Urban Radar
Urban Radar is a podcast series brought to you by Professors Tom Goodfellow and Beth Perry, which reflects on current events and emerging trends through the lens of cities and urban life. Drawing on the unique range of urban expertise in the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester, we place urban dynamics at the centre of contemporary global affairs.
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Email: urbanradarpod@gmail.com
Instagram: @urbanradarpodcast
Credits:
Podcast production, hosting, editing & promotion: Tom Goodfellow & Beth Perry
Post-production editing & promotion: Sam Burgum
Production support: Jack Clayton
Distribution, promotion & marketing: Vicky Simpson
Music: Horizon (music by Tom Goodfellow, produced by Alan Thomson); Falling Down (music by Tom Goodfellow, performed by the Dice, produced by Alan Thomson); Ghosts (music by the Dice; produced by Alan Thompson); Kilimanjaro (music by Tom Goodfellow, produced by Alan Thompson).
Supported by the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester.
Urban Radar
29. BREXIT, AUSTERITY AND YOUTH FUTURES: Ten years later, +unbounding zoos, +war with Russia, +street 'goons' in Kenya, +banned flags in Oxfordshire and more
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
In this episode Tom and Beth are joined by Professor Sarah Marie Hall from the University of Manchester to reflect on ten years since Brexit and specifically how austerity has altered the lifecourses of young people in Barcelona, Sardinia and Greater Manchester.
Together, they discuss how Brexit layered on top of existing crises, how community podcasts helped chart economic change during this extended period of waiting, and why valuing everyday lived experience as evidence is a radical act. And, perhaps, even a way to finally bring austerity as a lived condition to an end.
Go to 32:54 for this discussion.
Also on our radar:
- Why the UK is introducing Dutch-style youth hubs
- How the boundaries between humans and animals are changing in the city
- Whether local authorities are ready for a hybrid war with Russia
- How human factors, from corruption to poverty and planning regulations, might have worsened damage from the earthquake in Venezuela
- "Goonism" and the underground economy of political street violence in Kenyan cities
- Banning flags in Oxfordshire
Guest:
Sarah Marie Hall joined University of Manchester in October 2012 as a Hallsworth Research Fellow in Political Economy and became a Professor in 2022. She is a member of the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives and Manchester Urban Institute, where she previously co-chaired the Urban Justice, Gender and Social Difference Feminist Collective. In February 2021 she won a £1.5m UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship on the theme of Austerity and Altered Lifecourses, a 5- year project across the UK, Spain and Italy which has recently been extended for three further years. Click here to visit the Future Lives and Austerity Digital Exhibition.
From our archives:
Read more:
Much loved collection for Butterfly Conservation, in memory of Malcolm Tait
Archipelagic Technonatures (Simon Marvin)
Watch Salisbury Poisonings: The Untold Story | Stream free on Channel 4
Africa's shadow enforcers - The Continent
Hosts:
Tom Goodfellow is Professor of Urban Development in the Global Development Institute, and CEO of the African Cities Research Consortium, University of Manchester. His research focuses on the political economy of urban development and change in Africa, particularly the politics of urban land and transportation, conflicts around infrastructure and housing, and urban institutional change. (linkedin.com/in/tom-goodfellow-0b418441)
Beth Perry is Professor of Urban Epistemics and Director of the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on the relationships between urban expertise, governance and justice, underpinned by a commitment to co-producing collective intelligence across multiple scales to address complex urban challenges. She has worked in cities in Africa, Europe and the UK. (linkedin.com/in/itsbethperry)
Email feedback to: urbanradarpod@gmail.com
You can also follow us on instagram: @urbanradarpodcast
Thanks to the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester for providing time, resources and equipment to support this podcast. And to Sam Burgum, for post-production editing and promotion.
Hello. On this month's radar, I take a look at why the UK government is rolling out Dutch-style youth hubs, whether we are seeing an unbounding of the urban zoo, and how ready local authorities might be for a hybrid war with Russia.
SPEAKER_03And I'm going to be discussing the devastating earthquake that's just unfolding right now in Venezuela. As well as taking another look at the controversies over flag flying in the UK following Oxfordshire County Council's decision to ban flying flags. And I'm going to look at what is being called goonism in Kenya, which is about the deployment of political thugs on the streets in the context of political opposition.
SPEAKER_01And for our main discussion, we are joined by guest Sarah Marie Hall to discuss how Brexit has impacted the everyday lives of communities already living under austerity in the UK and what we can learn from European cities. Welcome to Urban Radar, the podcast taking an urban lens on current affairs. I'm Beth Perry, Director of the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield and Professor of Urban Epistemics.
SPEAKER_03And I'm Tom Goodfellow, Professor of Urban Development at the Global Development Institute here at the University of Manchester, where we are today.
SPEAKER_01We are, yes, in the sweltering heat, of course. So Tom, what have you been up to recently?
SPEAKER_03Well, um work-wise, most recently uh in terms of something perhaps worth highlighting was a trip to Lagos with African Cities Research Consortium, which was very interesting. We had a cross-project workshop where we were looking at five different action research projects that are happening at different stages of development in Lagos and how they all intersect. So we're trying to explore some of the ways in which um the different urban challenges they're looking at intersect and reinforce one another and what's being revealed about that through the projects and the solutions that people are trying to develop in their communities to problems around, for example, flooding, climate resilience, uh waste management and other things.
SPEAKER_01And you were on national TV, weren't you?
SPEAKER_03That's Nigerian national TV. Let's not say any more about that. I was that was a unexpected turn um in my business.
SPEAKER_01I thought you were very good.
SPEAKER_03Uh very kind of you. I think you're one of the only people who's actually watched it, apart from possibly quite a few Nigerians. But um no, it was a good trip. I mean we were very much confined to our hotel most of the time. Uh but it was really good to get out and visit some of the projects around Lagos on the on the final day there. Uh what have you been doing?
SPEAKER_01Uh well I think you flagged this last time we uh recorded that we had the Sheffield Urbanism Showcase and we were focusing this year on some of our research projects, some of which are action research projects, um some of which aren't, but other kinds of research engagements around Sheffield. Um and I think it's a really interesting kind of time to be having this kind of showcase because obviously there's a lot of debate in the media about the role of universities and how we need to justify our social value. Um and of course I think this is a really important debate, but it's also evident to me every day when I look at what's happening in the Sheffield urbanism community when you talk about the kind of work that you're doing. Um we had some presentations from the guests that we've had on the podcast already. So Liz Sharp was talking about her work with the Chief and Porter Rivers Trust, Christina Tathan was talking about her work with the Sheffield Play Partnership, and you of course were talking about your work uh with the Somali community in Sheffield and also Camden and Bristol. Um so it was really good to hear about some of our local engagements.
SPEAKER_03It was a great event and really, really inspiring to hear about some of those projects, particularly a lot of the stuff around schools and schools as community infrastructure which you've been involved in and having having people there from those schools and those communities in the room. So a very different kind of event.
