Global citizens vs the people

Global citizens vs the people


A short piece I wrote for Spiked on the way 'global citizenship' can express a disdain for the demos.

on the current furore over Milo Yiannopoulos's invitation to my sons' school:

Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys in Canterbury is the school my sons attend. It was also, some years ago, the school of self-styled alt-right controversialist Milo Yiannopoulos. Despite having been expelled for what he admits was ‘outrageous behaviour’, Milo had been invited back to his alma mater to speak to senior pupils about ‘politics, culture, political correctness and the result of the US election’. Today we learnt that Milo’s talk will no longer go ahead.

Since Milo’s announcement as guest speaker, the school has been subjected to criticism and condemnation primarily from people with no connection to Simon Langton. Some suggested that the government’s anti-extremist Prevent Strategy should be invoked to stop impressionable minds from hearing Yiannopoulos's ‘hate speech’.

The National Union of Teachers weighed in with concerns for the students wellbeing. A few ex-pupils and academics argued that racism and misogyny have no place in a school and posed a risk to vulnerable young people. One or two, so concerned that Langton students would fall prey to bad ideas, threatened to organise demonstrations. Today’s decision to cancel the proposed event follows contact with the school from the Department for Education’s Counter Extremism Unit.

Staff and students were overwhelmingly in favour of holding the talk. The tickets to the event went within a day. But sadly, too few outside the school shared the view that teachers be able to judge what is good for their students and that young adults to be allowed to decide for themselves what they hear.

Yiannopoulos’s  views  may be outrageous but they are out there in the public realm. In fact, there is a constant battle of words between Milo and his adversaries. The latter say ‘you can’t say that’ and the alt-right say it, in Milo’s case in the most extreme and outrageous way he can. And so it goes on, a circle of offence taking an offence giving.

Like it or not (and I don’t), this is a part of politics today. Yiannopoulos courts controversy with crazy, racist and misogynist statements, seeing them as a way of challenging the censorious mood around free speech. His opt out is that he does not mean all of it and only says it to undermine a restrictive culture. It is a childish modus operandi in many ways, and some of what he says is simply awful.

But this does not alter the fact that there is a censorious culture around speech today, as can be seen in the government’s Prevent Strategy and the no platforming of speakers in universities.  

Sixth formers, especially at a school like Simon Langton that encourages debate and engagement with all aspects of the world, are quite capable of dealing with Milo’s mad rantings and the alt right’s contrarian politics. The school prides itself on producing independent thinkers. They are well capable of judging Yiannopoulos’s views and taking them apart.

What have Milo’s opponents achieved? They have succeeded in telling young inquiring minds that they need protecting from bad ideas. They have succeeded in branding capable young adults, the next generation of leaders and thinkers, as vulnerable. They have made themselves feel good, virtuous and purposeful, but in so doing have undermined political debate in schools. They have denied the sixth formers the freedom to listen, judge and reject what they disagree with.

In the personalised world of the alt right versus the identitarian Left, Milo’s critics have served only to elevate his status. As former pupil Daniel Hamilton puts it: ‘The cancellation of his talk only serves to feed his misguided narrative about an effete liberal elite who refuse to have their world view challenged or debated. The way to beat bigotry and extremism isn’t to sweep it under the carpet.’

Simon Langton’s Head Teacher, Dr Matthew Baxter has stated that ‘…we at the Langton remain committed to the principle of free speech and open debate and will resist, where possible, all forms of censorship.’ It’s now up to parents, teachers and all of us to support this important principle.

No, Tourism is Not an Act of White Privilege

My article on spiked_online, published 29/9/16, is here.


I have also written a longer version of the same argument - less journalistic, more academic - below. Comments welcome to my email: jim.butcher@canterbury.ac.uk

White Saviour Barbies?

Opportunities to travel to try to make the world a better place are now commonplace at university freshers’ fayres. Advertisments for so called volunteer tourism and similar niches feature across the campuses. Numerous companies and NGOs offer the chance to help build schools, teach children and conserve nature, all as a part of a travel experience.

