Why do we reflexively include a woman in an artistic rendering of a kitchen?

In this blog entry, Krista Jenkins, author of  Mothers, Daughters, and Political Socialization: Two Generations at an American Women’s College addresses how women’s roles have changed–or not–over the decades.

I’m endlessly interested in the state of gender relations in the 21^st century. The women’s movement remains with us, but its revolutionary panache has dissipated as gender equality sounds more passé than novel. Women are encouraged to live lives unconstrained by traditional gender roles, and yet when it comes to who does the lion’s share of domestic work even in households with working moms, it’s the women who remain the go to sex for cooking, cleaning, chauffeuring, school volunteering, and the like. Look at the statistics. A recent Pew Research and American Time Use Survey found that within dual income households, working women spend almost twice as many hours engaged in housework and child care than their spouses or partners.

Not a big believer in stats? Ok, then consider the following: Back in April of 2010, Time Magazine included an article entitled “The Hazards Lurking at Home.” The story was about environmental toxins found in everyday household items, and was accompanied by a drawing of a home. Each room had items to identify its purpose, such as a crib in a baby’s room and television in the family room. The kitchen had the obvious items – refrigerator and sink, for example, but it also had a woman. The takeaway from this? Kitchens are unthinkable without a woman firmly ensconced in its environs.

So, what gives? If we’re almost four decades since the heyday of the modern women’s movement and women can be found in areas of life that were virtually unthinkable a generation ago, why does  a glass ceiling persist? Why are women disproportionately absent from certain high paying and high powered professions? Why do women with ambitious career goals choose to walk away once children arrive?  Why does dinosaur-ish behavior in the form of discrimination and harassment remain a part of the workplace for so many? And why do we reflexively include a woman in an artistic rendering of a kitchen?

To answer these questions, I did what social scientists often don’t do. That is, look at the forces in an individual’s life that are operative at the micro level. “Large N” surveys are the tool that’s most often used to examine the how and why behind a variety of political and social phenomenon. Although an invaluable tool, all too often we overlook what goes on at the micro level which, in the case of my book, means the influence of a mother on her daughter’s political development. Or, more specifically, what I consider in my book Mothers, Daughters and Political Socialization: Two Generations at an American Women’s College is the extent to which a mother influences whether her daughter accepts or rejects traditional gender roles.

My research is based on 23 paired interviews with mothers and daughters, both of whom attended the same women’s college a generation apart. They were selected because 1) their experiences at a women’s college should have made them especially receptive to the tenets of the women’s movement and 2) the mothers came from a cohort who were interviewed 25 years earlier while they were college undergraduates and experiencing the women’s movement during the peak of its heyday.

Ultimately, what I find is that mothers play an important role in how their daughters approach their understanding of gender roles. So, for example, I find a good amount of consistency between how a mother approached questions of professional and maternal responsibilities and how her daughter envisions her own life unfolding. If, despite her early career ambitions, a mother decided that caregiving was preferable for a variety of reasons to pursuing her professional goals, it was likely that her daughter would echo similar sentiments in her long term planning. This is just one of the interesting insights that I discovered through speaking with these smart, engaged, and verbose women.

Also considered is the role of coming of age during different political climates which, for the mothers, was an environment steeped in a revolutionary ethos while, for the daughters, post-feminism reigns. However, a central takeaway from my book is simply this: When it comes to the acceptance or rejection of traditional gender norms in one’s life, the apple doesn’t fall from the tree.

Mourning the loss of a pioneer of women’s history

Temple University Press is saddened to learn of the passing of women’s historian Gerda Lerner. In honor of Dr. Lerner, we are re-posting this interview from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Political Engagement as Therapy for the Intellect

By Danny Postel for The Chronicle of Higher Education, 3 May 2002

The writing of one’s life can offer an “explanatory myth” at worst and an “entertaining tale” at best, says Gerda Lerner, a professor emerita of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

In Fireweed: A Political Autobiography (Temple University Press), she recounts the prehistory of her career in what she calls the “intellectual revolution” of women’s history, a field on which she left a pioneering mark with such works as The Woman in American History (1971), The Creation of Patriarchy (1986), and The Creation of Feminist Consciousness (1993).

Q: You grew up in Austria in the 1920s and ’30s. How did that experience influence the development of your political consciousness?
A: From an early age, I experienced revolution, counterrevolution, military occupation, and fascism. I was imprisoned, I was a hostage—I lived in great danger. I was essentially struggling for my life. Living through this makes you very much aware of politics as a force in life and of the need to struggle for human rights.

Q: After the war, in America, you were active in the Communist Party for a time and then left. You write that it took you some years “to think [your] way out, not of one political movement only, but out of Marxism, the theory.”
A: There was a period when, though I was disillusioned with the Communist Party, I was still a Marxist. Then, after 1958, when I began to study academically, I began to have serious problems with the doctrine in regard to women. It was my feminism that made me realize that Marxism was wrong.

Q: You went many decades without publicly discussing this chapter in your life, the Communist years. Why now?
A: Well, I’m 81 years old—when am I going to do it if not now? I felt uneasy about evading the issue based on fear. I felt that I owed it to myself and to the people who have learned from me and respect me to tell them the whole story. And I feel that there is something to be learned from my story.

Q: What, exactly, would you say that is?
A: That active political engagement is good for thinking. If you are engaged in the world, you have a way of testing your thinking. I tested Marxist thought. It didn’t work.

Q: At the very end of the book, you say that for many years you felt that you had nothing to apologize for, but you go on to say that you feel differently about this now. Why the change?
A: We learned things that we did not know at the time. I defended the Hitler-Stalin pact [over which thousands of Communists left the party] at the time, and I’m sorry I did. The decisions I made in my life seemed to have a good logic then, even if 60 years later, that logic may not stand up.

 

Lamp Lighters and Seed Sowers: Tomorrow’s YA

In this blog entry, Beth Kephart, author of Flow and the forthcoming Dr. Radway’s Sarsaparilla Resolvent, provides the keynote address she gave at the Publishing Perspectives Conference, “YA: What’s Next” held recently at the Scholastic auditorium in New York City.

Illustrations by William R. Sulit

In the days following the colossal storm called Sandy, stories held us captive, terrifying aerial views, the news that began to leak in from friends. Trash bags strapped on like shiny boots, brand-new adults walked through rising fumes and fresh flotsam, looking for signs of ordinary life. Heartbroken by saturated eggplants and devastated garden fruits, they crouched to gather seeds.

