Frank Furedi

Turning Academics into Teachers

Abstract This article starts with a personal perspective written by Stephen Rowland. This is responded to in each of the four contributions which follow. In order to stimulate debate from a wide basis of experience, Catherine Byron, Frank Furedi, Nicky Padfield and Terry Smyth were invited to respond as academics from very different disciplinary backgrounds and types of Higher Education institution in the UK. In a brief conclusion to the article, Stephen Rowland draws together the contributions. Questions are raised for further discussion, reflection and research amongst those concerned to develop higher education teaching, and to resist the managerialist discourse which dominates in this field. We hope that the article will stimulate debate amongst readers of the journal from different parts of higher education at a time when the very purpose of higher education is itself in a state of flux. We suspect that the issues raised here apply in many countries and would particularly welcome a response from read...

From the Narrative of the Blitz to the Rhetoric of Vulnerability

Through comparing the cultural representations of the floods of the 1950s with those of the year 2000, this article explores the changing conceptualizations of adversity in Britain.The focus of this study is the shift from a narrative of resilience in the 1950s to a narrative of vulnerability in the early 21st century.This shift is paralleled by a reorientation of cultural scripts from an emphasis on community solidarity to individual distress. This article contends that both the representations of how a community copes with a disaster, and people’s lived experiences of disasters, were influenced by this shift.Through exploring the evolution of the cultural narrative of adversity, its changing meaning is discussed.

Population and Development: A Critical Introduction

Introduction. 1. The Numbers Game. 2. Does Population Growth Matter?. 3. Population and North--South Relations. 4. Forging the Connection between Population and Development. 5. Development and Population Growth. 6. Influencing Fertility: Modernization without Development. 7. Targeting Women. 8. Environmentalism to the Rescue. 9. Conclusions: Population and Development Discourse -- the Parting of the Ways. Notes. Bibliography. Index.

Reflections on the medicalisation of social experience

I am quite happy to accept criticism from any quarters*/even from Phillip Hodson. Criticism, even in the form of a polemic, can be a prelude to a genuine dialogue, something that all parties can benefit from. I do hope that it is possible to debate the many issues related to the cultural influences that provide us with our emotional script, definition of personhood and the relationship between individual vulnerability and resilience, without calling one another unpleasant names. One of the problems I have in responding to Phillip is that he imputes attitudes (neo-conservative) and beliefs (upholding the virtues of the stiff upper lip and ‘unreasonable nostalgia for the 1950s’) that are alien to my way of thinking. Phillip also generously attributes quotations to me that are directly antithetical to my outlook. He cites me as stating such ludicrous propositions as ‘the country is going to the dogs’, ‘we must find safe and certain ground again’ and ‘this therapy business is the single cause of our problem’. He then proceeds to valiantly counter these invented quotes to demonstrate that I am indeed a representative of the dark ‘forces of conservatism’. As someone who is a radical atheist and humanist and disinclined to conserve anything from the 1950s, I find Phillip’s description of myself as accurate as his account of my book. But I don’t think that he sets out to deliberately distort the arguments. Unfortunately, Phillip is so obsessed with the standing of his profession that he appears to overlook the fact that the book is not about therapists and counsellors but about therapy culture . Nor is this an anti-therapy book, whose objective is to attack therapists or counsellors. As I argue in the introduction, ‘therapeutic culture should not be confused with the growing influence that therapy exercises over people’s lives’. I explicitly note that in the book ‘we are interested in therapy as a cultural phenomenon rather than as a clinical technique’ (p. 22). So my focus is on a way of thinking and its impact on everyday life. Throughout the book, the emphasis is on culture*/on a system of meaning that informs life. I argue that a culture becomes therapeutic when this form of thinking expands from informing the relationship between the individual and therapist to shaping British Journal of Guidance & Counselling, Vol. 32, No. 3, August 2004

New Britain—A nation of victims

This article focuses on a debate on victimhood in Great Britain. Recent events in Great Britain indicate that the cult of vulnerability goes beyond the terms of the existing debate. This cult has emerged as a key element in a moralizing project that touches upon every aspect of social life. The events surrounding the death of Princess Diana showed how significant sections of the British population have been touched by the cultivation of public emotion. Less than two months after Dianas death, the British reaction to the guilty verdict against Louise Woodward indicated that there was still plenty of spare emotion in support of yet another heroine-victim. These events also demonstrated that when politicized, the culture of victimhood can become a powerful force. The politicization of grieving in Britain has been intimately linked to the institutionalization of vulnerability. Virtually every shade of political opinion and the entire British establishment has endorsed this project. Today, British society actually encourages those who suffer to discover some meaning in their experience. The media continually portray personal tragedies as moral plays, where a victims loss is endowed with special significance. Thus whenever a tragedy strikes, a member of the family invariably remarks on television that they hope that their loved ones have not died in vain. Critics of the culture of victimhood often direct their fire at its more mendacious and self-serving manifestations, such as the predictable demand for compensation or the evasion of responsibility for the outcome of individual action. The celebration of the victim identity represents an important statement about the human condition. It regards human action with suspicion. It presupposes that human beings can do very little to influence their destiny. They are the objects rather than the subjects of their destiny. Consequently the human experience is defined by not by what people do but what has happened to them.

