Author Archives: Jessica

All I have is a voice

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So I am coming to the end of another summer of writing, the third focused primarily on the book. With little bit of luck, this will be the last, as I now have an at least somewhat definite deadline for submission of the full manuscript, although next summer is likely to be occupied with editing and incorporating reader comments.  Sadly, while I have emerged from the previous two summers energized and enthused by successes in completing chapters, I end this summer with far more mixed feelings, having spent a significant portion writing what I can only describe as the wrong chapter. That is, I got an idea of what I was supposed to be writing into my head, struggled to draft about 15,000 words, went back and reread what I had actually proposed and discovered it was something different – more complex and less linear, but potentially far more useful in the overall scheme of the book.  There are bits that can be salvaged from the previous version, and the rest will form the basis of a lecture I hope to be giving next spring. In the meantime, I have nearly finished drafting the correct version, a process I have found far easier and quicker than the original. This version is far more comfortable because I am writing in a way that suits me, not trying to take on the voice of a different type of historian and applying it to my research.

I have been thinking a lot about this question of the writer’s ‘voice’ this summer, in part because my period of focused writing has been bookended by events which have (or will) asked me to push myself out of my comfort zone as a writer.  The first was the final event in the Passions of War workshops which I have been attending for the past 2 years (for details of previous workshops, see posts here and here). In addition to hearing updates from participants on the research they had presented on at previous events, participants engaged in a guided fiction writing session, aimed at helping us free up the writing process and gives us skills and strategies for our academic writing practice.  The second is a story-telling workshop that I will be attending as part of the War Through Other Stuff workshop, being held at Leeds City Museum on 30th September.

Both of these events form part of a wider trend towards ‘creative histories’ which has been developing over the past few years.  This is the move towards exploring the variety of ways in which ‘educators, researchers, writers, artists, students, practitioners, and curators [bring] the past to life, [make] history compelling, and [have] fun’, to quote the call for papers from the summer’s Creative Histories conference.  The idea that the doing of history involves more than solely academic analysis or traditional exhibitions (a subject which has been raised in my own field in relation to the newly renovated National Army Museum, more of which in a moment) is undoubtedly to be welcomed.  But my experiences this summer have left me thinking that we need to make the case for more traditional analytic, even formal, histories as well.

One of the things that the fiction writing workshop reminded me was how uncomfortable the writing of fiction can be.  I say that as someone who started out as a writer of fiction (and weak adolescent poetry). For three summers during my school days, I attended that most American of institutions, an writing camp.  For two weeks each summer I took classes on poetry, short fiction, screen plays, learning how to create characters, set scenes, develop plot.  I wrote some very bad fiction, most of it thankfully long destroyed, but at the time I was quite convinced that I would, one day, be a writer of fiction.  I even thought that I might be able to make a living out of it.

What being asked to write fiction again reminded me was how constrained I have always felt by the process of scene and character creation. Far from inhabiting my imagined worlds and people, I have always needed to get it right – to be historically, or socially accurate, to get the slang correct, the details of the setting just so.  Developing a good story (or even a believable character) fell foul of this obsession with detail, a fear of the criticism that it was unauthentic, wrong.  I couldn’t, writing fiction, find that most elusive of qualities, my own writer’s voice.

I did eventually find it, however, in my final year of my undergraduate degree in the rather unexpected form of the dissertation, or long-form academic essay.  Since then I have honed and developed it, through two post-graduate theses, journal articles, book reviews and one (nearly two) complete monographs.  While there have been moments of doubt about the process (am I just stringing interesting/relevant quotations together/this is entirely and blindingly obvious/x, y and z have all said exactly this before), I have developed (and hopefully will continue to do so), my own style, my own perspective, my own contribution to understanding, my own ‘voice’.

As part of the process of learning the rules and limitations of the form I work in, I have also learned how to bend and subvert them, how far I can push the boundaries while maintaining my own authenticity, how this can be used to make my work engaging to a variety of audiences.  I am learning how to adapt my voice to different forms – discursive/reflexive essays (probably the form I aspire most to succeed in – Joan Didion has been a hero since school days), public lectures, academic seminars, scholarly monographs, someday, I hope, trade histories. This summer I have sought to push the boundaries of my own form in a peer-reviewed journal article that adapts reflexive practices and a book chapter for a collection that will be marketed to the Christmas trade as something of a novelty volume.  But within these experiments I try to remain true to the voice that I have come to through my academic writing and training, a voice shaped by analysis, historiographic considerations, and a belief in the value of proper citation and acknowledgement of intellectual debts (even if that does take the form of the despised footnote).

That locating and nurturing an individual voice is a significant part of the historian’s craft even in the most traditional forms of academic writing has been brought home to me by two museum events that I contributed to, the late opening of the Science Museum in July as part of their current Wounded exhibition, and the Masculinity Late event at the National Army Museum last night, part of their current season exploring gender and the military.  For both, I was asked to provide some sort of interactive session for museum visitors, although I had initially been asked to give a talk at the National Army Museum (the change was to make the event over all work more smoothly).  For both, I did the same thing, taking an article (one published, one currently under review) and deconstructing it into a series of quotations and images which I stuck to a wall and asked participants to respond to with their own thoughts.  Essentially, I took myself, my analysis, my voice out of the presentation of my work and then presented it to a non-specialist, if culturally engaged audience.

I came away from each event with very different feelings about the process.  The Science Museum experience was, for want of a better word, depressing.  While I had many interesting conversations, and felt my audience was engaged with the material presented, I was left wondering what the point of my labour was in the process.  Many of the responses I got were conditioned by dominant narratives around shell shock, which I found difficult to challenge in this format.  What then was the point of my research? It wouldn’t reach a wide audience in the format it was published in (a respected but slightly niche academic journal), but, in removing my voice from the format in presenting it to a wider audience, my ability to shape that narrative had dissipated. My voice was important; it needed to be there in some form.

