• Kat Gupta’s research blog

    caution: may contain corpus linguistics, feminism, activism, LGB, queer and trans stuff, parrots, London

Rod Thornton’s article

It’s hard to know what to write here – there are so many issues of academic freedom, how universities should support their scholars and what constitutes restricted materials it’s hard to know where to start. For those unfamiliar with the situation, here’s a summary by one of the people involved and here are a couple of articles by Rod Thornton on a blog he contributes to. Among other things, he he offers some insight into what the Al Qaeda Training Manual is and is not. I also note that the text the student used was available from the university’s own library, which just adds another layer of weirdness to the wtf cake.

Anyway, here’s a link to the document in question – the one the university is trying to suppress and has suspended Dr Rod Thornton for writing. The first is a summary of his article, while the second is the full article in its 112 page glory.

apologies for the lack of posting….

Ginger and white cat sitting on someone's lap with they're at a wooden deskOh dear, haven’t posted for a while. In the past ten days I’ve moved house, one of my pet rats had a lumpectomy and spay, I attended the NUS LGBT annual conference (where our LGBT Network won LGBT Society of the Year!) and I’ve been trying to compile my annual report. Tomorrow I’m going to a session on whether my thesis is publishable (hah), and on Wednesday I’ll be presenting at the annual Postgraduate Symposium in my department.

Today I was “helped” with writing my annual report by Itchy, one of my housemate’s cats. His help seems to consist of purring and kneading my leg with his claws, but I’m not refusing any help I can get.

At the moment, I would very much like it to be this time next week.

Relevance

One of the questions that came up at the conference was the links between the women’s suffrage movement and protest movements today. There are a couple of points that I think are particularly interesting, although there are bound to be others.

Diversity of the movement
In any large protest movement there are going to be different factions, each with different ideologies, aims, motivations and so on. I’ve seen it first hand in the current anti-cuts movement, particularly within the student movement and even within the group in my university. This isn’t a bad comparison because I think both movements are issues-based and attract people of a huge range of political beliefs.

There are things that unite us but these tend to be quite broad things – general opposition to education and welfare cuts, for example. The things that can be divisive are in the details – what action do we carry out? do we support occupation? is it okay to ally ourselves with trade union groups? communist groups? anarchist collectives? how do we organise ourselves? how do we make decisions? how do we respond to other groups and their campaigns? to whom do we express solidarity? These things are not always simple, and there have been passionate debates about these issues.

The suffrage movement had broad agreement that the franchise should be extended to (some) women, but organisations could differ wildly on the details – should the vote be extended to all women or to women on the same basis as men, with financial and property requirements in place? what should be the role of men? how much independence was needed and/or desirable from political parties? were they happy with contemporary gender norms? what was the vote for – was it a symbolic gesture of women’s equality, or could it be used to improve women’s working conditions, pay and welfare?

Not easy questions, and quite often no right answers.

Direct action and violence
The second point of comparison is what counts as violence, and how individuals and groups within the movement respond to direct action carried out by others in the movement. In my research, one of the things I come across is that violence was carried out against property; this happens today as well. There are numerous accounts of WSPU speakers being verbally and physically abused by men at public meetings and requiring police protection, yet this doesn’t seem to get described as violence. Instead, violence is what happens when suffragette campaigners break windows. I note that Alfie Meadows, the student who had to have emergency brain surgery after being injured in the protests, has been charged with violent disorder (this post discusses it in more detail). Then as now, (some) property seems to be more important than (some) people.

There are also similarities in how those who don’t engage in property damage or other less socially sanctioned methods of direct action respond to those who do. While I was disappointed at the reaction to Millbank, I wasn’t surprised. Those who carried out property damage and so on were said to be attention seekers, their status as “proper” members of the movement challenged, and others in the movement tried to distance themselves as much as possible from the window-breakers. Sound familiar?

I suspect that these issues are ones that any protest movement has to negotiate – they’re not unique to movements. There are points of connection between the suffrage movement and what’s happening today, particularly when it comes to how damage to public property and injury to protesters are discussed, and it’s these points of connection that think are interesting.

In happier news, my favourite bookshop turns 37 this weekend – happy birthday News from Nowhere! Here’s some of their history for the interested.

Exciting conference adventure

Okay, so I wasn’t expecting a tornado.

