stories on the edge - mun
TRANSCRIPT
Stories on the Edge
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A Story of FrustrationThe troubles ….
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• Doing Politics in Northern Ireland
• How do you stop a place literally going to hell?
• No one will visit…
• Looking for optimism
• Finding positive stories to tell…
• Telling the stories….
Looking for places, stories and shared problems
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• Look across the Atlantic
• Where family ties are common
• Rural communities agriculture and fishing
• Similar problems deindustrialisation and
depopulation
• Challenges in fishing communities
• High unemployment
• Little inward investment
• Outward migration
Doing Development Differently (2007)
1. The twenty-first century world is experiencing multiple shocks. The election of businessman Donald J. Trump to the White House in 2016 along with the decision of the UK to leave the European Union (EU) has spurred a slew of self-examination across the Atlantic.
2. Disruption of politics in western democracies in the postindustrial age has in some places generated schisms with rejection of post materialist, individualist values of the young and better educated, by the older, less well educated, left behinds. Economic insecurity, growing inequality, and cultural backlash challenge the unregulated dominance of neoliberalism.
3. Peters (2018, 323) writing on The End of Neoliberal Globalisationand the Rise of Authoritarian Populism argues that the Brexitvote may herald the decline and fall of the liberal globalized world.
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Shocks across the Atlantic
1.Since 2016 relationships between the United Kingdom (UK) and other countries including Canada have been the topic of frequent and prolonged conversations: some might say angst.
2.This paper, in construction, seeks to consider if there are ways we might better understand places and peoples on the edge.
3. It examines stories from and on the edge. It takes as its foundation, and by way of example, stories from Atlantic Canada and from Northern Ireland. 6
Understanding people and places
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On the Edge- on a hiding to nothing?
In his seminal article ‘Thinking On: A Career in Public Administration’, RAW Rhodes (2011) outlines changes in public administration over his working life
1970s -structures and functions of government organizations
1980s -policy studies and organization theory
1990s -studies on local governance
2000s - anthology of change and an opportunity for political scientists and civil servants in ‘learning each other’s language’.
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Changing Research Approaches
• Rhodes’s work develops an interpretive framework in political science through his exploration of public sector reform, beliefs, traditions, dilemmas and narratives.
• By investigating actors’ beliefs in the policy-making process he breaks with positivist approaches to broaden the study of institutions and theory encompassing history, individual agency (Bevir, Rhodes and Weller 2003).
• This interpretation encompasses structures and paradigms (and culture) as well as anomaly, reason and agency.
• It connects directly with a foray into regional literature and expands our skills of interpretation.
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Policies ‘are theoriesabout how to change the social world’
• Deliberative democracy researchers have paid attention to narratives suggesting that democracy functions by understanding the world through a shared language and a series of discourses (Dryzek, 2001).
• Some believe that narrative frames represent the interests of the social, political or economic elite (Boswell, 2013, 625); others that telling stories and anecdotes allow ordinary people to clarify their views and take part in crucial arguments (Black, 2009).
• Different groups learn to speak the same language, to make arguments with shared knowledge or norms.
• So - the importance of storytelling for institutions as well as individuals.
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Storytelling
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The Context
• Government measures jobs created, grants applied for, organizations engaged, business start-ups and changes in unemployment rates.
• Their metrics tell of ‘success or failure’ to meet programme goals, but not the experiences of people in engaging with their programmes.
• Nor how people adapt policy initiatives to their culture and ways of life – even as such dimensions of life are changed (Clark 2012).
• Evidence-based policy initiatives and evaluations do not address adaptation well.
• This paper considers using regional novels to give us a deeper insight into local development, considering that novelists conscientiously construct their characters in the circumstances in which they live and work.
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What Government Does
• How do the stories people tell (civil servants, politicians, communities) inform us about the state in their everyday lives (Rhodes 2011) ?