By contrast, last night’s event at the NAM left me feeling far more energised and enthusiastic.  This may have been due to the fact that the audience was smaller, allowing me more opportunities to explain my perspective in some detail. It may have been due to the fact that the work presented hasn’t yet been published, leaving me more open to having my understanding shaped by the audience responses (there were also more of these in the form of post-it notes stuck to the wall by participants than there had been at the Science Museum, a reflection of the event being held in a more intimate space within the museum, allowing participants to feel safer in voicing their opinions, I think.) But I had also organised the display in ways that allowed me to demonstrate my ideas, my argument.  It was subtle, but it felt as if my voice was able to come through more clearly.

What last night demonstrated for me is that is possible for more traditional forms of history to be adapted to communicate with diverse audiences in ways that are both creative and yet recognise the authenticity of the original form.  This is the power of respecting one’s own authorial voice. Which may mean that, as fun and adventurous as writing fiction can be, it doesn’t need to be the approach taken by everyone. I will bear this in mind as I prepare to engage with storytelling at the end of the month.

What I do

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This isn’t going to be a response to the recent Andrew Adonis discussions, at least not directly.  I’ve put in my direct tuppence ‘orth on Twitter already. It is, however, going to be a response to one of the more obscure byways that the discussion trickled into over the course of the day arising out of two comments. The first, from an academic, pointed out that academics really aren’t very good at communicating what it is we actually do. Listing all the jobs we have to do in a way that can give an impression of competitive business, yes; actually communicating to non-academics what our job entails, not so much. Which was reinforced by the second, from an anonymous Twitter user who, agreeing with Adonis’s argument about the laziness and unproductiveness of academics who don’t teach during the summer, stated that academics had never done a ‘real job’.

So the following is my attempt to explain what it is about my work that feels like a ‘real job’, one that bears comparison with other white collar professional and service jobs which form a significant chunk of the British economy.  It comes with all sorts of caveats, to whit:

  • This is a reflection of my own experiences. Other academics do other things in different proportions. It reflects the stage I am in the academic life cycle and my own rather original route to a permanent position in academia. It reflects that I am on a research contract and hold an external research grant.
  • I am not attempting to engage in competitive busyness with this list. It is a list of roles I do or have done. I don’t do them all at once, although there have definitely been occasions when I have attempted to multi-task too much, at the expense of my own health and happiness, and those around me.  I am still working my way towards a work-life balance that works for me.
  • There is an important case to be made for ensuring that academics have the necessary space for reflection, about research, teaching, public engagement and everything else that we are asked to do. This is not the case I am making, but it is an important one.

All that being said, this then is what my job as a senior lecturer with an external grant entails:

  1. I teach. Not in the same way as a school teacher (primary or secondary) teaches, but I spend time in a classroom communicating my subject to students and I have done almost every teaching semester of every year since 2015 (plus for two years in 2005 and 2006 when I was on temporary contracts). This involves devising modules, creating reading lists and ensuring that the works they contain are available to students (in conjunction with library professionals), organising assessments (essay questions, exams, oral presentations, research portfolios, posters), assessing, marking, providing feedback, writing and delivering lectures, preparing and delivering seminars, identifying or creating materials to use for in-class analysis and discussion.  For postgraduate students (PhD and MA) whose dissertations I supervise, I offer regular one-to-one or two-to-one (we co-supervise PhD students) supervisions, a minimum of ten supervisions per student per year.  I prepare for these by reading students’ work in advance, up to a complete thesis draft for PhD students approaching submission.
  2. I write grant bids. These are of various sizes, from £70 to cover the permission costs of some images from an internal research fund to over £1 million for a five-year externally funded grant. I do this with the support of our research office, who can advise on what needs to be or can be included in the budget, and of my colleagues, who give their time to read and comment on my drafts. But I am the one writing and rewriting, devising and justifying the budget and, in some cases, presenting the project to an interview panel.
  3. I manage budgets. Again, various sizes, from £500 pa to organise events for a research cluster to that £1 million+ over five years. Again, I have support from the university finance office, but I sign off on my team’s expenses; I am the one with the calculator, working out how much we can afford to spend on that unexpected piece of equipment, and justifying it in the subsequent report; and it will be my name in the frame when the project is audited.
  4. I manage people. It is my responsibility to make sure that members of my team not only contribute appropriately to the overall project but also achieve career development goals of various types (successfully completing their PhD; securing a publishing contract/post-project position/etc.) I need to make sure that they work together as a team and that they thrive as individuals.
  5. I am involved in recruitment. I write job specs, sit on short-listing committees and have even chaired interview panels. I help recruit undergraduates by contributing to open days in various ways.
  6. I am a publicist. I present on my project at conferences, design and present posters, populate project websites.  Yes, I use the university’s WordPress template, but it is still my responsibility to provide content and ensure it is kept updated.
  7. I organise events – seminars, conferences, public lectures.This involves fund raising, scheduling, sorting out the room booking, publicity, travel and accommodation. I usually do this in collaboration with others, but I have organised a few on my own.
  8. I research. This means reading books.  It also, in my case, means identifying relevant archives, traveling to them, exploring them and collecting and recording relevant information, if any. I don’t have a PA, so I arrange this myself within the spending limits dictated by the university. I am incredibly fortunate to be on a research grant that provides me with a budget to do this. I then sort through the information I have collected and reflect on it, working out what argument it enables me to develop.  I read other scholars whose work provides the context to which that argument will contribute something original.
  9. I write.  I construct sentences, paragraphs, chapters. I try to make them coherent, engaging, literate. I need them to convey an original and convincing argument that will contribute to knowledge and/or methodology in my field. Again, I am indebted to colleagues who read and comment on drafts, making my writing better. I write proposals to convince publishers that what I am writing/have written is worth publishing and can be sold. I revise and edit. I source images and get permission to use them and other copyrighted materials. I copy edit. I index.  Some of this can be contracted out, but at a price, one that, to date, I have not been a position to pay.