I’m currently in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in the US for Exploring the Boundaries and Applications of Corpus Linguistics. The sun is shining, the sky is blue, and the large quad outside the building is full of people clad in red being very excited about an American football game.

Yesterday, however, the sky was black, the light was green and it was pouring with rain. Most of my fellow conference attendees were in the hotel lobby watching the news updates on the storm system when the tornado sirens sounded. I ended up sitting in the laundry room with some distinguished linguists, in the dark because the power had gone, and checking twitter updates because, mysteriously, the wireless internet was still functioning.

There don’t seem to have been any serious injuries and the place seem relatively unscathed, but I think this has to be one of the more unexpected things to have happened to me at a conference!

Anyone got any strange, unusual or bizarre conference stories?

Five (plus two) questions from Sophie

Sophie Duncan at Clamorous Voice thought it would be interesting to bring the five question meme to our academic or otherwise real-life blogs. She describes it as a “creative nonfiction thing…little snapshots of what’s going on with people” and well, how could I refuse an offer like that? So here goes, and if you would like five questions from me, comment and ask!

What would you like to ask Christabel Pankhurst?
I always get a bit nervous about “what would you ask [famous person]?” questions because I’m worried that I’ll be like I am in real life and gaze worriedly at them, realise I have no intelligent question or, indeed, response and blurt out something about paneer. So this takes place in an alternate universe where I a) can time-travel and b) am not totally useless at talking to people and c) am cool.

At first I’d probably try to start off with vaguely academic questions, like her thoughts on direct action and how she’d gauge its success, what her intentions were in founding the WSPU and how these changed over time, her thoughts on the role of male suffragists, how she felt about the portrayal of the suffragist movement in the press and so on. And then I’d probably get increasingly nosy about the intra-suffrage movement tensions, so really, tell me exactly how you feel about the NUWSS, and what really happened with the Pethick-Lawrences, and why did you choose to base the WSPU on a military organisation and whose idea was that and ooh, syphilis and white slavery. And then either ask her about falling out with her sister, Sylvia Pankhurst, or possibly present her with a cuddly syphilis. Either way, it would go magnificently.

Sue Perkins or Sandi Toksvig? [This is probably the most important question I’ll ask anyone, nota bene]
I really admire Sandi Toksvig’s knowledge on such a wide range of subjects, how she’s a ferociously intelligent and respected older female broadcaster, presenter and entertainer when there are so few on TV and radio, and how she’s fought discrimination against her and her family due to her sexuality. On the other hand, Sue Perkins is one of the few comedians who can make me laugh and laugh (I saw Mitchell and Webb live and fell asleep, true story), and while she’s self-deprecating she’s also whip-smart and passionate about the arts. On balance I’d say that Sue Perkins is ahead by a whisker, but that’s due to her commitment to empirical research as demonstrated on The Supersizers go….

What is corpus linguistics?
Very very basically, it involves collecting together machine-readable texts and using a computer program to look for patterns in them. The patterns you look for might be whether a word prefers or avoids other words (collocation), have a certain grammatical function (colligation), are associated with a specific semantic field (semantic preference) or are associated with a set of words or phrases which can reveal (hidden) attitudes (discourse prosody). Some people work with massive corpora, like the Bank of English, and some people work with very small corpora of tens of thousands of words. Some people treat it as a sub-discipline in itself while others treat it as a methodology. As such, there’s a tremendous variation on what corpus linguistics is and it kind of depends on who you ask as to what answer you’ll get.

How and where do you see yourself teaching, in the post-apocalyptic maelstrom of the Higher Ed future?
It’s hard to say. I’m troubled by the attitude that universities are profit-making service providers and students are consumers; I believe it fundamentally changes the relationship between teacher and student. On the other hand, the networks and resources you find in universities are valuable and it’s hard to create them from scratch. The answer is that I’m really not sure; I’d like to do some teaching within the university system, but I’d also like to work with groups outside it – school and college groups, activists, the public and others.

What’re your own newspaper & magazine reading habits?
Being a bit of a cheapskate, it depends if I’m buying them or not. I sometimes buy Diva if I’m faced with a long train journey, but other than that I tend to do most of my reading online. However, if there are magazines or newspapers lying around, I’ll probably read them – National Geographic, New Scientist, the Metro, I’m not particularly fussy. I am also likely to pounce on people’s copies of trashy magazines, especially if they have dodgy real life stories (e.g. I made my mum-in-law out of toast). I probably won’t read the Daily Mail though – I do have some standards.