• In search of shared meanings and values for successful policy-making we engage in: telling, acting and talking, close consideration of words and language, finding a history that fits, sharing experiences, constructing committees and importantly, facing up to reality.
(Hodgett and Cassin, 2012)
• New techniques need to be developed to assist policymakers.
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Responsible conjectures in the making of policy
• This paper seeks to underwrite this development by considering the contribution novels can make in thinking about public policy in particular places and achieving a more perceptive policymaking.
• Highmore (2017) Cultural Feelings: Mood, Mediation and Cultural Politics has revisited the work of Raymond Williams and has sought to clarify his concept “structure of feelings.” In paying attention to moods and emotions Highmore argues that how the world feels to us (and has felt to us) is the “phenomemal form of the social” (2017, 2). For him feelings are more than the ephemeral (2017, 2) for the verb to feel engages our learning and habits, intuitions and insights, tactility and practices, as well as collective and social experiences.
• We can track the course of a nation through its cultural texts including its films, music and novels.
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Contribution of Novels to Public Policy
Stories are the product of our webs of belief, cultures, places, actions, practices and discourses -all socially constructed and in this way “we make the social world by acting on conscious and unconscious beliefs that gain content …as part of wider webs of belief.” (Bevir 2011, 188)
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Webs of Belief
• The aim of this paper is to consider whether the knowledge of novels can offer us some forgotten insight into people and place before we initiate policy, before we consider the numbers.
• A close reading of novels about place presents the means for a modern mandarin to get inside the heads of locals to appreciate and understand their suspicions, their desperations, and their loyalties. With such insight policy initiation and creation becomes easier, more enlightened –as does the possibility of finding a policy that actually fits the place.
• Could such an indirect route for insight align with the necessary modern mantra of co-production of knowledge?
• Is this a vital form of evidence we ignore at our peril?
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A deeper way of knowing?
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The Places
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The People
What is Evidence ?
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• Close reading of our Atlantic and Irish literature allows us to undertake our policy interventions with greater confidence.
• We perceive what has gone before, we dodge the potholes where policy failed, we offset further cynicism by offering insights into populations who have experienced too much disappointment already.
• By considering this evidence, as evidence, rather than rejecting it because of dictat, ideology, or bias over forms, we offer important insights into experience of populations in serious need of hope.
• What is evidence?
Literary criticism
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• Facilitates greater knowledge through allowing the public to reevaluate a work from the original text by “the bringing of literary works to the public’s attention” (Brittanica, 2019) while, at the same time, presenting a fuller understanding of that literature to the wider society.
• Some have understood that role as necessary to human freedom (Satre, 1947) others believe it to be the means to reconcile politics with the arts and humanities. (Trilling, 1950)
• Literature is a necessary part of social and political debate in democratic countries -outlining local conditions and expectations of norms and values.
• Thereby literary criticism can become a useful process by applying intermittent moral and cultural reflection for politics and policy.
• R.G. Collingwood (1924) in his study of the map of knowledge, Speculum mentis, and in The Idea of History (1946) presents literature as the form of social theory closest to life.
• Our novels offer an object and serious lesson on the failure of traditional development policy to do its job; and a challenge to those working on interpretive approaches to look beyond accepted boundaries for new policy-making practice.
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Gap between the past and the present
• Caroline Levine discusses the organising principles of literary texts, and a set of general ‘patterns of sociopolitical experience’ that informs social institutions.
• Challenging the arts/humanities versus social science dichotomy -new ideas on how to better understand our modern, complex and divided societies including the ‘multiplied …potential interfaces between literature and other disciplines’ (John Frow, 2019).
• Levine argues “instead of assuming that social forms are the grounds or causes of literary ones, I suggest that both social and aesthetic forms have affordances and that they carry these structuring capabilities with them across contexts”. (2015, 77)
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Forms and Functions
• Theory as it currently exists is often insufficient.
• Limiting what we know, particularly in regard to policy, to quantitative data -inadequately informed by words-constrains what we can perceive or understand.