But the exciting chance to travel and laudable impulse to care for others are increasingly viewed through a dark lens, associated with colonial arrogance and an imperialist mentality.

Earlier this year Scottish actress Louise Linton faced the wrath of critics following the publication of her memoir  In Congo’s Shadow recounting her experiences as a 19 year old volunteer tourist ‘helping some of the world’s poorest people’. She claims to have fled armed rebels in Zambia – a claim contested by her detractors.   They accuse her of placing herself and her privilege at the centre of her memoir. They argue that as a result she falls back on and reinforces colonial assumptions.

It is hard to disagree that her book relies on cliché and that it is devoid of serious and deep analysis of central Africa.  She recalls: ‘I try to remember a smiling, gap toothed child with HIV whose greatest joy was to sit on my lap and drink from a bottle of coca-cola.’ Linton was subject to a vicious trial by twitter, accompanied by hashtags such as #LintonLies and  #WhitePrivilege. The story snowballed globally. Faced with a barrage of insults and condemnation, Linton apologised for hurting feelings, had the book removed from sale and deleted her on-line accounts.

Linton’s account may be clichéd, but for many of the critics the real crime is that it is penned by a white woman in Africa, who unashamedly puts herself at the centre of her travel memoir: colonialism in the form of ‘white privilege’ in black Africa.

The sort of volunteer travel Linton undertook has attracted a great deal of criticism. Again earlier this year, the satirical Instagram account  White Saviour Barbie was set up. It features posed Barbie dolls alongside the objects of their care, most often African orphans. The accompanying captions present the tourists as naïve, self obsessed and indulging neo-colonial fantasies: 'It’s not about me... but it kind of is'. White Saviour Barbie quickly  gained international notoriety, having been featured in widely the media across the world – the BBC news referred to it as ‘a modern version of Rudyard Kipling's White Man's Burden.’

The accusation that tourists constitute some sort of colonialism was in the past directed as a casual insult against package holidaymakers. Now the misanthropy lying behind that charge has caught up with those partaking of the new ethical niches, niches that ironically often validated their ethical credentials by comparison to supposedly damaging and thoughtless package holidays. Now all leisure travel, from a week bronzing on the beech to a “holiday with a mission” helping a community to paint a school, is in the frame.

It is tempting to go along with the criticism of volunteer tourists, especially given the way some of the marketing and advocacy of this niche has labelled holidaymakers as unthinking and unethical. Some of the criticisms hit home, too. There is certainly a point to be made about the elevation of western care over the ability of people in the developing world to build their own schools and dig their own latrines.

However, accusations that tourism is some sort of colonialism, or even imperialism, are very wrong, and often carry their own patronising and limiting assumptions.

‘Tourism is colonialism’

There is a long tradition amongst social scientists examining tourism of accusing tourism of colonialism and imperialism.

Jost Krippendorf’s influential The Holiday Makers: the Impacts of Leisure Travel regards it as having a colonial character ‘everywhere and without exception’ (1987: 56). Turner and Ash label tourism a ‘new form of colonialism’ in their often cited The Golden Hordes: International Tourism and the Pleasure Periphery (1975: 1). Sociologist Erik Cohen asserts that tourism is ‘always and everywhere, colonialism’ (1972: 82) and that ‘[t]he easy going tourist of our era might well complete the work of his predecessors, also travellers from the West – the conqueror and colonialist’ (ibid.). Lozanski  argues that independent travel is ‘embedded in the implicit hierarchies of colonialism that persist in a neocolonial setting’ (2011: 446).

Dennison Nash, grandee of the anthropology of tourism, has asserted that ‘[t]he North American vacationer who insists on fast food hamburgers, coffee with his meal, hot running water in his bedroom and the use of the English language’ is part of the systematic domination of the third world (Nash, 1989: 39).

