David Harvey’s (1974: 23) lesson, it seems, has been well learnt by geographers. Few today would talk about ‘relevant’ and ‘irrelevant’ geographical knowledges; the question is always ‘to whom?’ and ‘for what?’ (see also Demeritt 2000). And the answer, for some, is ‘government’/'the state’ and ‘public policy’. (For others, of course, activism of different kinds looms large.)

The so-called ‘geography and public policy’ debate is one of the discipline’s perennial discussions. And – sticking with the horticultural metaphor – it’s one of its most fertile too. It crackles (we’re switching metaphors now) with some of geography’s most electric interventions, from Jamie Peck’s (1999) ‘Grey geography?’, through Danny Dorling and Mary Shaw’s (2002) ‘Geographies of the agenda’, to Michael Woods and Graham Gardner’s (2011) ‘Applied policy research and critical human geography’ (there’s their interlocutors also: Pollard et al. 2000; Banks and Mackian 2000; Martin 2002; Massey 2002; Bell 2011; Gleeson 2011; Allen 2011; Bailey and Grossardt 2011; McGuirk 2011; Ward 2011). Questions explored include the feasibility and desirability of working with the state; the value of such academic labour; and the opportunities and threats which collaborations with governments hold out for critical scholars.

All these issues and more are considered in what we hope will be a very productive contribution to the conversation – Pauline McGuirk (University of Newcastle) and Phillip O’Neill’s (University of Western Sydney) forthcoming paper, ‘Critical geographies with the state: The problem of social vulnerability and the politics of engaged research‘. As Pauline and Phillip tell us, “[s]tate interventions to govern social vulnerability highlight the complexity of contemporary states, marked by neoliberal agenda but also by progressive interventions and the desire for effectiveness. This paper draws on collaborative research with government agencies on social vulnerability to assess the desirability of undertaking critical geographies with the state. We see states as contested terrains invested with the institutional capacity to mobilise diverse political projects. We argue that critical research in partnership with states is possible, as are mobilisations of the agency of state institutions to promote progressive policy development. The paper explores how we might use engaged research to intersect with the production and circulation of texts, technologies and practices within the state apparatus to achieve desirable change. While critical research with the state involves uncertainties and compromise, with no permanent resolutions, we conclude that states must remain centred in our critical conversations and praxis.”

You can see Pauline and Phillip speaking about their Antipode paper here:

References

Allen C (2011) Against dialogue: Why being critical means taking sides rather than learning how to play the ‘policy research’ game. Dialogues in Human Geography 1(2):223-227

Bailey K and Grossardt T (2011) Human geography, ideology, and institutional normativity. Dialogues in Human Geography 1(2):228-232

Banks M and MacKian S (2000) Jump in! The water’s warm: A comment on
Peck’s ‘Grey geography?’.Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 25:249-254

Bell D (2011) Grey area. Dialogues in Human Geography 1(2):215-218

Demeritt D (2000) The new social contract for science: Accountability, relevance, and value in US and UK science and research policy. Antipode 32(3):308–329

Dorling D and Shaw M (2002) Geographies of the agenda: Public policy, the discipline and its (re)‘turns’. Progress in Human Geography 26(5):629–641

Gleeson B (2011) The challenge of application: Policy research and much more. Dialogues in Human Geography 1(2):219-222

Harvey D (1974) What kind of geography for what kind of public policy? Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 63:18-24

McGuirk P (2011) Policy research as critical praxis. Dialogues in Human Geography 1(2):233-237

Martin R (2002) A geography for policy, or a policy for geography? A response to Dorling and Shaw. Progress in Human Geography 26(5):642-644

Massey D (2002) Geography, policy and politics: A response to Dorling and Shaw. Progress in Human Geography 26(5):645-646

Peck J (1999) Grey geography? Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 24:131-135

Pollard J, Henry N, Bryson J and Daniels P (2000) Shades of grey? Geographers and policy. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 25:243-248

Ward K (2011) Applied policy research and critical human geography. Dialogues in Human Geography 1(2):238-241

Woods M and Gardner G (2011) Applied policy research and critical human geography: Some reflections on swimming in murky waters. Dialogues in Human Geography 1(2):198-214

Last semester I spent one night a week sleeping on the floor in a small, windowless student office at my university. I had an adjunct teaching load that included one class which met on Thursday evenings and another that met on Friday mornings. Since I commute two hours each way to get into the city to teach, I reasoned that it would make more sense to hunker down and sleep in an office than it would to spend four additional hours and transportation costs to get back home on Thursday nights. I wrangled up some old bedding, figured out how to use the cushions of a small vinyl couch to make a mattress, and that was that.

This arrangement turned out to be less than ideal, but I kept doing it anyway. Security guards did sweeps at night to make sure everyone was out of the building. To avoid them, I needed to be locked in the office, lights out, by the time they started at 10pm. There was also a cleaning woman who came at about midnight. We learned about each other when, in a moment of mutual horror, she walked in on me lying there under my pink sheet on the first night. Maybe she took pity – she never mentioned me to the guards. In any case, this was a recipe for a restless night.

I am not suggesting that I endured any real hardship here. I didn’t. But in that space between the security guards and the cleaning woman I often thought about the increasingly problematic landscape of contemporary university life and questioned what people like myself – lying there and perhaps even romanticizing my own self-exploitation at that very moment – were really doing about it.

The litany of complaints about the neoliberal university is painfully familiar. Intellectual community strangulated by “excellence”, adjunctification, “self-funding” initiatives, tuition hikes, the commodification of ideas, and on and on. Radical geographers might know better than anyone about the big structural forces – surely beyond our control, right? – that are driving these insidious shifts. We may even vow to “resist” them to the best of our ability. But is that the whole story?

To take just one little example of something that everyone seems to loathe but that nobody does anything about, how about the avalanche of reference letters that are prematurely requested by search committees just so they can have them on hand should a candidate warrant further consideration? Every professor I know spends waaay too much time writing these. Is that structural? Certainly, everyone feels time pressures and no search committee chair wants to have to spend time soliciting letters at a later stage in the search. But this is clearly a situation where a time saving for a small number of individuals is purchased at the expense of a much larger amount of time needlessly taken from others. So why does this still go on? What would it take for the people who produce the values at the heart of the university – students, teachers, researchers, and scholars – to really change things (especially solvable problems like this), to go beyond identifying issues and collectively organize for something different?

