Posts by Megan Clayton
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
Medicine: pretty obvious. Law (and others) : the qualification is evidence of your ability to to a job. Arts: the qualification is evidence that you read a number of books.
Isn't this in some regard linked to the historical - and ongoing - tension between professional and general studies in the academy more generally? My impression has been that government - and to an extent, university management - tends to be far more attracted to funding professional qualifications precisely because of the "pretty obvious" factor that you cite. Where you and I differ I suspect is in the matter of whether value inheres in the arts in the way that it does in the research sciences, but I'm not convinced that students and management don't regard undergraduate science as a generalist's degree (albeit one that's culturally higher in status) in the way they do the arts.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to BenWilson,
Quite literally, he was a rocket scientist. “Why did you change?” I asked. “It was really boring, the whole job is filling out reports”. He laughed even harder when I said my degree was actually in Philosophy.
Many people seem to take an arts graduate working in fields significantly different from what the graduate studied as a sign that the person's degree is irrelevant or that that person studied in the wrong field. I take the view that someone working in a field far removed from their original studies is not a sign of the failure of that discipline's usefulness; it's a sign of success.
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My experience has been that when there is a general conversation about the value of the humanities, there is often a conflation between the content that is studied (and the knowledge we assume students gain about that content) and the skills that are developed as a result of studying that content. I agree that it's hard to make an argument justifying the funding of the study of, say, Middlemarch if the perceived outcome is solely that the student knows more about that novel.
I would say however that one of the aims of teaching and studying the humanities in general is that students learn how to think and write in manners more clear and on matters more complex than can be achieved in other contexts - including, to take Danyl's example, reading literature or philosophy for interest and entertainment. These skills are highly portable into sectors both public and private and in workplace situations of many kinds. While these skills can certainly be gained in the context of other kinds of study, they are not its principal product in the way they are with the humanities nor, I believe, will students have had the same concentrated education in reflecting on the style and composition of their prose arguments as things in themselves.
The density of academic prose in the humanities (a style of which I am no special fan, despite having been schooled in it in the previous century) is just one style. A well-tempered graduate ought to be able to turn their hand to more than this, and the majority do. The number of humanities graduates who go on to academic employment is tiny. Most do other things, and I believe that if the universities teach them effectively (which again, I think in general they do), they these graduates do these things well.
I'm not offended or affronted by the raising of these kinds of questions. A portion of my work is as a union representative through which I get to hear university managers and the governments who fund them ask versions of such questions most weeks, and sometimes most days. I think that current and future disciplines and professions will continue to need writers who can work swiftly to deadline and communicate persuasively on matters of all kinds, and I believe that these skills are most effectively and widely produced by study in the humanities - the three-year arts degree. This is a separate argument from the argument about the value of the content of the humanities, and we do well I think not to conflate them.
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Up Front: Say When, in reply to Rich Lock,
Thanks for your response Rich. I'm happy to respond with an account of some of the ways in which I think feminists and their allies can organise around some of the kinds of problems you identify. This comes, of course, with the caveat that it's my opinion and experience, Y[Feminisim]MV, etc.
To my mind, feminist approaches to industrial problems work particularly well when combined with other systems, in and outside the place of employment. This may mean engaging with HR on behalf of oneself or others, which may or may not be effective, being willing to talk to managers about specific or systemic problems, joining a union and forming a working relationship with an organiser or women's rights officer, and or joining (or starting) a women's network in the workplace. My experience has been that these things are harder to do for lower-paid women working in lower-status jobs, so part of feminist activity in the workplace is being willing to advocate for these women workers and support and encourage them as, over time, they feel more emboldened to do the same.
I'm aware as I write this that my workplace setting - a large public institution in which I am also a union rep - is very different from that of a woman working say for a private law firm or a woman whose children are cared for outside the workplace or the home (my partner and I work non-standard hours and our daughter attends ECE on site at my workplace). So I think it's all the more important to encourage young people entering the workforce to think about what they might want for themselves, their careers and their home life in the medium term. This applies to potential fathers as well as mothers - what is the institutional culture like for them? Part of changing workplace culture is articulating one's own expectations, even if contrary to the prevailing culture, sometimes over many years. As above, some workers will need others to do this for them. This is where I think women's professional networks can be so important in that they encourage, if they work well, that spirit of cooperation and mutual help and sustain people in an unwillingness to back down.