This, then, is the labour I undertake as an academic, or rather most of it.  I haven’t touched on the work I do that comes under academic service – sitting on committees, writing book reviews, acting as membership secretary to scholarly society – or public engagement – delivering public lectures, working with museum curators and artists, replying to email queries from people who have found my name on the internet and want to know more about what their great-uncle experienced as a member of the RAMC in First World War.  But this is the bulk of what I am paid to do for 37.5 hours a week, for 48 weeks a year. Those hours are not organised in a shift pattern; I am allowed to do them flexibly, so I can take an extended lunch break and then work on the evenings and weekends. It is a privilege that I try hard not to abuse and, like almost every academic I know, I end up working more hours in any given week (particularly weeks where assessments are due) and I rarely take my full entitlement of annual leave.  Outside of those hours I commute, do my best to raise my children, sustain my marriage, support my parents, nurture friendships, enjoy a few of hobbies (knitting, gardening, hill walking and running in my case).  I spend more time than I like on hold to utility companies sorting out bills and cursing my self-assessment tax return (yes, I know I need to employ an accountant).  It is not shift work or manual labour, but it feels like a real job to me, one that I value and through which I aim to provide value to others. It is what I do.

Women, Gender and Sexuality visit Women, Work and War.

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A guest post from Laura Boyd, a second-year PhD student in the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies at the University of Leeds. Laura is researching the work of non-combatant male medical caregivers in Britain and France during the First World War, and is a postgraduate member of the Women, Gender and Sexuality Research Cluster.

On 8 March 2017, the Women, Gender and Sexuality Research Cluster at the University of Leeds had the fantastic opportunity of a guided tour of the Women, Work and War exhibition at Armley Mills, followed by coffee and a chat. We were a mixed group of academic staff and postgraduates, from MA to Ph.D level in the Faculty of Arts. Guiding us was Lucy Moore, the Project Curator for First World War and member of the Legacies of War Project.

The visit began with the guided tour. The exhibition was wonderfully curated, and gave a real insight into the lives of the women working in and around Leeds during the Great War. These women came from all around Leeds and indeed much further, and took over the jobs in factories that were left by men who had gone off to war. Though it started in Armley, the factory expanded to the Barnbow site and employed large numbers of women.

Not only did it portray the ‘general’ or ‘bigger picture’ of the lives of these women who worked at Armley and Barnbow in the munitions factories, but was interspersed with personal stories. Lucy showed us around the different exhibits, including munitions and clothing, and shared other anecdotal tales that were not on display, taken from the writings of the ‘Canary Girls’ themselves. The exhibition featured personal accounts of the 1916 Barnbow explosion, which really brought home just how dangerous this behind-the-lines war work was. We even had the chance to have a sneak-peek at an original medal press that is currently awaiting restoration!

We then sat down for coffee and a chat with Lucy, and we began by asking about her own career progression into becoming a curator. Her answer? Refreshingly honest! And by that I mean that it wasn’t a straightforward, linear progression, as these things rarely are. A few of the postgraduates in attendance were interested in hearing about how to get into her line of work and Lucy gave us some great tips on how to get started.

This led to a discussion of the academic buzzwords ‘impact’, and ‘partnerships’ between academics and the community. Though these words tend to scare people like me, it was actually a really insightful and interesting discussion. Both Dr. Jessica Meyer and Lucy Moore are part of the Legacies of War Project here at Leeds, which they were delighted to talk about. Lucy was open about how the academic world has helped create interest around exhibitions such as Women, Work and War. Not only through organising trips such as ours, but by spreading the word among colleagues and at other academic events such as conferences and seminar series. She also said that she is happy to have connections to which (and whom) she can turn for information and help. Jessica was also keen on this point, telling us how the museum had also helped greatly in terms of ‘impact’, by helping the academic world bridge the gap between us and the public, leading to some fruitful and fascinating interactions. She also noted that often independent researchers involved in projects such as this come with knowledge and sources often unknown to academics!

So, to sum up, it was invaluable. Academic-community partnerships can help to get the public interested in what we do, and in turn can, through these partnerships make our research available to all. I would wholeheartedly suggest that if you have not yet been to the exhibition – GO! It will be well worth it, I promise.

Care Conference Report

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This is a guest post from Ellie Murray, a first-year PhD student at the University of Leeds working on children’s learning about parenthood in Britain between 1930 and 1980. Ellie was one of the co-organisers of the Who Cares? The past and present of caring conference held at the University of Leeds on 27th and 28th March, 2017.

This two-day conference, organised by the Women, Gender and Sexuality, Health, Medicine and Society and Medieval Studies research clusters at the University of Leeds, explored the past and present of caring. As well as traditional academic papers on the histories of care, a workshop provided space to explore current issues associated with care in academic institutions. Through this session, we explored how researchers at all stages of their academic careers care for themselves and for others. Panellists highlighted difficulties currently experienced within higher education, and were able to identify workable ways the academe can help to ensure personal well-being, and further support staff and students in their varied roles as carers.

Through this report, I will draw together some common themes which arose across the two days, before providing some reflections on the future directions of these discussions.

Care in Academia

As part of the care in academia workshop, academic staff, early career researchers and students formed four panels. These addressed personal experiences of motherhood, fatherhood, caring for those with additional needs, and self-care within the academe. These conversations were emotional, intensive and at times sensitive in their nature, but I will attempt to pull out some of the main discussion points and suggested changes within academic practice, raised across these panel sessions.

Guilt: One of the more striking reflections to come out of this workshop was the widespread feeling of guilt amongst the students and academics represented on the panels. On the motherhood and fatherhood panels in particular, parents studying or working within academia reported a sense of guilt that their careers prevented from becoming the parent they aspired to be. On the other hand, many working parents felt that due to their transition to parental caregiving roles, they were half the professional they once were, and felt that in some cases, they could not commit themselves as fully to their academic careers as they would perhaps like to. Childcare routines and nursery or school pick-up times mean that some parents cannot schedule meetings at certain times of the day, need to leave work at certain times, and cannot easily attend evening lectures or travel significant distances to present conference papers. For one mother in particular, her conversion to part-time work led to feelings of isolation, as she no longer felt included in the conversations within the department.