What’s the best thing about your life right now?
Right now? Possibly the cherry tomatoes, courgette and garlic roasting in the oven that I’m going to make something with for my dinner. It’s a beautiful sunny evening, my window’s open, and I can hear birdsong and collared doves cooing. It’s not the life I thought I was letting myself in for when I first started my PhD at Liverpool, but I’m trying to make the best of it.

What do your mornings look like?
Best avoided.

And now, questions for her!

  • Do you try to get distance from your PhD, and what form does that take?
  • What’s the arts organisation that doesn’t exist, but you really really wish it did?
  • Let’s imagine that you have the chance to go back in time and interact (talk, get drunk with, slap, etc) with any historical figure. They’ll then conveniently bang their head and forget they ever met you. Who would you pick and what would you do with/to them?
  • How has blogging influenced or affected your PhD?
  • What are you most looking forward to?
  • Comment if you’d like some questions from me.

    Press understanding of the black bloc

    On Saturday, over 500,000 people took part in the March for the Alternative. The Guardian live-blogged it (first part, second part) and for the majority, it was a peaceful and diverse march.

    At some point, some protesters seem to have headed to Oxford Street to engage in some direct action, namely occupying Fortnum & Masons (and were duly kettled upon leaving, having been told they’d be free to leave the area), and in a late evening a large group gathered at Trafalgar Square, apparently to rest, catch up, swap news and so on. At this point something happened, and the police responded by kettling them. People’s experiences could be very different depending on where they were and when – one person was baton charged by the police, Laurie Penny was caught in the Trafalgar Square kettle, this young blogger found himself protecting a girl whose arm was broken by the police in the Trafalgar Square kettle and Katie writes about the march and Trafalgar Square and the aftermath as a St John’s Ambulance first aider.

    The reaction from the conservative press was predictable but again, people were anxious to distance themselves from those not participating in the march and engaging in different forms of direct action.

    Johann Hari:

    Shame on the media for focusing on a few idiots from yesterday not the inspiring 500,000, and shame on the idiots for giving them the excuse (source)

    They were Black Block, who are entirely different people (and twats) (source)

    Charlie Brooker:

    Confusing these twats with the hundreds of thousands of actual protesters = mistaking football hooligans for footballers. (source)

    La Sophielle has some interesting stuff to say on the distinction between “good” protesters and “bad” protesters:

    All those news outlets with their talk of “splinter groups”, “mobs”, “maelstroms of violence”, “violent minorities” and “masked thugs” who “hijack” things – and don’t forget the bafflingly recurrent remark that those responsible “used Twitter to coordinate actions and cause trouble” – all these news outlets actually don’t care to differentiate between various expressions of political resistance, whatever they may say to the contrary. Protestors come in ‘nice’ or ‘black’ – full stop. I don’t resent this because I resent UK Uncut being “smeared” or lumped in with the black bloc. I resent this because it means that inane dichotomies (legitimate/illegitimate, nice/nasty, peaceful/violent) are shored up in the name of reporting, which in fact serve nothing at all except sensation. (source)

    Aside from the debate about acceptable and unacceptable forms of protest which is probably as old as protest itself, I find it really interesting how the term “black bloc” is used. I understand it as a tactic (as this FAQ explains): a black bloc is a temporary gathering of people with different ideologies and aims working together for the duration of a march etc. Wearing similar clothes promotes solidarity, is highly visible and hinders identification, particularly by Forward Intelligence Teams. What it is not, however, is an organisation. To my knowledge, there is no black bloc membership list. There is no black bloc committee. It forms on the ground, and dissolves afterwards. The individuals involved might have connections to each other, but the black bloc itself is not the organisation that they belong to.

    As a linguist, what I find interesting are the different ways the black bloc is discussed in this current round of articles. Not so much the evaluative stance, but the concept of the black bloc itself. This term is not being disputed in the press – instead, it seems to be misunderstood and the misunderstanding apparently goes unchallenged. I suspect there’s a power dynamic in that those most likely to participate in a black bloc and understand it are not likely to have a powerful voice in the press; the people writing about the black bloc in the newspapers are unlikely to be the ones with direct experience of it. And so “Black Bloc(k)” seems to become an identity rather than a tactic.