Ultimately these kinds of issues are about something a lot greater than the well-being of academic workers. The university could and should be a common, a collective resource for a better future, and this is what is really at stake in decisions about how time and energy are spent. As Meyerhoff, Johnson, and Braun (2011) suggest, the debt, instrumental thinking, and competitive individualism that academic time is increasingly channelled toward is doubly problematic because there are so many better things that this time could be used for. The alternative to the neoliberal university is the university as a common, and fighting for this means framing struggles over the use of time in common. In this context, initiatives like the Community Economies Collective and the Autonomous Geographies Collective (2010) are crucial. These efforts are not about an ethic of resistance so much as an ethos of expanding what university life is about and experimenting with collective knowledge production through collaboration in common with new publics.

I would like to think that this Antipode blog space could be a resource for these kinds of conversations and struggles. Culum Canally’s recent post about complicity through grading is a great start – a provocation, and one of many potential kernels to organize around (see Kean Birch’s post on exploitation in the academy also). We shouldn’t underestimate the power that this could eventually produce. As Hawkins, Manzi, and Ojeda have shown in their ongoing feminist project ‘Lives in the making: Power, academia, and the everyday’, when we are open about our struggles – about the numerous failures, frustrations, infuriations, indignities, and obstacles that we all experience – we can better understand that we are not alone, that we share much in common, and that we could and should collectively organize around this common to expand it and (re)produce a different kind of university.

This means you. If you have a story to tell – about your own nights spent sleeping on the floor, as it were, or about a solution or hopeful example that you would be willing to offer – please post it as a comment to this thread, anonymously if you like, or consider sending it in as a guest post of your own (antipode@live.co.uk). It would be great to make visible all the different experiences that are taking place out there, figure out how to connect them, and see what kind of struggles we could get up to.

References

Autonomous Geographies Collective (2010) Beyond scholar activism: Making strategic interventions inside and outside the neoliberal university. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 9:245-275

Hawkins R, Manzi M, and Ojeda D (ongoing) ‘Lives in the making: Power, academia, and the everyday’ – a longitudinal qualitative study, in five year intervals, tracking the experiences of a cohort of scholars from early career through their life course in academia.

Meyerhoff E, Johnson E, and Braun B (2011) Time and the university. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 10(3):483-507

The paper critically analyses a nationwide school-building programme in England – Building Schools for the Future – arguing that between 2003-2010 the UK government’s policy guidance for BSF represented a (re)turn to utopian discourse in governmental policy-making, mobilised in order to justify a massive programme of new school building. In doing so, BSF connected with the promise of three further discourses: school(-children), community and architectural practice. It anticipated that new school buildings would instil transformative change – modernising English schooling, combating social exclusion and leaving an architectural ‘legacy’. However, BSF constituted an allegorical utopia: whilst suggesting a ‘radical’ vision for schooling and society, its ultimate effect was to preserve a conventional (neoliberal) model of schooling. The paper highlights the critical role that notions of utopia might have in negotiating – and challenging – promise-laden mega-building policies like BSF. In doing so, it develops recent geographical research on utopia, education and architecture.

This is a slightly revised version of an article that originally appeared on the New Left Project website

This article was originally written as a response to a piece on the New Left Project website by anthropologist Jason Hickel. He wrote an article, ‘A short history of neoliberalism (and how we can fix it)’, which contained a number of problematic generalizations about neoliberalism. Now, while I have sympathy with some of Hickel’s arguments (and have actually made similar ones in the past myself), I take issue with the way he characterizes certain aspects of neoliberalism in his argument, especially how he characterizes monetarism. What it represented was the way that neoliberalism and associated terms like monetarism or ‘Volcker Shock’ are often used indiscriminately and without proper explanation. In this brief essay I seek to illustrate this claim in order to point out that it is too simplistic to classify the transformation of Anglo-Saxon political economies over the last few decades as the exemplar of neoliberalism. In fact, we could even argue that they are not neoliberal after all.

Starting with Hickel’s argument; he claims that:

“Neoliberalism has a specific history, and knowing that history is an important antidote to its hegemony, for it shows that the present order is not natural or inevitable, but rather that it is new, that it came from somewhere, and that it was designed by particular people with particular interests.”

This is a laudable aim for any take on our current political-economic system, and not one that I want to dispute here. Rather, I’d like to outline how Hickel’s presentation of core elements of neoliberal thinking and policy prescriptions is flawed when it comes to monetarism and monetary policy. Aside from historical accuracy, this is important because understanding these things in more detail actually problematizes the notion that we have ever been, or are now, neoliberal.

A concern with monetary policy – or the control of the money supply and inflation – is the foundation on which much of later, supposedly neoliberal thinking and policies have rested. Many things that are now identified as neoliberal – including privatization of national industries and public utilities, liberalization of trade and capital movement, and deregulation – have one thing in common: they are premised on a particular understanding of the economy in which the stability of money and the dangers of inflation are key concerns. Hence, understanding monetarism and monetary policy is central to understanding wider neoliberal processes and policies – if we accept that those other things are neoliberal in themselves, which is a topic for another day.

My argument necessitates two things: first, the ability to put aside political preferences for a minute or two in order to learn to think like a neoliberal (difficult I know, but important nevertheless); and, second, learning a bit of monetary theory. The latter may actually be trickier than the former.

First…

‘Neoliberals’ – and I apologize for using scare quotes here but I think it is important to do so – like Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman were concerned with money and monetary issues because they had a particular (and peculiar I might add) take on capitalism; they viewed the capitalist market as something that is ‘natural’ and necessary for ensuring freedom – see Friedman’s book Capitalism and Freedom for a prime example of this way of thinking. This means that anything that disturbs the (assumed) natural functioning of the market mechanism – which is itself dependent on private property and individual transacting – not only counts as unnatural, liable to fail and therefore incredibly costly, but also represents an assault on human freedom. Hence why neoliberals are so vociferously against government intervention – it not only disturbs the market mechanism, but it ultimately leads down the ‘road to serfdom’ as Hayek so stridently put it. Why is this important? Well, when it comes to money and monetary policy, thinkers like Friedman and Hayek – plus adherents to the Chicago, Austrian and other neoliberal schools – place a particular emphasis on taking politics and politicians out of the picture when it comes to the money supply. According to Friedman, this lifeblood of capitalism needs to be “free from irresponsible governmental tinkering” in order to “prevent monetary policy from being subject to the day-to-day whim of political authorities” (Capitalism and Freedom, p. 51).

