Hyper, pessimistic activism

James Kennell's blog on politics, culture, tourism studies and urban regeneration

New publication on Olympic legacies November 12, 2009

Filed under: conferences, olympics, publications — James Kennell @ 3:22 pm
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Along with two colleagues, Elizabeth Booth and Charles Bladen, I have edited a collection of papers from our Olympic Legacy conference held last year at the University of Greenwich. The collection contains seven substantial, refereed papers on Olympic legacy issues, including information about London 2012, Beijing 2008, Torino 2006, the Cultural Olympiad, volunteering and an overview of the meanings of ‘olympic legacy’.  You can download the publication for free by clicking on the image below.  If you would like a hard copy for your library or reference use, please leave a comment on this post and I will get in touch.

olympics cover

 

Chris Harman 1942-2009 November 10, 2009

This is a recording of Chris Harman, the influential British Marxist and SWP activist who died suddenly this weekend in Egypt, speaking at Marxism 2009  in the summer.  Chris will be greatly missed by the left for his activism and inspiration.   You can read a tribute to Chris written by Alex Callinicos by clicking here.

 

Heritage matters November 9, 2009

Filed under: Social Justice, art — James Kennell @ 1:14 pm
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A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to be invited to the unveiling of a refurbished Romany vardo, or caravan, that had been restored and interpreted with the artist Martin Brockman.  This was project was run by heritage matters as part of the HLF-funded ‘Kentish Culture Past and Present’ project.  In these two pictures you can see how my daughter took up residence inside the caravan for the duration…

 lyra vardo

The vardo, which has been completely restored, has had wooden panels added to it depicting scenes of traditional Kent life carved by Martin Brockman and students from schools in Canterbury, Kent have been involved at all stages of the project.

lyra vardo 2

 This is the first project of its kind that I am aware of my home county of Kent in the UK.   The history of Kent has always involved movements of people, whether they were part of highly mobile communities like the Romany, or the numerous temporary populations that have accompanied the hop-picking season, or the ebb and flow of seaside tourism.  More recently, Kent has found itself to be a point of entry for migrants seeking admission to the UK. 

I  recommend exploring the Heritage Matters website and making use of some of the intriguing audio recordings you will find there, to get a glimpse into some of Kent’s hidden histories.

 

The politico-cultural complex by the seaside October 8, 2009

Last week I went to the Black/North SEAS conference in Skegness.  I posted regularly to my twitter profile while I was there and because of this I was asked by New Start Magazine to contribute a blog post to their website.  You can read this short article by clicking here.

“There was some exciting artistic work on show as part of the seascape event, and reports of fascinating research. But it seems as though the vogue for coastal cultural regeneration is in danger of repeating the rhetorical and ideological mistakes of the now not-so-novel approach to cultural regeneration taken by inland cities over the last 15 years, concentrating on attracting high-spending cultural tourists and viewing communities as a problem that needed to be solved.”

 

New post on Arcades / Promenades September 19, 2009

Wesley has posted up the latest contribution to our ‘Reading the Arcades, reading the Promenades’ blog, where we are attempting to bring together our readings of Walter Benjamins’ ‘Arcades Project‘ and apply these to the British seaside promenade.

The Arcades Project

The Arcades Project

A taster of Wesley’s piece:

“Benjamin is, very, clear and, far too, concise in his summation of the method of The Arcades Project.  Convolute N, which deals with his historical method and his analysis of that method (moving into the philosophy of method and history), contains a very great deal of material but the following are his key methodological statements on the Project itself.

This work has to develop to the highest degree the art of citing without quotation marks. Its theory is intimately related to that of montage.
[N1,10]

Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse – these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them.
[N1a,8] “

 

SeaScape conference September 7, 2009

I’m planning on going to this conference in October,which for some reason I only found out about today!

SeaScape Conference – Butlins, Skegness, PE25 1NJ
Thursday 1st and Friday 2nd October 2009

This is a two-day international conference exploring culture as a regenerative force for coastal communities.

Bringing together cultural strategists, architects, and regeneration experts to discuss creative applications and practice from the Black and North Sea regions, also highlighting the Sea Change programme led by CABE.

The SeaScape conference is part of the ‘SEAS’, a festival featuring installations and performances, happening throughout Skegness

Programme of events

Each day will begin with presentations and discussion followed by more informal opportunities for delegates to actively respond to the conference themes through hands-on exploration of cultural mapping; site visits to innovative arts capital projects and dialogue with local residents.

International speakers will discuss and explore approaches to coastal regeneration from capital investment to community engagement.

The programme includes a session hosted by CABE of examination of Sea Change funded projects from Margate, Bridlington, Boscombe and Hastings.