SPEAKER_01It was. It was hopeful in many ways, but it was also obviously very sad. Um and for those that that don't know, um it was the event was shortly after we heard um the news about the tragic death of our colleague Malcolm Tate, um, who um was a very much loved colleague in the School of Geography and Planning and Urban Studies and Planning as it was. Um and that really took everyone um by terrible, horrific surprise. Um and, you know, I think we were thinking about him a lot that day, and of course every day since, but particularly then because of how important he was in Sheffield itself, um, because he was on the Heritage Committee and he actually had a second in the city council working on the local plan and working with colleagues on the future of the high street and developing the Sheffield Declaration and made so many important contributions to planning. And I think more than that, everybody's just been talking about what an inspirational and kind person he always was. So I mean I know we're gonna have some proper tributes in due course, and this isn't that. Um, but those of course need to be agreed with the family. But we thought it was just important, didn't we, too?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, absolutely. I mean uh uh everyone is is still in some shock, I think. And certainly uh you know, I worked with Malcolm in the department in Sheffield for thirteen years, and he was absolutely the the core, the kind of the spiritual, academic, uh core in all kinds of ways to that department, having been there for something like twenty-five years in urban studies and and planning at Sheffield. So it is deeply tragic and everyone is is is deeply saddened and shocked.
SPEAKER_01He was making such a difference to biodiversity and planning sort of debates within the UK. And um I'll put the link in the chat, but there's also a collection for butterfly conservation. So if anyone uh knew Malcolm or cares about butterflies, then I'm sure donations would be very much appreciated.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Okay, so let's move on now to what we're covering in today's episode. Although we've said a little about what we'll be covering in our radars. We also are going to have a guest, and it is, as many people will know, in the UK, the anniversary of something very particular, the ten-year anniversary of Brexit. There's a lot in the news reflecting on what's happened in that 10 years, what it means for the country, the legacy of it, um, and we will be joined today by Professor Sarah Marie Hall from here at the University of Manchester. Now, Sarah is a member of the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives and the Manchester Urban Institute. She's got a prestigious future leader fellowship on the theme of austerity and alter life courses, which provides an important lens onto everyday life before and since Brexit. So we'll be delving into that with her.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and as you say, I think a lot of the news coverage has been focused on the failure to deliver some of the promises, the deep disappointment and regret and worsening costs of living. And, you know, the headlines are quite stark really when they're talking about an absolute nightmare or how Brick Brexit has made Britain poorer. But it's also a context, isn't it, in which the cost of living crisis has been attributed by many to the fracturing of our two-party system in the UK into five different parties and the rise of populist parties in the left and the right. And, you know, arguably, and I'm sure people will be arguing, we wouldn't be seeing the imminent replacement of Keir Starmer with one expects, Andy Burnham, um, if it weren't for Brexit.
SPEAKER_03So, Beth, what's on your radar this month?
SPEAKER_01Well, there was a press release um in mid-June by the Department for Work and Pensions on the decision to roll out Dutch-style employment support uh for young people across the UK. And I think they're planning something like 180 hubs over the next two years, and each hub is going to provide like s wraparound services like education, welfare, and employment support. And the idea is that every local area, which will be up to something like 360 hubs by 2029, will have its own hub. So the reason that this is important is because we've passed the million mark this year in terms of the number of young people who are what's called neat, which is not in employment education and training. I don't I don't really like the language, um, because it's very deficit-based, isn't it? But basically that means that these young people, there's now over a million young people in the UK who are either unemployed and looking for work or economically inactive and not able to work. And that's like something like one in eight. And part of that is due to the overall high unemployment rates in the country, but part of it's also due to increasing mental health issues for young people. And so the hope is that these hubs, as reported by, and I don't think we've used this particular uh newspaper on the radar before, as reported by the mirror, will turbocharge an end to the NEETs crisis. So it possibly goes without saying, but I will anyway, because this is urban radar, that this is a heavily spatial crisis. There's a stark difference between, you know, the kind of university graduate without a job who's got social capital and networks and can boom around back home for a while, um, and those who have been failed by the education and care system from a really early age and weren't supported perhaps to get any qualifications at age 16 at all. And that there's a clustering of those with poorer life chances and outcomes in the most deprived areas. But this focus on Netherlands is in part justified by a report from the Resolution Foundation, which shows that the Dutch have one of the lowest NEAT rates in the world, which is something like over two-thirds lower than the UK rate, even though they've still got high mental health conditions facing their young people. Um and so they've got this the Dutch have an education and youth employment policy based on the principle of no dead ends. Um and I was just thinking about this through the lens of the work I've been doing in Arbathorne, which you mentioned already in South East Sheffield. I mean, firstly, it's a kind of good idea. It's coming from a good place that young people shouldn't be written off, and there's a good participation principle in the policy, which is that young people will go to that the youth hubs will be where young people already are, so they don't have to travel. So they'd be in football clubs, in community centres and libraries and things like that. But I wonder if there's a bit of a flaw as well, because researchers have documented how much our social infrastructure has been hollowed out. Um, and so where are those places where they can go? And I didn't see much mentioned in the press about primary and secondary schools as potential places where these hubs could be located. I've also been thinking a bit about the absence of intergenerational considerations because young people are far less likely to get into work if their parents or carers aren't. Um, and there's this idea that people age out after 24. You know, current government policies really only bothered about 16 to 24 because that's when you can catch people and when long-term issues don't arise. So that makes sense. But what happens to those people who have already perhaps been out of work for a long time? And then I was also thinking about the neighbourhood as a scale of action, um because a lot of the support is very hyperlocal, um, because things like travel costs can be a barrier to accessing work. Um, and so the neighbourhood is a space where these services can be delivered, but it's also a space of possibility and alternative education and skills. And again, it just brought me back to our work really, because current policy assumes that learning takes place in formal education and training settings and not necessarily in the community. And of course, work in the African Cities Research Consortium and in the Urban Institute and Sheffield Urbanism, we know that there's a lot of experience-based knowledge gained in community and neighbourhood settings about how to get things done. Uh, and that's not always recognised formally. And so, yeah, I'm doing a bit of work on that with the South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority and um a community group called Women in Community Action um in Arbathorn to look at how we might recognise some of that learning.
SPEAKER_03Sounds brilliant. Okay, what else is on your radar?
SPEAKER_01Um I've been thinking about the urban zoo. Um obviously we've talked a bit about multi-species dimensions of urban life before. Um we came up with the brilliant idea that we needed ratzars back in episode 15, if you remember.
SPEAKER_02So we did.