This helps to explain what it was about Keynesianism that got the goat of monetarists like Friedman. The key to understanding their overall concerns, and hence the ‘neoliberal’ perspective, is their fear that the Keynesian policy of full-employment would entrench an inflationary cycle as inflation was used to control real wages in response to pressures from trade unions, because wage restraint or moderation could not be used without the threat of industrial conflict. In the Keynesian model, then, inflation helped to meet the growing demands of an increasingly powerful labour movement, but was always dependent upon the maintenance of rising industrial productivity and ultimately demand. A good discussion of these fears can be found in Richard Cockett’s book Thinking the Unthinkable. To neoliberals, this meant that inflation was inevitable and that the inflationary pressures produced by the concentrated power of labour would mount over time as wages ratcheted up, leading to the erosion of the natural and proper functioning of the market, as well as political freedom. In these circumstances, neoliberals argued that governments would have no choice but to intervene, regulate and interfere more in the market as there would be no other mechanism to curb inflation, and this would gradually erode economic, and hence political, freedom. The shared concern with this prospect is what helped to bring together a wide array of often different thinkers – including the Austrian School, Freiburg School, first and second Chicago Schools, British intellectuals from Manchester and the LSE, business foundations, and so on – in a ‘neoliberal’ mélange.

This is the reason why monetary concerns are central to neoliberal thought. They became a key part of neoliberal policy-making as the 1970s progressed, since the ideas of people like Friedman seemed to become increasingly self-evident as inflation accompanied growing stagnation (i.e. ‘stagflation’), and it was hard to explain this rising unemployment alongside rising inflation using Keynesian ideas. As an aside, rather than the orthodox view that US government spending on the Vietnam War and then the 1973 oil crisis caused these inflationary pressures, I have made the argument elsewhere that an important and overlooked reason for rising inflation was the emergence of the state-less Eurodollar market which enabled financial institutions to increasingly raise and lend money outside of national regulatory control, leaving governments with no instrument to restrain the creation of money. The recent book by Nicholas Shaxson, Treasure Islands, provides an illuminating insight into this international financial market and the problems it has caused elsewhere. This, though, is a yet another topic for yet another day.

Second…

It is important to remember that neoliberals, to continue using that fuzzy term, have a point – or at least a point of view. It is somewhat hard to appreciate this, however, without some grounding in the basics of monetary policy. This is where I feel the need to correct Hickel’s argument (and those of others). My main concern is with his characterization of the Volcker Shock – named after Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker – and monetary policy. I would suggest reading Geoff Mann’s article here for an accessible and detailed explanation of monetary policy and its evolution.

Hickel follows David Harvey’s arguments in A Brief History of Neoliberalism that neoliberalism is really about the restoration of class power as the top 1% reasserted themselves politically and ideologically during the 1970s, 1980s and beyond. Obviously, this restoration is geographically specific in that there are major differences between countries, as this blog by Timothy Taylor illustrates. So, it is important to note that Harvey concentrates on the USA context, making his claims very country-specific – a great website called The World Top Incomes Database enables you to look at the differences between countries. That issue aside, the discussion of the Volcker Shock by Hickel (and often others) misses some crucial points and misunderstands some monetarist arguments when it comes to monetary policy back in the 1970s.

The key to remember is that monetary policy concerns the money supply; literally this means the amount of money in an economy. For a more detailed discussion see the website New Economic Perspectives and especially their ‘primer’ on modern monetary theory, or the New Economics Foundation booklet Where does money come from? There are different ways to measure the money supply and these are called monetary aggregates. They can be crudely split between M1, M2 and M3. Each refers to a different form of money: M1 represents actual cash (i.e. coins and notes) as well as deposits in current accounts which can be accessed immediately; M2 represents M1 plus money in savings accounts and mutual funds that take longer to access; and M3 represents M1, M2 and even larger and longer-term deposits (e.g. certificates of deposit). It is important to note that monetarists expected M1 to circulate about six times in any year; this is called the velocity of money and can be worked out by dividing GDP by M1. Monetarists also assumed – in contrast to Keynesians – that any increase in the money supply would lead to a subsequent increase in incomes as more money circulates thereby driving up inflation – see Michael Barratt Brown on this.

Unlike what Hickel argues in his article, monetarists do not want governments to use interest rates to cut inflation – that is not the point monetarists are trying to make. Instead they want governments to stop using interest rates as a way to influence inflation (or unemployment) and instead to focus on controlling the money supply by literally stabilizing the amount of money in an economy. Governments can do this by not increasing the amount of money in circulation. That would mean that governments simply stop printing more money to resolve their economic problems (e.g. wage demands, fiscal crises, etc.) and, more importantly, that governments let the market function properly to find the ‘correct’ price for money in any economy; that is, the amount that people are willing to pay for money (i.e. price) that then reflects the scarcity of money at any given time. This will mean that as money becomes scarcer (i.e. gains value) it will become more expensive (i.e. have higher interest rates), and vice versa. This was the theory at least…

What happened with Volcker illustrates the wrong-headedness – or perhaps naivety, to choose a kinder word – of monetarists and is important to appreciate if you want to criticize so-called neoliberalism. The best outline of these issues is in William Greider’s magnificent book Secrets of the Temple which covers, in great detail, the evolution of Federal Reserve policy during the Carter and Reagan administrations. The first thing to note is that the Federal Reserve is independent of the government, and so it is incorrect to imply that Volcker worked at the behest of either Carter (who appointed him in 1979) or Reagan (who reappointed him in 1983, despite concerns). Second, it is more accurate to claim that Volcker tried to institute monetarism, but important to note that this meant that he sought to let interest rates rise or fall in relation to the demand for monetary aggregates (see above) rather than simply raising interest rates.

