Works in progress

I've come to think of all work as work in progress. A busy couple of months have seen me mulling over what things in the literacy world look like after lockdown, and several things are out there already including this bulletin and this contribution to a UKLA symposium. At the same time I've been working for the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy on our pro-Black initiative and wanted to show my appreciation to the wonderful Susi Long who has been convening an important group. One of the most significant aspects of this discussion for me is the idea that returning to normal is not a viable option if normal involves perpetuating old injustices and inequalities. Bettina Love is an uncompromising and forthright campaigner for this perspective, and of course she's right. I'm not yet sure how my writing intersects with this - that too is work in progress. In the mean time I'm helping to bring an old project to print, a project that operationalises the stacking stories idea that Cathy and I have been working on for a number of years. There's a lovely bit in this collaborative work that evokes rich memories for anyone who has ever taught. 'Most teachers can relate to the experience of arriving in a classroom, perhaps at the start of a school year - four walls, a cupboard if you're lucky, and a collection of desks and chairs - of rooting around in store rooms and drawers, sifting though resources of variable age and quality, shunting furniture about to create pleasant spaces or groupings, and playing with texture and colour for a less institutional feel.' Some of the resources you find in dusty cupboards and dingy stock rooms have their own histories. In the second school I taught in I found a class set of books called 'An Introduction to the King's English'. Which king, I wondered? Could that be George V? The book was published in 1932! This certainly wasn't work in progress; it was a museum piece. As a seasonal gesture, one of the book's colour plates is shown above. It's entitled 'At the Seaside' and it shows an English holiday scene - an idealised portrait of family life between the wars. Dad reads a broadsheet and smokes a pipe whilst mum keeps an eye on the children making a sandcastle. The page opposite informs us that dad is Mr Jackson, mum is Mrs Jackson and the children are Tom and Kate. Students of the King's English practice sentences rehearsing words like 'father', 'mother', 'sister' and 'children'. It perhaps goes without saying that not all families looked like that in Hyson Green in the 1970s.

Fake profiles

The Pinterest algorithm got to know me pretty quickly. I'm not sure if it knows when and where I was born but it must be narrowing it down. The app feeds me old photographs of where I grew up, some are even in the black and white of old memory. I spend time on these images. Then I get poster art from the sixties and photos of the bands I used to follow back then. Pinterest serves me up with ideas for creative projects. Card models to make with the grandchildren and, more annoyingly, it shows me a brand of slippers I quite like. So it's not exactly got a full or nuanced idea of me and my interests but its still uncanny what Pinterest learns and knows about, how it gives me more of what I like. It's an example of how the internet has captured desire at the level of immediacy. You like this it says, emphatically. And it seems to say it before you've had time to think about it. Yes, that fast, particularly with push notifications. Speed is both its power and its promise. Faster processors, faster broadband. See-it like-it quickly converts into buy-it. See-it, like-it, buy-it simply produces frictionless consumerism. No frustration, no time for a (second) thought, just get it, delivered to your doorstep. It's tempting to experiment with a counter profile, to search for things that don't (p)interest you, things that you don't like or don't want to buy, to feign interest in different places, different people, different things. If I maintained a factitious interest in say Frank Sinatra, in old Amsterdam, in pre-Raphaelite painting - whatever, how might that change my online experience? Would Pinterest get confused or think my account had been hacked? I doubt it. Would it worry about my mental health? I doubt that, too. Or would it continue to serve up the things I'm not interested in? Or worse still, might I start to get interested in what I'm not interested in? Probably, but really why would I want that? Fake profiles aren't really that interesting in the first place.

Three short pieces

One. Events pass through novelty and nowness to become history, obviously. I'm thinking of when doing things or going places one perhaps registers either to one's self or whoever you're with, that you're here. This is happening, I'm in Santiago, Singapore, Cyprus or some other place, doing this and conscious of doing it, too. And then looking back on it, that was life, that was what happened, the novelty or uniqueness flattening off, smoothing out. It settles down into the narrative of a life. Not only is it unrepeatable, after all we already knew that didn't we? but it settles down into ordinariness in a way we didn't quite expect somehow. That was what we did. We went to different places and did different things. it was all gradually absorbed like sugar into the sum total of experience. What at the time seemed remarkable or unusual gradually became part of the texture of things. There's a sort of doubling effect, events are at the same time both very special and rather ordinary. But yes, we did these things. Didn't we? Two. Variations on the blind man's cane. Husserl or Heidegger? No actually Merleau-Ponty: 'The blind man's stick has ceased to become an object for him'. The cane has become an extension of the senses. The hammer (probably Heidegger?) recedes as it becomes an everyday tool. We only realise how invisible such things have become when they go wrong, break. The cane snaps. The head falls off the hammer. We miss the nail and strike our thumb instead. So much of Pandemic experience has been like this. The head fell off the hammer of our lives. The everyday gets suspended, at least for a while. We quickly call conditions the new normal and then slowly they become normalized. So normal we stop noticing them (face masks). A different sense of the everyday arises. We get accustomed to it, slowly forgetting how things were or romanticising our memory of how they were. We lockdown. And then lockdown eases and the way things scurry back to normality is unsettling too. Our memories are short, we are quick to adapt, in fact adaptation is our strength. Three. Blind spots, literally blind spots. The bits we don't see we quickly fill in. Our reality like rickety Super-8 footage, badly spliced, jump cut, ill-matched film stock with different colour tones, sometimes out of focus, the sound out of sync. Is it really like that, reality? Yes, all of that spliced in with random bits of information and all slicked over with the gel of consciousness. Consciousness pulling it altogether, imposing pattern, predictability, superimposing meaning. Making sense out of nonsense. Stitching it together, smoothing it over always making it normal. That was life. It was what we did.