A need for greater understanding and flexibility for working parents was highlighted in these discussions. For example, promoting the possibility of skyping into conferences, and for student parents, the ability to move seminars classes and easily extend submission deadlines, to accommodate the reality of raising small children.

During the self-care session, some panellists and attendees spoke about the pressures associated with an academic career, which can lead individuals to work in the evenings, weekends and in some cases, over the bank holidays. The perceived need to be constantly productive, either in doing intellectual work or cultural activities weighs heavily upon researchers. Academia can often be stressful and isolating, and so it was suggested that the importance of resting and switching off from work entirely should be emphasised and indeed, encouraged.

Support: This sense of guilt can be attributed in part the difficulties of achieving a good work life balance, and the lack of support received from some institutions.  The Research Excellence Framework (REF) seems to pose a significant problem for parents. It was generally felt that the requirements upon staff submitting work to the REF did not adequately take into consideration the effect maternity leave would have upon academic outputs. Permanent academic staff are required to submit four outputs for each REF. Staff can submit one less output for every period of maternity leave taken within the seven year REF cycle, but it was felt among the mothers that this does acknowledge the amount of time each submission reasonably takes to prepare. Further issues with the REF system may be identified with the opportunity of shared parental leave. The motherhood and fatherhood panels also drew attention to examples of good practice, through their experiences of dealing with certain institutions or funding bodies. Some research grants accommodate periods of maternity or paternity leave within the period of the award.

The lack of support within academia was also raised in a discussion related to the care of those with additional needs. It was felt that UK institutions did not adequately support colleagues coping with bereavement. There is no standard procedure for notifying colleagues or students of a bereavement, which has the potential to make a situation more difficult for academic staff, who often have their own office spaces and teach different classes each term. Grief has a long-term impact upon individuals, and for some, a death can change life dramatically. It was suggested that UK institutions could offer some form of individualised support, such as providing a trained professional for the bereaved to speak to, if they feel this would be helpful.

The need for self-care within the research community was raised by the participants on the self-care panel. Research can be highly emotive or sensitive, and by their very nature, some testimonies or subjects can weigh heavily upon academics. The affect that research can have upon individuals needs to be recognised and discussed more widely, and it was suggested that academics be given an appropriate space in which to talk, digest, and reflect on their emotions.

Relationship between Care and Academia:

A significant point of discussion was of the various ways in which caregiving roles intersect with academia. Caregiving in its many different forms can change working practices, and shape individual relationships with research topics or historical subjects. It was felt among some of those on the motherhood and fatherhood panels that becoming a parent heightened their empathy with the experiences of those in the past, or changed the focus a study. Participants discussing care for those with additional needs felt that academia could act as form of therapy, by providing the tools with which to reflect upon or further understand changes in everyday life. The rhythm of academic work also helped those transitioning to the role of a caregiver, and their adjustment to new routines, or ways of working.

Through discussions on the motherhood and fatherhood panels, it was felt that shifting priorities could change the ways in which new parents worked, or the time they allocated to certain tasks. Some of the fathers on the panel said their experiences of becoming parents had forced to have time away from their work, to leave the office at a reasonable hour and make time for family holidays.

These personal experiences highlight some of the ways in which the flexibility and creative opportunities offered by academia can be made to fit around, or even complement caregiving responsibilities. At the same time, there is still much work to be done in improving experiences of a healthy work life balance.

Histories of Care

Panels on experiences of care were followed by traditional research papers exploring the histories of care. Holly Furneaux (Cardiff University) delivered the keynote lecture, discussing care between soldiers in the Crimean War. This was followed by papers on the themes of Care in Wartime, Parenthood, and Violent Care of Animals on the second day of the conference.

One of the advantages of a thematic conference is that it provides speakers and delegates the opportunity to engage with research from a wide-range of historical fields and periods, which can provide interesting questions for your own work. Several papers explored the relationship between caregivers and the recipients of care. On the Violent Care of Animals panel, Sunny Harrison (University of Leeds) examined the violent care of horses in the medieval period, while Jonathan Saha (University of Leeds) explored the care of working elephants in colonial Burma, which were captured from the wide elephant population. These papers argued that care and violence are often entangled when it comes to the care of working animals, as what could be thought of as violence was often used to instil discipline, and not intended to cause unnecessary suffering. The speakers offered thought provoking reflections on the power dynamics of caring relationships, particularly of the status of the non-human patient is unequal to that of the caregiver or handler. This raises important questions about who the care is intended to benefit in these situations, the animal or the human. As part of the Parenthood panel, Rose Sawyer (University of Leeds) examines medieval changeling motifs. The changeling often took the place of a young saint, and was characterised by a failure to thrive or meet expected developmental milestones. In these motifs, parents or guardians continued to care deeply for their infants, despite the anxieties caused. In this sense, Sawyer argues that these motifs can offer a perspective on the experiences of caring for disabled children in the medieval period.

Many speakers reflected upon the relationship between gender and care. Joanna Phillips (University of Leeds) explored bodily care during the Crusades. Care in the Crusades has often been examined through the lens of medical care, but distinctions between care and cure were very fine in the middle ages, with therapies tailored towards the senses, such as food, drink and smells. Looking for acts of care, rather than seeking references to trained medical practitioners, Phillips argues that it is possible to locate women in the Crusades, and understand the caring roles they played, which could be construed as an extension of their domestic roles.