Socialisation as behaviour management and the ascendancy of expert authority

Daar waar in het verleden de scholen de functie hadden om jonge mensen de normen en de waarden van de maatschappij bij te brengen, lijkt het er tegenwoordig op dat ze zich hoofdzakelijk bezig houden met het corrigeren van probleemgedrag bij leerlingen. De school is verworden tot een cursus levenslessen. Een van de gevaren van deze verschuiving, gevoed door onderwijsdeskundigen, is dat scholen en ouders tegen elkaar worden opgezet. Bovendien zorgt dit soort therapeutisch onderwijs dat er onvoldoende tijd en middelen rest om leerlingen intellectueel te stimuleren.

New Dimensions: The Growth of a Market in Fear

Fear is one of the dominant emotions through which we imagine disaster. It also constitutes an important dimension of contemporary social reality. Public fear and anxiety play a crucial role in deliberations surrounding the environment, health, crime, children, new technologies, and recently and quite dramatically in relation to terrorism. Governments and public organizations often take the view that fear is a problem that they need to understand and manage. Today the discussion of public resilience in response to terrorism reflects this concern. Historically the imperative of maintaining public order and morale or concern about the outbreak of mass panic led governments to speculate about this problem with a view to containing it and minimizing its destructive effects. After the devastating experience of Hurricane Katrina, the problem of fear has also been “rediscovered” in relation to natural disasters.

Moral Panic and Reading: Early Elite Anxieties About the Media Effect

From its inception the medium of writing has been a source of moral concern. The growth of the printed media reinforced these apprehensions. Fears about the media effect on the behaviour of readers became recurring phenomena – in some cases provoking reactions characterised as a moral panic. These periodic outbursts of disquiet can be best understood as panics about the potential impact of the media on public morality. Such reactions were not simply media panics but panics about the effects of the media. The focus of anxiety was not on any particular issue but on the threat to moral authority posed by the media on the outlook and behaviour of the public. By its very existence the media appeared to represent a potential threat to the moral order. Exploring the moral dimension of this reaction is essential for the study of moral panics.

The Cultural Underpinning of Concept Creep

Nick Haslam’s (this issue) exposition of psychology’s expansive tendency to inflate harms and expand the boundaries of trauma and abuse offers a compelling account of an apparently powerful dynamic towards the reconstitution of personhood. Hitherto activities that were once perceived as ones that could be taken for granted as normal and even pleasurable have been rebranded as traumatizing and abusive. The recent trend toward the representation of the act of reading as potentially traumatizing and therefore requiring a health warning in the form trigger warnings exemplifies the cultural salience of concept creep (Furedi, 2015). Haslam’s case studies of the ascendancy of concepts of harm raise important questions about the drivers of this process. It is evident that there are a variety of cultural influences at work that intensify the sensibility of harm and the tendency to pathologize a variety of human interactions as toxic and traumatic. As Haslam notes, psychology’s concept creep is oriented toward negative harmful conditions rather than positive ones. It is our contention that this singular focus on negative concepts is not principally the outcome of factors intrinsic to developments within psychology but a reflection of wider cultural influences. Most of the concepts of harm outlined by Haslam are not merely conditions to be suffered; they are also identity conferring. The addict, the traumatized, the bullied, the abused, and the mentally ill are not simply afflicted by their conditions—that’s who they are. Many of psychology’s concepts of harm communicate the conviction that these are conditions that define the victim’s identity. Addicts do not transcend their condition—they become addicts in recovery. Since the 1980s the conditions of harm discussed by Haslam have been represented as causing longterm psychological damage to the point that many victims are said to be damaged for life. What underpins the imperative of concept creep are three interrelated cultural trends: the expansion of the meaning of harm, the redefinition of personhood, and the tendency to normalize vulnerability as the defining feature of the human condition. The Inflation of the Meaning of Harm

Book Review Symposium: Stefan Collini, What are Universities For?

The predicament facing the university is the subject of this book. Collini recognises that the university has come under formidable political and economic pressures to justify itself in utilitarian and instrumental terms. He is sensitive to the fact that institutions of higher education have responded to these pressures by justifying their role through a language that misrepresents ‘the true purpose and value of much of what is done in universities’ (p. 94). He writes eloquently of the culture of bad faith that pervades the prevailing institutional life – one where many British academics ‘feel obliged to speak an alien language’ and publish research in accordance with a ‘template drawn up in accordance with regulatory criteria’ (pp. 94–5). The narrative of bad faith that dominates university life indicates that its norms and values are increasingly shaped by forces that are external to it. In such circumstances it is necessary to stand back and elaborate a counter-narrative, one that insists that the scholarly and intellectual dimensions of academic life are logically prior to the many other concerns to which the university must attend. As Collini hints, in the era of the ‘global multiuniversity’, the very heterogeneity of a massively extended system of higher education demands that instead of seeking refuge in the answers of the past we develop an account appropriate for contemporary times. Collini appears to assume that the principle obstacle to elaborating such an account is the influence of the 19th century ideal of the liberal university and autonomy. He is particularly irritated by those who ‘nostalgically or defiantly’ cling to the ‘values of the good old days’ (p. 41). He dismisses what he perceives as the empty rhetoric of Cardinal Newman’s 19thcentury classic, The Idea of a University, and those who are still inspired by it. Collini is of course right to warn about the futility of substituting nostalgia for a realistic appraisal of the past. However, in his desire to distance himself from the bad old days of the elitist university system, unfortunately he overlooks the continuing relevance of some its core principles. One the foundational principles of the university is that of autonomy. Collini rightly argues that, historically, institutional autonomy has always been compromised by economic and political realities. However, the tension between the reality of practical life and the ideal of institutional and professional autonomy does not negate the value of the principle. The exercise and realisation of autonomy is always subject to conflicting interests and pressures. 476384 SOC47210.1177/0038038513476384SociologyBook Review Symposium 2013