Asking What can we do?, they collected blankets, baked tins of lasagna, emptied their personal libraries of books and took their spontaneous gifts into darkened neighborhoods. Meanwhile, the 19-year-old Rutgers student who lost both her parents to a capsized tree and will now raise three younger siblings on her own, was reaching into some impossible well of suddenly-now-adultness to help others suffering the ravages of weather.

We live in a new world, a Sandy-Irene-Katrina world. A world of fiscal cliffs and residual recessions. A world in which the College Board advocates for a Common Core curriculum that asks that 70% of the 12th grade reading list feature nonfiction titles. A world in which the kids who were raised to win are now making their way among winnowing resources, and singing, top of their lungs, We’re gonna die young.

What happened to the promises we made, and to the promises we ourselves believed? What happened to the perceived value of stories? What can we still give to those whose lives haven’t fully begun?

I don’t mean to politicize stories, but I am going to argue for their radical significance in this fragile stretch of time. I’m going to argue, specifically, on behalf of stories written for young adults and Generation Y. What is the future of Young Adult literature? That is the question. We can adopt the pose of forecasters here—pick and choose among genres, speculate, place bets—or we can build the scaffolding for the kind of stories good sense demands we leave behind.

I am biased and fervent. I have opinions and needs. There are kids I happen to love. Kids who follow my blog and profess their dreams with enviable certitude. Kids who crowd into my too-small memoir classroom at the University of Pennsylvania to learn the power of telling, and reading, the truth. Kids who travel far and inconveniently to meet other kids just like themselves — reader/writer kids taking rare advantage of a hodgepodge workshop.

I feel a personal responsibility to these kids when I write my own YA novels—to make room for them inside my landscapes, to instill in them compassion and empathy, to entertain them not just with plot but with ideas, to teach them something of the past, to suggest wisdom and value difference, to introduce places they’ve not yet seen, to invite them to declare themselves. Nothing is altogether black and little is crystalline.

The stories we write for young adults must, I think, be enlivened and also tested by all that percolates and yearns in between. They must come from a moral place, from writers who seek to do more than self-indulgently dazzle their Crayola-hued imaginations on a wavering literary line. They must, ultimately, be perceived as powerfully relevant and life-shaping as anything we might call fact.

We are a globe on the verge, I’m saying, and because we are, mere entertainment for mere entertainment’s sake — for mere (forgive me) profit — strikes me as an increasingly unviable platform. Literature as easy distraction, literature as untempered horror, literature as gossip, literature as desolation, literature as isolation, literature as sensationalism, literature that leaves us stooped, numb, incinerated, angry, distracted, glassy-eyed, New Jersey Shored (and I am referring the show), and emotionally paralyzed: Do we honestly have time for this now? The future of Young Adult literature, I believe, is directly and profoundly tied to the future of young adults. It is bound, to borrow from Jay Asher and Carolyn Macker, to the future of us.

There’s a reason why Patricia McCormick, with her riveting, poetic novels Cut, Sold, Purple Heart, and Never Fall Down, is not just an award-winner but an iconic force in YA today. It’s not because her books are well-meaning. It’s because they have actual meaning. It’s not because they didactically teach — about self-abuse, about child sex slavery, about Cambodian genocide, say — it’s that they engage, they make us care, they make us want to step up or step in.

They galvanize.

There’s a reason, likewise, that John Corey Whaley’s debut novel, Where Things Come Back, won so many awards and turned its young author into an insta-star. Because it’s brilliantly odd. Because it’s fantastically germane. Because it is about a search to know and overcome in a woodpeckers-are-going-extinct-and-parents-are-losing-their-way world.

Eliot Schrefer is winning accolades with his new novel Endangered because it is a novel elevated — concerned with a ravaged Congo and the helpless beasts caught in the war, brave enough to depict a young girl who learns what happens when she chooses to save something bigger than herself, when she understands herself to be larger and more capable than she might have thought. Eliot’s Sophie is navigating the world we’ve made, the world we wish we weren’t leaving behind. She has the opportunity to turn the tides with a singular act of courage. And so Endangered both alerts and moves us.

Ruta Sepetys’ new book, Out of the Easy (due out in February) is destined to soar because it takes us on a journey with a prostitute’s daughter in 1950s New Orleans who sure as hell wants a better life for herself, a girl who knows that better means books and education and learning tapped out of unexpected places.

A.S. King’s Ask the Passengers is getting named to this year’s best of lists because it asks readers to forswear boxes and labels and to see what happens when you catapult love into the world. Elizabeth Wein with her plucky, smart, history-saturated, we-will-defy-the-odds-or-at-least-go-down-vividly-trying Code Name Verity is a celebration of truth in friendship. It’s a World War II story that feels entirely right now. It gives its heroines opportunities to decide who they will be at the very worst of times.

And why is Lois Lowry still as relevant today as she was when she first created a type of story that has now been branded dystopian? Because Lowry’s dystopian landscapes teach us about the world in which we live. They teach us about the responsibility of knowing and the salve of empathy, something she calls veering. They suggest that teens abandon familiar places and established rules in search not only of what could be better, but of what could be made better. Lowry’s teens don’t simply harness power. They find it within themselves.

William Alexander’s Goblin Secrets — not, strictly speaking, a YA book but the winner of this year’s National Book Awards prize for young people’s literature — may be viewed as a particularly prescient precursor of the future as well — a magical, fantastical, steampunk story that, for all its revving inventions, for all its brilliant hues, is a story about a civilization working to stem off both evil and the obliterating force of floods. It’s about Staten Island, Long Beach Island, Queens, if we think about it. Desolation is on its way. What can, and will, young Rownie do?

Finally, let’s face the facts about Mr. John Green and Mr. David Levithan, as close to a YA Lit Rock Stars as they come. We don’t have to wonder why they’re loved; we know. John Green and David Levithan are loved because they are writing about love, and because they show their couple zillion vocal fans that love is the smartest version of cool.

These books—and of course there are others, for we are talent blessed in our lit world—are the books of right now, but they are also, I believe, the books of our future. They’re the books that transcend genres, age groups, and socio-economic lines, the books that have not been label-reduced or ghetto-ized, the books whose people and landscapes—real or imagined, historical or fantastical — have been rendered alive, authentic, urgent. They’re the books that, ten or twenty years from now, will take their place alongside The Book Thief, The Giver, The House on Mango Street, To Kill a Mockingbird, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, The Call of the Wild, The Outsiders — on a bookshelf, in a Kindle, on a smartphone — as classics. They’re the books that have something to say, in other words, and not simply a story to tell.