Several papers explored themes around masculine caregiving. In her keynote lecture, Furneaux (University of Cardiff) explored the nature of soldierly heroism, and care between soldiers during the Crimean War. Soldiers were often perceived as nurturing and compassionate, with cases of unmarried soldiers adopting children from the battlefield, and male nurses caring for casualties. Furneaux argued that these men were often described by their contemporaries as being “as caring as women”, raising questions about how different forms of caregiving intersect with cultural gender norms.

The gendered nature of caregiving was further explored on the Care in Wartime panel by Laura Boyd (University of Leeds) and Rosemary Wall (University of Hull). Boyd examined the masculine identities of stretcher-bearers in the First World War. These solider did not bear arms but played important roles in attending to wounded soldiers, and Boyd argued that this form of care was not necessarily seen as feminine in the context of the Western Front. Rosemary Wall spoke about her attempts to uncover the experiences of male volunteers in the British Red Cross in the First World War, as popular memoirs such ‘A Testament of Youth’ have led to assumptions that these organisations were dominated by female volunteers providing care for wounded soldiers. On the ‘Parenthood’ panel, Nehaal Bajwar (University of Sussex) discussed cultural resources for ‘involved fatherhood’ in modern day Pakistan, while my paper explored public images of adolescent caregiving and private family experiences of older brotherhood in post-1945 Britain.

Within these papers, it was implied that men participating in care were in some way subverting or reshaping masculine ideals.  This implies that caregiving is an inherently feminine role. As made clear during the discussions of motherhood in academia, the perception that women are naturally more competent carers than men can be inhibitive to mothers balancing academic work and caring responsibilities. This has led me to question whether conceptualising gender in this way is actually useful as an analytical tool. I have begun to consider whether examining family care in a gendered way could in fact mask how individuals understood their relationship with care, and the care which they provided for others.

Reflections

As a result of this conference, the participants and delegates have put forward suggestions about how we can progress our conversations from here. These experiences and discussions need to be heard as widely as possible, to promote tangible changes within academic culture. A report with suggestions for changes in academic practice, proposed as part of the care in academia workshop, will be circulated to conference participants and other groups working on related issues around equality and diversity in the academy. There have also been calls for further events exploring the particular issues faced by certain groups within academia, such as postgraduate researchers. A recently published report found that one in two PhD researchers experience some form of psychological distress, demonstrating the necessity for a discussion around mental health, research practice and institutional support for this section of the academic community.

This event, and the future plans arising from it, highlight the importance of such discussions, and of pooling experiences and ideas for improving working practice within UK institutions. Indeed, this conference forms part of a wider series of conversations taking place at the University of Leeds. In October, staff and students gathered to discuss women’s experiences within academia, and later this month, a conference organised by Jonathan Saha and Anyaa Anim-Addo will address the under-representation of Black and minority ethnic communities in the field of history, and discuss the difficulties faced by individuals working or studying in predominantly white universities.

It is likely that more events of this nature will take place within the academic community in the near future. Through raising the profile of such discussions, and circulating examples of best practice, we hope that substantive changes within academic culture can be made, to create a more equal and supportive working environments for current and future academic researchers.

 

 

A (belated) report from the wilds of Borsetshire

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A recent post on Twitter asked if we are starting to witness the demise of the personal academic blog, at least in the field of history. Reasons put forward for the decline in the number of posts being written were pressures on time, developments in the research cycle (implicitly related to the increased imminence of the Research Excellence Framework) and variations in the teaching cycle, as posited by George Gosling.  Concern was also expressed that blogging was coming to be viewed as a requirement of postgraduate and early careers scholars, rather than more established ones.

I didn’t respond, all too aware that it has been months since I posted anything here, and even more since I directly posted anything related directly to either of my research projects.  This is due to all of the above reasons. I am teaching this term, not much but a new module that requires a certain amount of additional preparation and organisation.  I have committed myself to a large number of speaking engagements and forthcoming publications, as well as helping to organise two conferences.  On top of my research commitments and administrative obligations, this leaves me little time for writing the remaining chapters of the book, let alone reflections for the blog. And then there is the question of what I write about.  While I agree that blogging should not be the sole responsibility of PGRs and ECRs, I am becoming increasingly aware that it is easier to blog about searching for a job than it is about applying for promotion.  Similarly, blogging about ideas at the start of a project enabled me to work through key themes in ways that now seem to have less utility as I actively incorporate them into the book. If I am going to write about these ideas, I need to do it as part of my manuscript, not as a shorter reflection.

Which doesn’t mean that I don’t have things to write about (beyond my despair at the current political situation).  There are stories emerging from the new research project, although as this has its own blog now, I tend to reserve them for that forum.  And the number of speaking engagements I have undertaken means I am regularly coming into contact with the work and ideas of others which is giving me much food for thought and which is worthy of putting on record.

Which brings me to the Academic Archers conference, possibly one of the oddest but also  among the most interesting academic experiences I have had since I spent two days up to my ankles in mud talking about medical care on the Somme last summer.  This was the second annual conference organised to bring together academic analysis subjects based on or inspired by Radio 4’s long-running rural soap opera and the immensely knowlegable ‘Research Associates’, the long-term listeners whose knowledge of the world of Ambridge and Borsetshire is unrivalled in terms of breadth and depth.  Papers presented range from sociological analyses of familial relationships among prominent family groups, and the wider social implications of the resulting (matriarchal) power structures through an examination of the programme as an exemplar of rural theology to a discussion of the social standing of male characters and the relationship to perceived penis size (a phrase I never thought I would type on this blog or, indeed, anywhere else).