SPEAKER_01Um I've been thinking about the relationship between humans and animals in urban settings, and I mean it was prompted by an extremely tragic story uh by about a young boy who was thrown in a crocodile enclosure in a zoo um in Cambridgeshire in mid-June. It was absolutely awful, very tragic incident. It's a rare instance where the boundary of a zoo is breached from the outside in. Um it's much more common for animals to escape. And so I was having a little look at this, and there was like an example in Belfast Zoo in April this year, where an eastern bongo, which is like an antelope escaped containment, and my favourite was an article in Science Focus where um a Japanese macaque monkey, Honshu, had escaped from a zoo in Scotland and was found only by eat they found him eating Yorkshire pudding in a local garden. Um but all in all, this got me thinking laterally about zoos and boundaries and enclosures, because like the early zoos were like um started by private collectors to reinforce wealth, status, and privilege, and modern zoos date back to the 19th century. So I think the first urban zoo was in Vienna in 1752, and London Zoo was set up in 1826. But obviously, there's been so much criticism about zoos and the cages and the boundaries and the enclosures, and we've covered before a bit that these are beginning to blur with sort of the different ways in thinking about human-animal relations and how animals cross our cities in different ways. Um, and some of that's good and some of it's bad. So there's all of the work around like what's happening when we disrupt animals' paths. So they're not in the zoo anymore, they're just in the city. And so, like uh things like koalas in New South Wales are having their natural range dissected by housing projects, or there was a Berkeley study about coyotes that were roaming more in the lower income communities than anywhere else. And then you've got all the stuff about rewilding, like whether that's gauzhawks being introduced into cities in the UK or beavers in London. So you've got all of these ways in which the boundaries are kind of being challenged. Um that, my final point, reminded me of some of Simon Marvin's work on controlled environments, um, who's always like 10 years before the rest of us notice these technological developments really. Um and he was working back in 2018 with John Rutherford at LATS in Paris on zoos as examples of microclimatic enclosures. So I'd already, I knew about that paper. It was in urban studies, and I was thinking of bringing it up. And then in my feed, it just popped up that a new paper's out literally this week in um, I think it's environment and planning, um, which is now looking at the idea, and I'm not sure I can say the words, of archipelagic techno natures. And basically these climate-controlled biomes in Paris and Munich that simulate Madagascar's rainforests. And I need to digest it more, but I think it's really bringing zoos into the argument about the geopolitics of urban infrastructural extensions. And so the argument is that these kinds of biomes in Paris and Zurich Zoo are carefully engineered urban ecological infrastructures, um, but that they actually are dealing with urban authority over the planet, but in a microclimate and producing some really strong north-south asymmetries. So, you know, it just made me think there's much more to zoos and their boundaries than might meet the eye.
SPEAKER_03There is. And I mean, you know, in terms of zoo, I grew up very close to London Zoo and we would hear the lions roaring, and we would hear, you know, I mean, literally from you could hear it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you can see the duals from Primrose Hill, can't you?
SPEAKER_03Uh I don't I don't know if I've ever spotted them. You can see you can see Oh well, well done. I was running. Yeah. But um and yeah, you can go around Regents Park and and see a lot of animals from in there. And um that was kind of amazing. And there's also these um, you know, there's these parakeets everywhere in Regents Park, which I always thought would escape from the screen. I mean these green paras there might be as well, but there's thousands of them in there. I my mum gets them in a garden. It's quite far away in other parts of North London. But apparently the rumour is that Jimi Hendrix released a pair in the 1960s. I don't know if it's true.
SPEAKER_01I was actually thinking of doing a story on parakeets because I and I can't remember if it is parakeetes, but there's certainly a story about a bird that's gone wild in Sheffield.
SPEAKER_03Okay, just the one.
SPEAKER_01No, I mean I think a breed, maybe a species.
SPEAKER_03Oh, I see. But the other, and slightly more seriously, I might have mentioned this before, is there's a very serious uh issue of human wildlife conflict in parts of Uganda, including in cities uh where I've been involved in research in western Uganda, which is so casese is between three national parks. Um some of them are not wildlife parks, but other ones very much are. And it really is a very serious issue with actually like elephants and these animals that roam because they're not fenced and cause real problems for people, particularly in informal settlements where the building structures are relatively weak and they get destroyed by animals.
SPEAKER_01So for my last piece, um I've been thinking with some fear about whether local authorities are ready for uh a so-called war with Russia. Um it's obviously been a bad week for the soon to not be Prime Minister. Um but actually I was interested in discussions in two related reports in the media these weeks. And just as a caveat, I haven't done independent research on this, so I'm just reporting what other people have already said and printed in the media. Um so the first thing was about the conviction of two men over arson attacks on property in a car linked to Keir Starmer, which was reportedly attributed to Russian involvement, though some of the details and claims seem a bit hazy. But it led to claims by those such as the former head of MI6, Sir Richard Moore, that Russia is trying to intimidate the UK with sabotage, arson, and cyber attacks on the British streets. And then, of course, we've also had the resignation of Defence Secretary John Healy and the Armed Forces Minister Al Khan's, who quit over disputes about funding for the military. And so this links to arguments. I went down a bit of a rabbit hole again, um, over whether we're already at war with Russia. And there's a lot of warnings dating back last year and even before that, that people don't realise a hybrid war is already being undertaken. Um so a few issues kind of caught my attention. The first was about whether and how it ranks as a priority compared with other pressing issues that are really manifest at the local neighbourhood level, like the cost of living crisis or of course extreme weather and extreme heat as we're experiencing at the moment. Um and despite the fact that there are some reports that suggest that the British public is being actively manipulated by foreign interference, including actually dating back to the Brexit results. So I came across some allegations that Brexit was entirely the result of foreign uh manipulation, um, there's little awareness of this. Uh, and so there's a lot of concern being reported in the media amongst defence experts that we're walking blindfold into a disaster. Um, local authority preparedness is obviously also variable. So one commentator who gave evidence to a London Assembly meeting, it was reported in the um Islington Tribune, they were saying is it in relation to Keir Starmer's the arson attack, as saying that Russian intelligence services are now scouring planning applications, building control measures to identify specific vulnerabilities and using arson as a weapon of terror. And that just made me think about the contradiction between public transparency and participation measures, where of course we want everything published, um, and the alleged use by hostile agents. So UK authorities are beginning to look at digital defences, cybersecurity measures and disinformation, for instance, uh, amongst other things. And the final thing that it just put me in mind of was why preparedness is so important if we're at war with Russia because it's so inherently asymmetrical. Um, and I watched a documentary recently about the Salisbury poisonings in 2018. It was a documentary on Channel 4 by Sophie Wright. Um, and I won't go into all the details now, but it was really brilliant setting out how this English city was simply not ready for warfare on a civilian battlefield. And it everything from like working in people's homes to mapping public spaces and using CCTV to trap movements, you know, the documentary really shows the human, military and community response to this military-grade nerve agent that was used in an English city. And the the aftermath also wasn't discussed as much, but I did a bit of light googling. Um, and you know, there were lots of things like enhanced anxiety and fear amongst residents, impacts on tourism, an increase in cyber attacks, and also a seven-year ban on litter picking in Salisbury because of the fears of decam uh contamination. And so the mantra was for seven years, if you didn't drop it, don't pick it up. Um, and I think to me, it's just bringing forth this point I also made actually when I was discussing Epstein and the grooming scandals, that we we need much better interconnected multi-level intelligence infrastructures and governance coordinations that plug local authorities into what's happening globally and nationally, because the Salisbury documentary was very clear that they weren't ready.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I think we we touched on, I feel like we touched on something about this before, but it's it's it's fascinating, isn't it, to think about local authorities having to engage in this kind of geopolitical security intelligence dimension, which is not really something that people often think about as within the scope of a city or municipal government. But but of course, there also is a lot of experience from the Cold War, and one uh really interesting area, um, and Rory Cormac has actually just published another book about this stuff, about kind of information operations during the Cold War and what we can learn from them. But what is less central in a lot of that is the role of local authorities. So I'm going to read that with interest and kind of think of that as well, what we might learn about that through an urban lens.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So Tom, what's on your radar?