The YA books of the future will — if we’re smart, if we harness our resources, if fiction still has a central place in public school curricula, if we are still free to want and free to read—be like the best of what is being written and published today. Which is to say intelligent and searching. Original and impassioned. Lit from within and motivated by a desire to start a conversation about what it means to be alive, what it means to choose, what it means to controvert the status quo, what it means to lead, what it means to yearn, what it means to be different, what it means to get along, what it means to take a stand, what it means to hope.

The YA books of the future will give rise and shape to the generation whose job it has become to fix the mess we’re in.

Call me naïve. Call me idealistic. Call me helplessly immune to the ways of commerce, to the power of trends, to the rules and regulations of the 140-character Tweet. You will not, I promise, be the first to accuse.

But I’m looking out my window these days, and I’m thinking about my kids. I’m thinking about dying woodpeckers, sick-making wars, wrung-out-eco-systems, the ceaseless battles of self-interested legislators, the jobs that aren’t, the families that are suffering. I’m thinking about a 19-year-old Rutgers student who is suddenly mom, dad, provider.

I’m thinking that politics aren’t working so well, and that our planet and our children need us, and that our stories, meticulously made, can still be the cure.

Beth Kephart’s fourteenth novel, Small Damages (Philomel), takes place in southern Spain and received starred rePreviewviews. She blogs daily at www.beth-kephart.blogspot.com and is at work on a novel set in Florence.

Expressing serious fears about our energy

Sherry Cable, author of Sustainable Failures  explains why we need to make some serious plans about our energy future.

I can hardly wait until this presidential election is over and done with. Yes, I’m tired of campaign advertisements. Yes, I’m tired of reciprocal mud-slinging. And yes, I’m tired of wondering about the real news I’m missing while the newshawks re-hash their campaign rehashes from the day before. But, mostly? I’m tired of not hearing anything realistic, thoughtful, long-range, or detailed about energy policy and our energy future.

Because I’m really worried. Not to sound like Chicken Little, but coal is killing us – some of us more quickly than others – and oil is running out. Natural gas is pitched as the answer to our national prayers – but is it? We need to make some serious plans about our energy future.

Energy is the first priority for economic expansion, which is related to higher standards of living, which is or can be related to greater equity. We meet the bulk of our energy needs with nonrenewable fossil fuels: the United States consumes over 19 million barrels of oil and tons of coal and natural gas every day.

Coal is burned to generate electricity and heat; it is liquefied to produce diesel fuel. Coal extraction is associated with loss of biodiversity, land subsidence, acid rain, soil erosion, occasional but catastrophic toxic flooding from failed slurry dams, water pollution from acid mine drainage, high-level releases of methane that contribute to stratospheric ozone destruction, and air and water contamination from lead, mercury, and arsenic. Black lung is not uncommon among coal miners.

Coal is the most toxic fossil fuel to burn. Coal combustion produces more than 80 percent of the nation’s atmospheric sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. It’s also associated with air and water contamination from trace elements of radium and uranium, releasing thousands of times more radioactive particles into the atmosphere per unit of energy produced than a normally operating nuclear power plant. Air is polluted from dust emissions, carbon dioxide, sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter. Mercury particles contaminate land and water. The greenhouse gases emitted in coal combustions are a major contributor to global warming. And air pollution from coal combustion kills thousands of people each year, contributes to at least 50,000 cases of respiratory disease, and results in several billion dollars in property damage. 

As regulations increasingly restrict stack emissions to reduce air pollution, coal combustion pollutants accumulate in the solid waste disposal stream – more than 130 million tons of solid wastes each year. If coal’s health and environmental costs were internalized in the market cost, and if government subsidies from mining were removed, coal would be so expensive that it would be replaced (Harper 2008). Concerns about the environmental and health impacts of coal extraction and combustion have led to policies that are (slowly) moving the nation away from coal-fired electric generating plants.

But what really makes our economic world go ‘round is oil, the nation’s primary source for energy and fuels. It is also the source of petrochemicals, used to manufacture three pillars of society: pesticides, plastics, and pharmaceuticals.

One oil drilling platform normally drills about 85 wells and discharges into the ocean more than 90,000 metric tons of drilling fluid, carcinogens such as benzene, and metal cuttings of lead, chromium, and mercury. Flaring, the burning off of oil, produces black carbon which contributes to global warming.

And then there are the oil spills. The 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill oozed out over 900 square miles, killing marine mammals and sea birds, closing fisheries, and prodding Congress to pass the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 to provide funds for cleanup. The act said nothing about spilling the oil in the first place. The largest oil spill in U.S. history began in April 2010 with an explosion and fire that killed 11 workers. By the time the well was capped three months later, approximately five million barrels of crude oil had seeped into the Gulf of Mexico.

Oil combustion releases suspected carcinogens cadmium, arsenic, nickel, chromium, beryllium, lead, selenium, and tellurium. Emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides produce acid rain. Exhaust from vehicle emissions and gas vapors combine with sunlight to form smog. And carbon dioxide emissions cause global warming.

Oil’s future? Pretty bleak. Oil supplies are diminishing and, eventually, it will be gone. We can argue about how soon oil will run out, but it’s inevitable that it will. But severe problems will arise even before oil runs out, when the global production of oil peaks. Peak oil production refers to the point at which half of existing oil reserves are gone and the remainder increasingly difficult to extract profitably or at the same pace. Peak oil is estimated to occur between 2016 and 2030. Ouch.

Now we plan to frack our way out of the mess. Natural gas burns cleaner than coal and oil and emits fewer greenhouse gases, it’s cheap to develop, and it’s plentiful here in the US of A which could make us less energy dependent on other nations.

But fracking – horizontal hydraulic fracturing – poses two problems. First, although fracking is a dirty process, regulation of it is haphazard. Huge amounts of water mixed with sand and chemicals including diesel fuel are injected under high pressure into shale rock to break up rock formations and hold open the shale layers to release natural gas. Leakage of uncombusted natural gas from wellheads and pipelines releases methane, a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Residents in the vicinity of fracking wells complain of water contamination caused by the disposal method typically used for wastewater from fracking: injecting it into the ground. A few fracking well neighbors claim that their tap water flames when lit because of the presence of methane. Some scientists have even associated fracking operations with small earthquakes. Yet no federal regulatory standards exist, leaving it to individual states.

The second problem posed by fracking is that the future of reliance on natural gas is unclear. Natural gas could be just the ticket – it could serve as a cheap and effective transition to the development and use of a variety of renewable energy sources. Or, natural gas could serve as yet another excuse to retain energy short-sightedness.