Third, it is crucial to highlight the failure of monetarism as a policy tool: it simply did not work because the Federal Reserve (and other central banks) found that their control over monetary aggregates did not translate into control over inflation or the economy. This largely resulted from the instability of the monetary aggregates themselves as – in contrast to what monetarists expected – the velocity of money slowed down and thereby “disrupted all the standard monetary equations” in Greider’s words (Secrets of the Temple, p. 479). Simply put, the aggregate changed as the Federal Reserve sought to control it. This did not mean that inflation lost its position as a central concern, merely that interest rates ended up being used as a mechanism to target a specific inflation level set by the Federal Reserve (and other central banks). This inflation-targeting, however, was not monetarism; see Mann’s article for more on this policy redirection. So, monetarism was a failure – it didn’t work and was abandoned as a way to control inflation to influence the economy. Moreover, and fourthly, it was implemented by Volcker who often ended up in conflict with both the Carter and Reagan administrations as a result. This was even the case in relation to Reagan and especially when it came to Reagan’s very loose fiscal policy. The fact that Reagan could not cut government spending for the first few years of his administration resulted from problems caused by the Volcker Shock itself. For instance, higher interest rates made investment more expensive, which led to a rise in unemployment and thus an increase in people receiving welfare. This outcome was compounded by Reagan’s fiscal policies, especially tax cuts, which led inexorably to the wholesale expansion of US federal public borrowing through the sale of government debt securities and the decision to give up inflation as a mechanism to cut this growing debt. As a result, the national debt tripled during the Reagan administration and, more importantly, doubled in real terms because of falling inflation that came after the Volcker Shock; see John Steele Gordon.

My wider argument – see here – is that inflation was curtailed during this time, not as a result of monetarism but rather through the expansion of national public debt that resulted from the sale of government debt securities and rising real interest rates. The wealthiest 1% benefited enormously as a result of these changes, for sure, but so did anyone with mutual funds, a pension fund, savings, or other forms of asset (e.g. housing). First, real interest rates – that is, interest rates minus inflation – rose again after years of negative real interest rates during the 1970s cutting into the value of all sorts of assets; see graphs for the USA and Canada and the UK. Second, governments ended up owing interest on all the outstanding government debt. According to Miguel Centeno and Joseph Cohen, what is evident here is a shift in government policy from taxing the wealthiest people to fund government expenditure, to simply borrowing money off the wealthiest people and then paying them interest on that debt. This necessitated more than simple supply-side economics; it required the wholesale transformation of the political-economic system, and the enrolment of large swathes of the population in this system as more and more people were enticed by membership of the ‘property-owning democracy’ espoused by Thatcher and the like. The outcome was the emergence of an asset-based economy which tied people closer to a particular form of capitalism, one driven by rising asset values rather than incomes as well as the interest returns on those assets, and not the rise and fall of neoliberal hegemony – despite what I and colleagues have argued elsewhere I might add!

Now, in conclusion, I agree with people like Hickel that what happened was (and is) not inevitable; people made decisions about these issues, they pursued particular policies to promote those decisions, and so on. What I think is important to consider, however, is that these decisions and policies do not necessarily provide evidence of a specifically ‘neoliberal’ restoration of class power. Indeed, the chronic instability of the economic system that has been constructed over the past few decades stands in marked contrast with the early neoliberals’ emphasis on the importance of economic stability. This instability results, in part at least, from the underlying transformation of our societies from income-based to asset-based political-economic systems. This restructuring was driven by the anti-inflation logic of neoliberal thinkers like Friedman who presented the inflationary pressures of organised labour (e.g. rising wage demands) as structurally problematic; as a result, income inflation became the bogeyman of economic policies around the world. In contrast, the logic of asset inflation meant that rising property ownership – whether it be in the form of financial products, housing, pensions, etc. – came to seem natural, liberating and even moral. The key difference between these logics, however, is important to appreciate; this difference is that as the value of an asset goes up so does demand for that asset, feeding a seemingly continual expansion of wealth. This ‘wealth effect’ has tied whole swathes of the population to the interests (pun intended) of the top 1%. However, the downside of the wealth effect is all-too-evident in the ongoing financial crisis and all the other asset bubbles since the 1970s. The asset-based transformation of the economy has in fact led to a much more unstable political-economic system, and not the market stability envisaged by neoliberals all those years ago.

Kean is currently writing a book tentatively titled We Have Never Been Neoliberal, but which he may rechristen Manifesto for a Doomed Youth. It will be published by Zero Books. http://www.keanbirch.org/

On 17 April 1996 a massacre occurred in the southeastern corner of the Brazilian Amazon. 21 members of the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra or MST) were killed by paramilitary forces while marching from Curionopolis to Marabá as part of their struggle for agrarian land reform. Among the dead was a high-school student, Oziel Alves, who is reported to have died screaming “MST”. Seeking to pay homage to their fallen comrades, and transform the symbolism of the space from one of oppression to one of hope, survivors of the community have created an annual ten-day educational event – the ‘Oziel Alves Pedagogical Encampment’ – leading up to the anniversary of the massacre. Having just participated in the various activities of the MST’s pedagogical youth encampment, I report back upon the spaces of critical learning that the encampment enables, and offer insights into the intersections of critical geography, resistance, memory, and education.

Land ownership has historically been unequal throughout Brazil, and there have been numerous state-led and popular attempts to resettle the landless in Amazonia (Foweraker 1981). Dissatisfied with a perceived lack of attention to the structural inequity underlying land concentration, social movements have become vocal and powerful actors in Amazonian agrarian reform (Simmons 2004). The MST is often considered one of the most successful social movements in Brazil, and seeks agrarian reform by occupying land it deems ‘unproductive’ (Branford and Rocha 2002; Wolford 2006). Tragically, violent conflicts such as the Eldorado dos Carajás massacre (named after the municipality it occurred in) have typified the landscape of the southern portion of the state of Pará (Simmons 2004, 2005; Simmons et al. 2007).

As the MST is concerned with transforming the landless into empowered agriculturalists, the struggle for education is as central to its ideology as its demand for land (Branford and Rocha 2002). Seeking to make the land and its landless members ‘socially productive’, formal and informal education play key roles in the MST. This integration of education – along a continuum from formal to informal learning opportunities – with radical political action has been well studied by educational scholars (see Welton 1993; Spencer, 1995; Kilgore 1999; Overwien 2000; Walter 2007). Since 2006, a ten-day ‘pedagogical encampment’ has proceeded the annual vigil that occurs on 17 April. In analyzing the radical educational space of this pedagogical encampment, I draw on  Foley (1999), who defines informal social movement learning as incidental, embedded in action, and not systematized. Within Foley’s conception of informal learning, ritualized spaces, such as political meetings and demonstrations, are sites of pedagogical value. Additionally, I believe the theoretical inroads of David Gruenwald (2003) in constructing a ‘critical pedagogy of place’, are instrumental to understand the  transformation of both this space and the MST youth members through the pedagogical encampment.