SPEAKER_03So, well the first thing on my radar, which is very current at the time of recording, although by by the time this comes out, there will be much more news and I fear higher higher numbers of of casualties, which is the the earthquake that's erupted in Venezuela. Quite close to Caracas, and of course a lot of the worst effects have been in urban areas. Um last time I checked the news, just before we started recording, there were at least 164 dead and 971 injured. Um and this, you know, uh has really been a big shock. It's the biggest, I think it's the biggest earthquake they've had in at least a hundred years, much b bigger even than a big one in the 1960s. And also it was some kind of double quake. There was some kind of unusual happening where you had two quakes quickly, quickly in in a in a row. And it was even felt over in Bogota, right? So it's a really massive quake in in the neighbouring country. Um so this is, I mean, we'll it's an emerging picture right now. There's not too much to say about the situation there. And I know we have talked about earthquakes before in the context of Myanmar, I think, in which we may have reflected on how, of course, the nature of the built environment and the quality of buildings is is absolutely fundamental to what happens in earthquakes. With one of the famous comparative examples, I think, is between sh between Haiti and uh a Chilean earthquake, I think, around the same time, and the one in Japan where the the the casualties in Haiti were were so much higher, disproportionately higher, even though the quake was of a similar size. But I mean there is actually quite a lot of literature out there um about how building regulations, particularly in connection to corruption, is really kind of a fundamental determinant of deaths from earthquakes. There's an article uh I found in Nature, the journal Nature, called Corruption Kills, that basically argues that 83% of all deaths from building collapse in earthquakes over the past 30 years has happened in countries that are anomalously corrupt. So they basically they correlate corruption levels with deaths from earthquakes and disproportionate numbers of of deaths. So I mean this is really uh obviously very important because it it draws attention to this hugely different levels of vulnerability even to similar sizes of hazard. But I do think we need to be a little bit careful as well in reading too much, you know, sort of be seeming to perhaps blame corruption. I mean, Venezuela is extremely high up. I think it's something like 180 out of 182 on the corruption index. So one of the most corrupt countries in the world. And there are lots of concerns about the state of the buildings and the level of neglect. But at the same time, correlation uh sorry, uh corruption correlates very closely with poverty, and that's a bi-directional relationship. So just sort of blaming corruption or or I think is a little bit risky as well in terms of how we think about these effects.
SPEAKER_01I mean I think it just points to the kind of multi-layered nature of these different crises, and I know we'll speak with Sarah later about the idea of nested crises, but that applies also when we're thinking about uh natural or man-made disasters um and what the binary is between those different things. Like what is a natural disaster if you're saying that actually a lot of it could a lot of the damage and um consequences could have been minimised um were it not for human factors.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I mean we'll have to see how it plays out. And I'm cautious to say too much when this is with this is so new, but you can already see in some of the analysis. And given what we know about Caracas and our conversation with Erica on the earlier podcast about really how Caracas' public services have been completely decimated over recent decades in ways that people were only you know, many people were only really becoming aware of in the context of that that the kind of regime change in Venezuela. Uh I I think we'll be hearing a lot more about this in terms of the earthquake damage.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it is really tragic, and of course that's you know those people living in Caracas have already been through so much.
SPEAKER_03So Yeah, absolutely. Um So what else? So next on my radar, so it's another quite gloomy story, although potentially the final story is is less so. But this one is uh an interesting piece I found in the Continent magazine, which is an online publication um uh based out of Africa, written by African journalists with various current issues from across the whole continent. And there's an interesting piece there, kind of extended article, about what in Kenya people are calling goonism or the phenomenon of political thugs, basically street fighters who are uh who are brought out onto the streets to disrupt protests, to go to public events, to sometimes suddenly in some very disruptive way sabotage something being done by the political opposition. Uh this is very common across the world. I mean, there are arguments, you know, so things that started to look a bit like that have happened to some extent in this country too. In Kenya they refer to it as goonism, and it there are particular groups of what might be called political enforcers who have been around since the 90s really, um, in opposition to Moy's campaign. Uh but they've now been, you know, there have been different groups called things like Mungiki and Taliban that are very well known. Uh, and they've often been quite hard to pin down and identify, but this has really been a part of Kenyan politics, a part of opposition politics, where you would get young people who are hired to infiltrate crowds, often to surveil in some extent. They're paid small amounts of money, so we hear things like a thousand Kenyan shillings, which is about eight dollars, uh, or one thousand five hundred, which is about eleven and a half dollars from a governor to basically go disrupt a protest. There are situations where people are paid, for example, eight to ten dollars to participate in this kind of activity. It's extremely common. And in many ways it's a structural feature of unemployment, right? This is a it becomes a sort of livelihood to go out and be a political disruptor. I remember in Uganda, around the time of my PhD research, there was a group called the Kaboko Squad, who uh they would suddenly appear in huge numbers around the times of political rallies, and they they would mobilize in these very fluid ways when needed. Uh, and it was a sort of livelihood opportunity to go around with big sticks, basically, terrorizing people who might be opposition. And in this article, they also look at these in in the context of Togo and cities there, um, where they're often called the uh milicien, I believe, in in Togo. And there's recently been attacks where, for example, uh in in the middle of a meeting of politician uh opposition activists, um young men suddenly picked up all the chairs and started lobbying them at the politicians. So it's kind of stuff like this, and they're paid to do that. So it's interesting because this, I mean, often it's much more severe than that, and obviously people are killed and assassinated. It made me think a little of David Jackman's work in Dakar as well, where he talked about how see political factions build up these these groups essentially. So it's often about intra-regime politics as well playing out in urban space. Um and then what happened in Bangladesh, interestingly, is that one faction or one part of the regime of a previous government basically decided to destroy all these groups with formal security architecture, get rid of them because they were causing too much trouble. But that meant that effectively when they were in opposition, they didn't have the street fighters they wanted to try and get themselves back into government. So there's an interesting politics around regime splits and different forms of authoritarianism playing out on the on the streets.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell Is it the case that those individually paid then goons as you called them or sort of street fighters like uh is is the natural progression that they would then organize into militias?