A hall of mirrors

Narrative fiction has become an important site for exploring interiority and the complexities of self-reflection. The conscious separation of author from narrator always present in fiction opens possibilities that twentieth century writers have been keen to exploit. Think of the unbelievable narrator of 'The Good Soldier' or the pathological one that tells us all about 'Lolita'. Stefan Zweig is a master of this art of separation. In his short stories and novellas he taps into psychological revelations by creating a series of layers of narration. Sometimes in this hall of mirrors we wonder who is who. In 'Fantastic Night', for instance, the narrator opens a sealed packet that contains the story of a Baron who has just died. The Baron's tale is something of an epiphany, but the way in which it is told allows for a forensic exploration of the self. Initially, or so it seems, the Baron is as hesitant about his writing abilities as he is about himself - but, of course, this is all beautifully written by Zweig. Take this, for example, 'But once more I feel I must pause, for yet again, and with some alarm, I become aware of the double-edged ambiguity of a single word.' Who is it that is really experiencing this ambiguity we wonder? Is it our Narrator, the Baron, or the author himself? The reader is destabilised. And a couple of sentences later, this sense of separation is extended further 'I have just written "I" and said that I took a cab at noon on the 7th of June 1913. But the word itself is not really straightforward....'. Well, no, it certainly isn't - however you think about it! He goes on '...I am by no means still the "I" of that time, that 7th of June, although only four months have passed since that day, although I live in the apartment of that former "I" and write at his desk, with his pen, and with his own hand'. All this is elegantly crafted - but we can't help but think of Zweig himself, sitting at his desk in Vienna, or wherever he was in 1922, writing about pretending to be a man who has opened a package containing the story of someone who has experienced a dramatic shift in his sense of self. Our attention is drawn to what writing is and what writing can do, at that same time as asking us who we really are. In this sense I can see parallels with Foucault's extended commentary on Velazquez's 'Las Meninas'. Zweig's 'Fantastic Night' disrupts our certainties about the world as well as being an excellent storyteller.

Back to school

On Monday children in England returned to their classrooms for the first time since the 2021 lockdown was introduced. I knew that because I heard them clattering past my house on their way to school. There was an exuberant atmosphere, much swinging of bags, slamming of doors and rattling of railings. And there were voices, too. Some subdued, some loud and unruly - but it all reminded me of how these diverse energies are so often overlooked, reined in and brought to serve adult purposes. In this I find myself in sympathy with the work of some scholars and researchers who wish to dislodge reductive accounts of meaning making and even to challenge reductive ideas about what children, learning and school are and could be. Yes, on Monday there was an almost palpable sense of relief. Children were back in school, they were back together, and the event underlined my understanding of how children thrive in each others company as well as through the sensitive guidance of adults. Of course they may also have been some reluctance, let's not forget that there will have been children who were less enthralled by the prospect of school, children who were not excited, were worried, anxious, or just uncertain. But all told, the crucially important function of public education is that it provides spaces for children to be together - not only classrooms and other places designed for learning, but also outside, at the school gate, in playgrounds as well as in corridors and doorways. Such spaces tend to be less regulated, but they are the spaces in which the energy of childhood culture thrives, where children play and interact, often under the watchful eye of adults but not usually through their explicit direction. In this way schools - and primary schools in particular, have always offered so much more than the learning on offer. Unsurprisingly this is a large part of what children will have missed. Parents and children have been thrown back on their own resources these past months, often heroically supported by teachers who have worked under extremely difficult circumstances to provide learning opportunities remotely. All told, being back together feels like something worth celebrating. That said, I don't subscribe to the notion that children are now massively behind, or that they should necessarily be subjected to additional days and hours of study. Those arguments seem to come from the outdated view that children are like empty tanks to be topped up daily with fresh content, a view often held by those who mistake the arbitrary construction of age-related norms for objective truth. If anything, we need something more like the summer play schemes which used to be modestly funded by local government. The school premises were vacant, the curriculum was put to sleep and the normal rules of engagement could be re-negotiated. Volunteer teachers and parents worked informally together to organise games, creative activities and outings for children of all ages. Above all children could be children together in a loosely structured permissive context. What better as an economical and humane approach to healing the scars of lockdown?