Hence, my frustration with the presidential candidates and my worries about our energy future. Candidate Mitt Romney advocates more oil exploration, faster permitting, and state control of exploration on federal lands. And now even President (candidate) Obama is willing to drill, baby, drill.

Shouldn’t we be conserving our nonrenewable energy resources and developing renewable resources? The policies we have aren’t about conserving non-renewable energy resources – they’re about continuing to exploit those resources. There is no meaningful energy policy – only economic policy, with only short-term planning.

<sigh>

Oh, well. Let’s ditch the news and watch a re-run of a re-run of 30 Rock.

How Can We Sing at a Time Like This?

Mark Pedelty, author of Ecomusicology, writes about the United Nations Environment Programme, and how he came to write about rock, folk, and the environment.

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is using music to increase environmental awareness. The Music and Environment Initiative is predicated on the belief that “Music is one of the most powerful media to communicate environmental messages to billions of people worldwide—irrespective of race, religion, income, gender or age” (unep.org). Participants range from the project’s official “Patron,” Benin’s Angelique Kidjo, to the giant rock festival Lollapalooza.

In Ecomusicology: Rock, Folk, and the Environment I examine popular music as it relates to ecological crises on local, regional, national, and global scales. It was tempting to focus on the most problematic examples, like Live Earth, but hopefully, the tone remains reasonably optimistic as I also highlight examples like Pete Seeger, Jack Johnson, Mos Def, Ani DiFranco, producer Mike Martin, and musical communities around the world (See also Ecomusicology.net). These artists recognize that positive pleasure is more likely to change environmental practices and policies than fear tactics. Projects like UNEP’s Music and Environment Initiative provide such optimism, the hope that popular music can do more than sell beer, cars, tickets, and sex, as if any of those things really need promoting (well, tickets might).

Global projects and movements like UNEP’s Music and Environment Initiative provide hope that the popular arts will be up to the task of dealing with global environmental crises. Of course, as South Park’s young activists discovered in “Die Hippy Die,” it takes more than a rock festival to change the world, and there are as many contradictions in stadium rock concerts as there are answers. Nevertheless, UNEP’s efforts indicate that musicians, producers, and policy makers are facing global environmental problems in earnest. At the national and global levels, movements are afoot to make musical production and performance more sustainable, to use music as environmental communication and inspiration, and to remind us that, for better or worse, music is always “environmental” whether it references rainforest destruction, trashes a field in rural New York, or evokes images of young lovers singing to each other in a Volkswagen.

Rather than the national and global, it is local music that I worry about, perhaps needlessly. After all, ethnography is not a generalizable science. What the ethnographer experiences in one locale is not necessarily true for other places. Unfortunately, in my little corner of the earth, the Twin Cities of Minnesota, it is hard to find music making reference to environmental problems. Not that I expect everyone to be singing songs about environmental crises and solutions, but rather that the conspicuous lack of such connections in musical meaning, performance, or movement makes one wonder what’s gone wrong? For millennia, local music has been intimately connected to the places where we live, we love, and bother to protect (from ourselves). What does it mean when such time honored musical connections are severed?

Local bands and producers are interested in environmental questions, but given how hard it is to make a living making local music, it is understandable how little effort is made to align local art with ecological interest. As in America’s domestic policy, the priority of maintaining a growing economy preempts all other interests, especially long-term sustainability and biodiversity. The most fundamental economy—ecology in the biological sense of the term—is rendered esoteric in that magical thinking mindset.

One can hardly blame local musicians or producers for ignoring environmental matters. Like the rest of us, they have to first make a living before they are able to think about relative luxuries, like making a positive difference (i.e., beyond selling drinks, merchandise, and tickets). Many local musicians express interest in environmental matters, even if they are frustrated when trying to do something about it. The solution lies more with the rest of us, audiences and consumers. As long as that is all we are, active audiences and passive consumers, rather than music makers in our own right, local music will be impoverished. Popular music is too often viewed as a hand-to-mouth (or voice-to-ear) form of consumption as opposed to the fundamental act of human creativity and communication it is. Through music, people gain connection to community, culture, and place.

The Honk! music movement and others like it around the world provide useful models for everyone who is willing to pick up and instrument and/or their voice and get involved. UNEP, recognizing the importance of place in the environmental movement, cites not only big name acts and events, but also creative local acts like the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra. These examples might inspire acts of musical courage on the local level: creative, ecological, and different. As Simon Frith points out, it is not so important that we have local versions of big time, global musics. He argues that it is important “to support not just one’s own local music, but also ‘local’ music in general, ‘different’ music wherever it comes from” (23). Given global digital integration, the entire planet, as well as its smaller places, have become part of everyone’s virtual experience.

However, our local material and community ecologies remain the best interlocutors into environmental problems on a global scale. As we walk through the world with ears in pods and eyes on screens, we are still physically in a place where material connections and disconnections matter, literally. Somewhere in that interface between global and local lives lies a promise for more meaningful musics and more biodiverse and sustainable ecologies. Thanks go out to The United Nations Environment Programme’s Music and Environment Initiative for reminding us of music’s potential to improve our collective lives, places, and planet. 

Frith, Simon. “Popular Music and the Local State.” Rock and Popular Music: Politics, Policies, Institutions. Ed. Tony Bennett, et al. New York: Routledge, 1993. 14-24.

Academia now operates more like a corporation than an ivory tower.

Losing Our Faculties

The Fall of The Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and why it Matters. Benjamin Ginsberg. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Under New Management: Universities, Administrative Labor, and the Professional Turn. Randy Martin. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011.

The Production of Living Knowledge: The Crisis of the University and the Transformation of Labor in Europe and North America. Gigi Roggero (trans. Enda Brophy). Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011.

Reviewed by James M. Saslow

---

It’s hardly news that academia is in perpetual crisis, but to judge from a spate of recent books, we’ve reached a tipping point. The latest books on the state of higher education evoke both sadness and anger, particularly for a gray-bearded baby boomer with enough historical perspective to remember when everyone respectfully called my boyhood friend’s father, a professor at a tiny local liberal arts school, Doctor Rockwood. When I went off to an ivy-covered Gothic Revival campus, the stained-glass windows glowed with the quasi-sacred dignity of the life of the mind, and the soaring arches seemed the portal to a fulfilling life of thoughtful and cosmopolitan citizenship.