SPEAKER_03Aaron Powell I do know that some of these groups, like the one group known as Taliban and and Mungiiki, are they really did become criminal gangs, quite seriously organized, operating very much in certain parts of the city. Uh whereas other groups I think emerge a bit more spontaneously and they don't necessarily form into these kind of long-standing gangs or militias in that way. There's just one other thing I wanted to say, which is slightly tangential, but also related to what you might call political thuggery, um, and in the African context has been a big story in the last month, which is in South Africa there has been this terrible xenophobic violence against other Africans, uh, in Johannesburg particularly. This happens every few years, it comes up every now and then, but this could possibly be the worst incident, to the point where actually some of these sort of gangs in Johannesburg literally issued a deadline for migrants to leave the country uh with threats of you know ongoing extremely serious violence. And when we were in Lagos, in fact, actually while we were on live television, they paused the discussion to feature a story of an aeroplane with all of these Lagotians landing back, uh Nigerians landing back in the city, who had been given this ultimatum by political gangs. So anyway, I mean it just goes to highlight, and again, I I'm not this is not confined to Africa by any means, how different forms of political organization are intertwined with very harsh economic conditions, and it makes um managing democratic politics extremely unwieldy, even in a democratic country like South Africa.
SPEAKER_01And of course that leads us to your next story, which I guess is also sort of about democratic unwieldiness.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, so this is a return to a story we've covered several times, but obviously we do that with a number of topics, and it's interesting to follow them. And this one specifically is about flag flying. So uh this is just to highlight this story that Oxfordshire County Council passed a um, or basically took a court injunction against organizations such as the the Raise the Flag Group to ask them to stop or to insist that they stop flying flags within Oxfordshire. Uh and four named leaders of this group went to court and agreed to stop doing this, reluctantly, but they basically agreed because there was a court injunction that the council successfully took. So this is quite an interesting story because I think it's the first time that any part of the country has actually said you you cannot fly flags. And we have that they have all these reasons that were, you know, some of them were to do with risks to council staff who'd been harassed when asking people to take flags down, but there were also things about like safety risks and um trespass, uh idea that they were causing obstructions that were dangerous. And of course many of the people involved have reacted and I had a quick look at social media. It was very interesting to see how this is being linked to efforts to bring in things like the 15-minute city uh and climate measures within Oxford as well. So you'd see people who are saying this is all part of an effort to control how we move around our city, how we use our city. We can't put flags up, but we're expected to, you know, comply or, you know, uh aspire to a kind of urban life we don't want that's much more about sustainability. Um I did also have a look. I'm interested to know where in the world there are these kinds of restrictions around flying flags. And I I'd be interested to know, listeners, or you Beth, you may have an answer up your sleeve, if there are other places with these kinds of rules, because all I could find was lots of countries with rules and laws against desecrating the national flag in any kind of way. We see that across the world from Europe, you know, Germany and France to places like China and various countries in the Middle East. Um and then there are places where you you can't fly certain flags, right? I mean uh uh interestingly in Denmark, um you can't fly foreign national flags in many places. Um but I couldn't find anywhere, with the possible exception of Northern Ireland, where due to the sensitivity of the Good Friday Agreement, I guess, and the and the protocol, that there are limitations on when you can fly different flags between the UK and Ireland. But I'm not aware of anywhere else that has even locally said you can't fly a national flag. So I think that this this is quite, you know, it it becomes part of this whole bigger politics uh in our cities that will be seized upon about control over urban space.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell I think we might have to rely on the listeners because I don't have any understanding of where else there could be prohibited flags. But you know, it's interesting. One of the stories I was thinking of covering was about the W World Cup. Yes. And of course, like what an interesting time to ban flags. I know, it's a flag. You know, I've been seeing it around. And because obviously we're living with this kind of emotional affective residue of the flag wars that we were covering last year and the associations with very extreme political positions, um, or at least contested political positions here in the UK. When I now see the flags, I have to spend moments thinking about what's that doing and why are those flags there, and what am I supposed to be interpreting about the kind of space I'm in. And at the moment it's all up for grabs because most people are just an England supporter or a Scotland supporter, and sorry to the Scotland fans today, of course, as well. But no, I don't have any information on that. But I mean it is interesting though just to put these kinds of grand ceremonies into context as well, where suddenly the flag is reclaimed as a symbol of national pride at the same time as it's still causing all of these local political issues.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I should say as well, of course, that the Oxfordshire that the ban is is uh is around flying them in public areas and in the streets, so people can still put up the England flag in their home.
SPEAKER_01Well, I feel sufficiently low now, but let's hope we can um bring the energy back up again then with our guest.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I keep forgetting to do really positive stories. I mean it's arguably positive if you don't want to see an England flag on the street in Oxfordshire.
SPEAKER_01It's pretty tricky to do positive stories, isn't it, at a time when all of this is uh is going on. Maybe we should have a like a positive radar uh week where we we go out of our way to make sure we only pick good things.
SPEAKER_03Maybe.
SPEAKER_01And perhaps if we're we need to change our own mindset because maybe we're only seeing bad things.
SPEAKER_03I think so. And it may just be that our guests will actually have some slightly more positive incarnations of the city.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think we do have some hope coming, so we should probably go to Sarah now. So welcome to Sarah Murray Hall for coming on and joining us to talk about this today. Um we've already given a short introduction, but just to recap, we asked you on because we really want to hear more about some of the insights from your future leaders fellowship project on austerity and altered life courses, um, which you've told us recently you found out has just been extended. So big congratulations for that as well.
SPEAKER_02Oh, thank you very much.
SPEAKER_03Yes, massive congratulations. Does that mean you're going from four years to seven years or whatever? Because it used to be something like that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, um actually it was I had uh a bit of an extension, so it's going from five to eight. Oh, it's amazing.
SPEAKER_03That's incredible. An eight-year research project, that's wonderful. Okay, so we'll hopefully get quite into some of the detail of that. But let's start with the blog you wrote in 2016, the year of Brexit, where you argued in a blog back then that Brexit the Brexit debate shouldn't mask the very real experience for those currently living in and through austerity, for whom the situation is unlikely to get better and a lot more likely to get worse. So you arguably already saw the direction of travel there. And how had your prior research led you to that conclusion back in 2016?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's a really great question. So I think the context here is really important that at that point um I'd recently finished a two-year ethnography with six families and a community in Greater Manchester. So that had been uh what is often called deep hanging out. Family ethnography is different to community ethnography slightly. Um so the way that you engage with a group that has such kind of intimate connections is slightly different. There's a lot more ebbing and flowing. Uh, but during those two years, you know, I'd really seen how um how the uh austerity policies that had just kind of started to be introduced from 2012 were really starting to bear on people in their day-to-day lives, and how it was significantly shaping everyday relationships, both in terms of family relationships and friendships, but also generally social relationships. So how those the relationships were being reshaped, dismantled in all sorts of ways as a result of the pressures that were being caused by austerity. And I think what I also could foresee what was going to happen a little bit because just before that, that was my PhD project. Um before that, I'd done another two-year ethnography for my PhD, and that was around everyday decisions families make around consumption practices, and uh my field work was smack bang when the recession hit uh in yeah, 2008, 2010. That's exactly when I was collecting uh data. Well, when I was with um it was also six families then, uh and really kind of witnessing on a day-to-day level the way that austerity became not just a condition, but became conditioning of everyday life. I'd I'd been witnessing that happening, and in a way I kind of realised I'm sort of a researcher of of researching the economy with the economy, actively doing research with people, with the community, with um with it, the economy as it's lived. Um so that's where I was, and then maybe I'll mention it later, but uh I'd also literally just started a piece of work supporting um a youth-led campaign that was being run by Reclaim, who were a working class young people's organization in Greater Manchester, and we just secured some funding on a really cool project working with them following this Powerhouse Pioneers project that was a direct response to devolution and a lot of the debates that were happening at the very same time. So it was like a confluence of things happening. Uh, and the day of the uh Brexit uh result, the young people, two young people from that campaign went into Reclaim's offices and said, We feel like we need to do something more, we want a youth-led campaign. And Reclaim were amazing, and so were the funders. And they said, actually, you know, maybe we should use the funding we've got and reshape it. So that became team future.