On 8 April, approximately 400 MST youth, ranging in ages from 12 to 30, and traveling from as far as 12 hours away, converged at a curve on a remote Brazilian highway known as the ‘S-curve’ (Curva do S). This place was chosen as the site of the pedagogical encampment because it is the location where the Eldorado dos Carajas massacre occurred. That this area holds symbolic importance is obvious to even the passing tourist because of the monument, consisting of 19 massive burned Brazil nut trees interred in a circle, which the movement constructed following the massacre. Beginning on 8 April, the MST youth transformed the space once again into one of informal and formal learning. Over the next ten days, plenaries were held each day where members learned about pertinent topics such as gender relations, agrarian land tenure, agroecology, and critical cartography.

In the middle of each plenary, groups of 15 students would divide off to debate the topics together and derive critical questions, which they returned to pose to the plenary discussants. This model of participatory education is diametrically opposed to that of the contemporary Brazilian educational system, and is emblematic of the re-constitution of this tragic space into one of hope.

In addition to these more formal educational opportunities, extensive informal learning took place as well. MST youth chaired each plenary discussion, and created misiticas, or pedagogical theatrical performances, that opened each plenary. The youth were also tasked with organizing themselves into nucleos de base, or collectives, which were responsible for the initial construction of living quarters, bathrooms, showers, as well as the ongoing maintenance of the encampment, including the cooking, cleaning, and security for the daily protest. This daily protest, which occurred at 5 pm, involved the occupation of the highway for 21 minutes in honor of those who died in the struggle for agrarian land equality and social justice.

During each day’s occupation, a loudspeaker was used to educate stopped motorists, as well as to remind the assembled MST youth about the history of the space, and its transformed nature into of political education.

Through the myriad educational activities that MST youth experienced at this annual event significant learning took place. Youth, who began the experience as timid students educated in an oppressive traditional school system, were transformed to those who felt comfortable posing and debating critical questions, such as the relations between pesticides and food sovereignty. From invoking the memory of the massacre, to creating poetry, to organizing daily work teams, MST youth developed as radical subjects through the experience of this annual critical pedagogy of place.

References

Branford S and Rocha J (2002) Cutting the Wire: The Story of the Landless Movement in Brazil. London: Latin America Bureau

Foweraker J (1981). The Struggle for Land: A Political Economy of the Pioneer Frontier in Brazil from 1930 to the Present-day. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Gruenewald D A (2003) The best of both worlds: A critical pedagogy of place. Educational Researcher 32(4): 3-12

Kilgore D W (1999) Understanding learning in social movements: A theory of collective learning. International Journal of Lifelong Education 18(3): 191-202

Overwien B (2000) Informal learning and the role of social movements. International Review of Education 46(6):621-640

Simmons C S (2004) The political economy of land conflict in the eastern Brazilian Amazon. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94:183-206

Simmons C S (2005) Territorializing land conflict: Space, place, and contentious politics in the Brazilian Amazon. GeoJournal 64(4):307-317

Simmons C S, Walker R T, Arima E Y, Aldrich S P and Caldas M M (2007) The Amazon land war in the south of Pará. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 97(3):567-592

Spencer B (1995) Old and new social movements as learning sites. Adult  Education Quarterly 46(1):31-42

Walter P (2007) Adult learning in new social movements. Adult  Education Quarterly 57(3):248-263

Welton M (1993) Social revolutionary learning: The new social movements as learning sites. Adult Education Quarterly 43(3):152-164

Wolford W (2006) The difference ethnography can make: Social mobilization and development in the Brazilian northeast. Qualitative Sociology 29:335-352

Here we catch up with Fenda, learn a bit about the paper and see what’s next from her…

Why did you decide to write ‘Global incorporation and local conflict’?

I have been working as a researcher and consultant in the Sierra Leone mining industry since 1987.  I started out in hydrogeology / water management / environmental consultancy in the rutile mining area.  I soon became aware of the many other factors – political, economic, and socio-cultural – that are relevant to my work.  Things I would know if I were an anthropologist, for example.  My eureka moment, as it were, was when I came across the following quote by a colonial water expert in East Africa in the 1930s called F. Debenham.  He said: “the water professional must have a wider view than his original training would of itself give him, since he is concerned not only with the existence of water but its potential uses. He therefore finds himself called upon to estimate social, economic and even political values in his work, and these judgments may often be of greater actual importance than his purely scientific training in finding or measuring water”.

What’s the central concern of the paper, and why is it important?

The central concern is that there are some historic root causes to conflict in Sierra Leonean mining regions that are not being adequately addressed.  There are historic structural-constraints to development of the mineral industry – core-periphery relations at several scales.  As long as this remains the case I feel conflict will continue.  It might be managed but not resolved.

What is it that draws you, personally, intellectually and politically, to this topic?

I think I have always been socially conscious – concerned about things like fairness and respect for people.  Even as a child:  As a 9 year old, I can remember being one of the leaders of a small group of 6^th graders at my elementary school, University Primary School who got one of our parents, Mrs Patricia Oyolu to type up a protest letter to the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the University of Nigeria at Nnsukka, Sir Francis Ibiam which we all signed.  We had heard that our principal Mr Samuel Akpadiok whom we all loved was going to be fired for political reasons.  We put pressure on our parents who took up the issue at PTA, and he did not get fired. I still remember the thank you letter he wrote to all students and parents which he ended with: there never was a greater testimony.  I had to ask my father what testimony meant!

Inequities and injustices in mining regions of Sierra Leone are glaringly obvious.  As I would observe the changing environment and people, I’d think – suppose this was me?  My house, my land, my sacred places – how would I feel?  Seeing the remains of a village that has just been relocated for mining can be quite disturbing.  I still have images in my mind.  In one case, a broken clay cooking pot next to three fire stones with the ashes still there, a wilting banana tree with a head of bananas 20 feet away.  That was all that was left of a 200 year old historic village.

How does your paper relate to current affairs and matters of concern?

I think conflict issues in mining areas persist worldwide.  Right now the Keystone Pipeline controversy in North America is on-going.  The weak bargaining power of developing countries such as Sierra Leone in the mining sector.  The poor implementation of legislation that might protect people is also a problem.  The lack of financial resources to monitor and control what goes on in mining areas.  This is not new information by any means, but it hasn’t been truly addressed.  I think one of the major constraints is not reconciling the dual governance systems in postcolonial countries – customary and statutory – in an effective way.  Different ways of seeing land and water resources, and different approaches to managing them.  In spite of recent efforts at reform, mining statutory legislation that is truly sensitive to, and respectful of, this cultural diversity that is the reality of Africa is still largely absent.  Major legislative reform of colonial era laws is needed.  Some clauses and contradictions in Sierra Leone laws still on the books are mind-boggling.