A recent exposition of this view is human geographer Steven Flusty’s essay, Rime of the Frequent Flyer (2011). He argues that tourism is complicit in the inequalities and oppression, past and present, that he encounters as he travels. For Flusty, tourism is ‘inextricably rooted in conquest’ (2011: 99), a view supported elsewhere through references to colonialism.  He goes further in suggesting that there is a culpability in all tourism – our leisure depends on their subjugation.

Suggestions of tourism’s colonial or imperialist character feature in popular commentaries and texts. In The Final Call: In Search of the True Cost of Our Holidays the UK Guardian’s lifestyle correspondent, Leo Hickman, likens Tallin’s budget airline tourists to Estonia’s previous Nazi and Soviet invaders (2007: 313). The popular university introductory text Tourism: A Modern Synthesis, suggests tourists have ‘superseded the armies of the colonial powers’ (Page et al, 2001: 397).

These writers, in different ways, present tourism as a part of a colonial and imperialist culture. 

But is this the case? Modernity is a key point of reference for Flusty. He asserts that ‘those who do not subject themselves to modernity’s relentless and shifting winds are forever in danger of finding themselves subject to those who have’ (ibid.).  One could equally argue that those who desperately want more of the benefits of modernity are denied this due to being subject to the macroeconomic and political relationships that prevail.

For all the sympathies with the poor and oppressed, emphasising modernity (a general state) rather than capitalism (a specific set of social and power relations) ends up conflating all modern human activities (such as tourism) with the failings of capitalist societies historically and today. For Flusty, we are all ‘playing Elgin’ (ibid.) – the humble tourist is linked to British colonialism and the theft of others’ property and culture. All things modern become complicit and suspect.

If this logic were to be accepted, how could one argue that others should have the opportunities enjoyed by many in wealthy nations, such as to travel widely for leisure? Anticolonialism used to be a demand for freedom from subjection by powerful nations, not from tourists’ unenlightened attitudes. If colonialism is held to be implicit in modernity, then anticolonial demands for a share in the benefits of modern societies are not likely to gain a hearing.

The assertions that tourism has anything to do with colonialism at best rely on superficial descriptions of inequality – the wealthy foreigner stepping out onto a private beach in the developing world, served by local people who have little immediate prospect of attaining the privileges of their guest. This is less colonialism and more simply the reality of capitalist society everywhere – rich people can afford nice things and others are employed to provide them. Subjective assertions about colonialism such as this, whilst radical in tone, rob it of meaning.

Nash’s suggestion that the American vacationer has, in effect, an imperialist lifestyle, can only be argued if one takes this subjective and limited view of imperialism. In the past imperialism was viewed as an extension of a nation’s interests abroad on the basis of claimed moral authority or as a result of capitalist crisis (Lenin, 1996; Hobson, 2011). Nash and others substitute colonialism as a set of attitudes and behaviours for colonialism and imperialism as a result of political systems and economic structures. In doing so they relativise the horrors of real colonialism by suggesting a moral and political continuum running from holiday making to the oppression of populations.

Why are holidays in the frame?

The equating of tourism with colonialism is exemplary of a number of trends.

The politicisation of even fairly banal (in political terms) human activities such as tourism is indicative of the ‘cultural turn’ in social sciences. The cultural turn broadly refers to the apparent opening up of culture and everyday life as an arena in which power is exercised, and in which it can be contested. Some date the turn to the early 1970s, when ‘the personal is political’ became a popular outlook on the left, and when sociologists such as those at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, UK pioneered the study of cultural forms as key battlegrounds of power and politics. Others emphasise the Frankfurt school, who viewed modern soulless culture based on consumerism and instrumental reason as the barrier to social and political progress.

But perhaps key in the modern dominance of culture in politics, is the exhaustion of the political narratives of Left and Right that constituted Politics (with a capital P) in the past. Whilst cultural radicals in the 1970s readily linked the personal to a contestation of the future and to wider narratives of social change, those narratives (or any to replace them), and the future orientation  they facilitated, have been conspicuously absent since the 1980s.