SPEAKER_01Oh, right.
SPEAKER_00The context of me writing that blog piece was the result of you know, witnessing um doing those family ethnographies through recessions, the in the start of austerity, through to austerity policies becoming more embedded and and normalised, and then doing that piece of work that was meant to be about devolution, but ended up really being about devolution, Brexit and austerity.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, the ABC, or there's a D in there as well, which is nice. Um, I mean, I think we'll come back to sort of the work that you've done subsequently, focusing more with young people, and that's really useful to have that backstory as well. Um, and I guess these this form of deep hanging out as you describe it really enabled you to understand as best we can as researchers what it felt like for communities. Um and I know you did some work as well looking at you you sort of talked about the complexity of the crises. I know in one of your articles you've called them nested crises, and that people are kind of always waiting. And this idea of of waiting for Brexit or waiting in these left behind places, I was just wondering if you could tell us a bit more about what those initial starting points led you to conclude through the uh ethnographies that you carried on doing.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. So the the waiting idea really kind of came up when um when I was uh doing a research project that was ethnographic participatory work on Brexit in everyday life, and that started around I think it was like 2018, 2019, and it was part of a bigger project. Um but so my element of the project was a a piece of work around Gorse Hill in Great Manchester, and the reason I chose that is because it was on my doorstep, it was away from where I lived, and that's kind of a method like a methodological approach that I use quite a lot. Um but the the waiting element came in because we were having discussions around um with peer researchers about what we might want to create together, and we were talking about creating a podcast around uh around Brexit and pros and cons of that. And some of the titles we were coming up with were like no sleep till Brexit. Um and then we started talking a bit about why a podcast, and the reason for that was to be able to be with the change as it was happening and to trace it. And that really got me thinking about work on waiting and not simply just as waiting in a particular moment, but the experience of staying with. So I was really influenced by um Will Mason's work that he's published recently about the idea of staying, and yeah, it has I love that piece actually.
SPEAKER_01We'll put the link in the show notes as well as your articles.
SPEAKER_00It's one of my favourites, and he knows that already. Um but this was this was as much about what can be created while we wait rather than uh the waiting as being only painful. Um and so because the official date for leaving um the EU kept being moved back, we decided to keep doing our podcast. So we ended up kind of tracing the changes as they were happening through these discussions. Um yeah, but that was a definitely a highlight in the process of all the Brexit shenanigans that were happening at the time.
SPEAKER_03So let's move on to think a little bit more about your work since, where over the past five years you've been thinking about things beyond Brexit and looking at the longer-term impact over a decade of austerity on young people in Greater Manchester, but also in Barcelona and Sardinia. So this is via your uh future leader fellowship grant from UKRI. So can you tell us a bit more about this project and the main emerging findings at this point?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for giving me a chance to speak about it. So, kind of where I came to with this project was I'd started thinking about um how the life of economic change like austerity um has its own life. It has its own life in terms of it, how it ebbs and flows, the changes, you know, and they are often discussed in terms of kind of policy terms, so you have work like around policy mobilities, for instance. But what I was seeing was that the life of economic change was a life that was embedded in life courses and in places too. So I wanted to understand how those lives intersect through more of a life course lens. Um and although it kind of never went away, a life course lens has never necessarily been the trendiest kid on the block, right? It's never been the thing of the of the moment when it comes to researching um the economy and economic change, but I felt like it had real resonances with what I was looking at. Um so the project, the idea was to understand how young people's lives um have been shaped by austerity as being formative in their in their lives as young people and as growing up. And so, because of the the way that the timing worked out, I wanted to focus on people who were aged 18 to uh 35 to understand what was happening during that period for young people, but significantly how it has altered and shaped their future, the futures that they imagine, that they dream about, that they foresee or don't foresee, or even the practice of dreaming and imagining. Um so the the project as well was also an attempt for me to think about um how do we how do we do this really embedded work? How do we have perhaps methodological innovation to try and understand futures in the context of the present and past? And how do you understand this in different contexts where there might be lots of things in common but also some differences? And the reason why I chose the three sites was because um it did it came down in part to kind of difference of experience, it came in part down to the relationships that I developed from my research over the years, but it also came down to the fact that each of those regions, so the Barcelona region, Sardinia as an island, and Greater Manchester combined authority, all have what can be described as different types of autonomy or devolution. And what my work had shown me is that sometimes those of us who do work on lived experience, it can be it can be assumed to be anecdotal, can't speak absolutely policy. But I was actually finding that my work had had a lot of traction and had discussions in a regional setting. So I thought kind of thinking about these regional, autonomous, devolved areas as having more potential for that kind of closer dialogue, but also perhaps some room for experimentation too. So that is kind of how the project was framed. Um and that first kind of five year phase worked with an incredible team of researchers and also carried out field work myself, and we used a method. That we call oral histories and futures, which is like a participatory type of oral history that tries to think about futures in the context of um lives that have been lived and endured.