Doing the Romans

 

Apparently school in lockdown has arbitrary rules just like school in real life. I have it on good authority that one such rule is that you don't do online learning in bed. But rules are there to be broken and when there's nowhere else it's obviously the most sensible option. And, after all that's been written about the benefits of family learning we could probably be making a lot more out of a difficult situation. We could. That's if we weren't doing the Romans. Again. Parents and professionals in primary education will be familiar with that word 'doing' and what it really means. Doing is about kindling curiosity but it can also mean rehearsing a rather random collection of half-truths on a subject, and then doing it to death. At its best doing is inspirational, at worst dull. Take the Romans - well no wait, let's start a little further back - why take the Romans in the first place? Because they were brutal oppressors who robbed the English of their sovereignty? Or because they were Europeans operating a frictionless border? Or maybe it's something about their culture, their language - Latin that 'special' language of theirs we learnt in school. Ostensibly it helped us to be better at English. Laid bare it was an historical remnant of the mutually supporting edifices of church and school - lauda finem! No, I strongly suspect that we do the Romans because we've always done the Romans. We've done their fancy legionary helmets, done their flowing togas and if we're lucky we've done their mosaics in art and their numerals in maths. So how come teachers and children have no time for the Romans? How come they say that the Romans are boring? Yes, partly it's because they've been done to death, but it's also because of the enormous vacuum of relevance (vacuum, from the Latin vacuus meaning empty). It's the yawning gap that separates contemporary childhood from those imagined Romans (yawn, from Old English yonen). I have to come clean now. I love history, and I also happen to love those long straight roads, I love the monumental failure of Hadrian's Wall, doomed like so many other geopolitical follies around the world - the Great Wall, the Berlin Wall and all the rest. It's just that when you line up all the things you could do with primary children in lockdown, and all the history you could do in pandemic, the Romans aren't the first to spring to mind. I'm sure they had the odd virus to contend with (virus, from the Latin for slimy liquid) but it's not in the popular stories - it's not one of their greatest hits. Why not just leave them to luxuriate in their mosaic-tiled villas, lounging around in their flouncy togas, sipping from their flagons of wine, maybe having the occasional orgy if they can rouse themselves? Come on now, I'm sure they'd prefer that to being done again.

Doing it differently

I really enjoyed the Doing Data Differently project because it was a move out of my comfort zone and into the realms of educational data - an area that I'd previously been extremely wary of. Cathy has written a great blogpost about the project, there are several journal publications out there and some examples of the postcards and discussions can be seen here. But just like all of the projects and initiatives that I've been involved in, there's so much more to that work that can't easily be told. I notice the same phenomenon with many doctoral students I work with - it's often as if the pulse that animates the work has grown faint, or it's essence has somehow evaporated. The skill in getting a successful outcome is rather like an alchemical process of bringing something meaningful into existence even as it threatens to disappear. Educational projects are nearly always greater than the sum of their parts. And like good teaching you can never be entirely sure about what has really happened. Of course you can have plans and objectives, you can predict some outcomes, and even measure them, but then there's always the particular atmosphere and the sense of being there. Those restless modulations and mutations of affect resist clear verbal description. The complexity and heterogeneity of entangled experience baffles us, and the unanticipated, unpredictable and sometimes unknowable effects slip through our fingers. When we try to include these in our writing what was always messy, as John Law observes, seems to become even messier - and quite a number of us have fallen into that particular trap! Despite these pitfalls I think it's still worth the effort of producing accounts that acknowledge the missing elements, of trying to capture the things that get lost, and of saying the unsayable - or at least gesturing towards it. After all it's very often those very things that should be returned to, and not necessarily the detail that gets written up (although that might be important in other ways, too).

Why Talk About Data (in Education)?

 

An Online Colloquium

12th-19th November 2020

What does data do in education? What does it become? Why does data visualisation matter? What might teachers do with data?

This online colloquium will generate debate about the role and purpose of data in education. It brings together researchers whose work, in different ways, raises issues about data use in schools, coinciding with the launch of a virtual exhibition produced through a British Academy funded project, Doing Data Differently, which showcases teachers’ data drawings about their everyday experiences of literacy teaching.

A series of short video think pieces will be released daily between 12th and 17th November 2020 from Helen Kennedy, Neil Selwyn, Luci Pangrazio, Gemma Moss, Lyndsay Grant, Alice Bradbury, Cathy Burnett and Guy Merchant. These can be accessed via the virtual exhibition – you will find more details on the Exhibition Events page.