What are your paper’s implications for praxis? How can the knowledge you have generated help change or shape the world in progressive ways?

I think one of the biggest problems for praxis is that we do not always fully investigate the root causes of current day problems/issues that we are trying to address.  Yet, a historic context is very important because it gives a better understanding of problems, and hopefully, better ways to address them.  How the structural constraints of the global economic system mirror locally in mining villages/communities is something an economist might not think about.  But if better informed, might this knowledge lead to better Corporate Social Responsibility, for example?

What sort of reaction do you hope your paper will get, both within and beyond the academy?

I hope people will see the importance of a holistic approach to analysing such conflict problems.  And also, the importance of addressing a problem at several scales – local, national, global – to see the interconnections.  Some days I feel like I’m masquerading as an anthropologist in my writings.  On other days, a political scientist!  Like what Debenham said, I guess.

What sort of audience did you have in mind when you wrote it?

I didn’t think of an audience.  I just wrote it as I saw it, really.  But I think it will benefit a variety of professionals.  And lay people, too, who want to be informed.  Policy makers, obviously.  But I think scientists like me need to be aware of all these issues which can impact or hinder our work.

What’s your current project? What’s next?

I am currently working on a book manuscript about strangers, indigenes, land rights, and conflict in Sierra Leone resource extraction areas in historic and present day context.  I talk a little bit about the stranger in my Antipode paper but it will be the conceptual framework and subject of the whole book.  I’m planning on finishing it this year and, hopefully finding a publisher.

Many thanks to Fenda for speaking with us.

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, William Pannapacker – under his pen name Thomas H. Benton – wrote an article titled ‘Graduate school in the humanities: Just don’t go’. In it he warned against undertaking a PhD in light of what he “had learned about the academic labour system from personal observation and experience”. His perspective is obviously coloured by his context in that he works in a North American university and in a humanities discipline, but since I recently moved to Canada his arguments have struck a nerve in terms of what I have read and experienced in my short time here. This is not to imply that these issues are, by any means, limited to the North American continent. Last month, the Times High Education Supplement published an article about the challenges facing junior academics in the UK as growing numbers of people apply for each new academic post.

However, my ruminations here result from reading a lot of rather depressing blogs, articles, etc. over the last month or so, specifically ones focused on the difficulties facing new academics in a fast tightening labour market. It wasn’t necessarily professional interest that has led me to these writings, although there is some connection to an essay forthcoming in Antipode 44(4) on the problems facing new academics in neoliberal universities that I helped to collectively write – note the deliberate split infinitive as a nod to the idea that we need to rethink our writing. Nor was it my own personal situation as I have managed luckily to find a tenure-track position over here – and I stress ‘luckily’ considering all the things I know now about selection committees, university decision-making, immigration requirements, etc. Rather, I stumbled across a number of these writings over a weekend back in late March and found them fascinating and deeply disturbing in equal measure.

What I started to read was less concerned with taking a critical look at the privatisation / marketisation / commodification / neoliberalisation of universities which many of us have explored and discussed in the last few decades. A recent special issue in The Hedgehog Review, for example, focuses on ‘The corporate professor’. One article by Gaye Tuchman called ‘Pressured and measured: Professors at Wannabe U’ seemed particularly relevant to these issues – I also found some resources on her work (see here) and a recent article of hers in Inside Higher Ed about ‘Commodifying the academic self’ that proved insightful reading. Her article reminded me of an interesting piece of software I installed on my computer not-so-long-ago called Publish or Perish. It really is the epitome of a Foucauldian disciplinary device as it enables you to work out your very own H-Index. It’s basically a more sophisticated form of citation counting on Google Scholar – itself a pernicious and addictive activity (or at least I find it so). In the Antipode essay I mentioned above we discuss how to go about subverting such citation-counting. For starters, collective writing moves us away from the claiming of sole authorship; other suggestions include not using direct citations to specific articles, but simply referring to the overall work of individual scholars. There are obviously issues with this that need teasing out (e.g. established scholars may benefit more), but it’s one way to avoid the continual disciplining that impact factors, H-Indexes, citations counting and so on entail, encourage, embody, etc. However, that is an issue you can read about in the essay itself…

Back to the issue at hand, and in contrast to the above, what I have been reading were reflections and arguments of different people about the everyday stresses and strains of entering or continuing in the academic labour market when there are fewer and fewer secure, tenure-track jobs and an ever growing number of ‘competitors’ for every permanent position. Whether this has caused or exacerbated the massive decline in the proportion of tenure-track or tenured faculty in the last three decades – from 57% in 1975 to 31% in 2007 according to Robin Wilson in the Chronicle of Higher Education – is an important question. Whatever the cause, more and more people with PhDs are ending up as temporary (or ‘flexible’ in management-speak parlance) workers exploited by universities and permanent faculty alike. Sometimes what I have read was darkly humorous such as the blog 100 Reasons Not to Go to Graduate School about the pitfalls of graduate life and after. Other times it was more sobering reading as illustrated by an article in The Washington Post called ‘Professor of desperation’.

The basic point that came across to me again and again was that the academic labour market is broken – or, more accurately, it has never worked properly in the first place (at least for a significant and growing proportion of those in it).

To me, it is increasingly evident that universities run on the backs of insecure, temporary and contracted faculty, staff and students – both in North America and in the UK where I worked until last year. And here is the rub, permanent faculty like myself depend on this continuing situation because without temporary staffing it would be impossible to put on basic courses or programmes, to cover sabbaticals, or to teach ever-expanding class sizes. There are also others who point out how universities and permanent faculty are increasingly tied up with this exploitation of an insecure ‘adjunct’ workforce, including this website dedicated to collating information on adjunct pay – The Adjunct Project – and a more recent article by William Pannapacker in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Here, Pannapacker talks of the ‘big lie’ behind graduate school and claims:

“Graduate school in the humanities is a trap. It is designed that way. It is structurally based on limiting the options of students and socializing them into believing that it is shameful to abandon ‘the life of the mind’. That’s why most graduate programs resist reducing the numbers of admitted students or providing them with skills and networks that could enable them to do anything but join the ever-growing ranks of impoverished, demoralized, and damaged graduate students and adjuncts for whom most of academe denies any responsibility.”