SPEAKER_01I just want to pick up a couple of things that have just come to mind, if it's okay with you. So the first is, well, when you were doing your work, let's go back to Team Futures with Reclaim, and that's the same time as devolution, which is obviously what you've been talking about now as well, in terms of like the powers and responsibilities that organizations have. I I had a conversation with Reclaim around that time as well. And they were really kind of they they drilled home to me like the insufficiency of these one-off moments of engagement for young people to have their voices heard. And yet everyone's really obsessed with the Youth Council, the Youth Assembly. But for Reclaim, it's like everyday life doesn't operate like that. So how do other young people have their voice? And I thought that was really interesting. And it also made me earlier in the radar today, I was talking about young people not in education, employment and training, and the policy to roll out these Dutch-style youth hubs. Um, but there's this, and so I've been looking at a lot of the skills policies, things targeted at 16 to 24 year olds at the moment. But there's this assumption that young people can just prepare themselves better in terms of their skills to get a job without understanding the massive disconnect, that imagination, that dream, that that hope. And someone described to me in a focus group this week that we've got a paradox at the moment where we've got young people who haven't had the same life chances as others, but have high skills but really low confidence. But we've also got people leaving universities like ours sometimes with high confidence and low skills. And like, what do we do with that? So I'm just thinking about the kind of life course and like how that how that relates to all of these kinds of questions of dreaming and imagining.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. And I think you've really picked up on something there, that kind of and it comes back to the staying with idea as well. I think for me, that how we look at these really important topics is so valuable. So the the importance of following team future was not simply a case of just um watching what they were doing. We were actively involved in the campaign and we brought resources to it. So we co-created a film together, we did workshops um across the country in in Greater Manchester, but also in places that were considering um devolution at the time. So we went to Birmingham and we went to the Northeast too with young people who led workshops and talked about the importance of not just young people being in the room, but also systemic change as well that they wanted to see across their lifetime and for people that weren't like them as well. And the campaign that they led was incredible. They, you know, they were they were very brave and went into spaces that sometimes they got a lot of pushback from other young people and they were so reflexive when they came back. I remember one session, they got into another youth group and they didn't feel that those young people were as engaged as they were in politics. And then they came back and really reflected on how they they'd made judgments of them that they felt other people had made had also made of themselves in another setting. So I I just felt that the way that they were able to conceptualize the importance not just of economic change and as it was affecting them, but also how it was really reshaping social relationships to to cause tensions and conflict and difference where they might that might not actually exist.
SPEAKER_01I mean, that's a really powerful example of what you said earlier: that lived experience is policy relevant and can shape all of these different kinds of agendas that we're facing. And I guess you started answering this a little bit, but like I'm thinking about the differences between the different case studies that you did and what the lessons are for us here in the UK, whether that's about devolution or what our youth policy and employment support is, or or perhaps something else.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so I think um I think one of the things that I've really learned is that holding together and understanding different types of economic change starts with the discussion that it's complex. I think I don't want to end with that argument all the time. Um but the life course perspective has been something that I felt has been really valuable in order to set it both in context but also in place to the way that people in place their lives in times of crisis or or times that actually, as we were talking about, are actually very normalized and very real. Um some of the kind of debates that I see coming out, whether it's a piece of research I've done that is uh kind of more of an ethnographic style with people in their daily lives, or if it's something more active like a youth campaign or co-creating a podcast or a a piece of artwork, is that there's a real focus on on the the difference that distance makes, or maybe the positives of having a closer dialogue to politicians that that understand your life. It might not be that they've experienced it in the same way, that does help. But there has actually been, you know, a lot of a lot of talk around that. And I that's a that's a theme that I've seen across the work from the work with the young people into future through to the work that we're doing now on the Austerity and Altered Life Courses project, that local decision making it does increase confidence. And I think there's a geographical argument there around feeling close and being close, so what we call proximity and propinquity, but also there's an emotional argument there of feeling listened to and feeling understood. I mean, just to respond to the question as well about all these projects that I've been doing, uh it was something that I was thinking about kind of ethically, but also is there something about doing all these different types of projects, what different types of economic change over an extended period? Some of them directly overlap, and economic change itself overlaps and merges and entangles. Um, and I have a new book coming out um hopefully later this year called Lives and Afterlives of Economic Change, and it brings together um six of the projects that I've done over the last 15 years around austerity, Brexit, and devolution. All of them have an have an ethnographic and participatory tone. And with those, I try and make the case for this idea of um economic change having a life and living through the lives of people, uh, but also this argument for afterlives, which is less in terms of like a haunting element of the afterlife, but more in a relational sense that um that afterlives are always all around us. When we think about austerity, we need to think also about post-industrialization. When we think about current conditions, we need to think about how that how those um ideas and enduring conditions will be felt in years to come, and that these afterlives are entirely intermingled with how we experience it in the present. So the book kind of tries to bring these together and develop some sort of coherence uh from the complexity. That sounds amazing.
SPEAKER_03It's interesting as well to think about how this is experienced by different kinds of age groups and generations. So you've obviously we haven't talked that much about youth, but uh you've done a lot of this work with young people. I was thinking actually when you were talking about waiting as well, that there's all this there's literature on African urban areas on things like weighthood and the kind of peer the sense of waiting that's there and youth waiting to become an adult, waiting to be able to work. And um when when we think about this in relation to youth particularly, that kind of waiting for austerity to end has a bit of a different sort of meaning, I guess. But more generally, it would be good to kind of hear a bit more about this idea that the future is foreclosed, right? And that's something that is very much relevant to the youth who are trying to imagine their lives ahead of them. Um and and many, of course, are asking, will austerity ever end? Will they have the economic opportunities their parents and grandparents had? And people have started to talk about ABC, austerity, Brexit, COVID, as kind of ramping up to this perpetual state of austerity. Do you think there's any lessons from your research about this? And maybe particularly as we have or well, certainly we have a new Prime Minister coming in. We can't be 100% certain yet who it will be. But what should that person, Andy Burnham, probably, be doing to try and bring austerity to an end? How can your research inform that kind of discussion?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean I think this idea of austerity coming to an end, that's something that people were saying in like 2015, so three years after those auster initial austerity policies have started to be implemented in the UK and we're still ongoing. So I think I think for me it's really important to tease apart that the end, the end of austerity is very difficult to talk about in a context where it is normalized for many people what they have just grown up with and what they just know. Also, when we think about austerity, you know, are we only talking about policies or are we actually talking about austerity as a live condition? You know, when you look in a dictionary, you get two definitions. Yeah. It is a very particular policy move, which is to pay off a national debt via public services. So you know that is very specific in itself. And then you've also got the fact that it refers to being, you know, a condition of severe simplicity and and self-restraint, which itself is also kind of it has a governance element to it, both governing a country and governing bodies as well. Um so yeah, I think for me, I think of those when I think about the ending of austerity. What could that possibly be or look like? And there's also a difference with that and the reversal of austerity policies themselves, which are just part of the story. But that is, of course, absolutely possible and possible. Um I haven't yet seen a very good answer as to why that couldn't be carried out. We have seen the reversal of some policies that we do understand to be austerity related, and the other element is we also have policies that themselves may not be austerity driven, but were the vehicles for austerity like parts of the universal credit system. So the rolling out of universal credit absolutely hit with the implementation of a lot of the welfare cuts, for instance. Um in terms of what could or should be done, I'd say that there's definitely something around um that local decision making. I think there's also something around um the actual praxis of policy making, which obviously is, you know, others know a lot more about that than me, but I see a lot about how to be involved in politics. Politics with a small P has been just as important. Two of the things that we're really thinking about with the Austerity and Altered Life Courses project is how do we engender hope without hype? And that's actually a term that came out. I like that. Um thanks. That's a term that came out of co-produced um pieces of work that we did when we shared our findings from our oral histories and futures in each of the sites. We had a co-production event with policymakers, with participants, with academics, and we from those we created a um like a policy public-facing response. And that is one of our kind of findings that hope without hype is really important, how we measure, how we measure it, how we keep it uh, how we keep it levelled, how we keep it real, but also making sure that hope is somewhere in there. So a couple of things that we kind of really focus on with the new project is thinking about in this new phase, how can we engender solidarity, how can we engender spaces, practices, relationships that do encourage connection, mutuality, um both in terms of the topic of the research, but in the project itself, the way we go about our research. Um and also the the ways that we share evidence, and this is where I think working on a on a localized level in terms of politics can be really useful. Yeah. This is where it's really important with our project of sharing things that aren't necessarily just anecdotal or they might seem it when you talk to a national policymaker, but on a more local level, whether that's in your kind of borough or in your regional council, sharing um particularly qualitative data as evidence is really valuable. And one of the things that we're working on is kind of trying to flip the system a little bit and trying to trying to remove this response of being told it's anecdotal to actually think, you know what, we don't want to do things in this way anymore. I think what we need is to elicit an emotional response. And so with the project now, we have a set of creative collaborations working with our oral histories and futures, working with our partnerships to develop these more emotional responses where instead of sending out um a document, we're creating immersive events with a women's organization, Inspire, in in Alden. Instead of um giving a talk, we're inviting people to take part in a bureaucratic escape room that's been developed with an artist in the Netherlands, Merrill Smith. You know, instead of um instead of uh sending out an email, we have a co-creative play that's been made with an oral historian who's a playwright, who's worked with our oral history data, and we've co-produced that with him. And we've workshopped with participants, and that's gonna be staged uh next year by uh the youth company at Contact Theatre. And so what we're saying is these aren't just ways of sharing, these are actually this is the evidence. Yeah. And if we want to make a change, maybe we need to put pressure on politicians, policymakers to come and engage with that on a human level.