Issues and questions arising from the think pieces will be discussed at a live panel   on 19th November 4.30-5.30 (GMT) chaired by Marjorie Siegel from Teachers College, New York. Panel members will include Alice Bradbury, Lyndsay Grant, Cathy Burnett, Guy Merchant and Stefanie Posavec, co-author of Dear Data . Please register for the panel on Eventbrite.

Think pieces include:

Data harms and inequalities

Prof Helen Kennedy, Professor of Digital Society, University of Sheffield

Data-driven technologies, automated and algorithmic systems, machine learning and AI are transforming society. They’re having wide-ranging effects, including numerous benefits, but they’re far from straightforward, and their use can result in harms as well as benefits. So we need to question claims that datafication will simply lead to a better society. In fact, it feeds into and is fed into by inequalities. Whether we talk about harms, inequalities, discrimination, bias, injustice or unfairness, the negative effects of data-related change and data-driven systems are not experienced equally by all. This is why we need to talk about data in education.

 

Deconstructing data traps: Where to draw the line?

Prof Gemma Moss, Professor of Literacy, and Director of the International Literacy Centre, University College London

This think piece sets out some of the issues a team of researchers at UCL have faced in documenting how English primary schools have dealt with the stresses and strains that COVID-19 has produced in our data-driven system. I will consider how and in what ways our research project findings might be able to disrupt the dominant narratives about system gaps and the urgent need to close them that the crisis has provoked.

 

The surprising non-appearance of the datafied school?

Prof Neil Selwyn, Professor of Maths Science & Technology, Monash University
Dr Luci Pangrazio, Research Fellow in Digital Literacies, Deakin University

This presentation considers an unexpected finding from our ongoing research into digital data use in Australian high schools – why is it that critical concerns over the steady ‘datafication’ of education are not readily reflected in current school data practices? We first identify apparent tensions between: (i) established ‘teacherly’ logics of ‘data-driven’ schooling; and (ii) emerging ‘datafied’ practices associated with digital systems, platforms and devices. In particular, we consider how promises/threats of digital dataism appear to be largely subsumed into prevailing institutional logics of state bureaucracy and professionalism. We then consider the extent to which these ‘school data’ logics can endure amid the increased digitisation of K-12 education and commercial pushes for personalised learning. Alternately, what scope might there be to encourage more resistant appropriations of digital data by otherwise marginalised groups within school communities?

 

Anticipating fair futures through educational data practices

Dr Lyndsay Grant, School of Education, University of Bristol

In this talk, I will draw on ethnographic research in a secondary school to explore how data came to play a role in shaping educational practices through defining what could be known about pupils, teachers and learning, and through determining the future outcomes that were made possible. This research raised questions about the role of data practices in shaping ‘fair’ future outcomes for pupils and limiting the possibilities of more open-ended educational futures. These questions can help us explore how claims of ‘unfair’ educational algorithmic decisions might reveal contested notions of how fairness is produced through data, and the limits of transparency as a response to questions of fairness.

 

The Five Ps of Datafication in Schools

Dr Alice Bradbury, Associate Professor in Sociology of Education, UCL Institute of Education

In this short film, I use a schema to discuss the impact of datafication which is based on five Ps: pedagogy, practice, priorities, people and power. This draws on my forthcoming book Ability, Inequality and Post-pandemic Schools (Policy Press, 2021), which examines the relationship between data and discourses of ability. In this talk, I give examples of how we can use these five categories to broaden out how we conceptualise datafication to include teacher subjectivities and relations of power, as well as what teachers do and care about.

 

Destabilising data: Creative data visualisation and professional dialogue

Prof Cathy Burnett & Prof Guy Merchant, Sheffield Hallam University

In this think piece we consider what data may do – and what may be done with data- when inserted differently into professional dialogue in education. We draw on a project that set out to ‘do data differently’ by inviting primary teachers to create, visualise and share their own data on what mattered to them in everyday literacy teaching using a postcard format. We argue that shifting the focus, visualisation and sharing of data can have ‘complicating effects’ which – through foregrounding data’s instability and partiality – can produce generative spaces for teachers’ professional dialogue.