• Ignoring what more we might know if we examined the full significance of power, forms and other sources of writing proves short sighted.
• Levine’s insight is to suggest that rather than worrying about what form evidence takes when we think about what to include, we should track the form of content along with the “organising principles that encounter one another inside as well as outside the literary text.”
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Inside and Outside the Literary Text
• Novels set in Atlantic Canada and Northern Ireland offer ‘stories’ of people’s lives, which include rich and complex variations of how people take up ‘opportunities’ and experience to change the fabric of their cultures.
• These stories tell us something of the lives of the people who become the subjects for the novelist’s.
• We read and feel in these regional novels a commentary on place, people and community, real or imagined.
• We use the novels of Newfoundland or Cape Breton and Northern Ireland to examine how development, done badly, can drive people to madness and dark dislocation.
• We examine how it feels to be of that place.
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A policy of human stories?
• Dramatizes the issues of peripheral places: poverty, exclusion, lack of education, class, cultural inferiority, exploitation and colonization.
• English disdain for the Newfoundlanders.
• The ubiquitous quandary of the place-left-behind; undeveloped “[t]o leave or not to leave, and having left, to stay or to go back home.” p.144.
• Johnston betrays a piercing resentment of (and resignation to) government’s attempts at development.
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Wayne Johnston’s -The Colony of Unrequited Dreams
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Johnston contd.
• Newfoundland- a different way of life- a different way to be.
• Living on the edge of development.
• Family, community, friendship, place, love.
• Lives changed by the forces of capitalism.
• The debate- when to stay and when to go?
• A hard life with nothing to show at the end but broken health and poverty p.83.
• Yet a joinery of lives p.169.
• Having to “[l]ive… by rules made somewhere else by sons of bitches [who] don’t know nothin’ about this place.” p.293
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Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News
The look on his face was something I care not to translate … Ever since the fishing had gone bad it was like everybody around here was ready to go off like a firecracker. Who the hell was to blame, anyway? Government, politicians, Spanish trawlers, the Russians? … Nobody could pin it down, and that frustration made some of the men go right crazy. Billy Jobb taking a hammer to the RCMP car one day for no obvious reason. Kyle McCurdy beating on his poor wife until she had to leave him … Stammy Woodhouse, who always had lived alone, just boarded up his house and took off in his four-by-four. Nobody ever heard from him.
(2001: 180-1)
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Dance the Rocks Ashore-Linda Choyce
• Novelists can shed light where figures have singularly failed to do so.
• Sheldon Currie (1995) tells the story of Margaret MacNeil from Cape Breton with a disabled grandfather and a father ‘killed in the pit’, leaving her near destitute in a miserable miner’s shack.
• We hear of her cultural alienation from the Gaelic language undone by her great-grandmother’s conversion to English while writing her ‘scribblers’.
• We see a caring community which rallies around at times of strike and death, in stark contrast to the double exploitation by coal companies and the American-based unions of the workers.
• We feel the miners’ deep drive for self-improvement and collective organization, a communal resistance to the past-in-present, since they
‘ Came [to Cape Breton] and lost their tongues, their music, their songs [indeed] [e]verything but their shovels’ (Currie 1995: 22).
• The crux, government portrayed as enemy -more interested in profits than in people. 29
Glace Bay Miners Museum- Sheldon Currie
• MacLeod talks of the leave-taking, within the ‘walls of memory’ on ‘the road to the larger world’ (191).
• He shows us husbands (and sons) lost to grand capitalism; gone and not expected back, we see the left-behind wives with ‘substitute money for what was once conceived as love’; humans made robotic (2001: 215).
• We experience through his writing, parents’ ‘anguished isolation’ and ‘confused bereavement’ (220). Children, lost to parents, journeying ‘to … distant lonely worlds … forever unknowable to those who wait behind’.
• Cape Bretoners’ appreciate theirs is a culture dismembered, cut in half, inevitably dislocated through the loss of the young.