Yet whilst the exhaustion of the grand narratives, transcendental of this or that individual experience, was brought into relief in the post Cold War period, it was subject to a much longer decline. The collapse of ‘communism’ and the end of the Cold War may have pulled the rug from under both left and right political identities, but in reality the capacity of these ideas to frame the political imagination had been in much longer terms decline. Furedi, in his First World War: Still No End In Site,  looks at a longer drawn out decline of ideology from when first world war seemed to question the moral value of liberalism and nationalism. Daniel Bell in the End Of Ideology (1960) saw the post World War Two period as characterised by the decline of ideology in the public sphere and the rise of culture in its place in what proved to be a prescient analysis.

The decline of transcendental ideologies has increasingly left private experience as the basis on which the world is constructed in the public imagination. Shorn of political roots, inequality and poverty are reinterpreted as cultural problems. Individual attitudes and behaviour are in the frame: where you shop, how you live, the language you use, how you travel. The notion of holidaymaker as colonialist is one unfortunate result.

Decolonising travel?

The way that  tourism is being associated with colonialism is changing. The privilege exhibited by Nash’s stereotypical American is no longer a question of relative wealth or class. It is increasingly being essentialised as ‘white privilege’  as indicated by the reception for White Saviour Barbie and the twitter storm focused on Louise Linton.

Brooklyn based travel writer Bani Amor espouses the emergent identity politics of tourism. She runs a popular blog called Everywhere all the time, seeking to ‘decolonise travel’, to challenge what she sees as a colonial narrative at the heart of modern travel.

Amor argues that travel often employs a time honoured colonial narrative: ‘The sad state of the savage Other necessitates civilising via white / western intervention, which maintains dominion over resources that sometimes trickle down to the needy via acts of charity’. This attitude ‘validates supremacy’, as ‘assuming the role of the saviour is also a show of power’.

She provides a list of points for privileged prospective travellers to reflect upon. Conspicuous luxury is  out: ‘All-inclusive resorts, slum tours, and white-savior cruise ships (yes, this is a thing) are just some examples of practices with noted records of colonial fuckery.’  Arguments that tourism is just about fun and freedom are condemned: ‘But when we deny its [tourism’s] political implications, we re-establish it as a tool of coloniality and become complicit in its oppressive chain.’

Amor’s way of looking at travel – rapidly becoming influential across human geographies of tourism and ‘critical tourism studies’ -  is far from radical. Its premises are profoundly conservative, and also diminish the potential in travel for real enlightenment, not to mention fun.

For Amor the traveller and the host are defined by their respective cultural identity. That identity in turn is tied to colour and background. It is not a political identity,  a take on the world and its problems to be argued over – but an essential and cultural one, rooted in blood (‘white’) and soil (‘western’).

This same view of the individual is applied to the hosts too, albeit with sympathy as they are viewed as the  victims of cultural colonialism. Geography and ancestry determine how you see the world, and in the case of poorer communities mark you out as ‘vulnerable’.

The obsession with cultures, always plural, as fundamentally different and defining of the individual, has a lot more in common with the justifications for colonialism from the past than any clichéd travel blog or conspicuous show of wealth. Anti-colonialism of the past was premised on the universal importance of rights, wealth and opportunity for all. Today it celebrates cultural difference not simply as lived experience, but as a rooted identity.

The politics or decolonising travel present human freedom as a zero sum game. The freedom of the tourist is the unfreedom of their host. Amor asserts that tourism ‘grants some of us the privilege of leisure, but it does so at the expense of other, more vulnerable communities, cultures, and environments.’ Radicalism of the past aspired to expand freedom, so that the wealth and opportunity of some could be enjoyed my many more. From a call for more freedom, to a demand that those who have it ‘check their privilege’ and back off, is hardly progress.