The spread : breadth and depth

Having a personal library could well become a thing of the past - and it's certainly a luxury, a rarefied form of consumerism and something that can function like an identity marker. I say this because I've often been more interested in the time or place that associates with a particular title than the content. And along with this there's the strange business of the scraps of paper that have been used as makeshift bookmarks before that book was abandoned and its restless reader moved on. I've found everything from train tickets to old computer punchcards and postcards lodged in mine. And amongst these ephemera I've also come across my own notes on paper and card. In one book I recently found half a card which said 'Wishing you a speedy recovery'. It wasn't clear who was being wished a speedy recovery and from what, but on the reverse side I'd scrawled the following: 'mechanistic theories of learning individual treatment that a comp. programme may not provide.' I think it's the kind of compressed study note that's often served me well. It doesn't really mean anything at all to me now, but at the time it was something that I was taking from what I read. I do the same sort of thing now, and I imagine it as a helpful way of distilling the essence of what I'm reading. Essence is probably the wrong word, because I'm actually referring to the meaning that I'm taking away, which is a more personal matter. And this meaning may be very different to the one intended by the author - for a start it's much narrower. But so much academic work depends on this process of narrowing down, the process of selecting from, and reducing another source. This is relatively easy in a small, focused area in which a body of literature can be read, analysed and synthesised but I think that there are always problems of scale. When the output is diverse and rapidly changing this is altogether harder to achieve. It would be a real challenge to do this across my personal library, for instance. Which brings me full circle, in fact, to the latest addition to my library which is Ben Lerner's acclaimed novel 'The Topeka School'. I enjoyed reading 'Leaving the Atocha Station' but this is altogether a more complex, more ambitious work of auto-fiction. The theme that concerns me here is what he calls 'the spread'. Briefly, in Lerner's world of high school debating 'the spread' is an important tactic. The spread, in the narrator's words, is 'to make more arguments, marshal more evidence than the other team can respond to within the allotted time'. As the novel unfolds the spread becomes an important trope and it stands in for the way in which we can feel paralysed by torrents of information, complex demands on our attention and so on. The popular idea of 'overwhelm' is something similar. And it is rather different from the personal library and the notes on scraps of paper which are attempts - and only attempts - to select, simplify and perhaps to go deeper into things. The spread is wide, overwhelming, destabilising and, in Lerner's world at least, it characterises the times we live in.

The Meaning Makers

I never met Gordon Wells in person, but as a long-standing admirer of his scholarship I was deeply moved to read about his tragic death. It was one of those unfortunate coincidences - I heard the sad news just as I was agreeing changes on the draft of a piece I’d written. Mine was a piece that underscored the enduring influence of his work. As is often the case with writing, I needed to go through the process to clarify my own thinking, and that led to a fuller appreciation of his influence. Wells had a lasting effect on me as a teacher and researcher. Writing about The Meaning Makers, first published in 1986, it was necessary to return to the work, and I was pleasantly surprised to find it as fresh, engaging and relevant today as it was thirty-four years ago when I first encountered it. Subtitled ‘children learning language and using language to learn’, The Meaning Makers is nothing short of a landmark text. It is based on fifteen years of longitudinal research, all rather diminutively referred to as the Bristol Study. Fifteen years is almost unthinkable under current funding regimes, but it certainly helps in getting some depth. And the work of Wells and his team certainly had depth. The research was rigorous and carefully theorized, providing detailed evidence of how children’s language and early literacy developed at home and at school. It also strongly suggested how such development might be effectively supported. In his work Wells referred to a wide range of child language research, building on the insights of Britton, Rosen and Barnes in seeing language and learning from a Vygotskian perspective. Alongside this he repeatedly turned to the work of Bruner, developing a social constructivist view of meaning which was vividly illustrated through carefully selected extracts from his extensive fieldwork. Transcripts are chosen with care and subjected to close analysis in Wells’ writing and this provides an important model for all who follow in his footsteps. For me the simple message that children are active meaning makers remains a powerful guiding principle. That principle, and the convincing evidence used to illustrate it underscores Wells’ significant contribution to language and literacy studies.

Drawing on something

 

I took up drawing again about a year ago - I say again because I haven't really done any since my teens. Armed with a pocket-sized sketchbook and a couple of pencils we sat outside cafes in Ortigia as I sketched people passing by, photographing the Church of Santa Lucia, delving into their holiday rucksacks, chatting with their friends and on their smartphones. They weren't up to much - my sketches, that is - but I had a particular project in mind, and I wanted to find my way into drawing people. You have to start somewhere. As with my earlier attempts, half a century before, I realised that I don't have much that you might call technique. In fact I don't think I'd really want technique even if it was on offer. I just want to discover what works for me. I want to watch my drawing evolve. Of course it's not quite as simple as that. It's not all about first hand discovery. As art critics have often pointed out we are always governed by what we have seen before. What we draw or paint looks right because we have seen something like it previously. Still it emerges afresh on the page as we draw. We do it ourselves, and that's a creative act whether it's 'good' or just good enough. It's our own expression of something. Anyway, in those intervening years - those between my early drawing and my current rekindled interest, I have been preoccupied with writing. Not particularly good or even interesting writing, but writing nonetheless, and most of it professional or academic in nature. And the most important thing to emerge from all this writing is the realisation that what attracts me most is not actually its originality (although of course that helps) but the creative self-expression itself - trying to represent things in my own way, in my own voice. As with drawing, my writing doesn't have a preoccupation with technique - at least not in a self-conscious sort of way. It's just constantly refining itself. And of course it refines itself in the light of what I read. That's not quite the same as saying it's all imitation, but I think it always draws on something, even if I might not be  sure exactly what that is. The word expression seems to capture that, and if I were to write another book that would be a driving theme. Writing - technology and expression or something like that. Even in writing that it would be perfectly obvious that I'd be drawing on something.