Women workers and workers in general have to my mind three ways in which they can push for change in everyday ways: in terms of the law, industrially and in terms of workplace culture. My personal view is that unionism is the most effective way of doing this, and that modern unions can also be places in which feminism is fostered, in pockets at least, if not intra-organisationally. To change systems and cultures in ways that might alleviate the problems you describe, I would counsel a long-term view, finding and cultivating allies, looking for intersecting networks (I am not Māori, for example, but a lot of my union work involves being an ally to Māori women staff and Māori staff more generally as best I can), being willing to talk to those one might not normally engage with (management, HR - HR staff can be feminists and allies too) and never giving up.
I think too that fathers in the workplace need to talk more with their colleagues about their own role as parents, and similarly articulate their expectations with regard to childcare - taking on some of that need for flexibility, for example. Managing children and work is not going to get easier for women as long as male parents continue to work the status quo - and I believe that there are many working men out there who would welcome the opportunity to be more involved in childcare, to work more flexibly, to do some of the things that it is expected that working mothers have to do. Those challenges won't be spread in the Swedish fashion however until more employees are prepared to articulate this at whatever level, changing culture, policy and law.
(I am not a frequent commenter as PAS because I favour the long-form in writing and don't wish to clog up the columnage unduly. I trust more active members will grant me this diversion.)
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Up Front: Say When, in reply to Rich Lock,
What is the end goal here, crudely speaking?
For me, it's the transformation of society as part of a wider movement for social justice (which for me, again, would include democratic socialism) to the extent that gender equality is both consistently upheld as a "first principle" of the state and within the lives of individuals and groups.
You can infer from that intersectionality the extent to which I consider sexism on the left wing along with the politically conservative beliefs of some branches of feminism (none discussed here, I might add) to be problematic in this regard.
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Up Front: Say When, in reply to Bart Janssen,
it seems to me from the discussions I have seen that feminist is a label that no longer functions.
I tend to think that it's because feminist, as a label, "can be affirming and also say true things about who you are" that it is a term whose definition people are willing to contest.
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Up Front: Say When, in reply to BenWilson,
I guess I’m saying there’s a constructive and a destructive way to go about [definition battles]. The two are not always mutually exclusive, of course.
Yes; the former relies on a level of self-consciousness in debate that itself can sometimes inhibit debate, especially on matters where it's appropriate and even desirable to have guns blazing, as it were.
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Up Front: Say When, in reply to BenWilson,
There's a whole layer of identity politics that's something like identity-politics politics, in which what's contested is the right to affiliate to the identity. "Woman" gets contested (and I won't even start on "lady") for sure, but so does feminist. It seems to me no coincidence that it's on the internet, where identity is even more fragmentary, where so many big battles about who gets to use which labels take place.
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One of the things that seems to me to come up particularly acutely in any attempt to discuss both (inter)personal gender relations (how you or I act as individuals in relation to our gender and the gender of others) and how beliefs about gender affect society more generally is the disconnections that occur when we go from the particular to the general and back, but using the same language. This is what I took Giovanni's comment with regard to sociological uses of the terms men/women, upthread, to mean.
When it comes to gender, everyone is part of the general and the particular, but may have more substantive views on one rather than the other, and may also identify their feminism (or otherwise) as aligned with one more than the other. Combine that with using the same nouns and pronouns to talk about big social or cultural structures and individuals (so "men" gets used interchangeably with "the patriarchy" but also means that group of which each man is a part) and it seems like a fast-track to getting pissed off.
I'm a feminist of both kinds, I think, personally and big-structures-wise, but I'm not convinced the linguistic apparatus we bring to internet debating always gives us the best tools to keep the two in play at the same time. What I do think is that one of the points of being part of a collective is that not everyone has to do all of the mental labour all of the time. Personal feminisms - those that focus on autonomy and pleasure, for example - can co-exist and complement big-structure feminisms, I think, but this is a hard notion to defend if in any comment it's not clear whether it's the big picture or the individual that's under discussion. (People who pop up and make meta-critiques such as this are perhaps the most irritating of all.)
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I am surprised in all of this Knievelry (to borrow Jolisa's excellent analogy) how many of the commenting public, in support of what they take to be the spirit of Henry's words, have complained at the way in which simply seeing East- and South-Asian-looking people on the street erodes their sense of national identity. Perhaps for those who do not share the proposed t-shirt sentiment, some solid black sunglasses with decals of Paul Henry on the outside would do?