As that quaint vision recedes, critics of higher education fall into two camps: those who believe that the university has shortchanged society and those who think that society has shortchanged the university. The books surveyed here align with the latter faction. Their common core is an urgent wake-up call to the subversion and usurpation of faculty power and autonomy. While acknowledging that our syndrome has many symptoms, most focus on one cluster: the professoriate’s progressive loss of authority over curriculum, hiring, tenure, and promotion; over institutional purpose; and over our own working conditions. The authors range in tone from impassioned political analysis (Randy Martin) to ironic bemusement (Benjamin Ginsberg). Ginsberg provides frequent anecdotes from his own experience, while Gigi Roggero eschews examples for a jargon-heavy and historiographic but blistering sociological critique. All concur that academia, once widely treasured for its perch above worldly pressures, now operates more like a corporation than an ivory tower.

These diagnosticians probe three sore points: power, ideas, and money. First is the mushrooming of powerful administrators and their creeping takeover of the higher education agenda. This is Ginsberg’s strong suit: The Fall of the Faculty brims with absurdist cynicism over managerial bloat that has come at the expense of actual teaching. He labels these newly created administrators “deanlets”: professional managers who often do not come from an academic background and thus favor public relations over pedagogy.

In the region of ideas, according to Ginsberg, what hurts are the sweeping changes in curriculum and teaching, mainly toward vocational courses and instructional technology, initiated by those deanlets in response to outside pressures. The debate is between education and training: is college an apprenticeship for informed public participation or a store selling competitive private credentials? The pain lies not only in the changes themselves—which reflect a major shift in public perception of education—but in the fact that it is no longer educators who decide what students should know, as opposed to what the business model wants them to know (or not know).

As for money matters, business forces are restructuring the college workplace, aiming to turn the ivory tower into a factory. Salaries stagnate even as demands increase for accountability, spawning time-consuming forms and reports and the dreaded insistence on “outcomes assessment.” And that’s for those with a “real” job. The drastic reduction in tenured positions has reached the point where, at my school, more than half of all classes are taught by adjuncts.

What needs to be understood, if any headway is to be made in countering these trends, is that this infection in the US academy is but one outbreak of a broader epidemic: the penetration of American society by the values and methods of the increasingly global, late-capitalist social-economic order. Roggero’s analysis of mounting inequality in labor relations uncovers similar processes in Europe and Israel. Wherever they look, these authors find the same problems, and they use common terms for understanding this brave new world:

• Privatization: The transfer of universally accessible public services into the realm of private enterprise for profit, largely through cuts in government budgets.
• Corporatization: The increasing tendency to define every enterprise as if it were a profit-making corporation competing for a market of consumers. Hence colleges, like beer or baseball, strive for brand recognition, bragging rights, and customer satisfaction.
• Managerialism: The mode of organization intended to maximize productivity in all sectors of an enterprise by coordinated oversight and evaluation based on unquestioning faith in quantifiable “outcomes.” In the interest of efficient control, governing structures are hierarchical, bureaucratized, and secretive.
• Deprofessionalization: A new attitude toward specialized knowledge, which aims to discredit or eliminate all independent expertise and subject it to management-generated criteria. Insurance companies now overrule doctors; deanlets ignore faculty recommendations.
• Contingent labor: The result of the transformation of jobs that once promised full long-term employment into part-time positions adjustable to changing demand. Martin calls this process “casualization,” underscoring “the minimal commitment of institution to employee.”
• Precaritization: The deliberate creation of permanent insecurity and anxiety among workers by cutting jobs and reducing salaries along with health care, pensions, and other benefits. See also: proletarianization, Dickensian, social pathology.

This new regime is repugnant to academics not only for self-interested economic reasons but also viscerally, because it blasphemes the values and practices of the university, traditionally conceived as a service to the common good. Deconstructing the battles over workplace culture reveals profoundly different goals, philosophies, and worldviews. Just ask yourself which side you favor in James Truslow Adams’s venerable adage, “There are two types of education: one teaches you how to make a living, the other teaches you how to live.”

That difference is between two models of human interaction and power relations—the corporate and the cooperative—which embody mutually hostile conceptions of human nature and potential. The hierarchical, mechanistic managers mistrust every individual as fallen, lazy, and selfish; they seek power over the anarchic masses. In contrast, the idea of a college—a term, like colleague and collegial, rooted in “bound together” for common purpose—is collective and communitarian. It is grounded in the belief that people are basically good and should be given power to bring out—“e-duce”—their unique potentials, thus maximizing the shared welfare of all. In this guild paradigm, one is a long-term, active member, not an alienated part-timer, and a faculty, whose integrity is safeguarded by our commitment as an honorable “profession” (a religious term) to maintaining public trust, is granted autonomy and influence based on its specialized expertise.

Most academics I know have some sense of that “vocation,” of being called to a higher purpose. We wear the same robes as our clerical forebears when celebrating our secular priesthood of knowledge and reason. But for preaching that education is for public citizenship, not private productivity, we are now besieged by an inquisition-cum–hostile takeover. The managerial strategy is to surround and blockade, cutting off all aid and supplies to propel surrender in the face of starvation. For the ivory tower, that means choking off public funds, stripping us of the robes of authority, and undermining public sympathy for the professoriate, represented as a bunch of expensive, meddlesome, and unaccountable slackers.

Examinations of academia are often long on diagnosis and short on treatment. What do these researchers prescribe? Ginsberg is pessimistic about the future; both he and Martin seek to balance adjustments that both faculty and administration might reasonably make. All three offer a limited menu of suggestions, which probably have mixed chances of success. Mary Burgan, in her 2006 book What Ever Happened to the Faculty, usefully introduced two principal arenas of action—college governance institutions and labor unions—and all of the authors under consideration here take professors to task for their disengagement from faculty senates, committees, and other sites that offer at least some platform for both meaningful cooperation and resistance. They’re right. Most of us avoid such service—and not only because we know that despite lip service to “community,” it won’t get you tenure. Many are bitterly frustrated to discover that their local managerial juggernaut is already unstoppable. I once chaired a task force to investigate whether faculty were unduly pressured into, and inequitably rewarded for, prestige research—even as our president was planning to ratchet up those demands. In our campus survey, most felt teaching and service deserved greater weight, and I duly reported the junior faculty’s message that, if quotas increased, they would seek work elsewhere. Madame President’s blunt reply: “Let them try. There’s nowhere else to go.” Such snarling realpolitik is engendering a rise in union activism: if they are going to treat us like labor, we need to respond like labor.