Arguably this was all tongue-in-cheek good fun, something not to be taken very seriously but to be played predominantly for laughs.  Certainly the most popular papers, such as the ones picked up by the press looking at negative aspects of competing in village flower and produce shows, and the ‘Ambridge Paradox’, or why all the characters don’t suffer from type 2 diabetes, involved much laughter along with the learning.  But there was very serious scholarship being undertaken here as well.  The session focussing specifically on the Rob and Helen story line of domestic violence and coercive control was sobering not only in terms of the subject matter, but also in relation to the information conveyed, whether on the forensic analysis of blood spatter patterns or the cost per day of food for women in prison.  Additionally, my understanding of my own work has been enhanced by a number of papers.  I have come away with a long list of recent sociological texts on masculinity, disability and violence taken from Katherine Runswick-Cole and Becky Wood’s paper on the use of the stoma bag in representing Rob’s disability and Jennifer Brown’s keynot on using Rob to understand the antecendents of domestic violence perpetration. Amber Medland’s concept of culinary coercion, while derived from the domestic context of Rob’s control of Helen, has opened up questions for me about the regulation of food in the institutional setting of the military hospital.  And I am looking forward to learning a lot more about masculinity in post-Second World War literature, particularly as it relates to birdwatching, in the on-going work of Joanna Dobson.

As for my own paper, I’m not sure I got the balance between humour and scholarship quite right.  ‘Erudite’ was one description of it, and I can only apologise to the tweeter whose brain apparently hurt when I finished speaking.  But the opportunity to explore how this particular artefact of British popular culture has memorialised the First World War – and to use the title ‘Some Corner of a Foreign Field/That is Forever Ambridge’ – was too good an opportunity to miss.  Among other things, it provided me with the opportunity to design an academicMeyer Poster poster in collaboration with some very excited and supportive colleagues. [1] I will, I hope, be publishing an extended version of the paper in the forthcoming edited collection (the one from last year’s conference is a beautiful object, available to buy from Amazon).  Writing it up will enable me to engage more fully with debates around imagined communities and invented traditions than I have done since I was a post-graduate, a useful exercise that will enhance my other academic endeavours.

And, in a sign of just how stimulating and welcoming the conference was, I’m already considering the topic of next year’s proposal. Leading the field is a plan to recreate the Ambridge War Memorial using the information from English Heritage uncovered by Laurie MacLeod, one of the attending RAs.  I’m even thinking about putting together an application to the Heritage Lottery Fund, if any of the Academic Archers community would like to form a group to work on this.  And I know there are several other First World War historians, many more eminent than I, who might be persuaded to trace the progress of the Borsetshire Regiment on the Western Front, analyse the minor poetry of Lt. Rupert Pargeter, explore the records of the Borsetshire Military Appeals Tribunal or discuss the impact of the use of women and prisoners of war in agricultural labour on wartime Ambridge.  I hope they will consider putting in a proposal when the call goes out.  The experience, both intellectual and social, will be well worth it.

 

[1] My thanks to Sara Barker, Tess Hornsby-Smith and Sabina Peck for their encouragement and insight.

Bread and Roses

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As I have said previously, poetry is currently serving as a huge source of solace and consolation, something that I feel very much in need of at this moment. But it is also enabling me to articulate my anger and defiance, particularly the two poems that follow, which have been reminding me that, whatever the next four years may bring, I am proud to be a woman, a scholar and an American.

As we come marching, marching in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing: “Bread and roses! Bread and roses!”

As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women’s children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!

As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient song of bread.
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.
Yes, it is bread we fight for — but we fight for roses, too!

As we come marching, marching, we bring the greater days.
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more the drudge and idler — ten that toil where one reposes,
But a sharing of life’s glories: Bread and roses! Bread and roses!

James Oppenheim, 1911

Still I Rise – Maya Angelou

We march on – and still we rise.

The unfinished year

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So as is traditional (at least for the past two years), it is time for me to reflect on the past year and offer a few hopes for the coming one.  Last year I reflected on a hard year in 2015 and hoped for an easier one in 2016.  I doubt many people would identify this past year as such, and the political and international situation looks bleaker than it did 12 months ago.  But at a personal level, this has been a year that, even if not noticeably easy, then at least an improvement on the previous one.  Both my parents are still ill and neither will ever rid themselves of their respective conditions, but somehow we have come to some sort of accommodation that makes the day-to-day manageable, most days.  This is life, not crisis. Similarly, the managerial work that felt so frightening two years ago has become less overwhelming as I have become more familiar with it.  It is still labour that I am less secure with than, say, writing a book, but I am slowly discovering my own capability for this role, which makes things easier.

And there have been some triumphs. My husband got himself a new job, which he will take up in a couple of months.  This brings many positives and a few potential problems, but it is definitely a step in the direction that he wants to go.  My daughter started on the great intellectual adventure that is formal schooling. In the column marked ‘unadulterated joy’, my sister got married and my brother introduced us to his new partner. The Men, Women and Care project is properly off the ground (including its very own website and blog!) and definitely going places, places which offer their own challenges but are hugely exciting.  The team I have recruited is, so far, living up to their promise and doing interesting and creative work.  There have been a few (small) funding successes, to balance out the inevitable failures.  And, above all, I finally got my book proposal off to a publisher and it has been accepted!

Which is why this year, more than most, feels unfinished.  So much of the positive has not be the culmination or completion of hard work, whether personal or professional, but baby steps along the journey.  So I will enter the new year with papers to write, books to read, a major project to work on, including pursuing new theoretical and methodological angles which I hadn’t considered before this year, a few smaller projects (including two conferences) to organise, and, of course, a book to complete.  On the domestic front, there are still carpets to be laid, decisions to be made about renovations, and the tantalising potential of a house move that has been under discussion for the past year. The children continue to grow, physically, emotionally and mentally, challenging me as a parent as they do so.

There is a lot to do, but I will go into the new year with some lessons learned – about my own ability to recover from the personal paralysis induced by major political crises, about the importance of flexibility and my own capacity to accommodate the unexpected, about how much I can do, how much I rely on others to lend a hand or ear – and just how many wonderful friends and colleagues I have who do just that.  Some things, I hope, will come to fruition in 2017.  Others will carry on carrying on.  Whatever the new year brings, however, I am approaching it, once again, in hope and more energy than last year.