• This introduces a different view of ‘traditional’ and a profound attachment to place.
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MacLeod’s No Great Mischief
• Troubles, brutality, “armoured for survival” p.8
• Siege mentality blighting lives.
• Engrained suspicion of the English and colonialism.
• Belfast as periphery and NOT London.
• Community, family, friends, overwhelming tradition.
• Past made present, hunger strikes, forces of oppression, paramilitaries.
• Cultural clashes
• Desire lines- places where people wish to cross the road.
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Desire Lines- Annie McCartney
• What our novels can demonstrate, which statistics cannot, is that allegiances are not irrational nor passing.
• As Bevir and Rhodes have shown us they are not less than empirical, they are informed deliberations, “structures of feelings” borne from experience of “being there.”
• History, context and interpretation is crucial and laid bare. Only when such deep emotions are understood can we truly appreciate what policy interventions might work -and those which certainly won’t.
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Being there
• Hostility to capitalism
• Refusal to leave the place or culture
• Humans made robotic
• Anguish and isolation
• Distant lonely worlds
• Poverty
• Powerlessness
• Caring Collective Community
• Government as enemy
• Cost for individuals
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What can our novelists show? Will this help our policy making?
• An expanded hermeneutical circle into policy-making and life, to expose individual and collective intentions, making sense of the world as it actually is- to the clients of policy-makers.
• We need a policy-made-personal, within the context of a known community.
• This way of thinking needs to be replaced by the aspiration of feelingful development, rather than feeling-about development; an intimate development project rather than the usual one-step-too-distant variety.
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Policy Made Personal
• Mixing up forms without and within texts offers a wider feeling frame- a feelingful development(Hodgett, 2012)
• This increases the possibility of being more successful in our policy interventions.
• Through these more creative ways of knowing we strive to find a public administration truly with “the imagination to create a new sense of the world that enlarges our knowledge and [our] sympathies.” (Bevir, 2011, 191).
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A Feelingful Development
RAW Rhodes and Susan Hodgett (2020)
What Political Science Can Learn from the Humanities -Blurring Genres, London, Palgrave.
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Forthcoming
Bevir, M., Rhodes, R.A.W., Weller, P. (2003). Comparative Governance: Prospects and Lessons. Public Administration, 81(1), 191-210.
Bevir, M. (2011), Public Administration as Storytelling. Public Administration, 89(1) 183-195. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9299.2011.01908.x
Boswell, J. (2013). Why and how Narrative Matters in Deliberative Systems. Political Studies, 61(3), 620–636. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9248.2012.00987.x
Dryzek, J. (2001). Legitimacy and Economy in Deliberative Democracy. Political Theory, 29 (5), 651–69.
Choyce, L., 2001, ‘Dance the Rocks Ashore’, in idem, Atlantica: Stories from the Maritimes and Newfoundland Fredericton: Goose Lane.
Collingwood, R.G., 1924, Speculum mentis, or The Map of Knowledge ,Oxford: Clarendon Press.
—, 1946, The Idea of History ,Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Clark, D.A. (ed.), 2012, Adaptation, Poverty and Development: The Dynamics of Subjective WellBeing Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Currie, S., 1995, The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum, Wreck Cove, Cape Breton: Breton Books.
Frow, J., Hardie, M. and Rich, K. (2019). The Novel and Media: Three Essays, Journal of Language, Literature and Culture, 66(1), 1-15, DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2019.1595493
Highmore, B. (2017). Cultural feelings: mood, mediation and cultural politics. Routledge.
S. Hodgett and M. Cassin (2012) Feelingful development: redefining policy through interpretation British Journal of Canadian Studies 25 (2), 267-286
Levine, C. (2016). Forms, Literary and Social. Dibur Literary JournalIssue 2, https://arcade.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/article_pdfs/Dibur-v02i01-article07-Levine.pdf
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Sources
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