For the traveller, the potential lies precisely in the free, open interaction of individuals who can experiment, judge, be judged, make friends, make mistakes and experience new things free from the  mea culpa politics of guilt by colonial association. The politics of decolonising travel is effectively an impulse to police boundaries of the imagination, neatly subsuming the individual within a Culture (with a capital C) from which, try as they might, they can’t escape.  Having given up on changing the world, some radicals seem to want to change the people in it through policing behaviour.

Tourism should not be decolonised because it has not colonised in the first place. People travelling and meeting others, for fun, enlightenment or as volunteers, have nothing whatsoever to do with colonialism. The conflation of everyday cultural encounters with colonialism relativises and trivialises the latter, and restricts the potential in the former to promote reflection, judgement and moral autonomy.

Bell, D. (1960) The End of Ideology, Free Press, New York.

Cohen, E. (1972) Towards a sociology of international tourism, Social Research, 39, 179-201.

Flusty, S. (2011) Rime of the Frequent Flyer. Or, What the Elephant has got in his Trunk, in Real Tourism: Practice, Care, and Politics in Contemporary Travel Culture, (Eds) C. Minca and. & T. Oakes, Routledge, London.

Furedi, F. (2014) World War 1: Still No End in Sight, Bloomsbury, London.

Hickman, L. (2006) The Final Call: In Search of the True Cost of Our Holidays, Eden Project, London.

Hobson, J.A. (2011) Imperialism: A Study, Spokesman Books. London (originally published 1902).

Jacoby, R. (1999) The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy, Basic Books, New York.

Krippendorf, J. (1987) The Holidaymakers: Understanding the Impact of Leisure and Travel, Butterworth-Heinemann, London.

Laidi, Z. (1998) A World Without Meaning. The Crisis of Meaning in International Politics, Routledge, Abingdon.

Lenin, V.I. (1996) Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Pluto Press, London. Originally published 1916.

Lozanski, K. (2011) Independent travel: Colonialism, liberalism and the self, Critical Sociology, 37 (4), 465-482.

MacCannell, D. (1992) Empty Meeting Grounds: The Tourist Papers, Routledge, London.

Nash, D. (1989) Tourism and Colonialism, chapter in Host and Guests (Eds) D. Nash, D and V. Smith, pp. 37-53.

Page, S.J., Brunt, P., Busby, G. and Connell, J. (2001) Tourism: A Modern Synthesis, Thomson Learning, London.

Turner, L and Ash, J. (1975) The Golden Hordes: International Tourism and the Pleasure Periphery,

Pro-Europe, pro-democracy, pro-migration, anti-EU

The Brexit vote in the EU referendum is one of the most important political moments of my lifetime. Here are some thoughts on the vote, the reaction to the vote and most importantly on looking forward:

Brexit

The EU referendum ended in a victory for Brexit. I voted Brexit. The vast majority of academics voted Remain. Amongst cleaners, catering and security staff the picture is quite different.

I voted Brexit as I believe the EU is undemocratic and a barrier to social and economic progress. It reflects a strong trend away from a politics contested by the demos towards the technocratic rule of commissioners. We have, whatever else people may say we have lost, won greater democracy. That is to be celebrated.

The post Brexit debate has strengthened my belief that this was the right way to vote. Many colleagues who were on the Remain side accept formally that there is a crisis of democracy. The depth of that crisis has been fully revealed by MPs, academics and campaigners calling for the vote to be ignored, overturned or looking for legalistic ways to undermine the decision.

Demosphobia

Others accept the vote, but insult the Brexit voting electorate. I have been shocked at the extent to which Brexit voters have been portrayed as ignorant  / racist / unthinking / naïve / not ‘decent people’ etc . The implication of this view is that we now all have to live with the terrible results of pretty terrible people.