What comes across from this brief trawl of the internet, is that the two-tier (or three-tier if we include graduate student labour) structure of university teaching is deeply problematic, structurally embedded and performatively embodied all in one. What worries me most is that I can’t seem to think of any practical solution to this dilemma short of cutting the number of graduate students until all the recently minted PhDs have jobs, or to push for an expansion of tenure-track faculty.

This leads me to the question of how are we supposed to ensure that everyone who wants a secure academic job can get one? As one colleague said to me recently, it may simply be that we have an ethical responsibility to ensure that we do not take on too many PhD students since there is a risk that we simply flood the academic labour market – what counts as ‘too many’ is an another question entirely. A more down-to-earth, yet short-term solution is provided by people like Karen Kelsky who gave up her tenured position and now provides career advice on her website The Professor Is In. The fact that she can make a living from providing this service, and that her website, Facebook page and Twitter account have so many likes and followers, indicates the need for this kind of practical and often brutally blunt and honest advice. She is not alone either, as this article by Carolyn Steele in the Canadian higher education magazine University Affairs illustrates. These kinds of practicalities point to the responsibility of graduate supervisors to be better mentors to their students than perhaps they have been in the past. In thinking about my responsibility as a teacher, I have come to the conclusion that any PhD student who wants an academic career basically has to be set on a particular career pathway from year one of their doctoral programme; it’s no good waiting until the end to start providing advice. Unfortunately, it would now appear that new tenure-track hires are expected to have two or three peer-reviewed articles under their belt, a modicum of networking or organizational ability (e.g. running a conference panel or two), a range of teaching experience (e.g. tutorials and lectures), even examples of applying for research grants, and so on. All those things, however, will not ensure an interview; it is also necessary to have a clear and well-pitched CV, cover letter, teaching portfolio or whatever has been requested.

All in all, these practical suggestions do nothing to counter the continuing exploitation of temporary faculty and may even perpetuate it. Whether and how we resolve this issue will likely determine our professional lives over the next 30 or 40 years. Hence why we’d better start thinking about it now.

Kean is currently writing a book tentatively titled We Have Never Been Neoliberal, but which he may rechristen Manifesto for a Doomed Youth. It will be published by Zero Books. http://www.keanbirch.org/

Why? Because it’s our contention that the value of research is underdetermined by its author; plainly, we don’t know and can’t control how our labours will be used, where and when. And despite (or because of) that, if they are going to be put to work, then they need to be publicised. What’s more, if our work is to be ‘germinal’ rather than ‘terminal’, then arguably we should be prepared to “look forward and speculate in evidence-based ways” (to quote Dunleavy and Gilson again), suggesting how it might speak to ‘live’ events, help others understand and explain the world around them, and thus be drawn out and spun on.

Here Leah Horowitz (formerly at Rutgers, now at Hawai’i Pacific University) speaks about her paper, ‘Translation Alignment: Actor-Network Theory, Resistance, and the Power Dynamics of Alliance in New Caledonia‘, which is forthcoming in Antipode 44(3) in a week or two. The video abstract is a great example of what we’re talking about: it outlines the paper’s thesis, introducing us to the literature it builds on/contributes to and the empirical material it marshals, before stepping back, as it were, and sketching out some of the questions it enables students of similar (and, indeed, not-so-similar) phenomena to ask, some of the problems it abstracts into focus, etc.

There was a terrific session at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers this year that looked at the life and work of Clyde Adrian Woods, a brilliant and kind scholar who passed away last summer. I’ve wanted to put down some thoughts toward a larger essay on Woods’ work for some time. Here, I’m sharing a piece of that work.

In 2002, in a special issue of the Professional Geographer that’s worth reading in its entirety, Woods commented that he had spent his life witnessing the death of African Americans and their communities – through environmental disease, through the redevelopment bulldozer, and through what he elsewhere described as “asset stripping” of poor communities of color (see Woods 2009a). He lamented about the ways that mainstream social science ignores so much about how these disappearances take place, and questioned the ways that even well-intentioned researchers, with a well-formed critical analysis about race and power, can play a role in declaring the death of communities and people: “Have we become academic coroners?” he asked. He went on:

“Have the tools of theory, method, instruction, and social responsibility become so rusted that they can only be used for autopsies? Does our research in any way reflect the experiences, viewpoints, and needs of the residents of these dying communities? On the other hand, is the patient really dead? What role are scholars playing in this social triage?” (2002:63).

It was of course an echo of that much-quoted line from Karl Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, in which Marx insisted that academic pursuits be directed towards social change: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it”. It’s a message that Woods and others (Crenshaw et al. 1995) have urged scholars to apply to our work on race and racism, lest, as Woods was warning, we fall in the ‘pure objectivity’ trap, which might require us to simply record the speed at which people die preventable deaths.

Because that’s what it means to look at racism – it’s not about ideas alone, it can never be. The study of race and racism, as they are reproduced and challenged before us and within us is a study of “death-dealing” (Gilmore 2002) processes that play out through bodies and in material space.

In that vein, Woods was especially interested in making the racist underpinnings of post-civil rights development visible, to remove the socio-historical shroud that has implied that the civil rights successes of the 1950s and 60s had in fact scrubbed our cities clean of institutionalized segregation. He wrote about how racially-inscribed urban processes were foundational for power building on a broader scale:

“In many studies of urban African American communities, even progressive scholars seem to be incapable of seeing the new regional social and spatial foundations of post-civil rights racism: suburban residential and industrial re-segregation; massive state investment in predominantly white areas; massive state disinvestment from rural and urban areas with large African American, Native American, Latino populations; the triumph of the state’s rights movement; the fracturing of any semblance of national social policy; and so on. By first understanding the central role of race in the [spatial] restructuring process at the regional level, we can then trace how dominant regional blocs use race to reorder national and international realities” (2002: 64).

So, Woods argued that race mattered – not as simply yet another vector of power, but because his empirical research had shown that race was a central principle in the organization of post-civil rights real estate development in the Mississippi Delta. And that one of the effects of this was the subordination of black culture and people to the white plantation power bloc – so the impact was both spatial and political-economic.

On the other end of the spectrum he found resistance. One mode of political and social survival for the subordinated, he found, was the refinement of blues music as critique, as news, and as remembrance. Describing makers of the blues as “sociologists, reporters, counsellors, advocates, preservers of language and customs, and summoners of life” (1998: 17), Woods developed the concept of the blues epistemology in his book Development Arrested. He used the concept to argue for a research vision that allows us to see the connections between culture and political economy – rather than separating them into isolated strands of history. It was an important part of his efforts to help us see the multiple ways in which those who are socially evicted can build power, below the radar.