    It makes me wonder how prevalent this is, both diachronically and across domains. Is this a fairly standard feature of mainstream press discourse about the black bloc? Is it something more recent – was the black bloc discussed differently in the 1990s/early 2000s/mid-2000s to now? Is the black bloc understood differently when taking part in different kinds of protest e.g. anti-war, environmental, anti-cuts (even if these issues are often closely connected)? Has the term become more widespread, or used more frequently?

    This is the kind of research that lends itself to corpus research methodologies – focusing on a limited number of terms where a) the term is crucial to identifying the group being discussed and b) the term itself is what’s interesting. There may well be incidences of “protesters dressed in black” and so on, but I’m not convinced that identifies the protesters explicitly enough to know that it’s a black bloc being discussed. Because the black bloc itself is a somewhat nebulous concept – its power lies in its lack of organisation and definition – it becomes a site for projection. Do you want the black bloc to be full of violent hooligans, justifiably angry disenfranchised working class kids, rentamob thugs? Again, this seems more about identity than discussing the black bloc as a tactic.

    If I didn’t have a conference paper to write I’d be creating a custom corpus with WebBootCaT, but the paper must take precedence. The custom corpus will have to wait a couple of weeks.

    Arguments

    A couple of weeks ago I found a link to 7 Stupid Thinking Errors You Probably Make and it reminded me of being introduced to fallacies in AS Critical Thinking. There’s a rigorous, elegant beauty to lists of fallacious arguments – that all these fallacies have been recognised and identified and named and summarised. A taxonomy of bad arguments.

    They’re very useful for PhD researchers. As people who engage with other people’s arguments, it’s extremely useful to be able to identify fallacious thinking – whether it’s someone else’s or your own. Writing a thesis is hard enough without falling into the trap of straw men or post hoc ergo propter hoc.

    Suffrage imagery

    Sometimes I like going into the library and just browsing, skipping the catalogues and directed searches, and just poking about until I find something interesting. Sometimes you find things you didn’t know existed – Rethinking Language and Gender Research: Theory and Practice opened my undergraduate eyes. At other times you find seemingly random things. A couple of months ago I was flicking through a book on “fashioning the body politic” and to my interest, found an article on fashion and the suffragette movement. I photocopied it, thinking it would be an interesting diversion but not really relevant to my thesis, but it’s turning out to be surprisingly useful.

    I’m currently analysing a report of a WSPU procession and having an understanding of suffragette visual signifiers is proving essential. The procession was in honour of Emily Wilding Davison and accompanied her coffin through London to the station, where it was taken to Morpeth and buried. The procession itself is more like a state funeral – colour coordinated dress, music, groups of women marching in formation, banners, a cross-bearer, and young girls dressed in white and carrying laurel wreaths. It’s astonishing in terms of scale and organisation – there’s a sense that every visual element is there for a specific reason and to have a specific effect. One of the aspects I’m interested in is the procession as publicity – this was an opportunity for the WSPU to create a new kind of visual spectacle. Rather than being purely a political demonstration, this procession celebrated the life of a suffragette. The banners read “Fight on and God will give the victory” “Thoughts have gone forth whose power can sleep no more” and “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”, celebrating Davison as a fallen soldier who had given up her life for the cause.

    The WSPU leadership seemed to have been ambivalent about Davison. Her propensity for unpredictable and independent direct action outside the guidance of the leadership seems to have caused tension; for example, she set fire to postboxes before arson became an acceptable tactic and this did not appear to have gone down particularly well. She was knocked down by the King’s horse in the 1913 Derby – it is unclear whether she intended to stop the horse, pin WSPU colours to its bridle or was merely crossing the racecourse after she thought the horses had passed – and died three days later. The inquest recorded her death as “death by misadventure”. What I find interesting is the WSPU reaction to her death. The paper reports no immediate WSPU response, although a day or so later WSPU colours were draped on the screens around her bed. This rather muted response contrasts with the extravagant procession; I’d argue that the WSPU leadership realised the potential for publicity after her death, wanted to capitalise on it, and so brought Davison’s actions under their aegis. The resultant procession involved thousands of sympathisers and the crowds gathered to watch were so thick the police could only keep the way clear for the procession with “utmost difficulty”.