Finally, it has been a year when I have turned more than usual to poetry as a source of consolation, primarily Auden and Frost, who I can probably say with some confidence are my favourite poets.  So I will leave you with a poem appropriate for this point in the year, as the temperatures tumble and cover the world in frost crystals, if not necessarily snow, making my first run after a 5-month hiatus due to planter faciitis, a thing of sparkling wonder and promise.  It is, as it happens, the first poem I was ever conscious of memorising as a child.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and snowy lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost, 1922

Wish you and yours a year of promises kept and fulfilled and miles travelled safely, however near or far the ultimate destination. Happy New Year.

Bearing Witness

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*Spoiler alert throughout*

I hadn’t intended to write this post. I have been making a very conscious effort this holiday not to do any work until today anyway, and I was planning (still am, I hope) a short post reflecting on the labours of the past year and the promises of the new one, to be written tomorrow.

But then last night, while watching the BBC’s flagship Christmas drama, The Witness for the Prosecution, as a double bill on catch up, I found my husband attempting to soothe me as I harrumphed in irritation at the First World War backstories supplied to both the Voles and John Mayhew.  Having tweeted indignantly and non-specifically about it, I feel it behooves me to explain why in more detail.

To start with, I should say that the production as a whole was beautifully shot and acted extremely well by its stellar cast. It is hard to go wrong with Andrea Riseborough or Toby Jones, and they were, as expected, exceptional.  I wasn’t so keen on the adaptation which, padded out to fill a full two hours felt baggy and lacking in tension.  Was the whole twist involving the cat (very much not part of the original) necessary or even credible?  Given the amount of time which passes between the murder and the discovery of the cat’s body, surely it wouldn’t be in such an uncorrupted state?  But that is, perhaps, a minor criticism.  The bones of Christie’s original plot were maintained, even if the twist she wrote had less impact after nearly two hours than it did in the compact half hour dramatisation that was my introduction to this story.

So I could live with this production of a classic mystery drama, with all its updated bad language and sex scenes.  It was with the First World War back stories that I found I could no longer sustain my suspension of disbelief.  To start with the second, that of the solicitor, John Mayhew, whose poor health and blood-spattered coughing underscore almost every scene he appears in.  The cough, we are told, is the result of being gassed in the war, in which he lost his son, age 17, also to gas.  In the final scenes of the drama we are informed that Mayhew lied about his son’s age in order that they could enlist together and his motivation throughout the play is ascribe to the guilt he feels that he came back while his son did not, thereby destroying his wife’s love for him.

This narrative is physiogologically unlikely, but perhaps not impossible, although Toby Jones as Mayhew looks old enough to have had lie about his own age to have been accepted for service before 1916 (when the dual enlistments must have happened if the two men ‘volunteered’ together. His eyesight, given his spectacles, would have made doing so when overages particularly difficult.)  Equally unlikely would be for them to be serving in the same unit, causing them both to become casualties of the same gas attack (as is strongly implied).  Mayhew’s son apparently learned about motor vehicles during the war, which would suggest a posting either to the Army Service Corps or the Tank Corps to me.  It is just possible that Mayhew Senior would be assigned to the ASC which, as a non-combatant unit, might take volunteers with impairments that disqualified them from combatant duties.  Even so, the chances of father and son ending up in the same unit seem slim.  Psychologically, however, this story seems nigh on impossible.  Fathers certainly supported and even encouraged their sons’ decisions to enlist, may have in some cases turned a blind eye to a teenager lying about his age, and there are examples of fathers and sons both serving, as Laura Ugolini [1] has shown, but the idea of a father supporting his son to the extent of both lying about his age and enlisting alongside him assumes a level of war enthusiasm that has been effectively undermined by historians such as Catrionna Pennell and Adrian Gregory [2].

So Mayhew’s back story is unlikely in the extreme, calling into question the attribution of his motivation to old man’s guilt, as in Owen’s Parable of the Old Man and the Young, over the loss of his son and his son’s generation.  By forcing Mayhew into the role of both guilty old man and, apparently, a witness to war, a ‘man who was there’ [3], the story ensures that he is incapable of properly representing either.

Which brings me to the second backstory, that of the Voles who, in the opening scenes of both episodes, are shown meeting in a bombed-out trench during the war, before walking hand-in-hand across a shell-pitted landscape oddly denuded of any individuals, given that this was apparently the scene of a major battle. For the military historian, this is a frustrating piece of representation.  Setting aside the question of what the hell Romaine as a woman was doing on the battlefield in the first place, somewhere that military authorities on both sides went to great lengths to ensure did not occur, the recurrent emptiness of no-man’s-land is an extremely irritating trope of contemporary televisual dramas.  Even if the battle itself was over, and night had not fallen, in which case Leonard and Romaine would have been fair game for snipers, there would still be wounded men around, as well as corpses, human and otherwise.  Desolate here does not mean empty, but presumably the scene is meant to be symbolic, as much as literal.

I hazard this suggestion on the basis of the final scene in which Leonard and Romaine appear, as they pursue Mayhew down the corridor of a luxury hotel, taunting him with their brutal success.  ‘We are what happens when you butcher the young’ says Romaine, following up her husband’s dismissal of Emily French’s murder ‘just one more life after so many’.  And it was at this point that my husband had to stop me from yelling something very rude at the television screen, because this interpretation of Christie’s story, and the relationship of the whole genre of Golden Age detective fiction to the war, is just plain wrong.  Yes, this narrative of disillusionment existed in contemporary modern novels, the ‘war books’ of the 1920s boom.  But as Rosa Maria Bracco and Alison Light have both shown [4], it was not the narrative of genre fiction, including detective fiction.

In fact, the relationship between interwar detective fiction and the war is a complex one, but the idea that the war brutalised society to the extent of making murder acceptable is, in fact, the very antithesis of the message the genre holds.  There are remarkably few interwar murderers (although rather more murder suspects) who are explicitly ex-servicemen or whose motives can be traced back to wartime experiences.  More common, indeed, are ex-service detectives (some, but not all, attempting to assuage their guilt a la Mayhew), the very people whose role in such fiction is to reassert the social order by bringing the murderer to justice.  War, like murder, may disrupt society in these narratives but in the case of murder, social order reasserts itself; civilisation and society are restored, not distorted.