Most of the proposals offered by these authors are well intentioned but small bore. We can’t solve the structural problems of higher education within the gates of our own quad; our only hope is to change priorities in society at large, ultimately a political task. Faculty unions have already marched with labor coalitions to demand our shared goal of economic justice, as my City University of New York group did recently. But educators also face a more abstract lobbying challenge unique to our job description. Martha C. Nussbaum’s eloquent defense of traditional liberal arts in Not for Profit argues (in the publisher’s pithy blurb) that “we must resist efforts to reduce education to a tool of the gross national product. Rather, we must work to reconnect education to the humanities in order to give students the capacity to be true democratic citizens of their countries and the world.” Amen—but how do we “broadcast our pitch” past the corporate-sponsored and radically segmented mass media? How can we convince our students, legislators—indeed, anyone who will listen—that knowledge is not a product, college is not an assembly line, and students are not just future worker bees? For what is at stake in the current academic wars is, quite starkly, the nature of our still nominally democratic society.

It is clear from these books that, if the present disease metastasizes, our national prognosis is cancerous inequality of education, wealth, political agency, and overall opportunity, squeezing the mass of citizens closer to the desperate misery that drove a Tunisian fruit vendor to set off last year’s Arab Spring by immolating himself. Our society is increasingly sacrificing the long-term future of all, disinvesting in sources of public well-being like education while enabling huge short-term profits for a few. Perhaps this backward step is feeding the current pop-culture fascination with the vampire: an unfeeling aggressor who sucks the lifeblood out of others so it can feast forever. There’s a name for such societies: “banana republic.” A good working definition, adapted from the one offered by the late social critic Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair, is a country operated as a commercial enterprise for private profit, reinforced by collusion between the state and favored corporations, through which the profits from private exploitation of public resources remain private property and the debts incurred become public responsibility. Because of corporate manipulation, the government is unaccountable to its citizens, and the legislature is for sale and functions mostly as a ceremonial rubber-stamp.

Sound familiar? That’s why so many people occupied Wall Street (and beyond) last fall, trying to broadcast the pitch that the corporate-technocratic 1 percent are stealthily entrenching a system in which no one will be able to challenge their greedy domination. They have already driven America’s universities, once a magnet for students from around the world, down the path toward becoming underfunded, micromanaged trade schools that fewer and fewer can afford. Soon the 99 percent won’t have any education in the full sense, not to mention a secure job or social safety net, that might enable them to look up from the struggle for survival and survey the causes of their plight. How ironic that, in a nation whose political rhetoric and institutions are unusually religious, the elite should be so contemptuous of Judeo-Christian ideals of equality, charity, and brotherly love. There are no Good Samaritans on Wall Street. Unchecked, they will transmute faculty into “human capital,” students from citizens into robots and consumers—all sucked dry, by ceaseless worry and crisis, of the energy for social activism. Anyone else remember the chilling line from Star Trek, intoned by the bionic Borg invaders? “Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.”

While writing this, I turned sixty-four, which summoned to mind the old Beatles song: “Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty-four?” Four decades ago, I eagerly donned the pipe-and-tweed habit of what was then a respected confraternity, but the new abbots of that monastery, rebranded as a McJob-training center, don’t need or want us outdated veterans. As for feeding, my oft-frozen salary keeps shrinking with inflation, and impoverished younger coworkers (no longer “colleagues,” being adjuncts) have no place else to go.

Though sixty-four isn’t so old today, I yearn to retire as soon as my precarious 401(k) may permit. I can’t bear any longer my front-row seat at the relentless boxing match between the corporate deanlets and us dwindling holdouts. They haven’t yet scored a final knockout, but we’ve been up against the ropes for years, continually punch-drunk from the latest dictatorial, wrong-headed, or merely superfluous “innovation” that management keeps jabbing at faculty. I used to be an honored professional, with valued expertise and integrity certified by peers. Now educators, like everyone else, are being beaten down to lazy unreliables who must be monitored and kept hungry and ignorant of everything outside our assigned task. I only hope we still have strength enough to fight off these pandemic assaults.

James M. Saslow is professor of art history, theater, and Renaissance studies at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He has lectured and published widely on sexuality and gender in Renaissance culture and is the author of four books, including Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality and the Visual Arts. His e-mail address is james.saslow@qc.cuny.edu.

Reprinted with permission from the May-June 2012 issue of Academe, the magazine of the American Association of University Professors.

Why We Need to Name Whiteness

In this blog entry, George Yancy, author of Look, A White! provides lessons on white privilege as he chronicles the shock, bewilderment, and anger his students experience as they realize just how pervasively race functions in our society and in their lives.

I am constantly reassured by my white students that racism is a thing of the past. They seem eager and proud to correct my apparent misunderstanding about the pervasive reality of racism. “We are not like our parents and grandparents. We live in a different world.” Some even occasionally make reference to our first African-American president as confirmation of our post-race moment and our “colorblind” ethos.

I teach courses in the area of critical philosophy of race at a predominantly white university. What I have discovered is that most of white students have not thought about race in any sustained way. Part of the problem is that whiteness constitutes what I refer to as the transcendental norm, that norm in terms of which only nonwhites are raced. In fact, most of my white students have no understanding of how white privilege works, how, because they are white, they are perceived as just persons and not as raced, and how they have come to adopt, uncritically, a metanarrative about success, economic mobility, and social respect that includes absolutely no reference to whiteness as a site of exclusive historical power, citizenship, and privilege.

Denying the reality and significance of race is not a problem for just my students. The problem is also prevalent in the profession that I have chosen. Given the often myopic view about what constitutes philosophy and what constitutes “genuine” philosophical problems, especially as dictated by philosophical gatekeepers who think that race is not a topic worthy of philosophical discussion, I often find myself fighting on two fronts. Pedagogically, I find myself confronted by hostility and defensiveness on the part of my white students, especially as they deny that race continues to matter. Professionally, I find that I am up against a certain abstract and purist conception of philosophy that relegates anything that has to do with the inchoate and messy domain of embodied social reality (like race) to sociology or anthropology. This is one way that philosophical borders are policed; indeed, this is one way of restricting what constitutes philosophical intelligibility.

Look, a White! performs, without hesitation, the act of calling whiteness out of its normative shadow. Naming and marking the rigid philosophical values and demarcations within the profession of philosophy, along with marking philosophy’s attempt to exclude certain topics and, by implication, certain non-normative white bodies, requires unambiguous forms of declaration: “Look, a white!”

The practice of naming reality is one way that I have been able to get my white students to give attention to the centrality of race within our country and within their everyday lives. After four weeks of critically engaging the topic of race, many of those white students who were initially skeptical about or who outright denied the relevance of race within our contemporary moment have experienced shock, bewilderment, and anger once they have come to see just how pervasively race functions in our society and in their lives. They all get to witness collectively not only just how mistaken they were about the centrality of race and racism, but they also come to explore the source of their naivety regarding race and racism.