In the face of a neoliberal monolith, which he carefully documented, and in the context of a world of social science that claimed objectivity as it narrated the death of communities, he argued for research that offered new stories: “new epistemologies, theories, methods, policies, programs, and plans for communities confronted by the…neo-Bourbon/neoliberal agenda” (2009: 448).

For Woods, uncovering the blues epistemology was one important way to find the cracks in prisms of power through which people might pry open spaces for social change, even if such change is slow to arrive. To understand a place, he wrote, we “have to explore the subterranean caverns that shelter the wellsprings of dreams during the seasons when hope can’t be found” (2009: 430). Those wellsprings were fed by the poetry and subterranean political force of the blues.

References, and selected further reading

(Thanks to Katherine McKittrick for contributing to this list.)

Crenshaw K, Gotanda N, Peller G and Thomas K (eds) (1995) Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. New York: New Press

Gilmore R W (2002) Fatal couplings of power and difference: Notes on racism and geography. The Professional Geographer 54(1):15-24

Isenberg A, Connerly C, Lipsitz G, Wilson B, Thomas J and Woods C (2004) Symposium on Clyde Woods’ Development Arrested. Journal of Planning History 3(3):241-260

Lipsitz G (1998) The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press

McKittrick K and Woods C (eds) (2007) Black Geographies and the Politics of Place. Toronto: Between the Lines

McKittrick K and Woods C (2007) Introduction: “No one knows the mysteries at the bottom of the ocean”. In McKittrick K and Woods C (eds) Black Geographies and the Politics of Place (pp1-13). Toronto: Between the Lines

Woods C (1998) Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta. New York: Verso

——- (1998) Regional blocs, regional planning, and the blues epistemology in the Lower Mississippi Delta. In Sandercock L (ed) Making the Invisible Visible: A Multicultural Planning History (pp78-99). Berkeley:  University of California Press

——- (2002) Life after death. The Professional Geographer 54(1):62-66

——- (2005) Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans? Katrina, trap economics, and the rebirth of the blues. American Quarterly 57(4):1005-1018

——- (2007) “Sittin’ on top of the world”: The challenges of blues and hip hop geography. In McKittrick K and Woods C (eds) Black Geographies and the Politics of Place (pp46-81). Toronto:  Between the Lines

——- (2009) Katrina’s world: Blues, Bourbon, and the return to the source. American Quarterly 61(3):427-453

——- (2009a) Les Misérables of New Orleans: Trap economics and the asset stripping blues, Part I. American Quarterly 61(3):769-796

——- (2012) Development Arrested: From the Plantation Era to the Katrina Crisis in the Mississippi Delta (new edition). New York: Verso

In a recent editorial, we stated our desire “to support creative new initiatives within and beyond the conventional spaces of the academy, allowing us to work, in a collective spirit, through new solidarities, more – we hope much more – toward egalitarian changes and institutional interventions that will further Antipode’s longstanding commitment to the development of a better, more just society: a society that opposes an organisation of production which sustains and reproduces inequality and injustice, that opposes a global order oriented to profits rather than human needs”. Some of these initiatives, we hope, will be funded by Scholar-Activist Project Awards.

The Awards are intended to support collaborations between academics, non-academics and activists (from NGOs, think tanks, social movements, or community grassroots organisations, among other places) which further radical analyses of geographical issues and engender the development of a new and better society.  They are aimed at promoting programmes of action-research, participation and engagement, cooperation and co-enquiry, and more publicly-focused forms of geographical investigation.  We want to fund work that leads to the exchange of ideas across and beyond the borders of the academy, and builds meaningful relationships and productive partnerships.

Projects could take many forms including, but not limited to: collaborative research with artistic, community, cultural, grassroots, or social movement groups; the production of educational materials and other innovative pedagogical initiatives; and the promotion of links between universities and institutions/organisations outside the academy.  We envisage projects being eclectic in nature and focus – they might involve small or large groups of people, and they may have a focus on a range of scales from the local right up to the global, for example – but they will be designed to foster new thinking or doing, and different mixtures of the two.  We encourage initiatives that are adventurous, that explore and go beyond the boundaries of established academic practice.  We’d like to see work which is innovative and original, but more than that, we want to fund work which is significant: we want to support activities that have implications for praxis, to better understand contemporary political concerns and develop alternatives.

The Antipode Foundation expects to allocate each project up to £10,000 (or its equivalent in the awardee’s currency of choice) but the amounts of its grants will vary according to the proposed project.  The distribution of funds will be as equitable as possible, with other prospective resources and the nature of the proposed project being taken into consideration.  The Antipode Foundation will explicitly privilege applicants and initiatives from historically under-represented groups, regions, countries and institutions in its decision making processes.

Eligibility

Anyone can apply for an Antipode Foundation Scholar-Activist Project Award (including academics and students, and activists of all kinds), but the award needs to be held and administered by a host institution (these could be research, higher education or community-based institutions).  Projects must take place within the year of award; in this case between 1 September 2012 and 31 August 2013.  Those who have already received funding for a previous project are not eligible to apply for another.  Regionally-based events (such as conferences, workshops, seminar series, summer schools and action research meetings) are not covered by this award; they are funded by the separate Antipode Foundation Regional Workshop Awards.

Application forms

Application forms are available here or from the Editorial Office Manager, Andrew Kent, and should be returned to him by 30 June 2012.

Assessment process

Applications will be considered by a panel of Trustees of the Antipode Foundation, and all applicants will be notified of the results in late July 2012.  Unfortunately, we cannot give detailed feedback to unsuccessful applicants.

Post-award procedures

Initiatives supported by an Antipode Foundation Scholar-Activist Project Award should acknowledge this in any outputs arising from it.  The phrase to use is: “This work is/was supported by a Scholar-Activist Project Award from the Antipode Foundation.”

Successful awardees should provide a short (one page) report one calendar year after receipt of the award.  This should be sent to Andrew Kent and will be posted on AntipodeFoundation.org in the interests of transparency and to encourage further applications.  We also welcome more detailed reports, including photos, recordings, etc. for the website.  Please note that successful applicants will be able to apply for additional funding to develop a short film of the project that will be posted online – details will follow the announcement of the awards.