Book pairing

Continuing on the theme of books that provoke surprising connections when read together I want to recommend pairing Marilyn Strathern's work on Relations with anything by Henry James (from Daisy Miller onwards). I've always been struck by the Jamesian use of the term 'vulgar' - in part because it resonates with a family joke, (which I won't go into) - but mostly because it's one of those words that surfaces repeatedly in The Awkward Age, The Golden Bowl, The Wings of the Dove and in some ways becomes James's signature theme. Relations, people and behaviours that are below the norms of an idea of respectability all fall into his category of the vulgar. For James the vulgar is a register of social distinction at a time in which it is being tested in New and Old World sociality as well as by shifting generational impulses and family tensions. Purdy's 1968 essay 'Henry James's use of vulgar' in the journal American Speech explores some of this and is particularly good at teasing out the different connotations of the word. Strathern, however, has an entirely different project in mind as she problematises the place of relations in and beyond anthroplogy. Charting the rise of relationality as a way of looking at and ordering the world she is optimistic about new ways of thinking about relations - a re-enchantment through language.

Neurodiversity and after

I was advised not to write about neurodiversity by an expert, a well-respected colleague that I've worked with for a number of years. It was very good advice, there was already too much at stake in writing for Child-Parent Research Re-imagined. The book is an excellent collection and I'm pleased with my contribution. Of course everything has to be re-conceptualised, re-imagined or otherwise re-branded at the moment - but this is only a minor quibble because it is a great piece of scholarship. But neurodiversity doesn't get a look in, which is a shame. Another colleague of mine, Liz Barrett, has used the child-parent relationship in exploring this topic and to good effect, but my family context made this more complex - that, and my driving interest in how idiosyncratic meanings get made, re-made, and re-mixed across media. I had to be close up, intimate even, to read these meanings and to understand how they were forged. Researching en famille bestows these advantages, or at least that's what I argue. I got round some of the ethical issues by making a soft toy the focus of the piece and I really enjoyed playing with that idea. But since the last ten years have been a steep learning curve with respect to neurodiversity there's part of me that wants to come back to the topic. As I followed advice and edited out all the giveaway clues to neurodiversity in my piece of writing something inevitably got lost. It wasn't exactly neurodiversity that got lost, it was more the particularities of a specific relationship. That is a relationship that is coloured by neurodiversity but also one that comes after neurodiversity.

In lockdown

Covid-19 has impacted on so many things - too many to list. And as it has progressed a whole new vocabulary has sprung up in its wake. If words make worlds we are now in a place where lockdown, furlough, distancing, shielding and masks have new meanings and stand in for new forms of behaviour, and new ways of being social (or not). We are now governed differently and UK politics, abruptly wrenched away from the national sport of Brexit-baiting, has taken on a new role in people's lives. Politicians are telling us when to stay at home, when to wash our hands, what to wear and how to socialise. Such things would have been unthinkable this time last year. When the English radical William Goodwin wrote that 'Each man should be wise enough to govern himself, without the intervention of any compulsory restraint' he clearly didn't have plague or pandemic in mind. Nevertheless ideas about autonomy, personal liberty and social responsibility have all been reconfigured in recent months. Most of us have been keen to learn about 'what we are being told to do now' approaching it with some degree of credulity - variously moderated by critique, scepticism or silent resistance. In fact critique has probably been rather in abeyance in the UK. Perhaps the decent thing might be to just accept what we're told given the gravity of the situation. At least that seemed to be the national mood at the start. It's taken a few months for things to unravel. The rationalist appeal to 'follow the science' has taken a battering. Scientists and politicians make odd bedfellows. More recently the fallacy that there is one truth, the science has been exposed. After all England, the UK, could have done different things at different times. Could and did. And then even the most unscientific of us are beginning to realise that modelling is a complicated and contested business. Clapping the NHS and other key workers may be yesterday's news but the idea of a state that has some duty of care over its citizens shouldn't be allowed to pass so quickly. I remain committed to welfarism, and this pandemic has crystallised that simple fact for me. I want to live in a society that can look after all people as well as the environment that they inhabit. I'm not well versed in politics, but it strikes me that the amount of government we need should be dependent upon what is needed to enact those principles.