If you are depressed at the vote, have a listen to the public debates such as the post Brexit BBC Question Time, or this short film. You’ll hear thoughtful responses to pressing problems, responses that often put to shame the rhetoric of campaigners, academics and the entire political class. Why should this be surprising to some? Because there has been a strong trend towards objectifying and denigrating the demos, in particular the Brexit voters.

Purveyors of modern demosphobia stand in a long tradition of regarding the people as potentially irrational and easily led. Not dissimilar arguments were levelled against the Chartists and the Suffragettes, albeit in very different circumstances. Cancelling democratic votes is an authoritarian measure with grave consequences for democracy. If a society does not respect a democratic vote, how can it with any moral authority expect people to pursue their own interests through democratic means?

Of course elections throw up all sorts of messy issues and can bring to the surface views many find abhorrent: on one side Project Fear (which I hope will abate soon) and on the other the targeting of immigrants as to blame for social problems. UKIP’s poster was despicable in the latter respect. It is also an invitation for anti-racists to argue that blaming others is not in their interests. Many commentators have preferred caricature, hyperbole and moral condemnation in place of political argument. The latter is part of the democratic process – ideas we find despicable we can argue and campaign against with our fellow citizens.

The EU has never done that. Instead it takes an issue like immigration outside of the democratic process, and places it in the hands of a pseudo democracy dominated by technocracy. This is a fundamental problem. The arguments in favour of the free movement of people have rarely been had or won with the UK electorate. They will have to be now.

Brexit and racism

Many Remainers emphasise the racism that was undoubtedly a part of the campaign as the most important issue for them. Some now talk up the worrying and despicable instances of racism from a minority of Brexit voters as something akin to the rise of Fascism, or the unleashing of a vicious xenophobia.

First, racism did not emerge with the referendum campaign. Overt and violent racism, in the form of racist attacks, has been a stronger feature of British society in, for example, the 1950s/60s or 1980s. Much more recently the London mayoral election involved attempts by Zac Goldsmith and his team to link Sadiq Khan to Islamic terrorism. This really was gutter politics (supported by key Remainer David Cameron every bit as much as by Conservative Brexit politicians).

Second, the EU represents nothing whatsoever positive in relation to racism. Whilst it has promoted the free movement of labour within the EU for economic reasons, it has enforced  a fortress Europe approach to potential immigrants from outside it. These are mutually reinforcing trends – Europe as a trade block, open internally for people and trade, is closed externally to others, and less amenable to their farmers and manufacturers as trading partners. To say that Brexit voters are responsible for racist incidents that happen now, as some are arguing,  is as logical as saying racist attacks prior to the referendum campaign were due to voters for pro EU parties. Neither is true, in the sense that the conditions that promote division are there irrespective of whether we are in or out of the institution of the EU.

Where individuals express their racist views more openly in the light of the campaign, it is the duty of internationalists, anti-racists and tolerant people to oppose them. Where prospective UK governments propose measures we feel promote racism people should speak out and organise. Again, the EU will not, and never has, protected people from racist attacks.

If opposition to racism is to be effective, it should be underpinned by a commitment to democracy. At the moment we have the grotesque situation where anti-immigration campaigner Nigel Farage can claim the mantle of democrat. Putting aside his and some voters’ motivations, his side argued for and won a bit more democratic control for British citizens. How can people who now seek to undermine the ballot result even start to argue with people whose votes they want to cancel out? Why would you try if you believe they are simply irrational and racist?

The blame game

The response from some to the vote is to think about who is to blame for Brexit. This has the merit of absolving oneself of being, just possibly, wrong on some things. I have seen a lot of culprits in the blame game in recent days:  people voted Brexit due to austerity, Thatcherism in the 1980s, the labour left, Corbyn, the Tories, Rupert Murdoch, the Blairites …. even university vice chancellors discouraging critical academics has been blamed (which is bizarre given the overwhelming pro-EU bias in Universities).