To encourage my white students to see just how whiteness operates in their daily lives, I have assigned a journal project where they are required to keep a detailed record of experiences that have racist implications, no matter how vague or implicit. Many of them have been deeply saddened and disillusioned by the results. However, they come away from the project able to offer a more critically informed narrative about racism in their lives and in our country. The objective is to get them to name, in this case, instances of white racism, and to do so courageously: “Look, a White!”

For example, one student wrote, “We were watching a television show and one of the characters who was black came on screen; one of my [white] friends then said, ‘My dad calls them coons.’” Another student wrote, “The first day back from Spring Break, we had a new…student move in. When [my] other floor-mates came and noticed this, one ran down the hallway (possibly inebriated) screaming, ‘There’s a nigger on the floor now, guys! Watch your stuff!’” Another student noted, “Today, I was hanging out in my room with three of my friends. We were looking back and enjoying a good laugh at old Myspace pages. My roommate was looking at her old friends on Myspace, and she goes: “Oh my gosh I had a black friend?!’” Lastly, another student wrote, “When I was on the elevator…I realized as a black man and woman walked into the elevator with me, I was clutching my bag close to my body and moved it to the shoulder away from them. I had no reason to clutch my bag other than the fact that they were black.”  Whether observing white racism in others or within themselves, my white students came to see and nominate reality in important ways that reveal complex layers of racism that are so mundane that they are invisible. I have had my white students complain that now they see the operations of race and white racism everywhere they go.

Look, a White! was intended as a gift to white people, an offering to encourage white people to name white racism (including their own) with as much honesty as possible. Yet, the book is not just about naming what is there, pure and simple, but it is about providing a critical framework for recognizing that there is something there to name at all.

Can Victims of a Scandal Find Closure?

In this blog entry, Nancy Berns, author of Closure addresses the Penn State scandal.

Hoping that victims will find “closure” in the Penn State sex abuse scandal is wrong. Using the concept of closure helps those responsible for the harm; it doesn’t help victims. What does “closure for victims” really mean when used in these political and criminal cases?

Jerry Sandusky, former assistant football coach at Penn State University, is facing multiple sexual assault charges for molesting many young boys. The grand jury report lays out damaging evidence and outrageous details regarding these criminal acts. And those who knew about these crimes failed to take proper action. They did not view the children worthy enough to risk reputations and jobs.

In 2002, a graduate assistant witnessed Sandusky raping a child, approximately 10 years old, in the shower of an athletic facility. The witness was Mike McQueary, former Penn State quarterback and current receivers coach. After seeing the sexual assault still in progress, McQueary called his father who told him to leave the building immediately. So he did nothing to stop the assault and help the child. After waiting a day, McQueary and his father told Paterno about Sandusky. Paterno (after waiting another day) told university officials. A week and a half later, these officials talked to McQueary and then banned Sandusky from campus. Basically this action says, “We’re not going to stop your sexual assault of children, but please do not do it on campus.” None of these people called the police. None of them tried to find out who the boy was and what help he needed.

Not long after witnessing the sexual assault, McQueary was promoted. He eventually became an assistant coach.  Did this job come with the pressure to remain silent?

People are starting to resign and more will surely follow. Reports indicate that Joe Paterno will announce his retirement today. But the problems of sexual assault and bystander silence are much larger than Penn State.  It is not clear whether our society will seize this moment to understand and change the cultural attitudes that allow this abuse to happen. Unfortunately, the calls for “closure” will only inhibit any ongoing conversation.  And that is a travesty for victims.

Victims of sexual assault do not get closure. Effects from abuse stay with people the rest of their lives.  This does not mean that victims cannot go on to have successful and beautiful lives.  Many do.  But they still carry the pain from the abuse. Other victims don’t recover but are lost to severe depression, drugs, or suicide.

We want to believe victims can find closure. Don’t misunderstand what I mean. Victims can heal and learn to live with the experience.  But when we fool ourselves into thinking they have “closure,” then the devastating, long-term effects of abuse do not stay in the conversation.

The undergraduate student body president at Penn State, TJ Bard, released a statement calling for closure: “I believe that the well-being of the victims and closure for all involved should be the top priority.” He has no idea what those victims experienced, and how they continue to manage the abuse. In calling for closure (for ALL involved), Bard is saying that having this story “go away” would be good, especially for Penn State’s reputation.

McQueary’s father wants the case to be resolved, so his son can move on. What will help the young boys who were molested?  What will prevent future abuse? What will make bystanders do more to stop the abuse?

Rather than seeking closure, we need to talk about what we value in our society. Using the misguided idea of “closure for victims” shifts attention away from the perpetrators and the gut-wrenching cultural truths about sexual abuse that we need to face. There should not be closure to this case.  Seeking closure to the case is what the university coaches and officials have been doing for years.

Values and Mind-Set always Trump the Facts

In this blog entry, Kenneth Tucker, author of Workers of the World, Enjoy! Aesthetic Politics from Revolutionary Syndicalism to the Global Justice Movement  writes about Aesthetic Politics and the Tea Party. 

Social media seem to be everywhere today. For example, while careful observers have discussed the particular historical, economic, and social contexts that influenced the recent democratic struggles in the Middle East, there is no doubt that social media have played an important role in facilitating the Arab Spring. From Facebook to cell phone photos, social media not only conveyed information about protests in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere, but portrayed powerful images of protest that helped spark struggles throughout the region.

The rise of social media is but one instance of the power of images to influence politics and social movements in our mass-mediated world. The widespread availability of televised and digital images has promoted the emergence of a distinctive aesthetic politics in contemporary societies. Aesthetic politics refers to the role of images, drama, and emotions in shaping politics and public discourse and action. It promotes a more fluid, theatrical, and less centralized understanding of politics at odds with conventional understandings of politics as rational debate or the delineation of clear public policy proposals.

Aesthetic politics can help make sense of the contemporary political scene in the United States. We are all aware of the role of constructed images in electoral politics today, for politicians have to convey sincerity, authenticity, and the like. But this notion of aesthetic politics can also aid us in understanding the Tea Party. Critics from Sean Wilentz to Richard Bernstein tie the rise of the Tea Party to social changes and long-standing movements in American history. They note that in recent years ideas associated with radically conservative groups marginal in the 1950s and 1960s, such as the John Birch Society, have become more acceptable to mainstream audiences. Broad social changes from globalization to the shrinking power of nation-states to control their borders and local economies have played a role in the increase of conservative politics worldwide. Distinctively American factors include the rise of conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the emergence of conservative media from radio talk shows to Fox News. Further, wealthy financiers such as David Koch have provided the resources that allowed the Tea Party movement to become an important player in American politics. Yet these analysts tend to dismiss the Tea Party as ideologically incoherent political know-nothings, as libertarian and religious themes intermingle and many participants decry government spending while advocating increases in Social Security and Medicare. They also have difficulty explaining why Tea Partiers are so angry, and why the movement resonates with many in the public. 