The significance of this reading can, in fact, be seen in Christie’s own treatment of The Witness for the Prosecution, which she rewrote to ensure that Leonard does not get away with murder.  In this second version, Romaine stabs him as he is about to leave her for his lover, Christine.  The Law in this story remains an ass, but justice, in the classical sense, is served and Emily French’s death avenged.  No life, in interwar detective fiction, is ‘just one more death after so many’.  It isn’t until post-Second World War detective fiction (such as Marjory Allingham’s Tiger in the Smoke and Ellis Peter’s The Funeral of Figaro) that we start to see the war-brutalised ex-serviceman emerge as a hardened criminal.  By attempting to attach this narrative to the First World War, the adaptors of The Witness for the Prosecution do a disservice to both the ex-servicemen of the First World War whose main aim was to reintegrate themselves into civilian society in spite of the trauma they had suffered, and to the writers of detective fiction in the interwar years who sought, through their fictions, to make it easier for them to do so.

References:

NB: As I am not in the office, I don’t have all the notes to hand for full references for this.

[1] Laura Ugolini, Civvies: Middle-class Men on the English Home Front, 1914-1918 (Manchester University Press, 2013).

[2] Catriona Pennell, A Kingdom United: Popular Responses to the Outbreak of the First World War in Britain and Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2014); Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

[3] Samuel Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War (Allen Lane, 1997).

[4] Rosa Maria Bracco, Merchants of Hope: British Middlebrow Writers and the First World War, 1919-1939 (Bloomsbury, 1993); Alison Light, Forever England: Feminity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (Routledge, 1991).

Talking about caring

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I am still planning on writing a post about Sgt. Arnold Loosemore, VC, but while I wait to hear from someone who has done far more research into his life than I have yet done about a query, I am also helping organise the ‘Who Cares?’ conference to be held in the School of History at the University of Leeds on 27th and 28th March, 2017. In particular, I have been approaching people to ask if they will talk about their personal experiences of providing care as academics.

So far, everyone I have asked to contribute has responded positively, not to say enthusiastically, providing evidence that there is an appetite for having these discussions within the academic community.  This has been a huge personal relief to me as I have been finding it surprisingly uncomfortable to make these approaches in the first place.  While my head has been telling me that these are conversations we need to have, and have in public forums, not privately behind closed doors, my gut has been questioning whether these really are conversations people want to have and are comfortable having.  Are these subjects too personal?  Should we be combining our work and family lives in this way?  Do we risk one colonizing the other in unhelpful ways if we start to blur whatever boundaries we may have established as individuals to maintain our sanity?

I am hoping that all these questions will be explored in March.  But even if they are not discussed directly, then at least the very fact that I feel such discomfort has reaffirmed for me the importance of starting and continuing these discussions as part of our professional lives.  The more openly we can talk about our family responsiblities and how they combine with our professional commitments, the burdens they place on us and the support we get from our colleagues and communities, the easier it will come to have such discussions and to establish good practice for all concerned.  If the end result is a free-flowing discussion where everyone feels heard, then it will have been worth every gut-tightening moment of anxiety that organizing this event is causing.

In the meantime, I am hugely grateful for the generous enthusiasm of colleagues who have agreed to contribute.  It will, I believe, be worth all our effort.

Who Cares? Call for Papers

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Next March the Health, Medicine and Society and Women, Gender and Sexuality research clusters in the School of History at the University of Leeds will be jointly running a conference on histories of care.  There will be a conference website in due course, but as this is taking some time to set up properly, I am posting the Call for Papers here as well.

Who cares?: The Past and Present of Caring

Monday 27th – Tuesday 28th March, 2017

School of History

University of Leeds

A collaboration between the Women, Gender and Sexuality, and the Health, Medicine and Society research clusters.

Call for Papers

Deadline for Abstracts: 13th January 2017

 

At all stages of life, people give and receive care. Rapidly changing demographics are affecting the dynamics of care, and now more than ever, gender-based expectations of caregiving in history are being called into question. A growing emphasis on personal well-being denotes a generation that is complicating traditional notions of care.

The way care has been understood and delivered has developed across time.  Approaches to care have historically been and continue to be changed and challenged by spatial, temporal, and socio-political boundaries. This conference seeks to shed light on care within communities and across borders, exploring changes in its perception throughout history and how it intersects with different ages, cultures, and identities.

Our keynote speaker will be Professor Holly Furneaux, Cardiff University, author of Military Men of Feeling: Masculinity, Emotion and Tactility in the Crimean War (OUP, 2016).

The conference will also include a half-day workshop exploring issues associated with care in academic institutions. Through a discussion of parenthood, experiences of supporting family members, and mental health, this workshop will provide a space to explore how researchers at all stages of their academic careers care for themselves and for others. This session aims to highlight difficulties currently experienced within higher education, and identify workable ways the academe can help to ensure personal well-being, and further support staff and students in their varied roles as carers.

Submissions are now invited for 20-minute papers on subjects which may include but are not limited to:

 

–       Varieties of medical care

–       Gender and caregiving

–       Self-care and mental health

–       Care in the military

–       Care and the family

–       Care and the life cycle

–       End of life care

–       Care and the non-human

–       Care and marginalised communities

–       The economies of care

–       The politics of care

–       Critical care

 

We particularly welcome proposals from postgraduate and early career researchers.

Submission guidelines

Abstracts must be no longer than 250 words for 20-minute papers.

Please send abstracts to hisccon@leeds.ac.uk no later than 13th January 2017. Please ensure abstracts contain your name and institutional affiliation (if any).

Any general enquiries may be sent to hisccon@leeds.ac.uk