organised around the themes of the Colonial Hangover project. I delivered three sessions to the students during the course of the week: (1) To What Extent Is Empire Still With Us Today?; (2) The Politics of Imperial Commemoration; and (3) The Politics of Global Apologies. I also helped to organise their outing for the day that they spent away from campus, which was designed to show them how the threads of empire were woven deeply into the Warwickshire countryside from the seventeenth century onwards.

West Midlands IPE Workshop, University of Warwick

Sat, 24 Mar 2018 09:12:50 GMT

On March 23rd 2018 I presented a paper at the West Midlands IPE Workshop held at the University of Birmingham. The paper was entitled, 'The History Curriculum in English Schools: What Have Our Undergraduates Been Taught About the British Empire?' It focused on the very positive effects that result from the ever greater attention that university students now pay to matters of curriculum design, in particular via the Decolonising the Curriculum movement. As a way into this question, I spoke about the prior history curriculum our English-based students would have experienced whilst they were at school, with its supposedly connected narrative of British national achievements and the Secretary of State for Education's desire for that narrative arc to be constructed around the activities of national 'heroes'. A contrast was drawn between the unquestioning ascription of heroic status to specifically imperial heroes in the Secretary of State's desired school history curriculum and our own students' deep-seated desire to challenge such assumptions.

All of the papers on the day were presented in the pecha kucha format.

Colonial Hangover Schools Day Lecture, University of Warwick

Sat, 27 Jan 2018 10:53:41 GMT

The 2018 Colonial Hangover project for my Department's Widening Participation schools began with a full day of events on January 26th. This year's competition was introduced to the students, along with the list of milestones that will help them to develop their entries under the guidance of our undergraduate student ambassadors. I delivered the opening lecture for the day, called 'The British Empire and the 'History Wars' over the English School Curriculum'. Over seventy students were in attendance during the day.

Colonial Hangover Widening Participation Project

Wed, 09 Aug 2017 09:02:11 GMT

I spent some time duing the summer of 2017 giving lectures to school-age students on my Department's Colonial Hangover Widening Participation project. On June 30th I was asked to deliver the opening keynote lecture to the Colonial Hangover Conference, which brought together A-level students with whom we had been working over the course of the year and our own undergraduates to whom we wanted to give experience of operating in an academic conference-like environment. On August 8th I gave the first two lectures to my Department's Sutton Trust Summer School, which was run throughout the week on the Colonial Hangover theme. The first lecture was entitled, 'The Politics of Imperial Names', the second 'The Imperial Politics of the Built Environment'.

Warwick Global Development Society Guest Lecture

Fri, 09 Dec 2016 07:59:36 GMT

On December 8th 2016 I delivered a guest lecture followed by a question and answer session to the Warwick Global Development Society. The topic of the talk was 'Adam Smith on Empire'.

Pathways to Politics Presentation, University of Warwick

Thu, 24 Nov 2016 14:10:34 GMT

On November 24th 2016 I gave a talk to a group of Year 12 schoolchildren entitled, 'The Price of Citizenship'. It focused on taxation, the way in which markets are currently being made to facilitate tax avoidance, and what the current political tendency to equate taxation with some sort of state-sanctioned theft of peronal money does to the ability to continue to fund public goods such as healthcare, education, environmental protection and pensions, access to which is traditionally seen as being part of the rights we hold as citizens.