Event Speakers

Speakers include Dragan Klaic (Netherlands), Fast Urban Research: Jacek Dominiczak and Monika Zawadzka (Poland) and representatives from key projects in Sweden, Norway and the Ukraine. Mark Simmonds (UK), MP for Boston and Skegness and Shadow Minister for Health will be chairing Day 2 of the conference.  Mark is leading on the Conservative’s Coastal Manifesto.

Conference Purpose

SeaScape is part of ‘Cityscape’, a series of conferences within the Black/North SEAS festival. The festival has travelled through Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey, Denmark, Sweden and Norway before arriving in Skegness, on England’s North Sea coast.

SeaScape provides an international platform for reflection and discussion embracing politicians, residents, artists and cultural entrepreneurs exploring common themes of climate-change, regeneration and demographic challenge that bind these coastal communities.

The conference will be a dynamic and inspiring interchange of ideas and experiences, connecting UK activity to international exemplars and supporting European networking and community action.

Attendees

Senior decision makers, planners and regeneration officers in coastal local authorities from the UK and internationally; RDA and other staff responsible for Coastal Action; Senior cultural officers, academics, planning consultants and other influential professionals; Local Strategic Partnership representatives; artists engaged in regeneration projects.

Costs

£80 + VAT + Booking Fee – conference, including lunch and refreshments (Does not include accommodation).

Book Now

 

The first of the summer wine August 19, 2009

Filed under: Wine growing — James Kennell @ 11:54 am

I’m trying my best to have some kind of summer holiday at the moment.  This should mean less work, less stress and less blogging.  All it has really meant so far is less blogging, as the volume of the other parts of the puzzle has increased in inverse proportion to the number of students on campus….

The one thing that I am trying to spend time on is tending to my burgeoning vineyard…..

the yard

 

It might not look like much, but hidden in that foliage are enough grapes to produce my first vintage this autumn:

good bunchvines035

 

For those of you with an interest, I’m growing Bacchus grapes, a variety very suited to the English climate.  These are also grown at the Chapel Down vineyards, which are just down the road from me, so I have high hopes for a dry, flinty sauvingon-esque wine, once I work out how to make it not taste like brandy vinegar.  This is the third year of growth so they should be ready for their first harvest this autumn.  Like Chapel Down, my house sits on the same vein of chalk that runs through the Champagne region and pops up in Kent.  If this experiment works, I’m hoping to quit the day job and retire on the profits of contraband cristal.

The main question I get asked about my wine-producing plans is “how will you crush the grapes?”.  Well, I have two willing helpers…

aphraleeks

 

Hey big spender! July 30, 2009

Will Hutton is interviewed about the economic crisis in this week’s Big Issue magazine. Despite Hutton’s position in the mainstream media as a bit of a maverick, he normally makes quite conservative predictions about economic and social matters, trumpeting the rise of China or promoting economic / managerial approaches to social and cultural change. As director of the Work Foundation, he is certainly not a radical voice and for that reason we should look at his predctions as representative of a current within mainstream political circles, albeit one that he is able to voice publicly due to his ‘outsider’ status in the media.

 

Hutton points out that an economic recovery will require a rise in spending, by consumers or businesses. The consumer, claims Hutton, is concentrating on rebuilding savings, while businesses are becoming debt-minimizers in order to future-proof themselves against difficult economic times. Whether the British are re-building savings or merely starting to save after years of credit-fuelled spending is a moot point, but the likely outcome of this is stagnation in the economy, as happened in Japan in the 1990s after their economy crashed following a sustained boom. Stagnation of course, is even more problematic than a recession for a capitalist economy. A recession and a collapse in asset values at least offers the opportunity for growth and the restoration of the rate of profit; a prolonged stagnation denies capitalists the ability to grow their capital and limits the potential for competition, destroying the engine of the economy.

 

The stagnation that Hutton predicts however, doesn’t look like stagnation at the level of the individual worker or their communities. In order to maintain profit levels, it is likely that the current rate of job losses could continue at 60,000 per month for another three years before stabilisation is achieved. This could (should) lead to a period of social change as the economy and social provision is restructured to reflect this new socio-economic reality. Whether this period of change can be politicised to promote positive political developments remains to be seen, but already the possibilities of workforce mobilisation and collective responses to the crisis are facing up to the use of the recession to intimidate and manipulate workers. Politicians are keen to avoid taking the blame for the current crisis, as each country seeks to line up other markets or ‘the world financial system’ as the villains of the piece. This tactic creates a moving, camouflaged target for the public at large to aim at, and one that is obscured further by techno-managerial jargon and PR.