Fish, floating signifiers and WhatsApp

Online multimodal communication seems to thrive when it's easy to use and experiment with. It's one of the more attractive features of WhatsApp as a platform. Still and moving images are easy to pull in, links work well, and voice messages provide a useful alternative to typing. And of course it's so handy just to click on to an audio or video call. Compared with old school synchronous chat, exchanges are more coherent. That's because the way in which you can quickly quote solves the problem of chaotic multi-threaded conversations. All in all there's plenty to research in WhatsApp chat and the smooth interplay of media makes it a gift for multimodal analysis. It may be a generational effect that I'm a bit slow on emojis, but I'm learning. Animated gifs on the other hand have tended to leave me totally bemused. Bemused until yesterday when my daughter just slipped one into the chat as naturally as you might raise an eyebrow in talking with a friend. And given that she's been studying this sort of thing I asked some basic questions and from her answers a whole new territory opened out. Searching gifs is a rudimentary affair and most of them could be described as floating signifiers in that they only become meaningful in their immediate context of use or within a particular speech community. Her partner's group of buddies use this fish one regularly in their banter - when someone has taken the bite. And it's therefore quite something looking back over a string of exchanges that effortlessly mix communicative resources - and all in the playful arena of casual everyday meaning making, the laboratory of human communication.

The religion of science

There couldn't be a better time to believe in science, to trust that reading the RNA structure of Covid-19 is useful and to hope that a randomised control trial of immunisation will come up with a coronavirus vaccine that works. I trust the processes of medical science and through what little I know I also understand that those processes take time, and I'm prepared to wait. Broadly speaking I also believe what I'm told about the origins and transmission of the virus. Yet despite all this my faith in science is a cautious one because it must always be the case that science doesn't hold all the answers just as it doesn't ask all the questions. Making simple connections between truth, fact and scientific research can be intellectually lazy. The idea that something is right just because it wears the badge of 'scientific research' or because it studied a 'large population' has widespread appeal. And that appeal has been seized upon and cultivated by a generation of advertisers keen to convince us that 'a million housewives can't be wrong' (1967), that a particular brand of toothpaste protects us from decay, or that one sort of breakfast cereal is better for us than another. In this sense it's ridiculous that we should always 'follow the science'. Of course we need to evaluate it, to look at contradictory evidence and replication - but we also need to be aware of the values and assumptions that are its bedfellows as well as the work that evidence does as it combines and recombines with other forces. Scientific communities have developed reasonably good processes for dealing with some of these issues. The peer review system plays its part, but there is always room for improvement. Although it's hard to argue against knowledge sharing and open access, that all comes with some caution. If anyone can publish online or upload a YouTube video, how are we to assess the credibility of scientific claims as non-experts? Perhaps one way is to trust the scientific community on its own terms. We could also remind ourselves that claims are only ever claims, and that evidence is always - yes always, open to question. I want a Covid-19 vaccine more than I want a vitamin supplement or CBD, but I don't believe that those in white coats are the priests of a new religion. Any vaccine developed will be backed by powerful forces, it will be manufactured, and then distributed across similar networks to those that have contributed to the spread of the virus. And in an unequal world, suffering and its amelioration will be unevenly distributed, and there's a science in that, too.

It's not war

It's only natural to compare the new with the old, to compare new situations with those we've seen before. It gives a sense of perspective, bestowing some comfort and perhaps even a sense of optimism. But there's a limit. Comparing the current pandemic to the war exceeds that limit. For a start 'the war' - by which we mean WWII is now cultural history, a dim memory for an ever-diminishing group of people. Life in wartime, as represented in books and films, allows us to make our own sense of it.  It's easy to romanticise it. But however serious the threat, however great the human suffering this is quite different from wartime. Our enemy is not another nation to be manouevered into defeat or surrender. And our strategy should not evoke jingoistic hubris. Violence will not be involved. That cataclysmic European conflict earned its status as a
'world' war because it spread across continents but any reading of Covid-19 shows that it is truly global in scale. There are important differences. Unlike WWII it demands a global response. This is not about defeating a brutal racist regime but about managing and then outwitting an invasive virus - an organism on the borderland of life. This will be achieved through human collaboration not human conflict. The comparison between this situation and wartime should be swiftly quarantined before popular nationalism infects us once again.

Slides and datasets

These are strange times to be thinking about data. In the tightening grip of pandemic and amidst all the uncertainty there is a thirst for hard information, for the facts. But where should we look for them? As a nation we seem to have quickly turned to daily government briefings, gathering around our devices, reverting to older ways, putting our trust in media and the messages our political leaders broadcast. And what we hear is a mixture of science and politics with a liberal dose of affect management thrown in. It is a war, we are told, and we will win. Meanwhile the facts dance around in the background periodically taking shape as data - numbers, graphs, comparisons, trends, spikes, predictions and all the rest. On Monday they danced before us on PowerPoint (courtesy of Microsoft) as if to claim authority over the slippage between actual and reported cases, the distorting effects of testing, and over what actually counts as a death attributable to the virus. Controlling the pandemic will be about controlling the numbers, whichever way you look at it. Managing the response will be about managing the data. To say that data combine with government to enact power may sound suspiciously like some kind of postmodern denial but actually it just illuminates what data do and what science does. After all science is political, too. In this instance, data and science intermingle with a political view of the governance of human behaviour to encourage us to comply with official advice. Encourage is the key word here, and that's because we are a liberal democracy in which it is 'our problem' and by working together we will win, or so we are told. And of course we hope to be rewarded for our efforts with a change in the shape of the graph - what Boris calls 'squashing the sombrero'. Together we can change the data. Swifter intervention may have been a more effective approach but a politically and ideologically unpalatable one. It would also have involved thinking about data differently because stopping the spread looks very different to slowing it down. Whatever the outcome we are in a strange sort of lock down - strongly encouraged, open to interpretation and largely consensual. I hope we survive. Every Tuesday evening we allow ourselves 5 minutes of national release as we loudly applaud the NHS. Brexit seems like a dim memory. Now we all love the welfare state.