    The procession was rich with symbolism. One of the mistakes I’m trying not to make is interpreting the imagery as a present day reader would; the cultural touchstones are different, and this is illustrated clearly in the use of “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” on the banners. My immediate association with this phrase is the bitterness and outrage of Wilfred Owen’s war poetry – written some four years after this procession and published seven years after it. Today this phrase has connotations that weren’t widely present in 1913. Instead, I’m trying to look at early twentieth century interpretations of colour and flower symbolism, religious and classical allusions, and banners. What does it mean when the WSPU members wear purple, white and black rather than the WSPU colours of purple, white and green? Does it really symbolise the death of hope? This is where the article on fashion in the suffragette movement comes in – not just because it touches on some of the areas I’m interested in, but also because it draws on sources that look really exciting. I badly want to get my hands on Lisa Tickner’s The Spectacle of Women: imagery of the suffrage campaign, 1907-1914.

    Naturally the library doesn’t have it. Am tempted to take up a Cambridge friend’s offer to swap beer for books.

    In India

    I probably should have posted this before I left, but I’m in India visiting family. My thesis has come along too and I can now say that I’ve written a bit of my thesis practically in a nature reserve. Where, incidentally, I saw rhinos, deer, wild boar, elephants and a tiger! The tiger was stunning – all power and sleekness and muscles shifting under the brightest red-gold fur I’ve ever seen.

    My thoughts on eco-tourism are complicated – at what point does it become too indulgent, is it okay to invade habitats with tourism, does it support the kind of human enroachment that threatens these habitats? but on the other hand, tourism helps people see the reserves and wildlife within them as valuable (which has all sorts of effects, including helping locals feel protective towards their nearby reserve and so defend wildlife against poachers), gets the government to protect the reserve because it brings in tourists and their money, and brings in money to fund the reserve, pay rangers and so on. The people running the hotel we stayed with did outreach in local schools during the rainy season when the park is closed and clearly cared about the reserve and those living within it. Without tourism, there’s a risk that the reserves wouldn’t exist, wouldn’t have support from the local community and there would be more exploitation of the reserves – poaching, logging, grazing and so on.

    As valuable as zoos are with their captive breeding programs, reintroducing species back into the wild and conservation work, they were miles away from seeing this tiger easily lope across the road, glowng in the late afternoon sun, and disappearing into the grass and shrubs. For tigers to become extinct in the wild would take something precious from them.

    World Book Day

    Books are awesome, so here are some questions about books and my answers.

    The book I am reading: These questions were written by someone who reads one book at a time, finishing each one before starting the next. I am not that person. I rarely have one book on the go, and am possibly infuriatingly promiscuous.
    The Junior Officers’ Reading Club – Patrick Hennessey
    Rise Up, Women! The Militant Campaign of the Women’s Social and Political Union, 1903-1914 – Andrew Rosen
    Methods for Critical Discourse Analysis – edited by Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer
    Introducing Forensic Linguistics – Janet Cotterill and Malcolm Coulthard

    I recently finished Rivers of London by Ben Aaronvitch and have been dipping into GenderQueer: Voices from Beyond the Sexual Binary edited by Joan Nestle, Riki Wilchins and Clare Howell.

    The book(s) I am writing: My thesis, ahahahaha. Hahaha. Ha.

    The book I love most: But you can’t have one you love most! The others will be upset.

    The last book I received as a gift: Not quite a gift but they’ll probably end up residing with me, but my mother has just lent me Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett.

    The last book I gave as a gift: One Day by David Nicholls for my mother. As a family of avid readers, we tend not to give surprise books to each other – it’s impossible to keep up with that many bookshelves. Instead we each get a book allowance at Christmas, agonise for ages over which ones to choose, then get someone else to wrap our chosen books.
    My favourite book-as-a-gift was to an ex – an out-of-print collection of essays called Mornings in the Dark by Graham Greene. I managed to stumble upon a copy in a little second-hand bookshop in Liverpool – a beautiful hardback copy in near perfect condition, almost like it was waiting for me.

    The nearest book on my desk: I’m not at my desk, but somewhere on the kitchen table is an article about purple, green and white colours in fashion during the suffrage campaign (I thought it sounded interesting) and have “Stunning, shimmering, iridescent: Toys as the representation of gendered social actors” by Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard and Theo van Leeuwen open on google books.