 

Will Hutton’s prescription for the crisis is a super-Keynesian level of fiscal stimulus, mainly based around a massive programme of public works similar to that which helped to lift the US economy out of the great depression in the 1930s. This might include large engineering projects and the development of a green economy. Of course, after the 1930s the US was left with a vastly expanded productive capacity which could only be usefully employed on a war footing over the following 60 years. The government funded expansion of production can only fix the system in the short-term, eventually the levels of state production work against competition and so have to be reduced and the debts incurred have to be repaid.

As David Harvey has pointed out, the current crisis offers an opportunity, as do all crises, for the reconfiguration of society within a different ideological framework. A more equitable society is not the necessary outcome of this process. Previous crises have seen the deepening and strengthening of the current system of power and attempts to provide a stimulus to return the economy to ‘normal’ are attempts to do just this.  The human costs of this will be enormous, and should shame journalists and politicians out of their current fetishisation of the fiscal stimulus as they hide behind superlative descriptions of it’s size and importance.

 

CFP: Liminal landscapes – remapping the field July 20, 2009

Filed under: Theory, Tourism, arcades / promenades, conferences, seaside, walter benjamin — James Kennell @ 6:14 am
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This looks to be an excellent event. Wesley Rykalski and I will probably be submitting a paper, based on some of our work on our arcades / promenades project.

Symposium
Liverpool John Moores University
1st July 2010
 
Convenors
Dr Hazel Andrews, (Tourism, Consumer and Food Studies, LJMU)
Dr Kevin Meethan, Department of Sociology, University of Plymouth
Dr Les Roberts (School of Architecture, University of Liverpool)
 
Ideas and concepts of liminality have long shaped debates around the uses and practices of space in tourism. Victor Turner’s writings on ritual and communitas, Graburn’s theory of tourism as a sacred journey, or Shield’s discussion of ‘places on the margin’ have secured a well-established foothold in the theoretical landscapes of travel and mobility. The unique qualities of liminal landscapes, as developed by these and other writers on the subject, are generally held to be those which play host to ideas of the ludic, consumption, carnivalesque, inversion or suspension of normative social and moral structures of everyday life, deterritorialisation and ‘becoming’, and so on. While these arguments and tropes remain pertinent, and their metaphorical appeal evermore attractive, the extent to which these spaces provoke counter ideas of social control, terror, surveillance, production and territorialisation, invites an urgent call to re-evaluate the meanings attached to ideas of the ‘liminal’ in tourism studies. The deaths of 21 Chinese migrant workers in Morecambe Bay in 2004 has prompted a sobering re-assessment of the coastal resort as a site of tourism, leisure and consumption. The shifting social geographies associated with these landscapes has meant that the example of the beach may equally be looked upon as a space of transnational labour, migrancy, racial tension, death, fear, uncertainty and disorientation. In this instance, the precarious and un-navigable natural landscape of Morecambe sands becomes a metonym for the increasingly de-stabilising landscapes of trans- or post-national capitalist mobility. Moreover, the settlement of asylum seekers and refugees in UK coastal resorts such as Margate has exposed the underlying tensions and social divisions between representations that play on the ludic, touristic heritage of these resorts and those which address the marginality and exclusion that characterises the other set of mobilities and meanings evoked by these spaces. In addition, the appropriation of liminal landscapes by, for example, local authorities, commercial bodies and marketeers constructs an increasingly mediated or textualised space of performance that re-fashions the embodied (and embedded) spaces as lived by those who make up their diverse social fabric.
 
We invite contributions from across a broad interdisciplinary field, including scholars and practitioners working in tourism and mobility studies, anthropology, geography, film and cultural studies. We also invite multimedia submissions on the topic of liminal landscapes.
 
For enquiries and further details contact Dr Hazel Andrews H.J.Andrews@ljmu.ac.uk.
 
Please submit proposals for papers (300 words maximum) by e-mail to H.J.Andrews@ljmu.ac.uk. We also welcome proposals for panels and exhibits.
 
Deadline for proposals:                                                 30 September 2009
Notification of acceptance:                                            November 2009
Date for Registration:                                                    March 2010
Final submission deadline for full papers:                       7 January 2010
                                                  
Papers selected from the conference proceedings will be published in Journal of Tourism Consumption and Practice (www.tourismconsumption.org.).