There is an implied passivity in this. It often amounts to arguing that people’s role is now only to ameliorate the bad effects of this vote. Yet democrats should not see themselves as clearing up the mess of democracy. Rather we should look ahead and use the democratic rights we have to argue for our politics – again, something the majority could never rely on the EU to do for them.

Contrary to the mood of demosphobia, many people voted, at least in part, out of the wholly positive desire to have a bit more democratic control over their lives, regardless of Johnson, Cameron, Farage, Stewart, Hoey, Corbyn or anyone else. There is no one to blame for that, and a great deal to celebrate. This is a democratic moment, in which political people have a duty to go and argue their politics. Instead some seem intent on waging a culture war against the voters, with the decent and reasonable on one side and the supposedly easily led and irrational on the other.

Looking forward

Democracy should not be just a tradition we invoke from the past – the noble acts of the Chartists, the Suffragettes, anti-colonial movements -  but something we strive to live and promote in the present. Democracy has a value beyond the result itself. To celebrate democracy on instrumental grounds – i.e. when it returns the result you want – is to reject that value.

Given that there are so many in positions of influence seeking to undermine the referendum result, and that political leadership (from anybody on anything) is so weak, it is important for citizens to begin to suggest how we would like to see things progress. It is heartening that some commentators are thinking that way.

Democrats should insist the government does three things: invoke Article 50, as they are mandated to do, straight away; given the vote was not party political, involve a range of opinion (including Kate Hoey, Gisela Stewart and principled Remain voting politicians such as Jeremy Corbyn) in setting clear goals and a timetable to progress leaving the EU; negotiate the best possible trade relationship with the EU; guarantee all current EU workers in the UK a minimum right of permanent leave to remain, to calm fears and undercut those who seek to target EU migrants.

Given that the question of democracy and control are posed in the context of this vote, I’d like to suggest a few broad goals for democrats who want to see the expansion of human freedom through greater democratic control and prosperity. We can: champion the value of democracy within, and beyond, the EU; argue for tolerance of political views and promote political debate rather than fear and caricature; use our democratic rights to the full to pursue our political views, and; be vigilant in upholding democracy when it is under threat.

To be pro-Europe, pro-democracy, pro-migration and anti-EU is entirely consistent, and worth fighting for.

Invoke Article 50!

UCU and opposing Prevent

I wrote this on my Union, UCU, and Prevent.

Travelling for a change: the new ethical tourism

The video of the excellent debate at the 2015 Battle or Ideas Festival in London between myself, Anna Mdee and Harold Goodwin is linked above, and introduced below. Many thanks to the Worldbytes crew for producing this. Do check out their many excellent videos.

Volunteer holidays and ethical gap years are a staple feature of university life and broadsheet travel supplements, and have become a rite of passage for ambitious young people with altruistic intent.  Yet this holiday humanitarianism is met with varying degrees of cynicism from many: tourists are often regarded as naïve, patronising or more interested in saving their own guilty Western consciences than genuinely helping people. Some even argue they are complicit in a new colonialism, which has been dubbed ‘the white tourist’s burden’.  It has been claimed that volunteer tourism’s focus on small-scale projects like digging wells and building compost toilets may actually be responsible for setting low horizons and stymieing the development that is needed in poorer parts of the world.  Is volunteer tourism driven as much by a quest for adventure and personal growth as it is by altruism? And if so, is that a problem?

a link to my recent article on Spiked: Students don't need no datafication

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/students-dont-need-no-datafication/18004#.VxCyL8sUXcs

Diary dates

I will be speaking at two Salon events in the next few months. On 24th May I am very pleased to be speaking in my home town of Derby (details go on line soon as I write). I'll be looking at the moral baggage accompanying debates about 'mass' and 'alternative' travel both now and in the past:

http://www.eastmidlandssalon.org.uk/

... and on 15th June I am in Leeds. I will be debating the merits of ethical tourism with Davina Stanford and Simon Woodward:

http://leedssalon.org.uk/

The Salons are a terrific initiatives for anyone interested in debating contemporary culture and politics.