Two at a time

A long-established habit of mine is to have two books on the go at the same time. More often than not one of them will be fiction, but then that’s not always the case. Whatever the combination might be at any one time I often tend to find that the two different texts interact with one another in unpredictable ways. And what’s more their subject matter or themes can often connect with what I’m writing about in my professional life, and I suppose that’s down to the sense I’m actively making in the moment, as it were. Reason aside, it feels like a productive way of proceeding. But then there’s always room for exceptions, and the two I’ve just completed over the last few days have combined in altogether surprising ways and ways that don’t relate to anything I’m writing about at all. Michel Serres’ book Hominescence, which I commented on before, is a really engaging overview of those recent shifts that have led to a changed experience of what it means to be human, to be globally connected and to have become an all-powerful species on the planet. And then Europe: the first 100 million years, by palaeontologist Tim Flannery, traces the long and diverse history of fauna on our continent – including for example wisent, aurochs, elephants, big cats and a long succession of hominids and hybrids. Of course, Flannery works on a larger timescale in which periods of interdependence, species dominance and extinction move across the landscape of Europe like shadows cast by moving cloud. In some senses you could say that Hominescence expands on Flannery’s final chapters, and certainly some of Serres’ ethical considerations gain traction when we consider the variety of rewilding projects and ecological conundrums that are described in the Europe book. But what unites the two authors is actually a sense of optimism. Flannery is stronger on detail when it comes to climate change but he still believes that humans can turn things around. And although there’s a wistful tone to Serres’ recollections of pre-war France there’s still a strong commitment to the future possibilities of global connection. And now that very idea of inter-connected humanity comes to the fore when considering responses to the Coronavirus pandemic. It could well be a test case for hominescence. Can we work together across national and political boundaries to do what is best? Only time will tell. And in the meantime it’s a case of what to read next and that will become even more significant to me if we decide to increase social distance. What better way to spend the time; two at a time.

Meeting the King

The only time I met a king was when I was trekking in Zanskar in Northern India - and even that's not quite true because although his father was a king, Phunstok Dawa could not claim that rank. He wasn't that easy to track down. We picked our way through the rocky backstreets of old Padum and had to ask passers-by for directions on several occasions. When we eventually found him we were given a very warm welcome, invited into his house and served tea and biscuits. Phunstok had a joyful manner and relished the opportunity to reminisce about his past, recalling for our benefit a lifetime of encounters with intrepid English travellers, adventurers, researchers and even a BBC film crew. Most of this occurred before the road reached remote Padum and consequently quite a while before the advent of mass tourism. He told us that as a young man he had made some important friendships and asked us if we could help him track down some of them. We tried hard to memorise their names but because of language and accent we were never exactly sure whether we'd got it right. I remember jotting down some possible names in a notebook and promising that I'd try my best. Phunstok had email and by walking down to the internet cafe in the newer part of the town he could use it, but he wasn't entirely confident that he could remember the address. As it turned out he probably got it wrong, but that's a longer story. Back home in England I tried a number of searches with little success. In amongst the names was someone, perhaps associated with the West Country or Bristol, whose surname was Crowther, Crowley or Crowden and he lay claim to being the first European to spend the winter in Zanskar since the Hungarian linguist Cosma de Koros! Cosma was there in 1826 working on the first dictionary of the Tibetan language (incidentally you can still visit the place where he stayed and it's a particularly remote perch overlooking a deep valley). Anyway after several attempts I located someone - just about the right sort of age - an author and poet by the name of James Crowden and that turned out to be our man. He was quick to get back on email and we worked out that it was nearly 45 years since his long stay in Zanskar! I remember saying that I hoped he'd write it all up and he soon got back to say that he was working on it. James also planned to go out and visit Phunstok, but I don't know whether he's managed to do that yet. But the good news is that the book is now in print. It's called The Frozen River: Seeking silence in the Himalaya. Phunstok is an educated man, a former teacher and I hope he gets to see a copy! I have fond memories of meeting 'the king'.