Faculty of
Education, Community and Leisure

 
Dr Hazel Andrews PhD, MA, BSc
Senior Lecturer Tourism, Culture and Society
Centre for Tourism, Consumer and Food Studies
 

IM Marsh, Barkhill Road, Aigburth, Liverpool, L17 6BD
t: 0151 231 5234  e: H.J.Andrews@ljmu.ac.uk 
w: www.ljmu.ac.uk
Symposium
Liverpool John Moores University
1st July 2010
 
Convenors
Dr Hazel Andrews, (Tourism, Consumer and Food Studies, LJMU)
Dr Kevin Meethan, Department of Sociology, University of Plymouth
Dr Les Roberts (School of Architecture, University of Liverpool)
 
Ideas and concepts of liminality have long shaped debates around the uses and practices of space in tourism. Victor Turner’s writings on ritual and communitas, Graburn’s theory of tourism as a sacred journey, or Shield’s discussion of ‘places on the margin’ have secured a well-established foothold in the theoretical landscapes of travel and mobility. The unique qualities of liminal landscapes, as developed by these and other writers on the subject, are generally held to be those which play host to ideas of the ludic, consumption, carnivalesque, inversion or suspension of normative social and moral structures of everyday life, deterritorialisation and ‘becoming’, and so on. While these arguments and tropes remain pertinent, and their metaphorical appeal evermore attractive, the extent to which these spaces provoke counter ideas of social control, terror, surveillance, production and territorialisation, invites an urgent call to re-evaluate the meanings attached to ideas of the ‘liminal’ in tourism studies. The deaths of 21 Chinese migrant workers in Morecambe Bay in 2004 has prompted a sobering re-assessment of the coastal resort as a site of tourism, leisure and consumption. The shifting social geographies associated with these landscapes has meant that the example of the beach may equally be looked upon as a space of transnational labour, migrancy, racial tension, death, fear, uncertainty and disorientation. In this instance, the precarious and un-navigable natural landscape of Morecambe sands becomes a metonym for the increasingly de-stabilising landscapes of trans- or post-national capitalist mobility. Moreover, the settlement of asylum seekers and refugees in UK coastal resorts such as Margate has exposed the underlying tensions and social divisions between representations that play on the ludic, touristic heritage of these resorts and those which address the marginality and exclusion that characterises the other set of mobilities and meanings evoked by these spaces. In addition, the appropriation of liminal landscapes by, for example, local authorities, commercial bodies and marketeers constructs an increasingly mediated or textualised space of performance that re-fashions the embodied (and embedded) spaces as lived by those who make up their diverse social fabric.
 
We invite contributions from across a broad interdisciplinary field, including scholars and practitioners working in tourism and mobility studies, anthropology, geography, film and cultural studies. We also invite multimedia submissions on the topic of liminal landscapes.
 
For enquiries and further details contact Dr Hazel Andrews H.J.Andrews@ljmu.ac.uk.
 
Please submit proposals for papers (300 words maximum) by e-mail to H.J.Andrews@ljmu.ac.uk. We also welcome proposals for panels and exhibits.
 
Deadline for proposals:                                                 30 September 2009
Notification of acceptance:                                            November 2009
Date for Registration:                                                    March 2010
Final submission deadline for full papers:                       7 January 2010
                                                  
Papers selected from the conference proceedings will be published in Journal of Tourism Consumption and Practice (www.tourismconsumption.org.).

Faculty of
Education, Community and Leisure

 
Dr Hazel Andrews PhD, MA, BSc
Senior Lecturer Tourism, Culture and Society
Centre for Tourism, Consumer and Food Studies
 

IM Marsh, Barkhill Road, Aigburth, Liverpool, L17 6BD
t: 0151 231 5234  e: H.J.Andrews@ljmu.ac.uk 
w: www.ljmu.ac.uk

 

Symbolic capital in practice July 13, 2009

Filed under: Theory, bourdieu — James Kennell @ 10:19 am
Tags: , , , ,

Much of the discussion about symbolic capital focuses on the cultural and social capital that individuals or groups don’t have, and how this can explain behaviour, attitudes and achievement.  Because of this we often fall into the trap of defining symbolic capital in negative terms, or explaining it by setting out the consequences of it’s absence.  I was fortunate yesterday to stumble across an example of how cultural and symbolic capital functions within an elite group in a positive sense, to support the values of the group as a whole and give advantage to it’s members individually.  The quotation below is from Nigel Nicolson, former MP and son of Vita Sackville-West.  The quotation comes from Geert Mak’s excellent In Europe.

“My inheritance was not extensive in the financial sense, but rich in contacts and influence.  And it lent me a natural self-confidence, a background against which I could place myself.  My father put it this way: ‘I detested the rich, but I was wild about learning, science, intellect, the mind.  I have always taken the side of the underdog, but I have also adhered to the principle of the aristocracy.”

In this quotation we see the interplay of social and cultural capital, the links to education and the development of a faux-essentialist conception of the self and the worth of certain conceptions of intellectual endeavour.  Finally, the values of the elite are held up as a moral principle.