SPEAKER_01I don't think we can top that. That's I was gonna ask you about where next for your research, but you've beautifully answered it. Um and again, it's not always that we end these episodes with some hope, but I I think we have done here. Um, the last practical question is how can people find out more then about the next phase of your research and come to some of these events if they are indeed the intended participants?
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. So if you look up Austerity in Altered Life courses, we come up first on a Google search. Um, we have a website that we'll share as well. Um, we're updating our website with the new project details because that's only just started. And we also share on different types of social media, uh, we have you know social media accounts and things. But please do get involved. If you're interested, drop me an email and yeah, watch this space and look out for the book, of course, as well.
SPEAKER_03Thank you so much. That's been absolutely a really very timely insight, and we do hope that people will follow up on some of those things. So we appreciate you joining us at this point.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, thank you very much. So that was a fascinating conversation again, and um we needed some hope, didn't we? And I think we really got some. I think that sentence about hope without hype really stood out. And also, actually, even though young people have, let's face it, have a really difficult deal in all kinds of ways, especially if they've lived their whole lives through these austerity conditions. Um, but actually they are also the ones without over-responsibilising them, um, who can give us some encouragement about the direction that we need to go in. And they certainly should be far more centered in the ways in which we make decisions about the societies that we live in.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and I mean uh it's really interesting to hear about this in such different contexts. So I hadn't realised until we got around that working in Barcelona and Sardinia and things she was saying about different levels of decentralization, um these are not contexts we talk much about on the programme, on the on the podcast rather. So I think learning how people we we get very stuck, I think, in our own British sense of hopelessness and austerity and what it means to be a youth in the current economic conditions. In Southern Europe, things have looked very different for a very long time. And so it'll be very interesting to see how that plays out in the way that people manage and experience this, basically, in those contexts.
SPEAKER_01I think there's also that thing about what the future looks like and what we're waiting for. I was just thinking of the chapter in um the book Cities Rethought on Africa's deleted future, and then of course there's Abdimaliq Simone's work on foreclosing and waiting as well. Um but I think we see something productive actually was coming out of that waiting as well, and and sort of the longitudinal ability to follow something through with the same people and to commit is so important. I was also sort of thinking about how deeply political all of this is, where austerity it's it's it's a policy. You know, I I was really mindful when people started talking about austerity as a state of affairs to say no austerity is a policy, and what I was trying to do by that was say it's a choice, not a necessity. But actually what we've also heard through, again, a more longitudinal approach and deeply embedded is that it has become entrenched and endemic in people's everyday lives, such that it the policy decision that is avoidable is not necessarily seen.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I also find it really interesting what she was saying about the kind of state of mind created by austerity and how that's part of it. The the sort of self-disciplining is quite like Foucaultan, right? For those people who are, you know, the way she was talking about the disciplinary, the self-disciplinary aspect of austerity that's part of the the definition by in a way, by some some definition. To be austere, to kind of um to have that as part of your mindset. And it reminds you that part of this political project is is about that, right? And again, when I was thinking about the waiting literature and what she was saying, um the stuff I know is is a lot of it's from Ethiopia are actually. Daniel Maines has written about this and other people, about how youth in a context like Ethiopia, where employment and benefits have often been very dependent on the state, it's quite a statist country, even though the state has limited um, you know, resources, people expect the state to do things for them. Whereas in a way, what she's talking about here is that withdrawal of the state very intentionally, and people sort of waiting you know, n with their expectation of the state diminishing over time, because the state has made very clear it won't do certain things. And it's like, how do you then pick that up again? Like what's what happens if you have austerity for as long as we have had, and then you try and insert a state? It's it's kind of an interesting puzzle because people's whole way of thinking has changed. And it doesn't mean they'll necessarily welcome the state doing things in the ways you might expect, right?
SPEAKER_01It's interesting, that's a theme that came out of uh work I've been doing with Madeline as well in Sheffield and some focus groups with communities there, and and one of the big themes was we have to wake up to the fact that no one's coming to save us. And the state is not coming back in the way it was, but the state is still there and I think also has a responsibility. So it is neither one extreme nor the other, actually. And I think that is about why it's so important to recast the role of the local state and think imaginatively about that as well. Before we wrap up, we I just wanted to say we missed an opportunity today, you know, in our radar. Because did you know that today is World Beatles Day?
SPEAKER_03Beatles as in the popular sixties beat combo or Beatles as in kind of small.
SPEAKER_01The first one I heard on Thought for the Day this morning, um, and they were talking about World Beatles Day. So I thought I'd just ask you what your favourite Beatles track is.
SPEAKER_03Oh my gosh, that is a big one. What am I gonna say? Um I'm gonna go for George Harrison. George Harrison number, just to be a bit unusual. What about something? That's a beautiful song.
SPEAKER_01That's very nice, yeah. Okay, good. I was gonna go for Maxwell's Silver Hammer, but I'm not sure why. It just lodged in my head as a child, but it's probably actually Blackbird. Oh yeah. Which is just unbeatable.
SPEAKER_03Check it out. Quite, you know, controversial, but not bad.
SPEAKER_01Okay, well, there's some extra listening for you guys. Um, but that's all we've got time for this week, so thank you very much, and we'll be back again next month.