Aesthetic politics can illuminate these issues. Early meetings of Tea Party groups were publicized and coordinated through blogs and Facebook. More significantly, the election of Barack Obama, the great recession of 2008, and the continuing economic turmoil created not only confusion about the proper policies necessary to combat these problems, but also promoted a crisis among many (primarily white, older) Americans about a key identity term, i.e. what it means to be an American. Tea party members seized upon an iconic American symbol, the Boston Tea Party, to define their “Americanness” and anger at the federal government. Demonstrators often dress in tri-colored hats and other colonial costumes, and draw on Revolutionary era imagery, creating flags with slogans such as “Don’t tread on me.” They express their opposition to government spending and taxes through long-standing cultural codes in American life, such as the heroic Founding Fathers, the centrality of the constitution in political life, Horatio Alger stories of rags to riches, and categories of the deserving versus the undeserving.  Obama became a symbol of everything they detested, painted as a big-spending liberal who wanted to illegitimately redistribute wealth to the poor, and who most likely was not a real American (up to 30% of Tea Partyers do not believe that Obama was born in the U.S.). But this political debate was also about tone and emotion, fears and fantasies. As politics becomes theater, dramatic criteria such as emotional identification, dramatic performance, and visual effects become ever more important. The election of the first African-American president played on the complex emotions surrounding race and privilege that have long been a part of American life. The Tea Party tapped into an intense anger fed by cultural and economic insecurity, given voice and image by the emotional outbursts of media figures such as Rick Santelli, Glenn Beck, Michelle Bachman, and Sarah Palin. The Tea Party is as much about rage, vehemence, and authenticity as it is about policy or even facts. As one Tea-Partyer put it, mind-set and values always trump the facts. Such a politics is volatile and not coherent, as fluid as the images on which it is based.  It is no surprise that the U.S. has had three “wave” elections in a row. The consequences of aesthetic politics are not inherently left or right—but we dismiss aesthetic politics as superficial or silly at our political peril.

Rhoda Wilkie receives the British Sociological Association’s Philip Abrams Memorial Prize

Livestock/Deadstock by Rhoda Wilkie received the British Sociological Association’s Philip Abrams Memorial Prize for the best first and sole-authored book within the discipline of Sociology. In this blog entry, Dr. Wilkie is interviewed by Network, the BSA newsletter, about her work and the award.

Dr. Rhoda Wilkie was awarded the Philip Abrams Memorial Prize by the British Sociological Association for her book Livestock/Deadstock about people working with farm animals; the book explores the experiences and attitudes of those involved in the daily tasks of breeding, fattening, marketing, medically treating and slaughtering food animals.

One of the judges, Dr Garry Crawford, of the University of Salford, said: “Rhoda Wilkie’s book is an excellent contribution to British sociology and sets a great example of what contemporary academic writing should be like.”

“Wilkie deals with a very pertinent and important issue – our treatment and relationship with farm animals – and in doing so manages to produce a book that is balanced, engaging, insightful and accessible, which all-round is a real triumph.”

The prize is for the best first and sole-authored book within sociology and was established in honour of Professor Philip Abrams, whose work contributed substantially to sociology and social policy research in Britain. He is remembered for the encouragement and assistance he gave to many sociologists at the start of their careers.

The BSA President, Professor John Brewer, who gave out the prize, said: “In this anniversary year for the BSA, it’s fitting that this prize honours Philip’s legacy. He had a great commitment to the BSA and to the profession of sociology. He was one of the chief organisers of the 30th anniversary conference celebration.

“Indeed, he went on to co-edit one of the conference volumes, which is well known to many of us under the title Practice and Progress: British Sociology, 1950 to 1980.  And thus it seems in a way so fitting that his immense contribution to the BSA, and to British sociology, is kept alive with this prize.

“It’s going to be difficult for me at this point not to be sentimental and give something like a father-of-the-bride speech, because I’ve known Rhoda ever since she was a PhD student.

“She’s now a colleague with me at the University of Aberdeen. So I feel as if I ought to explain that while the president is normally a judge on the Phillip Abrams Prize, the conflict of interest has meant that I had to withdraw. So congratulations to Rhoda.”

In an interview with Network, Dr. Wilkie said: “I hope the book will encourage people to think in a more nuanced way about human-livestock interactions because it challenges the view that people working with farm animals see them only as commodities. My book illustrates that livestock can be more than just ‘walking larders.’

“For example, livestock workers have different opportunities and constraints depending on their roles in the productive process from birth to slaughter. Breeders tend to have more knowledge and more opportunities to handle their animals than those who specialise in fattening up animals for slaughter.

“Agricultural workers and hobbyists form varying degrees of emotional attachment to and detachment from the animals they work with. They might start off being emotionally aloof then get to know some of the animals.

“This may occur when animals deviate from the routine process of production – for example, if an animal becomes ill or if an animal is on the farm for many years. Although livestock are routinely slaughtered it can be emotionally challenging for some workers to send individually-known animals to be killed.

“This indicates that, in practice, the commodity status of livestock is ambiguous and far from static. To varying degrees, workers commodify, decommodify and recommodify the animals they work with.

“I use the term sentient commodity to highlight this dynamic status and the fine perceptual and emotional line that workers have to negotiate in terms of seeing livestock as both economic commodities and sentient beings.”

She found though the profession could be poorly paid, and outsiders often saw it as dirty work, many of her interviewees talked about how they enjoyed working with the animals.

She carried out fieldwork in 1998 and 1999 mainly in north east Scotland, but in other areas of Scotland too. She wrote this up for her PhD at Aberdeen and then into the book.

Her fieldwork took place mainly among those working with cattle and sheep, and she met farmers, slaughterhouse staff, vets, auction workers and hobby farmers.

“This is one of the first attempts to explore human-livestock relations from a sociologically informed perspective,” said Dr Wilkie.

“It also begins to animalise our understanding of work within sociology as it reminds us that people don’t just work with people, they work with animals too.” She remains interested in interspecies work contexts and has just designed a new fourth-year course entitled “Animals and Society.”

Interview and photo reprinted from Network Summer 2011, the magazine of the British Sociological Association with the permission of the BSA.